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, and here in the UK, news from Marketing of Debenhams and Domino’s Pizza use of Foursquare.

Update 2: Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

We’re really pleased to be helping the NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations – England’s umbrella body for the voluntary sector) socialise tomorrow’s flagship political campaigning conference, A New Politics.

The event pulls together an impressive line-up of campaigners, political insiders and high-profile commentators to debate how social media is shaping the future of the UK’s political landscape as we approach the 2010 general election.

To support the event and extend its online reach we’ve created a conversation platform which forms a hub for all the juicy content created ahead of, during and after the conference.

The pre-event debate has already kicked-off with guest posts from some of the speakers. For starters Leonard Cheshire’s local campaigns coordinator, Ellie Bullimore, has posted about the importance of hyperlocal activism in getting your voice heard by politicians; while the Speaker of the House of Commons himself, John Bercow, gives an insight into the implications of the expenses scandal and sets out how parliament will be seeking to work closer with individuals and organisations in the future.

The most re-tweeted post comes from the NCVO’s Learning and Development Officer for Campaigning, Liam Barrington Bush, asks the question: does it matter what politicians and political parties do with social media? After all, social media is increasingly empowering the public to self-organise and achieve great things with needing government intervention.

Tomorrow’s full speaker line-up is available on the site. Highlights for me include:

• Tom Watson MP (follow on Twitter: Tom_Watson)
• Oliver Letwin MP
• Peter Tatchell (follow on Twitter: PeterTatchell)
• MyConservatives.com’s Sam Coates (follow on Twitter: Samuel Coates)
• ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie and Jonathan Isaby (follow on Twitter: TimMontgomerie and Isaby)

We’ve also created ‘events’ on Facebook, LinkedIn and Upcoming so attendees have been able to let their networks know about the event and that they’re going along. They’ve also been able to let their friends and followers on Twitter know about the event via Twtvite.

If you can’t make the event tomorrow, don’t worry! We’ll be live-blogging from the conference, working with those friendly ‘social reporters’ from Amplified! who will be creating AudioBoo content, taking photos and conducting video interviews with delegates and speakers. All this great content will be aggregated on the conversation platform and there’ll be a live Twitter back-channel so you can join in the conference debate by following and using the hashtag #newpol.

So if you’re not doing anything tomorrow and want to know how you can use social media, radical transparency and hyperlocal activism to help shape the UK’s political agenda at the 2010 general election, head along to A New Politics and find out.

On Saturday I went along to UKGovCamp 2010 at Google’s UK HQ in Victoria. It could be broadly described as an unconference for those working in and around, or simply interested in, UK government online – an opportunity for people with a wide variety of skills, experiences and perspectives to share their knowledge and get to know each other.

It was run in the BarCamp format, meaning there was no set schedule prior to the event and the programme was decided upon by the participants at the beginning of the day.

Photo by Paul Clarke

It was a great day, with too many great sessions to choose from. The highlight for me was Eve Shuttleworth’s session on the future of journalism – where is traditional media headed and how should a government / local gov press office evolve. Despite us being packed into a tiny room, it was a really enlightening and lively discussion. I learnt a lot about the sorts of challenges social media brings to those on the front line and the organisational barriers they face and I was able share some hopefully useful experience from work we’ve done with some of our clients. For those who were in the session with me – here’s the Clay Shirky quote I was referring to:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Towards the end of the day I ended up running a small session on public consultations and social media. It was really useful to hear people’s first hand experiences of using social media to gather the public’s opinions for consultations, both large and small, and how to best present them back to policy makers in order that their voices actually get heard. It was also good to get positive feedback on an approach to tapping into conversations in social media we think has the potential to significantly augment the standard way of conducting public consultations.

However, the day was really about making and strengthening connections, and it was great to see people like Steph Gray, Dave Briggs, Paul Clarke, Jeremy Gould, Emma Mulqueeny, May Race and Harry Metcalfe again, and to meet Eve Shuttleworth, Justin Kerr-Stevens, Hadley Beeman, Simon Dickson, Sharon O’Dea, Alistair Reid, Kim Willis, Roger Oldham, Charlotte Beckett and many others for the first time. The pub afterwards was a lot of fun too.

My thanks go to Dave Briggs, Hadley Beeman and the rest of the organising team. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff, I’d recommend you check out the tweets from the day, read Dave’s wrap-up post and join the conversation on UKGovWeb.

Following on from my last post about Forrester’s new social technographics ladder, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang have put together this great deck about understanding your customers’ social behaviours:

As Charlene explains:

Beware of plans or proposals that start with “Twitter Strategy” or “Facebook Strategy” Instead, they should have a “Customer Strategy” that focuses in on how customers behave – not on the ever-changing toolset. As a result, companies should first understand how their customers use social technologies before they choose the tools.

1. Where are your customers online? First, find out where your customers are online, knowing which Web sites they are participating at, this will reduce guessing.
   Don’t aimlessly approach social networks without knowing if they are there, if they are in Hyves, Mixi, or Facebook, go there. Fish where the fish are.
2. What are your customers’ social behaviors online? How do they use social technologies? Do they share? Comment? Create their own content?
   Which social features should you deploy. Example: if they frequently like to comment on Web sites, allow them to leave their comments.
3. What social information or people do your customers rely on?
   If they rely on their friends, facilitate a marketing program that encourages customers to share with friends, this data helps with determining resource allocation on advocacy programs.
4. What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?
   If your customers are trusted by others, highlight your customers in front of their community. For example, teens may share information with each other, spreading their influence to others. Example: Walmart’s 11 Moms blogger program is a platform for customer voices.
5. How do customers use social technologies to learn, make decisions, and support your products and services?
   Be confident in your resource allocation by understanding when customers rely on social tools or their peers in pre-sales, awareness, decision making, implementation, or support of a product.

Forrester have just released a new version of their famous Social Technographics ladder, which looks at how people use social media:

As you can see it now includes ‘Conversationalists’:

Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

For now this just includes US data, and is not reflected in their consumer profile tool but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before this changes. And for those of you wondering why the figures don’t add up to 100%:

That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

Update: Mike Arauz has created a different and useful view of the data.

Recruitment consultants find digital skills in short supply within PR industry
PR recruitment agency Major Players last week told PRWeek that there is a shortfall in candidates with a general understanding of social media. After analyzing a sample of 4,500 CVs from the past two years, only:

• 6% referenced social media
• 9% mentioned Twitter
• 2% talked about blogging
• 13% included ‘Facebook’ – although in some this was merely highlighted in the ‘interests’ section

This stands in fairly stark contrast to the current need for digital skills in the industry “with around 33 per cent of recruitment searches by employers being for digital and social media expertise, while a further 28 per cent require a general understanding of social media, generally in consumer roles.”

Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder
The rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco recently, he suggested that the rise of social media reflected the changing attitudes of ordinary people online. Though a great number of people are choosing to share more information online, the degree to which ‘privacy is no longer a social norm’ is debatable.  Check out the full article in the Guardian, which sums up Facebook’s moves in recent to bring more information into the public domain, and the adverse reactions that followed.

Social Media and the Haiti crisis
Following last week’s tragic earthquake in Haiti, social media played a significant role in raising awareness and getting aid donations from individuals across the world. Below are a few impressive ways in which web and mobile technology have been deployed in the past week to bring the tragedy to light.

• Photos posted on Twitter shortly after the devastating 7.0 quake swept across the web causing an outpouring of support
• Twitter and Facebook users respond to Haiti crisis helping raise $35m in donations in 48 hours for the the American Red Cross
• Google worked with satellite imaging company GeoEye to make available accurate aerial imagery to help humanitarian aid get where it needs to be most
• Apple created an iTunes donation page [iTunes link] to allow users to donate money to the Red Cross directly from iTunes.

If you haven’t already done so, you can donate to relief efforts via UNICEF or the International Committee of the Red Cross.

PostRank Top Blogs of 2009
PostRank last week announced their list of the most engaged, most influential and ‘biggest mover and shaker’ blogs of the last year.

To create the list, they gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, (e.g. Twitter, Digg, Delicious) and ranked 15,725 blogs in 491 topics. Check out the Top Blogs of 2009 here. Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009.

Yelp takes on Foursquare with new iPhone check-ins
In the latest version of its iPhone App, Yelp has added the ability for users to “check-in” and share their location with friends, similar to what you can do on services like Foursquare. Unlike Foursquare though, users don’t compete to become the only mayor of a single location, but can become ‘regulars.’ We wonder whether removing the ‘game’ element will affect user uptake and the incentive to check in. That said, Yelp have an existing userbase of about 1.25 million people per month. Some key features include:

• Friends can see a list of all of your check-ins
• You can bring up a map of nearby check-ins
• Post your check-ins on Twitter
• Businesses can offer promotions and discounts to their regulars