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Social Media – Finding your voice

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.

Seven Eleven’s cool iphone app with coupons

7-Eleven in Sweden has released an iPhone app, that no only includes a 7/11 store locator, but also includes coupons for free coffee and biscuits.  Users key in their phone number and then the unique coupons (that are only valide once) are delivered to the iPhone.  April’s free coffee coupons will be followed by free ice cream in May.

iphone7eleven

Stockholm-based digital agency Lonely Duck developed the application and it had 2500 downloads in it’s first week.

This is a great example of where a branded application provides value both in terms of the mapping function, but also via the mobile coupons.

via Springwise

Facebook in Australia now 5.5 million

I still recall presenting the Facebook Australian population at 4.3 million around the middle of 2008.aust-facebook-stats-may2009

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 Media Marketing is growing as a niche form of marketing and whilst it’s still quite a new service,  it’s pleasing to see increasing demand as well as a willingness to embrace the changing communication protocols that social media requires.

Facebook stats from Checkfacebook

Here’s the Facebook population of the top 10 countries

1. United States 60,271,820
2. United Kingdom 17,983,160
3. Canada 11,352,400
4. Turkey 9,493,840
5. Italy 9,386,960
6. France 9,360,720
7. Australia 5,489,240
8. Colombia 4,605,260
9. Chile 4,558,560
10. Spain 4,478,380

BESTBUY – using social media

Here’s a great video that describes how BESTBUY is using a corporate wiki to share ideas within the company.

Utilising a website that acts as a web2.0 intranet, BESTBUY employees are able to share and edit knowledge.
This video has more detail.

Social Media tools will continue to grow and exist within what is often referred to as Enterprise 2.0

For some companies this will mean another attempt to roll out a corporate intranet, but for others the concept of embracing a culture which shares knowledge and instills the right reward mechanics will provide efficiencies and a greater ability to leverage innovation.

It’s a pity the site doesn’t support a discussion area for BESTBUY consumers as well as their employees.

Imagine if – portable social graphs

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

Whilst this is interesting, it’s often not easy to visualise the possibilities of what Data Portability actually means for the end user.

This presentation from Razorfish looks at what might happen if Amazon and Itunes implemented Facebook Connect and cleverly paints a picture of how the experience of their sites would be enhanced.

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

I have no doubt that sharing of information between social networks will continue to be embraced, and as long as consumers feel safe that  they are in control of their own information and relationships, then the privacy issues can be managed.

facebook connect

facebook connect

For business, allowing ease of signups, as well as potential access to the large amounts of personal information presents a great opportunitiy.  So if you have a site that has a large database of users, it’s probably a good time to be considering integrating Facebook’s Facebook Connect and / or Google’s Friend Connect

Australia Day – A digital perspective

Australia Day LogoAustralia day is here for 2009, and a good chance to review the way digital has brought about change to the way we live.

Here are some key events from 10 years ago in 1999
– Mark Taylor was the 1999 Australian of the year
– Companies spent millions protecting themselves from the Y2K bug
– Google moved from their garage to their first office with a search market share of < %1
– George Bush criticised President Clinton on Kosovo saying “We need an exit strategy before going to war”

Dial-up connectivity was what we used for internet connectivity, making “doing internet” a task that was performed daily or weekly.

The latest ABS statistics, show that at June 20008 we had 7.23 million internet subscribers which according to Neilson figures reflect that 16.3 million Australians are online or about 80% of the population.

4.3 million Australians now use Facebook or 25% of the internet population.

Consuming media online 13.7 hours / week in March 2008 surpassed out weekly TV usage, at 13.3 hours according to Neilsen.

From modest beginnings, blog growth continues with an estimated 440,000 bloggers in Australia.

We are indeed well and truly living in the Digital age, with historical information and events now readily available for consumption, such as this historical coverage of Australia Day.

Whilst Australia has a diverse range of cultures, I think we are becoming more nationalistic. The Australia Day Facebook page, launched last year has an impressive 52K fans.

Embracing online content this year, the Australia Day organisation is running an Advance Australia Dare campaign – a consumer generated video contest inviting people to submit videos of themselves.

The digital age has certainly changed things, even radically changing the way governments interact with citizens. Getup.org in Australia is one such example which has over 300K members. Not only do we celebrate Australia Day this week, but globally change is upon us with the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

change

There are lots of Australia Day events, which will generate there own digital memories.

I trust you enjoy your Australia Day,

Ian Farmer