On Wednesday this week Steve Jobs and Apple announced a number of new products and concepts at an Apple event in California. Among them was the launch of Apple’s first foray into social media, called iTunes Ping.

I was listening to the event on my iPhone and following the commentary online via Twitter. There were lots of interesting instant-reaction Tweets by industry types. I found this one, by Kara Swisher, columnist for AllThingsD.com, to be quite interesting:

Apple Ping is “vertical Twitter” says Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, sitting next to me at launch event in SF

At the time of reading, I hadn’t used Ping yet. My first thought was, Oh, I’m Not Sure This Is A Good Idea. Apple is an utterly closed company, making its living off of closed platforms. There is no sense of openness, of encouraging sharing, that is required in today’s social media landscape.

However, I wanted to reserved judgement until I had the opportunity to play around with it for myself. I downloaded iTunes 10 and created my Ping profile ( iTunes link).  Ping profiles do not work with browsers. Everything must be done within iTunes.

I come to Ping as a five-year user of Last.FM (formerly Audioscrobbler), which can be accessed via browser and is an open social network.

First off, if you have an Apple/iTunes account, then by default you have a Ping account. You’ve just got to activate it and pick a photo for yourself. Once that’s done, you can find “friends” to “follow” (similar to Twitter) and talk about music.

How you do that, though, is the tricky part.

The entire purpose of Ping is to make people spend more time in the iTunes Store. Every action requires that you wade through the iTunes Store. Want to write about an album? Find it on the iTunes store, then click “Share”. Just want to “like” a track (a la Facebook)? Find the song and click the tiny arrow next to the price.

After you “share” an album or song, or “like” something, it appears in your stream as recent activity. It always appears in such a way to make the album or song easy to purchase, should the mood strike.

Sound weird? It should. I believe GigaOm sums it up well:

Ping is essentially an e-commerce platform for music disguised as a social network.

An industry standard for new social platforms is that they all must connect to the other existing social networks in some way. Tweet this, Post to Facebook, etc. You can’t find much of that in Ping.

Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

Despite that, people are joining. iTunes has 160 million users worldwide, so odds are in Apple’s favor that they will be able to make some significant gains.

However those gains could be wiped out if Apple is not able to get Ping’s spam problem under control.

Ping really is a “social network inside a walled garden”, as GigaOm’s Paul Sweeting calls it.

Just because you’re a wildly successful tech company does not guarantee success in social media. Just ask Google. They know all about that.

Image credit: Bruno Pedro/Flickr

Naturally there is an interest in understanding what this means for people working in marketing. How can this trend be used to benefit brands?

Before we can answer that question, it’s important to know exactly how this older userbase is using social media. The study has some interesting data:

One in five (20%) online adults ages 50-64 say they use social networking sites on a typical day, up from 10% one year ago.

Among adults ages 65 and older, 13% log on to social networking sites on a typical day, compared with just 4% who did so in 2009.

Not big numbers, but for those companies operating in industries of interest to this age group, this growth represents an opportunity to further invest in social media and online community development.

Initially the 50-64 age group joined Facebook to keep up with family members. Not it seems that they are joining to do more than that. This is certainly a trend to keep an eye on.

You’ve got a Facebook profile, claimed your business on Google Maps and Foursquare, and you may even have a Twitter account. So far, your businesses is well situated to use the internet and social platforms to generate business and raise awareness of your brand.

But there is one other platform where your business is absent: Blogs.

The natural inclination of businesses is that blogs are time-consuming and labor-intensive. I won’t dispute that — blog posts require time and effort to write and publish.

But the benefits to maintaining a company blog are considerable. Consider the following:

1. Distribute content. Having presences on social media platforms is great. In addition to communication platforms, social media are also distribution platforms. Post your blogs to Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you are active.
2. Improve SEO. The more of your content that search engines have to crawl, the better your search engine results will be when someone searches for your company
3. Advertise products. Blogs offer businesses a place to advertise and discuss their products.
4. Build reputation. Use a company blog to cement your company’s and your own status as an expert in a field, via informative posts.
5. Create community. Use your company blog as a gathering place for customers. Stick to a content schedule so that customers are waiting for your next post.

There are more reasons to do it than just the five above, but that’s a good start.

In the rush for businesses to get on Facebook and Twitter, some are forgetting about the value of blogs to their business. When developing an online and social media strategy, don’t forget to include a company blog in the planning.

When used correctly, company blogs can become an asset to the company’s presence online.

Talking about how great new innovations in social media are, is fun and easy. You can do this and you can do that. Isn’t it great?

More often, however, the difficulty comes in when trying to explain in clear terms what the benefit of these new social platforms is to business. Businesses want to know: What’s in it for me, how can we use it and how long will it take to see results.

Each of those questions is tough to answer definitively, because a certain amount of trail-and-error is required to know for sure.

Then I came across this simple four-step process for explaining the business value of Foursquare, developed by Ogilvy PR Worldwide. What’s interesting about it isn’t what they’re saying — any social media marketer worth their salt already know this — but rather how they are saying it

Take a look at the image below. Click here to see it in full-size.

Every strategy needs to be unique to an individual company’s needs. So trying to use the above figure as your company’s plan for geolocation/Foursquare would be a mistake.

Instead, use the above figure to start the conversation on the right track. Determine what you want to get out of the services, how your customers might already be using it, and set some goals for what you’d like the outcome to be.

Geolocation services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, loopt and now Facebook Places, offer businesses a lot of great tools to engage both current and potential customers. But each services is different, as is each business. In order to get the most out of them, it’s important to have developed a clear strategic approach.

Photo source: Team Sticker Giant/flickr

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Places

Last week Facebook debuted their latest product, a geolocation feature called Facebook Places. In the months leading up to the formal announcement, there was a lot of talk that Facebook was developing it, just no-one from the company would say so in any official capacity.

At the moment it is only available to Facebook users who have the iPhone application. Users had to download the latest update in order to get the new Places feature, which now appears directly in the middle of the menu screen on the application.

I had the opportunity to begin using the new feature on Thursday last week, while out with friends. We visited a few different locations, so I was able to try a few things out.

Facebook Places works two ways: You can check yourself into a location, or your friends can check you in. The latter is causing some uproar, because of the privacy implications. When someone checks in on Facebook Places, they are given the option to “tag” whomever else is with them. The problem is that discretion is entirely up to the friend, who can check you into a location without you even *being* there.

Early on, I ran into this problem. I was at a pizza place with one friend, waiting for another. I went to “check-in” on Facebook Places and tagged her as being there with me. I didn’t think much of it, but in fact she hadn’t arrived yet. She saw the tag and then untagged herself. She did not like other people checking her into places, which then shows up in her personal timeline on Facebook.

Count this as a “lesson learned the hard way” for Facebook after past privacy slip-ups. When they launched Facebook Places, they included an opt-out for letting other people tag you. It’s somewhat buried in the privacy settings, but it is there. Over at ValleyWag they’ve published a “how-to” for ensuring that friends don’t check you in places.

Once it launched, talk soon turned to whether Places would kill other geolocation services like Foursquare, Gowalla and loopt. My opinion is that it will not. Places is an interesting service, and I’m sure it will create greater interest in geolocation as a whole, but it’s a one-trick-pony as geolocation applications go. Plus on the day that Places launched, Foursquare recorded record one-day new user sign-ups.

It seems that the one-dimensional nature of Facebook Places was intended. Here’s an interesting quote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg about that very thing:

When asked about checking-in to watching television shows or the like, Zuckerberg joked, “there’s a lot of stuff we’re not doing.”

Like with Foursquare, businesses can claim their spot on Facebook Places. However, unlike Foursquare, businesses using Facebook Places aren’t shown any meaningful analytics. You are shown how many people have “checked in”, but you aren’t able to see who they are. This could be an instance of Facebook being gun-shy when it comes to potential privacy flare-ups; however in this case it’s something that is needed.

Since Places is only available to Facebook users who access the site via iPhone, it is difficult to determine the overall success rate with any accuracy. Only a fraction of my friends are using it — most of whom are already Foursquare users — so the case for “mass acceptance” is not there right now. And since Facebook hasn’t released any usage statistics yet, we’re all left to guess.

Places could go on to be a major player in geolocation. But before that happens, they will need to build the service out and add more features and functionality.

In sum: Reports of Foursquare’s death at the hands of Facebook Places are greatly exaggerated.