Social Networking Now More Popular Than Email, Report Finds - Re. Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web. Youth watchers have long argued that for young people, email is how you communicate with elders in formal situations, while social networks and SMS are the preferred method of communication among peers.
Nielsen found, however, that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young. This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook, whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it had under-18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).
Our take away from these findings? 9 Twitter Search Apps : Better Than Twitter. Twitter Search was a red hot topic last week, and will probably continue to heat up as Twitter usage grows beyond tech peeps and early adopters and penetrates the masses via Presidential Twittering, Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) of CNN motivating his viewers to Twitter and other timely events like the baseball season, holidays and unfortunate events all result in the wildfire spread of Twittering. Nothing has really caught on online with such a grassroots movement since, well, since Google. Speaking of Google, a lot of last week’s Twitter buzz was Google oriented, with acquisition and search buzz including : The notion that Twitter could be more important to Google than YouTubeGoogle actually launching an official Google Twitter AccountTwitter testing a search bar on Twitter.com and sponsored Twitter adsGoogle’s CEO claiming that the company is not yet interested in buying Twitter (but not saying that they will not).
The Better Business Experience for your Cust. Axel Schultze got my attention over at Social Media Today. We were discussing the Forrester report on sponsored conversations and as comment to my post he quoted his post "Not the Internet but the business model killed industrial media. " Of course, if he were a reader of my blog, he would know that I've written about that here in my Sunday series on new media and mainstream media. Which goes to show that even though we're having these conversations on content and may make instant friends online, we do not really know each other or the whole of how we think and operate until we take the time to talk, listen, experience, and maintain a dialogue. That is valid for companies as well.
In a post that addresses the topic of Recession 2.0 Axel shares observations on the current economic situation. We call an economic melt down “Recession”, when we don’t know the origin of the situation. . (1. . ) (2. . ) (3.) Value in the marketplace is determined by your customers. Trends in Social Influence Marketing. A year ago, here at Razorfish, we developed a hypothesis that the way people were influencing each other -- online, in small groups, through peer pressure, reciprocity or flattery -- was giving rise to a whole new form of marketing that we called Social Influence Marketing™ (SIM).
This post also appears as an article in the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report and was quoted by Guy Kawasaki at Open Forum . We defined it as marketing to the network of peers that surround and influence the customer across social platforms and on brand Web sites. The rise of SIM reflected the emerging thinking in our agency that the social Web and the mainstream Web were converging and that digital marketers needed to deliver better value exchanges to consumers and allow for influence more directly. Today SIM is not just a hypothesis. With those broad themes as a guide, what exactly can you expect in 2009?
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. This piece was first published in our 2009 Digital Outlook Report. Predictions on How Twitter Will Change Blogs in 2009 | SocialCom. The Social Graph and the value of Like. As we move further into a social media world where unlike anytime in the past friends can have a much larger and far ranging impact than before. This isn’t your father’s type of friendship as many of the people we call friends in this social media world are people we most likely haven’t met nor in a lot of case will ever meet in the traditional face-to-face manner. Yet they are becoming an increasingly important influence in our lives. This effect is especially apparent when it comes to what is referred to as your personal and public social graph.
Brad Fitzpatrick in an excellent post outlines what is meant by the term social graph thusly – “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related” and while Wikipedia doesn’t have a specific Social Graph page they do combine it with social networks in which they state On it’s own a person’s social graph is pretty well a static entity that only changes as you add or subtract contacts from it. TwitterFall: Because Twitter Isn't Distracting Enough. If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room. I tend not to write too much about Twitter these days. God knows enough gets written about it elsewhere.
But we had such a great experience with Twitter at Hacking Education on Friday that I feel compelled to share it with everyone. Hacking Education was what we call a "Union Square Sessions" event. We've done a number of sessions events now and we use the same format for all of them. We find a nice venue here in NYC, we put together a big table where everyone faces each other, and we talk for five or six hours about a single topic. There are no presentations, no panels, just discussion that is lightly moderated by the Union Square Ventures team. We record, transcribe, and photograph the event so its easily bloggable. This year we added Twitter to the mix. You'll notice on the far wall that we had Twitter up on the big screen. At the start of the event, most of the messages on the Twitter screen were coming from the room.
So here are my top three takeaways from the experience: Integrate Feedback On Your Website via Friendfeed. Integrate Feedback On Your Website via Friendfeed If you created a website or write a blog, you might find Friendfeed rooms a nice way of collecting feedback about that site posted anywhere on the web. Here's what you can do, say your website is Example.com:Register with Friendfeed if you haven't already. Create a room for your website by clicking on Rooms -> "Create a new room". Let's call the room "Example.com Feedback".
Set the privacy to Public if you want people to add feedback messages to the room, otherwise set it to Semi-Public. (You might want to give the room a nice icon, like from your website's logo.) Add a Google blog search results feed into the room. You now have a working, auto-updated feedback room. You could set up one room for each of your websites, and then quickly navigate through the feedback via Friendfeed's left-hand side room navigation.
In Friendfeed click Tools -> Embeddable Widgets -> Feed Widget. The layout of the Friendfeed widget can be adjusted. The Newest Annoyance on Twitter: Follow and Refollow Spam. Unless you've turned off notifications when users follow you on Twitter, you are no doubt used to the e-mail messages you get when somebody has opted into seeing your updates. Follower updates are a staple of social services - and if you are maniacal about keeping e-mail like I am, you can start to see trends on the data, including when people are oddly manipulating the system, in a way that's not normal. And for whatever reason, a small number of Twitter accounts look like they regularly follow me multiple times a day. I use auto-follow capabilities from SocialToo, letting me automatically opt in to see followers' updates. The way I use Twitter means there is little downside to having new incremental users in my feeds.
Take a look at two examples: @PoliticalUpdate and @twtr.us. Twice a day, starting on February 27th, I have been followed by @twtr.us, the first time at 3:56 a.m. my time, and a second time, at 5 p.m. that same day. (Also: See an earlier discussion on FriendFeed) HOW TO: Manage Multiple Social Media Profiles. Start counting the number of social media websites you have a profile with, right now.
Out of fingers yet? Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube are just the start of it - for people active on social websites, you could have several dozen social media profiles, half of them using a really old picture of you. Heck, some of them probably have inboxes filled with strange messages from some girl named "Leota" who wants you to visit her sexy singles website. While inbox spam and old pictures may not be the end of the world, keeping up a consistent image across the web and keeping your content fresh is vital to good business and strong relationships.
Step 1. The first step is to exactly know where you have a social media profile and where you do not. Tip: Always keep note of other people using your most common username. Step 2. People may disagree with me, but I believe you should sign up for the most popular social networks regardless of whether you are going to use them all.
Step 3. Share photos on twitter. Changing Nature of Virality: Facebook and Twitter. After Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views on the day after the Oscars, web research firm Hitwise found that the celeb gossip site’s top traffic source is Facebook. That’s crazy — for nearly as long as web analytics have been widely available, the top referrer for just about anything has been Google. But since the last week of December, Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins said, Facebook has given Perez more visits than Google; with 8.70 percent compared to 7.62 percent in a week in the middle of February. So what part of poking your crush and sharing your vacation photos includes referring enormous amounts of traffic?
Content sharing is an increasingly important activity on Facebook, and it will only grow with the company’s coming integration of real-time streams of friends’ activity. Online videomakers are probably a better fit for these personal broadcasting tools than we are. Full Circle Associates. The folks over at BrandonHall, the learning folks who blog lots of interesting links, pointed out a value of Twitter that not all of us may have seen yet. Twitter as a search engine. This was interesting to me because I’m co-leading a short online workshop introducing social media in a global international development network. The question always comes up “why would we be interested in something like Twitter. One application I try to show is Twitter as social listening. But I never really conceptualized it as search. So I thought I’d put it to the test. First, I searched for something for me. Well, the answer is yes and yes. SavingEveryday: Off to work! That last one bolstered my outlook of the current economic situation.
Climate change gave me on the first page a lot of links and serious tweets about the issue. I thought agricultural research might be a bit thinner. All in all, this 25 minute exercise told me a lot about Twitter as a social listening tool. P.S. Be Sociable, Share! TwitteReader turns Twitter into a feed reader | Webware. My Webware colleague Don Reisinger would get a kick out of TwitteReader, a new and free service which turns Twitter into something resembling Google Reader (something he's ditched entirely in place of Twitter ).
Once you've plugged in your username and password, it presents the latest tweets as individual feed items, which you can cruise through either by reading the short snippets (a la Google Reader) or expanding them out to full posts with a click. Just like Google Reader and Gmail, you can move up and down the list with the same J and K keyboard shortcuts. You can also star items, which adds them to your Twitter favorites list. The application keeps track of what you've read and what you haven't, which, depending on how many people you're following, could be useful. If a system like Google Reader's trends were to be applied to this you could see which people's updates you're not reading and cut them out of your followers list. Twitter: the 13 types of tweet to take notice of | Blog | Econsu. Twitter has many uses for our business beyond sending us traffic and spreading word about our articles, research and events.
While it is now our fourth-largest referrer, Twitter is more than simply a people hose. By tuning in to tweets we listen to user feedback, which helps keep us on our toes. It is useful in a wide number of areas, some of which I have listed below. Some recommendations and questions are easier to deal with than others, but we certainly take note of all of them. Tweets have alerted us to problem areas on the website, leading to numerous bug fixes, and helping us maintain quality control in our work. They can be useful for business and product development, as well as for PR and marketing reasons.
Everybody at Econsultancy loves to be retweeted, but beyond this kind of word of mouth action there are 13 other types of tweet that really help us to help our users. 1. So when emails and telephones fail you, there’s always the option of hurling something at us in Twitter… 2. Twitter Jumped the Shark This Week. Michael Egan III, the 31-year-old man accusing X-Men director Bryan Singer of sexually abusing him as a teenager, says he considered committing suicide as he struggled to come to terms with what he alleges happened to him. In an exclusive interview, Egan told The Daily Beast: “I didn’t know who to talk to, or how to deal with the demons eating away at me.
Suicide absolutely went through my mind. I had a horrible time with drinking. If it hadn’t been for the support of my mother and family, I don’t know what I would have done.” Egan was speaking as his lawyer, Jeff Herman, launched a civil case against Singer alleging in court documents that the 48-year-old director “manipulated his power, wealth, and position in the entertainment industry to sexually abuse and exploit the underage plaintiff through the use of drugs, alcohol, threats, and inducements which resulted in the plaintiff suffering catastrophic psychological and emotional injuries.”
Facebook Pages Change The Face Of Business | Holographic Life Ma. The Facebook Bombshell Yesterday Facebook rolled out their new look Facebook pages; They’ve made business pages become more like personal profiles allowing more interactivity and are set to open a doorway for businesses and brands to gain deep penetration into the mainstream market of Facebook users. The people who understand these implications are rubbing their hands with glee at this new announcement. Are Pages Hard To Find? Facebook still make pages difficult to find, I have no idea why this is but in order to create a page you have to scroll down to the bottom of your facebook profile and click on the advertising tab, then click on pages and then click on create a page.
Public Profiles What used to be termed Fan Pages are now being called Public Profiles. From what I have read it seems that Facebook are intent on introducing Public Profiles into the news feed. Facebook explain it like this. Windows Live Writer Back Up. Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect - ReadWriteW. SP2 RC for Vista and Server 2008 goes public - Ars Technica. Gen Y is hard to reach on social networks too | Blog | Econsulta. 15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress | How-To | Sm. The Second Coming of. Why Google won. Embrace Your Customers Through Social Media | Social Media Marke. Offline Google Calendar, Available for Everyone. What Results Can I Expect From My Social Media Campaign? Facebook. Expert Advice for B2B Marketing: The Top 5 Tips from Our Thought. View-Through Conversions Are Not Conversions - ClickZ. Notes from the Search Masters Conference at Google. Three Questions to Ask ( McKinsey: What Matters: Building an innovation nation.
Oodle Launches Facebook Marketplace 2.0, Aiming to Make Classifi. Online - E-Media Tidbits. Social Media Marketing Tops Digital Marketing Tactics for 2009 | HOW TO: Measure Online Influence. Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google (MT Hacks)