This week I have an interview for an internship at a social media marketing firm called SocialMedia Pilots. I wanted to brush up on what I know and what I need to know about social media. I stumbled across an article that described what marketers plan to do with the quickly changing pace of social media trends.

According to Effie Worldwide and Mashable, 70% of marketers plan to increase their social media budget by 10%. With this increase the goal is to increase the number of Facebook "Likes". Reaching out to its audience through Facebook is a growing trend that many companies have accounted for. It is relatively easy and costs next to nothing.

In 2010, according to Mashable, marketers spent 11.9% on their overall budget compared to the 13% that was spent for TV. They also spent $68.7 billion on TV advertising, where $28 billion was spent on Internet advertising. It would seem that with where the Internet is going, in the future more money will go to online advertising.

In the next year marketers will use social media to achieve their largest marketing goal of the year. In the past year the top brands that used social media as a successful campaign for their product were Old Spice, Pepsi, Starbucks and Ford.

Going into my interview tomorrow I will keep in mind the important aspects of marketing through social media and how advertising may be leading in this direction. Many careers are beginning to develop because of this trend and I can see myself being successful in this type of business.

Wish me luck!

Viral Video

In light of discussion this week, I chose to blog about viral video sensations. Millions of Americans watch videos daily and find great entertainment in watching other people. It's obvious that if you have a special moment that is caught on tape, you must instantly post it to the viral market. Many have become instantly famous through the likes of YouTube by doing this very thing.

I know that in my household we usually conjure up one video a week that we find ourselves putting on repeat. Last week I become totally obsessed with a little boy, age 2, who new every word to the Justin Bieber song, "Baby." His mother caught him in the act while riding in the car. Something as simple as that has recieved over 100,000,000 hits! He has been featured on the Today Show and made his way to appear on Jay Leno.

It is amazing how one video can be seen by millions of people within minutes. They aren't hard to produce and they don't cost much. Yet, people have made extraordinary amounts of money by allowing the world to view them.

I stumbled across this new video on Mashable.com . I have yet to see it anywhere, but on Mashable. It features a young lady that does animal impressions extremely well.  I would assume, based on it's uniqueness that it too will be in the category of viral videos.

Animal Impressions

The Mystery of Facebook

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to disappear on your Facebook news feed. Or how you constantly see some of your friends status updates, but not others? Over the years the creators of Facebook have created a behind the scene system that allows you to pick and choose what it is that you see. When the "like" button was created, it enabled you to pick what you thought was interesting and deny what you didn't want to see. They also created an option in your news feed to hide, un-like or mark as spam any material from others you didn't like. This is a way to customize your profile so that you see only what you prefer.

Another aspect to Facebook is affinity which measures the amount of interaction you have with others. The more you visit some one's page or the more they visit your page, the more information you see about them. This contributes to the weight factor and why you see posts in your recent news feed from two days ago from certain people. The more you comment, like, tag or post on some one's wall, the more of them you will see.

I do enjoy this part of Facebook and it allowing you to customize who you interact with, but this also causes me to spend more time on Facebook then I need to. This is because I become interested in why other people haven't posted a status update in a while. I then spend time finding them and catching up on their life by going directly to their page, which takes more time then reading a status update.

But there you have it, the basics of how the behind the scenes of Facebook works. What is the future of Facebook? What will be their next invention that will cause us to be even more involved in each others lives than we already are?