Dominique Stender A blog about my thoughts and experiences in Information Technology

23Dec/090

The Power of Facebook: A Case Study

In case you or your company are still not convinced of the power of social media sites such as facebook and twitter or you're wondering whether they can give your company a sales boost, read this story on BBC.

In a nutshell a Facebook group formed to put the 17 year old Rage Against The Machine Song "Killing In The Name Of" on top of this years British Christmas Charts.

Here's their official video

YouTube Preview Image

The video itself does not say very much, the information text next to it on the YouTube page itself is much better.

The X-Factor is a Music Chart TV Show much like the "American Idol" or the German "DSDS". In the last years, the winner of the X-Factor show has always been the number one hit for the British christmas charts.

Apparently people have enough of this. Hence they formed the Facebook group to push another song into the charts - Rage Against The Machine with Killing In The Name Of.

You can help their cause by buying a download of the song either on iTunes, Amazon and various other sites.

Currently the song in fact is number one in the British charts.

This is a wakeup call to everyone that is not yet convinced about the potential of social media to drive business. The potential is there. Now it is proven again.

10Dec/090

Improved social bookmarks for Wordpress

statisticsI further enhanced the social bookmarking options in this blog by dropping the Tweet This plugin that I mentioned in an earlier post in favor of the wordpress plugin for AddThis. This was done because the CSS sprite hack I did on Tweet This kept bugging me although it worked just fine - I hate hacks. Besides, the many icons don't really make the blog look better.

The AddThis "Social Bookmarking & Sharing Service" provides the possibility to share my blog to virtually all social bookmark services (currently over 200) with a single (!) button and also has an easy option to send links via email. Similar to ShareThis, AddThis provides me with an analytics-like overview of which articles have been shared when and where. Pretty neat. The documentation on AddThis is better than the one for ShareThis though so I went for the former.

Since with removing the Tweet This plugin the "auto-post to Twitter" option is gone I installed WP To Twitter to compensate for that. In fact WP To Twitter has more options than Tweet This, making things even more flexible for me.

If social bookmarking is a concern for you, check out AddThis and WP To Twitter.