Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare Oh My!

Our technology-infused culture has become over-saturated and overwhelming, don’t you think? It’s not easy sifting through the messages, texts, check ins, emails and tweets that bombard us every minute of every day.

A panel of in-the-know celebrities and industry insiders gathered at the Hearst Art & Culture Hub for Social Media Week in New York City yesterday to discuss the techniques to utilizing today’s social technology in the most productive and beneficial ways possible.

The panel was moderated by Laura Brown, Hearst’s Features/Special Projects Director, who explores the role and growing popularity of social styling and social media in today’s digital world. The panel consisted of celebrity Denise Richards, Popeater.com Entertainment Columnist and Blogger Rob Shuter, indie fashion blogger BryanBoy, Lancome CEO Kerry Diamond and Leandra Medine of Man Repeller.

Almost as soon as it began, the discussion turned to the social media queen herself, Kim Kardashian. Celebrities like Kardashian use social media tools to connect with the public, gain exposure and drive their personal business initiatives. When launching her new fragrance Kardashian used her twitter followers as a focus group when she posted the pictures of two possible bottle choices, asking her thousands of followers, “What do you think?”  Whether or not the one voted best is the one chosen, twitter was a crucial tool for Kardashian in maximizing her influence and allowing her to hear what her fans want first-hand.

Denise Richards noted that it’s important to “have a goal and stay true to yourself” when connecting. Although she maintains everything she types is legitimate and sincere, misleading tweets seeming more contrived than genuine are streaming from the twitter feeds of many celebrities. We recently covered the topic of endorsement deals and contracts regularly stipulating stars to use social networking sites for brand and product-related advertisement. Kim Kardashian denies ever being compensated, but how likely is it that her deal for Reebok Easy Tone sneakers had nothing to do with her tweeting pics of her wearing the shoes at the gym saying “I love my Reebok Easy Tones” and including a link to buy them?

You may not know this, but the FCC does require tweets that are being monetarily compensated to include “AD” at the end of the message to clarify intent, as to not mislead the public. We rarely see this appearing on celeb messages even though law requires it.

Independent fashion blogger BryanBoy had a more grassroots approach to broaden exposure and engage an audience. He says that being himself, documenting his day-to-day life and sharing his love for fashion and style is what first made him famous. However sharing his personal dreams and encouraging others to do the same is what has skyrocketed him into the limelight. So much so that Marc Jacobs designed a handbag after him in his 2008/2009 Fall Collection. His success-achieving advice is to put  forth your true self and it will attract desired results. A big topic of the day was the emergence and acceptance of original bloggers like BryanBoy and Tavi, who are essentially “playing fashion editor” through social sites, offering styling tips, fashion advice and even trend forecasting. Social media sites have served as an unmatched platform for amateurs to build a trusted brand for themselves in the industry.

In essence many of the panel members shared personal experiences that hit on many of the same points. Lancome CEO Kerry Diamond shared her work with Pee-Wee Herman and his new “comeback.” What we already know and love about Pee-Wee is his unpredictability and crazy energy right? They launched a Twitter campaign in New York where the 80’s star would hop around popular locales in Manhattan and tweet his whereabouts to fans on twitter, encouraging all to come see him. It was a hit. People showed up all over the city to see Pee-Wee, even the New York Times stopped by to see what it was all about. Introducing Pee-Wee to Twitter was a cautious, well-orchestrated event that engaged his fans and made his return fun and spontaneous. Knowing Pee-Wee Herman as a brand and using the internet to broadcast is what made the launch so successful.

Whether it be from a business or personal perspective, a strong content strategy or product development strategy are key building a real-time measurement of branding success through social media. Joining such networks requires transparency, accessibility, and a strong self-identity.

So, in an effort to “provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability,” CEO Mike Jones made the announcement that 47% of MySpace workers (nearly 500 employees) would be getting pink slips. {TechCrunch}

Ouch. Guess they missed the memo on the economic recovery thing.

The job cuts are across the board, and follow a deep 2009 cut that took MySpace’s international staff from 450 to 150 people. {Paid Content UK} Most of the international staff cuts are in ad sales, and though there’s no breakdown by department for the US, sales positions there are expected to be on the chopping block as well.

Though it’s likely not much consolation for the newly unemployed MySpace alumni, Jones ended his official statement on a somewhat more upbeat note.

“While itâ€s still early days, the new Myspace is trending positively and the good news is we have already seen an uptick in returning and new users. Since the worldwide rollout of the new Myspace, there have been more than 3.3 million new Profiles created.  We also introduced Topic Pages, which connect users to entertainment-focused content from news sites and blogs all over the Web. Over 134,000 Topic Pages have been created since the introduction of the new Myspace. There has also been a boost in viral activities, with over 10 million social actions and 90 million “follows” within the Hubs and Topics categories.  In addition, we are seeing Curators driving a lot of the engagement on our site.  Users who “friend” one of our Curators increased their frequency of visits by 35 percent.  Lastly, we have already seen a rise of four percent in mobile users just between November to December, now totaling over 22 million,” he said. {Paid Content}

A social network, pop star and socialite top popularity lists. Stop us if you've heard this before.

YouTube, which rose from 7th most visited site in 2009 the 5th most visited in 2010, helps make up the 9.85% of all US internet visits that Google properties claim. While Facebook hasn’t surpassed total Google owned/controlled traffic yet, they aren’t too far off at 8.93%. Yahoo!, often seen as the big engine that couldn’t, still represents 8.12% of all US visits with their various properties including email, which is actually a more popular destination than the Yahoo! homepage.

What surprised us though, is actually the site that traded places with YouTube: MySpace. The site is down off of last year’s 5th place to number 7, but still ranking. Yes, we thought that everyone had abandoned the site with the strange new logo. Frankly, we were pretty sure the people running MySpace were abandoning ship when they seemingly threw in the towel and partnered with Facebook, but it looks like some of you just can’t say goodbye to sparkly glitter gifs and 2001-style clip art.

Speaking of sparkly, glittering things, silver covered magazine mover Kim Kardashian edged out Oprah (who does a pretty good job of moving magazines also) for the title of top searched personality. Rush Limbaugh, Miley Cyrus and Glenn Beck are numbers 3, 4, and 5 respectively. That sounds like the start of a party game where you have to put random words into a sentence that makes sense. We’ll let you know when we come up with one.

Moving on to musicians, butcher calendar girl Lady Gaga dominated searches and beat out the teenage endorsement dream that is Justin Bieber for number one music personality search. Eminem, Taylor Swift and late King of Pop Michael Jackson were 3, 4, and 5 respectively.

TechCrunch is reporting that in just a few minutes, MySpace CEO Mike Jones will announce a partnership with Facebook that’s closer to “a formal surrender ceremony.”

MySpace, which once defined social networking, has lost considerable ground to Facebook in recent years. Users followed their friends away from glitter gif encrusted profiles, to a more streamlined experience at Facebook. Under heavy pressure from parent company NewsCorp, MySpace has had something of a revolving door for CEOs after pushing co-founder Chris DeWolfe out. On a recent earnings call, NewsCorp announced that MySpace had “quarters, not years” to turn things around before facing the risk of being unloaded. {ClickZ}

Judging from today’s “partnership” announcement, which will let users login to MySpace via Facebook Connect and publish Facebook status updates to MySpace, they didn’t even get very many quarters.

MySpace’s success was largely tied to the music and entertainment acts who set up pages to connect with their fans, and that’s one area where Facebook’s cleaner, standardized look hasn’t always been able to compete. It hasn’t proven to be a detriment to growth though, as gaming companies have helped to satisfy the entertainment cravings of Facebook users, so there’s no question as to who will benefit most from this deal.

It doesn’t seem like it will be long before MySpace is relegated to Facebook Pages for Entertainment, but with a gun to their head, perhaps that’s really all that can be expected.

Back to Gap: The Gap's new logo is now their old logo

On one hand, we give credit to companies that understand they have to keep up with the times. On the other, when you have a logo that’s been around as long as the Gap’s has, why trade it all in for yet another Helvetica logo?

But in all the furor over Gap’s new (now old) logo, you may have missed out on another logo competing in the “you paid how much for that?” rebranding category.

In case you haven’t been there in a few years, let us reintroduce you to MySpace. {TechCrunch} You remember them, right? They’re the social network which got dethroned by that other social network, currently  having a Hollywood moment. Given that MySpace’s old logo hasn’t been able to encourage enough nostalgia to keep users from abandoning the site for Facebook, rebranding makes a bit more sense here. Plus, the old logo wasn’t really that great, so what have they got to lose?

5 letters apparently. When users left the site, perhaps they took some letters along with them. Call it the equivalent of leaving with office supplies when you leave a job. The positives: at least they didn’t use Helvetica (a lovely font, really, but overused). The negatives: everything else. While we’re sure using a line to represent a space sounded like a cute idea in theory, it fails in practice.

As a promotional campaign, perhaps it works. As a logo, we get that MySpace wants to represent a network that everyone can make into their own thing, but it could also represent the vast amount of space from all of the users migrating to Facebook. Or the uncertainty of how to reclaim any of their former glory. Any ideas? Fill in the blank.