Spreading the Social Media Love With @MARCOME (Episode 32)

Tonight we were honored to broadcast live the very first video interview with the the gifted musician Marcome, who is the creator of the song “Twitter Me Some Love”. Marcome shared her thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube that could perhaps be insightful to other musician’s looking to utilize Social Media to engage and promote their profession.

In this episode we also talked about some topical events in social media such as how the oscars were turned into a social media spectacle, facebook jumping on the local based bandwagon, and how twitter has finally taken steps to block out phishing attacks. We also announced the digg user of the year award, EMFK who was chosen by you and our co-host Patrick Parise disclosed his nearing departure from Social Blade. (You will be missed Pat!)

Watch the full show here!

Topics Covered:

“The Cove” Uses Oscars to Promote Social Media Activism
Despite the popularity and fluidity of social media and the technology that allows for it; much of the world is still very much so living in an analog and old media centric world. The Oscars, which took this past weekend, is one such example of a platform that almost exclusively exists within the old media world. Sure, there was a lot of integration with the web in general for the event, but most folks watching the Oscars tuned in and watched through their televisions.

When the producers of “The Cove” won best documentary for their production scrutinizing dolphin hunting, they decided to use the enormous old media platform to make a push for their social media campaign. Their cause received a lot of buzz, both in the context of the Oscars and on the web. One of the producers held a poster up with “Text DOLPHIN to 44144″; this allowed people to sign up for SMS updates which subsequently pushed people to visit their website, follow them on Twitter, and become a Facebook fan.

The impact of their social media campaign can’t be precisely measure just yet, but one thing is certain: something as minute as poster with directions to subscribe via SMS updates provides a multi-lateral gateway that helped many people integrate with their activism – both online and offline.

[via mashable]

Facebook Locations to Begin Next Month
For close to a year now Facebook has been working on a location-based tool so much so that they have even implemented its location feature in the Privacy Policy last November. However, many of the details are still scattered all over the web and will be until Facebook unveils this tool next month during the F8 developer conference, there are still some of its features that we can report on.

[via mashable & nytimes]

Twitter Routing All Links Through New Anti-Phishing Service
For quite some time now there has been a huge phishing spam problem ocurring on twitter and this week twitter finally stepped up and implemented something to ward off further attacks. Phishing basically is what it sounds like. An attacker casts out their bait, a DM to you trying to trick you to click on a link, but if you fall for it and click the link they usually confuse you by showing you a twitter login page again. If you enter your user and password there you just gave the attacker your info to twitter and they can DM all your friends. After the attacker has collected enough logins and passwords to satasify themselves they start DMing your friends spam.

What Twitter has done to fix this is simular to what Firefox and some other browsers have done for a while now. Firefox periodically checks google and stopbadware.org for a list of blocked sites so when your browser tries to go to one of those it pops up a warning to you. While twitter hasn’t disclosed where it gets its data from it appears they’ve implemented a simular feature. Whenever you send a DM it gets checked and if its found to be bad they won’t allow it to be sent. Also to prevent links which have been emailed to you (if you have DM alerts turned on) from hurting you later on if they are determined to be bad twitter is re-shortening them so they get passed through its system so you will see them being sent as twt.tl.

[via twitter blog]