SOFTA Ventures

Facebookers Spend More on Brands

Social Media News and Web Tips – Mashable – The Social Media Guide.

SOCIAL MEDIAA social media marketing company called Syncapse surveyed [PDF link] 4,000 people who have “Liked” the top 20 brands that have pages on Facebook and figured out exactly how valuable those “fans” are.

The study (“The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”) estimates that someone who has Liked a brand will spend an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than will someone who has not Liked it on Facebook

June 13th, 2010 Posted by Larry Zinox | social networking | no comments

Is This What the New Twitter Will Look Like?

Is This What the New Twitter Will Look Like?.

A Twitter designer has provided a sneak peek of some of the features that might be in an upcoming redesign, by uploading a screenshot to Dribbble, a site used by designers for sharing their work (hat tip to Icodom for noticing the screenshot first). It doesn’t show much, but it looks as though Twitter is adding some analytics to a user’s profile page — the screenshot (which appears to be the upper-right corner of a profile page) shows not just how long a user has been using the service, but also indicates their activity level by showing how many tweets they post per day. The site also appears to be going with pulldown menus for sending messages and other actions involving the user.

April 14th, 2010 Posted by Larry Zinox | Twitter, social networking | one comment

The young prefer Facebook to blogging, Twitter – USATODAY.com

The young prefer Facebook to blogging, Twitter – USATODAY.com.

A new report paints a picture of how teens and young adults are using social media these days.

Teens are eating up Facebook but are not so keen on Twitter, and they are not blogging as much as they used to, according to the Pew Internet Project’s report.

February 4th, 2010 Posted by Larry Zinox | Twitter, blogging, facebook, social networking | no comments

Aggregate Your Social Media Life with FlavorsMe | Search Engine Journal

Aggregate Your Social Media Life with FlavorsMe | Search Engine Journal.

February 4th, 2010 Posted by Larry Zinox | social networking | no comments

Life Beyond the App

Now that the iPhone application is coming together, both the front end and the back end engines, it’s time to start working on all the ancillary pieces.

Attended a 3 hour class this morning at the Illinois CPS Society on using social sites to build your brand.  Ostensibly it was for job searchers, but the lessons apply to building a corporate brand just as well.  Covered using all the major sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, as well as several less known but hopefully just as effective sites.

We had already done a lot of discovery on the topic, but there were several insights on doing specific, targeted searches to help build followers, especially regarding Twitter.

My goal over the next 30 days is to build out our main social sites in a coordinated professional looking manner.

October 21st, 2009 Posted by Michael ORoark | SOFTA, social networking | no comments

All Good Things Come to Those Who Research

Well it ends up that our trials with the iPhone SDK 3.x shortcomings proved to be one of the best things that could have happened to our project.  In searching for a work around we uncovered an answer that is not a work around but is truly a superior solution to what we had thought the SDK could provide.  The answer moves us from the realm of just providing a software application to being a service provider.

It entails adding some equipment at a data center, but that equipment opens us to some very expansive telecommunications possibilities.  It will allow us to create an engine that we can then use not just on our iPhone app, but as the back end for any smartphone on which we choose to release our application.  We’ve had numerous conversations with both the manufacturer as well as the local VAR and we are convinced it will do everything we need for now and well into the future.

And in a serendipitous twist it also solves the issues we were having with out Iowa project.  It will allow us to do everything we wanted our third party technical partner to provide but couldn’t.

In speaking with the manufacturer it seems that no one else is using this hardware in the way we intend, even though it is 100% capable of doing what we want.  That may be the best news of all, it gives us a competitive advantage.

Shows what you can do when you view problems not as roadblocks that impede, but as challenges to succeed.

September 9th, 2009 Posted by Michael ORoark | SOFTA, Uncategorized, blackberry, development, internet, iphone, mobility, palm, smartphone, social networking | no comments

Twitter Takes Off

Why do we bring you this clip?  Because Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, will all become and integral part of business solutions we will be rolling out on iPhones, Blackberrys, and other smartphones in the coming months.

All geared toward businesses that want to touch their customers with relevant, useful information, specifically targeted at them.

August 7th, 2009 Posted by Larry Zinox | SOFTA, blackberry, iphone, smartphone, social networking | no comments

Growing Up the Blog

We started our blog about our new company, SOFTA Ventures, on wordpress.com, which is where I am currently writing this addition.  But the more we use it, and the more we learn,  we have come to the realization that in order to use the blog effectively we are going to have to take control of it within our own domain.

So beginning today I am starting the process of moving our softamobile.com domain from under the umbrella of wordpress.com to our own hosting site.  After that it will be figuring out how to set up our wordpress based blog there, fortunately it is a supported host so that eases the burden.  A supported host is one where the wordpress software is a utility available in your domain control panel.  No need to get the installation file form wordpress.  Installing should be easy, we’ll see.

Think the real challenge will be migrating the data from wordpress.com to our site.  Hoping there is enough on-line support to make this fairly painless.

We’ll see.

July 14th, 2009 Posted by Michael ORoark | SOFTA, social networking | no comments

10 Social Media People You Must Follow on Twitter

Ploked.com is all about being plugged into social media. We strive to provide informative, relevant, and unique perspectives in the world of social media.

10 Social Media People You Must Follow on Twitter | ploked.com.

July 2nd, 2009 Posted by Larry Zinox | development, social networking | no comments