Social media and Digital stats

My colleagues at McCann Metro put on a fantabulous social media and all round digital conference last week called Real World Digital. As the title suggests, its focus was looking at how the real world has now blended with the digital world.

It had great speakers from Google, Facebook, Apple and Autonomy. There was a good back channel chat on Twitter via #RWD2011.

I've summarised some of the things I found interesting from each speaker.

John Lamphiere, Facebook.

• Social channels increased in use by 52% from 2010 to 2011, due to the power of word of mouth recommendations for products and services.
• XBox Live increased profits from Xbox by 242%
• 43% of news is shared through social channels [source CNN]
• $1.5 billion has been saved by consumers via Groupon in the last 12 months
• 66% of govt agencies in the UK use at least one social channel.
• Social Ads are 4x more likely to results in sales than standard ads.
• Herbal Essences received 1.5 million views of its Facebook Page by using Facebook ads to target fans of The Hills [as they had the same demographic/interests as Herbal Essence target audience].

Hamish Nicklin from Google.

• Quote: "Search engines are databases of intent" i.e. people's search habits reveal what they are intending to do/buy.
• 20M searches for camping in December. [the big question is why?]
• 21M searches for 'new job' each month.

Suzanne Wright from Apple talked mainly about the iAd platform.

• It costs brands £300K to get involved in the iAd platform.
• Nissan's iAd is phenomenal [my opinion]. See embedded video and this link http://bit.ly/isTN1D
• For iAds, the ad agency does the creative and Apple does build and integration and ensures that the creative fits with the iAd channel.
• Lead time 8 weeks

Overall, there was some serious geekery going on.