image credit: YUKI.N
It's been another big week to talk about social media. It's just something in the air. Maybe it's the Olympics and all the social media campaigns and general chatter surrounding such a huge event. Or maybe it is this startling (and questionable) statistic that half of ALL US adults use social media.
It's big, and it's only going to get bigger, but there are many challenges ahead, including excessive online clutter, lack of standards, and no solid framework around social media measurement.
What's Been Happening This Week...
The Always-On Brand
Despite the challenge of "excessive online noise", lifestreaming and brandstreaming are only growing in strength. Twitter is seeing an astounding rate of Olympic "tweets" (tagged #080808): there is one message every 0.5 seconds!!!
And it's not just Twitter... while Twitter has stayed the #1 microblogging site despite frequent outages, FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse have see a rapid rise in recent months. But beyond those "early adopter" platforms, lifestreaming has also come into play on more mainstream social networks like Facebook.
Increasingly brands from Firefox and Comcast to Southwest and Whole Foods are realizing the value of immersing themselves in their customer's lifestreams. Unfortunately, with no clear way to indicate "official" corporate messaging, services like Twitter are an easy target for "brandjacking". A user recently fooled the Twitter-sphere into thinking she was the voice of Exxon Mobil.
Where, Oh Where are My Social Media Metrics?
The blogs have been a flutter with the talk of social media measurement after Mashable post last week called How To Measure Social Media ROI for Business. 2 of the 11 challenges Jeremiah Owyang outlined for the social media industry relate to measurement, revenue, and ROI. Jupiter Research shows that marketers are becoming increasingly cautious over social media spend. And rightly so, American Apparel isn't apparently getting the bang for their bunk with social media advertising.
Yet us newly-titled "social media experts" still like to believe that there is a way to measure ROI. Maybe we just haven't found it yet, or maybe we are calling it measurement, when we really should call it monitoring?
And Now For Some Random Facebook Stuff
We can't get through a newsweek without hearing something about Facebook. Despite the fact that Facebook and MySpace are supposedly "failing" in Japan, other reports are showing that Facebook's traffic has recently tripled in the country. Glass half empty, glass half full?
Facebook also released some interesting data about which applications are the most engaging to users. Despite A&E's Parking Wars game, no application on the list was a brand application. Perhaps now that Facebook will provide developers with more detail statistics about applications, brands can finally discover exactly where they are losing so many people. Perhaps...
That's all for this week in social media.
Marta Strickland
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