Content Updates & Scheduling on Social Networks

I'm often asked how I maintain my social media updates throughout the day (while still doing a full-time job!). Well, I cheat. I pre-read a lot of sales and marketing content and schedule it to be published at a later time/date. I usually do around 6 -8 updates per day on Twitter and LinkedIn, and 4 on Saturday and Sunday. It only takes an hour or so per week (plus reading) but gives you a robust social media presence. Here are the 4 key steps:

1. Find the right content.

The most important step is finding the right content to share. It takes a lot of time to read through it all but it gives you the dual benefit of getting you up-to-speed on what's happening in the industry but also identifying what content to share. As a kick start, here are 50 blogs that are worth reading: http://bit.ly/1hiV5nC

I also regularly read www.marketing-interactive.com, www.campaignasia.com, www.marketingmag.com.au, www.adweek.com, www.adage.com and www.econsultancy.com. Twitter is also incredibly useful in finding relevant and useful content.

2. Aggregate content in one place.

The best content comes from those you follow or respect. To help identify this, I’ve subscribed to Newsle (www.newsle.com) and Nuzzel (www.nuzzel.com), which are free tools for news about my friends/network.  I also use Feedly (www.feedly.com) to aggregate news/blogs together in once place.

3. Schedule your content.

I really love and use a tool called Buffer (www.bufferapp.com). There’s a free version that allows you to schedule up to 10 updates at a time. There's a paid version (which I use) that allows for unlimited updates. Buffer is simple to use, and has a Chrome extension, meaning if you download it for the Chrome browser, when you’re reading a website or article you simply click on the Buffer icon in the top left corner to schedule it into Buffer. Other tools you might consider are Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) and here are 6 more: http://empowerlounge.com/6-great-social-media-scheduling-tools/

4. Publish them to your social networks.

I’ve connected my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to Buffer, but you can also connect your Facebook account if you like. If you’re advanced, you can scheduled different content for different social networks (for different audiences).

I hope this helps - and happy content publishing!

Be a thought leader: Creating, finding and sharing great content

One of the most common questions I’m asked is where do I find all my content that I publish on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks? It’s a great question that can make or break you as a thought leader. If you’re consistently posting low quality or poor information this will hurt your reputation and quickly drive Followers and Connections away. On the other hand, having a focused stream of excellent content is one of the paths to being a respected thought leader. I usually publish between 5 and 20 posts per day, every day. So where do I find all this relevant (and hopefully useful) information?

Here are a few tips and information sources that I find useful when talking about marketing, digital, social media and technology:

The best content is your own.

 

This might seem like a pretty simple idea but with the millions of people tweeting, retweeting and reposting other peoples content it’s often overlooked. The best content, always, is the unique content that you create yourself. Not everyone has deep industry knowledge and many years of experience but everyone has a perspective. It’s simple – write down what you think.  This could be anything from a long, comprehensive article on an aspect of digital like Search Marketing or Mobile Advertising, or could be a short opinion piece you’ve written in response to someone else’s content or events/news in the industry. The important thing is to add your own flavor, in your own voice.

If you’re not sure where to start, there are 3 great blogging platforms I recommend. Google’s www.blogspot.com is what I use for my blog. You might also want to consider www.wordpress.com or www.tumblr.com – they’re all great. They’re also free and easy to set up.

Tips for creating your own unique content.

Not every blog post needs to be the length of a novel, nor does it have to be Shakespeare. It doesn’t have to be written text either – an image, infographic or a video are great for conveying your thoughts and ideas. Here are 5 tips for getting started on your own blog content:

1. If you want to be a thought leader in digital, you need to stand for something. There are a lot of different areas of digital including social media, online advertising, creative, web development, video, mobile and search marketing. Pick the ones you’re most comfortable with, or are most experienced in, and simply write. Staying on topic and focus is good. It lets your ideas flow more freely.
2. Short is great. A few simple lines or a couple of paragraphs is all you need.
3. Longer is better. Sometimes you need to dive deeper into an issue, or feel particularly strongly about a topic. Break your content into sections (similar to this article) and write it down. In-depth articles are more likely to be shared, so when you get some spare time and the passion to write, go do it!
4. 4Critique other peoples work. Look at articles on professional publications such as Mashable, Tech in Asia, TechCrunch, Forbes, Marketing Magazine, Ad Age, link to them via your blog and comment on them. Add your own insight or thoughts. Strongly agree or vehemently disagree. It’s your opinion that counts.
5. Move beyond the written word. Some of the best and most sharable content is visual. If you have the time and inclination (and don’t feel like writing), get a video camera out and talk through your ideas. Publish it on your blog and make sure you create a YouTube channel. Images and infographics are also fantastic. Either share other people’s images and infographics (but please make sure you acknowledge the owner/source and are not infringing copyright), or better yet create your own.

Twitter (as well China’s QQ Weibo and Sina Weibo) are the best content aggregators in the world.

Twitter and Weibo are social services that allow you to Follow “interests”. This is fundamentally different from services like Facebook, which encourage you to connect to friends, family and colleagues in more of a social or fun context. The difference is that often you don’t share the same interests as the people you connect with on Facebook. It’s extremely rare that all of your family and friends work in the same job, share the same taste in music or like the same things. But you like them anyway and want to stay in touch. This is your “social network”. Twitter on the other hand is an “interest network” – it encourages you to follow acquaintances, strangers (and sometimes friends) who have the same job, work in the same industry or generally like the same things you do. This means that Twitter is fantastic for finding like-minded people in digital marketing, social media, e-commerce, technology, etc.

The best source of content sharing is Twitter. Follow as many people as possible who you feel are thought leaders or inspire you in what you do. Digital marketing experts have flocked to Twitter and are posting interesting stuff all the time. Take advantage of the unrestricted rules that allow you to follow up to 2,000 other people (note: you can go well beyond 2,000 people but you need to have about the same number, give or take 10%, following you back).

Be a little shameless as you cut and paste other people’s Tweets, or repost content you’ve been directed to. Its good etiquette to list the person you found the content through though, so keep this in mind before blatantly stealing without appropriate recognition. Or you can simply Retweet (RT) other great Tweets you find. Just remember 5 things:

1. Focus is good – talk about areas where you want to be a thought leader or seen as an expert.
2. Throw in a bit of personal info now and again, but be aware that the vast majority of people don’t want to know what you had for breakfast or intimate details of your last visit to the doctor.
3. Interact with others, particularly the experts. Try to thank those that RT your Tweets, or simply comment on great Tweets you come across. Twitter might be focused on building your interest graph but it’s still social.
4. Follow and Follow-back is the etiquette, but not the rule. You don’t want your Twitter feed filled with “How to make money online” scams, pointless quotes or irrelevant information. Be nice and follow most people back but carefully read the persons bio and previous Tweets to ensure their content is relevant.
5. Be considerate and acknowledge others – it is great when others RT you or share the same content you do. But if you don’t bother occasionally thanking them or acknowledging where the original Tweet came from, people get tired pretty quickly of freeloaders (or even worse plagiarists). It’s just not cool.

Some of the key digital marketing leaders I recommend you follow on Twitter include: @Econsultancy @eskimon, ‏@hannahlaw, @JamshedWadia, @jeffbullas, @ladyxtel, @MargeryLyle, @Mashable, @rachelyyhuang, @ruhanirabin and of course me! @DamienCummings

Professional tech & digital-focused publications I recommend.

If you’re new to sharing content or just starting out, you’ll quickly realize that there are a few very influential publications that most people are sharing information from. Here are the leading blogs and publications I find useful:

www.mashable.com
www.techcrunch.com
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.forbes.com
www.econsultancy.com
www.techinasia.com
www.businessinsider.com
www.allthingsd.com

Professional marketing publications I recommend.

There are many advertising and marketing publications worldwide. I focus my reading on Asia, specifically Singapore, Southeast Asia, Australia and China so my list is influenced by this. There are many great publications around the world, so I encourage you to find others in your country. Here’s my reading list:

www.adage.com
www.adweek.com
www.adnews.com.au
www.bandt.com.au
www.mumbrella.com.au
www.marketingmag.com.au
www.marketing-interactive.com
www.campaignasia.com
www.campaignsingapore.sg
www.brandrepublic.com

Other excellent reading.

It’s not just the big players that make an impact on me. I regularly read through some of the industry thought leader’s blogs, as well as interesting content from other industries. These include:

www.jeffbullas.com
http://blog.firebrandtalent.com
And of course my own blog “Digital Future”: http://damiencummings.blogspot.sg

Best of luck in your content creation and sharing, I look forward to seeing you on your Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media!

The Ups and Downs of Social Networks

Facebook has announced that it now has 500m active users, just six years after it was launched. The site has become the poster child of social networking on the web. While some others have seen growth, MySpace, Flickr and Bebo appear to have declined in the past year, according to these figures from Nielsen. Interesting international variations are seen, both in the amount of time Facebook users spend on the site each month and in the competing networks' popularity in different countries.

You can see the original published article at BBC.co.uk.

Social Media Dominates Asia Pacific Internet Usage

Great statistics from Nielsenwire.com. July 9, 2010.

Social media usage has seen unprecedented growth in Asia Pacific in the past year and is now one of the most critical trends in the online sector, according to Nielsen’s Asia Pacific Social Media Report.

The survey found that three of the seven biggest global online brands are social media sites – Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube. Close to three quarters of the world’s Internet population (74%) have now visited a social networking/blogging site, and Internet users are spending an average of almost six hours per month on social media sites.

Social media is having an increasing impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions – in Asia Pacific, online product reviews are the third most trusted source of information when making purchase decisions, behind family and friends. This is particularly so for purchases of consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars – products where consumers are most likely to base their purchase decisions on online product reviews. But not ever country shares the same way.

REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

Blogging… it’s Big in Japan

• Japanese Internet users are the most avid bloggers globally, posting more than one million blogs per month, significantly more than any other country in the region.
•  Japan’s adoption of Twitter continues to grow, with unique visitor numbers increasing in the last year from less than 200,000 to more than 10 million.
• Sixteen percent of Japanese Internet users now use Twitter, which compares to 10 percent in the U.S.

 Grass roots celebrities attract China’s social networkers

• Bulletin board systems underpin popular social media behavior in China – more than 80 percent of social media content is bulletin board systems.
• Social media games are used as a stimuli to drive new users and gain reach with existing users, while content sharing behaviors are more popular among the more experienced users. Virtual product placement within social networking site games is becoming one of the most profitable methods of revenue for social networking sites.
• ‘Grass roots’ celebrity tracking dominates online conversations in China, with social media celebrities such as Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan outperforming real life celebrities in popularity.
• Chinese Internet users are the most likely in Asia Pacific to post a negative online product review, and are the only consumers in the region more likely to share negative reviews than positive reviews – 62% of Chinese Internet users say they are more likely to share a negative review compared to 41 percent globally.

Facebook threatens Orkut’s share in India

• Although 70 percent of social media users in India identify Orkut as their preferred social media site, Facebook is gaining market share with 50 percent of social media users claiming to use Facebook most often, compared to 38 percent for Orkut, with the most common reasons for switching include friends moving sites, preferring the look and feel of the site, and offering more features.
• Twitter has enjoyed exponential growth in popularity in India, with more than half of Twitter users (57%) having signed up in the past year. Close to one third of India’s social media users (32%) use microblogging sites such as Twitter at least once a day.
• Online product reviews are increasing their influence on purchases in India, particularly for consumer electronics – 55 percent of Indians that read online product reviews have purchased products based on feedback. Consumer durables/electronics are the most common products purchased based on reviews (64% of purchases).

Koreans a-buzz about social media

• By population, Korea is one of the most social media engaged countries in the world, with the country’s leading social media site, Naver, attracting 95 percent of the Korean Internet population every month.
• While penetration of social media amongst Korea’s Internet population is already strong, it continues to grow (Twitter alone saw 1900% growth in the year to May 2009) with much of this growth coming off the back of Korea’s June election and the adoption of mobile social networking.

Australians flock to online forums

• Australia leads the world in social media engagement, with the highest global average for time spent per month engaging with social media, averaging over seven hours per month
• In contrast to many countries, Australians look to communities of interest such as parenting or sports sites as a key channel for social media discussion – 62 percent of Australian Internet users visited a message board or forum in 2009.
• LinkedIn has seen one of the fastest growth trends amongst social media sites in Australia, with unique audience numbers increasing by 99 percent from July 2009 to May 2010

“The findings highlight, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that social media is here to stay and needs to be taken seriously by the broader business community, from the CMO to the CEO,” notes Megan Clarken, Managing Director of Nielsen’s online business in Asia Pacific. “With three quarters of the global Internet population now participating in some form of social media, businesses can no longer afford to simply observe the social media phenomenon, they need to embrace it.”

Losing To The Social Web: Visualized

From Digital Buzz Blog

A brands website has been the single biggest ”online” focus for 99% of businesses over the last 10 years apart from banner campaigns and microsites here and there, but with the evolution of social media growing at unheard of rates (Twitter is up over 3500% alone this year, while Facebook increased over 700% to finally overtake MySpace and then turned them to dust!) businesses really need to think about what’s happening to their website traffic.

I recently read a great post on Supercollider by Geoff Northcott (via Martina on Adverblog) that talked about the end of the destination web, along with adage, we are social and adweek about how the times are fading for websites and microsites are dead – Geoff posted a few good Google trends graphs, so I thought I might take that a little further, find a few additional graphs and look at why and where this traffic is going…
 
What you’ll notice from the graphs below (you can see them here) is that some of the biggest brands, websites and portals are loosing unique visitors hand over fist for the last 3 years. Doesn’t make sense right? More and more people are connecting online, brands are spending bucket loads of cash on digital campaigns, so website traffic should be the complete opposite?
(Note: The graph below without a heading is the BBC.co.uk)



So with such dramatic declines in website traffic and rapidly increasing numbers of Internet connected people, where is all that traffic going? The Social Web – the emerging networks where everyone is connected, everything is relevant, and everything can be shared with a single click and browsed, summarized or bookmarked with ease.



There are 2 key reasons why website traffic is declining.

1. Social Networks (obviously) are growing and most people prefer to hang out there instead of searching the big brands websites for content to interact with. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter share what you’re already interested in. Everything is relevant and you don’t have to leave to get the best content from 10 of your favourite brands / websites.
2. Off-Site Content Distribution is rapidly growing, I’m talking RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels, Facebook Fan pages and so on… All the best brands and websites now actively push their content (the same stuff you use to get from their website and still want to access) to as many various “off-site” sources and platforms as possible.So naturally this removes unique visitors from their main sites, channeling them into a maze of various networks, feeds and tweets…Oh, and of course, widgets/apps – we’ve only just seen the start of these.

Over the next few years, brands will need to re-structure they way they deliver experiences to their customers online (the best ones are already doing it), and that means delivering unique content to anywhere customers want to experience it.

Maybe that’s the latest offers by RSS feeds, new product demos by YouTube, campaigns by iPhone apps, online shopping via widgets in facebook or branding exercises by seeding stopmotion viral videos (they seem to be all the rage!)?

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking!

I don’t think websites and microsites are dead yet. There are still years and years of usefulness ahead for them, we’ll just need to come up with better ways to connect them and their content into the social lives of customers online…

Social Networking Usage Surges Globally

Jennifer Van Grove 19th March 2010, Mashable.com

According to the Nielsen Company, the global average time spent per person on social networking sites is now nearly five and half hours per month (February 2010 data), with Facebook accounting for the majority of that time. That’s up more than two hours from last year.

In arriving at that conclusion, Nielsen measured social network usage per person across 10 countries and compared that to data from the same time last year.

When looking at specific countries, Italy tops the charts with social network time per person just under six and a half hours per month (6:27:53), and Australia is a close second (6:02:34). The United States — which has the largest unique social networking audience — ranked third in usage with the average person spending just over six hours (6:02:34) on social networks.

What’s even more interesting is that Facebook— with its 400 million members — is far and away dominating the rest of the competition.

Facebook is the number-one social network destination worldwide and accounts for nearly six hours (5:52:00) per person with the average user logging in more than 19 times per month. What that boils down to is that the time spent on Facebook is almost five hours longer than the time spent on MySpace (0:59:33), the second closest social network in terms of time spent on site per person.
Nielsen also found that:

- Globally, the average Twitterer conducts three unique sessions for a total of 36 minutes per month.
- In the U.S. the active unique social network audience grew roughly 29% from 115 million in February 2009 to 149 million in February 2010.
- Active unique users of social networks are also up nearly 30% globally, rising from 244.2 million to 314.5 million collectively.

5 Tips for Optimising Facebook Marketing

One of the great things about the Facebook platform is that it provides you access to a large audience of more than 200 million people worldwide at a low cost. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a strategy in place for what you are trying to achieve. Whether you are a small local business, or even a well-known product or service, you will need to give some thought to your audience, like: who are they; how do they want to be spoken to; what messages would you want them to receive; and what are the tactics for having them interact with your message. So let's go through some of your options when it comes to social networking marketing.

HAVE A STRONG PRESENCE
A Facebook presence, like a Web site, is a fundamental tactic and should be on everyone's list of must-haves for social network marketing. Similar to the dot-com land grab that happened in the late 90's, you should secure your company name on as many social sites as you can.
Once you have your presence, you will need a strategy for posting updates with interesting content as frequently as you can. Be sure to get your employees involved. Encourage them to become fans, and drive the conversations to create a thriving community. The reason being, you will want Facebook users to be able to discover your Facebook page through their friends' profiles and with Facebook searches. This is the key to growing your fan base “virally.” Also keep in mind Facebook pages are indexable, so be sure to write your content with good SEO in mind.

DO SOME ADVERTISING
You will find that advertising on Facebook is unlike any other advertising experience you have ever had. This is mainly because of the unique ways in which you can precisely target a specific ad down to the person's profile. For example, if you want to target M.B.A. graduates who are 3-to-5 years out of school, working in Southern Connecticut, like classic rock and whose favorite food is sushi—you can do that!

There are two basic types of ads—display ads and social ads—and they can be purchased like banner ads with cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand (CPM). While they work similarly to online banner ads, do try not to use them in the same way. Most Facebook users feel more comfortable staying within the Facebook environment. So try to direct them to somewhere on your Facebook Fan page. With the new Facebook Fan page design, you can send them directly to a tab of your Fan page since each tab has a unique URL.

CREATE AN APPLICATION
If you are going to send your ads to a specific tab, why not send them to an application you built to engage them with your brand. Facebook applications are similar to widgets, or snippets of code, which can be embedded in any Facebook Fan page to make it more distinguished. You can think of them like interactive spaces that can allow the user to take a poll, play a short game or anything you can dream up.

Creating a Facebook application has become widely popular because custom applications are not that hard or expensive to build. Some Facebook applications have seen tremendous growth because they were built to take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook.

SYNDICATE YOUR CONTENT
Another tactic to consider if you already have a steady stream of rich content is to use Facebook as an outpost for your content. If you already have a blog, podcast or video series, you can effectively use Facebook to attract another audience to interact with those assets.
There are a variety of ways to syndicate content on your Fan page. You can use the Notes page to import blog posts to your Fan page. You can use the My Del.icio.us application to import any bookmarks you may have made in your Del.icio.us account. You can use the Simply RSS application to bring in all the RSS feeds you may have on your company Web site. You can edit your Links section and have a variety of blogs or Web sites you may want to highlight—perhaps by employees or partners of your company. And don't forget to edit your Feed settings to include the complete versions of all your blog posts so they appear not only on your Fan page but on the Feeds of all your fans.

THROW AN EVENT
Facebook events are a great way of getting people together virtually or in person in support of your local business, brand or product. They are also a very economical way of getting the word out beyond your normal in-house marketing list by inviting the Fans of your page. Fans can also help you promote your Facebook event to their friends by sharing the event if it seems of value to a group of their friends.
Don't forget to follow-up after your event; it's just good protocol to do so. If you had a very healthy debate with lots of questions, consider sending a transcript out to everyone who attended or even those that didn't. If some questions didn't get answered because of time constraints, try writing up the answers and sending them to the all attendees, too.

The key point is try not to take a “set it and forget it” mentality to any social presence. While the costs of social marketing are low, don't let that fool you. The true cost is found in the creation of content. And your key to success will be the consistent participation and willingness to engage your customers you can create by using great content.

The Online Lives You Leave Behind After Death

With my recent health scare, I got to thinking - what happens to all of your Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Blogs and other social media profiles after you've died? Do you leave a painful lasting memory or eternally happy smiling face for all your loved ones on the Internet? That's when I saw this interesting (but somewhat morbid) article about the impact of death on your online lives.

Death leaves online lives stuck in limbo

By PETER SVENSSON, The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) W hen Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password, and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to.

One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Kentucky, heard about Spangenberg's death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

"I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off," Pagoria said. "I was blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn't been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out."

With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they're also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There's even a tiny industry that has emerged to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

When Robert Bryant's father died last year, he left his son a USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Oklahoma. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

"It was creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead," Bryant said. "It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed."

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

"I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can leave e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

It's not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn't sure about how many members it has — "probably close to a thousand." Nor does he know what's in the e-mails that have been created. Until they're sent out, they're encrypted.

If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there's an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mails when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while they're alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

He wasn't dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he'd spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already started Slightlymorbid.com.

A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Florida, was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan's online friends after the boy died at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy's accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn't be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

Vogel has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person's e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web-site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within "the next hundred years or so" would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

But, he said, "as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you're only 13."

Coke Building Fans Through Facebook

There are few marketing successes brands can point to in the social media space. But Coke seem to always get it right - even if they're don't fully understand it themselves. The second most popular fan page on Facebook is a Coca-Cola page (the most popular is Barack Obama) created by a couple of devoted Coke fans. This article from Advertising Age details how both the fans and the Coca-Cola Company were taken by surprise by their success.

How Two Coke Fans Brought the Brand to Facebook Fame
Soda Has Most Popular Page After President, in Collaboration Between Creators and Marketer

by Abbey Klaassen, AdAge.com, Published: March 16, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Pop quiz: Who has the most popular page on Facebook? Barack Obama. Who's second? Coca-Cola. Yes, sugared water runs second only to the leader of the free world. Who was it again that said people don't want to be friends with brands?

Coca-Cola still remains perplexed over why, of the 253 pages on Facebook devoted to the beverage, Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski's page is the only one that has amassed millions of 'fans.'
Coca-Cola still remains perplexed over why, of the 253 pages on Facebook devoted to the beverage, Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski's page is the only one that has amassed millions of 'fans.'

The Coke page, which totals 3.3 million "fans," wasn't even created by Coca-Cola, but by a pair of Los Angelenos who just love Coke.

In late August 2008, aspiring actor Dusty Sorg was hunting for a Coca-Cola fan page he could join on Facebook. He didn't find one that seemed legitimate so he hunted down a high-resolution digital image of a Coke can, uploaded it to Facebook and made a page.

Popularity a mystery
And the page grew. And grew. There are 253 pages on Facebook devoted to Coca-Cola, but for some reason, Mr. Sorg's page -- which he runs with his friend Michael Jedrzejewski, a writer -- took off. The guys weren't sure why theirs ended up with millions of fans -- Facebook fan pages, at least last year, were relatively static, and the guys said they had been pretty inactive on it as they got busy during the winter holidays.

And most people can't actually do that much with branded page -- unless a brand is putting dollars behind it. Which Coke didn't.

Coca-Cola still remains perplexed over why Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski's page took off.

"We've discussed a dozen hypotheses about why it took off," said Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing at Coca-Cola Co. One theory the company keeps coming back to, he said, was the quality of the photo -- a crisp, high-resolution image of a Coke can covered with a thin layer of condensation. "For us as marketers, luckily it was exactly right -- the can we had in the marketplace. ... It grabs you." He said another theory is that Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski had very active, expressive "social graphs," i.e., their network of Facebook friends. But "we can't measure that," he said.

Facebook Page Statistics -- Top Pages
Name # of Fans Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1 Barack Obama 5,881,499 0.10% 1.45%
2 Coca-Cola 3,287,101 0.19% 2.93%
3 Nutells 3,052,502 0.18% 2.98%
4 Pizza 3,005,922 0.20% 3.52%
5 Cristiano Ronaldo 2,730,570 0.23% 3.93%
6 kinder surprise 2,581,651 0.18% 3.13%
7 Facebook 2,492,881 0.27% 4.22%
8 Windows Live Messenger 2,469,402 0.13% 2.75%
9 Sid 2,409,639 0.17% 3.25%
10 Boo 2,343,221 0.20% 3.95%
Source: AllFacebook.com

Problems with the page
As the page picked up fans, it also racked up spam and obscene comments -- issues that can plague many large pages on the social network. In November, Facebook decided to start enforcing a policy that says anyone creating a branded Facebook "page" must be authorized by or associated with the brand. Independent Facebook users could still create homages to brands, but they must live as a "group" or fan club.

"The problem was they had created a page, not a group," said Mr. Donnelly. Facebook made the decision to either close the page or let Coca-Cola take it over. Coca-Cola instead proposed an alternative: Let the creators keep the page but share it with a few of Coca-Cola's senior interactive folks.

"We threw a variable to Facebook and said we're interested, but we'd rather walk away from it than have it be perceived that we caused this action," Mr. Donnelly said.

Over the December holidays, he got in touch with Messrs. Sorg and Jedrzejewski to explain to them that this was a Facebook-driven change, and asked if they'd want to join him in administering it.

A friendly approach
Now normally when a giant multinational company calls a consumer about something the consumer has created in that company's brand name or image, it's not a good sign. And initially Mr. Jedrzejewski said he was worried about it.

"Everyone has this vision that if something like this happens, the big company will send you off to Guantanamo," he said. "This was exactly the opposite."

Coke instead flew the guys down to Atlanta for a few days of meetings, a tour of the World of Coke museum and a visit to the company's legendary archives. It was a friendly, not heavy-handed approach, Mr. Jedrzejewski said.

"We talked openly about ideas, the future of the fan page," he said.

Coke's actions in sharing the page are indicative of not only the lessons the beverage giant has learned in the social-media space but also proof that big brands can tread gracefully in social media.

Coke's progress
The company has come a long way. Its initial reaction to a Diet Coke-Mentos viral video sensation in 2006 was that the stunt didn't fit the brand's personality -- after all, people are meant to drink Diet Coke, not use it to make geysers. Now the company appears to be more at ease with its consumers creating content on its behalf -- and it's largely eschewed a destination-centric philosophy as it has recognized that its expressive fans are everywhere.

Mr. Donnelly recounts how in the early days of the web, big marketers would define success by how much traffic came to their websites -- and they've only recently become comfortable with the fact they can deliver a message through gaming, rich video and other places across the web. The same thing happened in Second Life, when marketers busily built islands, or destinations, within the virtual world. And it's a natural tendency in social networking.

"This page is a fan page and happens to be the biggest one, but we recognize that when you do a search you see 253," he said. And when it comes to communities, they recognize they need to ask advice, counsel and permission before engaging. "We don't want to be a big brand there doing big-brand advertising."

Social Networks Overtaking Email?

I'm not sure if the data is really accurate, but there's no denying there's a huge trend towards people using social media more often. Social media is becoming an integrated part of many's people's lives but whether it can overtake email as the most popular activity in the digital world? I'm not so sure. It's a great thought provoking piece of research from Nielsen though. Check out this article by Brian Morrissey at AdWeek.

Nielsen: Social Nets Overtake E-mail
As online paradigm shifts, advertisers must find a way to add value, rather than follow the 'push' model

March 9, 2009, By Brian Morrissey, AdWeek.com

NEW YORK Social networking has overtaken e-mail as the most popular Internet activity, according to a new study released by Nielsen.

Active reach in what Nielsen defines as "member communities" now exceeds e-mail participation by 67 percent to 65 percent. What's more, the reach of social networking and blogging venues is growing at twice the rate of other large drivers of Internet use such as portals, e-mail and search.

Nielsen, which is the parent company of Adweek, concluded that the shift to social activity online would have profound effects on marketers and publishers. For publishers, social networks are eating into time spent with other online activities, according to Nielsen. For advertisers, the phenomenon at this stage represents mostly unfulfilled promise for a deeper connection with consumers who are more difficult to reach in social environments.

The rise of social media coincides with the decline of portals. Social networking appears to be snatching away users' online time formerly spent with e-mail, traditionally a large draw to portals. Such fragmentation is decreasing portals' importance to advertisers. In a separate report, top digital shop Razorfish said its spending at portals declined from 24 percent in 2006 to 16 percent in 2008.

Nielsen found that two-thirds of the world's Internet users visited a social networking site in 2008. All told, social media now accounts for almost 10 percent of Internet time. Facebook is leading the pack worldwide, with monthly visits by three out of 10 Internet users in nine global markets, per Nielsen.

The growth in social media is not confined to the U.S. Nielsen charted comparable or higher growth for Australia, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Yet for now, user growth at social sites is outpacing advertising increases, per Nielsen. This will likely change, Nielsen said, as models shift to value engagement over exposure.

"As the online industry matures and the value of online real estate is increasingly measured by time spent, rather than pages viewed, a significant shift in advertising revenue from 'traditional' online media towards social media could be realized -- if the successful ad model can be found," the report stated.

The search for a workable ad model is even more urgent now that social media has broken out of the youth demographic, Nielsen found. For example, Facebook's greatest growth has come from 35-49-year-olds, and it has added twice as many 50-64-year-olds as those under 18.

Yet advertising and social media to date have mixed like oil and water. Part of that is a function of social media's communications role -- advertising has typically performed poorly in chat and e-mail. The larger challenge for advertising is to move from an interruptive role to joining conversations. That means advertisers need to find ways to add value to users' experiences, Nielsen found.

"Whatever the successful ad model turns out to be, the messaging will have to be authentic and humble, and built on the principle of two-way conversation -- not a push model -- that adds value to the consumer," the report said.

MySpace's Hybrid Advertising Model Making Profits

There's been a lot of speculation about the profitability and business model of social networks since the extraordinary valuation of Facebook, when Microsoft bought a small stake in the company back in 2007. With billions in valuation but the business barely making enough to break-even, many questions have been raised about whether social networks can make real money. But then there's MySpace. MySpace is still holding onto the number 1 spot in the US but it's total global audience is now about half that of rival Facebook. However MySpace is at the $1 Billion revenue mark and growing strong. This article by Matthew Garrahan of the Financial Times looks at the success of MySpace's hybrid advertising model. Perhaps this is the right template for other social networks to follow?

On the money in social networking
By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles, Financial Times/FT.com, January 28 2009

Chris DeWolfe is dashing around his Beverly Hills office. The co-founder of MySpace is preparing to go to Davos, where he will rub shoulders with leaders of the world economy, including his boss, Rupert Murdoch.

Davos this year is packed with gloomy-sounding sessions on the collapse of global capitalism but Mr DeWolfe is in an upbeat mood. MySpace has fine-tuned its advertising model and as it celebrates its fifth birthday he believes the site can prove its critics wrong about the durability and profit-making potential of social networking.

With their millions of users, social media has long been seen as a panacea of online advertising. But sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which is part of News Corp, have been unable to turn those users into significant profits. MySpace narrowly missed a $1bn revenue target last year, while Facebook has preferred to concentrate on building a large base of users.

By Mr DeWolfe says a relentless focus on profits at MySpace is starting to pay off. "From day one we have always been focused on building a really big, scaleable business that is based on advertising," he says. "If you are a big brand and you want to reach any demographic you can get real scale on MySpace."

The group has devised a hybrid business model that combines big branding campaigns on the popular pages with its ability to "hyper-target" millions of users according to their interests.

The big, more general advert campaigns are a recent factor: MySpace has introduced branding on its home page, which is seen by more than 50m users daily. "That's more people than watch American Idol ," says Mr DeWolfe. Such campaigns used to be found only on portal sites, such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN but Mr DeWolfe says MySpace has those companies in its sights.

This is partly because MySpace has built a sufficient user base to compete for what is a much larger pot of money. "In the early days, either the brands or their media buyers would reserve a small part of their buy for social media sites - the rest would go to the portal sites," he explains. "But what has happened is that we are now competing against offline media and the big portals, such as Yahoo and AOL."

Analysts say this move to a hybrid model that combines the penetration of social media with the broad reach of a portal site could be decisive. "MySpace is going to be more attractive to advertisers because they have created these 'safe havens' where advertisers can put their brands," says Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research.

The home page branding comes a year after the site launched its "hyper targeting model". Mr DeWolfe says the move does not represent a strategic U-turn and instead gives the site the best of both worlds.

He points to the more than 1,000 "enthusiast groups" on MySpace as being appealing for advertisers keen to target their products at niche demographics. "We have also built a product that reaches small and medium-sized businesses that represent billions of dollars in potential ad revenue."

One user - a roofer in Chicago - turned a MySpace advert offer costing a few hundred dollars into a $30,000 roofing deal. "There has been no easy way for people like that to advertise online other than buying big display ads or by buying text ads on Google. But more than 15,000 have used our product to create graphical advertising."

With the economy crashing and advertisers reining in their spending, maintaining momentum is going to be difficult, although he says first-half sales rose 16 per cent on last year. "Where the next six months are going is hard to say because the economy is changing so quickly. But I think we are in a much better position than most of the other [online] companies formed in the past five years."

Social Networks - The New Portals?

This article by Jeffrey F. Rayport in BusinessWeek presents an interesting point-of-view - are social networkings becoming the new web Portals?

Social Networks Are the New Web Portals
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are becoming the new gateways to the Web, threatening the dominance of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL
By Jeffrey F. Rayport

Not long ago, it seemed that four companies would forever dominate the Web in traffic and ad dollars. Each of the Big Four—Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN, and Time Warner's (TWX) AOL—attracts more than 100 million unique visitors a month. Collectively the group accounts for roughly 90% of gross ad dollars online. So far, so good.

But now those companies are facing a threat to their dominance. I'm not talking about the recessionary headwinds that have slowed growth even for mighty Google. Nor is this about the self-inflicted wounds that have weakened the positions of the other three players. Yahoo spent the last year in turmoil following Microsoft's takeover offer, inducing Carl Icahn to elbow his way onto the board and then force out CEO Jerry Yang as business conditions grew increasingly dire. AOL is hardly better off. Its former CEO, Jonathan Miller, freely admits that AOL essentially missed the boat on social media and the decline of AOL's legacy connectivity business. Microsoft failed to acquire Yahoo and continues in vain to seek a credible competitive response to Google's search advertising juggernaut.

These travails aside, there are bigger threats on the landscape. Today's massive social networking systems are rapidly becoming Webs within the Web—one-stop shops for a wide range of services (from content to communications to commerce) that were once the unique province of the Big Four.

One-Stop Shopping at Facebook
For example, through a combination of its own creation and that of third-party developers, Facebook has become a world unto itself. Now the Web's largest social network as measured by active users (140 million at yearend 2008), Facebook offers bread-and-butter portal services like e-mail and instant messaging as well as photo posting and video sharing. But Facebook's reality extends much further. A partnership with Amazon.com (AMZN) has produced a shopping application that lets users buy items at Amazon without leaving Facebook's site, while tapping opt-in "news feeds" that broadcast activities on Amazon, such as product reviews and wish list updates, to Facebook friends. At the same time, a chat feature introduced last spring, which automatically populates itself with a user's Facebook "friends," may render older services like AOL's AIM (where new users must build their own "buddy lists") socially impoverished.

Facebook's mobile alerts, long familiar to the site's users, are just the tip of the iceberg in wireless apps, as the company delivers mobile services for plain-vanilla cell phones and more sophisticated smartphones. Applications for popular devices, such as Apple's (AAPL) iPhone or Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, deliver even richer social experiences. Video has taken off, too, with 45 million clips uploaded on Facebook to date; last month, the site also introduced higher-resolution video formats. Facebook users can send video messages from the site and from mobiles.

Though Facebook now offers 52,000 applications created by 660,000 developers (this has done much to enrich the site's features), other social networking giants have entered the fray, too. News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace, for example, claims 120 million active users; it recently introduced a service called MySpace Music that lets user create and host playlists on their pages.

Lots of Users Spending Lots of Time
Social networking sites are also growing at exponential rates and attracting users of all ages. Facebook's fastest-growing segment is users over 25 years of age. LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site, claims more than 30 million active members with an average age of 41.

Of course, scale is only one metric of success. Another is what tech types call "engagement," or "time spent." Researcher ComScore (SCOR) ranked Yahoo the No. 1 site for engagement, with users worldwide collectively spending some 120 billion minutes on the site in October. For the same period, Google users logged 42 billion minutes. Yet, Facebook and MySpace were not far behind, with 34 billion and 18 billion minutes, respectively.

The traditional portals still win on unique visitors per month, but from the standpoint of where Web users "live" their lives online, social networking sites are gaining share.

Building Constellations, Not Destinations
What all this augurs is a new stage in an ongoing battle for influence, even dominance, of the Web. Back in the "old days" of the late 1980s and early '90s, online service providers such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServ generated revenue through monthly subscriptions for bundled services, which combined connectivity, communications, and content. With the advent of the Web's friendly user interface combined with the rise of Internet service providers, which offered dial-up and then always-on connectivity, the old guard gave way to a new host of dominant online players—the Big Four portals. While Google focused largely on search, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN provided a rich array of content as well as services and relied on advertising rather than subscriptions to pay the bills.

Now, as usage shifts to social networks, there's a catch. This is no longer a race to build destinations, but constellations.

To be sure, the social networking sites, like the portals before them, aggregate services to provide one-stop shops for Internet users. But they're competing, too, in a race to provide a social context for Web usage generally. Facebook Connect and MySpaceID are new tools that offer users a way to make their social networks—previously wedded to a single platform—portable across other social networking sites and, in fact, Web sites of all kinds. Google's Friend Connect, based on that company's OpenSocial standard, represents similar functionality. Though late to the game, Yahoo is planning a pan-Web social offering, and Microsoft has built one into its new Windows Live. In practice, these services mean users can visit a site for the first time, register with a standard username and password, and find their experiences instantly enriched by friends' lists, profiles, reviews, ratings, and feeds. In essence, it's a way to bring social context to sites that have no social media components of their own.

It's all about defining a new World Wide Web—a meta-Web that has the functionality of a social Web.

While the portals are doing their best to catch up, challenges abound. Google's oft-stated mission is "to organize the world's information." Organizing information is how earlier generations of Web companies have traditionally created value for users, with or without search. But the new game is radically different. Facebook, in particular, has set out to organize not the world's content, but the world's people. As this social meta-Web emerges, the players that own and harness social applications will radically reorganize and reshape the Web in ways we can only imagine today, and that will profoundly alter our experience of the online world.