Search results matching tag 'social networks'

eModeration's Social Media Round-up #14

2543443 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:19:00 GMT

Welcome to eModeration's weekly round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate). This week: President Obama's thumbs; Twillionaires; and 'intextication'.

Next week, eModeration is sending me on a social-skills course (day one: eating with implements) - so the next round-up will be on Friday the 4th December. See you then.

THE HEADLINES ...

President Obama has revealed that his absence from Twitter is due to a lack of dexterity in the thumb department. He was asked by a group of Shanghai students if they should be able to use Twitter freely – and the thumb quip launched a careful response about freedom of speech: “I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Stephen Fry this week claimed that Twitter celebs like himself can now opt out of the ‘pact with the devil’ which required them to open up their private lives to journalists, in return for press coverage of their work. Now, he says, Twillionaires like he and Britney can “reach their circulation just by typing into my keyboard.” Grave news indeed for Sleb magazines, which are already clinging on for dear life to the sinking ship of print.

Facebook came in for widespread and heavy criticism this week, for failing to follow Bebo’s lead in including a ‘Report’ button developed by the Child Exploitation and On-line Protection Centre. CEOP’s boss Jim Gamble urged the social networks to adopt the feature, which allows young users to log bullying, hate speech and sexually explicit content, and to contact trained advisers: “there is a responsibility, a duty of care, to the young and the vulnerable”, he said.

The scam offers scandal could spiral still further: a team of Sacramento lawyers is investigating complaints that unauthorized charges were made without users’ knowledge – and are considering class actions against Facebook, MySpace, Zynga, and Offerpal amongst others.

Yes, it’s that time of the decade already: as we inch painfully towards 2010, the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences bestowed Webby Awards on the top 10 internet moments of the last 10 years. Amongst the chosen: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone, along with the birth of Wikipedia and the Iranian elections.

Channel 4’s landmark deal with YouTube went live this week, unleashing around 5000 videos – 80% of which are full lengths shows – upon a grateful nation. Peep Show and Gordon Ramsay's F Word are among the goodies, which Channel 4 is hoping will lure in fresh advertisers.

The Digital Economy Bill was amongst those trailed in The Queen’s Speech yesterday. The bill proposes that those caught in the illegal-download act would first be sent warning letters – but would lose their connections if they continued to break the law. No mention, though, of the hotly-disputed Broadband Tax, which now looks likely to be slotted into the Finance Bill, due in 2010.

THE LOWDOWN ...

Every now and again comes a piece of news to which the only response is a brief contemplation of the expression “it takes all sorts to make a world”, and here is just such a one: a French company has developed a set of bathroom scales which will tweet your weight to your followers.

Teens are risking their own lives, as well as others’, by texting while driving- and worse, the figures seem to show that they’re learning from their parents. A new report claims that people are well aware of the dangers of texting on the road – but their desire to stay connected to their networks is stronger than their desire to stay connected to the tarmac.

Which leads us neatly to the American Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year shortlist, which, in an example of terrifying cultural serendipity, this year contains the word ‘intexticated’: the condition of being distracted by texting while driving. Sadly it was pipped at the post by ‘unfriend’ - possibly more useful but not quite as clever.

UK Twitterers are confirmed lefties - the Citizen Smiths of the Interweb. The news comes from a joint poll by Prospect Magazine and YouGov, which found that the average Twitter user is under-35 and London-based – and somewhat to the left of the Labour Party.

Trying to sell your house? Facing a wall of indifference, despite your original features and your central location? Could be that potential vendors are put off by your slow broadband connection. ISPreview.co.uk's survey reveals that 75% of people won’t buy a house – even an adorable one - if the best broadband ISP speed it could achieve was just 1Mbps.

IN OTHER NEWS ...

Yelps of excitement here, as Bing is launched in the UK – with enhanced visual search, Twitter integration and an “instant answers” service for real-time news on football scores and suchlike. But should Google be perspiring slightly and watching its back – or has it nothing to fear from the young pretender? iCrossing reveals the Five Things You Need To Know about Bing.

Bebo, whose web TV slate includes KateModern, Sofia's Diary, and The Gap Year, has nixed all new commissions, following parent company AOL’s announcement that it would slash 100 jobs globally.

Despite Rupert Murdoch’s admission last week that his paywall plans were likely to be delayed, it’s been announced that Times Online will start charging for content in the spring. James Harding, editor of The Times, said the site would offer 24-hour passes, as well as subscriptions.

The European Interactive Advertising Association – which includes stalwarts like AOL, the BBC, and Condé Nast amongst its members – predicts that online advertising will laugh in the face of the recession next year, with a projected 7.6% year-on-year rise in Europe, and a further 15% increase predicted for 2011.

And if further proof were needed that it is customers who are now directing the brand message, 360i reports that 77% of social media search results are generated by individuals with no affiliation to the brand.

ON FACEBOOK ...

It’s good news for Facebook this week: it towers above the nearest competition in the British social network league, netting half of all visits in UK last month. Twitter languishes a distant fourth, with a contextually-microscopic 1.9% of UK visitors.

But wait! Whispers of coming gloom can be heard, as research by WPP Group’s Mindshare suggests that the crucial older teen and twentysomething demographic might be drumming its fingers and looking round for something new.

Sony is catching up with rivals Microsoft, which recently hooked Facebook and Twitter to their Xbox 360. New software for the PlayStation means that gamers can now link their PS3s to their Facebook accounts to share game-play updates with friends.

ON TWITTER ...

Despite the recent slowdown in Twitter’s growth, it can still produce stats that make us gasp: according to Pingdom the average number of Tweets per hour is 1.1 million; the daily figure is 27.3 million; and at this rate, we’re looking at 10 billion tweets a year.

The typical Twitter user is male, and in his late twenties/early thirties – and wants brands to listen and respond to his questions, finds new research from InSites. News which sits uneasily against this other study, which finds, amongst other interesting tidbits, that 76% of brands on Twitter are infrequent users - and only 9% use it as a customer-service channel.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Marmite has formed a secret society – the Marmarati – to develop an extra-strong version of the loveit/hateit yeast-based spread. Members were chosen because they expressed their love for the Unilever-owned brand on social networking sites, and fans will be able to win a sneak-pretaste of the new spread by uploading marmite-centric content.

Mydeco.com, which sells homewares and furniture, has inked a deal with Sony's PlayStation Home to sell iconic pieces of virtual furniture – for example, the famous Marilyn ‘Lips’ sofa – on the community-based network.

Maclaren, who produce children’s buggies, recently offered a voluntary product-recall on one million of its pushchairs, amid reports that children had lost fingers in their folding mechanisms. But it found itself at the wrong end of a sharp social-media stick when UK customers discovered that only US customers were included – and this week it was force to roll out the offer worldwide.

For this year's Los Angeles Design Challenge, Audi has tapped its Facebook community of famously partisan fans to help design a fantasy Youthmobile for release in the year 2030 – you can see some of the designs here. http://www.facebook.com/audi

ON GOOGLE ...

The tech world was agog this week, as rumours swirled that Google’s eagerly-awaited new Chrome operating system might be available for download as soon as next week, with Search Engine Journal suggesting that the traction being gained by Windows 7 might be motivating a hasty launch.

Eek. Californian developer Frank McCabe created a programming language in 2004, and named it Go. He published a research paper about it in 2004. And a book in 2007. All the more surprising, then, that Google has just called IT”s new language by the same name. McCabe says he doesn’t have a trademark and can’t afford a lawsuit, but is determined not to let the search giant steamroller his prior claim.

Meanwhile, the Swiss data protection organization says its complaints to Google about breaches of privacy in Street View have fallen on deaf ears. It alleges that the company has refused to fix insufficiently blurred faces and numberplates, which could lead to individuals being identified in ‘sensitive’ locations - outside hospitals, prisons and schools.

Google means business with its latest policy on scam and malware advertisers who use Adwords – it’s imposing a blanket policy of ‘guilty till proven innocent’ on all suspect ads, and a lifetime ban on confirmed scammers.

Social Search, Google’s snazzy new feature which allows users to combine search with social data, has gone down – and according to a baffled Mashable, will remain down till early next week. What, Mashable wonders, could have happened to Social Search that could possibly take that long to fix?

ON YOUTUBE ...

YouTube has launched a dedicated channel called YouTube Direct, specifically for citizen journalists to bring their work to a larger audience. The tool allows media companies to connect directly with user-reporters, and request and rebroadcast news clips.

The video-sharing site is also testing a new approach to making online ads relevant – allowing users to skip the ones that bore them – with the idea that they will then engage more deeply with the ones that they do in fact watch.

ON MOBILE ...

T-Mobile faces consumer wrath again this week after it emerged that one of their workers had been selling customers’ details to a rival company - a major breach of data protection regulation.

In the first mobile-Twitter deal, Orange have snagged an agreement with Twitter to let users upload photos by text, via Snapshot - a custom picture platform developed by Orange.

73% of marketing execs think mobile is the UK’s ‘most likely to expand’ medium, says the IAB, whose survey canvassed the opinions of 100 senior agency reps.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...

Hi-yah! Kung Fu Panda World – in development for the last 2 years and targeted at kids of 8-12 – is to be launched in early 2010. The world will feature high levels of parental control, and will offer both long-term and one-day subscriptions.

Despite a spot of bother with its in-game ads – which some have suggested are rather dastardly - social games company Zynga’s investors are clearly chomping at the bit. The upwardly-mobile games enterprise, whose biggest success is the Facebook mega-game Farmville - has just received a massive injection of cash: $15.1 million to be precise, bringing its total haul to over $54 million.

Quick work: Gravity Bear, who declared as a social games developer less than four weeks ago, has already unveiled Battle Punks, a Facebook app which it bills as a ‘3D social game. It’s due to launch in open beta before 2010.

Subscription revenues for Disney’s Club Penguin were up a cozy 4% last quarter, contributing to a overall increase in revenue for the company - despite an icy economy.

That's all folks!

eModeration's Social Round-up #13

2543443 — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:25:00 GMT

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).

This week: News Corp and Google; Twitter's wailing grumps; Britney's encounter with the Dark Side; and why Stephen Fry is like a giant St Bernard.

Check back soon!

THE HEADLINES ...

Rupert Murdoch plans to hide his content away so Google can’t see it. He told Sky News that he’ll prevent the search giant from indexing News Corp sites, to ensure that users pay up to view his news.

Many commentators pointed out inconsistencies in Murdoch’s interview, not least the vexed question of how readers would find the content if not through search engines – at least 25% of traffic comes via Google alone. All in all, the news was taken as the paid-content equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand.

But hold on, paid-content naysayers – is that the cavalry I hear? A new poll finds that ¾ of us would consider paying a 10p micropayment per article – with Jeremy Clarkson, Charlie Brooker and the redoubtable Richard Littlejohn being most likely to tempt us to splash the cash. So perhaps there’s life in the old paywall yet.

COI boss Mark Lund says that digital is the key to solving Britain’s social ills, by increasing trust and brokering a new relationship between citizen and government. “Digital is at the heart of behaviour change and to make the revolution we need."

The social gaming ads controversy continued, with Facebook banning Zynga’s FishVille before it had barely had a chance to wiggle a gill, blaming ‘deceptive ads’ for the red card. Now Zynga has decided to nix all cost-per-action ads till further notice.

Parents are obsessed about the perils which face children outside the home – but are far less clued up when it comes to the dangers of the internet, according to Prof Tanya Byron, who investigated the possible dangers posed to children by videogames and websites for the government. "An integral part of development is risk taking. Children are taking risks online because we live in a risk-averse culture."

Toyota is in a little hot water – having purloined some UGC photos for a crowd-sourced ad campaign, without asking the photographer his work first. The image, along with some others which the car company aggregated from Flickr, has now been removed – Digital Marketing offer advice for brands eager to avoid a crowd-sourcing headache here.

THE LOWDOWN ...

A Stephen Fry recommendation is the digital equivalent of an enormous St Bernard jumping up to lick your face. Flattering, but leaves you floundering on the floor, scrabbling for your glasses and a tissue. Fry, who also revealed that he now considers himself to be a ‘content provider’, says that he has to warn websites that he’s going to recommend them, or they crash within seconds.

From the sublime (Mr Fry), to the ridiculous. Poor Britney Spears has had her Twitter updates hacked, and, for a while there, was posting as a Lucifer-lovin’ Satanist who longs for the new world order. Which isn’t true, of course - unless pop music really is the work of the devil, as my old headmistress was fond of saying.

The Telegraph raised an eyebrow at the £3175 per year which the taxpayer coughs up for Lord Mandelson’s three Twitter accounts. Between them, @bisgovuk, @digitalbritain, and @BIS_Science have 9,894 followers. About 30p a follower on my calculations - cheap at half the price.

Hurrah – a story which contains Facebook, the Law, and a Young Person - and yet doesn’t end in a jail term. A judge has accepted that the Facebook update which 19-year-old Rodney Bradford posted at 11:49a.m. on October 17 gave him an alibi for the mugging charge he faced.

The first of the Twitcoms? The Twitter account of Justin Halpern, who passes on the world-weary, no-bull pronouncements of his 73-year-old dad (Example: "You look just like Stephen Hawking...Relax, I meant like a non-paralyzed version of him.”) has been snapped up by CBS, who will turn it into a comedy series [Advisory: red-blooded language].

IN OTHER NEWS ...

Bing UK is not yet up to scratch, according to sources close to Microsoft. The site has been in beta for four months, but isn’t yet fully relevant to us Brits, who are quickly turning back to Google. Microsoft is now hiring natives to create UK-centric search categories.

But it’s not all bad news for Microsoft – seems Microsoft sites harness 15 percent of worldwide online time – swiftly followed by Google and Yahoo, with Facebook bringing up the rear.

Enterprises are grasping Twitter to their bosom – business use is up a tweet-tastic 250%, from just six months ago. Facebook is also benefitting, with workplace use ballooning by 192%, despite the 20% of companies who block social sites.

The IAB has said that online media companies need to significantly raise their game if they want brands to really get behind internet advertising – at the moment, ad formats and creative simply aren’t making the grade, according to AdAge.

Hmm. We seem to be rather conflicted at the moment when it comes to research. Lightspeed says that ‘only’ 33% of consumers trust social nets to help them make purchasing decisions, compared with 68% who trust search, product reviews and comparison sites.

While Performics is pleased to find that (a separately-surveyed) third of us think social media is a good place to find out more about brands – and touts the fact that 25% have clicked directly to an online retailer or e-commerce merchant as evidence that, contrary to conventional wisdom, hard marketing may not be a social media no-no.

LinkedIn and Twitter have partnered up – their users can now publish Tweets on LinkedIn, and vice versa. In a simile which really only works if you are a fan of high-calorie nut-based confectionary, Biz Stone said the deal was “like bringing peanut butter and chocolate together to make the perfect combination."

ON FACEBOOK ...

A quiet few days at Facebook Towers – though brands will be quietly pleased about the launch of ‘Friends of Connections’, which will allow them to personalize ads to target the friends of their fans.

The ‘Book also launched a new set of guidelines for brand promotions, which contained a few significant changes concerning where promotions and competitions can live. Brands pondering their next Facebook foray could consult Fresh Influence’s ‘Five Things You Should Know‘ – a handy breakdown for brands to flick through.

ON TWITTER ...

Facebook must have been sniggering into their hands this week, as Twitter faced the same wails of disgruntlement that have been plaguing Facebook recently. The complaints concern the rollout of Twitter’s new Retweet feature, which makes it impossible for Retweeters to edit or add comments. Hubspot's Dan Zarella warned that these will “completely eviscerate most of the value out of Retweets" - but Ev Williams insisted that the feature was here to stay, and was deliberately designed to be super-simple so that tweets can be clearly attributed and traced.

The horizontality of Twitter’s stats is causing some comment in the Socialsphere, with mashable’s Stan Schroeder pointing out the oddness of Twitter's grinding halt, given its till-now explosive growth, and the media’s current obsession with its cultural importance. But, he expands, none of this will matter in the long run – Twitter is becoming ‘part of the net’s infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be popular, it merely needs to be there.’

ON GOOGLE ...

Google’s world domination plans are going swimmingly – it now intends to pimp the web, having been working quietly on a replacement for the HTTP protocol, which will make the internet infinitely faster.

Time for some Caffeine then. Google announced the launch of their latest incarnation, telling the waiting world portentously that “we believe Caffeine is ready for a wider audience. Soon, we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data centre’. Rather brings to mind Donald Pleasance, stroking a white Persian and pressing big buttons, no?

The search giant also launched a big upgrade to Latitude, adding location history and location-based alerts. The latter will let you know, via email or sms, when you’re near friends and connections. And took another step towards social with the introduction of a Twitteresque ‘Following’ feature to Google Wave. The follows can be temporarily removed from your inbox at the click of a button, to avoid social exhaustion.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Alfa Romeo is using Twitter to promote its MiTo model to a youthful, more urban audience. Users are challenged to spot one of 1300 MiTo-shaped stencils around major UK cities, and post a photo of it with the hashtag #MiToStencil when they do.  

Burberry has used Facebook to launch a new site – called Artofthetrench.com – which encourages fans to submit images and comments on the brand’s iconic outerwear.

Tesco is bringing x-factor-style thrills to the nation with the launch of ‘performance pods’ outside some stores, where users can record an audition video to be entered into a competition run by talent search site 1Click2Frame.

Nikon is leveraging Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter presence to launch its Nikon Film Festival, a UGC contest which offers $100,000 for the best video. The festival, whose theme is ‘a day through your lens’, kicks off with Ashton’s own entry, in which he records a day he spent in Africa with wife Demi.

ASOS has relaunched its fashion-forward community, having consulted members on how to improve its features. Users will now get RSS feeds, emails to notify them when fellow members reply to their posts, and a spanky new look.

Disney follows other Hollywood studios in using Facebook and Twitter to drip-feed advance promotion for upcoming films, this week releasing two new posters for Tim Burton’s March-slated 3-D extravaganza Alice In Wonderland’. 

UNDER THE GAVEL ...

The government has had to climb down from its April announcement of a new law to prevent more than 30,000 registered sex offenders from accessing social sites like Facebook, after it was ruled likely to restrict the right to privacy. The Home Office is seeking leave to appeal the Court of Appeal ruling.

Privacy campaigners are still determined to pursue Blockbuster for its participation in Facebook’s Beacon programme – they’re urging the court to reject an argument from the video chain that its ToS requires mandatory arbitration in any class action.

SOCIAL STATS ...

Almost 65% of consumers surveyed by Razorfish made first bought a brand because of a digital experience - via website, microsite, mobile coupon or email.

And there’ll be tumbleweed blowin’ down Oxford Street this December, if these figures are anything to go by: a new study finds that 93% of us plan to buy our gifts online this year, with a quarter buying more online than last year. What’s more, 17% of us are looking to social sites like Facebook for gift-buying, with 60% of that number looking for offers and discounts, and another 52% checking the wish-lists of friends and family.

A full 23% of the women surveyed by Q Interactive and Social Media World Forum visit social games like Farmville and Causes several times a day – and more than half have used virtual currency. Plus, they’re not averse to watching ads to get it – many more details here on MediaPost.

Looks like the younger women are, the more brand-social they are. Gen Y women make double the mentions of brands and products of their Gen X compadres, and are significantly more influenced by blogs, according to a study by PopSugar and Radar Research.

ON MOBILE ...

Last week Verizon sold an astonishing 100,000 Droids in a week. This week, Apple effortlessly trumps them with a jaw-dropping 30,000 iPhones sold by Orange in 1 day. Remember folks, that’s 30,000 of a smartphone which has already been freely available for a full 2 years.

News which neatly supports Nielsen’s prediction that the majority of mobiles will be smartphones by 2011 – just a couple of years away.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...

Massive and comScore have worked out a way to get detailed insight into how in-game ads work for gamers, building a picture of engagement for the first time.

Games developer Playfish has been caught by Electronic Arts, for a reported $400m. The purchase means that EA is now Facebook-forward, as well as leading the way in console, PC and mobile gaming.

Microsoft is pulling the plug on up to 1 million Xbox Live players who have illicitly modified their consoles to play pirated or other-region games.Twitter and Facebook Come to Xbox Live November 17 SAVE The rest of the ToS-obeying Xbox Live community will be enjoying a Twitter and Facebook dashboard from November 17th.

Habbo-creator Sulake have announced the launch of Bobba Bar, a series of virtual social venues for mobile users. Over-17s can make friends with and date other guests via an avatar which can be customized to a total of 1 billion combinations.

THINKING ...

If you’ve got any downtime over the next days, the following might get your brain-cells whizzing:

iMedia Connection looks further into ad networks and online reputation-protection for brands - and finds it not as straightforward as you’d think.

In case the worst-case scenario should arise, here are some steps to take in order to make your company’s crisis-plan ‘social-media compliant’.

Finally, if you are suffering from social media shellshock, you will appreciate this guide to reducing the noise, whilst remaining connected.

That's all folks!

eModeration's Social Round-up #12

2543443 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:10:00 GMT

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!

THE HEADLINES ...

Good news! It turns out that using the Internet may not, after all, lead to alienation/sharp reduction in moral fibre/early grave (delete as applicable). A new study reveals that social media use is associated with real-life social benefits – for example, they find that blog-writers are more likely to confide in someone from a different race; photo-sharers more likely to discuss serious issues with someone of another political party; and – my very favourite – internet users in general are more likely than non-users to visit a café.

Once upon a time, when MySpace was the blushing belle of the ball and had princely suitors competing for its hand, it inked a $900 3-year deal with Google which allowed the search giant to become its sole search provider. But now the magic spell is broken: $100 million of that will not be going to MySpace after all, having been partly dependent on traffic levels. What’s more, Rupert Murdoch’s plan to rebuild his business model by secreting news content behind a pay-wall won’t be coming-off as soon as he’d hoped. And plans to combine with other publishers would quite possibly breach competition regulations, according to the Guardian. Bad news indeed, as print earnings crash from $134 million to $25 million.

Google is attempting to allay users’ privacy worries with Dashboard, which provides a single-page view of all the different pieces of information which Google holds on them. Hmm, not sure myself. A smidgeon too close to that movie moment where we find that Nice-Neighbour-Guy‘s bedroom wall is covered in long-lens photos of the girl-next-door, and he’s got an axe in his wardrobe.

THE LOWDOWN ...

Three cheers for Walmart, for putting comments and reviews at the heart of their strategy. And a manly pat on the back for not realizing that their new range of coffins and urns would prove irresistible to a stream of clever-clogs commenters: “I picked one up to bury my cat in. Other than having room for about 100 cats, it worked well.”

Hyundai score a social media gold star for cheering up the crestfallen victim of possibly the worst piece of parking that any of us will ever see. CCTV footage of the squishing of Todd Jamison’s 2004 Hyundai Elantra went viral – you can watch it, and the cockle-warming video of his surprise gift from Hyundai, on Mashable.

The guy who invented the first mobile phone - which on the evidence of other tech firsts probably required a winch-and-pulley system to transport - is 80. And he isn’t all that impressed with how the mobile story unfolded, telling a privacy conference this week that “whenever you create a universal device that does all things for all people, it does not do anything well.”

IN OTHER NEWS ...

Online advertising revenue was the only cheerful note in ITV’s limp financial report this week. It leapt 8% to £27m for the nine months to 30 September, despite an overall group revenue plunge of 11% to £1.3bn.

A new social net, neatly-named Honk, uses existing social networks to gather opinions from friends and family about the cars each has owned – helping drivers decide their next ride.

US e-commerce has drooped again. According to Comscore, Q3 spending was down 2% year on year to $29.6bn - which means that for the first time, year-on-year revenue has declined two quarters in a row.

Online retailers aren’t taking the news lying down, however: many are planning to increase their social media presence in the run-up to the holiday season. 60.3% have upgraded their Facebook pages, and a similar number have tweaked their Twitter pages - while 40% have improved customer ratings and reviews.

ON FACEBOOK ...

As all eyes turned to Facebook in the evolving controversy surrounding scam offers in social games and apps, they announced on their blog that they were taking firm action to prevent advertisers and users from being suckered. According to Nick Gianos, of Facebook’s platform team, “this battle is not new - and it’s far from over.”

Twitter may be the dashing young pretender, but The ‘Book is still king of the social castle as far as consumer brands are concerned. According to Business.com’s new study, 83% of them have a presence on Facebook – but only 45% interact on Twitter.

And, when you look at those Social Scales, it’s hardly surprising. Facebook is putting on half a million users every day; the beefy giant now weighs in at a belt-busting 325 million users.

ON TWITTER ...

Which is not to say that Facebook shouldn’t keep a wary eye on Twitter's stats. While its own users are creaking up in age, from 26 to a dessicated 33, it looks as though Twitter’s users are finally getting younger. They average out at a comparatively youthful 31, with the 18-24 age group accounting for 37% of users, compared with 19% in December ’08.

Twitter is testing its new Retweet feature this week, hoping to enable information to spread even more quickly across the site. According to VentureBeat’s mockups, there’s a retweet button, and a tool for tracking a link or idea back to its source.

And while Twitter’s in the mood for a spring clean, they’re running the Hoover round trending topics. As the site’s ballooned, trending topics has become more and more unwieldy – but now Twitter promises we’ll begin to see more relevant results appearing.

And if you’re still Lost with Lists, @mashable is your friend. They’ve started some jolly useful ones, including one for social media (there’s a link to make suggestions of anyone they might have – ahem – missed...)

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Car brand Infiniti has flipped its usual strategy and is breaking its new TV ads on Facebook and other social media sites, following its home page takeover last week on AOL, Yahoo and auto sites like Cars.com.

20th Century Fox are promoting Night at the Museum 2 with an augmented reality insert in the Times’ T2 section. Users are directed to a dedicated site, and when the insert is held up to a webcam, characters will appear to jump out of the screen.

Nestle’s Skinny Cow has shifted the hub of its marketing to its Facebook fanpage, launching a £2.5 million campaign to encourage women to share their cheekiest and sneakiest ways to say ‘Oh yes I can' to life's little indulgences.

Teen virtual world Habbo Hotel is supporting the release of vampire flick 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon' with alluring offers including film-related virtual goods, and the tantalising prospect of unscheduled chats with the film’s stars.

NBC Universal is adding social media features to its main Olympics website, NBCOlympics.com website in the runup to the 2010 Winter Olympics, incorporating Facebook Connect, which will let users to chat with their Facebook friends as they watch events.

Godiva chocolates are launching a virtual goods campaign to support their new range of desserts. Animated cakes and chocs open to reveal flash-based chocolatey-rich media , then offer the option of becoming a Fan, visiting the brand's website, or forwarding the treat to a friend.

Chick-fil-A’s Cows, who encourage us to eat more chicken (thus less beef) have been herding in traffic to its microsite, doubling visits in a week without promotion. And its Facebook page has just hit 1m fans – up from 20,000 fourteen months ago, when it was still run by a volunteer enthusiast.

ABC.com is using the premiere of the sci-fi remake V to launch ABC Social: Episode Commentary, which will allow Web viewers to comment live to their Facebook friends.

SOCIAL STATS ...

Twenty-something mothers are now the most social and device-dependent demographic, beating college students for the first time evah. Mr Youth’s new survey says Millennial Moms (b.1977-1996) are digital trendsetters (as well as being Mistresses of the Overshare ...)

Twitter users are enthusiastic followers-up of brand mentions. Nearly half of them use search engines to look up products they’ve heard about on the network, compared to 34% of other social network users, according to Performics’ new study.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...

In a marked failure of imagination – or a sensible ‘stick with what works’ business plan, we can’t quite decide – Zynga have launched their follow-up to Farmville. It’s about fish, and it’s called Fishville.

THINKING ...

If you’re interested in reaching teens, this is worth a once-over: MediaPost says there are three rules: think global, act local, go social.

And iMedia offers CMOs useful advice here about the tricky matter of brand protection in an online world.

eModeration's Social Round-Up #11

2543443 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:34:00 GMT

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.

The social networking circle-jerk!

822535 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:45:00 GMT

Readers of my US blog, AdScam, where informed yesterday that I have given up on Twitter. Why? Because in the last few days, I have had dozens of emails from very pissed off people asking why I am bombarding them with shitty emails flogging everything from insurance to condoms. Obviously someone has hacked my account. Just as someone phished my Facebook account FIVE times a few weeks ago. That’s whey I am no longer on Facebook.

Ah, you might say, but there are steps you can take, like changing your password and blocking certain url’s and IP addresses… But why the f**k should I? It's too much like hard work for little return. As someone commenting on AdScam puts it so well…

I completely understand George, if you really look at it.. this is what happens. To all of us. 1 - you get pushed to blog 2 - you get pushed to twitter 3 - you get pushed to Facebook 4 - you get pushed to LinkedIn 5 - you get pushed to digg 6 - you get pushed to YouTube 7 - you get pushed back to your blog. At the end of the day you run around to 2000 social media sites and what did you accomplish... you talked to the same people you would if you only stuck to your blog. because like all of us, we all are cycling to each of them... I read your blog.. then check my twitter feed and see snippets of what I just read. You know... the more I think about it.. the more I think George might be right.. it's a massive circle jerk.

I think you will see an increasing number of people beginning to question the time we are spending churning out so much useless crap. We are not all Steven Fry's. So from now on if you want to read my pearls of wisdom, you’ll have to settle for AdScam, MadScam and psfk.

Customer service goes social

1360959 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:49:00 GMT

It’s hard to ignore the boom in popularity of social networks – whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or blogs – it seems that social media now needs to form a core element to any customer service strategy. And for good reason.

At its heart, social network-based customer service interactions drive increased intimacy between company and customer. Consumers now have the ability and means to use social networking sites to broadcast their frustrations’ at the short comings of brands - or indeed praise excellent customer service experiences - to a wider audience than ever before. It’s word of mouth operating with immediate and exponential reach.

More importantly however, is the trust associated with these sites. We recently undertook research that indicated consumers are increasingly turning to their peers, friends and families for product and service recommendations because they often do not ‘trust’ corporate communications. Social media then provides consumers with a personal recommendation from a trusted party.

As people start to bypass traditional customer service routes in favour of digital platforms then, brands are faced with both more challenges and more opportunity than ever before. However, there still seems to be confusion amongst brands about what social networking services mean for them and how, if at all, they should factor in their communication strategy with customers.

On a basic level, there is the reactive approach. If, for example, a customer complains to the world at large about poor service, the company being complained about should reach out to that customer to try to solve the issue. Social media is all about individual thoughts and opinions, and the people participating in this digital forum want acknowledgement that they are being heard – even if the issue can’t necessarily be solved.

Beyond that however, there are also opportunities to identify and engage current or potential brand advocates proactively. Through Twitter or Facebook, brands have the ability to identify who is unhappy with competitors’ customer service and target them with an alternatively. There is still no substitute for having your customer service enquiry dealt with by a dedicated representative who can provide immediate resolution – regardless of the channel.

Companies that choose to simply ignore this trend will in many ways relegate themselves to the outdated camp. Whether brands want to embrace the latest social networking phenomenon or not, it is clear that consumers are placing these customer touch points close to their hearts.

Brands need to stop being scared of the public’s freedom to broadcast what they think via Twitter or Facebook and start to recognise the opportunity that these channels provide. The golden rules for brands engaging with social networking are the same as any customer interaction; take people seriously, don’t jibe them, be honest and really listen. Ultimately, it’s about choice – you can’t force everyone to use social media, just like you can’t force everyone to use automation. Don’t start taking away channels – just give people the choice. Whatever your opinion, social networking has become a fantastic communication tool, for brands it is another customer touch point that must feed into the overall strategy for brands.

eModeration's Social Media Round-Up 10 - 17 Oct 09

2543443 — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:21:00 GMT

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.

I just need $100 million to start this new social network. Trust me, it’s going to be worth billions!

822535 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Did you happen to read the amazing interview in Monday’s Wall Street Journal with Jeff Horing, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, a New York private-equity firm that was the lead investor in Twitter’s third and latest fund-raising round?

These are the geezers who just pumped in $100 million in funding to the 140 character wunderkindt, to give it a valuation of over ONE BILLION F******G DOLLARS. This for a company that to date, generates not one penny in revenue.

When asked about this amazing number, Horing said… “When we modeled it, we were looking at revenue somewhere between Google and Facebook. Google monetizes at $30 a user and Facebook is about $2 a user. If you look at Twitter’s user community and make some fairly conservative assumptions about revenue, we thought you could make a healthy exit at a multiple of a $1 billion.”

Hey, pardon me, but based on the Google and Facebook numbers, and the fact the Twitter's founders have made no bones about how at this stage, they don’t have a bloody clue how they’re going to start making money… For this guy to claim they are making conservative assumptions about revenue, smacks of either pig-headed bravado, or pig headed stupidity.

Remember, it was just three short years ago that Rupert Murdoch paid over half a billion dollars for MySpace, and all the pundit's said it was a steal? Now after massive layoffs, it’s leaking money like a sieve, and in all the happy chat about social media, it hardly ever gets mentioned.

In the Social-Sphere, three years is an eternity.

Something smells like Boo.Com to me.

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

2543443 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:42:00 GMT

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

THE HEADLINES...

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

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

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

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

THE LOWDOWN...

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

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

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

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

ON TWITTER...

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

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

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

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

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

AND ON FACEBOOK....

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

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

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

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

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

BRANDS ON SOCIAL...

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

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

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

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

SOME MORE SOCIAL STATS

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

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

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

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

TEENS...

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

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

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

ALL RISE...

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

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

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

ELSEWHERE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS...

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

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

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

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

Khan & Warren vs Facebook – Round One

2543443 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:59:00 GMT

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)