THE HEADLINES ...HM Customs and Revenue is clearly in a state of some denial about the extent to which their pet subject is a byword for catatonic boredom: they have allowed the Boss Of All The Taxmen to have a go at delivering their new YouTube ad, instead of getting a professional in. If you are currently experiencing the agonies of insomnia, I advise you save this treat till bedtime. The Telegraph serves up a list of HMRC’s competitors for the title ‘Most Boring Video on YouTube (at Number 1: 'watching paint dry') here.It sounds like the punch-line to an (admittedly low-hilarity) Tech joke, but apparently not: the internet really could run out of addresses within two years, unless more companies migrate to a new naming protocol, warn experts.Over at BoingBoing, they claim that the top secret global Ante-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been leaked – and that it’s blimmin’ bad news for us all. Amongst other things, ISPs might be forced to take proactive responsibility for pulling copyrighted material – which BoingBoing says would sound the death knell for YouTube, and much of Web 2.0.One of the joys of remote working is being able to do so in your pyjamas (or, in my case, a maroon velvet smoking-jacket and spats.) Now Linden Labs has spoiled it all by launching Second Life Enterprise, where companies can do virtual business behind a firewall. My friends, pyjamas won’t cut it now.Charles Dunstone, the increasingly vocal chief exec of TalkTalk, has castigated the government for the second time this month – this time over its plans for a broadband tax to fund the rollout of high-speed broadband to non-profitable rural areas. He warns that around 100,000 low-income households will be forced to give up their Internet connections because they will not be able to afford to pay the tax.THE LOWDOWN ...Twitter dejection appears to be catching. Following Stephen Fry’s attack of the dismals last weekend, Katie Price (aka Jordan, glamour model extraordinaire) has posted a series of overwrought tweets telling her ‘haters’ to do their worst, and saying that she feels she can do nothing right. Celebs and Twitter – an unhealthy combination, prone to increase self-loathing and thence end in tears?It would be fair to say that Facebook's recent redesign has not gone down too well, and last week we reported that the group ‘Change Facebook Back to Normal’ has 1.4m rebels and rising. We hadn’t clocked, however, that the proto–revolutionary expertly fomenting this dissent is… a 14 year-old boy called Jonathan Woodlief, from North Carolina. Asked for a quote, the boy’s dad said "He's doing what on Facebook?" There goes the allowance.IN OTHER NEWS ...Crime and Security Minister David Hanson has confirmed that a number of suspects have been held this year by the police’s e-crime unit, in connection with cyber attacks on government depts. The minister declined to elaborate, citing national security – but did reveal that the (rather Gilliamesque) ''Office for Cyber Security'' had been established ''to monitor the health of cyber space and co-ordinate incident response''.Is social networking destined for the same spam-bedevilled fate as email? The big networks need to do some urgent thinking, warns Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos, if they don’t wish users trust in the blossoming marketing platform to be crushed. Sophos found that 1 in 4 companies had been exposed to spam, phishing or malware via sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.MSN, the wallflower at the social media party, is finally getting a makeover from Microsoft. The site’s dramatically-different design is now sleeker and more minimal – and focuses on video and importing key feeds like Twitter and Facebook.Sharp intakes of breath from cable companies, with the announcement that Apple is having another go at Web TV – this time with an iTunes-based subscription service.And amid growing concern that some social gaming app developers are scamming both users and advertisers, MySpace boss Owen Van Natta has announced a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy – particularly those which sign users up for a repeat transaction without telling them.ON FACEBOOK ...It’s been a sedate few days for Facebook and Twitter – a pleasant change after the giddy whirl of the last few weeks, during which announcements came at breakneck pace from both. As you catch your breath and mop your brow, we bring you The Buzz Bin’s Facebook Fan Page Best Practices, followed by Jason Falls on why Facebook mentions of your brand won’t show up on your monitoring service...ON TWITTER ...... and for Afters, we have Mashable’s Twitter Lists How-To, plus a wee peek at Peek, the handheld device for mobile tweeting which launched this week.ON YOUTUBE ...Google’s YouTube wants to convince media companies like Disney that it's better to sell advertising space around illegally-uploaded material, than to take it down. According to YouTube their ContentID system can identify material even if it’s been customized by users - they hope that this will reassure copyright-holders, who will then play along.BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...Sainsbury's has been slow off the Twitter mark – its @JSainsburysPlc has made 9 posts since its launch in March. Now, though, it’s taking a leaf out of its celeb spokesman Jamie Oliver’s book, and launching @sainsbury’s, through which they hope to inspire shoppers with recipe ideas.Kodak has launched a branded YouTube channel, ForMom, which encourages mothers to upload content on various topics that will make other mum’s live a bit easier.US cake brand Mrs. Freshley's has launched a Facebook search to find “the real Mrs. Freshley” – someone who embodies the spirit of the brand which, till now, has not had a fixed persona.Sara Lee Deli had lassoed some new Twitter followers whilst helping the fight against hunger. On Monday they donated $1 per follower (to a max of $25K) to Share Our Strength, which fights childhood hunger in the US. Followers used hashtags and retweets to help the campaign go viral.ON MOBILE ...Finally. After iPhone’s 2 ½ years unchallenged at the top of the market, here comes a competitor to make Apple twitchy. Buzz is getting busy around Motorola’s Droid – here’s a peak at the latest of its super-stylish (if slightly baffling) commercials.VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...Linden Lab announced its Q3 figures this week – with user-to-user transactions jumping 54% year-on-year, to $150 million. Total user hours, however, rose by a meagre 13% year-on-year, which Linden ascribed to the introduction of their bot-banning policy. Monthly repeat logins for September 2009 peaked at 750,446 - a 23% increase year-on-year.Bebo launched its Social Games Experience ecosystem this week. The site section includes developer tools and games, fronted by the Games Homepage, which allows users to access social games apps and communicate around them.The Chinese authorities have told NetEase, which operates World of Warcraft in China, that the game is in "gross violation" of Chinese regulations and that they must stop new account registration immediately.Kzero have updated their very useful Brands in Virtual Worlds slideshare – it now includes campaigns from Hush Puppies, NBA, and Skittles amongst many others - and you can give it a quick once over here.THINKING ...If, in this light news week, you found yourself with a spare two minutes, you could do much worse than cast your eye over David Armano’s sharp assessment of where social media might lead us in 2010.
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Welcome to eModeration's twice-weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate). Check back soon!
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Welcome to eModeration's digest of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media. We'll be posting bite-size morsels of nourishing news not once, but twice a week - so check back soon!
THE HEADLINES...
The Web 2.0 world was reeling this week, after Microsoft slapped it round the chops with a real-time search double-whammy.
Whammy one: Microsoft has inked deals with both Facebook and Twitter, allowing status updates to be integrated into the Bing Search engine.
Then, while the social world was rearranging its expression to read ‘not in the slightest bit surprised, saw it coming a mile off actually’, came whammy two: Google is about to do precisely the same thing.
The CIA has invested in social monitoring company Visible Technologies. Now the guy who manually checks through a zillion 'u comin 2 mai partee?’ posts in the hope of one which reads ‘the quick coyote has met the cunning fox’ can finally go home to his wife and kids.
A Tory govt would jack the 50p tax which the present govt say will bring rural broadband up to urban speeds - in apparent contrast to the speech David Cameron gave in January. Oh dear - there’s nothing Middle England likes more than a snipe bid on a pair of BNWT driving-gloves – and you can’t do that on a 1meg connection, you know.
Meanwhile Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw confirmed that persistent file-sharers would not be ‘cut off willy-nilly’ – news which might reassure the British public, 70% of whom oppose an internet ban for file-sharers. Kudos also to Mr Bradshaw for a unilateral revival of ‘willy-nilly’ despite grave risk to his gubernatorial dignity.
THE LOWDOWN...
Some companies do find this Woman thing so hard, don’t they? At a Yahoo-hosted hack weekend for developers in Taiwan, company-hired lap-dancers provided the entertainment. Really, What Were They Thinking? (We’re going to have to agree on an acronym for that, aren’t we? I like DERBRAIN – you?)
Quick, come and see Bill Clinton through X-ray Specs! A twitter bug left the former prez accidentally exposing his tweets - click here for the twitillating details.
Twitter is now the platform of choice for Slebs who are up for a ruck. "Giving some celebrities Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded gun," says a PR firm chief. In the case of Perez Hilton, whose first tweet to Rumer Willis was “welcome to Twitter, Potatohead”, more like “a loaded gun and a kilo of Skittles”.
This is more like it. A gamer customized a Super Mario World level so that "Lisa will you marry me?" was spelled out in gold coins. See? Romance isn’t dead. It’s just not so good with, you know, face-to-face interaction these days.
According to Netimperative, 1 in 10 UK adults is ‘not interested in getting online’. Right... Got it... No, sorry, you’re going to have to run me through that again.
AND IN OTHER NEWS...
Interesting times for Yahoo. Though revenue dropped, net income is up by a whopping 225% due to fierce cost-cutting. What’s more, they’re launching a rival to the Huffington Post, which will use a combo of smart tech and smart humans to offer link excellence and tip-top writing.
Apple is still the people’s darling – the company saw a crunchy 47% rise in profits in the quarter to September - news of which bounced shares by 7.5% to an all-time high.
Amazon is also confounding the recession, with a Q3 profit surge of 68% year on year. Founder Jeff Bezos lays the laurels at the feet of Kindle, which is now at the heart of Amazon’s strategy.
Channel 4 is offering targeted ads around its YouTube programming; meanwhile speculation that Hulu may start charging for content next year is starting to look like concrete fact.
Microsoft and T-mobile now claim they have recovered most, if not all, of its Sidekick users' missing data. Finally: when display ads do badly, it could simply be that they are pug ugly. Aesthetic failure is often to blame for limp performance, according to Dynamic Logic.
ON FACEBOOK...
The ‘Book’s deal with Bing, which will integrate status updates into search results, is expected to go live within two months. As the Telegraph points out, the thought of unseen millions reading “wooohooo - trolley’d!“ should give a sense of urgency to those who have yet to master Facebook’s privacy settings.
Facebook’s graph is so steep they need crampons: in the US, it now gets an astonishing 1 in every 4 page views. Market share is up 194% since last year, and there are now over 45 million updates a day.
It won’t come as a dreadful shock, then, to hear that MySpace’s new CEO has conceded defeat in its battle with the social colossus. Owen Van Natta says the company now aims to be a music hub.
ON TWITTER...
Twitter, meanwhile, appears untroubled by Facebook anxiety: CEO Evan Williams nonchalantly declared last week that “the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter”. Despite flat-lining stats, Williams was pretty chipper about a near-future revenue stream – and indicated that mobile is looking very alluring to the microblogging service, which last week celebrated its 5 billionth tweet.
Each one of which will now be accessible through Bing and Google: According to Venturebeat, Bing’s Twitter search will have tag clouds and organize results according to both age and popularity. Retweets will move an entry up, as will embedded links – the most popular of which will be sortable too.
GOOGLE...
It’s not yet entirely clear what Google’s Twitter/Facebook search will look like – but news of the deal tops a great week for the search powerhouse.
It reported an 8% revenue increase for Q3, and announced plans to spend heavily on long-term growth. The first pennies go on a six-nation roll-out of its enterprise-aimed ‘Gone Google’ marketing campaign.
Google is also dipping a toe into the smartphone market, with a branded Android phone of its own - and launching a music service, which according to Wired will offer streaming, and enhanced search.
ON YOUTUBE...
As if there weren’t enough real-time excitement turning our pretty heads, YouTube announced Comments Search, which will allow real time search of conversation topics on the network.
It’s also testing a new advertising model, which melds AdWords with YouTube videos and allows advertisers to target video ads via keywords.
BRANDS GET SOCIAL...
Run, kitty, run! Petco has launched a ‘Howl-O-Ween’ comp, which allows owners to upload photos and videos of their Halloween-bedecked pets.
Ask.com launches a Facebook-integrated microsite, which asks users to celebrate their greatest deal.
Cheez Doodles wants to expand its share of the teen-market, and is offering them the chance to “Rock the Cheez” by creating virtual bands online.
Honda’s ‘social experiment’ – its ‘Everybody Knows Somebody Who Loves a Honda’ Facebook page - has been a roaring success. The page, which allows owners to connect with Honda-lovin’ friends and strangers globally, has topped 2 million fans.
ArmyStrongStories.com, a blogging system that lets anyone in the service make a post, is letting soldiers’ voices be heard and driving recruitment for the US Army.
Ford’s latest wheeze is the Fusion 41 social media campaign, which is seeking 8 socially-savvy fans of the Ford Fusion to compete in a relay race - the winner gets their vehicle paid for.
Lonely Planet is testing an App which uses Google Wave to give independent-minded travelers recommendations and reviews, which they can transform into content-rich itineraries.
Coca-Cola has sent a team of young Happiness ambassadors to visit each of the 206 countries where Coke is sold, and share the secret of each nation’s happiness, via social media.
Procter & Gamble's marketing team is flushed with success: they've launched a search for 5 people who, for the not-at-all-bad salary of $10k for a month’s work, will man their ‘Charmin Restroom’ in Times Square.
Arsenal and Spain midfielder Fabregas took over Nike's Football Page on Facebook last Thursday, answering questions and posting behind-the-scenes photos.
UNDER THE GAVEL...
A judge in California has provisionally okay'd Facebook’s settlement of the class suit arising from its Beacon ad programme.
Another in New York has ruled that Facebook is protected by the Communications Decency Act, in a teenager’s defamation suit.
conix Brand Group has settled - to the tune of $250,000 – the FTC’s complaint that they illegally collected children’s data.
And two former Yale students have settled the suit they brought against anonymous posters whom they allege defamed them on law-grad site AutoAdmit. They weren’t able to sue the board itself, but managed to identify some 8 or 9 of the bloggers.
SOME SOCIAL STATS...
The numbers who post or read status updates on social sites has shot from 11% to 19% - that’s almost a fifth of us – in under a year, according to Pew’s new report.
63% of online mothers regularly use socnets, against 11% three years ago – and 44% look for recommendations – and complaints - before buying.
UK e-commerce growth slowed to a snail’s pace this year, up only 7.6% against last year’s 15%.
US ad-spend figures were even less perky, with a predicted 2.9 % drop from last year – the first since 2002.
ON MOBILE...
The rate at which Africans are buying mobile phones is breaking world records with a rise of 550% in 5 years – changing lives across the planet.
Volkswagen is marketing their new GTI via an iPhone app, and nothing else. In 2006 they spent $60m introducing the marque – the new app will cost $500,000.
Out of the lab and into the market – smartphones will help grow augmented reality from a $6m to a $350m industry by 2014, says new research.
VIRTUAL AND GAMES...
Virtual goods sales in the US and Europe could expand by as much as 150% this year, with more growth to come, says Business Insider.
Pocoyo, the Spanish preschooler cartoon series, is launching a virtual world, with some free zones and premium content by subscription.
Civilization – one of the all-time Gamer Greats – will next year get a Facebook version, under the name Civilization Network.
Open virtual world Meez Nation is to integrate with the MySpace platform – reaching even further into its teen user base.
That's all folks!
These social media updates are painstakingly put together by our research consultant Kate Williams. If you'd like to listen at the horse's month (so to speak), she's @emodkate on Twitter.
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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.
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.
Welcome to our round-up of all that's new, controversial or just plain weird on the social media scene in the last few days.THE HEADLINES…The blogosphere was abuzz this week after the US Federal Trade Commission ordered Celebs and Bloggers to ‘fess up if they’ve been paid to plug - or face a whopping $11,000 fine. Commentators were universally aghast - but it soon emerged that the FTC were less concerned with free cookie-cutters for mommy-bloggers, than with habitual dirty-dealers and paid user-reviews.And, as a supremely Zen Louis Gray calmly pointed out, its unlikely to change the world: “good people will continue to be good, and bad people will continue to be bad.”There were high hopes last week that Google Wave would provide an invigorating dip in the collaborative ocean - but by all accounts, an encounter with Wave is as likely to leave you winded on the beach, with your swimmies round your ankles. Not quite a wipeout - but not yet the answer to our real-time prayers. As one commentator said: “This will not kill Twitter, Facebook, Ning or [insert social network here].”(But if you’re still desperate to give it a go, please don’t ask this guy if he’s got a spare invite. He really hasn’t.)Twitter struggled manfully with the news that the US president had been awarded the Nobel peace prize, as users went Obama-rama. The microblogging service was simultaneously stretched by the shock news that Miley Cyrus had deleted her account - a moment which neatly illustrates Twitter’s encapsulation of the sublime, and the ridiculous.Mass panic, after 30,000 email accounts were compromised in a phishing scam. Up to 21 million users of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts were warned they were at risk of fraud, after 10,000 passwords were grabbed by a fake website which was designed to look identical to Hotmail’s.If you have been scammed, don’t be glum - you’re in excellent company. The BBC reports that America’s top G-Man was himself nearly taken in by an email from his bank, which wasn’t.It all neatly confirmed the findings of this poll by moneysupermarket.com, which found that 13 per cent of us have had their online accounts hacked. Worse, 1 in 12 of us have considered hacking the account of a friend, colleague or loved one. For shame!THE LOWDOWN…70 per cent of employers will have codes of conduct for their employees’ virtual-world avatars by 2013, predicts IT research consultancy Gartner. It urges companies to impose dress codes on employees’ avatars, to avoid alarming customers (though if your client-facing staff want to wear bikinis to virtual meetings, you might also want to rethink your recruitment strategy).More news from the coalface: it seems that over half of employers now block staff access to social sites. Only 10% of companies give employees a free rein, and the rest impose some kind of limit, for example ‘work stuff only’.Yikes. According to a new Ofcom survey, one in three British schoolchildren thinks search engines like Google rank sites by ‘how true they are’. Which is more disheartening to grownups, I wonder? That news, or the fact that Electronic Arts just hired a 12 year old to script their latest TV commercial? Hmm, tough call.Two men have been arrested for allegedly using Twitter to help G20 protesters to evade police. The pair were found in a motel, surrounded by contact-lists, a bank of laptops, and emergency-frequency radio scanners. Anarchists, huh? Always just that little bit more organized than you’d think.FACEBOOK...Facebook announced its own "Gross National Happiness" indicator, which analyzes the peaks and troughs of national sentiment via a mass survey of the emotional tone of their users updates. Key insights so far: Holidays: good; Death of much-loved public figures: bad.Sadly, The ‘Book is not yet allowing continual access to the results, denying brands a looksie at data which might be useful when planning campaigns.On the upside, brands were cheered by the news that Facebook provided the most loyal visitors to third-party sites, with 20% of Facebook-originated visitors returning three or four times in a week. This loyalty contrasted with a lukewarm 16% from Digg, and a turncoat 11% from Twitter.The stats for social games on Facebook continue to accelerate - with app-maker Zynga on track to make $200 million this year. Zynga already broke records with FarmVille, and now its CafeWorld has gone stratospheric, with figures jumping from zero to 8.6 million in one wild week.TWITTER...Twitter co-founder Ev Williams displayed nerves of steel this week when he declared that he felt no pressure to come up with a revenue model for the yet-to-see-profit service. He wants to “create something that you want to see in the world" rather than slavishly following "some MBA brandishing a business plan"…His glacial sang froid was contextualized a few days later, as it emerged that Twitter is already in talks with both Google and Microsoft to offer real-time tweets in search results. Which would quite probably provide a source of real and sustainable revenue.Elsewhere on Twitter…Twitter took two leaves out of Facebook’s, um, book this week. First, there was the launch of a third-party platform offering virtual gifts – not in themselves new, but the first time that brands have got on board. Developers AdNectar have already signed up Cadbury, Nestle and Malibu Rum (my kinda party).And hot on the heels of Facebook’s crowdsourced translation project, Twitter announced plans do the same, expanding language options from the current English and Japanese (who knew?), to French, Italian, German, and Spanish.GOOGLE...Busy-busy for the search giant this week: armed with the news that a full 90% of UK searches are Google-powered, and that Bing’s market share is shrivelling, Google renewed its assault on the browser rivals IE and Firefox with the launch of Chrome-for-dummies on YouTube. They hope to persuade the public - many of whom don’t fully understand what a browser actually is - to switch to their shiny new offering.Google then stepped up to the smartphone plate, with a new Adsense feature which allows advertisers to create ads specifically optimized for ‘high-end smartphones’.Hmm. It all points to a Cunning Plan to Rule the World, as Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang point out. Instead of going head-to-head with Facebook and other destination SocNets, Google is gradually releasing social spores which will eventually connect to form a layer of Google across the entire social media universe.BRANDS GET SOCIAL...Coke Zero wins double points this week with the release of its Facial Profiler – upload a photo of yourself and their Facebook app will scan the web for your digital doppelganger.But a grim week for poor old T-mobile, as the hashtag #Tmobilesucks rocketed to the top of Twitter trending topics.A client who (swearily) tweeted his frustration at Crucial Paradigm’s tardy customer service was summarily sacked by the over-sensitive webhosting company. Unfortunately their somewhat disproportionate response was spotted by Laurel Papworth, whose post detailing the Fail has thus far been seen by a stonking 24,872 people, and counting.ITV’s X-factor (an eModeration client, we feel duty-bound to disclose) went socialtastic this week with the launch of a swathe of social media features, including a Facebook app for each contestant and a Twitter ribbon, which users can add to their profile to show their support.Intel have launched a two-day interactive campaign which allows customers to talk live to Intel experts through banner ads on targeted websites.And top marks to Estee Lauder, for ingeniously blending RL with social media: they’ve been giving women free makeovers for their profile pics - the resulting photographs have company logos in the background.SOCIAL STATS AND FACTS…People who’ve seen a brand’s campaign on social media are 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand. What’s more, click through rates for this group are up by half.Which might explain why 6 in 10 companies are planning a social media spend in the coming year – placing it second only to email in the Centre for Media Research’s study. Specifically, brands are investing heavily in online communities, despite the recession: another survey of 400 companies, including Fortune 100 enterprises, found that 94% were planning to continue their community spend. Worryingly though, a dismal 70% of companies have failed to use feedback from social media to improve their products, according to a PRWeek survey.What’s more...In a world where the visual volume dial is turned to ten, this data from MTV seems to show that audiences were more likely to remember subtlety and soft sells.And the social web really is a woman's world, according to this chart, compiled by Information is Beautiful with data from Brian Solis.MOBILE...Damn – the world just got fatter. Manually typing a search query via keyboard used up – what, 5 calories? No longer, with the release of Microsoft’s new app, which allows Bing users to speak a search query or text message.It’s not you, it’s them: if your iPhone-toting associates seem even less focused on your pearls of wisdom than usual, could be they’re orc-battling under the table. TibaME, the MMO for mobiles from CipSoft, are releasing an iPhone app next year.AND IN VIRTUAL WORLDS…Counsellors are warning that addiction to online games is on the up. They blame the rise on a combination of recession (more downtime) and an increasing tendency for games to be visually bewitching.But, as Massively reports, the news is likely to fall on deaf ears – “gamers will argue almost endlessly over which games are the best, which ones were most important, what the proper way to play is... but one thing we almost universally agree on is that we are not addicted.”
Welcome to eModeration's social media/community roundup of last week's events, compiled by our Research Consultant Kate Williams. All the good stuff you missed on Twitter, and the newsletters you were too busy to open!
The social media beach was afroth with anticipation this week, as excitement over Google Wave’s beta roll-out reached Point Break. Mashable provided a vital ‘how to’ for the lucky 100,000 who’d received an invite for the real-time tool, which combines elements of email, IM and wiki-style editing. Only Robert Scoble refused to get his swimming trunks on, warning that "all this real time noise [is] an attention dump and will kill your productivity”.
And there were more Google-y eyes this week, as commentators peered into the future to assess the impact of Google Sidewiki, the sidebar which allows any user to leave permanent comments on any web-page. Vizion Interactive reminded brands to claim their Sidewiki space in order to grab the top spot on the bar. And AdAge urged brands to make sure the really interesting conversation goes on on the page itself - diminishing Sidewiki's potential.
The US secret service was mobilized after a Facebook Poll asked "Should Obama be killed?”. Users were offered a choice of "Yes", "No", "Maybe" and "If he cuts my health care". The culprit turned out to be a teen (bet that was a fun family pow-wow: Mom, Dad, Junior - and six guys in shades) but the incident raised questions over whether Facebook should increase its policing of user-generated content.
ON TWITTER…
Twitter’s back-and-forth over the small matter of advertising might be resolved sooner, rather than later. An Interpret survey just revealed that Twitter users were twice as likely to click on ads, to visit company profiles, and to review products online than non-Twitterers.
But the microblogging service shouldn’t rest on its laurels – it might be staring at a growth ceiling. Despite last week’s massive injection of $100m capital, there’s been a ‘significant’ slump in new users: looks like a resistance point been reached.
SOME SOCIAL STATS…
Smug smiles in online marketing circles this week, as UK internet ad spend made history by knocking TV sales into the proverbial cocked hat. But it wasn’t all unmitigated hilarity – the overall market plummeted 16.6%, and 60% of the internet spend went to search, for which we can probably read ‘Google’.
Americans have tripled the time they spend on social networks to 17% of all their internet time, according to Nielsen. What’s more, US users are likely to be more affluent, and more urban, than average – and to place social networking at the centre of their lives, higher than game-play, TV, and reading.
Advertisers have been quick to act – the spend on top social networks and blogs rocketed by 119% to $108m in August. And according to eMarketer, nearly all online retailers will soon have Facebook Fan Pages, and 91% will be using Twitter by 2011.
This despite the fact that ads on social media are achieving lower click-through than other ads – although it’s not all bad news: engagement is higher, with users more likely to use ad’s interactive features (but see our recently published White Paper for the full lowdown on interactive advertising.)
Asda is harnessing social media to take a giant leap towards transparency, with the launch of a 'new era of democratic consumerism'. The supermarket giant is placing webcams in factories and offices, launching a new blog called Aisle Spy, and tapping its 18,000-strong online community to crowdsource product launches.
Nokia this week took aim at Google Maps, and introduced Good Things via its Ovi ecosystem: the new interactive map feature allows users to let others know about the local things they love.
And cinema chain Cineworld is promoting Disney Pixar’s new release ‘Up’, encouraging users to compete to get the most digital balloons ‘attached’ to their home, on Google Maps.
AND VIRTUAL…
Electronic Arts launched the long-awaited Littlest Pet Shop Online, a girltastic world of virtual pets and customization. Key features include parental consent–based access to the game, anonymity of child accounts, and “safe chat” – meaning only approved words can be typed.
And Massively launches MMO Family, a resource for "leveling a gaming-specced family". Offering tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate niches for every family member, MMO Family is written by the mother in an all-gamer family that’s growing up on MMOs.
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SNIPPETS...
We’ve just published our latest white paper, Interaction in Advertising, which is summarised below. The paper examines how advertising is evolving from a one-way communicative process (the advertiser telling the consumer what they should be thinking), to a more collaborative, engaging format where brand and consumer communicate with an open dialogue.The paper discusses examples of campaigns that are putting interaction in advertising into practice and highlights the risks and benefits of the developing trend.Included in the paper:From ‘interactive’ to ‘interaction’
- Brands are switching from paid display advertising to promoting themselves through branded online communities, virtual worlds/games and social media - Advertising campaigns are evolving into an interaction between brand and consumer, rather than the traditional one-sided communication.
Opening the dialogue
- Engagement is all about basic human behaviour. People don’t want to be talked at. They want to interact, share opinions, be heard.- Advertisers are naturally gravitating to where their audience can be found, in communities and social networks. But the way that they engage has to change. It’s not enough to buy buttons on Facebook: research by Uvizz has shown how poorly people respond to this. They don’t want to interact with advertisers on social networks, but with friends.
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 STATSWHOOSH! (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.
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.
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)
In our recent guide, How to Moderate Teens and Tweens, we examined the psychology of teenagers when they use online or on mobile platforms, and the perceived anonymity that gives rise to bolder behaviour.Let’s face it, all of us have made choices as a teenager that we want to forget about, but what if we never had the option of forgetting? Yesterday’s research by Beatbullying highlighted the issues of ‘sexting’ and bullying by children and teenagers using mobile and social media. At an age when these children are developing and learning about their own views, opinions, sexuality and personality - as well as dealing with emotional and peer pressure issues - the boldness and risk-taking that teenagers engage in these days can have lasting and sometimes extremely damaging consequences. The Beatbullying survey showed that one in three teens have received offensive or distressing sexual images electronically. It also revealed that 23 per cent of these “sexts” came from a boyfriend or girlfriend.One in three of these images were sent via an instant messenger service. The immediacy of this technology, combined with the ability to capture the content, and the viral nature of the pictures involved, have a high potential for being spread from person-to-person until a decision to share something private with a trusted friend becomes the talking point of the classroom.If you asked most of these teenagers if they would expose themselves to people in the school playground, they’d probably be appalled. The fact is, the teens involved are taking part in this activity in the privacy of their homes, and sending the results to a person they think they can trust via a technology that also makes them feel safe.The only way we can tackle this issue is by engaging with teens in the environment that they feel confident in, which means that parents and teachers need to understand what they are dealing with. They need to realise what teens can do with computers and mobile phones, beyond sending text messages or researching their school homework, to enable them to communicate on the same level as the teens they are trying to protect. There are a growing number of excellent resources in this area (and I’ll list just a few) where parents, teachers and carers can find help and advice. Aside from Beatbullying (a charity which provides mentorship to deal with on and offline bullying), good resources are Digizen, which promotes responsible digital citizenship, itself with a very useful resource hub on cyberbullying, and a useful new guide by McAfee, aimed at educating parents.
Ensuring the safety of users can be a big headache for brands that create and maintain online communities, as anonymity has traditionally made it incredibly difficult to ‘vet’ them. Maybe they have a history of abusive behaviour on other sites? How would brands be able to tell until the same behaviour patterns have emerged in their community, the damage already being done?Well now there’s a system that has the potential to eliminate the problem. We’re starting to offer our clients trials with the revolutionary ReputationShare technology (a product of LOOKBOTHWAYS Inc). We believe that this technology marks a significant step in community management, and, more importantly, online child protection.ReputationShare tracks the online reputation of community users and shares this information with companies that also use the technology on their websites. It does this by linking the user’s online reputation to their email address(es). It also allows people to check their own user rating – more details can be found in the ReputationShare whitepaper. We’re hoping that the technology will be adopted by as many people in the community management and moderation sector as possible. The more companies that adopt this technology, the more effective it will be.To sum up the benefits of ReputationShare:Reputation travels - ReputationShare lets brands access user reputation information so that a user’s reputation will travel with them when they join a new site/community – in much the same way that credit reference information is shared.
Which means that if a user is notorious for stoking flame wars, trolling, cyberbullying or grooming on one or more participating websites, the technology lets the website they are joining see that the new user has a negative reputation, which gives the site owners a chance to make an informed choice about who they interact with based on reputations. Moderating staff will receive automatic updates on the behaviour of their users on participating sites, so a user's status is always current and moderating decisions can be based on up-to-date information.Rewarding positive participation - But this technology is not all about moderating bad behaviour, it’s also about acknowledging positive participation. Allowing companies to identify and reward users who take a positive, active role in their communities. Making moderation and community management more efficient. There are potential cost savings as companies find that users with a history of positive participation don’t require as much of the moderators attention as those with no history, or a less than stellar reputation. Community Managers will be much more effective in their targeting of the best or worst performing users on their site.Are there any concerns?As with all technology, especially technology that monitors the activity of people, concerns will be raised.Data Protection - Naturally, reputations are anonymous and secure. To ensure user's privacy ReputationShare provides services with a secure one-way encrypted hash algorithm to apply against their user's email addresses; it never receives or stores personal information.,which is important for data protection purposes. The reputation information can be leveraged by all participating companies across the whole spectrum of online services, but no company ever receives details about another company's user base; this information remains anonymous.What about freedom of expression? - As we have discussed in our teens and tweens whitepapers, moderators have to allow people to have disagreements and give them the space to work them out between themselves, only stepping in if community rules are broken, or things start to get out of hand. So it is important to note that everyday misunderstandings will not massively impact users’ reputation scores.Users will only get a seriously reduced rating for specific, serious abuse of the rules of a website (like uploading offensive or abusive material onto a community designed for children). The service’s algorithms take into account the date and severity of the offence and only in cases where an incident report is extreme, such as a report of sexual or grooming behaviour, would a single report dramatically damage a user’s online reputation. What if a user feels they have been unfairly scored? Users can view their online reputations and challenge a negative contribution with the site concerned if necessary. Reputation Share will be monitoring the participating sites to ensure that moderation actions are fair.Participating sites choose for themselves how to interpret ReputationShare information and apply rewards or strictures accordingly. It’s always going to be difficult to provide one hundred percent protection for children, teens, even adults, one hundred percent of the time. As technology progresses there will always be work-arounds that savvy and malicious users can exploit to manipulate the vulnerable, but, if brands work together with the same aim in mind – protecting their communities – we can all make a huge contribution in the continuing fight to give all of us a safer online environment.
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The teenage brain is, “like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash.” – Laurence Steinberg Teens are always going to make mistakes: it’s part of what being a teenager is about after all, but the internet represents a whole new set of issues for teenagers. For older teens, innocent pictures of a night out posted on their Facebook profile or MySpace page can result in difficulties when they eventually start looking for work. Younger teens and tweens can run into trouble by posting to much seemingly harmless information about themselves, positing anything from their favourite place to hang out after school, to what they’ll be wearing when they go out. Naturally, risk taking is a key part of anyone’s development, but do social networks foster too great a sense of security? How can we give teenagers the space to explore and share whist doing everything possible to keep them safe?Without some sort of guardian present, online spaces can become a virtual version of the unsupervised school playground, often made worse due to the anonymity afforded by the internet. Someone who may think twice about harassing a class mate face-to-face may have no such inhibitions when sitting behind a computer screen in the comfort of their own room.So how can we guide teens, without stifling them?Inhabit their world Understand the language used by teens / tweens. This includes keeping up to date with changing language trends, including code words that children use to get round automated filters. Children are developing and need some freedom to do this. At this stage in their lives, they are forming individual opinions and testing ideas. Our role as adults is to keep children safe, not censor them. But be clear what the line is, and intervene once it is crossed. Listen to concerns or questions, and respond quickly. Traffic should be two-way – not only to protect your users and your brand, but also to learn from them and develop your offering. Avoid being intrusive, or engaging with the user over the wrong platform. Listen (see above) to what platform children want to engage with you over, and use it. Earn trust and respect. This is so important to young people finding their own boundaries and voices. Show trust and respect (and consistency), and don’t patronise teens and tweens. That way you’ll get trust and respect back. Keep them engaged and happy online. Diffuse difficult situations, be aware of the day-to-day dramas and heartache and help them through the highs and lows. But don’t jump in too soon. Assuming a child is not in any danger, he or she will only learn how to deal with the emotional journey of teenage years by experiencing it. Keep them safe Watch out for and deter cyberbullying, peer-to-peer abuse and the kind of peer pressure that leads to this abuse. Researchers cited by CNET in an article on online abuse say that anywhere from 40 percent to 85 percent of kids have been exposed to some kind of digital bullying, whether it's a stolen password or being called "fat" via instant message. Spot and prevent grooming behaviour. Technology has become so advanced that it is possible to use software as well as human moderators to spot early grooming behaviour by analysing patterns of behaviour, and to link that behaviour to previous activity on a website. Keep children safe from themselves. Most children will give away personally identifying information (particularly from live feeds) without even thinking about the consequences, which can lead to abuse. Don’t let them be exposed to potentially damaging, offensive or otherwise inappropriate material, uploaded by other users. Educate them on the consequences of inappropriate behaviour. The role of a moderator in educating children is to work with parents and other adult role models to act as a guide for children – akin to a teacher in the playground, rather than a more censorial role – to help diffuse potentially damaging situations, or help children work their responses out for themselves. Create mechanisms to report abusive behaviour, give feedback, or voice concerns. It is so important that children can easily voice their concerns or ask questions in confidence. The moderator’s role as guardianAdults who have a presence in online worlds inhabited by children – no matter how good their intentions – will be seen alternately as role model, common enemy, powers-that-be, guide, teacher and intruder. That is the role of an adult mentor, or guide, to a teenager starting to flex their muscles - it’s the way of the world. Above all, moderators must be a guide to steer children through difficulties, and someone to keep them from self-harm or abuse by others. Currently, there is no legal obligation to moderate online behaviour or content – although the Digital Britain report indicates that a content labelling system of some sort is not far away - but of course there is a moral one. The reputational risk of being associated with offensive material could have wide-reaching implications for brands. For a more in-depth look at marketing to teens/tweens and their online behaviour, see eModeration’s white papers on the subject.
The ROI within social media has long been a bone of contention, and seems likely to become ever more so, with the equally lightning spread of both social media use and savage budget cuts. In a tightening economy, businesses have to make sure that they’re getting more return on their marketing investment.
‘Inability to measure ROI’ was named by marketers as one of the most significant barriers to the adoption of social media tactics by their organization from a poll quoted by MarketingSherpa.So why should your company be in the social media arena?
However, according to Augie Ray, “Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of this report is that a reader might get the idea that every action is equal. The report suggests that "Comments posted" are worth measuring, but it says nothing whatsoever about sentiment within those comments. In the entire report, the following words do not appear even a single time: "Sentiment," "Attitude," "Rating," "Positive," and "Net Promoter Score." Check out his post on The Customer Collective to see his ‘dimensions’ by which clients should analyse a blog’s suitability for their brand.I'm still wrestling with the social media metrics though, and nothing I see above has really told me about anything other than new media versions of traditional media campaigns: where to place your ad, sponsored widget or sponsored conversation, and how to judge its effectiveness. How about real social media, finding out how your forum is contributing to your reduction in online support, how customer reviews are affecting sales path, whether your 30 second TV spot crowdsourced in an innovative UGC campaign really made your audience feel engaged? It’s really not all about online advertising anymore. It’s about what else is happening in the social networks, very likely somewhere your company isn’t.But you’ve got to measure something to know if what’s working and how ...The ubiquitous Jeremiah Owyang provided an excellent guide on how to measure your social media programme as far back as 2006. (Don’t let that put you off though: it’s still completely relevant.) He starts off with the basics: if you haven’t got a goal, then you can’t measure against it. Then build in measurement of this before you launch – not as an afterthought; as part of the process.He guards against trying to measure it all – it can lead to ‘Analysis Paralysis’ (and don’t we know it)
Importantly, he exhorts us to monitor alerts as they happen, “A negative meme, an exploding battery could shatter your brand: are you watching in real time?” and finally, he helpfully provides a list of attributes to measure:
So where does that all leave the ROI question?Divided, I’d say, into three main camps.The Deniers: What, really, is this obsession with ROI? This is the group who are most resistant to any attempt to measure social media; possibly because past attempts have been so clumsy and obviously missing the point.The Definers: Never mind the community stuff. Just give me the click through rate. Please. IAB’s new metrics were made for this group. They are the ones who’ll be the best audience for the new definitions, and are likely to be hugely comforted by a large benchmark and a level playing field upon which to chalk it.The Dedicated: It’s not a perfect science, and it’s a lot of work. But we’re getting there. This group are realising the importance of using every available system of measurement we have: web analytics, buzz monitoring, community management listening – the whole gamut – to try to bring in as near to a 360 degree picture of people’s reactions to and interactions with, a brand, as is currently possible.I’ll leave you with this opinion from MetricsMan: a really useful resource on all matters social media and PR ROI: “ROI is a financial metric – percentage of dollars returned for a given investment/cost. The dollars may be revenue generated, dollars saved or spending avoided. ROI is transactional. ROI lives on the income statement in business terms.
Value is created when people become aware of us, engage with our content or brand ambassadors, are influenced by this engagement, and take some action like recommending to a friend or buying our product. Value creation occurs over time, not at a point in time. Value creation is process-oriented. Value lives on the balance sheet.
From a sales process perspective, the ultimate value of a social media program may be in increasing the number of people who are likely to buy our products and services. Other programs may be designed to improve or protect corporate reputation or to build and enhance brands. Much of this value is said to be intangible. It is goodwill that becomes tangible at the point in time a transaction occurs. When buying decisions happen, your investments in marketing, brand and reputation work together. They become tangible. You can measure the ROI.
Many of the well-intentioned but misguided attempts to rename or reinvent what ROI means in social media – return on influence and return on engagement probably getting the most play – seem to be the result of an inability to distinguish value creation from ROI."
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Tia Fisher
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