California, U.S.A. — Talenthouse, the leading social media platform for creative talent and brand advertisers, announced on the 28th that digital entrepreneur Chris DeWolfe, is joining its Board of Directors. Currently the CEO of Social Gaming Network, a leading developer and publisher of cross-platform games on social and mobile networks, Mr. DeWolfe was the co-founder and CEO of pioneering social network Myspace which defined the concept of socializing around shared interests. Talenthouse provides brand advertisers with content-centric branded campaigns that leverage the global creative community to drive social media engagement at unrivaled scale and impact.

“Direct relationships with social media influences and compelling, branded content is exactly what advertisers are looking for and Talenthouse offers that in a brilliant way,” states DeWolfe. “Custom branded advertising campaigns that leverage the reach and content of the global creative community are proven to be highly successful. Talenthouse has developed a self-service platform that allows for an infinite amount of campaigns – scalable, repeatable and targeted. The approach achieves spectacular virality, is social network agnostic and provides an infinite number of content creators to choose from.”

Amos Pizzey, Talenthouse Founder, says, “It was meant to be that Chris joins our Board. When we first conceived of the company, it was born out of an idea that was pioneered by Chris at Myspace when he brought together the music world and social media – how can we create a bridge between the entertainment and the technology worlds that enables collaboration and engagement through social media. Talenthouse’s unique creative community is exactly that meeting point and provides advertisers an easy way to connect with content creators.”

“Chris built Myspace around a business model that allowed brand advertisers to benefit from the enormous reach artists bring to the table,” states Roman Scharf, Talenthouse CEO. “We’ve just taken it one or two steps further. Creatives have content and influence – brands need content and influence, it’s that simple. Chris understands the intersections of social media, entertainment, advertising and technology like no other and we are honored to have him join our team.”

Image Courtesy of  Chris DeWolfe

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The National Inflation Association has announced that it believes Facebook will likely start trading this May at a peak valuation of $100 billion and see its market capitalization and share price decrease in value in the years afterwards.

Facebook has successfully grown their monthly active users from 1 million in 2004, to 6 million in 2005, to 12 million in 2006, to 58 million in 2007, to 145 million in 2008, to 360 million in 2009, to 606 million in 2010, and to 845 million in 2011. After achieving compound annual user growth from 2004 to 2010 of 191%, Facebook’s user growth in 2011 declined to only 39%.

If Facebook begins trading with a market cap of $100 billion, Facebook will be trading for approximately 27 times 2011 revenue of $3.711 billion and approximately 150 times 2011 net income of $668 million.

A price/sales ratio of 27 and P/E ratio of 150 is too high of a premium to pay for a company that has just reached 50% market penetration in the U.S. Moving forward, NIA believes in 2012 we will likely see Facebook’s user growth decline to 20%, with its user growth declining to just 15% in year 2013 and 10% in year 2014.

It is unlikely that Facebook will ever be able to achieve the same market penetration in Europe that they have achieved in the U.S. Facebook needs to expand into the Chinese market, but the Chinese government has blocked off access to the social network.

In October of 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion. In January of 2011, Goldman Sachs’ international clients invested $1.5 billion into Facebook at a valuation of $50 billion.

While Microsoft is set to make a profit of 667% in 4 1/2 years and Goldman Sachs’ international clients are set to make a profit of 100% in just 1 1/2 years, NIA believes that the U.S. financial mainstream media that is currently hyping the Facebook IPO, is setting the general public up to get slaughtered on Facebook’s common stock.

The consumer social networking space has experienced very dramatic growth over the past few years, with Facebook being the dominant leader of the industry. Moving forward, NIA believes that social networking technology will soon begin to revolutionize the workplace in the same way that it changed the personal lives of millions of people around the world.

Recent college graduates, who experienced Facebook’s very dramatic growth first hand, are beginning to enter the workforce and are demanding that their employers adopt enterprise social networking technology at their place of employment.

The enterprise social networking industry is projected to grow 61% annually between now and 2016. Enterprise social networking is expected to grow from being a $600 million space in 2011 to a $6.4 billionspace in 2016. This is similar to the type of growth seen in the consumer social networking space over the past four years.

Although Facebook is the dominant leader in the consumer social space today, there is a good chance that another consumer social company will grow to become larger than Facebook in the future. Back in 2006, many analysts expected MySpace to remain king of consumer social networking forever and projected MySpace to continue rapidly growing indefinitely. Instead, Facebook surpassed MySpace and MySpace was recently sold by News Corp for 94% less than what they paid for it.

The American public needs to realize that Facebook at a valuation of $100 billion has far more downside risk than upside potential. While Facebook’s growth is going to rapidly decline in the years ahead, there are two publicly traded companies in the enterprise social networking space that are positioned for enormous revenue growth moving forward.

The user growth of these two companies could accelerate greatly in the years ahead as major corporations begin rapidly deploying their own enterprise social networks. Currently the enterprise social networking industry is still in its infancy, but by 2016 it is likely that the majority of the largest corporations around the world will be using some type of enterprise social networking platform within their business.

The two major publicly traded companies in this space now are Jive Software and BroadVision Inc. Jive is the industry leader with a market cap of $937.97 million. After subtracting Jive’s estimated net cash position of $200.99 million, Jive’s Engage social platform is currently being valued by the market at $736.98 million.

BroadVision only has a market cap of approximately $153.51 million. After subtracting BroadVision’s cash position of $54.4 million and another $17 million in value for their old legacy products still generating revenue, BroadVision’s Clearvale enterprise social platform is currently being valued at only $82.11 million.

BroadVision is NIA’s latest position. BroadVision just reported that they signed 117 new Clearvale Enterprise customers in 2011, up an amazing 290% from the 30 they signed in 2010. In fact, BroadVision signed 33 new Clearvale Enterprise customers in the 4Q of 2011 alone, which was more than they signed in the whole entire previous year.

Jive hasn’t yet reported their year-end 2011 results, but Jive has reported that they only signed 113 new Engage customers in the 12 month period ending June 30, 2011.

BroadVision’s Clearvale is now growing faster than Jive’s Engage, when at their current share prices Jive is receiving a valuation for Engage that is approximately 9 times higher than the valuation that BroadVision is receiving for Clearvale. Besides BroadVision’s fully featured Clearvale Enterprise, BroadVision also offers a free starter version called Clearvale Express.

Any employee at a company can quickly and easily setup their own Clearvale Express account to use at work. After outgrowing Clearvale Express, companies have the ability to seamlessly upgrade from Clearvale Express to Clearvale Enterprise.

BroadVision also offers a unique Clearvale Passport reseller program, which allows other companies to offer Clearvale to their clients. Softbank, a $30 billion Japanese telecommunications giant, had so much success using Clearvale Enterprise within their corporation that they have now joined Clearvale Passport and are offering both Clearvale Express and Clearvale Enterprise to their partners and clients.

NIA believes that BroadVision’s free starter Clearvale Express platform along with their reseller program Clearvale Passport, gives the company a huge advantage over Jive. In NIA’s opinion, BroadVision has the potential to become a bigger company than Jive in the future.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/

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Social Media continues to expand around the world and impact it, in its own way. In Guatemala, e-Marketing didn’t start picking up until about 3 to 4 years ago and it wasn’t only until about a year and a half to two years ago that agencies started to develop social media strategies.

After seeing some of the success from local companies, restaurants started taking advantage of it, to get their share of the market. It continues to expand throughout the years, with Facebook being the biggest social media platform utilized in Guatemala today. With only 2.5 million people with access to the internet in Guatemala, 1.6 million people have a Facebook account.

However, before Facebook, hi5 was considered one of the most popular social networking sites. In 2008 hi5 had 12,831,000 Latin American unique visitors ages 15 and up, while Facebook had only 7,711,000. MySpace became very big 2 years ago. According to comScore, social media has always been huge in Latin American countries. They are heavy internet users and mainly use the internet as a way to communicate with others.

According to Enrique Parros of TPP Emarketing, Twitter is a Social Media platform that is starting to grow in Guatemala and the reason for this growth is that mobile phones are becoming more easily attainable. The demographic segment in Guatemala that is currently active on twitter is mostly made up of kids, but 24- 35 year olds are starting to pick up on Twitter. This is why twitter is still an educational process in Guatemala.

The main social media Platform used for marketing in Guatemala is currently Facebook, due to the high concentration of people logged into Facebook. Facebook, to TPP Emarketing, is a great way for consumers to communicate with a brand. It is also a great way for people to interact with the brand, which will later help them to decide the future of the brand, and where it is heading. Another way Facebook is being used in Guatemala is as a focus group.

One major success story for TPP Emarketing is from the Facebook page Claro, which has 264,196 likes on Facebook. Gallo was also another great example of how successful Facebook was in helping to boost sales. In April of 2011, Gallo had about 90% of the market share in the country.

TPP Emarketing works with so many brands, such as Claro, P & G, and McDonald’s, that it would be hard to manage each account separately. This is why they use Hootsuite. It is a service used to manage social media accounts on one dashboard. With Hootsuite, companies like TPP E-marketing can manage their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and myspace accounts at once, and even schedule posts for later dates.

E-marketing is still growing in Guatemala, and for some it is still a learning experience, but digital marketing is always growing and expanding. Agencies are starting to pick up on it and take advantage of the marketing tools that are accessible. Some of the services offered today are SEO marketing, Public Relations, E-Mobile, Social Media and E-Advertising.

Digital marketing may be growing but TPP E-marketing understands the importance of utilizing it in their marketing campaigns and strategies.

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Social media websites in United States are almost half a decade old now and the statistics that broke news lately proves that social media websites have beaten porn in terms of traffic. The distance between the porn sites and social networks has remained steady over this time, despite a number of innovations by the former which are intended to attract visitors.

Similar results were presented by Hitwise, a UK-based web analysis platform which spotted that the average British web surfer spend more time on social media websites than on porn sites. According to the netcraft.com 2011 report of “Most visited websites” or the report of toptenreview.com, all social media websites are in the top 10, leaving porn behind in the competition.

The popularity of adult films cannot be denied as a form of entertainment. According to cnbc.com the porn business is so big that every second: $3,075 is spent on it, more than 28,000 internet users are viewing it and 372 internet users are using search engines to find it. Online, porn sites make up about 12% of all sites, taking in approximately $2.4 billion a year.

Developments in porn distribution includes credit card sales, web video and driving up the development of such technologies as 3D TV. According to David Amerland, a British NUJ journalist, editor and author of the best-selling “SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page”, the main drive behind the consumption of porn online has to do with deep-rooted feelings of isolation and loneliness.

There is an explanation on the Toptenreview.com 2011 report of ‘Most Popular Websites’ why social networks are so popular:

Through social networking, people can use networks of online friends and group memberships to keep in touch with current friends, reconnect with old friends or create real–life friendships through similar interests or groups.

Besides establishing important social relationships, social networking members can share their interests with other like–minded members by joining groups and forums. Some networking can also help members find a job or establish business contacts. Most social networking websites also offer additional features.

In addition to blogs and forums, members can express themselves by designing their profile page to reflect their personality. The most popular extra features include music and video sections. Members can read bios of their favorite music artists from the artist’s profile page as well as listen to their favorite songs and watch music videos. The video section can include everything from member–generated videos from hundreds of subjects to TV clips and movie trailers.

Amerland expresses a similar opinion on socialmediatoday.com. He noticed that social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are personally invested and built online interaction. They are there to fulfill a human need to connect with new people, retaining friendshops, finding partners and lead a digital lifestyle.

He also noted that ECG studies of subjects carried out while accessing porn and social networks has shown that many of the same areas of the brain light up while visiting these websites. It suggests that the same form of addictive and compulsive behavior arises whether it be from adult films or social media platforms.

On August 15, 2011 the American Society of Addiction Medicine issued a public statement defining all addiction in terms of brain changes. “Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” Porn addiction is included on the list. Should we ask the question, when will social media addiction appear in this ranking?

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A huge victory for Facebook after Sanford Wallace, 43, surrendered himself to the FBI after facing lawsuits with Facebook announced Attorney Melina Huaag  on August 4.

Wallace will be looking at 40 years in prison and $2 million in fines if found guilty, on six accounts of electronic mail fraud, three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt on the indictment handed down on July 6.

Prosecutors said that the indictment was followed by a two year investigation on the Wallace, also known as “The Spam King”. According to the indictment, Wallace would send phishing messages, which are messages used to deceive people into revealing private information, to trick users into disclosing their password information from their Facebook account.

He would retrieve the information, then log onto their accounts and post spam messages on friends’ walls. After the spam was posted on their respective walls, they would then click on the link and be directed to the websites that paid Wallace for internet trafficking.

This took place between November 2008 and March 2009. The attack compromised 500,000 Facebook accounts and sent 27 million spam messages.

This was not Sanford’s first appearance in the Spamming business; back in 1990 Sanford became Spam’s biggest vocal defender. Cyber Promotions was a company led by Sanford, which sent out about 30 million junk emails a day in the 90’s.

The Federal Trade Commission accused Wallace and his spybot.net company of running an operation that administered spyware and was ordered by the New Hampshire Court Judgment to pay $4 million in fines in 2006 In addition to that court case, Myspace won $230 million in 2008, over junk messages sent to their members, applying the same tactic he utilized on Facebook members.

In 2009, Wallace was restricted from accessing any social networking site, after being sued by Facebook for crimes under the CAN-SPAM Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Anti-Phishing Act and was facing a hefty fine of $711 million along with an agreement forbidding him from the Spam business.

He violated that restriction and disappeared after his trial to flee from the punishment appointed to him. The charges brought before him today originated from this case two years ago.

Chris Sonderby, a lawyer for Facebook said “We will continue to seek and support the civil and criminal consequences for those who generate spam and others who try to harm Facebook or people who use our service.”

This has generated good feedback from Facebook users, knowing that their accounts will be safe from spammers and that Facebook is doing everything they can for justice.

After posting a $100,000 unsecured bond, Sanford was released. His next appearance in court is scheduled for August 22 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. Wallace was banned from usage of any social networking sites yet again.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanthatcher/

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College students’ fantasies of becoming “famous” are quickly becoming a reality. With the rise of social media in our everyday lives, college students are taking advantage of social networking to get their talent recognized. These days, you no longer need a producer or an agent when you have a business, music, graphic design or  journalism major in your dormitory hallway.

Our society is accustomed to our celebrities having “connections,” knowing someone notable to help them make it big in the industry. However, what defines “connections” nowadays? It used to be knowing someone that could help you on the road to becoming famous, but now with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc … “having connections” is not as exclusive. Now connections to any music sensation or artist are merely a click away on the World Wide Web.

College students and artists with a passion for their talents are benefiting from this. Aspiring artists are realizing that the power of a college network and friends can create opportunities to make a  name for themselves.  Only the rich becoming famous is a slowly dwindling stereotype due to the possibilities of social media. The ability to download movies, pictures and music for free on the internet is causing controversy with established artists all around, yet everyday musicians, especially college students, are not complaining.

From the dorm room to the studio is an increasingly common story that we hear coming from upcoming artists. These include Asher Roth and Sam Adams, two successful rappers who started from their college dorm room. In 2009, “I love college” was released by Asher Roth; a song about college parties he went to while attending West Chester University in Pennsylvania. After posting his verses and sending a friend request to a producer on Myspace, he quickly became a college sensation. The music video was shot at a fraternity house, put on Youtube and quickly climbed its way to the top of the charts. All Roth needed was his talent and social media to get his voice heard.

Who needs a professional studio, when you have your own microphone and video camera on your laptop for free? Just from one Youtube video, your music can spread like wildfire. MTV studios is noticing this and helping college students take their talent to the next level.  Launched in 2007, MTV studios run a college network called MTVU.  It is now the largest college network site and channel; broadcasting to over 750 campuses in the United states. With over nine million users MTVU has dedicated their site to college music, videos, contests, shows, and news.

Websites such as FratMusic.com and Collegeplaylists.com are websites for students made by college students themselves. College students are increasingly more interested in partying to music from their own peers, since they are one of the largest demographics in the music industry. Who knows better what they want to listen to than themselves? According to Billboard.com, in everything from country to rap, 2011s hottest artists are all under the age of 21, and what is the most appealing about them? They’re just getting started. College artists create a fan base that not only grows but lasts.

The power of a college network and social media gives college students the tools to make it big on their own. Most college artists are already well known on the web or at parties before they even get to perform live, which is slowly becoming a reality for some artists instead of a fantasy. Younger generations are slowly taking over the music industry, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon with each new artist getting younger and younger.  The rise of social media and the effect it has on the music industry makes it easier for artists to be recognized for their talent instead of who they know. Why go hire a manager and producer when all you have to do to start your career is to create a Facebook account?

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