we are social

The shortlist for the Revolution Awards has just been announced, and we’re chuffed that our This is Now campaign has been shortlisted for Best Use of Online PR and Little break, Big difference has been shortlisted in the Leisure/Travel category and for Best Use of Online PR.

In a surprising move, the judges have also put We Are Social itself forward for Best Digital Start-Up, even though we didn’t enter the category (we’re up against Spotify and Tweetdeck so we’re sure to win – what use is an iTunes clone that requires you to be online to use it? and this Twitter thing is just a fad, surely? ).

It makes us proud to be in such great company – Dare has 8 shortlisted entries, AKQA and Agency Republic 5 each, followed by ourselves with 4, ahead of others like i-level, Razorfish, Profero, iCrossing and LBi.

Keep your fingers crossed for us on the evening of the 8th April, when the awards ceremony takes place…

In a comment piece in last Friday’s Guardian, We can make you behave, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne set out his vision for a public policy framework based on the recurring mantra of Cameron’s Conservatives’: “behavioural economics”.

Before I dive into Osborne’s article it’s worth expending a few words to explore exactly what ‘behavioural economics’ is. Essentially, behavioural economics is a rejection of the idea that “individual behaviour is always entirely rational”. So for example, policy experts in Whitehall could spend years planning public policy that presumes the public will make rational decisions that follow logical reasoning. But when the policy is applied it doesn’t deliver the expected results because it failed to account for the fact people don’t make rational decisions. Rather they make irrational decisions based on a range of inter-related, complex and often sub-conscious effects that are usually not taken into account.

Chief among the behavioural economists is US academic Richard Thaler (whose names appears as co-author of the Guardian article). Thaler famously co-wrote the book, Nudge, which offers a sociological underpinning to the idea that rather than designing abstract policy without taking into account human behaviour, Governments and the State should develop policy with the ability to encourage or persuade people to follow policy designed in.

Thaler and Osborne have past form and the Conservatives’ grand strategy is to apply this thinking to their public policy planning.

So let’s jump back to Osborne’s article.

While the bulk of the op-ed focuses on Labour’s failure to effectively regulate financial markets because of it’s assumptions of actors in global financial markets making rational decisions, tucked away in the penultimate paragraph is a passing but intriguing reference to Government advertising.

In particular, Osborne turns briefly to outline how a newly elected Conservative government would embed the theory of behavioural economics into Government communications campaigns.

Osborne tells us categorically:

A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency fee will be made contingent on achieving the desired outcome. This will not only help to cut wasteful spending, and secure better value for money for taxpayers, ensure that government advertising reflects the best thinking about behaviour change, but it will also mean that the public can transparently scrutinise the goals and effectiveness of government advertising.

I’m not sure whether my reaction to Osborne’s plan is rational or irrational, but my initial feelings include pleasure; confusion and concern. Let me sketch out why and analyse what it might mean for the communications and marketing industries.

At face value, there’s clearly a lot of merit in adapting the ‘Nudge effect’ to public communications. It makes perfect sense to try and maximize public service campaigns’ chances of achieving real behavioural change and to provide value for money. And who is going to object to increasing the success of campaigns like Change4Life, which aims to improve children’s health?

Osborne’s idea of building a ‘success fee’ into agencies budgets will no doubt resonate well with taxpayers but should we as an industry be worried? I’d argue not.

Incentivising success is no bad thing and it will mean the development of more robust measurement and evaluation tools and methodologies – something we’ve seen the COI thinking about recently. However, it’s unclear how rigorously this proposal might be implemented – achieving success and demonstrating success are two different things.

In fact, behaviour change is something the COI is already pushing through in its Five Step Plan to Behaviour Change so the Conservatives’ agenda won’t be too much of a step-change for Whitehall communicators (but it may come as a shock to those in other areas of the public sector).

Perhaps the most commendable element of Conservative plans is its desire to make Whitehall “state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about”.

This drive for transparency works on a number of levels: Firstly, as us social media types are well aware, proactive disclosure is key to building trust. With trust comes increased likelihood to change opinion and subsequently behaviour.

Secondly, by declaring the aim of the campaign and what it’s designed to achieve the public can truly act in their capacity as ‘monitorial citizens’ and scrutinize whether the state is attempting to change public behaviour for the good. This is a crucial role and raises some ethical questions about the use of behavioural economics that I’ll address later.

It could be that Osborne is using the terms ‘marketing’ and ‘advertising’ as short-hand for communications in general, but it’s not clear what sectors will be affected. Will the same transparent, incentivised approach apply to PR? Social media? And what about public sector websites? It’s worth noting that the ASA famously don’t consider websites as advertising.

It also could be seen as an intentional move to woo the UK’s advertising industry, who’s umbrella body, the IPA, has made a public commitment to improving efficacy through behavioural campaigns.

Indeed, the IPA’s president, Rory Sutherland, is a major fan of behavioural economics and wants the industry to commit more to on behavioural research as part of his presidential agenda. Here he is making the case:

Behavioural economics is described (by Thaler himself) as ‘libertarian paternalism’. This is the idea that while people should be able to live their lives as they want, “it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better”.

However, as political analyst Tim Pendry puts it: “What we have to watch for is drift into projects that suit them and not us”.

Of course, you could argue the same about any marketing by the state, as Tim points out:

There are philosophical issues here – should your or my money be spent on systems that try to change my behaviour rather than just require compliance with the law? Should a democratic state be using techniques designed to sell goods and services against its own people?

There are no definitive answers to be had here – but it does create shades of gray that the marketing industries need to take into account should the Conservatives come to power.

Andrea Di Maio, a VP at Gartner specialising in e-government, recently penned these thoughts about communication and engagement in a Government 2.0 context. I think he’s spot on, and it’s a pretty universal lesson. I swapped the words ‘citizens’ for ‘people’ and ‘government’ for ‘your organisation’ in his text and here’s what I got:

Using social media to communicate means to expand a multichannel communication strategy to encompass new channels. It used to be the counter, the telephone and the web site: now you have the Twitter hashtag or the Facebook page, but these are just channels. Of course people can engage, retweet your information, post on your Facebook page, and so forth. So it would appear that simply setting some ground rules about what people can and cannot do and how the moderation policy works would go a long way toward moving from simple communication to engagement.

But “real” engagement is something else. It is about figuring out where people are already having conversations that your organisation needs to be aware of. It is about bringing information and dialogue to places where people want that dialogue to happen: their blogs, their Facebook groups, their Twitter streams.

In essence, an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy. The former chooses and controls channels, while the latter joins somebody else’s channels. The former determines rules of engagement, the latter follows somebody else’s rules. The former assumes that people reach out to your organisation, the latter is based on your organisation reaching out to communities and groups.

Google release beta version of Social Search
Google have launched a beta version of their personalised search platform Social Search. When signed into a Google account a search using the new platform will pull in content from members in your social circle. An element on the interface also allows you to the see connections and reasons behind the search results presented. Watch this video to learn more:

Pope 2.0
Pope Benedict XVI, himself an avid tweeter, has decreed that priests should embrace blogging as a means of reaching members of the Catholic Church and sharing the Christian gospel with the wider world. The past 12 months have seen the creation of Papal iPhone and Facebook apps as well as the launch of a YouTube Channel which posts the Pope’s speeches as well as coverage of events at the Vatican. It remains to be seen if the world’s other major religions will pursue the digital realm as a means of disseminating information and connecting with followers as avidly as the Catholic Church.

How Not to Claim a Brand ID
Claiming your brand ID on as many social networks as possible is step one for executing a social media strategy.  But what happens if the brand ID has already been registered and not by brandjackers hoping to sell it for a premium rather by someone who can legitimately lay claim to the name. This dilemma was experienced by Harman Bajwa who fended off a hostile facebook page takeover bid by media agency Carat on behalf of audio systems manufacturer Harman International. When bribes of a speaker system  in exchange for the Harman name were refused, Carat enlisted the help of facebook who messaged Mr. Banjwa to tell him he was in violation of their policies. Publicity duly followed along with a robust facebook campaign to help Mr. Bajwa keep his name. Facebook, Carat and Harman relented with lesson learned that bribery and threats probably shouldn’t be included in an attempt to secure a brand ID – though as I happen to share a name with a French chocolatier I am personally open to selling my moniker in exchange for a lifetime supply of sweet treats…

Twitter Launches Local Trends
Twitter users in six countries (Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, the UK and the US) and 15 individual cities now have the option to view localised trending topics. This launch marks the start of an initiative by Twitter to increase geographic and language functionality. While some would speculate on the sharing which might happen organically in the specified cities there is real potential for local businesses to connect with potential customers. Twitter’s encouragement of locality could provide another means of realising geographic segmentation in social media strategy.

Five Francophone journalists test limits of social media as news platform
With social media as a means of accessing and disseminating news on the rise, five Francophone journalists have decided to tests its merits. For five days the journalists will be holed away in a farmhouse in the south of France with access only to Twitter and Facebook as a means of sourcing news on the outside world. The aim of the experiment is to assess the legitimacy of information posted on social media sites. Already citing social media as a source of hoaxes organizers have perhaps given away their inherent bias as proponents of traditional media (all the participants are radio journalists and the experiment is organized by France Inter). This experiment will no doubt continue the debate surrounding the role of traditional media which in the instances of the Iranian protests and the Haiti earthquake, was one step behind social media in releasing breaking-news content.

Next week, from Monday 1st to Friday 5th of February, it’s Social Media Week, with a week long series of (mostly) free events going on simultaneously in London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Sao Paulo.

The line up of events here in London is looking pretty tasty, and as you’d expect, you’ll find us out and about at quite a few of them:

Monday 6:30pm, The Opening Night Reception
A few of us will be at the opening night reception (client deadlines allowing), kicking the week off in style at the Adam Street Private Members Club. Currently this is an invite only event, but they may open up registrations later today. I’m guessing we may spill round the corner into Social Media Monday once the free booze runs out at Adam Street.

Tuesday 6:30pm, Chinwag Live – Show Me the Money: Where’s the ROI in Social Media?
I’m on the panel at Chinwag Live – Show Me the Money: Where’s the ROI in Social Media? where we’ll be debating social media measurement and ROI. Expect a lively debate. If you want to read up on the issues beforehand, check out our posts on the ROI of social media.

Tuesday 6:30pm, ShoreditchTwit X
The rest of the We Are Social team will probably take a pass on the Chinwag event, excusing themselves by saying they’ve heard me go on about the subject of measurement and ROI way too much already, and head straight to ShoreditchTwit X, where I’ll be joining them later. Shoreditch Twit has a special place in our hearts, as you could say we grew up together. Back in the days when we were based in Shoreditch we were regulars at the first few events, and we’re looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting a some new twits…

Wednesday 4:30pm, IAB Social Media Debate
Wednesday’s IAB panel event will see me debating the importance of picking your battles online: when, where and why should brands respond to people in social media? This one’s going to fun and I’m looking forward to sharing our latest thinking in this area, based on hard won experience on the front line.

Thursday 1:30pm, Media 140 Third Sector: Real-time web for good
To finish the week, we’re hosting Media 140 Third Sector: Real-time web for good here at We Are Social towers. There’s a great line up of sessions aimed at helping charities, non profits, and volunteer organisations understand and use social media to further their goals. Simon Collister, head of our public sector & non-profit practice, will be discussing using social media for campaigning, giving some insights into how in the age of networks third sector organisations need to change their tactics, drawing on our experience with ActionAid, Open Up Politics and others.

It’s going to be a whirlwind week, so to avoid blinking and missing it, tune into #smwldn on Twitter. Hopefully we’ll see you at one or two of the events.

Update: a more nuanced look Foursquare from Charles Arthur, Russell Davies and John Willshire, an interesting experiement from Harvard using Foursquare and one from Bravo on a seemingly much larger scale.

Over the New Year break I decided to have a look at We Are Social’s stats for the year. It proved to be a worthwhile exercise and the deeper I dug into the data, the more interesting it got (and the longer this post took to finish). True to the spirit of social media, I’m going to share what I found.

For those of you less interested in We Are Social and more interested in generally applicable insights, you might want to skip ahead to the sections on other engagement measures and distribution factors, 2009’s most popular We Are Social posts, traffic sources, RSS/email subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members or my conclusions.

Prelude
We launched the We Are Social site and accompanying blog back in December 2008. We’d had a holding page live for the previous five months, which gave people the opportunity to subscribe to our feed by RSS or email, which certainly helped kick start things once we started publishing content. As individuals, we’d also been part of to the wider onine community for some time, through reading and commenting on other people’s blog posts, through our personal blogs and of course on Twitter. We were also pretty well known in the London social media / agency ‘scene’. All of these things meant people were pre-disposed to be interested in what we had to say, so let’s see how it worked out…

Top line figures
According to Google Analytics we had 88,664 unique visitors and 285,522 page views in 2009. Looking at this monthly, as you can see we’re hovering around 10,000 monthly unique visitors:

and just under 30,000 monthly page views:

At this level, things look fairly comprehensible, with surprisingly shallow rises over the year but if you look at things on a daily basis, things are not quite as simple:

In this instance we’re looking at a graph of daily unique visitors, but the daily page views graph looks very similar. As you can see, long term trends are much harder to discern and the obvious conclusion is that individual blog posts (or the lack of them), their quality and their distribution are driving the peaks and troughs in traffic and in this view of the data, other underlying factors are obscured.

Other engagement measures and distribution factors
We’ve looked at how many people are reading We Are Social’s content, and how much of it. However, in the era of social media people are doing a lot more than just reading content, by subscribing, joining, following, bookmarking, tagging, sharing and/or commenting. These actions all indicate higher levels of engagement than just reading alone, and are major factors in the distribution of content. Forrester made this idea famous with their Social Technographics Ladder, and PostRank have put measuring this sort of engagement into practice with their PostRank methodology. PostRank have also shown that engagement is increasingly happening offsite, out in the wilds of social media and it’s important to remember often the engagement is relevant in isolation of the content.

Here’s how PostRank measured engagement with We Are Social’s content in 2009, with the vast majority of our engagement (79.9%) happening offsite in social media:

Looking at the engagement on a weekly basis:

You can see it correlating reasonably well with our weekly unique visitors:

So, how much individual posts are engaged with in social media is clearly a very important distribution factor.

2009’s most popular We Are Social posts
Before we move on, here are 2009’s most popular We Are Social posts (in terms of page views), along with their on and offsite engagement as measured by PostRank Analytics, so you can get a feel for yourselves for how it affected their distribution:

As you can see, although all the popular posts have high engagement figures, it’s clear there are other factors at play, with some posts looking like search may have been an important factor in their success (for example Why do people use Twitter? and Best Buy: A social media case study).

We can usefully look at some of these distribution factors and discern other underlying factors from a site-level perspective (the factors that explain when the weekly enagement drops to zero the weekly unique visitors graph only goes down to around 1.5k).

Traffic sources
So how are people finding our content? How big a deal are these social media distribution factors? After spending some time cleaning up the data in Excel, it breaks down as follows:

Here we can see the underlying factors. 30.1% of our visits are driven by people coming directly to our site (through typing in our URL or using a bookmark in their browser). 30% are from people arriving as a result of performing a search and clicking through to our site from a SERP. 28.9% are coming from some form of social media service (not including blogs) and 11.1% are arriving as a result of clicking on a link somewhere other than on a SERP or what we’ve defined as social media.

There’s almost a very neat 30:30:30:10 split between social media, direct traffic, search and referral links. So what does this tell us?

Social media has been the key to our success. Almost all of the web referrals will have come from links to We Are Social from people’s blog posts and blogrolls, meaning almost 40% of our traffic is coming from social media.

If you think about it, it is responsible for a lot more traffic than that – without all of those inbound links, we’d be getting nowhere near the same amount of traffic from search. And those direct visits? We can also assume a very large proportion of them are as a result of the reputation we’ve established using social media.

I’ll stop there, before I create some sort of social media singularity and crash the internets…

Breaking the out the direct and search visits, and looking at how they’ve changed:

Patterns in the direct visits are hard to discern, but you can see that search has grown reasonably steadily throughout the year, presumably as a result of our PageRank increasing with the number of inbound links and also as the amount of content has grown (meaning there are more pages to appear in search results).

Let’s look at some of these categories in more detail:

In terms of social media, Twitter dominates, driving almost 10 times the number of visits of that of its closest rival Facebook. Its scale compared to ‘proper’ social bookmarking services, such as StumbleUpon and Delicious, shows how Twitter has become a de facto social link sharing service (or as David Armano more eloquently puts it, the human feed), even if it was never designed as such. It surprising how little traffic Delicious is driving (0.8%), given the number of times our posts have been bookmarked on the service, and FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook in August, makes a very poor showing with only 0.3%.

It’s also worth noting how much Google dominates, accounting for around 95% of our search traffic, although to be fair, Bing only launched in the US in June ‘09 and in the UK in November, and Google currently has around 90% market share in the UK.

Search terms
Looking at what search terms brought people to the site, they can be broken down into three categories:

35.5% of people were ‘searching’ for We Are Social. These are equivalent to direct visits, with people using Google as their address bar, typing in terms like “We Are Social”, “wearesocial.net” etc. and clearly knew about us before their search.

5.6% are searching for a social media agency, by typing in terms like “social media marketing agency”, “online pr agency” and of course “social media agency”, for which we’ve ranked no. 1 for here in the UK for quite a while. I’d say this is a surprisingly low amount, considering how well we rank for these sort of terms.

58.9% are searching for something else entirely, something that Google thinks one of our pages answers, which knowing them, they probably do. It goes to show how effective a blog is at driving search visits…

Our audience
Looking at where our audience are, as you’d expect, nearly half of our visitors are from the UK, with the following breakdown across countries:

Our traffic is dominated by English speaking traffic from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia & Ireland and traffic from the rest of Western Europe, with the rest of the world not getting much of a look in. This is no great surprise given we have a blog written in English and we pitch ourselves as a European social media agency.

It’s worth noting that despite having a French site and blog running for the same amount of time as our main English one, France only accounts for 8.2% of our traffic. As some of you will know, we recently opened an office in Paris, and at the same time moved the French site from wearesocial.net/fr to wearesocial.fr so we’re hoping that this number decreases significantly here on .net but .fr’s growth is disproportionally larger.

RSS/email subscribers
We provide email and RSS subscription options to We Are Social which allow people to read the entire content of our blog posts without visiting our site (and thus appearing in Google Analytics stats), so it’s important we also understand how these are working.

We use FeedBurner to measure the number of RSS subscribers we have, and also to provide the email subscription service, and on the 31st December, we had 1,779 subscribers, of which 167 (9.4%) were email subscriptions.

As you can see from the graph above, this has grown pretty consistently throughout the year (the sudden jump in June was due to FriendFeed starting to share subscriber counts, and the few downward blips are just FeedBurner being screwy occasionally).

It’s important to remember though, that just because someone has chosen to subscribe, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re actually reading the content. Of course, FeedBurner have thought of this and handily provide daily reach and feed item view figures.

As I’ve already shown, daily figures fluctuate massively, so for ease of comprehension, the above graph shows a 30 day moving average of RSS reach in red and for comparison, the 30 day moving average of We Are Social’s daily unique visitors from Google Analytics in blue. As you can see the RSS reach is equivalent to around 50% of We Are Social’s unique visitors. However, thinking about this in more detail, FeedBurner’s reach figure also includes clicks, which obviously would register in Google Analytics as visits and thus we’re in danger of double-counting.

FeedBurner’s feed item view figure seems safer though, as we can presume they only count a view when they serve an image embedded in the content of an RSS item, and if someone is seeing the content, there is no reason to click through to the site.

Above you can see the 30 day moving average of RSS views in red and the 30 day moving average of We Are Social’s daily page views in blue. On average, the daily RSS views are equivalent to 23.1% of We Are Social’s daily page views.

So despite the naysayers, it appears RSS is still very important. And if we go back to the pie chart looking at We Are Social’s traffic sources, it should actually look something like this (I haven’t separated out email and RSS as there’s no way of telling how views are distributed between them):

Twitter followers
We’ve also seen steady growth in our Twitter followers throughout the year (data taken from Twitterholic):

Like many news sites and blogs, we use the @wearesocial account mostly as a news feed for our blog posts and other announcements; although we do respond to those talking to us, it’s through our personal accounts that you’ll find us fully engaging, as you can see in the live stream of our individual Twitter conversations on the top-right of our blog.

We did experiment at different times last year with different techniques to grow an engaged follower base for a Twitter account with minimum effort, using the @wearesocial account as a testbed. We had some success with this, but ultimately our position remains as follows – the key to success is the simple technique of growing an account organically by being interesting to your target audience and engaging in conversation with them.

A larger factor in our follower numbers would be, we hope, the success (or not) of our blog and to a lesser extent of We Are Social itself.

Out of politeness we also follow back everyone who follows us. This behaviour probably accounts for a significant proportion of the growth and that of our 29,559 followers on December 31st 2009, only 66% were engaged users (according to Ad.ly Analytics – i.e. the other 34% were recognised as a bot, had abandoned their Twitter account, had been suspended from Twitter or simply were following way too many people).

As demonstrated by the above and by Anil Dash’s recent post about his experience of having nearly 300,000 followers, overall follower numbers are pretty meaningless and we much prefer Klout’s way of measuring the influence of Twitter users (as does Google’s analytics guru). Currently @wearesocial has a Klout score of 63/100, not bad when compared to publications like @Econsultancy’s 46 or agencies like @Digitas’ 31 or @Razorfish’s 54.

However, if you were to draw conclusions on a per follower basis, in our instance RSS/email accounts for around 16 times the amount of engagement with our content per subscriber/follower when compared to Twitter.

Facebook fans
The number of fans we had on Facebook grew fairly steadily at a rate of around 75 fans a month, standing at 893 on December 31st:

We’d obviously like the graph to have been steeper, but as we’re only using our Facebook page to automatically post our latest blog entries (which people need to click through to our blog to read) and we’re not using Facebook social ads or any other method other than linking to the page from the sidebar of our blog to recruit fans, we’re pretty happy with this.

Aside from Poland’s surprise mid-table appearance, the geographic breakdown of our fans is similar to that of our website visitors above:

And bearing in mind what they are fans of, the demographic profile is again pretty much what you would expect:

What’s more interesting though, as noted above, Facebook accounts for only 2.5% of our traffic, but we have around half the number of Facebook fans compared to RSS/email subscribers. Doing the math, RSS/email accounts for around 4 times the amount of engagement with our content per subscriber/fan when compared to Facebook (which as I’m sure you can work out, means Facebook accounts for around 4 times the level of engagement per fan/follower when compared to Twitter).

LinkedIn group members
Unfortunately LinkedIn keeps its group data fairly close to its chest, so no pretty graphs, but I can tell you we had 1,601 members of our LinkedIn group on the 31st December. If I had to guess, I’d say this has been growing organically in a similar way to our Facebook group.

Again, the interesting thing to note is that LinkedIn is only responsible for 1.3% of our traffic, and although there are plenty of other reasons to join, our blog posts do get automatically posted as news items in the group. Meaning RSS/email accounts for around 16 times the amount of engagement with our content per subscriber/member when compared to LinkedIn (which is broadly the same per member/follower as Twitter).

Conclusions
So, as you’ve seen, it’s an incredibly complex picture, and we should be wary of applying these findings universally, but what stands out for me is:

• success is about the quality of individual pieces of content
• offsite engagement drives significant traffic
• Twitter is the most important engagement factor by far
• RSS is far more important than you think
• social media underpins everything

And as for We Are Social, we had a great 2009. We ended the year in 85th in the AdAge Power 150, 67th in the social media category of PostRank’s Top Blogs of 2009 listings, and 9th in the list of the UK’s top marketing weblogs. Not bad for a site that was less than a month old at the start of the year.

Jeremiah Owyang outlines four social media trends for business in 2010:

1. Don’t fondle the hammer.
   Understand customers, focus on objectives, not develop strategies based on ever-changing tools. Companies really need to understand their customers first.
2. Live the 80% rule.
   This is a movement: get your company ready. 80% of success is getting the right organizational model, roles, processes, stakeholders, and teams assembled –only 20% should be focused on technology.
3. Customers don’t care what department you’re in.
   Customers just want their problem fixed, they don’t care what department you’re in. Yet, now, nearly every department can have a direct relationship with your customers using social tools. As a result, provide customers with a holistic experience Start to investigate how brand monitoring, community tools and CRM systems are merging.
4. Real time is *not* fast enough.
   Companies cannot scale when it comes to social media, for most companies, you cannot hire enough people to monitor and respond to the conversation, As a result, lean on advocates, by building unpaid armies, and anticipate customer needs through advanced listening techniques.

They’re all essential points to note, but ‘customers don’t care what department you’re in’ is resonating pretty strongly for us all here at We Are Social at the moment.

Facebook adds post insights
A week after rolling out their version of the Retweet, Facebook has revealed a new feature: insights for posts, for page owners to find out how users are interacting with specific posts from thier pages. At the moment it just covers ‘impressions’ and the percentage of impressions that lead to an action, such as a ‘like’ or comment. There’s been some confusion about what exactly an ‘impression’ is, but as Mashable points out, it’s better than nothing, and as this interview with a Facebook employee reveals, they’ve got a lot of behavioral data at their fingertips, so expect more of the same to come along.

Marketers continue to shift budgets to social media
Brand Republic reports that more and more marketers plan to shift budget from direct marketing to social media. 40% of over 1,000 responding to a survey said DM would be cut by a fifth or more to make budget for social media, and 51% said they would be making effort to move away from a campaign-based DM model.

Illustrating just how seriously big brands are taking social media, Coca-Cola recently announced a shift from building campaign microsites to using existing social media platforms, making their Facebook and YouTube profile pages content hubs and NMA also outlines Unilever’s plans to do the same.
Disclosure: Coca-Cola and Unilever are both We Are Social clients

All of this is being played against a backdrop of growing optimism in the industry, according to the latest IPA Bellwether report. After cuts for the past two years, in 2010 average marketing budgets are higher, and internet advertising budgets are taking a lead, rising for the second quarter running.

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Dating site OKCupid has a rather excellent blog and some eloquent data crunchers – as exemplified by this incredibly detailed post on what profile pictures generate more activity. If you’re a woman, you should smile & make eye contact while men should avert from looking directly at the camera. But to get a conversation going, don’t just rely on abs or cleavage – photos of you doing something interesting are more likely to get talk going. Interesting implications for how you choose your avatar on social networks, whether you’re looking to meet new people or avoid needless approaches.