Social media stat-fest

I've been reading through the latest Universal McCann Wave 4 on social media trends, published this month. [Disclosure: UM is a sister company]. I thought I'd share some of the interesting stats that stuck in my mind:

1. Total global internet audience is 625M

2. Two thirds of internet users have now joined a social networking site

3. 63% of internet users have created a profile on a social network [an increase of 6% from last year]

4. 17% of internet users access the net on the move.

5. 71% read blogs, which is about the same as last year

6. 83% watch videos online, again, about the same as last year

7. Denmark has the highest penetration of social media, followed by Malaysia.

The UK tends to follow the global trend, but it looks like blogging has peaked with a small decrease of blog writers and readers compared to last year. Activities in social networking is up, but video watching is slightly down.

It's a good read and you can see the whole report here.
Or, drop me a note and I'll send you an electronic copy: robin.wilson@europe.mccann.com

Tinker: monitoring social media trends

I've been having a play with Tinker, a mainly twitter monitoring tool developed by Glam Media. It's described as a 'micro blogging service for brand advertisers'. In reality it's a firehose that aggregates Twitter conversations around particular events.By this, I mean it gives you all the hot topics being discussed on twitter in a neat, clean user interface.

It also allows you to create your own 'events'. An event is a 'persistent search for key words on Twitter'. Users can create their own eventbased around one keyword e.g. Durex. The cool thing is that once you have created an event, you can create an embedable widget that serves up all the twitter conversations around the event. The historical trends is really cool too, as you can track how conversations around an event has changed over time.

It would be even better if it integrated different forms of social media such as blogs, but I guess you can't have everything.

social media top brands

An interesting report by former Forrester analyst Charlene LI that looks at the brands that are most engaged in social media. Check it out here.

There are no massive surprises, with Starbucks and Dell at spots 1 and 2 and the rest of the top ten littered with names like Reuters, Nike and Yahoo.

The cool bit is where the report compares the financial performance of the companies analysed and their engagement level. Interestingly the companies that are most engaged tend to have the better financial performance. OK, so the analysts don't claim a causal relationship i.e. do social media and your profits go up, but there is definitely a connection.

An interesting question is: are these companies more successful financially because they use social media? Or is it more like: these companies are, and always have been, very customer focused and so they are more successful. And, because they are customer focused, they use social media?

My feeling is the reason is the latter: customer focused organisations are successful; customer focused organisations use social media. Otherwise, wouldn't Ford, with it's excellent engagement via social media be up there?

Social media for the environment

I've been following how Do The Green Thing has been using social media to great effect to encourage people to lead greener lives. They've got some great results - over 3M people signed up and almost 9M Kg C02 saved, which is pretty damn amazing.

The secret to their success is :
- brilliantly compelling content
- making everything available and shareable
- getting online communities involved
- having a simple message i.e. Do The Green Thing - an activity that anyone can easily do such as walking not driving.
- being really nice about it and not trying to preach to anyone.

The latest initiative is a cheeky take on what would it be like if a certain Kate Moss 'Stuck with what she had'. The aim of the initiative, as the name suggests, is to encourage people to stick with what they have rather than buy new stuff.

The animations on the video are fab. Have a look:
Twisted Kate, Sticky Moss

Shared via AddThis

what type of social media user are you?

Andersen Analytics created a quick and dirty test so you can work out what kind of social media user you are. It was covered by Mashable here, and shows a graph of where you would sit.
I think it's a great idea and appeals to people's need to self label [I do it all the time]. I just wish it went into more detail about the how people use the different types of social media - as I don't think you can blend a person's habits on all forms of social media to get one particular profile. I mean, I use Twitter and write a blog but I'm going off Facebook because its cluttered and has privacy issues and I never use LinkedIn. So my label might be Maven for Twitter but a Social Media Pessimist when it comes to LinkedIn.

This isn't a moan [honest] I just think it would be much more useful if the analysis looked at usage by social media type.

social media & social marketing

This is a great example of how social media can be used to start conversations and ultimately change behaviours around social issues. It's a game that encourages you to look out for your mates, cunningly called look out for your mates.

It's been promoted by Team Rubber for the Somerset NHS Primary Care Trust as part of an anti-binge drinking campaign, aimed at young people in the region.



I like it because it's not preachy, it's very simple, has a clear single message and links out to other forms of social media e.g. a Facebook Group. My only criticism would be that the game is not very 'yoof' and it doesn't show the negative effects of binge drinking. The game designers could have gone all out and had your mates being mugged when they are drunk etc. but maybe the Somerset police, who are part sponsors, would have got a bit twitchy if it was too extreme. Plus Bebo or MySpace might be better places to have profiles that talk about binge drinking.

Overall, I think it's a pretty cool initiative that brings home what a pain you can be when you are shitfaced on a night out.

McCann wins Best Digital Campaign at CIPR

Just a short bit of own trumpet blowing but mainly to give a big hand to Katie G and Cath Usher for the great win last week. Katie and Cath were at the CIPR Excellence Awards to pick up our gong for best digital PR campaign.

McCann Erickson social media team won the award for the Durex Play O campaign, which involved sex bloggers, Facebook and Twitter Festivals that ultimately resulted in a 36% increase in sales.

Normal non-trumpet blowing postings will resume next week. Until then: "Woo Hoo! Hell yeah! and Excellent"

Real time social media search

I'm playing around with a real time search engine for social media called Collecta.com. It's pretty cool - it gives you a waterfall of real time results from twitter, blogs, comments, Flickr photos and online news. Like twitterfall, but for more social media channels than just twitter.

There is a bit of tailoring, you can select between 1 to 4 sources:
1. Blog posts and articles
2. Comments on blog posts
3. Updates on Twitter, Jaiku, Identica
4. Photos on Flickr

I like the the fact that there is a box out of the detailed post/update.

I can see this being used a lot for real time issues monitoring and for tracking back channel conversations at conferences.