Friendr.net has just launched; Friendr.net has been worked on by Virtuaffinity website developer Jim Neath.

This is a new social media optimization tool, that helps people add MySpace friends to their profiles.

This tool is useful for people who use their MySpace profile to promote their business or band, without spamming the typical MySpace users who purely use it to contact their friends and associates. MySpace is a great tool for keeping in touch; but spamming can be a problem.

As Social Media Optimization is relatively new, and the scope of Web 2.0 projects is constantly increasing, best practices and Social Media Marketing etiquette will also evolve.

Here are a couple of suggestions from an article by Kent Lewis of Search Marketing Standard:

• Respect the community
• Building and maintain a consistent and robust profile (or brand)
• Engage in the community by commenting, contributing and sharing regularly
• Don’t include blatant self-promotion
• Don’t post biased information
• Don’t breaking community rules
• Don’t spam

Learn more about Social Media Optimization from Wikipedia, or a brief summary of it from PushON Online Marketing specialists.

The Big Chip Awards are coming up in May, and I’m quite excited to be going again. Last year, the party was great, and it was good to see the quality and variety of digital projects going on in the North West.

Brilliant news for Jamie Clouting, who has been short listed for the award of Best Rising Star. Jamie does some excellent Online Marketing work for PushON, and will be joining full time shortly.

Virtuaffinity has been shortlisted for the Webdesign they have done for Didsbury Magazine; this project has been shortlisted for Best Commercial Website.

And it’s great to see Fudge shortlisted for Best Use of Visual Design for BGS Boys. Fudge have also been nominated for Best Use of Visual Design in the Dadi awards, for rags-to-bitches and BGS Boys. They do some stunning Flash Website Design.

Should be a good night!

Lucozade are using User Generated Content (UGC) for their online marketing campaign.

It’s great that they are encouraging users to get involved, but to be honest I think it’s a bit cheesy so far. The initial videos they used as examples are fairly tame clichés and as a result, most of the videos that have been submitted by users have been of a poor quality.
I can’t get too excited about this, but for more information:

• Lucozade puts user-content at heart of £8.2m brand campaign
  
• Lucozade does UGC
• Lucozade - Get your edge back

What I do find quite interesting however, is that they are using Video Egg for their on site videos, rather than going for the popular choice of YouTube.

Doubleclick is a global digital marketing company that offers ad serving, rich media, video, search and affiliate marketing.

Google has a wide audience, and offers self service options to companies of all sizes. This has been great for smaller businesses who may not have the budget to cover account management and setup fees that are often in place for Online Advertising Publishers.

It will be interesting to see what self service tools Google will make available, and if this move makes rich media and interactive advertising more accessible to smaller companies. Targetting and tracking tools are also expected to be enhanced.

Online advertising has consistently seen growth year on year, this aquisition will undoubtably contribute to further growth.