Social network usage on a promising rise

A recent study conducted by the Nielsen Company revealed that the average time spent on social network sites keeps increasing. In comparison with February 2009, global web users have scoured the Social Web more than two hours more in February 2010, leading up to an average of five and a half hours spent per person.

Although the United States have the largest active unique audience to social networks, they have been dethroned as leader of the social network time per person: the “average” inhabitant of Italy and Australia spends just under six and a half hours on SNSs:

Not surprisingly, Facebook is still top-of-mind when people interact on the Social Web: more than half of the active social users have a profile page, and on average, they spend almost six hours a month on Facebook.

It’s a pity that only these five SNSs were included in the Nielsen research. I would have liked to know how much time the average Digg- or Last.fm user spends on these platforms in comparison to Facebook.

Anyhow, if the number of users and the time spent on SNSs keep rising steadily, I think brands will keep investing more and more in traditional or direct advertising on social network sites.

Maarten Van Hoorickx

Source:
The Nielsen Company



How to cope with the demands of the Social Web

Do you ever feel sad when no one remarks upon your latest YouTube update? Do you never feel obliged to comment on the ridiculously uninteresting Facebook-status of one of your dear friends?

People feel more and more compelled to post and share their interests and preferences in an attempt to construct their online identity. As I have pointed out earlier (cf. blogpost 10/11/09), research has shown that there are severe differences between the ‘offline’ identity, and the way in which people go about on their daily online life.

Secondly, the Web 2.0 generation is able to connect to the World Wide Web with their smartphones and pda’s via 3G Networks. Everyone is continually reachable and constantly online. Furthermore, with the rise of mobile apps such as Foursquare, the footsteps of the hip and dynamic Internet user can be traced in detail.

Doesn’t this put a lot of pressure on people? Although the Social Web is a powerful and flexible tool to interact with people all over the world, it has a downside as well: social network sites constantly push you towards interaction, and that can become stressful. An article on Mashable about social media stress proposes 4 tips in order to reduce the tension aroused by the needs and expectations of the Social Web:

1. Take time to disconnect
2. Breathe
3. Eat food that adds energy
4. Awaken the body: move

Maarten Van Hoorickx

Source:
4 Tips for reducing social media stress

Google Bookmarks adds lists

Google Bookmarks, the free online bookmark storage service provided by Google, allows users to access their bookmarks from anywhere, just by logging into their Gmail account. It has recently added “lists” as one of its new features. Whereas Google Bookmarks was previously only for private and personal use, Google has now seemingly implemented a strategy to attack the dominance of del.icio.us (Yahoo), a social tool which allows its users to share their bookmarks with the Internet community.

The purpose of these “experimental” lists is to enable users to share their common interests easily with other people: lists are private by default, but users can choose to share them with their friends or the World Wide Web. Secondly, these lists can give structure to the chaotic nature of your bookmarks: it becomes more easy to organize your “stuff” into suitable categories.

Furthermore, Google Bookmarks provides its users with “rich” and “integrated” lists. A dynamic preview of a url can be generated automatically, and thanks to the integration with Google Search, users can discover new web content more efficiently. Finally, the possibility to reorder, or add comments to existing lists, generates more interaction between the users of Google Bookmarks.

Although this new listing feature seems to be a promising innovation of Google Bookmarks, a number of remarks can be made: despite the integration with Google Search, other Google properties seem to have been forgotten. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate your Google Buzz with Google Bookmarks, for example?

Furthermore, a lot of Google Chrome users are staggered by the fact that there is no integration with Chrome Bookmarks. Shouldn’t a pioneer like Google make sure that Google Bookmarks is compatible with different web browsers?

Moreover, the blogosphere is flooded with complaints that Google Bookmarks has not added the possibility of editing the url’s name and description, which is an option in del.icio.us.

I am glad that Google has finally done something about their outdated and laborious bookmark-system, but they could have done a better job. Yahoo still provides a much better service with del.icio.us, and the possibilities in the “listing universe” have not at all been explored to the fullest. Maybe a new, young and frivolous internet start-up might do the job?

Maarten Van Hoorickx

Source:
Googleblog

Invested in – a social fundraising platform

Last week, Demo – “The Launchpad for Emerging Technology” organized the Demo Spring 2010. On this conference, “Invested in” was launched, a new online platform allowing people to “pitch” their idea or project and ask funding for its implementation.

The concept behind Invested in lies in the creation of an online community which uses its existing social network presence to raise money for anything. Visitors to the Invested in platform are required to fill out a simple registration form in order to create a profile page, on which they can then “pitch away” their ideas. Those who believe a proposed project can become lucrative, can donate through credit card and become investors.

The mission statement of Invested in goes as follows: “We are truly putting the future of the community into the hands of the community, and out of the hands of the traditional banking and credit card sector.” This grassroots fundraising strategy enables members to leverage their social capital in order to collect financial capital: once fundraisers have published their idea, Invested in provides them with the tools to promote it adequately via their existing social media channels. You can, for example, try to create buzz for your idea by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, etc…

Although at first sight, Invested in is an alternative, fresh and original way to raise funds for your start-up, it seems wise to be cautious with that one billion dollar idea. For how can you avoid that your concept gets stolen and developed by a company with the time and means to do so?

Invested.in

Killer Startups

The Buzz Coke = Pepsi Max!

The mystery has been revealed: the anonymous coke of my previous blog is Pepsi Max!  The international coke company launched a mysterious campaign two weeks ago in which they asked people to taste the ‘black can’ coke and to answer the question “like it or not?”.  By means of this anonymous and large-scale taste test, Pepsi found out that 73% of the public actually likes their coke. Recent radio and television advertisements refer to these results to convince the Belgian consumer. In my opinion, this marketing campaign (organised by VVL BBDO) is an interesting way to interact with the Belgian coke-consumer.  April 1, you can taste a Pepsi Max in Ghent (restaurant De Brug, station). Go have a drink!

Lore Vandoorne

The Buzz Coke

When looking for the best way to reach the – ever becoming more critical – consumer of nowadays’ society, brands have to be original. They have to stand out with their vision and ideas in the overcrowded world of advertisements. An interesting case to illustrate this:  the launch of a mysterious new coke in Belgium this week, called The Black Can Experience.

In seven big cities in Belgium, an anonymous organisation is giving away 75,000 black unbranded cans of coke. The superscription on the can invites the consumer to give his or her opinion of the drink via text message to the free number 8955 or via a post on the website www.likeitornot.be. A curious person, like me, might think the mystery will be solved on the website. But no, visitors dive into a big coke can and in between the bubbles they can find some limited information about where to post their opinion and about the locations for the next samplings: in the mood for a coke swimming lesson? The Belgian newspaper De Standaard has tried to find out the identity of the company behind this project. However, their investigation only indicated that it is not Coca Cola.

Is this an effective campaign or not? Has mysterious marketing a great impact in the long term? Are the organisers really going to take into consideration the public’s taste? Does this type of ‘market research’ really work and are people going to exchange their familiar Coca Cola for the Black Can in the future? Whose brain is behind this project?  More news to be posted soon!

Lore Vandoorne

Social media in times of trouble

For Planet Earth, 2010 got off to a very rocky start, with eathquakes in Chile and Haiti, and various other natural disasters, causing worldwide grief. But it is nice to see that numerous social networking companies are stepping up to help. Below is a brief overview of some of the things that have been done:

- Twitter, which played a great role in spreading news about devastating earthquake in Haiti, is now offering free SMS-service and mobile Twittering to all Haitians. This should further assist the local population with the exchange of real-time information.
- Google recently launched a Person Finder for Chile earthquake victims: concerned family/friends can simply head over to this page, where find and/or submit information about people missing after the disaster.
- also, numerous tech firms are generously donating money to help the less fortunate: e.g. Google donated a whopping 1 million dollars.

It is truly great to see how so many SNS’s and web companies (and of course many other people and organizations) are getting involved in the wake of such tremendous disasters, both with donations and updates to their services that go toward helping those causes.

Frederik De Bosschere

The Ultimate Battle: Facebook vs The Virtual Suicide Machine

Improve your relationship! Get rid of stalkers!

You can do it! It’s so easy!

May you rest in a better Real Life!

With these encouraging slogans, WORM, the Dutch producer of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, tries to convince social network users to delete their digital identity from websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Since the launch of the Virtual Suicide Machine, 229,651 friends have been unfriended and 391,125 tweets have been removed. 3,109 people have used the ‘suicide killer’ so far. Sounds interesting, no?

The concept was originally created by Walter Langelaar, a Dutch artist living in Amsterdam who wanted to bring people back together in real life. With two colleagues from Moddr, a media lab, he created the group WORM that has run the Virtual Suicide Machine since December 19. The suicide machine automatically erases your profile from the social network site of your choice: watch here. However, for this process you need to fill in your username and password and that’s why Facebook reacted furiously on the Dutch creation. Social network sites do not allow their users to give their login details to a third party.

Since January, Facebook’s lawyers have advised and even forced WORM to shut down the Virtual Suicide Killer. On February 18, Facebook excommunicated WORM from Facebook. Yet, Worm assures the persons who want to commit virtual suicide, that they won’t use or save their passwords but just need that information to completely delete their accounts. The Dutch artists believe that Facebook is afraid of the financial repercussions of their idea: when you personally deactivate your Facebook profile, you are not visible anymore on the social network site, but Facebook retains possession of your personal details to pass them on to a third party or to use them for advertising. However, the Virtual Suicide Machine deletes the account completely and, in doing so, breaks the social network.

I support WORM’s initiative because it makes SNS users aware of the limited data freedom they have on the Internet. Our personal data is stored and used forever on the world wide web. Currently, I am not using the virtual suicide killer myself because I am not tired yet of my online life.

Lore Vandoorne

Sources:
Kunstenaars in oorlog met Facebook
The Suicide Machine

Google lets you search your social circle

Since the social revolution has taken place on the internet, there been a drastic change in the nature of much of the content published on the web. As Google points out:

Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place.

Enter Google Social Search, which helps you to “find more relevant public content from your broader social circle”. Social search combines results from your friends’ blogs, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google profiles) with Google’s regular search results.

This new feature will display relevant search results from your social circle at the bottom of the search results page. This could be travel photos from your friends, a recent blog post, a set of status updates, or other information Google pulls from supported social networking sites.

Here’s a video explaining Google Social Search:

Google Social Search is now available from Google Labs. Go try it out!

Frederik De Bosschere

Source:
The Official Google Blog

Surge in time spent on social networking sites

According to a report by The Nielsen Company, social networking usage by Americans continues to soar. From a comparison of internet time spent on social networking sites and blogs between August 2008 and August 2009, Nielsen has measured an increase of 11%, from 6% of all internet time to 17%.

Nielsen vice president of media and agency insights Jon Gibs explains this triplication of usage of social networking websites: “This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used. While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth.”

As users spend more time on social networks, advertisers are starting to take notice and move their campaigns to social networking sites. Despite the recession, online advertising spending on the top social network and blogging sites has seen an increase of 119 percent, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 to approximately $108 million in August 2009.

And how about you? Have you spent more time on a social networking website this summer than you did a year ago?

Frederik De Bosschere

Source:
The Nielsen Company