Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

What's Been Happening This Week?

Brands + Social Media = A Happy Marriage?
In the same week that Obama admits that he has never used Twitter, a study was released that shows that he's not the only one that doesn't get it. 50% of the Fortune100 twitter accounts have less than 500 followers, and many brands still view the service as another platform to push their "newsfeed".

Despite the not-so-perfect partnership of brands and social media, 40% of all Facebook users admit to friending brands on Facebook. And brand-related content brought up by search engines is dominated by user-generated content. So even if brands still don't "get it", it sounds like that is not stopping users from talking about them, writing about them, or friending them. Maybe the Salesforce launch of new Facebook-like and Twitter-like features will help get the out of touch brands up to speed with the social world today.

Location, Location, Location
Not that we need to give teens any more reasons to text while driving, but announcing your location to your social circle and the world at large is a growing trend. Twitter launched geolocation tagging to tweets, making it possible to understand not just the WHEN but the WHERE of "what's happening". Meanwhile, developers are excited over Foursquare's API going live, and the bevy of applications already created for it from Wordpress plugins to location-based games. And finally Google Latitude has added location history and location-based alerts.

Then again, for some people... the best location is right in their own living rooms. Hardcore gamers will be excited to know that both Xbox and Playstation 3 announced integrations with Twitter and Facebook.

Marta Strickland

Composition Index Trend (Source: comScore Media Metrix)

Marta's off today, so I'm stepping in to bring you this week's digital happenings.

Twitter's Getting Younger and Facebook is Getting Older
Not only has your Grandma probably posted on your Wall, those college student that have been on Facebook since it's inception are aging. Hence the median age of users is going up. And all those reports that say Gen Y just isn't interested in Twitter are now out of date. According to ReadWriteWeb, "Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites." MySpace still takes the youth crown. Back to Twitter: 12-24-year-olds now represent the highest average growth segment, beating out the ever-popular 35-54 range. Could it be celebrities popular with this audience (remember the Ashton-CNN faceoff) that are driving this trend? Jonas Brothers have over 950,000 followers. Katy Perry has attracted over 1.3 million. Case in point.

Bold Moves
Volkswagen claims the only advertising they are doing for the launch of their new GTI is via an iPhone app. That's more than a $59 million savings. But it's also a first in car launches. VW has clearly defined their target and they feel this is a smart move. It might work due to the press behind it, but I wouldn't encourage marketers to be quick to copy. A second, third or tenth marketer to do this wouldn't have the novelty that might be part of it's success.

More Insight Into Your Social Media
Omniture announced the Social Media Optimization Solution in order to bring you "more actionable insight into social media activity, performance and impact." So now brands can more easily spot trends in Twitter or Facebook activity as they relate to a specific action on the brand's behalf. And that's just the beginning. This might be the first step in helping marketers more effectively spend their time and money on social media.

Google's Keeping Tabs on You
Google's Friend Connect is another way for users to interact with your brand. But do brands really need to add another tool to their "connect" mix? If it allows their users to interact with each other on their own terms as does Google's new Friend Connect, they might want to consider it.

Then again, users might be turned off to find the search-engine giant coddles your online habits in their Privacy Dashboard. Once the word is out, the Friend Connect feature on your brand site might not be the worth the implementation.

What's new in your digital world this week?

Sarah Jo Sautter

There is an obvious shift in digital communication. Email is becoming less and less relevant, as social networking sites dominate our online lives and now our mobile online lives.

With the internet becoming not just a place to learn, a place to buy, but a place to live... it's fairly interesting to see how much the digital space is becoming a political issue. How do people access it? What are rights and what are privileges? Does regulation make the internet more or less free? One country, Finland, says that high speed connectivity is a right, and not a privilege.

But there is more than political battles being fought this week...

The battle to Own Real-Time Web
The information flow has become intense. There are 45 million status updates on Facebook every single day. And with Facebook looking to open up their public messages to search, everyone is looking for a piece... a way to index our collective consciousness.

Bing, who continues to grow while Yahoo! declines, announced official alliances with Facebook and Twitter this week. The idea is to incorporate status updates into their search results. Not very long after, their top competitor (if you can call the giant of search that) Google also announced a search deal with Twitter and the plans to incorporate real-time discussion search and tracking into YouTube.

The Battle to Own Social Music
After experiencing a sharp decline ("falls off a cliff") in their traffic, MySpace issued a plan this week to revise their strategy and focus at what they do best... music. Many are questioning if this shift in focus will be enough to save them, to make them profitable again. While MySpace certainly has the advantage, Facebook and Google are certainly not out of the game when it comes to integrating music into their long-term strategy.

Marta Strickland

Numbers You Need To Know
$11,000 is the supposed fine that bloggers will have to pay if they don't disclose getting free product or payment from brands for their postings, according to a new FTC ruling. The FTC has recently replied to a series of questions posed by influential bloggers, in order to downplay some of their fears, including the hefty price tag attached to lack of transparency.

99% is the amount of online retailers who currently have or plan to have a Facebook Fan Page in the next two years. Twitter isn't that much farther behind. 20% is the amount of loyal traffic Facebook brings in as a referring site, making it the most valuable source of traffic. Is social media considered mainstream yet?

1,000,000,000 is the number of video views that YouTube now gets in a single day. That is over 11K views per second. Is YouTube faster than the speed of light yet?

2 billion is the amount of applications that have been downloaded from the Apple App Store since its launch. While that number is pretty impressive, other numbers have been harder to come by, like the true market share Apple has in the smartphone space.

Launches, Rumors, and Let Downs
After much heated anticipation, Google Wave launched. Invites went out to happy Google geeks around the net, and demand soon outpaced supply, leading to the launch of trading sites and eBay auctions. The feedback was mixed. Some were disappointed, while others, including Organic, saw great potential.

Also this week, Adobe announced support for Flash on just about every smartphone... just about. Not so surprisingly, Apple was not included on that list. Later in the week, after some pressure, Adobe and Apple announced Flash support, but only for Apps. The negative news didn't stop there, as Verizon has begun launching ads mocking AT&T for their poor coverage, and many have begun speculating on whether the iPhone will soon be coming to other network carriers. For the near future though, it looks like Verizon isn't going to be one of them.

Marta Strickland

Let's Do The Numbers
84% of Social Media Programs Don't Measure ROI. What's even scarier is that more than half of marketers don't know where to begin when it comes to social media measurement, or that they should have an objective in mind before they begin.

One in five tweets is about products, which means that Twitter should be considered not just as a marketing platform, but a key component of customer service and product research.

Time Spent on Social Networks Has Tripled and thus Email and IM Decline Thanks to Social Networks. But time spend does not mean easy eyeballs on adds. Users have also come to expect more engagement out of brands who want their attention in this space.

Significant Launches and Let Downs
Google Sidewiki turns any page into a collaboration. Brands should worry less about how people will comment over their pages, and start thinking about inspiring their advocates to go out and contribute all over the web.

MMS comes to the iPhone finally!! Now is the time to create applications and programs that leverage this long awaited update.

Project Retweet is Twitter's plan to more fully integrate retweet functionality into their platform. Advantages are that it will be cleaner and more efficient, but many are discouraged by the lack of comments and customization. A cut and paste retweet does not provide insight our authority.

MySpace Now Syncs Status Updates With Twitter, and a dying platform hopes to latch onto a rising one. Since their platform doesn't support a clean newsfeed model (nor should it), I'm not sure what benefit this adds.

Marta Strickland

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Twitter and teens, twitter and teens. It's such a hot topic lately that even The Onion has tackled it not just on their TV show (above) but in a very smartly done edition of America's Voices, which criticized a recent Nielsen survey which found that only 16% of Twitter's audience is under 25 suggestion, "Isn't that the same percentage of teens who would respond to a Nielsen survey?" and also proposed that teens are too busy sexting to use Twitter.

I'm not sure what the obsession is, but the articles keep on coming. It seems we are obsessed as marketers with the behavior of this particular audience. Is it true that the average Twitter user is a teenage girl or do teens not use Twitter at all? Perhaps young people are beginning to flock to Twitter? Are the behaviors of this audience really that different or interesting? In a more comprehensive study also done by Nielsen, they found that teens are "more normal than you think" when it comes to their digital habits.

But let's forget teens for a second, because I think the best headline of the week about social network platforms was one that suggested that Facebook makes you smarter, while Twitter does quite the opposite.

Even if that is true, it makes me wonder what happens to our brains as these platforms become more and more the same... Just this week Twitter opened up their terms of service to allow for more advertising. At the same time, Facebook launched a "lite" version of their site, and in its biggest move to be most Twitter-like yet, Facebook now will be supporting @mentions, allowing users to call out other users in their status updates.

I think soon we will have less questions about what platform teens are using and which one makes us stupid... and more about what the heck the difference is between these sites any more, if there will be any at all.

Marta Strickland

You would think in this information overloaded world full of statistics and bloggers and Wikipedia, that finding an answer to your everyday professional questions would be easy. Instead, all I find is more questions... more than I had before I started...

What's Being Questioned This Week?

Teens and Twitter, Can We Make A Decision?
After the release of a highly retweeted New York Times article called "Who's Driving Twitter's Popularity? Not Teenagers", the blogs have a field day of different reactions. It's funny because I remember this happening not to long ago when a certain 15 year old intern for Morgan Stanely said the exact same thing. And so the questions begin... are we sure? Teens don't really tweet, or do they? Or if they don't, are they going to start soon?

Organic strategist Jonathan Cohen took a slightly different approach to the question. Instead of concentrating on teens, let's talk about why adults (an inarguable Twitter demographic) are driving such high usage numbers in Twitter.

Augmented Reality, Do We Want It, Need It, Have To Have It?
According to readers in a recent ReadWriteWeb poll, 45% feel that augmented reality is important. Others however feel that augmented reality will fall the way of other technology promises like voice recognition and RFID, as an unnecessary and often complicated addition to an otherwise pretty intuitive process like finding a restaurant to eat dinner at. Well, Yelp certainly hopes that is not the case, as they launched an augmented reality extension to their iPhone app today, and according to Organic's Jay Bain... it clearly demonstrates the great potential this technology has to offer.

The Real-Time Web: Is It Hype? Who Will Own It?
I think by now we can assume it's pretty much not hype. Twitter has become a support system for the news industry, for networking and marketing, and even for the sale of physical products (Korean BBQ anyone?). This has lead people to ask just how much power Twitter has in our world today. Are they winning the battle against Facebook or has Facebook's new introduction of a Twitter app put them at a competitive advantage? Win or lose, is now the right time for the real-time front runner to sell, and to who?

Marta Strickland

The Two Big News Items This Week

1. Facebook + Friendfeed
The big announcement this week was that Facebook acquired Friendfeed. The alliance wasn't a shock to some, as Facebook had already took some features (news feed, like) from the microblogging platform. Still for others it was more of a confirmation of Facebook's move to be more like Twitter. Between that announcement, Facebook's move to make user updates searchable and the slimmed down Facebook Lite version, it seems more and more like a reality, despite Facebook's insistence that Facebook Lite is merely for low bandwidth users.

2. Project Retweet
Just yesterday, Twitter announced on their blog that they will be officially supporting retweets in a way that Twitter users have never experienced before. The new APIs come in four flavors that sound a lot alike to me: retweets in the new home timeline, retweeted by me timeline, retweeted to me timeline, my tweets retweeted. Whatever each of those flavors mean, the idea is that this is going to change the retweeting experience, but not necessarily for the better. As ReadWriteWeb points out, the new format could break a lot of the old conventions... confusing third party analysis engines, as well as frustrating users who are no longer able to add their own words of wisdom to each retweet.

Augmented reality is something geeks always dream about. The above video shows TwittARound, an application for the iPhone 3GS that uses the GPS, compass and camera to show where Tweets are coming from. Pretty cool and pretty scary, once you think about how social media is now being used to conduct cyber warfare. Turns out the big Twitter and Facebook outages yesterday were not caused by a Twitter zombie takeover as many had hoped. But instead, the downtime might have been the result of Russian lead DDoS attacks targeted at one man (cyxymu), a Georgian blogger who was known for criticizing the Kremlin.

What Not So Scary Stuff Happened This Week?

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet, Teens Are In Quesiton
While some things about Twitter users are fairly inarguable. Twitter is big at conferences (duh!), Twitter not so big in the places that ban it... like China or the White House, although many users find a way around that barrier. But there is one target demographic that has been the subject of MUCH debate. Do teenagers tweet? Morgan Stanley and Nielsen claim they don't, but the 123 Social Media blog says that Google data disagrees.

Microsoft On The Up & Up
It's really weird to wake up one day and see nothing but pretty positive articles about Microsoft in my RSS feeds. Bing is still growing, and is possibly stealing market share away from Google. Claims that Bing results are Microsoft-biased are getting disproven, and it even looks like they have found a catchy new jingle for their search giant. In an ironic twist of merger fate, the long negotiated Yahoo!-Microsoft FINALLY goes through after Microsoft proves they don't need Yahoo! to conquer the search market.

The Dead & The Resurrected
A recent report has established that while the big social networks are growing, other social sites are stagnating or losing engagement. One year ago, there was a lot of social media watchers placing bets that Imeem would overtake a lot of share from MySpace, due to its music focus and unique features. One year later, Imeem growth has fallen flat, and while MySpace has been bleeding traffic and engagement, they are still at least fighting to survive. Most recently MySpace has unveiled their version of Facebook Connect, leveraging open standards to integrate with sites around the web.

Other people up for a fight, namely against Twitter... Digg and Delicious. These social bookmarking sites have lost a lot of that "link love" behavior to the allure of Twitter, where everything is real-time and easily retweetable. Over the past week, the two sites have added some features to try drive traffic back. Delicious added filters, graphs, and a real-time news tracker to their home page. While Digg opened up, adding a read/write API that will allow third-party developers to add "digg this"

Marta Strickland

It really feels like the last few weeks have been relatively slow compared to a few months ago. No big disasters or revolutions that Twitter could help spread news about. No more movies or television shows about social networks in the works. No new and crazy announcements from the standard three big news producers... Twitter, Facebook, Google. It's almost been unusually quiet...

So What Has Happened In The Past Week?
Namely... What's Hot + What's Not
Hot... Bing and its contest to design a "bingle". Not... Myspace as an entertainment platform. Hot... sharing your links and favorite content on Facebook. Not... doing it in that old fashion thing called e-mail. Hot... twittering in a response to an awesome article. Not... leaving comments on a blog (say it isn't so).

Each of these new statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt, as these behaviors and demographics are changing all the time. Still, that didn't stop The Guardian UK from dedicating a whole featured article to a 15-year-old journalist's thoughts on what is in and out with the kids these days. While some of the information seems useful, it's gotten a lot of flack for not being scientific or very trustworthy.

Finally, Amazon is feeling pretty hot right now. They just bought online retail giant Zappos for a handsome sum of $850 million dollars. It's a scary proposition, especially for a business built on its unique brand, its culture, and its people... but it sounds like Amazon realizes just how special Zappos is, and doesn't want to change that, as much as study it and learn.

Marta Strickland