Don’t shoot the social media messenger
I was horrified to read UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron was considering blocking social media networks because of their role in the UK riots. Blaming social networks for the speed and ease of communications, and blocking them, is the digital equivalent of shooting the messenger. Twitter’s position of “tweets must flow” is the central tenet of its network. Twitter doesn’t censor individual tweeter’s content, and that’s its power as a channel. For British politicians to block or attempt to censor social channels they are exhibiting the same traits as Egyptian’s totalitarian regime.
Social Personas: implications for social marketers
Social Media Club Sydney’s sponsored event Social Personas: How different is the social media you from the real you? probably achieved the aims that the research set out to do, which was to cause people to question the “acceptable” behaviours related to authenticity versus superficiality in social media in Generation Y. The other speakers, demographer and historian Bernard Salt, and researcher Dr Rebecca Huntley focused on Facebook and the reported, self described superficiality in Generation Y behaviour’s particularly on Facebook.
My presentation was intended as a bit of a tongue in cheek thought starter, rather than fighting the superficiality and behavioural traits, maybe marketers should just play up to it?
Australian Election 2010 – social media match fitness
The 2010 Australian Election is going to be an interesting one for social media analysis, because for the first time we will see to be able to see whether social sentiment is going to have an impact on how people vote. I started looking at this on Friday 16 July, the day before the election was called, and left Alterian SM2 monitoring tool looking at the same keywords over the weekend which included the day of the election announcement.
This analysis is from 1 to 18 July and includes mainstream media as well as strictly “social” media channels. Twitter has by far the largest volume of mentions for both parties.
Mobile phones are changing the way we use social media
This infographic confirms what we already know: global access to social sites and networks via mobile phones is growing at a rate even higher than the uptake of smart phones . My favourite statistics from this:
* People who use Facebook on their phones are twice as active than non-mobile users.
* Growth in mobile access to Facebook grew by 112% year on year whereas Twitter access via mobile grew 347%
Introducing the authors of Age of Conversation 3
I am very excited to be part of a new book, Age of Conversation 3: It’s time to get busy!. It’s going to be a physical book, available directly from Amazon and other online book stores. The new cover, was designed by Chris Wilson. And the website, was designed and built by my friend, Craig Wilson and the hard working team at Sticky Advertising. The editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan have done an amazing job pulling it together
Australians increasing social media use is led by Facebook
Nielsen reports today via Nielsen’s 2010 Social Media Report, that there are now 9 million Australians interacting on regularly on social networking sites with Facebook dominating – more than 83% of social networkers naming Facebook as their main social networking platform, up from 72% in 2008 and 34% in 2007.
Overall, Facebook is Australia’s most popular social network with 75% of online Australians having ever visited, and via time spent per month (more than 8 hours per month which is seven and a half more hours than its closest rival site YouTube)
Women use social mobile more than men
Nielsen posted these mobile social stats from December 2009 about the gender differences when accessing social networks via mobile devices. You may be surprised to discover women were found do use their phones to “tweet” and “friend” 10% more than men. Nielsen research also showed the 35-54 age group had more active mobile social networkers than any other group.
what are the rules of social media?
A friend who runs a very successful business was contacted via email recently as he’d been held up as a “How not to use twitter” case study at a marketing event. While the person who emails this may or may not have had good intentions, there are a bunch of reasons why they are just completely wrong and inappropriate in judging at all. I’ll start with their Twitter profile:
Honesty is the best social media policy
When considering your personal or a company or a corporate social media strategy, one of the key cornerstones should be honesty.
Why?
* Because so much advertising, marketing and PR involves spin, stretches of truth, hyperbole and wild claims.
* Because in social media, authenticity and honesty are valuable commodities.
* Because you can’t “buy” honesty.
How Facebook privacy is being eroded for advertising
Facebook signup continues to grow at exponential rates across the globe. In three months since April 2009, they’ve added another 50 million users If you’re looking for statistics on Facebook’s infiltration into individual countries, the CheckFacebook site provides great stats about Australia.
Qantas Travel Insider on building a social community
At the Social Media Club Sydney June event panel discussion Do you need an agency to run effective social media campaigns? Karla Courtney – Online Editor Qantas Travel Insider, and @qftravelinsider – represented the client perspective. Karla works client-side and has built a community around the @qftravelinsider Twitter account by engaging in conversations around travel. Watch the video excerpt from the evening.
HabitatUK apologises for Twitter hashtag issue
The post I did on the weekend, How not to use twitter HabitatUK a case study, hit a chord on Social Media Today. It was the most viewed post, and it obviously struck a chord with the Twitter community because of spammers use of hashtags. It was picked up by the Guardian and Sky News. As a consequence, the Habitat press office contacted me this week to apologise for the matter, and asked me to post this on their behalf. Here’s what they said:
iPhone, AFL and social media
Being a big Australian Football League fan, (and Sydney Swans member), I was chuffed when the ultimate AFL application Aussie Rules Live was released. It has pretty much everything you need to follow your team and all the others, including live scores when the games are on.
AFL is a social game, with footy tipping giving you a reason to have a competition between your friends to see who gets through to the top of the ladder. You can extend your network outside of your immediate network to others who are also passionate about sport. It adds another dimension to use a tool such as Twitter to keep in touch with your favourite team for me its @sydneyswans, and your real and online friends live while the game is on.
How iPhone shapes social media
The infographics display from Apple’s WWDC conference has generated a lot of buzz. What’s really interesting is what it represents:
* There are now 50,000 + iPhone (and iPod Touch, so iPhone OS) applications less than a year since release of iPhone 3G.
* The displays are representing 20,000 of the most downloaded applications
* More than 1 billion apps downloaded, the milestone was reached in April 2009, again less than a year since iPhone 3G
* 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute
* New iPhone 3G S is faster, with video capabilities & even edit your video on the phone and share it straight to YouTube
I am an unashamed iPhone champion, I got one the day it was released in Australia. However, there are loads of detractors who keep looking for an iPhone killer, lauding Android, Blackberry and various Palm and Windows OS devices. The figures from Apple are significant enough to keep the competition at bay at least for the moment:
10 Twitter strategies for Australian brands
With all the mentions of Twitter in mainstream media, one could be turned off by the hype but Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks in Australia. Twitter is also very adaptable to long term strategies in social media marketing and there are some brands that use it well, and others who are virtually invisible.
I’ve identified 10 Twitter strategies now being used by Australian brands. I’ve divided them up arbitrarily into “Talking” and “Listening” and low interaction (one way) and higher engagement (two way interaction) and plotted some of the types (and the examples) in a matrix diagram.
Social Media Club Sydney plays nice
Authenticity and Transparency in Social Media Part 1 from SocialMediaClub Sydney on Vimeo.
We got over the hurdle of the initial Social Media Club Sydney inaugural event with a packed house of people who came to see Adam Ferrier talk about the Naked Communications Witchery Man “Girl in the Jacket” campaign and Leslie Nassar talk about his alter ego, the fake Stephen Conroy.
Beach Meet was on the week before and there were waves of hostility directed at PR agencies (accused of hijacking Twitter) and Social Media Club Sydney (accused of random stuff) was at an all time high. So much so that Kelly Tall was prompted to name the Twitter/blogosphere sniping and bitchiness a “feral sandpit”
Leslie already had a cult Twitter following, so he was likely to be OK. Given that the Witchery Man launch had already copped it on from the social media set, as well as digital marketing/regular advertising commentary, we were all steeling ourselves for some serious stoushing.
We never expected what happened.
Is it customer service if you’re not a customer?
When you’re interacting with brands using social media marketing: is it customer service if you’re not a customer?
With all the brands using social media to outreach and build up relationships, there are many paths to becoming a customer beyond the traditional one to many, company to customer “traditional” marketing model. Social media is causing a major rethink of the one way conversation. I found this great summary of the degrees of relationships in social media marketing…
Don’t believe the celebrity Twitter hype
This excerpt from E! Channel’s The Soup is from one week of Twitter mentions on prime time TV in the US. Even though the celebrities have been drawing the masses onto Twitter, Nielsen reported yesterday that around 60% of users signing up to Twitter “fail to return” after a month. The report has been picked up verbatim by the ABC & SBS and has been retweeted throughout the day. In Australia, the report hasn’t been given any kind of analysis or insight by people who actually use Twitter
In one corner we have “celebrities are bringing the masses to Twitter and ruining it for early adopters”. In the other corner we have “Twitter has only 40% retention rate for new users and won’t keep exponential growth”. Reality is somewhere in the middle, but do celebrities amplify the Twitter hype?
Is public the new private?
Is public the new private? What constitutes oversharing on the public channel of Twitter? So a lot of angst of private being the new public relates to the equation
* how famous/reputable you are
* relative to how private you want to keep your life
* relative to your awareness of who your talking to
* and what you are saying
* how public the channel is
Social Media Club Sydney and the Secret Handshake
There’s been some healthy debate around the “exclusivity” of the Sydney Social Media Club. And despite the title of the post, you won’t need a secret handshake to be let in. Mumbrella released the news this morning about the Social Media Club Sydney starting up, with the first event scheduled for April 27th featuring the figures at the centre of two famous social media incidents in 2009 – the (fake) Stephen Conroy a.k.a Leslie Nassar and Naked Communications Adam Ferrier.
