Articles in Social Networks
Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams talks about the ideas for driving twitter’s growth in the future.
Here’s an updated video from the team at Socialnomics which includes some great examples of how social media is used to deliver real business results.
It’s surprising giving the hype surrounding Social Media, that it’s still quite a challenge to sell the adoption of social media to organisations.
There are many obstacles that stand in the way of running social media campaigns such as 
- Risks associated with open conversations
- Non existant Internal policies covering social media engagement
- Lack of internal communication of social media engagement policies
- Perceived lack of metrics
- Clarity of roles for managing the campaign
October 15th is Blog Action Day, where 10,000 bloggers around the world are writing about climate change.
Social Media certainly provides a platform to harness the “collective” due to the global accessibility of internet and the ease of content publication which has given consumers a voice. Cause marketing is certainly one of the early adopters of doing this, and I expect to see a continued growth in corporate sponsorship of these initiatives, demonstrating the merging of social media engagement and PR.
Here’s an excellent presentation I came across today from Rob van Alphen.
Great pictures, and covers many of the issues that we cover with clients about the ways to engage with social media.
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? 
Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
Qualman defines socialnomics as “The ability of social media to generate exponential returns for individuals and businesses”.
They have released a video which showcases some of the social media statistics that describe the social media revolution, and how it is changing the world.
And this revolution has only just begun !
Facebook now let you insert a widget of pages onto other sites such as blogs or websites.
Here’s an example of the BRITA facebook page widget that we have developed.
The Fan Box as Facebook call it allows people to become fans of your page with 1 click without needing to visit Facebook.
Often one of the hardest challenge of engaging with Social Media is to find your voice.
It often involves trial and error as well as feedback from trusted friends.
This week I gave a presentation to the Future Leaders meeting in Sydney and as well as providing insight into what Social Media is, I talked through the process for getting engaged and identifying your niche.
I still recall presenting the Facebook Australian population at 4.3 million around the middle of 2008.
It’s now surpassed 5 million which means that more than 1 in 3 of Australia’s online population is on Facebook.
This is quite compelling, and its not wonder that brands and organisations are starting to allocate marketing spend to reaching this audience.
The challenge of course is that social networks don’t respond well to interruption marketing.
Social data portability has been a hotly debated topic with a range of emerging standards competing for adoption.
Afterall, single signon to the web offers a great deal of immediate benefits for users.
Dataportability open standards group has been marketing the concept for a few years now, which supports the OpenID login standard and has been adopted by Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, and MySpace. Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook’s Facebook Connect are both offering open API’s to developers who can integrate their own login details with one of these major players. Mashable has a good coverage of both of these tools here
Facebook has experienced a 18% rise during the last quarter of 2008 in Australia, to now boast 4.3 million Australians – up from 2.3 million from 12 months ago.
This number represents about 25% of the online population !
Matt Dickman has more Facebook stats here (note : he is using % of total population where Facebook is %17.07 of the 21.5 million populatoin)
I’ve posted a version of a social media presentation that I have been delivering.
It runs through my definition of social media, why it matters, and then outlines the 3 step action plan that I have developed.
- Listen
- Engage
- Influence
Tweetscan now lets you download your twitter history https://www.tweetscan.com/data.php
Here’s the last few tweets from my history.
Here’s a list of 10 Digital Marketing predictions for 2009.
1. Mobile apps
Goldman sachs estimates 210 million iphone apps will be dowloaded by 2010. Much of this will be monetized by the emerging mobile ad market, e.g. www.admob.com
2. Video streaming from mobile
e.g. www.qik.com www.kyte.com www.ustream.com
Soccer mums through to corporate presentations will be beamed from mobiles directly to the internet
Social scientists refer to the craving for online contact as “Ambient awareness”. They liken the feeling to being similar to being physically near someone and sensing their mood by their body language, mood and comments.
I think the desire for ambient awareness is what has driven the popularity of Facebook, which through it’s provision of the news feed feature, is supplying a stream of up to the minute updates on what your friends are doing. In many cases this feed substitutes the need for email. Twitter is another service which streams snippets of thoughts into a single stream.
Whilst the craving for ambient awareness of our social graph (or friends list) might be strong, it is surprising to me that the use of RSS feedreaders to supply a personalised interest based news feed is still quite low.
