Social Media key to Brown win in MA

Just saw this article about the rising importance of social media in political campaigns: MA Senate Race Poll- Scott Brown trounces Martha Coakley The numbers they show are interesting, but they only look at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube statistics.

If we go by the article's numbers, Scott Brown should win by a landslide, but the polls show a much more balanced election. This shows that rough statistics aren't very reliable as far as determining a candidate's chance of success. What's more important are the finer details.

Numbers only show the number of followers/mentions that the politician has generated. What they don't show is where these followers come from, who these people are, or what these mentions were referring to. In many ways, this particular election is a good case study, since it's a local election with a national reach. Many of the followers and mentions on these pages are very likely to have come from places outside of the voting districts, seriously skewing the results.

However, the raw data still shows some interesting trends. Political momentum is important in running a successful campaign, and the immediate availability of the data allows for fast political action. In the fast-moving political landscape of today, monitoring these statistics is vital.

For more on social media and politics, please check out our web site at: www.yoly.com

Yoly Week 2

Marketing and Brands

It's been a great week for us. We now have over 200 people on all of our social networks that are following our news streams. We have also gotten some people volunteering their expertise to help out with our effort. Thanks to all of you that have given your time and energy to our efforts. Don’t forget to tell your friends about Yoly and get them to start following our progress!
We just received our stickers for our marketing campaign this week. The stickers and the T-shirts from the previous week are part of our push for the Beta Launch next month. Exciting times. As you can see from the photos we already have some great models for the shirts. All of them are Darren’s nephews and a niece. Walking billboards have already been seen with Yoly on their shirt in Idaho, Utah, California,
Dallas, Houston, Missouri and Illinois. The word is spreading.

Partnerships and Video

We had a great meeting with another startup that is further down the road than we are. It was great to hear their startup story and learn from what they have already gone through. We are partnering with them to co-market Yoly and RezBuzz, an all-video resume service. They have a focus on colleges and helping college students differentiate themselves in this tough job market. They have had tons of press on NBC, CNBC, Fox news and several local stations all over the US. We will be working together to help promote Yoly and RezBuzz as tools that can help college graduates find opportunities for work.

Development update

We had another release this week. We have made improvements in performance, integrated Facebook contacts, improved the contact application, and changed the interest elaboration user interface. One of the coolest new features is a mashup with Wikipedia to suggest additional search words for an interest. We have also added the ability to filter results based on words or phrases. You can check out the latest release at www.yoly.com. Register today and give us some feedback.

Banking and accounting

Every startup needs to save money and spend money. It is best to keep things separated from your personal money. It can be difficult to work out what money went to the company and what you spent on your own. So we opened up an online bank account, which cost us nothing. Another startup move since money is tight. To do our bookkeeping we decided on Quickbooks basic which gives us the basic functionality that we need to keep our books. Keeping the money separate is the only way to go.  I look forward to another productive week this week with another release and the start of our marketing campaign at the beginning of next week. See you next week.

August 11 Alpha Release

The latest release has been put up on the web site. http://www.yoly.com
You will need to register again.

• Speed improvements - Improvements in Searching websites, blogs, video, maps, etc...
• Unified Contact List - import contacts from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and from google Contacts. Yoly can find duplicates between the lists and create single individual with multiple profiles.
• Search and Filter - Click on Interest and Describe and you can add keywords for each interest and filter words which will remove links that have the filter words.
• Tag Clouds - For each profile or document loaded into Yoly a tag cloud is generated and can be seen in the "Your Profile". Tag Clouds are also available on the "Social Connection" tab. Tag Cloud show the most common used and found phrases about you or your interests.

Check out the latest. Please send feedback to feedback@yoly.com

Yoly Swag and Events

  Marketing Swag

This was an eventful week with the arrival of our Yoly T-shirts, a great VC event and working on the Business side of the Business.
Thanks to Matthew Pulsipher for the help with the design of the T-shirts. Yoly get Socially Centered.
Yoly Shirt - Matthew Model We went back and forth on the tag line under the Yoly Logo. Everything from "Socially Centered", "I got socially centered", "Get yourself Socially centered", and then finally "get socially centered". We are working on getting shirts out to our target markets in the next couple of weeks. For now you can see Matthew and Dallin wearing them around town and in Nauvoo, IL this week.
We have designed stickers that are on their way next week. The hot craze right now is to put stickers on laptops, and the back of cell phones. When we finalize the sticker design we will let everyone know. Any ideas will be appreciated as well.

Investment Front

We also spent the week preparing for a Investment event on August 6th in Costa Mesa, CA at Crevier Classic Cars museum. We spent several late hours going over the slide deck
decreasing the size from 20 slides to 10 back up to 14. Trying to make sure we showed the key point of our pitch. We have great technology, we have a  growing marketing, and we have a great team.
It was a great event put on by Brian Jue from Proformance capital. Great venue with some cool classic cars and a large number of investors. It was a great event for getting our business out to investors.Our late hours paid off. We received tons of feedback and some hot contacts for Yoly investment.
Matthew and Dallin helped out by talking to investors while Darren was going through the details. Thanks to Barbara Bickham from Techgenii for the invite and the valuable feedback on our VC pitch slide deck. Valuable information and we have already incorrporated changes into our slide deck.

Development Work

We did not sherk on the development front and we have been working early morning and late nights to add the first look at the unified contact list which consolidates google contacts, facebook, linkedin, twitter, and myspace into one contact list. A sneak peek of the ui can be seen in the picture attached. We are hoping that the new release will come out Monday or Tuesday this next weeky. 8/10-11/09. We have also added the ability to filter keywords during search and improved the keyword search interface. Of course performance is always something we are always improving on. Look forward to the release in the next couple of days.

Business Busy Work

Of course we have everyday Business Busy work to do as well. Everything from Corporation documents, bank accounts, signature cards, tax ids, tax forms, and we have filled trademarks for Yoly and Yoly get socially centered. Busy business work is not as fun as coding in my mind but things need to be completed. Overall a great week for Yoly. We have some great leads for investment. We have great feedback from our alpha users group. We have started getting fans that are watching our progress during this startup process. We are getting ready for our viral marketing campaign and the launch of the Beta Yoly site.
Should be an interesting week this next week, hope to have some great news next blog entry.