Facebook Research: Brands Lean on Interactive Marketing –Yet Lack Social Marketing Skills

Nice framework approach from Jeremiah Owyang on how to approach, and rate, your facebook page activity.

This is followup data from the Altimeter Report: The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing, you should read this first.

Thanks to your help, Altimeter Group’s latest research on Facebook Marketing Best Practices, which now has over 17,000 views, and over 1,900 downloads (see slideshare stats) in less than a week. While we tried to include as much helpful information in the report, it was only the highlights of our findings. There’s far more data, scorecards, and findings that just aren’t able to fit into the report. Below is some additional information from our quantitative and qualitative study about the findings. Expect us to share more helpful data to marketers over the coming weeks, Altimeter clients can contact us for more details from the specific criteria, data, screenshots and scorecard.

[A fundamental mindset change must occur as brands approach social networks. In addition to interactive marketing (human-to-computer) brands must add social marketing (peer-to-peer) to their playbook.]

In the below graphic, we’ve aggregated the scores of the 30 brands to find out which of the criteria they’re good at –and which ones there are missed opportunities. We’ve then provided additional analysis on why we think brands scored this way, and some recommendations to improve. Research Graphic: Brands Great at Messaging and Branding –Yet Lack at Setting Expectations, Peer to Peer, and Advovacy

Criteria	How They Scored	Our Take: Why Brands Performed This Way	How Brands Can Improve Their Score
Set Community Expectations	2.08 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands failed to be clear why they were doing a Facebook effort, likely due to the fact that they jumped into the the social network bandwagon. Most brands are experimenting, and are unable to articulate their purpose	Clearly have a business objective and be sure the site goals cascades these objectives. By not doing so, sets company up for a potential backlash as unchecked or unsolved customer woes can quickly cascade to their friends, on brands owns pages.
Provide Cohesive Branding	3.90 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Brands showed some sophistication from over a decade of online interactive marketing has taught them how to cascade their experience to all touch points	This is a huge risk. Customer that have product complaints may echo them loudly here, and if the brand doesn’t respond, this public griping could escalate into a full blown groundswell. Continue to reflect the brand in all digital channels, but don’t overwhelm the member experience.
Be Up To Date	5.00 (Exceptional or “Escape Velocity”)	Brands have a strong legacy of broadcast marketing, which is also know as message bombardment. Brands demonstrated an incredible ability to propagate messages at a rapid rate, not unusual for other mediums as well.	Continue this energy of being interactive with their customers, but in addition to populating the Facebook page with up to date updates, ensure they are engaging in a two-way dialog.
Live Authenticity	2.87 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands suffered at being ’social’ in a social network, and are in many cases afraid to show their human side. Decades of being logo centric has cascaded to social networks and most members may question having conversations with a logo.	Behave in the same way the members are behaving: be social. Put the human side first by showing the team photos, giving human replies, and responding with first and last name.
Participate in Dialog	3.10 (Adolescence or “Climbing”)	Mixed bag of performance, while some brands may interact, often it was inconsistent. Even after a few years of social marketing blogging, forums, and Twitter, brands are still struggling to have real conversations with their members.	Interact with customers by engaging in a two way conversation. To scale, you don’t need to respond to every message, but set expectations on how frequently you’ll respond.
Enable Peer to Peer Interactions	2.03 (Immature or”Take off”)	Poor performance from brands here. In many cases, we expect brands hid from these features as they are difficult to moderate, manage, and risk of conversations going awry.	Better features are needed by using third party community applications, as well as hiring seasoned, well trained community managers to monitor and moderate.
Foster Advocacy	2.27 (Immature or”Take off”)	Brands are barely able to participate in the conversation let alone rely on the advanced features such as sharing or using your own members to share on your behalf.	At the bare minimum, encourage members to share content with each other and to cascade the branded experience to friends. As brands gain confidence, create formal advocacy programs.
Solicit a Call to Action	2.45 (Immature or”Take off”)	Unsure of even interacting with their members, it’s no surprise they didn’t know how to engage them for next steps or even conversion.	Don’t rush this. Until you’re scoring 4 or above on the previous mentioned criteria, I encourage brands to avoid this. Yet, for those that are succeeding in the other criteria, they can help members with conversion.

Summary: Brands Must Learn Social Marketing –Beyond Interactive Marketing
Brands are applying their years of experience of applying interactive marketing and broadcast marketing to the social web and it shows. With the natural inclination to brand and broadcast, we see these same behaviors in the Facebook Marketing. Yet, despite these existing strengths, brands are missing the two way aspect or ’social aspect’ of social network marketing. They must start to leverage peer to peer communications to reduce costs and content publication, show their human side, and quickly set expectations of what’s required –or risk a brand backlash. While setting community expectations doesn’t guarantee that a customer backlash could occur, it could help funnel them to the right place to be quickly supported. Yet, as problems are resolved, don’t shove them under the carpet in the call center, be sure to indicate back to the community they’ve been solved. Above all, brands must change their mindset from interactive marketing (human to computer) to also include social marketing (human to human)

Video: LEGO’s Social Media Strategy

Thanks Digital Buzz Blog

Diving into LEGO's Strategy Behind Connecting Their Amazing Network of Fans -- presented by Jake McKee from GasPedal on Vimeo.

This is a great video from Jake McKee (formally LEGO’s Global Community Relations Specialist) discussing how LEGO found, supported and incubated their biggest fans from around the world to help pull the company out of a pretty dark time to be back on top of the world, lead in part, by a strong social media strategy.

A word of warning, this is a 30 minute video, from a conference late last year (so skip the first 30 secs) and is not exactly their strategy, but more a case study of success, however, it’s well worth the time, and probably something you won’t have time to watch at your desk today so just make sure you remember to watch it later!

Jake McKee makes three really strong, but incredibly simple (how often do we see simplicity works socially?!) points.

1. Look beyond your target customers
2. Support existing fans
3. Find what works and replicate

1. Look beyond your target customers
Your target market isn’t always your biggest group of talkers. For years, LEGO was focused on kids — that is, until they realized adults had created their own community of enthusiasts. When LEGO started connecting these talkers, not only did they increase their word of mouth, they immediately helped their bottom line. Whereas kids were spending $20 a year on LEGOs, these adults were spending around $1,000.

2. Support existing fans
Without LEGO’s knowledge, adult fans had already created an online LEGO community and marketplace. LEGO approached this group by offering support and resources in the form of an ambassador program. By offering to support what these fans were already doing so well -instead of demanding ownership and control -LEGO was welcomed into the community.

3. Find what works and replicate
The enthusiasm of the adult fans helped teach LEGO how to gain more participation from their other fans- including kids. Jake says that when you find something that works with one fan group, try applying it to other groups of talkers. Because the fundamentals of great communities are the same, strategies behind one fan community can often generate similar success for another community. (via Igor on Viral Blog)

Question: What's a Facebook Fan Really Worth to Marketers?

Interesting piece from Adage

Two Social-Media Tech Companies Set Out to Answer It With Differing Formulas

Posted by Judy Shapiro on 06.14.10 @ 06:40 PM

True to form, many of the technologies showcased during New York's annual Internet Week wowed, but what really generated attention were efforts to answer the $64,000 question: How do we measure the value of a Facebook fan, especially since Facebook is a dominant part of a marketer's toolkit?

Two clever social-media technology companies, Syncapse and Vitrue, took a crack at answering this seemingly simple question. I say seemingly simple because, in reality, the "value" of a fan can mean lots of things such as actual sales value or value as evangelists or value as a research resource in a crowdsourcing campaign.

And given the ad hoc nature of measurement today, it's no surprise, therefore, that we see wildly divergent answers from these two companies. Syncapse, for instance, assigns the average value of a fan at $136.38, and Vitrue pegs the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60. The wild differences, of course, lies in what you are measuring. Let's take a closer look.

The Syncapse approach
I got to hear Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons present the findings from a joint, proprietary research study his company did with Hotspex. It was designed to calculate the value of a fan based on a set of attributes as described by Synapse in the study:

• Product spending -- Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
• Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) -- Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
• Propensity to recommend -- 68% of fans are "very likely" to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
• Brand affinity -- 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).

Together these attributes (and a few others) roll into a sophisticated formula which yields an average value of $136 per fan. Now, I love the idea of these metrics. I love the scope that these attributes reach for. I appreciate how cleverly they assigned a dollar value to intangible attributes such as brand affinity. And rightly, the study spends a fair amount of time acknowledging that the value is highly dependent on lots of variables.

Yet, the study requires us to take some pretty big leaps of faith since the data is self-reported -- not behaviorally tracked. This somewhat stacks the data deck – after all a fan means they are already favorably predisposed.

But even if one is willing to take these leaps of faith, what are the practical applications of this information? Does a marketer then use this measure to justify shifting dollars from one media into Facebook? Is it a "dollar for dollar" shift? Or is this information best used as a theoretical baseline for some objective measure of progress? While I like this approach because it is innovative and ambitious, its practical application remains to be seen.

The Vitrue approach
Vitrue's approach to the question, "What's the value of a Facebook community?," is to associate fan value to the value of impressions generated in the Facebook news feed. It then applies display banner advertising pricing to the number of Facebook fans (at $5 per CPM) for a value metric. The results of the study are based on Vitrue's own client data that had a combined 41 million fans. With this approach, one can theoretically increase monthly media impressions significantly so that, for instance, a marketer with a large Facebook fan base that posts twice a day can deliver 60 million more impressions/ month. Here is a recap (and many thanks to Webtechuniverse's blog post) of the formula: 1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions 60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000 $300,000 x 12 months = $3.6M $3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60

This approach is valid and similar to the methodology used to assign media value to publicity received in the news. "It's important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you're leveraging it," said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue, and they provide a nifty tool to help you measure your value Facebook fan page.

While this approach is more focused than the Syncapse approach (though less strategic), even within the more limited scope, here too we must be willing to take a leap of faith, which is that all impressions perform equally irrespective of environment within which those impressions are delivered. And then the inevitable "Now what?" problem also raises its head because we are not clear on how to apply this learning in the real world. Does this suggest that a wholesale dollar shift will deliver comparable results? (I'd love to hear from the Vitrue folks on this point.)

Conclusion
I fully appreciate the need to put an ROI face to the question (pun intended), and I much applaud the efforts by these companies to give guidance. But it seems fair to step back for a moment and ask ourselves a bigger question: "What is our Facebook marketing investment worth?" The way to answer that bigger question might be, in fact, to reframe it within the context of specific marketing campaigns like direct marketing rather than looking at this problem in a "monolithic" sense. As David Armano, senior VP, Edelman Digital, observed in a session on Facebook; we would do well to think of Facebook as part of a larger marketing "ecosystem" where there are practical and actionable set of measures like customer lifetime value, acquisition costs and sales.

The way forward
There is a rising chorus of voices demanding a coordinated industry approach to metrics and methodology used in the measurement of social media that integrates the disparate trade organizations' efforts while introducing the best thinking from innovative companies like Syncapse and Vitrue. This will allow the industry to come up with an accepted standard set of metrics that provide true actionability. It's time we roll this initiative out in earnest -- so if you have a voice or want to help, feel free to e-mail me.e-mail me

So what did I learn about the value of a Facebook fan in the last week? At least I learned enough to say, "It all depends..."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Judy Shapiro is chief brand strategist at CloudLinux and has held senior marketing positions at Paltalk, Comodo, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Bell Labs. Her blog, Trench Wars, provides insights on how to create business value on the internet.

Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center

Now this is monitoring the social web... thanks mashable

Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center

In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.

The company recently created the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters, a room that sits in the middle of the marketing department and could best be thought of as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media.

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Mission Control

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The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 () and IBM. Below are a few of the visualizations that we got to check out in an interview last week:

This monitor is a visualization of tweets that are relevant to Gatorade; the company is tracking terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics.

This monitor measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed sentiment analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches.

This video from Gatorade shows all of the different types of data being monitored from Mission Control.

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Mission Control in Action

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While certainly impressive visually, the first question that came to mind when being introduced to Gatorade Mission Control was how it’s actually being used on a day-to-day basis, and if its lead to product and marketing changes at the company that might not have happened without it.

Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, Consumer & Shopper Engagement Carla Hassan offered a few examples, starting with the company’s monitoring of its “Gatorade has evolved” campaign. The commercials featured a song by rap artist David Banner, which, Mission Control quickly saw was being heavily discussed in social media. Within 24 hours, they had worked with Banner to put out a full-length version of the song and distribute it to Gatorade followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, respectively.

On a day-to-day basis, Gatorade’s tools are also being used for more conventional marketing tactics –- like optimizing landing pages and making sure followers are being sent to the top performing pages. As an example, the company says it’s been able to increase engagement with its product education (mostly video) by 250% and reduce its exit rate from 25% to 9%.

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The Future

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The goal of the project, says Hassan, is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.” To that end, the company’s not only monitoring its brand on social media, but giving its fans increased access to its athletes and scientists.

During the Super Bowl, for example, Gatorade let fans interact with a number of its NFL starsUstream () as they tested out the new Gatorade G Series Pro. More recently, Hassan told me the company has been doing more regular small-scale live events, such as having a sports nutritionist answer questions from fans through Ustream and Facebook. through

If that strategy is successful, expect to see the Mission Control approach applied to other businesses within PepsiCo says Bonin Bough, director of global social media at the company. “We believe what we’re building here is an example of a sandbox of tools and processes we can use across the organization,” he said.

Facebook Poised to Take Geo-Networking Mainstream

Wow... been so lazy/busy that i've not posted anything for ages .Anyway going to to try get back into things with this from Adage:

Geo-location and making the real world interactive have long been personal favourite topics of mine, and with this little move from facebook it seems like it's all about to kick off big time. Which while i'm happy about that, i'm kinda pissed (but not surprised) that facebook is making a play here... do they really have to be EVERYTHING on the web?! I'm kinda fond of my geo-location stuff being on nice, not-evil, foursquare

Social Site Announces Location-Based Functionality, Marketers Eager to Leverage 'Check-Ins' Look for Scale

by Michael Learmonth and Emily Bryson York
Published: May 10, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- This could -- finally -- be the year of mobile marketing. But not exactly in the ways first predicted.

The combination of location and social networking -- once confined to tiny players like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Whrrl, Loopt and others -- is about to get massive scale in the form of Facebook, which as of last month had 450 million users and is adding a million new users each day.

MAC ATTACK: Facebook is building a location-based functionality that lets users 'check in' at restaurants and share menus with friends.

Facebook is expected to launch location-based functionality as soon as May, according to an exec with knowledge of Facebook's plans. Marketers will be allowed in soon after.

Related Stories

Facebook to Add Location This Month, Integrate Brands Later

Marketers Line Up to Try New Updates That Allow Users to Share Their Whereabouts

Last week Ad Age reported that McDonald's is building a location-based functionality with Facebook that will allow users to "check-in" at restaurants and share menu items with friends. That campaign is expected to be rolled out some time after the consumer launch, when Facebook integrates brands into the system.

The social impact of including a physical location in a virtual sharing app is immense; so is the marketing application as brands are then able to turn their physical locations into media channels connected to real people across Facebook's social graph.

"People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising," said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. "If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her."

Mr. Goldstein sees marketers adding location as a key part of the value exchange with consumers. A store could, for example, offer free Wi-Fi to patrons who share their location to their friends.

McDonald's declined to comment on its Facebook plans, but one can imagine it could allow users who "check-in" the ability to share an offer or promo, as well as their location, with their social connections.

Jumping on bandwagon
Brands quickly recognized the power of location-aware social networks, and Pepsi, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, Bravo, Warner Bros. and others jumped on the bandwagon and did deals with Foursquare.

But location-based marketing is very much in an experimental phase, mostly because the medium is tiny. Foursquare just signed up its millionth user, for example; MyTown has 2 million; Loopt has 3.5 million; and Gowalla still under a million. For a marketer that needs to reach hundreds of millions daily, geolocation social apps just can't provide the scale yet.

"Today no one can do location-based social marketing at scale other than potentially Facebook, should they release something," said Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media.

But with the proliferation of smartphones and location-aware networks -- including Facebook -- lots of marketers are betting that the sharing of physical location is about to become as natural and ubiquitous as a status update. Indeed, where you are could become the most valuable part of social networking. See a friend is having a coffee down the street? Why not join him?

Budgets devoted to this kind of marketing are tiny, just like social media budgets were a few years ago. But unlike some other recent social phenomenon -- take Twitter, or even Facebook itself -- it didn't take marketers long at all to figure out that the marketing potential is immense.

"We're always looking for the next big thing that isn't just a passing fad, but a viable wave in consumer behavior," said Chris Fuller, emerging media director at Pizza Hut. "Geolocation services appear to be just that." Pizza Hut built a Facebook ordering platform in 2008.

But the greatest opportunity for geolocation apps could be for local businesses, for which scale is less important than reaching the right people to generate foot traffic. "This will be the biggest thing to happen to local businesses since paid search," said Ian Schafer, CEO of DeepFocus, which just launched specialty practice GEOFocus. "It enables people to move in flocks or herds; you create waves of people."

Boon to local businesses
Some local businesses are catering to their Foursquare "mayors" with offers and special services. The Scholastic Store in New York is offering visitors 10% off any purchase, just for checking in while visiting.

Facebook, incidentally, has a self-serve ad platform created for small advertisers, the types most likely to benefit from location-based services.

Still, some wonder if this could be too much. Facebook is a platform that allows people to share their lives, and it makes sense that location would become part of that. But each feature Facebook adds -- such as its recent Open Graph function, which brings its social graph to third-party sites -- brings pushback from users, mostly in the form of privacy concerns.

"Being fully connected and available 24/7 to all your peeps and tweets may not be as healthy as it seems," said Scott Bedbury, CEO of BrandStream. "Not being available, being off the grid and being fully present in whatever moment you're in, and with whoever is with you, is my measure of 'engagement.'"

IN SEARCH OF THICKER CONNECTIONS / THE SOCIAL WEB

Nice post from Contagious about the what, where and why of trusted sources

A lapse in trust between friends and peers, and why all social media connections are not created equal

A couple of days ago, Patricia McDonald of BBH Labs in New York put up a thought-provoking blog post entitled 'Will Social Media Eat Itself?' In this post, she responded to the startling finding, by the Edelman Trust Barometer, 'that we trust our friends and peers considerably less than we did two years ago'. Apparently, in the US, just 25% of respondents said that they regarded friends and peers as very/extremely credible - that's 20 points less than 2008. Go here for the full post - it's a great read.

We'll get into the loss of trust in real world environments towards the end, but for now, let's consider the 'media' angle of this social circumspection.

McDonald posits some different theories for the loss of trust with regard to the social web, for example: In times of trouble, we look to more established sources of information. As social media gets older, more commercial players treat it like old media and damage its credibility. Smart commercial uses of social information have been slow to emerge.

However, the suggestion we find most interesting is this:

As the network gets bigger, connections weaken.

BINGO.

We've been pondering this for a while. It is the great fallacy of social media that numbers mean power, and that all online connections are created equal. For example, on Facebook, there are people we communicate with all the time - close friends, family members etc. These we will term thick connections, as they facilitate regular exchange of content and sentiment.

Then, there are those creepy people from school that we agreed to be friends with because...well, that's Facebook, innit. These are thin connections. They are weak. They are barely used. They are breakable. They are there to bolster the numbers. And they were exploited deliciously and notoriously by Burger King at the beginning of 2009 with its Whopper Sacrifice app in which Facebook users were invited to sacrifice 10 thin connections in exchange for a free burger. 234,000 friends were dropped in five days, QED.

It's the different between blood and water. Online connections vary in 'thickness'. It's a fact of the web.

Twitter, too, is equally guilty of the numbers game, giving rise to a kind of hollow activism. Just because thousands of people are baying in 140 characters for policy change in Iran / the head of Jan Moir / Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number One, it doesn't mean it will actually happen. (In the first two instances, it didn't. In the third, it was only when those people were persuaded to go one step further than retweeting, or adding their name to a Facebook group by actually buying the single that any kind of positive effect was produced).

There is no greater indication of the fact that numbers do not create de facto meaning than Chat Roulette, the random web chat service in which visitors are randomly paired with a stranger on the other side of the world. Acting as a kind of penis media delivery service, Chat Roulette exploded from 500 users in January to 10,000 by the beginning of February, despite the fact that most conversations either last only a few seconds or end in a picture of a scrotum. What does this mean? Nothing, probably. That we're bored. That we enjoy a little dose of unpredictability and randomness from the comfort of our own homes. Nothing that we didn't already know about human nature.

The rise of niche networks populated with enthusiasts and experts on a given subject has been predicted for a while. As McDonald points out, 'for a while this seemed counter-intuitive as I considered the all-conquering power of Facebook and the wisdom of fishing where the fish are.' However, the joy of a niche network is that all connections are thick connections. Information is shared on a regular basis on specific subjects by people who know or at least recognise each other's value, and enjoy interaction.

Dunbar's number is a theoretical number at which a community stops being 'stable' - the number at which people in the group cease to know and understand every other member of the community. The most commonly cited representative of this number is 150. It's fascinating to note that Facebook has more than 400m active users, yet the average user has 130 friends, pretty close to Dunbar's number. Even if marketers are judging the worth of Facebook on sheer weight of numbers, it appears that we know how to limit our social circles to manageable levels, tech or no tech.

It is here, we suspect, that the benefits for marketers may lie. By providing a utility, a platform, a sensitive addition to these connections, they get thicker, and stronger, and so does their association with the brand. Rather than an irritant, another clattering cymbal in the overwhelming noise of a network borne up by a million thin connections, the brand weaves itself into the DNA of a community. It is as much part of the experience as the participants.

Some other points to bear in mind:

In boom times, when we dedicate ourselves to the reckless accumulation of more stuff, it's more likely that purchase decisions will be made on the recommendation of a random peer or acquaintance. When money is less readily available and people are notably spending less, any purchase they do make is likely to be the result of more careful research from a number of different sources, both established and casual. It's not necessarily a reflection on the peer-to-peer relationship, more an indication of overall caution in the marketplace.

And finally - it's worth bearing in mind how exactly the report defines 'friend or peer'. As far as we could tell, the report makes no distinction between 'people that make me laugh on Twitter' and 'John and Sarah next door'. They're all just friends or peers. So - this isn't necessarily just indicative of a failure of trust in the connections that underpin our online lives. It points to something bigger. (Have a look at Richard Edelman's discussion of the results here.)

It's no coincidence that these results have emerged immediately following an absolute nail-biter of a year in which the global banking system came close to collapse, and many traditional sources of authority revealed themselves to be as clueless as the man on the street. Trust is not like energy. It can be both created, and destroyed, with devastating consequences.

According to the report, trust in the government is up, and trust in corporations (at least in the US) is slowly returning, yet trust in ALL information sources is down. Clearly, it takes time to rebuild what once was. So if we have less trust in our governments to protect us and our bankers to look after our money and our media outlets to be objective and our online social networks to be populated by anything other than mildly amusing strangers and old classmates, then what do we have left? The dichotomy of a world in which we are more in touch but less connected than ever before, and a feeling that if you want something doing, you know who your best bet is going to be

Crowdsourced company purchase

Nice idea with a lot of traction behind it: http://buyabeercompany.com/

Interesting to see what happens when they hit the 300M... will everone cough up for a round?

Losing To The Social Web: Visualized

Interesting post from Digital Buzz Blog. I guess my only real argument against this 'everything going social' idea is that just as we've all foreseen the death of TV and print, the reality is that these media, just like websites and microsites, have roles that they will continue to fill for the near future at least, even though these roles may well change. To my mind, there is never a single answer and smart use of digital will involve multiple presences and activities that cater to the myriad of ways people want to find, absorb, engage and share information. Marketing via content, utility and distributed services... hell yes, but don't rely on me wanting to check out your products in public while i hang out with my friends.
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A brands website has been the single biggest ”online” focus for 99% of businesses over the last 10 years apart from banner campaigns and microsites here and there, but with the evolution of social media growing at unheard of rates (Twitter is up over 3500% alone this year, while Facebook increased over 700% to finally overtake MySpace and then turned them to dust!) businesses really need to think about what’s happening to their website traffic…

I recently read a great post on Supercollider by Geoff Northcott (via Martina on Adverblog) that talked about the end of the destination web, along with adage, we are social and adweek about how the times are fading for websites and microsites are dead – Geoff posted a few good Google trends graphs, so I thought I might take that a little further, find a few additional graphs and look at why and where this traffic is going…

What you’ll notice from the graphs below (you can see them here) is that some of the biggest brands, websites and portals are loosing unique visitors hand over fist for the last 3 years. Doesn’t make sense right? More and more people are connecting online, brands are spending bucket loads of cash on digital campaigns, so website traffic should be the complete opposite? (note. the graph below with out a heading is the BBC.co.uk)

So with such dramatic declines in website traffic and rapidly increasing numbers of Internet connected people, where is all that traffic going? The Social Web – the emerging networks where everyone is connected, everything is relevant, and everything can be shared with a single click and browsed, summarized or bookmarked with ease…

There are 2 key reasons why website traffic is declining.

1. Social Networks (obviously) are growing and most people prefer to hang out there instead of searching the big brands websites for content to interact with. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter share what you’re already interested in. Everything is relevant and you don’t have to leave to get the best content from 10 of your favourite brands / websites.
2. Off-Site Content Distribution is rapidly growing, I’m talking RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels, Facebook Fan pages and so on… All the best brands and websites now actively push their content (the same stuff you use to get from their website and still want to access) to as many various “off-site” sources and platforms as possible.So naturally this removes unique visitors from their main sites, channeling them into a maze of various networks, feeds and tweets…Oh, and ofcourse, widgets/apps – we’ve only just seen the start of these.

Over the next few years, brands will need to re-structure they way they deliver experiences to their customers online (the best ones are already doing it), and that means delivering unique content to anywhere customers want to experience it.

Maybe that’s the latest offers by RSS feeds, new product demos by YouTube, campaigns by iPhone apps, online shopping via widgets in facebook or branding exercises by seeding stopmotion viral videos (they seem to be all the rage!)?

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking…!

I don’t think websites & microsites are dead yet. There are still years and years of usefulness ahead for them, we’ll just need to come up with better ways to connect them and their content into the social lives of customers online…

Facebook Now Tracking Gross National Happiness; Continues Hoarding Data

Thanks Mashable for this on Facebook's latest data fun... and greed

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / October 5, 2009 1:09 PM / 12 Comments

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Facebook announced this afternoon that it is tracking what it calls its version of Gross National Happiness, based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status. It's very interesting to see how people feel about various world events that Facebook has cross referenced - US users are more happy on Thanksgiving than on Christmas, for example.

The new index is interesting, but it's also a frustrating example of just how much value Facebook is withholding by not allowing everyone access to the anonymous, aggregated activity and conversation of more than 300 million people.

Almost a year ago we wrote about how a widely discussed Facebook Sentiment Engine could be a huge asset. That theoretical possibility held at least as much potential as the very real Google data about most popular searches minute-by-minute during the last Presidential debates.

One best-case scenario we imagined looked like this:

Think of the non-commercial, public interest kind of data that could be acquired. When the economic stimulus plan of 2009 was first announced on national television - what was the reaction of people in their mid twenties who lived in the Mid West of the US? Was that collective reaction substantially different from the reaction of self-identified queer people of color living in the North East US? How did the public reaction to the proposed plan change one hour, one day or one week after the announcement? This is all very interesting and potentially valuable data that could be, for the first time in history, available in near real time. Just by listening to what people are talking about in status updates and comments.

Unfortunately, that's not what Facebook has given us. It's almost a year later and all we get is a hands-off graph showing that people were sad when Heath Ledger died and were happy on National Holidays. What a tragic loss of public access to a valuable resource that we ourselves are creating.

If the movement to make social networking a distributed, decentralized phenomenon ends up succeeding and capturing these kinds of benefits of scale - we're going to look back at this point in history and think it's absurd that one company kept so much important knowledge from society at large.

Shame that name

Nice work from Green Peace. Using social media to try make Rudd's name dirty if he does a dirty on the climate: http://www.dirtykev.org/

City Life, One Minute At A Time

Thanks PSFK for this post on a great programme underway to give us 1 minute glimpses of life in other cities. Fascinating stuff

cityoneminutes is a global web video project that allows you to observe 41 different cities around the world in one-minute intervals.

From a drunk man staggering to hail a cab in Addis Ababa to a serene San Francisco cityscape in the wee hours of the morning, there’s a wide range of cultural and behavioral morsels to absorb, in addition to all of the architectural and design idiosyncrasies of each area.

You can search for videos by city or specific time of day, watch an entire day in one region, or skip around from place to place.

The project is part of a greater collaboration between Dutch public television station VPRO and many different sponsors (including UNICEF and the Netherlands China Arts Foundation) called theoneminutes, which is a site that applies the same one-minute video idea to different scenarios- such as train rides, weddings, and abstract video art.

theoneminutes is also accepting submissions for all of their different categories at present. The best one minute videos will be picked out at year’s end for an annual awards show. Click here for more information.

[via Pop Up Cities]

Social media stats

Nothing new here, but a nice video summary of some of the more interesting social media stats. Thanks Digital Buzz Blog



By Eric Qualman from Socialnomics. This is another great visualisation of the latest social media statistics that always makes for a few minutes well spent watching! It provides a range of great stats like these…

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
• 96% of them have joined a social network
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year have met via social media
• Facebook added 100 million users in 9 months
• If Facebook would be a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
• In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
• There are over 200.000.000 Blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.