2013: The Year Of Social HR. Privacy Policy. Google Acquires Meebo for its Google+ Team. In a post on its blog, messaging service Meebo has announced that it is being acquired by Google. Meebo was an early IM pioneer and spun out several other products related to advertising and leveraging social messaging like the Meebo Bar. The service is an unusually long-lived one for the competitive world of messaging, largely due to decent mobile apps and its ability to monetize one of the most basic forms of Internet chat. Meebo says that the company has entered into an agreement with Google to be acquired, adding: For more than seven years we’ve been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging.
Together with Google, we’re super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike. The team says that it has ‘had a blast’ building Meebo and that it’s excited to start the next leg of its journey. Edgerank is interesting. How FB decides what we see in our news feed. Twitter to be ‘hero’ social media channel for media brands in 2013.
With half a billion Twitter accounts, over 1 billion Facebook accounts and an estimated 200m more online users across the world by end 2013, social media is changing the way media brands connect and engage with their audience. Over the past four weeks, we’ve interviewed experts across all media channels – TV, radio, magazines, newspapers – and asked about the challenges they’ve faced from social media, the lessons they’ve learnt and their preparation for 2013.
From this audit with heads of social media, communications experts and business leaders, along with our own experiences working with UK and international media owners, we’ve put together a series of observations and insights, identifying clear trends for social media use by media brands in 2013: Twitter is only going to get bigger Every media brand is focusing on its use of Twitter. 4G will fuel more socialising of media content The arrival of 4G is an evolution/revolution that everyone is recognising. Influence the influencers. $50 Android Smartphones Are Disrupting Africa Much Faster Than You Think, Says Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. What phone does Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have in his pocket? An unlocked Android-powered 3G smartphone, made by Chinese mobile maker Huawei – which was selling for $85 on the streets of Kenya last year and now goes for $50. While the majority of Africa’s mobile phones are more basic talk-plus-text feature phones — recent figures from analyst ABI Research suggest 3G connectivity accounts for 11 percent of the continent’s overall mobile subscriptions vs. 2G’s 62.7 percent – 300,000 of these $50 Android smartphones have been sold in Kenya, according to Wales and African carrier Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore.
The pair were speaking at Vodafone’s Mobile for Good summit taking place in London today. “What I always thought about mobile in Africa…is this [smartphone adoption] is coming in the future — in the future someday,” said Wales. “Well the someday’s happening faster than I ever realised.” The pace caught the Wikimedia Foundation by surprise. The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes. Lately I've been noticing the spread of a meme regarding "Dunbar's Number" of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas. The Science of Dunbar's Number Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes: ... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.
Dunbar supports this hypothesis through studies by a number of field anthropologists. Source: Boston Consulting Group Revisiting Dunbar's Number Dunbar's theory is that this 42% number would be true for humans if humans had not invented language, a "cheap" form of social grooming. 10 Grammar Mistakes that Can Keep Your Content from Spreading.
Understanding EdgeRank, Facebook's 'Quality Score' for Wall Posts. Just because you post a status update to your Facebook Wall doesn’t mean it gets syndicated to each of your Fans. Last year, Facebook created an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines which posts get shown to whom in the Newsfeed. Thanks to EdgeRank, every post that gets published to the Wall receives a quality score. If the score is low, not many people see it. Conversely, if the score is higher, it gets wider syndication and a greater place of prominence, including potential placement in the “Top News” category. EdgeRank Defined Below is the EdgeRank formula. Facebook EdgeRank formula is Affinity x Weight x Time Decay. Objects and Edges Start with the understanding that everything posted to Facebook — status updates, video, photos, links and questions – is an “object.”
EdgeRank Formula The EdgeRank algorithm is: Affinity x Weight x Time Decay = EdgeRank EdgeRank Variables Affinity Score. These three variables are multiplied together for each edge. 5 Steps to Improve Your EdgeRank Score. Sensational Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics – 6 Infographics. Social media is no longer just about Facebook. Social media is splintering and fragmenting as more users find increased activity about their interests and passions residing on other social networks. Facebook knows that it cannot evolve internally fast enough to keep up with this dispersion and so is resorting to identifying and buying fast emerging start-ups such as Instagram.
Through the rapid rise of smart phones and mobile platforms globally such as tablets led by the surging iPad, the way we use and view media is changing business and marketing. Maintaining your business marketing momentum on a social web requires constant updates to identify and understand how and why users are using social networks. Here are some of the latest facts, figures and statistics to help keep you on top of the rapidly changing social media ecosystems. Related Resources from B2C» Free Webcast: The Future of Search: Drive Big Profits with Competitive Intelligence Facebook by Socialbakers Twitter Google+ LinkedIn.
Social Sharing Best-Practices for B2Bs and B2Cs. As might be expected, the best day and time of day to share content via social media depends on your target audience (business or consumer) and the specific social platform you're using, according to research by Compendium. Based on social sharing data from 300 companies using the Compendium content marketing platform, the research found the following: When sharing B2B content via LinkedIn, Sunday is the most effective day of the week (ranked by number of clicks generated), whereas Monday is the most effective day of the week for sharing B2C content with LinkedIn members.When sharing B2B content with Twitter followers, Wednesday is the most effective day of the week, whereas when sharing B2C tweets, Mondays and Wednesdays are more effective than any other day of the week.
Below, other findings from Compendium. Timing of Social Shares Timing is important, too. Social-Sharing Practices: Punctuation and Symbols Use of question marks and exclamation points. Social Media Marketing for Professional Services. New Social Media Effect: The Dark Halo. The Halo Effect is a term used to describe a favourable cognitive bias towards an individuals character based on an encompassing perception of him.
The term has since been adapted and used throughout many different industries to mean a favourable result based on the success of another entity. (i.e. In movies "The Halo Effect" can cause a film to perform better because of the success of a different film. In marketing, it can cause one brand (or product) to perform better because of the success of a related brand.) This same line of thinking has been applied to social media, suggesting that a social media "The Halo Effect" can improve the results of communications based on related conversations. The Dark Halo Effect The Dark Halo Effect is caused by several factors, but manifests itself in one universal way: users are discouraged from sharing.
FACTOR 1: Tolerance of Faking-it People don't like fakers. Here's what I found out: 1. 2. 3. (On average 25 tweets per article.) 4. 1. 2. 3. 1. 2. The Social Era Is More Than Social Media. Editor's Note: This story contains one of our 11 New Years resolutions you can actually keep in 2014. For the full list, click here. Things we once considered opposing forces--doing right by people and delivering results, collaborating and keeping focus, having a social purpose and making money--are really not in opposition. They never have been. But we need a more sophisticated approach to understand business models where making a profit doesn't mean losing purpose, community, and connection. Here are the social-era rules that allow both people and institutions to thrive: 1. The social era will reward those organizations that realize they don't create value all by themselves. 2.
Power used to come largely through and from big institutions. 3. Organizations that "let go at the top"--forsaking proprietary claims and avoiding hierarchy--are agile, flexible, and poised to leap from opportunity to opportunity, sacrificing short-term payoffs for long-term prosperity. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.