Last year I launched the Walker Studios Challenge, a Video Blogging Challenge set to encourage Businesses, Individuals and Charities to raise awareness of themselves and their missions by placing themselves on the second largest search engine in the world; YouTube. Some people found this comical, some found it engaging and others found it helped boost their confidence.
Yesterday on Mashable there were two very interesting articles, one on Google and it’s new image format, WebP, which takes up less space on a server and is designed to kill of the JPEG and speed up website loading – Read Here. The other was on how Facebook plans to update their Facebook Photo’s platform to a level that it would be a serious rival for the website Flickr – Read Here.
The problem that Google has it that Flickr uses JPEG files rather heavily which will cause a big problem for them trying to make their WebP a standard file format. Unless…
If you look closely at my Twitter, Facebook or this blog even you may have noticed something new and different. For instance, the main point of call even, my logo has changed. That would be because Walker Studios is no longer a student portfolio of work, but is now fully operating as “Walker Studios – Multimedia Design & Social Media Solutions” (holds for applause).
During the Summer in Northern Ireland I’ve noticed something. Fewer and fewer advertisements and flyers I’ve seen around say “for more information check out our website” followed by a web address. Something else is replacing the web site. Facebook Pages.
If they see this, Socks For Happy People may be a little confused, as far as they are aware I haven’t done anything to them apart from Retweeting and Sharing their messages on Facebook, not they are necessarily aware that I am doing that.
I have however in my opinion done them an injustice, for as I mentioned on my last Blog post I have just finished and handed in my Dissertation based on Viral Marketing and Social Media. As part of it I had a section on Case Studies of people and companies that I believe make excellent examples of why Viral Marketing, Social Media or a combination of both to spread their message and their brand. In this section I did not once mention Socks For Happy People and this is what I believe to be an injustice.
As part of my Dissertation at University I undertook research into social media and it’s use as a means of distributing marketing messages virally. To some that would sound like an excuse for a student to sit about on Facebook and Twitter all day and to an extent those people would be right. Not about doing nothing though.
A lot of Facebook applications make it “better” if you have a lot of friends playing the game, bonuses, better chances of rewards, ability to buy things if you have so many friends etc.
This however can be a security risk to those that are so eager to play these games that they will add pretty much anyone they see playing the game so that they can get these edges.
Admittedly I enjoy games, I have been playing games since my fourth birthday when my parents bought me the Nintendo Entertainment System. I also very much enjoy some of these Facebook games which encourage adding others that play it. To protect myself I made some changes to my account that reduces the risk of Identity Theft and similar security issues.
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John @ Walker Studios 