Yes FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook yesterday.
There is outrage and stories galore out on the interwebs, but only one thing out there got me to really understand the pain and anguish of FF loyalists.
Enjoy.
The buzz in the Twittersphere is all about Hubspot’s latest State of the Twittersphere, available here. It examines levels of activity of Twitter users by the following statistics:
- 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
- 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
- 68.68% have not specified a location
- 55.50% are not following anyone
- 54.88% have never tweeted
- 52.71% have no followers
With an astounding 55.50% never tweeting, many started to say that most people were not using twitter and the huge growth that Twitter experienced were just accounts being created, not users being created. The main argument here goes back to the idea of monetization – if most Twitter accounts are inactive (as determined by the lack of tweets and followers) then Twitter’s value is severely decreased.
However, I don’t see the above statistics (especially the lack of tweets) as a sign that Twitter users are inactive. All of us social media consultants always say that the first step to social media is listening. Its important to know what people are saying and how to use a social network, before just jumping right in. Secondly, after the initial Twitter objection, “I don’t want to read about what people are eating,” comes “I don’t have anything interesting to say.” Of the few (real life) friends I have on Twitter about half don’t tweet. They subscribe to their favorite celebs, a couple news outlets and their own real life friends. To them its just another RSS feed.
The real value of Twitter isn’t the number of active users, its the number of active listeners.
Big news out of China this week is that the government has once again cut off access to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social media sites in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. You can read here, here and here to learn more.
Which makes me wonder why this awesome campaign by Ogilvy (Frankfurt, Germany) for the International Society for Human Rights does not include the President of China, Hu Jintao? (Via)
Iran
Cuba
Venezuela
Google turned me into a stalker with the launch of Google Latitude. I wasn’t paying attention when I signed up to test it out and checked everyone in my Google address book which is, thankfully, much smaller than my Yahoo or Outlook address books. Apparently, Google sends an email to everyone letting them know you’d like to stalk them and then sends them emails whenever you check in.
Everyone in my address book received an invite to let me stalk them and then two emails telling them where I was (sadly both times at the office). One of my friends was so kind as to let me know via Facebook that she had received notification that I wanted to know her every move. While for the most part stalking my friends is totally cool, there are a couple people in my address book I would rather not stalk (especially when it tells them I’m doing so). Awkward….
So thanks Google.
Is a double opt-in set up so much to ask? You couldn’t have put in a little pop up that says “Are you sure you want to send an email to these people to invite them to your Latitude network?”
Oh and my assesment of latitude is that it is sub par geo-location social networking; BrightKite does it better.
Politicals are known to ruin any media buyers schedules, but they also push the boundaries of media and advertising with incredible creativity. Politics is not just about negative ads and talking points, its about harnessing the future of advertising.
Obama’s use of social marketing, new media and traditional is a perfect example of how to integrate and reach out to niche groups of your target demographic. By hiring Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder in 2007, Obama sealed his fate in connecting to and motivating the younger voters through these platforms.
In addition to a slew of new media, Obama has started running in game advertising. The presidential candidate will be featured within nine games from EA within X-Box Live editions of NHL, Madden, NBA and other sports games. Obama is featured on billboards and other signage within the games and is running the in game ads through November 3rd.
Other successful use of news media by Obama include:
Technorati released their annual State of the Blogsphere earlier this week. Increbily insightful and interesting data. I’ll let you pour over it yourselves, but here are some of the findings.
On a side note, blogosphere is one of my favorite web words, not as good as flasturbation, but sooo much better than the boring lingo of traditional media.
- 77% of active internet users read blogs
- The mean annual revenue for a blogger is $6K
- 4 or 5 bloggers post brand or product reviews
- 53% of US bloggers are male; 73% of bloggers in Europe and Asia are male
- More than half of bloggers in teh US and Eurpoe are 35+
- Women are more likely to sell their advertising via an ad network
- San Francisco is the US city with the highest concentration of bloggers
- Personal satisfaction is the most important measure of success
- A third of bloggers are concerned with people learning their identity
Ok I don’t want to give it all away! Go read more here.
There is a lot of argument amongst advertisers, social media users and the online gurus as to where advertising stands in the lines of social media.
Honestly, I have no flippin clue to any of those answers.
New Facebook layout is nice. Streamlined, clean and easy to navigate.
I realize they’re trying to live up to their price tag but they ads feel so much more intrusive on the right hand side, constantly refreshing with every tab I navigate to.
Thankfully the horrid Shaun White ads are gone, but I have yet to find a facebook ad that makes me want to click on any of them. And shoving more ads at my eyeballs will increase the likelihood of my clicking on them.
The concept of BrightKite is brilliant -a location based social network that helps you keep track of your friends and introduces you to people around you. Great idea right?
But then people sign up like “skepticism” who recently checked in ti 92101…and felt the need to send everyone a picture of their breakfast. Yes those strawberries and what looks like a bran muffin look delicious, really. But I don’t care what you are eating. Especially, when you send the same breakfast picture 3 times throughout the day. If that’s the most interesting part of your day, then I’m sorry.
FYI:- Loopt does about the same thing, but my phone is not compatible with the service so I’m stuck with BrightKite. Loopt utilizes GPS to let you know where your friends are but also works with local bars and venues to let you know where there are good happy hours, specials and other events going on.
So a couple days ago I started to question if the proliferation of social media was concentrated among social media folks and tech savvy people because my friends are concentrated on myspace and facebook. I don’t know anyone else who is on Twitter, Plurk, Brightkite, Friend Feed or Hi5….
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that some social media sites have a higher concentration of marketers/techs. The Toad Stool has noticed the trend too. Read his take on it here.
The Toad Stool definitely brings up a very valid point that as marketers we always have to put it back into perspective or real world users. Social media geeks (or geeks in general) are the foundation of most social networking sites. I bet most of my friends have never heard of the 5 sites mentioned above, but the ones they do use they are experts within and would take offense to an unwanted invasion of their social space by a brand. It becomes the marketers responsibility to fully understand each application, its users and the best way to communication within each network.
Another side to this is the analysis of social networks in Google Trends by Louis Gray. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are so much more media savvy and immersed in social media that the rest of the nation. If you take a look at the findings you’ll see that SF residents are into the newer social sites, while the rest of the nation is into the biggies like Facebook, AOL, Ebay and MySpace. Which makes sense as these are the early adopters, the progressive techies.
Actually, we have a client located in the Livermore/Pleasanton area, just east of San Francisco, who is currently trying to increase the customer base amongst 18-34 yr olds within the region. This data is making me rethinking their online strategy….back to work then.
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