Tuenti switches on local for a location-based future
Spanish social networking site Tuenti, often referred to as the Facebook of Spain, has introduced a location-based feature called Tuenti Places (reads “Tuenti Sitios” in Spanish) allowing users to “add any local place, interact with it, share it with friends, upload images and write reviews.” Each Tuenti place (e.g. bars, clubs, restaurants) will have it’s own unique space for user interaction so unlike Facebook pages, there won’t be any duplicates.

According to TechCrunch, this is a very different strategy from the likes of Gowalla, Yelp, Foursquare or Spain’s 11870 who’ve built a community on top of local:

Tuenti first built a massive and incredibly segmented community and now they’re introducing local, which in itself is social by nature, but they can build in local by crowdsourcing their 8 million active users who are already sharing places…. Overnight Tuenti promises to get thousands of very dynamic local business pages and will shortly introduce new features such as Foursquare-like check-ins.

With everyone expecting Facebook to introduce location very soon, it will be interesting to see how Tuenti’s location-based feature fares.

Middle-aged travellers leading travel social media revolution
The Social Travel Report by independent media agency Total Media, claims that the holiday industry is facing a social media revolution and that middle age travellers are shaping consumer views of the best hotels and holiday destinations. Based on a sample of 1,375 people, the report found what many people have long suspected:

Holiday reviews written by strangers on independent websites such as TripAdvisor, search results on Google and word-of-mouth advice from family and colleagues are more influential than brochures, advertising, media reviews and advice from travel agents.

Some of the highlights:

• Almost half of travellers over 45 are using websites to recommend or warn fellow travellers by posting a review
• 25% of British travellers say that online reviews by strangers help determine their travel plans
• Almost 70% of consumers use the internet to book their holidays
• Expedia was the leading online resource for consumers planning long trips (more than five nights) with 25%, followed by Tripadvisor and lastminute.com with 22%

The Social Media Bubble
Last week Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, advanced a hypothesis in the Harvard Business Review:

Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

It makes for an interesting read, and he goes supports his hypothesis by arguing that hate, exclusion and disempowerment are flourishing online, whereas there is no greater trust or a rise in value of relationships.

This created quite a stir, and invited about 188 comments from readers and almost 50 blogs in response.  Two noteworthy blog posts responses came from Bud Caddell over on What Consumes Me and a lengthy post on Stowe Boyd and the /messengers.

In all, Umair’s argument about the devaluation of relationships because of social media is fairly grand one not necessarily supported empirically anywhere within his post.  That said, it’s certainly refreshing (and desirable) to have the social media industry’s thinking about online relationships tested every now and again.

Earth Hour 2010, the global event when people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour at 8.30pm local time is coming up again this Saturday, 27th March.

We’re working with the WWF to get the word out to bloggers to start conversations about Earth Hour, encourage people to sign-up to show their support and send a clear message to the world’s governments that climate change needs to be addressed urgently.

Hopefully, by working together we can top last year’s awesome achievements which saw hundreds of millions of people across 3,000 cities and towns in 83 countries participate.

If you have a blog, or a Twitter account or are on Facebook it would be fantastic if you could blog about Earth Hour and even better if you could ask your readers, friends, families, colleagues to get involved too.

If you’re keen to do more, WWF have come up with a number of online resources for you to use, including:

• The all new Earth Hour UK & Ireland county signup challenge which pits county against county to see which part of the British Isles has the most people signed up
• A nifty light-switch widget for your blog (see this in action at the top-right hand-side of our blog)
• Embeddable YouTube videos

And if none of those takes your fancy then there are loads of other ways to show your support and take part.

Every contribution, no matter how small you think it might be (even re-tweeting this post would help!), is important, so please help us and show your support. Essentially, the more signups we get, the more we can show governments around the world how seriously their people now consider global warming to be, and how loud their voice is on this urgent issue.

Jordan is off skiing down the side of a slope right now, so I’m taking over Mashup duties for today. Hope you’re all in fine fettle.

Conservatives web campaign backfires

Anatomy of a hashtag: #cashgordon by Meg Pickard

The Conservative party scored an own goal today with a website attacking Gordon Brown’s links to the Unite union. Dubbed ‘Cash Gordon’, the site encouraged users to gain action points by reading, donating or Tweeting about the campaign. However the site was built using the same template that’s been used by right-wing U.S. lobbyists for a number of campaigns including; the scuppering of U.S. healthcare reform, the banning of homosexuals in the armed forces and attacks against carbon trading legislation. In addition, the tweets Cash-Gordon.com was encouraging supporters to generate and displaying on the site weren’t moderated and allowed Javascript, leading to much profanity and many hilariously mocking tweets. At the time of writing #cashgordon is the second largest trending topic in the UK and the site’s been taken down.

Facebook ousts Google as the most visited site in the US
Hitwise’s story that Facebook.com surpassed Google.com in visits for a whole week last week was deemed big enough to be picked up by mainstream media. Although Facebook is still a long way off overtaking Google here in the UK, the battle in traffic numbers for these two internet titans reflect what’s already happened down under in Australia with the social media sector overtaking search engines, before swallowing all of planet earth (possibly). Pull is slowly turning to Push. Social media FTW!

Nestlé runs into a spot of bother
Greenpeace launched its latest campaign last week with the aim of shocking the general public (not me, I thought those Orang-utan fingers looked lovely – hmm, yummy) into taking action against Nestlé for using palm oil from non-sustainable sources. They got off to a flying start by rather cleverly turning the Kit Kat logo into something rather different as well as doing their own rather grisly version of a Kit Kat ad. Whoever was running Nestle’s social media channels managed to add an articulated lorry load of fuel to Greenpeace’s little campfire by first demanding YouTube take down the spoof ad from their service for breach of copyright, before responding rather irately to criticism being left on their Facebook fan page. It appears they now realise the error of their ways and are now taking steps to rectify it.

Social fans are more likely to buy
Although Nestlé would probably argue these findings given its experiences in the past week, it appears that consumers that are friends and followers of a brand online are more likely to purchase from that brand. According to an article on eMarketer based on findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate: “60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly eight in 10″. However this dovetails nicely with the fact that the reason those consumers followed the brand in the first place was that they were customers already (49%) and wanted to show support (42%).

STOP PRESS! Majority of Chatroutlette users are MEN! (and big dirty pervs)
TechCrunch recently conducted their own analytics study into Chatroulette and it’s users, here are some of the highlights:

• About half of all Chatroulette spins connects you with someone from the USA. The next most likely country is France at 15%.
• Of the spins showing a single person, 89% were male and 11% were female.
• 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. 1 in 3 females appear as part of such a group. That number is 1 in 12 for males.
• 1 in 8 spins yield something R-rated (or worse)
• You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity

The UK also dominates the pervert rankings with a concentration rate of 22%. This won’t be news to any of you who’ve spent more than 5 minutes looking at Blighty on Chatroulette map.

Facebook to roll out location based service
Staying with TechCrunch, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of rolling out it’s own location-based feature to possibly rival that of FourSquare’s. This feature would be based around the use of QR codes (no, we haven’t given up on those yet) which businesses could print out and display in-store for people to check in manually (an issue which is becoming more and more tiresome for folk). More details are likely to be unveiled at it’s f8 conference in May.

Have a lovely week.

Ottavio Nava, Stefano Maggi, Gabriele Cucinella – Managing Partners, We Are Social Italy

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed the Italian flag that’s appeared today at the top right hand side of our site. This time, unlike the German flag, it signifies more than just a translated version of our website.

About six months ago we were lucky enough to be approached by three charming Italian gentlemen – Stefano Maggi (@stefanomaggi), Gabriele Cucinella (@gabcuc) and Ottavio Nava (@ottavionava) – who were working at Agency.com in Milan, where Stefano was head of Experience Planning and Gabriele and Ottavio led their social media efforts. They liked what we were doing with We Are Social in the UK, and wanted to know if we had any plans in Italy. In depth discussions ensued which revealed, amongst other things, that:

1. we shared a common view of how brands can and should be using social media
2. they shared our love for beer
3. Milan is only a short distance from the alps, and they were keen snowboarders too

Well, what can we say other than one thing led to another. So, in less than two years after launching in the UK, and less than three months after launching We Are Social France, Nathan, Sandrine and I are very happy to announce the launch of We Are Social Italy with our third European office in Milan.

It goes without saying that with offices in London, Paris and now Milan, we now have a hugely increased capacity for international campaigns and the ability to advise our clients on their strategy across Europe. And just as importantly, we’re absolutely chuffed to have Stefano, Gabriele and Ottavio on board. With their help and input, it feels like we’re poised to take We Are Social to the next level.

You can see Ottavio, Stefano and Gabriele and in the photo above (I deliberately picked the cheesiest photo they sent over, which I’m sure they’ll be thanking me for shortly) and you can say ‘ciao’ to them yourselves over on their inaugural post on the We Are Social Italy blog or on the We Are Social Italy Twitter account.

Today’s Monday Mashup coming at you with the help of Melina Hägglund. Let’s get to it.

Hot off the press: Twitter announces @anywhere platform
In his keynote at the South by Southwest festival in Austin today, Evan William (@ev) has announced a new platform, called @Anywhere:

The service will add a range of functionality, such as allowing users to login to third-party websites using their Twitter account – similar to Facebook Connect – and to follow a columnist on Twitter, for example, by clicking on their byline.

Over on the official Twitter blog, they describe the move as adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web:

Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com… Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be launching @anywhere with several major websites, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

CNN says Facebook is its biggest rival
Although Fox News is currently beating CNN as the most-watched cable news network in the US, CNN’s president Jonathan Klein considers its main challengers not to be rival TV news stations, but social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Speaking at the 2010 Media Summit in New York, Klein said:

I’m more worried about the 500m people on Facebook versus the 2m on Fox. The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge.

Though the average number of primetime viewers has shrunk for CNN over the years, they maintain a very strong online presence.

With recent data from Hitwise showing that Facebook is the fourth-biggest source of US traffic to news sites (behind Google, MSN and Yahoo!), it’s easy its easy to see why Facebook might be keeping CNN up at night.

Twitter, Facebook and Geolocation
The big thing at SXSW this year has been geolocation, and sure enough, Twitter rolled out their geolocation function on twitter.com ahead of this year’s conference. While it’s been possible to access geolocation through Twitter’s API since November last year, only now is it being integrated into Twitter.com for tweets tagged with a location. That said, the integration doesn’t appear to have lasted too long, and it looks like Twitter has just turned off the location functionality. Hopefully we will see it back up again soon.

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction. An anonymous source said to be involved in their geolocation project claims that the functionality will be launched at f8, Facebooks’ yearly developer conference.  An update to Facebook’s privacy policy late last year, seems to support this claim:

When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.

According to the source, Facebook is not out to compete with services like Foursquare or Gowalla, but with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. As ever, we’ll be watching this closely.

Facebook vs. The Daily Mail
“The Daily Mail and Facebook are at war, with new media accused of failing to protect children – and old media in the dock for shoddy journalism”. So read the opening paragraph written by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC where he recapped a high profile battle between one of Britain’s most influential daily newspapers and the world’s most popular social network.

Last week The Daily Mail featured a ‘ghosted’ article by a child-protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas with the headline “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.” In the article, it was claimed that Williams-Thomas attracted sexually motivated messages from series of men when he posed as a teenager on Facebook.

The only problem, however, was that this experiment was not actually conducted on Facebook at all but another unnamed social networking site.

The Daily Mail has since amended the web article, and made a rare concession by printing an apology on page 4 of the paper. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will take legal action for the “false and defamatory statements in the article”, which it had threatened to do when this story first broke.

Sky creates first head of social media position
In a move that demonstrates its social media savvy, Britain’s biggest spender on digital advertsing, Sky, has announced that it is seeking its first head of social media in its marketing team.

The lucky person who steps into the job will be responsible for all social media activity in its brand marketing department and encouraging audience engagement. A Sky spokesman said: “The aim of this position is to offer an in-house specialist to develop digital strategies alongside above-the-line planning”.

At 12:30pm tomorrow, in Austin, Texas, I’m meant to be giving a talk entitled ‘Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media’ at SXSW:

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures.

Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

I’m very honoured to get a speaking slot. The SXSW organisers whittled down over 2300 applications to just 300 based on public votes (if you were one of those that voted – thank you!) and their own judging criteria.

The trouble is, I’m not going to be there. Despite some of our friends taking the whole company to SXSW, with the speed things are moving here in Europe for We Are Social, right now I simply can’t afford five days away from the office.

Thankfully, our friend Peter Bihr (@thewavingcat), one of Germany’s leading social media thinkers, has agreed to step into the breach and lead the talk, but he’s not had much time to prepare. So, we need you your help – I’m going to talk below about what I was planning to cover, but please chip-in in the comments if you have any insights to add of your own. Peter’s relying on you!

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media
With over 10 pan-European social media campaigns under our belt, we feel like we’ve got a handle on the nuances of European social media, but it’s very hard to sum-up in a few words. Let’s take things step by step.

For those needing to get up to speed, Forrester’s social technographics profile tool is a good place to start. To save you the trouble of playing around with all the drop-downs, here’s a presentation I put together based on the data from it:

As you’ll see, there’s a lot of variation between age groups in each country, with different generations in different places using social media in different ways. Germany really does seem to be lagging behind, with the Netherlands and Sweden leading the way.

However, the data doesn’t support the deliberately provocative proposition in my preamble that “Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media”. Well, Forrester is only one source of data, and others paint a different picture.

Nielsen’s ‘Global Faces and Networked Places’ report from March last year showed Spain, Italy and the UK ahead of the US in terms of social media usage:

And others often show similar findings. Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker Wave 3 showed the vast majority of Europe ahead of the US in terms of blog readership (page 18), people starting their own blog (page 22) and membership of social networks (page 36). Sysomos has shown that London is the captial of Twitter (in fact, it could be argued it’s the social media captial of the world), and more recent data from Neilsen shows that people in the UK and Italy spend more time on social networks each month than those in the US:

Aside from the detailed look at European social media usage that the Forrester data provides, there are other reports worth looking at. Our friend Tom Smith of Trendstream put this really useful deck together based on his first round of Global Web Index data:

And IAB Europe’s Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected data is really useful when trying to understand what’s happening in some of Europe’s regions and smaller countries. Here’s a summary of their findings:

So far, I’ve concentrated on European social media usage and behavior, but it’s worth remembering that Europe has a rich landscape of social media services, despite Facebook’s merciless and continuing rise to world domination.

The FT recently carried an article by Maija Palmer that’s essential reading if you want to understand this landscape – ‘A future alongside Facebook’, looking at the fate of services like Skyrock in France, StudiVZ in Germany and Tuenti in Spain now they’ve been eclipsed by Facebook. Meanwhile it seems that Hyves in the Netherlands, Vkontakte in Russia, nasza-klasa.pl in Poland (which famously was more popular that Twitter in the UK this time last year), Lidé in the Czech Republic and iWiW in Hungary are holding their own against Facebook in their respective markets.

So where does that leave us? Europe is a complex and varied continent, and it’s no surprise to find that its social media landscape matches this. From our pan-European campaign experience, we know it’s important to treat each country differently, and we always make sure we either have a native of each country working on the team in London or Paris, or we work closely with local partners. Despite the varied uptake and usage of social media in different countries, we’ve found if we respect the local social media culture, it’s possible to run successful social media campaigns in any market in Europe.

Update September 2010 – Another nice presentation on European social media trends from Trendstream’s Tom Smith:

Update January 2011 – Twitter usage in Europe.

Very nicely timed with the announcement by CNN’s President that he’s more worried about social networks than FOX, the first video installment of a unique Facebook documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe has been released.

Goa Hippy Tribe is using Facebook in a number of ways: as subject matter (in particular the re-connection of the eponymous Goan Hippies via the social network); in part for research, production and content, and also as a platform for marketing and distribution.

Whilst the story behind the film itself highlights the role that networks such as Facebook play in creating new stories for documentary to cover, what’s really interesting is the way Facebook is being used to shape the content and format of the work.

The filmmaker, Darius Devas, has been interacting with the community of people who were part of the scene in Goa as he makes the film, not only shaping the way the film evolves, but building a community that is a part of the filmmaking process.

Interviews and other items of ‘micro-content’ have been posted over time, sparking conversations, building shared connections between the audience and involving everyone in the journey of the filmmaker and the film. There’s even a lively discussion on a separate Goa Hippy Tribe Group page considering the role of Facebook as an enabler, versus the inevitable privacy concerns when old photos and stories are made public.

This kind of collaboration would not previously have been possible, and it’s a particularly effective way of increasing the emotional involvement of the audience, who will be more likely to share links and recommend the film to their friends, especially as Facebook provides the means to easily do so.

All of this starts to change the way we think about broadcast. This project has an obvious community interested in the subject, but there are just as many niche audiences outside of hippies in Goa. As CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein puts it: “The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.” As these “trusted sources” – our friends – become our audience(s), and we involve them the narrative of our own status updates, the relevance and role of the one-way broadcast media comes into question.

Arto Joensuu, Head of Digital Marketing at Nokia, and the rest of his search & social team are spreading the message that conversations are the new conversion across Nokia and beyond:

Smart brands embrace the notion of co-creating social practices with customers and listen carefully to when these come to life in specific usage contexts of a particular product. These conversational conversions are the future for brand success as they are fueled through advocacy. Conversations are thus the new conversion metric smart brands will start to measure.

BitchBuzz.com founder calls for rethink of blogger relations

PR Week’s video podcast sparked some debate last week on the state of blogger relations in the UK, when Cate Sevilla, founding editor of BitchBuzz.com, told the publication that she wanted PR professionals and bloggers to hold a serious discussion, rather than simply ranting about one another all the time.

It seems that (some) PR practitioners continue to miss the mark when outreaching to bloggers, and have been accused of bad pitches, not doing their research, not reading the target blog, or generally not ‘getting’ bloggers in some cases.

The call for honest and professional feedback by Sevilla is an important one, in order for the industry and this debate to move forward. “Professional bloggers and PROs need each other, so instead of ranting about one another on Twitter, we need to have a serious discussion.”

Bing’s Facebook Page Gets 400,000 New Fans in a Day Through Ad Offer in Farmville
Microsoft ran an advertising offer for Bing within Zynga’s hit game FarmVille, which according to Inside Facebook, netted Bing over 400,000 new fans to their Fan Page in a single day.

Gamers who became a fan of Bing on Facebook earned 3 Farm Cash (the virtual currency used in the game) and caused the page’s popularity to skyrocket from 100,000 to more than 500,000 fans in 24 hours. For those unfamiliar with FarmVille, the Facebook game has over 83.1 million monthly active users, and 28.7 million daily active users according to AppData.

To be sure, the tactic was wildly successful but has attracted criticism from some. Griffin Farley points out:

[the success of the incentive was] very impressive but what is the value of the fan that was bought? Sure the cash was only virtual money but don’t you want true advocates in a Facebook community? I don’t want to have to pay my loyal fans every time I want to engage the community. I want fans that want to be fans of a brand or a branded movement for the sure pleasure of being involved with a bigger community of people.

The Bing Fan Page now has over 592,000 fans. It will be interesting to see what they do with them.

UK ad industry to extend self-regulatory remit to social media
Today it was announced that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are extending their self-regulatory rules for non-broadcast media (known as the ‘CAP Code’) to ensure that: “marketing communications on advertisers’ own websites and other non paid-for space online, such as in social media, comes within the scope of the code.”

As Mark Sweeney from the Guardian puts it: “the extension to the ad code will ensure that all online marketing will have to be responsible, legal, honest and truthful under the same regulations as, say, press and poster ads.

The new rules are expected to come into force during the third quarter of this year and have the backing of the whole advertising ecosystem (including us!).

Facebook and Twitter mobile users soar according to comScore
Access to social networks via mobile phone has increased rapidly in the last year, according to new research from comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

Much of the growth of mobile social networking has been driven by smartphone users, as better functionality enables millions to access social networking sites via a mobile browser or dedicated apps.