eModeration's Social Media Round-Up for 21- 27 Sept 09

Welcome to the round-up compiled by eModeration's research consultant Kate Williams, of all that's new, controversial or just plain weird on the social media scene in the last few days.

THE HEADLINES...

The UK Govt is to rush a controversial broadband tax into law before the General Election. The tax, which levies 50p per month on everyone with a fixed-line telephone, was first mooted in Lord Carter's Digital Britain, and could raid £175m to 'make high speed networks nationally available.'

First Direct's new campaign will highlight both positive and negative comments made about the brand, and includes a microsite which will aggregate every brand mention on more than 5m social media sites. Don't worry, perhaps it's like free-running. It seems counter-intuitive now, but in a year's time I'm sure we'll all be doing it...

There was some anxiety this week - and not a little resentment - as social-heavyweight Seth Godin launched Squidoo, a service which aggregates all conversations around Brand X and funnels them onto one page. The resentment began to bubble when it emerged that Brand X would have to pay $400 per month for the privilege of responding to any negative comments.

Further audible gulps came with the announcement of Google's Sidewiki, a new tool which lets anyone comment on any web pages - including brand sites. One furious but anonymous commenter said "This service is like posting a whiteboard in front of my house, that I'm not allowed to erase, and giving a marker to anyone that walks by."

THE LOWDOWN...

Squeeeal! Justin Timberlake casting rumours confirmed! The Timble is to play Napster co-founder Sean Parker in the The Facebook Movie - and look, he speaks Mandarin too! A Renaissance man indeed.

A rookie Redskins linebacker tweeted that his team's fans were "fake" and "dim wits", before asking "who are you to say you know what’s best for the team and you work 9 to 5 at Mcdonalds?” Touché, you'll agree. Sadly, the account has now been deleted.

The developers of the dystopic MMO Fallen Earth say their players thought female characters should look "more feminine". Which, if the results are anything to go by, translates as 'considerably younger' and 'no stranger to the surgeon's knife'.

Using just their phone number, DateCheck rifles through your prospective paramour's online drawers, and alerts you to Sleaze factor (past sex offences) and Compatibility (their star sign). Conveniently, it also lets you know their Net Worth. Pragmatic - or creepy? You decide.


ON TWITTER...

The micro-blogging upstart drew astounded gasps this week when they announced that a new financing round had pumped £100 million into the 3 year old service. With characteristic reserve, Twitter called the injection 'significant' - but the rest of the world was less restrained, and valuations zoomed straight to $1bn. The news predictably put co-founder Biz Stone's revelation that Twitter won't, after all, carry ads this year into the shade.

Following legal rumblings from Ewan McGregor amongst others, Twitter is moving swiftly towards an account-validation system. Other slebs who've been stung include Britney, the Dalai Lama - and David Milliband, who it turns out didn't tweet "never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael" after all...

MySpace has rolled out a two-way Twitter synch allowing updates to appear in Twitter feeds, and vice versa. Fits neatly with the recent news that Twitter's teen share is looking pink and healthy.

Some fabulously odd Twitter stats to mull here: a deathwish-tastic 11% of Twitter users tweet while driving, double the number of Facebook-users who do so. (Tiresomely, the stat has a useful point to make: it highlights Twitters superior compatibility with mobile phones.)

Just under a quarter of Twitter users have posted Tweets which seemed at the time to be of a pithy or hilarious nature, but which they later bitterly regretted. And for every user who tweets on a daily basis, there's one who never has, or who no longer does. Finally, key concerns of Twitterers remain, if not Neanderthal, then basic: the top 5 most frequent recurs on Twitter are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.”

AND ON FACEBOOK....

The weather was rather changeable for Twitter's rival, Facebook:

On the upside, they partnered with Nielsen to launch Brand Lift. The new platform will poll those who have and haven't seen specific ads, and compare the two groups - offering brand advertisers performance measurement. And a new home page unit of engagement will help brands target potential customers with a pop-out window to register for free samples.

But the social giant also announced the death of Beacon - the no-opt-out monitoring platform which noted when a user visited advertisers' sites, then auto-invited that user's friends to join him or her. Disgruntled Facebook users launched a class suit - the $9.5 million will now be going to a foundation dedicated to online privacy and security.

And there wasn't a huge amount of love for The 'Book swilling around the marketing blogosphere either. Chris Brogan was a bit meh about the risqué ads he's being served ("Call me a prude, but I find these ads offensive") and wondered why Facebook isn't more concerned about scratching its shiny.

And Social Media Playground pointed out that the new sample pop-outs might be a way of charging brands for what they've been doing free for a while. As Todd Deffren says, "here's the trouble with Facebook: it’s a proprietary network... the rules change pretty frequently... and there’s little the average Corporate Marketer can do about it."

BRANDS ON SOCIAL...

Woo-hoo for Cadbury's Wispa and CocaCola's vitaminwater: the two brands saw considerable fan gains on their Facebook pages this week, according to Inside Facebook.

Boo-hoo for Sara Lee, whose social media campaign failed to rise. One eMarketer analyst was succinct: "I'm a mom and I didn't see the point."

A new, mobile-only social network is being launched by Albion London. The O2-backed network's members will get rebates for participating in user-generated marketing campaigns, and voting on the company's business decisions.

And finally, if you're a brand who's courting the bookish, steer clear of social networks: less than 3% of readers find them useful.

SOME MORE SOCIAL STATS

WHOOSH! (that's the sound of social networking usage on Smartphones skyrocketing). Nielsen reports a rise of 187 percent to 18.3 million unique users in July 2009. That figure triples the 6.4m users of a year ago, and Socnets now account for 32% of all Smartphone activity. Nielsen also reports that nearly a third of all mobile video is viewed by 24-35 year olds.

I'll have what she's having: Science Daily reports that there are two intriguing tipping-points in the conformity of groups. Researchers discovered that, after one menu-item has been ordered by 30% of a group of diners, the tendency to go for something different weakens. But after 80-90% had chosen the same dish, the instinct to be different kicked in again.

Yikes! 84% of companies don't measure social media ROI and 40% didn't even know whether or not they had the tools to do so.

Even the ones that are measuring don't feel that they are doing enough. The full results of the survey are definitely worth a look.


TEENS...

To highlight some of the threats which face teenagers online, US communications net Verizon have teamed up with the Ad Council to create a campaign which will run across mobile, web and TV. The ads spotlight the various forms of digital dating abuse with the tagline 'Where do you draw your digital line?'.

The New Jersey School Boards Association recently published their policy regarding staff, students and social networking. The paper, which other bodies can use as a template, advises that 'teachers should be friendly, and not friends'.

The new gTrend Teen Report was launched this week, based on a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 American teen influencers. The reports authors say they have identified 15 new trends around teens’ relationship with technology.

ALL RISE...

The Pizza Kitchen in Knox County has embraced social media - perhaps a little too warmly. After falling out with their marketing company, its owner posted his disgust - and allegations of the theft of his email list - on both Facebook and Twitter. The marketing company in question have now filed a libel suit against the restaurant.

Amongst many interesting takeaways from a recent conference which pulled together the legal brains from 100 top companies: companies are most at risk when employees contribute company-specific information online but don't disclose that they're an employee. Plus, it's not a good plan to block employees' access to social media, since it drives workers to their mobiles instead.

PalTalk has launched scattergun lawsuits against six virtual world/MMO developers, including NCsoft and Sony, alleging infringement of their patents for real-time chat during gameplay.

ELSEWHERE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS...

Linden Lab released some stats which reveal that globally users have spent more than a billion hours in Second Life. User hours have grown 33% year-on-year to an impressive 126 million, and they've transacted the equivalent of more than $1 billion USD between themselves.

Dizzywood, a virtual world for kids aged 8-12, has nabbed a National Parenting Publications Award. Previous winners include Club Penguin, and the Word Girl PBS Website.

The 20 fastest-growing Facebook apps are social games - with Zynga scoring particularly well. FarmVille hit 46 million, and Mafia Wars 23 million - placing them at number 2 and 4 respectively.


That's all folks! Do let us know if you've found this of interest.

Social Media Round-Up - the latest news

I wanted to share eModeration's (more-or-less) weekly round-up of the latest, greatest or simply weirdest in the social media scene with the Brand Republic audience.  Hope you finding it engaging!  More good stuff on our blog at http://blog.emoderation.com.

THE HEADLINES…

Facebook became embroiled in global politics this week, after pressure from some residents of the Golan Heights, a disputed region connecting Israel to Syria which was captured by Israel in 1967. Until a few weeks ago, if you lived in Katzrin, a town in the region, your profile said you lived in Syria. Now users can opt to live in Israel.

Social Media – it’s Chicken-Lickin’ Good. When British supermarket giant Asda discovered that an employee had posted a video of himself licking frozen poultry, it used the same platform to hit back. Their own YouTube post features four of his shocked co-workers' expressing their clearly heartfelt dismay – and has effectively headed off the Domino’s Effect.

In a case which is either evidence of a serious social media addiction, or of chronic dim-wittery, a burglar left a hefty clue to his identity when he checked his Facebook page whilst on a job, and failed to log out before scarpering with the loot. Doop.

Doop 2: Martha Lane Fox's Digital Inclusion office (target: get 6m of the digitally-excluded online, ASAP) was this week hit by a thief, who broke into its offices and stole some laptops. One down, 5,999,999 to go.

It's all over between me and George Clooney: when asked about Facebook, the star responded that he would “rather have a prostate exam on live tv by a guy with very cold hands”, than a Facebook page. That’s a pretty vivid picture you paint there, George, and now I can’t get it out of my head.

US start-up The Whuffie Bank now gives you tangible evidence of your online reputation (also check out our previous post on ReputationShare). The non-profit’s algorithm assigns Whuffies to your comments, posts and mentions by others - in other words, it’s Karma for Web 2.0. Go on – you know you want to.


ON FACEBOOK THIS WEEK…

A stunner of a week for what is now, definitively, our favourite place to waste time online, per Nielsen. The social behemoth reached a humungous 300 million registered users – putting the Great Twitter/Facebook Face-Off into some serious perspective.

Not only that, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg simultaneously revealed that the company was already cash-flow positive – a milestone which it had previously predicted for ‘sometime in 2010’.

Facebook’s special sauce turns out to be ‘self-serve ads’ – targeted ads which advertisers can create on-site, in minutes, to reach particular demographics. According to Facebook’s Chamath Palihapitiya “all channels are doing very well, but that channel is just crushing it" and has been accelerating every quarter since it was launched.


AND ON TWITTER…

A mixed bag this week: researchers analysed half a million Tweets, and discovered that an astounding 20% of them were about brands. That’s 600 thousand brand mentions per day – time to get sentiment-mapping, folks.

And e-Marketer predicts 18 million Twitter users (that’s those who tweet at least once a month) by the end of 2009. That’s an impressive 50% up on their predictions of earlier this year - but not quite enough to worry Facebook, 120m of whose users check in once a day.

In that context, Facebook’s claim that that Twitter ‘is in the rear-view mirror’ seems entirely feasible - particularly when Nielsen's latest figures show that 50-64-year-old users are twice those of 18-24s, with 22% vs. 11%.

And eyebrows were raised when it emerged that Twitter’s private investors had valued the company at a breath-taking $1bn. That’s quite a figure, for a company with no revenue in sight.

And this week’s best Twitter headline goes to… The Guardian, with ‘Avatar Loss Horror Afflicts Twittering Classes’. (It was a temporary glitch, we’re assured.)


BRANDS ON SOCIAL …

Home retailer Habitat has made a sheepish return to Twitter three months after its spamming disaster (it hijacked an Iranian election thread to promo its Sale) hit the headlines: “We're back. Sorry it took so long. This time we want to get it right.”

TGI Friday's campaign to get 500,000 Facebook fans signed up reached its goal far sooner than anticipated – leaving many fans too late for the promised free burger. As negative comments piled up on their fanpage, the brand narrowly averted a backlash by extending the offer to the first 1m signups.

And..

Vitaminwater is crowdsourcing its next flavour - Facebook members can download a shareable application which lets them vote for their choice among ten flavor proposals. Each of those proposals will have been chosen according to the amount each flavour is discussed in online conversations on Twitter and other social media. Voters can also specify the vitamin content, write the ad copy, and design the packaging – with $5000 for the winner.


SOCIAL NETWORKS GOING NORTH…

Former Bebo CEO Joanna Shields heads up a new venture with Elisabeth Murdoch, which will meld TV production and social media.

And Nokia has bought micro social-networking site Plum in the latest expansion of its social media ambitions.

AND GOING SOUTH…

HMV is folding GetCloser.com, its social discovery network which launched last July to help film and music fans access content and find each other.

And poorly BusinessWeek, whose bid deadline is fast approaching, was revealed last week to have spent a hefty $16m creating its social networking site, which is thought to have generated just $600,000 in revenue.


SOME SOCIAL STATS…

The best overall way to raise a brand’s reputation is via forums and social networks, according to new research by Trendstream: 36% of 16-24-year-olds and 20% of 55-64-year-olds said brands who did improved their opinion - by 29% on average.

But these new stats from E-Tailing suggest that brands are still rather, erm, conflicted about grasping the social media nettle. 34% were concerned that consumers would think they were “using outdated marketing/ merchandising techniques” if they didn’t do so - but a whopping 49% were also worried that social media meant that “people can trash my products in front of large audiences.”

A study has revealed that more than half of ad impressions and a terrifying 95% of clicks in online ad buys could be fraudulent. Radar Research’s Marissa Gluck called it "the dirty little secret of the online ad industry”.

Mediaweek reports that increased user time on social networks is stolen from email and IM. Adults spend slightly over 3 hours a month in online communities, whereas back in the mists of time (well, 2003) consumers spent most of their online time emailing and IMing.

But overall, Content is emphatically king: time spent on content sites averages seven hours, a healthy increase of 88% from 6 years ago. Meanwhile poor old e-commerce was 18.7% down, with consumers spending a monthly 2 hours, 40 minutes on e-commerce sites.

AND ELSEWHERE IN E-COMMERCE…

A study by McAfee found that the majority of online shoppers – 65% - wait a day or more to complete their purchase. Far from being shopping cart abandonment, this behaviour might simply be indicative of the cautious shopper.

And while that species will inevitably expand as the recession continues, eMarketer predicts that the number of online shoppers will rise from 26.9m to 31.8m by 2013 – that’s over half the UK population.


ON THE BOX…

Rumours abound that Hulu, the free online viewing service, is already beta-testing a subscription version. Precisely what the premium service will consist of – better content? Zero ads? – is unclear, but analyst Laura Martin warns Trad TV businesses to be afraid – be Very Afraid – of Hulu.

The BBC is opening up iPlayer to third parties. Announcing the move, the Beeb’s head of future media let slip that the most searched term on the iPlayer was ‘Coronation Street’, the jewel in the crown of rival network ITV.

AND IN THE OFFICE..

Twitter breaks could become a regular feature of worker’s days – with those who check their SocNets at other times subject to disciplinary procedures. It follows research suggesting British firms are losing millions of pounds to social networks each day. You can view the social media policies of large US companies here by the way.


MOBILE HOME…

Socks up, mobile sites! While 31% of phone users browse the Mobile Web, they give an extremely limp 52 out of 100 average rating to dedicated mobile sites.

Those very same users are also ‘extremely ad wary’, according to research from Chitika: mobile as a whole hit a measly 0.48% clickthrough rate - just over half of the average non-mobile rate, which hovered at 0.83%.

And of all measly clickthrough rates, iPhone users' were the most measly. Though they browse the net the most, they were even less likely to click through than other mobile users, with a paltry 0.30%.

Perhaps matters will be improved by Microsoft’s launch of behavioural targeting service, which collects user data across Microsoft properties - Hotmail, Bing, Xbox and other MS-owned websites.


LEGAL BRIEF…

Evony has filed libel suit against a blogger for causing ‘significant damage to the company’s brand.” Though Evony is US-based, and blogger Bruce Everiss resides in the UK, the suit has been filed in Australia where libel is easier to prove.

A federal judge in California has ruled that video-sharing site Veoh is protected from liability for hosting pirated clips uploaded by its users. The law “does not place the burden of ferreting out infringement on the service provider," the judge wrote.

A California Judge has bashed out a compromise order which may suit the current slew of requests to unmask anonymous commenters. She’s ordered that a commenter's IP address be disclosed to an independent investigator: only if it turns out to be a specific individual will the name be turned over.

An ex-Congressman who did successfully unmask an online commenter has had the resulting libel suit thrown out. The court ruled that the comments were a matter of public interest, and that the ex-Congressman had "failed to demonstrate that [his] action has a substantial basis in fact and law.”

France's lower house of parliament has approved a bill which could see pirates who ignore email and postal warnings get their internet connections cut for a year - and face €300,000 (£267,000) in fines.

Entrepreneur Kevin Alderman, who sells virtual erotic goods in Second Life, launched a suit against Linden Labs for allegedly allowing other virtual marketers to offer knock-offs of his "SexGen" beds and other products.

Social game-maker Playdom responded cuttingly to a suit by competitor Zynga, who apparently accused it of nefariously accessing a document which contains "non-public … know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games." Playdom replied that the lawsuit "comes as no surprise given Zynga's penchant for litigation", and that the company has “no interest in Zynga’s ‘secret sauce’". Ouch.


ELSEWHERE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS…

By the end of this year, Virtual Worlds will hit the 150 mark , according to Kzero’s figures – and the total is set to double by the end of 2010, driven largely by media companies launching IP-driven platforms for their toy, film and tv properties.

There’s little doubt that we are now a society which wants what it wants, when it wants it – and so of course microtransactions are big business. Here, Massively explains all, and argues that we’re witnessing a rapid and far-reaching shift in the culture of MMORPGs.

With new free-to-play MMO titles like Earth Eternal in development and other titles ported from from Asia at a rapid-fire rate, has the market become oversaturated with free-to-play?


TOOLS AND TECH…

Vivox has launched VoiceChat, an App which allows Facebook friends to chat while gaming. The developers followed 100,000 users and found that those used voice chat in their games were four times more likely to be playing a game five weeks later than those who didn’t.

Twitter heroes Seesmic have come to the rescue of both time-strapped Facebook brands and fans. Page admins can easily update their content – and fans can view all their Pages as distinct entities and engage with them more easily.

Our friends and partners Crisp, the online child protection specialist, have unveiled Automated Behaviour Management (ABM). Working in real-time, ABM allows NetModerator clients to automate responses to low-level rule infringements such as sharing phone numbers or profanity, stopping potentially serious offenders from taking root in the game.

Social review tool provider PowerReviews is launching BrandConnect, which features two elements: Listener and Megaphone. Listener asks users to review a product in far more detail than usual, and also carries out a 2-stage review-moderation programme. while Megaphone gives customers the option to syndicate their reviews to Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs.

Rookie social network Vreebit.com launched last week. The site “combines the best of top social networking sites with new organizational, e-commerce and promotional tools, changing the way people connect, communicate and organize their social and professional lives”

Centaur Media has launched Reputation Online, an ad-funded site aimed at PR firms, agencies and brands looking to better manage their image on the web.

BillMyParents has gone live: Teens and tweens can use BillMyParents to purchase virtual goods and virtual currency for game play upgrades inside Gala-Net’s gPotato online game portal and Artix Entertainment’s AdventureQuest Worlds’ virtual game worlds.

Khan & Warren vs Facebook – Round One

According to the Guardian, Frank Warren and Amir Khan are threatening to sue Facebook over derogatory comments made about them on the social network.

Facebook allows any user to set up private or public groups. You can go onto Facebook right now and search for Johnny Depp, which will bring back 500 groups dedicated to the actor, but these user groups can just as easily be set up to deride people – like the recent example of the Dixons employees who set up a Facebook group and proceeded to make fun of Dixons customers.

Amir Khan and Frank Warren are not objecting to fan pages, but to abusive and racist comments posted on Facebook.  Facebook has a policy of removing "abusive, vulgar, hateful or racially and ethnically objectionable" comments which violate its terms, but, as the Guardian points out, the sheer volume of content makes this a difficult task, relying on users to police comments themselves. It also states that this language would not be accepted in a newspaper.

The ease with which someone can set up a group or post a comment which is specifically designed to bully another person is frightening. Unlike Amir and Frank, most people who fall victim to this kind of behaviour do not have the financial means to threaten legal action unless the content is removed.

The newspaper analogy is an interesting one. The Daily Mail recently announced that it was not going to pre-moderate user comments, but rely on users to flag abusive content that the paper will then assess and remove if necessary. (In my view, by doing this, the paper risks its reputation by association with abusive user comment.) But the fact is that Facebook is not a newspaper: it is a ‘social utility’, and merely provides a conduit for individuals to publish their own material and thus could not be viewed as a ‘publisher’ in the same way as a newspaper.  However, it does have also some responsibility for its content.

 To be fair, the fact that it has a user policy at all means that it is going some way to realising this responsibility. Facebook terms state: “You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” But just having a policy is not enough. From a moral standpoint, you have to implement it, and relying on user reports obviously isn’t enough: if a group is set up specifically with the aim of abuse, members of that group are unlikely to report abusive content. I accept that it would be prohibitively expensive and against the whole set-up to pre-moderate the whole of Facebook’s content, and indeed, the legal defence  under Section 1 of the UK’s defamation Act 1996, or the ‘European hosting defence’ would rely on material NOT being pre-moderated by the human eye.  But the development of sophisticated filters means that it is now possible to automate moderation of abusive or illegal content, and set up a ‘warning’ system where potentially harmful content could be passed to a moderator to assess and take appropriate action.  This would surely be construed as application of “duties of care, which can reasonably be expected .. in order to detect and prevent certain types of illegal activities”i rather than re-classifying Facebook as a publisher responsible for all content on its sites.

Khan and Warren are not complaining about an unfair remark, or a comment about their performance. They’re complaining about racist abuse, which is not only against Facebook's terms of use, but is both morally wrong and illegal. It is unclear at the time of writing what action Facebook will take to fulfil its legal obligation to take down the offending content following Khan and Warren’s complaints, but there is no doubt that it must do so. If it is Facebook’s policy to remove this kind of abuse, it must take steps to implement it.

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i) Recital 48 of European Directive on electronic commerce (2000/21/EC)