Australia - How is this for an innovative social media marketing idea? An Australian marketing company called  uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service Twitter. Is it cheating? You decide.

Last year I wrote a blog post entitled “If the news is important it will find me”. The point was that we all live in so many social networks, that someone will send us an update if something in the world happens that we would be interested in.  Back then I was guessing.  A year later I have data. For the 1st time ever, more people are finding my blog from Twitter and Facebook referrals than via Google.  The total number of people coming to my blog is increasing. The percentage of people who find it via Google is declining. Significantly.

The South By Southwest (SxSW) conferences and festival begin March 13 in Austin, Texas, and will go on until March 22. DMW is happy to once again bring you the hottest list of buzz bands, courtesy of music publicist Fiona Bloom (after the break). If you can't attend, make sure to check out some of these bands and other news from SxSW on the official SxSW YouTube channel. Enjoy!

We want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support during 2008 and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year! We will resume publishing our daily newsletter after the holidays on January 5th and preparations are already underway for eight exciting events during 2009! In the meantime, you can check out our website dmwmedia.com for updates, as usual. We look forward to continue to serve as your trusted source for digital media news, information, jobs and networking during these tumultuous times.

Jay on behalf of the DMW Team

Image by satosphere

I've been a fan of the iconic Flip camera for some time now. In my own experience, the device has single handedly unlocked the immediate power of creating video for me because it has made it a simple process. It has always been a great product. But now there are other products that offer similar features. Their groundbreaking idea of a compact video camera with popup USB connection is no longer the differentiator it once was. To take it's place, they've done something very smart with their most recent product, the Flip Mino (and Mino HD).

This past Nov 22nd Youtube had its first major live event. A concert featuring HDNet fave Joe Satriani , Katy Perry Will.I.Am and others.   Of course everyone involved in the space is chattering about whether or not the show was a success. According to Mogulus, the live internet broadcast peaked at about 700k simultaneous users. That’s huge for an internet audience.   I think by any traditional Youtube measure , you have to call it a success, with some major gotchas.

By now you may have seen some posts from several social media influencers (Peter Shankman, Chris Brogan, PSFK, Jason Falls among others) in the marketing and advertising field about Pepsi's innovative new campaign being dubbed by many the "Pepsi 25" for their choice of 25 bloggers to single out and send three packages over the course of an hour. Since I don't have my camera at work with me today, I'm going to gratuitously grab the image Steve posted on Adrants (another of the 25 chosen blogs) with full credit back to him of course:

Yesterday at the MarketingProfs event, Ariana Huffington took the stage for a keynote presentation sharing some lessons she has learned about building a successful blog network with the Huffington Post. Though she definitely ignored my advice to speakers about spending some time at an event to get to know the attendees (she was barely off the stage before heading out the door), she did share some interesting points in her talk that should be useful to most marketers:

Last week, the forthcoming Democratic National Convention and Vice-President selection drove the 2nd highest share of visits to each of the websites of the presidential candidates in the past year. The only week with a higher share of visits included the Super Tuesday primaries. The market share of visits to BarackObama.com jumped 53% and 46% to JohnMcCain.com from the previous week.

Beijing, China - I have officially been in Beijing for 4 days now. I start this post with that admission, because before you read this I want you to know that I'm no expert on Beijing or China. Before this current trip, I have been here once before. Aside from a few useful phrases, I don't really speak any Mandarin ... and any experience benefit I might have from having been to Beijing before has surely been erased from more than ten years of development and more recent construction and preparation for the Olympics.

Apple is expected to launch a new version of its iPhone at the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference in San Francisco today Monday. As with all such events, the speculation amongst Apple fans and foes has almost reached fever pitch. Last week UK Internet visits to the iPhone website reached a new high. In fact, there were over twice the number of visits last week than during any of previous peaks, including the initial announcement, UK launch and recent price cut.

“Camden Town is burning down” claimed Amy Winehouse during her Grammy acceptance speech and, unfortunately, parts of it actually were. The fire that ravaged through Camden Market at the weekend received a lot of coverage in the press, and as a result searches for ‘camden’ increased by 250% last week. The top two destinations for searchers were the Camden Lock Market homepage and the Camden local government page, both of which experienced a significant spike in traffic on Sunday.

In the networked web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g. newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, del.icio.us power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social network user with links to lots of friends.

Not everyone is a content creator. Open up any report of statistics on social media, and you will usually see some standard ratio of content consumers to content creators that typically ranges from 1 in 10, or less. This means, on average, that in most communities less than 10% of the individuals in that community are creating content. This post is about the biggest myth many people believe about the other 90%.