Social media marketing: Bebo

Bebo was purchased by AOL in 2008 for $850 million.  AOL sold Bebo earlier this year for somewhat less, after threatening to shut it down.  Bebo was obviously patterned after MySpace.  If you are peddling bubble gum flavored lip gloss, Bebo might hold your target market.  Bebo users seem to be very young adults still focused upon adolescent pursuits.  It's a big, if temperamental, market segment.

Bebo offers its users a public profile page consisting of selectable and movable modules.  My own experimental Bebo user profile page has a "Lifestream" module that currently displays this Microenterprise blog RSS feed.  This is subject to change at any time by either Bebo or myself.

The Microenterprise blog RSS feed is now channeled to Bebo like this:

Blogger —> Feedburner —> Twitterfeed —> Status.net —> Ping.fm —> Bebo.com

The link to the original blog post goes through several transformations withing the various steps of theis transmission chain, but by the time the Twitterized blog post reach Bebo, they are all shortened to the ping.fm system and they all point back to a Status.net post, but not to the original Blogger post.  Even at that, Bebo displays the shortened link-back verbatim, but passes the URL as a text string to a Java Server Page (JSP) as a query parameter.  I doubt that a search engine would follow that level of re-direction, but at least both Bebo, Ping.fm, and Status.net can count the clicks, if there are any.  Bebo does not insert any rel="nofollow" tags that I noticed.

One anomaly is that not all the posts get all the way through the pipe.

Another branch of the RSS distribution channel is to Twitter, like this:

 Blogger —> Feedburner —> Twitterfeed —>Twitter

Bebo also has a Twitter module available for its user profile page that I installed.  This made it possible for the same Twitterized Microenterprise post to appear twice on my Bebo profile page.  The Twitter feed to Bebo contained the Bit.ly link shortening URL used by Twitterfeed.  Again, I don't know if, or how, Google search deals with shortened links in general, but I'm fairly sure that the larger link shortening services count clicks and sell link popularity data to somebody, for some purpose.

How useful this information may be for internet marketing purposes remains to be seen.