A Sense of Community

Tia Fisher

Here's eModeration's round-up of what struck us most over the past week or so.  Compiled by our research consultant, Kate Williams.  She's @emodkate if you want to tag along on Twitter.

THE HEADLINES...

After six long months, YouTube has finally inked a landmark deal to take Channel 4 content shortly after broadcast. Top pop TV, for example Skins and Peep Show, will now be available free of charge - and C4 has managed to cling to ad sales around the content.

More than 10 million UK adults have never used the Internet, according to a new report for Martha Lane Fox, the government’s Digital Inclusion Champion. 17 per cent of the population have never been online – and 4 million of those are already socially excluded. 

"Internet? What the Divvil’s that?", barked the Duke of Edinburgh, who acknowledged this week that he was baffled by technology in general and remote controls in particular, generally lying on the floor to operate the set instead.

And a rough old week for T–mobile, and anyone else with their their data in the clouds. The company faces sky-high legal bills after two separate class actions were filed in response to the 'catastrophic' loss of data faced by users of their Sidekick smartphones. The outage appears to have been caused by a server malfunction at Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, who now claim that 'the majority' of the lost data is recoverable.

THE LOWDOWN...

Gordon Brown faced the Wrath of Mum this week in a live web-chat on parenting site Mumsnet. Mumsnet members, who have a rep for being both straight-talking and politically-savvy, expressed their disappointment rather sharply – but the PM managed to avoid a stinging slap to the back of his knees.

Swing it, Daddio! The Conservatives, meanwhile, are hanging with Der Youth, having commissioned a 40-second ad on music-streaming service Spotify. Don’t tell, but had I been picking the Tory best-placed to connect with the young, I might have pretended not to see doughty Eric Pickles’ hand go up.

In a Backslash Backlash, the Father of the World Wide Web™ Sir Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that, had he his time again, he would go //-free.

Hoorah! those Facebook Fails just keep on coming. Maxi Sopo, a 26-year-old suspected of bank fraud, wanted all his friends to know what a grand old time he was having lying low in sunny Mexico. Unluckily, he’d already made the schoolboy error of adding a law-enforcement official to his list of friends.

Finland has declared fast Internet access a legal right. From July, Finnish telecom companies will be obliged to provide the nation’s 5.3 million citizens with at least 1 Mbps, with even faster speeds in the pipeline. “We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,” said an official.

All rather galling for Sweden, who actually broke their bit of the Internet last week. The .se domain was out for a whole hour on Monday, before they fixed it up with a rubber-band and some blu-tak, and managed to jump-start the motor.

I Tweet Dead People. Yes, it’s come to this - the first social media séance, or “Twéance” [baboom-tish], will take place on October 30th, when UK psychic Jancye Wallace will attempt to contact Dead Slebs via Twitter.

No need, I feel for ornamentation – this story speaks perfectly well for itself. The Glo Bible has high-resolution photos, virtual tours, interactive timelines and a slick, youthful publicity campaign featuring a soft-rock soundtrack - and is available in the UK for a very reasonable £59.99.

I’mma let you decide whether t’laugh or cry / When Miley Cyrus raps her Twitter goodbye.

And in spookily-related news, Hollywood execs are cracking down on movie-industry celebs who leak info through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. No idea why.Finland has declared fast Internet access a legal right. From July, Finnish telecom companies will be obliged to provide the nation’s 5.3 million citizens with at least 1 Mbps, with even faster speeds in the pipeline. “We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,” said an official. 

The IAB (that's the US Interactive Advertising Bureau) got a bit shirty this week in response to Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines on bloggers and brands. The new rules, it claims, stifle free speech by restricting online communication – “the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented” - more harshly than they regulate trad forms of media.

Social news site Digg says their new ad format, which allows users to vote ads up or down just as they would other site content, has surpassed expectations. Those ads with the most Diggs are super-exposed, whilst the least popular eventually drop off the edge of the world.


ON FACEBOOK...

Hoorah! those Facebook Fails just keep on coming. Maxi Sopo, a 26-year-old suspected of bank fraud, wanted all his friends to know what a grand old time he was having lying low in sunny Mexico. Unluckily, he’d already made the schoolboy error of adding a law-enforcement official to his list of friends.

Threadsy, a site which aggregates users Facebook, Twitter and email, is developing an app which would allows its users to ‘abhor’ an item in their Facebook feed. Harrumph. As my dear grandmama used to say, if you ain't got nothing nice to say, shut up and browse elsewhere ...

Other than that, it’s all about the numbers this week for Facebook. In the UK, The ‘Book is cookin’ - it claims one in every seven page views, up 86.1%. And although Google grabbed the official ‘most visited’ title, Facebook was the clear moral victor, with each of their users racking up a higher number of pages per visit.

US stats are also looking good for the social giant. According to Experian, Facebook and MySpace are making like elevators, with the former’s share of social traffic zooming from 19.9% to 58.6% over the last year, while the latter’s plummets from 66.8% to 30.3% – a stomach-lurching 55% plunge towards oblivion.


ON TWITTER…

The People’s Medium? Twice this week, Twitter users have wielded national influence. First against Trafigura, who had attempted to place a watertight legal gag around the Guardian newspaper, banning them from reporting details of the oil company‘s alleged waste-dumping in the Ivory Coast. But with #trafigura topping trending topics, the company’s legal reps Carter-Ruck retreated, leaving the Guardian (and indeed anyone else) free to publish.

Then, following expressions of outrage from Tweetmeisters Derren Brown and Stephen Fry, Twitter users jammed the Press Complaints Commission’s website with a flood of protests at the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir. In her daily column she’d written that gay singer Stephen Gately’s death was “not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. Mass accusations of homophobia forced the Mail to edit the piece, while several top brands, including Nestle and M&S, asked for their ads to be withdrawn.

Having recently launched its translation programme, Twitter closed a deal with India’s largest mobile operator, potentially adding 110m users – many of whom will only ever experience a web connection via their phones - to its stats.  And Twitter finally added limited reporting features last week: now users can designate certain accounts as Spam, alerting a “Trust and Safety” team to investigate further.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL…

Last week, some big brand marketers urged their compadres to loosen their white-knuckle grip on the wheel, and embrace the impact that user generated content is having on brand reputations.

Luckily, a slew of brands launched social media campaigns this week, and heading the pack is First Direct, with a campaign that aims at total transparency. They’ve opened a real-time site which aggregates all comments (whether positive or negative), highlights trending keywords, and even provides graphs so that users can analyse the stats.

Lufthansa has created a cunning Twitter/Facebook app to support its ‘passion for precision’ slogan. The app sends status updates from travellers’ Twitter or Facebook accounts at take-off and landing, to promote the airline’s excellent on-time record.

You tweetin’ to me? Sony’s Crackle.com partnered with YouTube for a full-length screening of the cult classic Taxi Driver, which includes the audience’s real-time Twitter updates.

Audi is launching a branded virtual world and game on Sony PlayStation Home later this year - serendipitously supporting this report, which points out that German car brands dominate the social media landscape, while Japanese and U.S. luxury car brands have much to learn.

MySpace is offering their users the chance to see their inner thoughts writ large on more than 300 digital screens, in a team-up with outdoor-media owner Titan. The 3-week campaign is called "Step Up to the Mic", and will allow users to upload both images and messages to sites in the US, UK and Ireland.

MTV Europe’s Music Awards have partnered with teen-world Habbo Hotel to create a virtual ‘awards ceremony’ space. The branded area, where users can hang out backstage and compete for virtual awards, is already claiming 14m unique visitors per month.

Sony Ericsson’s virtual space-hopper flash mob has attracted more than 27,000 users to a dedicated microsite, where they can customise their own virtual hopper, right down to the height of its bounce.


SOCIAL STATS AND FACTS…

A sheaf of UK stats to shuffle through this week. Nearly twice as many UK internet users have a social networking profile than did two years ago – with three-quarters keeping their profiles private, compared to 48% back then. And 41% of web users look at a SocNet site daily, up from 30% in two years ago, according to Experian Hitwise.

Virgin finds that 29% of us feel liberated when we lose our mobile/internet signal in a social environment – but more than a third of us feel highly stressed.   UK ad spend dropped again – but the good news is, the downward trend might be bottoming out. Bellwether reports the lowest fall in 6 quarters, while online ad spend actually rose for the first time since 2008.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES...

With a reported 11m Facebook members playing FarmVille daily, social gaming goes from strength to strength. And FarmVille’s maker Zynga is on the lookout for its next cash cow which, it turns out, might actually be a fish. According to Trademork, the developer registered ‘FishVille’ last week. I’m sure it will grow on us.

Speaking of fish (as we were), games giant Electronic Arts has shed a reported $250m on social-gaming company Playfish. Playfish have amply demonstrated that the social games-virtual goods combo is a strong one, with their 2009 revenue expected to hit $75m.

eModeration is a community management and moderation agency, and we do these blogs 'cos we're very interested in all things social media.  If you like what you read and want some more, just pop over to our other blog.