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 in that network.

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?

It’s not a definitive guide, more a fun piece on how tricky it is to stay relevant and engaging to an audience with a highly developed sense of when they are being “sold” to.

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 the social media 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.

Australian Labor party mentions by social media channel

Australian Liberal Party mentions by social media channel

To see the impact social media has on volume, look at the day that Julia Gillard started tweeting. It caused a spike almost as large as the day the election was called when you look at all media, but on Twitter itself, had more interest/volume than the election announcement.

Labor Party social channel mentions over time

Impact of Julia Gillard joining Twitter on volume of mentions

Net Sentiment score: Liberal Party in front

On Friday, the share of  voice was dominated by Labor with 78% of conversations about Labor or  Julia Gillard and 22% was for Liberal or Tony  Abbott (for Australian domains only, I didn’t have enough time to run a US and AU inclusive search).

By the end of Sunday, even though the numbers had spiked massively in terms of the volume of conversation, and even with US domains included in the search, the share of voice had moved only 1%, 77% Labor to 23% Liberal. I also ran a sentiment score analysis on Friday and again post election announcement.

Pre-election announcement:
(1 is positive so both have a negative score)

• Labor net sentiment 0.67
• Liberal net sentiment 0.74

Post-election announcement including US domains
(1 is positive so both have a negative score)

• Labor net sentiment 0.67
• Liberal net sentiment 0.70

So Liberal sentiment is going down and Labor’s is steady. It will be interesting to keep watching this score to the election. I haven’t looked at the entire “landscape” of the wider election sentiment in this analysis so the Greens and other parties issues are not included here, just the 2 major parties.

Analysis of Liberal & Labor social media efforts

There’s poor form overall from both Liberal and Labor. They’ve both set up social channels but use them to broadcast messages just like they do in traditional media channels, and they let the emergent community monitor itself. Spam is a problem in Facebook for the Liberal Party (not that they do anything about it).

There are huge missed opportunities to respond to issues in social channels. Neither party is responding in any channel to the huge volume of discussion. They may or may not be monitoring the issues, but given the extremely negative sentiment regarding internet filter, and immigration policy and boat people, the Government could at least be pro-actively addressing these issues.

Here are the breakdowns

Australian Labor Party

Website

Newly relaunched site has 2 places for social engagement

- it’s a public forum – the main barrier to entry is that people must register

- can’t login with Facebook, Twitter OpenID or any other “social identity”

- people can give ideas for policy

- Blog is more an article feed – users can’t comment

- Interactive game – “Tony Abbott Hospital Cuts” game

Twitter

Australian Labor

http://twitter.com/AustralianLabor

1,680 Following 1,638 Followers

Joined 10 December 2009

Ratio:

Good following to followers ratio - they are making an effort to follow back everyone who follows them – best practice

Hashtags:

• ALP Use of hashtags is not as smart as it should be. Inconsistently used, inconsistent naming, and too generic.
• For example, tweets marked with #news and #blogs too generic and does not enable people to search for specific ALP topics relevant to them
• Only started using specific hashtags Friday 16 July related to their 2 community forums #Thinktank and #LaborConnect
• Again #ThinkTank could be anyone’s think tank and does not identify it as ALP. Should be #ALPThinkTank to make it work harder for them
• Use Twitter lists as a way to track MPs but only one list

Content:

Not conversational at all – use it to broadcast blog article links, official announcements.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard

http://twitter.com/juliagillard

9,389 Following 20,752 Followers

Joined 27 October 2009 but only tweeting since July 4, 2010

Ratio:

Decent follower to following ratio, would say that since she’s been PM that it’s difficult to get the auto-follow to keep up with the amount of people following her each day

Content:

Strictly broadcast

Tweet content is partly first person, partly third person. Inconsistent tone suggests her account is managed by different people but there’s no transparency on who’s tweeting on her behalf.

Facebook

Julia Gillard

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Gillard/161674172327

32,651 People Like

Australian Labor

http://www.facebook.com/LaborConnect

1,620 People Like

Facebook commentary is raging on every article or status posted in Facebook on Julia’s page but no official voice is responding.

The community is talking to itself here, on the wall, discussion board, but there is no input from the people running Julia’s page.

The community is left to run and moderate itself – not best practice

Minimal/no spam so the pages seems to be monitored but no responses back from anyone running the pages.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/user/australianlabor

Subscribers 1504

72 Videos

Channel Views: 185,685

Total Upload Views: 765,591

Style: Broadcaster

Joined: June 10, 2007

Australian Liberal Party

Website

• has “support”, “comment” and “like” social interaction features on the “Our Ideas” section of their website
• “Our Ideas” as a name for this section does not suggest that feedback is elicited (i.e. they are Liberal Party ideas and they aren’t interested in your ideas) or wanted and as a consequence doesn’t have a lot of responses

Twitter

Liberal Party

http://twitter.com/LiberalAus/

3,801 Following 4,261 Followers

Good following/followers ratio

Joined 4 April 2009

Content:

• Strictly broadcast but well written tweets
• Links to news content articles on Liberal website

Hashtags:

• Easily identifiable and consistent use of hashtags
• #myliberal and #ausvotes on every tweet.

Tony Abbott

http://twitter.com/TonyAbbottMHR

20 Following 10,950 Followers

Joined

Poor following ratio – doesn’t follow people back

Content:

Broadcast. Not conversational

Personal content with photos and descriptions, mixed in with jabs at the government and then also Liberal policy announcements.

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/LiberalPartyAustralia

6,751 People Like This

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tony-Abbott/216342268645

7,920 People Like This

Both these pages have Facebook spam (people linking to off topic or personal pages) suggesting its not viewed or monitored very well.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/liberalpartytv

74 Videos

Subscribers: 6

Channel Views: 20,985

Total Upload Views: 230,283

Joined: September 28, 2008

Summary

Neither Liberal nor Labor parties are responding in any of the social channels - they are too busy “broadcasting” messages and leaving the communities to manage and moderate themselves. The debates are raging (on and off topic) in Facebook and Twitter, but with no official responding voices in any party channels. The only minor benefit is that the parties are taking the political messages into the social spaces where the voting public spend the majority of their time online.

What do you think? Would the political party that addressed the issues in social spaces get any brownie points going into this election?

Love this infographic summarising the 2010 World Cup social media and brand statistics from Ireland’s simply zesty. The big win seems to be the English team’s Facebook Page.

2010 World Cup social media and brand sponsor statistics

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%
• More women than men access social sites from their phone - which I’ve covered in more detail in a previous post.

Compelling statistics showing how mobile phones change the way people use social networks

As an early adopter of the iPhone, I’ve noted its enthusiastic uptake in Australia. Looking on the streets and in meetings, it seems to be the dominant phone, at least in Sydney. Recent statistics prove this, showing the iPhone and iPod touch is dominant operating system - 93% of phones or mobile devices accessing the internet in Australia and NZ are iPhone iOS.

93% of phones accessing the internet in Australia are iPhones

Yet this statistic globally tells a completely different story. iPhone and iPod touch (the newly defined iOS 4 platform) are at 60% of the mobile devices accessing the internet.

Global iPhone/iOS penetration is at 60%

Is Australia & NZ heavy iPhone penetration because Blackberry and other smart phones didn’t have much mainstream uptake prior to iPhone release? Or is it because Australians are the heaviest users of social networks and social usage continues as the fastest growing mobile category? Either way, the statistics point to a massive behavioural change with mobile devices - phones are barely used for telephone calls, they are more data devices and the internet is in people’s pocket.

There are some other interesting statistics (this time global and just iPhone/iPod touch related)

1. 225,000 applications in the iTunes app store
2. 5 billion application downloads from iTunes store
3. 73% of iPhone users have at least one 3^rd party app
4. 70 is the average number of applications on an iPhone
5. There will be 100 million iOS 4 devices by July 2010

This is the mobile landscape that the iAd platform is releasing into, although  the iPad will be unable to see iAds until the iPad upgrade to iOS 4 likely to be September 2010.

iAd may transform digital display advertising in the same way that iPhone transformed phones, and with the app developers getting 60% of the revenue to fund further free/cheap application development. What the hope for iAd is to bring emotion & interactivity via content to digital platforms with no “hijacking” or need to leave or be directed out of the apps themselves. This in itself may bring a level of trust back to the digital space, where click through rates have been declining year on year. The question then will be: will the “emotionally engaging” iAds lift the rest of the digital display ad industry?

UPDATE: For all those who are questioning references Apple’s statistics, here’s a great summary of global smartphone statistics from AdMob:

photo credit: cycle60

1. Geo-locations.
   Since November 2009 geo location aware social services are hotting up. Foursquare, launched 50 cities (including Australia) outside of the US, it’s mobile app makes geo location social a fun game. Twitter has had a tweet your location also since Nov 09 and Facebook’s soon to launch “Places” tab has been described as a Foursquare killer Google is trying to catch up with Latitude while SimpleGeo rakes in the venture capital, describing itself as “iTunes for geodata”
   
2. Social shopping.
   Facebook reworked Facebook Connect into a super simple to implement Open Graph and its already changing the way most destination sites interact with their users. The biggest innovations will be in “socialising” the online shopping experience – seeing what your friends like and buy. A great version can be seen at Levis US store.
3. Using a Facebook Page instead of a microsite.
   After the launch of the the new logo and look in Australia and the success of Hit Refresh,  Pepsi Australia dispensed with their website and now run the Pepsi Australia Facebook Page as a customer engagement hub.
4. Blogs are everywhere
   Blogspot, Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, the blogging platforms just keep getting easier and more flexible. The amount of blogs increase every year as brands, companies and individuals are using blogs to optimise their SEO and express their opinions. Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 describes 4% of blogs as “corporate” while BlogPulse has indexed more than 126 million blogs.
5. Would you like an app with that? iPhone and iPad apps go from strength to strength.
   The phone game changer is now the “tablet” device game changer. Magazine and newspaper publishers like WIRED magazine, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and GQ are hoping iPad and iPhone subscriptions will keep people engaged on new platforms, and boost interest in content that’s flagging in a printed format. So far, the initial edition of WIRED for iPad is outselling the print edition. iPads will change the way people consume content, whereas iPhone will continue to influence the way people create social content on the go. The most popular camera on Flickr is still the iPhone 3G

photo credit: Mecookie

How quickly the social landscape changes. A year ago, I was working on a digital campaign that featured user generated content at its core - the majority of the content for the site was going to be photo uploads from individual users, mashed up with the clients’ products to create a hybrid UGC/product site. It wasn’t called a “social” campaign because it was being run on a microsite, (rather than social channels) but the issues it faced are symptomatic all user generated content/mashup/crowdsourced [social content] campaigns. The legal issues centred around using other brands’ logos or other brands’ products in association with the campaign brand. The client was very nervous around getting sued by Apple, say, if an iPhone was uploaded by a user. The site is not live anymore, and didn’t get much traction -a combination of death by a thousand lawyers’ cuts and “Flashsturbation”

A year later,  most clients are now active in social media - they are asking for Facebook apps, one of them has even replaced their corporate website with a Facebook Page and many of them are even using Twitter, personally if not for their brands. The legal/creative issues for user generated content have not gone away - the clients lawyers are still saying “no” to many creative, social content campaign ideas.

It goes like this:

1. Creative team pitch in a cool, engaging user generated/social content,  game/application/tactical campaign
2. Client loves it
3. Digital producers spec it out, and it all looks like its all systems go.
4. Then it gets run past the lawyers
5. Lawyers say no
6. Campaign gets killed or its “Back to the drawing board”

Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event on Monday 19th April 2010 will be exploring this very topical issue, what constitutes “ownership” in the era of the social web. I’m really interested to hear from Professor Brian Fitzgerald - Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology. He will be representing Creative Commons Australia (ccAustralia) is the Australian derivative project of the international Creative Commons project. There have been a some notable Australian success stories with Creative Commons, for example the Flickr crowd source tagging project by the Powerhouse Museum.

Representing the lawyers (and IP holders and brands!) will be Stephen von Muenster – principal, vonMuenster solicitors & attorneys, advisor on copyright and content ownership issues to advertising agencies and brands. He’ll be answering the tough questions like “How do you avoid getting sued in another country?”

Of course what’s a fate worse than getting sued in another country? No-one being interested enough in the brand or the user generated competition to be bothered putting in hours of effort for a prize. So instead, the agencies make “fake user generated content” e.g. Doritos e.g. Best Job in the World to start the ball rolling, or in the case of the Toyota Yaris social campaign, put the nails in the coffin. [where Saatchi & Saatchi asked their supplier to create an ad to pump up lacklustre entries, so they could be assured of winning]

Spammers it seems are into this social content piece to artificially boost Google rankings. Ars Technica reported recently that UGC has even become a spamming technique, saying that 95% of user generated content is spam or malware or both.

Given the cavalier attitude to copyright and intellectual property on the web, and the trendiness of mashups and UGC, the era of social content is proving to be a fairly treacherous minefield for the brands or agencies who are naive or  insular.

UPDATE: Read Jye Smith’s summary of the event, which includes the very informative Slideshare presentations

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.

There are some very high calibre writers, who chose one of the following themes as their contribution. At the Coalface, Conversational Branding, Influence, Getting to work, Corporate Conversations, Measurement, In the boardroom, Pitching social media, Innovation and Execution, Identities, friends and trusted strangers. Stay tuned, I’ll let you know when the book will be available.

The authors who have contributed to this year’s edition are:

Australia's most popular social media websites March 2010

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)

Nielsen see the growth in Smartphone ownership in Australia to 43% of online Australians assisting the growth in mobile social networking. Of the pool of social networkers, 26% are participating via mobile.

Twitter is used increasingly a mobile social network in Australia, with half of its mobile users visiting the site daily. In comparison, Facebook saw 36% of its mobile users visit the site, whilst 22 percent of MySpace users and 16 percent of YouTube users were making daily visits. Twitter’s usage in Australia grew more than 400% in 2009 and 14% of Australians have followed companies or organisations on Twitter (up from 5% in 2008)

The chart below shows the fastest growing social media activities from 2009.

Fastest growing social media activities in Australia 2009

Interacting with brands in social networks overall is at 38% in 2009 up 15 points year on year. This translates to nearly two in five online Australians are now interacting with companies via social sites, and shows Australians are open to engaging with brands and companies online.

Melanie Ingrey, Research Director for Nielsen’s online business, sees social networks having big impact on brands:

“The opportunities for brands and companies to tap into the social media phenomenon are really just beginning to emerge and to date we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. Incredibly, nearly nine in ten Australian Internet users (86%) are looking to their fellow Internet users for opinions and information about products, services and brands, and Australians’ engagement with online word of mouth communication is going to increase in coming years as social media plays an increasingly important role in consumer decision making.”

I find these stats support what we see everyday as social media marketers - that consumers are looking to make two-way connections to brands. Consumers are looking for brand interaction, in the places they spend the most amount of time, which increasingly is in social spaces. The challenge for marketers in the coming era of social commerce is in becoming a genuine social brand, and to be open to conversation, feedback, and to integrate social marketing into all the other marketing channels.

What do you see as the coming challenges for social brands?

demographics of social media use on mobile devices

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.

demographics of mobile social use - breakdown by age

This was exactly the data I was looking for I wrote a post last year about how iPhone was shaping mobile social use and was driving a lot of mobile content creators. 9 months on, and I feel the impact of iPhone and other smart phones is just starting to hit the mainstream, and the statistics support this. AdMob report growth of nearly 300% in iPhone and iPod touch use in Australia alone, between January and November 2009

So how can we use these insights?

• optimising websites - making them mobile and smartphone friendly
• making social sharing easier - sophisticated scripting to know whether you’re logged in to social network so you don’t have to log in every time you want to share on the move
• social shopping, both real and virtual- Facebook announced a strategic partnership with PayPal, Read Facebook Credits “give users a fast and easy way to buy virtual goods on Facebook, including items from the Facebook Gift Shop”
• geo location social- hot for 2010. Watch Foursquare - the sponsorship pieces like Pepsi & Bravo, and the localized business offers
• social games -  ones that work on the move. Foursquare encourages repeat use through reward. There are so many social mobile game opportunities, its the “how to monetize” which is the hardest nut to crack.
• extending social media marketing to older audiences - Facebook’s fastes growing demographic in US is also reflecting the shift to 35+, whilst in Australia 25-34 is still growing fastest.

Any others? Please comment