Facebook unveils Open Graph protocol
At last week’s f8 developer’s conference, Facebook unveiled the next stage of their platform’s evolution, the Open Graph protocol. Described as “Web 3.0”, “winning the Internet”, “advancing the semantic web” or “a great crusade of colonization” depending on which pundit you’ve been reading.

As Stefano detailed so well here last week, the Open Graph effectively extends Facebook to any page on the web. Up until now external tools on a website typically extended to social bookmarking or sharing via services like Buzz, but by accessing Facebook’s vast collection of social interaction data, you can find out who else in your friend group likes the site, and what else they read and like on the site, thus turning Facebook into a mediator of information all over the web.

Already we’re seeing interesting implementations of the protocol come up, such as likebutton.me – a site that tracks what your friends have been liking on popular sites such as YouTube, CNN and Techcrunch. And we wouldn’t want We Are Social’s fans to miss out on the action either – which is why you can now find Facebook like buttons on the bottom of all our posts (including this one).

Every time Facebook releases a new feature there is an inevitable privacy backlash, usually the domain of a few choice experts, but it’s interesting to note that this is extending into the wider Facebook audience as well. A survey out today details how Facebook users are increasingly aware of the privacy implications of the site, with 77% (of an admittedly small sample) having used the site’s privacy tools to customise their privacy options. Could the new Open Graph become hamstrung as more users become privacy aware and opt-out?

It’s not just Facebook

While Facebook makes it all about conquering the web, location-based services are having a flying start in conquering meatspace. This week saw Foursquare hit a million users just over a year since it launched (even Arnold Schwarzenegger is on it). It took Twitter two years to do the same, and as sure as night follows day, this has meant Foursquare becoming the latest startup to be christened “the new Twitter” (seriously guys, can we get this decided once and for all, so the rest of us can get back to enjoying ourselves?).

Pointless analogies aside, the growth of Foursquare and its competitor Gowalla come under more and more scrutiny. This infographic from Mashable shows an interesting trend – Foursquare has far outpaced Gowalla in the popularity stakes since SXSW in terms of mentions, but the feedback on Gowalla is more positive and less negative. As the two continue to slug it out we could be witnessing one of the best case studies possible in whether sheer numbers or member affection is key to a vibrant and profitable social network.

Blogging – for the young and self-expressive
With all the talk of Web 3.0 it can be easy to dismiss blogging as “so 2004″. Yet new research from eMarketer show that the biggest age group amongst those who blog is 18-25; 40.4% of those who write a blog compared to 28.1% from the much larger 26-42 age group. More tellingly, the reasons given were primarily for self-expression rather than making money:

Bloggers of all ages polled by BlogHer and iVillage overwhelmingly blogged for pleasure, with self-expression the No. 1 reason, followed by “fun.” One-half of bloggers wanted to give advice, and fewer than one-third hoped to earn money with their efforts.

A lesson there for anybody wishing to engage with bloggers – understand what drives them to write and engage with their topic rather than consider them as the same as paid-for writers.

#socialmediasfault
As the election campaign in the UK grinds on, the past week saw an interesting divergence in how old and social media have been treating the leaders. After what most commentators have regarded as a strong performance in the new TV debates, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has been heavily criticised in the mainstream press – so much so even Conservative bloggers such as Iain Dale voiced their concern. Twitter had different ideas, though. The hashtag, #nickcleggsfault, coined off-handedly by Justin McKeating, spread like wildfire as Twitterers all over the UK came up with ever-more sarcastic and nonsensical things to “blame” on Nick Clegg as a parody of the media backlash. While it’s clear this election won’t just be won on social media, it’s a clear sign of the disconnect between the traditional and new media – and this is an issue that will last long beyond the election.

Photo CC by linh_rom

At the end of another momentous week here at We Are Social, hot on the heels of Paris and Milan, I’m very happy to introduce the newest members of We Are Social: Julian and Heather in our brand new Sydney office.

Robin and I are really pleased to have such high calibre people on board to kick things off in Australia. We’re looking forward to developing a a strong local offering, as well as enhancing our abilities to deliver on a global and regional basis.

Combining clever social media thinking with solid digital, media and editorial backgrounds, both Julian and Heather make great additions to the fantastic group of people we’ve brought together. And as I write this, in true We Are Social style, celebrations are continuing well into the early hours over in Sydney.

Welcome to the team Heather and Julian, and have a great Anzac Day long weekend.

On Wednesday, during the ‘F8′ conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced a platform that will revolutionise our on-line experience.

It’s called ‘Open Graph’, releasing the Facebook experience from the bounds of Facebook.com and activating it in any digital context.

From now on, everyone who visits a site that implements the technology will be able to interact via Facebook without accessing Facebook’s site.

A practical example?

• You read an article on CNN.com
• Without needing to login or ‘connect’
• I see how many friends liked the article
• I click the ‘Recommend’ icon inside CNN.com (sites can either use ‘like’ or recommend’, the result is the same)
• The article is recommended to my friends

Any website can implement Facebook Open Graph to offer people a completely integrated experience with the social network and the three kinds of data it provides:

• User identity
• Connections
• Content

Facebook Open Graph is – in fact – “the portable user”: it makes the whole web social, part of the Facebook ecosystem.

What can we expect for the future?

• Digital experiences will be personalised and integrated with each other;
• Facebook.com won’t be the only Facebook destination and – in the long term – it will lose relative relevance because it will be subsumed within Facebook as an ecosystem;

Facebook Open Graph is an unprecedented opportunity for brands to socialise and customise their digital experiences.

And what about privacy?
Is this another nail in the coffin of the very concept of privacy? In the future will we really share everything? Ultimately people will be the ones to decide what they want to share and with whom. But now it will be not only what happens on Facebook.com, but everything happening outside it too. Facebook is trying – after problems in the past – to manage this issue in a transparent way. And Open Graph shares less data compared to the ‘old’ Facebook Connect, because it shares only what’s strictly necessary. However, it’s too early to tell how people will ultimately react.

What do you think? Do you see a risk or an opportunity for people in the long term, once everyone has understood the real impact in terms of privacy? What opportunities can you see for Facebook Open Graph?

As our new readers arriving via Mumbrella, B&T, Digital Media, wearesocial.com.au & @wearesocialau will know already, today we’re proud to announce the launch of We Are Social Australia.

Allow me to introduce Julian (julianward) the Managing Director, and myself, Heather (likeomg) the Strategy Director of We Are Social here in Sydney. We’re looking forward to meeting you and having a chat about what’s happening in social media in Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and the rest of the world.

Although the last few months have been busy with plenty of early morning and late night Skype calls between Sydney and London (and I’m certain there will be many more to come), the genesis of Sydney office was, appropriately enough, based in social media.

I first met Nathan at Twestival last year, here in Sydney, when We Are Social first came on my radar. From then I’ve been watching with interest and a certain amount of jealousy as the team did amazing work in Europe… and now I’m lucky enough to be a part of that team. That’s pretty exciting stuff, if you ask me.

Julian met Nathan during his time in London, and through many social occasions become friends. Yet it was social media that kept them connected, personally and professionally, when Julian moved back to Australia.

It’s a unique country we live in; we are geographically isolated, yet now so incredibly connected to the rest of the world – and each other. There are plenty of theories about why Australians have adopted platforms such as Facebook more avidly than other countries, but really the answer is pretty simple: we are social.

Twitter unveils ‘promoted tweets’ ad plan
Last week Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, announced a new advertising platform for Twitter that serves up ‘promoted tweets’ written by advertisers which will appear when people search on the site.

Users will see sponsored tweets at the top of some Twitter search pages, which will be an ordinary tweet from the brand clearly labelled “Promoted” to distinguish paid-for tweets from normal ones.

This is another important move by Twitter in defining its business model, but has raised a few questions about what promoted tweets will mean for the user experience? Anticipating this, Stone has said said in a blog post:

Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Twitter have partnered with Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America during the first phase of the Promoted Tweets roll-out. Over on Mashable, Virgin America’s Vice President of Marketing, Porter Gale, has gone into detail about company’s strategy around Promoted Tweets and what users can expect from them.

Is ‘free’ finally falling out of favour?
Online social networking platform Ning will be phasing out its free service in favour of offering a premium service only to paying customers, saying “existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.”

The news follows the announcement last month of the resignation of Gina Bianchini, Ning’s CEO, and more recently that the company is in the process of laying off 40% of its staff.

Of the wider implications of this development on the Freemium model on the web, Patricio Robles of eConsultancy had this to say:

Make no doubt about it: Ning’s move is significant. That’s not because the company itself was ever really important. It was never Facebook or MySpace, for instance. But it was a Silicon Valley poster child for Web 2.0 and the social networking craze… the fact that it was giving away the farm for free was always promoted as a positive.

Does Ning’s fall from grace signal a storm brewing for other free web services?

McDonalds signs up social media chief
McDonalds has joined the ranks of Ford, Comcast, Coca-Cola, Dell and Starbucks to become the next major brand to have to have someone in charge of social media “100% of the time, rather than someone who’s got a day job on top of a day job”.

Rick Wion has been named McDonald’s head of social media, charged with using social media to build the business, manage customer care and build up their blogger outreach programme to groups ‘like mommy bloggers’.

Twitter’s night as record numbers tweet during first leader debate
Approximately 184,396 tweets were sent over the course of the UK’s first televised leader debate last Thursday 15 April as citizens took to web to interact with one another as the event unfolded on TV screens across the country. Some other highlights:

• 29.06 – the approximate number of tweets sent per second
• 36,483 – the total number of users who Tweeted during the debate
• The Democracy UK Facebook page attracted 46,000 fans
• Live blogging took place on the BBC, The Guardian, The FT, The Telegraph, as well as political blogs like Labourlist and Conservativehome

It was already being dubbed the ‘internet election’ before it had even begun, so it will be interesting to see how activity on the web grows as we near election day, and the next leader’s debate scheduled for Thursday 22 April.

$3.60 Facebook Fan Valuation Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
According to research from social networking specialist Vitrue, Facebook fans are worth $3.60 each in media value for brands.  Vitrue developed the Fan valuation to attribute a value for highly targeted impressions, which is just what brands get whenever they post to their wall on Facebook. Vitrue based their research on Fan Page data from its clients, for which they manage over 45 million fans.

It’s a step in the right direction in determining value of social media engagement for brands, beyond simply racking up a large number of fans or followers. Indeed, with additional methods of social engagement such as clicks, comments, likes, plays and shares, brands that actively engage with their fans stand to earn far more value than the estimates above.

In terms of stepping-up to the plate and tackling social media head-on, it’s fair to say, the PR industry has broadly lagged behind the wider digital, marketing and advertising sectors. Robin, our MD, sits on the IAB‘s social media council which has been in place for almost two years, and even the old-school IPA launched IPA Social six months ago.

The PR industry’s tardyness in waking up to social media is something Robin talked about last year and I addressed again my inaugural blog post when I joined We Are Social.

So I’m really pleased to be able to say that it seems the alarm clock has gone off for the industry, with its leading trade body, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), setting up an Advisory Panel to deal with social media and it’s impact on the PR industry.

I’m even more pleased to be able to say I’ve been asked to sit on the panel, along with a host of other luminaries, including:

• Daljit Bhurji, MD, Diffusion (@Daljit_Bhurji)
• Mark Borkowski, MD, Borkowski (@MarkBorkowski)
• Rob Brown, MD, Staniforth (@robbrown)
• Stuart Bruce, MD, Wolfstar (@stuartbruce)
• Dominic Burch, head of corporate comms, Asda (@dom_asdaPR)
• Gemma Griffiths, client director, Racepoint (@GemGriff)
• Katy Howell, MD, Immediate Future (@katyhowell)
• Marshall Manson, director of digital strategy, Edelman (@marshallmanson)
• Becky McMichael, head of corporate & technology, Ruder Finn (@bmcmichael)
• Danny Rogers, editor, PRWeek (@dannyrogers2001)
• Julio Romo, PR and communications consultant, Twofourseven (@twofourseven)
• Philip Sheldrake, partner, Influence Crowd (@sheldrake)
• Stephen Waddington, MD, Speed Communications (@wadds)
• Robin Wilson, director digital PR & social media, McCann Erickson (@robin1966)

I think it’s fair to say that the CIPR has gathered together some of the PR industry’s leading thinkers on social media and I definitely look forward to working with friends, ex-colleagues and new contacts to help address and shape the Institute’s policy guidance, education and training.

While the announcement has been largely well-received on Twitter a few leading PR bloggers have offered up more contextual opinions, with one PR academic suggesting that while overall the panel is a step in the right direction, ultimately it’s, “too little, and… rather too late”. Industry trade magazine, PR Week, has also covered the announcement.

As someone that has been pushing the CIPR towards greater engagement with online and social media since 2006, I say, better late than never.

When it comes to tackling some of the wider challenges social media has brought to the industry, such as the oft-debated issue of social media measurement or of ethical best practice, we’re looking forward to sharing our specialist expertise.

AOL to sell or shut Bebo
AOL have announced their intention to sell or shut down social networking site Bebo in the forthcoming tax year. Bebo cost AOL a hefty US$850m when they bought them two years ago, and looked set to overtake a flagging MySpace, but both ended up being overtaken and overwhelmed by Facebook; most crucially, Bebo has struggled to gain any sort of foothold in the United States. Nevertheless, Bebo still remains relatively popular in the UK – although no longer top dog, it’s still the UK’s fourth most popular social site, ahead of fifth-placed MySpace. With talk of it being a tax write-off, if Bebo is to be closed, it will be interesting to see where its UK and Ireland users end up flocking to; alternatively, if it is to kept alive, will it end up becoming a regional niche network like Orkut in Brazil or Tuenti in Spain?

Twitter make a stake for the mainstream
While Bebo flounders, Twitter has been going from strength to strength and has been making a more concerted pitch to expand into the mainstream of late. There are rumours of an overhauled redesign, with a purported mission to make the site more elegant and attractive for newer users. Additionally, they’ve acquired the rights to Tweetie, one of the most popular and usable paid-for Twitter apps for iPhone, with the intention of rebranding it ‘Twitter for iPhone’. Perhaps surprisingly, there has not been until now an official Twitter app for iPhone, but Tweetie’s acquisition brings it level with MySpace and Facebook’s free apps.

Foursquare clamps down on cheats
Foursquare is rapidly emerging as one of the most popular social location services – yet up until now it’s been remarkably easy to cheat at it. However now Foursquare have announced a “cheater code” to clamp down on nefarious activity. All check-ins are now double-checked via GPS before Foursquare will accept them – a hit in usability terms if you’re in an area with poor coverage, but the tradeoff is a better quality of data. And this is timely given Foursquare’s rapidly-growing commercial deals, which rely on dependable data to avoid fraud; today the FT announced a hookup with Foursquare, with check- ins around several leading business schools allowing students access to premium subscriptions.

UTweet – useless or brilliant?
Uniqlo’s new UTweet application was much the talk of social media marketing world this week; given a username or hashtag, it would create a funky animated visualisations of the conversations about the respective user or topic. As delightful as it was to watch, there was also a counter-reaction that it was not particularly engaging, conversational or useful. Certainly, Uniqlo aren’t using their userbase to help shape or improve their brand (compare and contrast, say, the ongoing Nokia Designed by Community project), they’ve certainly created a bit of quick, pleasant light-hearted buzz about the brand. But you can only keep successful on this path if you’re continually inventive and creative, and even one slip could risk you ending up with a jaded or bored reaction.

#debill becomes #deact
The Digital Economy Act was signed into law last week despite a wide-ranging and strong consensus against the bill (as charted by Simon in his post last week). The issues raised remain though, and one of the bill’s leading opponents, Tom Watson MP, is now busy building a list of digital pledges to campaign for election on and is inviting suggestions and refinements over on uservoice.

Having picked up Silver for our Marmarati campaign for Unilever in the Creative in Social Media category at the IAB Creative Showcase Grand Prix a couple of weeks ago, we seem to be on a bit of a roll.

Last night Nathan and I were proud to be representing We Are Social at the Revolution awards, where we ended up receiving ‘highly commended’ accolades both for our Little break, Big difference campaign for Eurostar in the Leisure & Travel category and for We Are Social itself in the best digital start-up category (Spotify took top honours in a shocking decision by the judges ).

We are, of course, pretty chuffed about this, and would like to say thank you to everyone that has helped us get to where we are today, especially all of the team here and our clients, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Two weeks ago I joined about 200 people standing outside Parliament demanding that the controversial Digital Economy Bill get a democratically fair debate rather than rushed into law without scrutiny during the pre-election process known as the Wash Up.

The Digital Economy Bill has been drafted largely by corporate content providers attempting to protect their industrial business models and includes measures to disconnect alleged copyright infringers without any judicial oversight. Other impacts include forcing open wifi providers, such as cafes, bars, libraries, etc, to close their networks or face crippling penalties if someone downloads copyrighted material. The Bill also gives unprecedented powers to the Government and State to block and censor websites it (or big business) doesn’t like and take over domain names where it sees fit.

In short, the Bill will make the UK’s Internet less free than China‘s and stifle innovation, creativity and economic growth.

On Tuesday afternoon and last night the campaign for and against (but mainly against) the Bill reached its climax as Parliament gave it its second an third readings in the House of Commons. Both the debate itself and the past few weeks of vociferous campaign activity has offered a fascinating case study of what a digitally empowered politics looks like and might even give us a glimpse of what we can expect to see after the General Election in terms of online political campaigning and edemocracy.

So I thought I’d take a look at some the ways in which the Digital Economy Bill campaign has played out online and offline. Before I do this, however, it’s worth noting that it would appear at first analysis that traditional, mass media campaign techniques have also played a significant part in driving the campaign, even around such a digital issue as this one.

The first interesting insight to emerge is the way in which both sides of the debate have attempted to influence the Bill’s content. The tactics can be boiled down to classic ‘behind closed doors’ lobbying (largely carried out by the content industry) versus open, crowd-sourced lobbying conducted by grassroots online activists. While the former tactics relied on private meetings between key industry figures and Ministers, the latter used only the web to publicly identify MPs and key influencers and co-ordinate mass lobbying efforts that included the voices and opinions excluded from the top-down, industry approach.

The tactics of online activists came to the fore during yesterday’s debate when Twitter was used by hundreds of digital-savvy Tweeters to report the parliamentary debate in real-time – with thousands more contributing throughout the debate.

The results are nothing short of astounding. At the culmination of the second reading debate the official hashtag for the Bill – #DEBill – was the 6th top-trending topic on Twitter worldwide. In the space of 24 hours during Tuesday’s debate a total of 17,749 tweets were sent with the #DEBill hashtag (and research evidence shows that hashtagged content is only a fraction of the total relevant content).

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones correctly blogged yesterday that the #DEBill’s Twitter backchannel had “a real sense that many people outside were connecting with the Parliamentary process for the first time”.

Compare this online outpouring of expertise, deliberation, knowledge and passion with the number of MPs that actually turned out to debate the Bill on its second reading. Only around 3% of elected politicians, as you can see below.

The second insight from the #DEBill campaign is how campaigners used social media to fundraise. A great example of the power of tapping into passionate networks to achieve shared goals in a short space of time came when 38Degrees and the Open Rights Group joined forces to raise enough cash to pay for a series of newspaper ads.

Within five days, £20,000 had been raised using Twitter, email and blogging to drive donations.

While it’s not the first time campaigners have used the Internet to raise money (others such as The Atheist Bus Ad campaign and Obama both had wider mainstream media and marketing campaigns to support them) I believe the #DEBill example is ground-breaking for two reasons.

Firstly, as far as I am aware it’s the first major fundraising success for online political campaigners, 38Degrees. In case you’re not familiar with 38Degress, they are aiming to be a UK equivalent of MoveOn, the US political activism organisation. Worth noting is that based on MoveOn’s pioneering model, 38Degrees exhibits a classic example of organisational hybridity; something I’ve blogged about before.

This essentially represents a new Internet-enabled form of organising that allows campaign groups to switch rapidly between organisational models and thus achieve a wide variety of aims through a wide variety of networks. 38Degrees’ ‘campaign methodology’ sums this up neatly with the idea that they are “people-powered and multi-issue”

The other observation about the fund-raising campaign is that just as happened with the Obama campaign, once funds had been raised using social media and peer-to-peer networks, in order to reach the intended audience of MPs and policy-makers, the cash was then ploughed into newspaper adverts in The Guardian and The Times. Another great example of the movement building capacity of the Internet being converted into traditional mass reach media to have a perceived effect.

The final insight into what a digitally empowered politics could look like has only really emerged over the past 24 hours, after the first parliamentary debate wrapped up late on Tuesday.

By mid-morning Wednesday a number of creative and powerful tools had sprung up to re-energise the anti-Bill campaign’s momentum ahead of the third (and final) reading.

These tools ranged from campaign videos mashing up speeches from the debate to reinforce anti-Bill messages (see the video at the top of this post) through to the incredible www.didmympshowupornot.com a site created that allows the public to check if their MP attended the debate and providing links what to do next if they didn’t.

Other cool sites that have appeared overnight include the debate content aggregator, Debillitated and What DEBill? which encourages people to sign-up via Twitter to an online declaration of their intent to refuse to accept the Digital Economy Bill if its passed.

Our very own Chris Applegate has also created an awesome mash-up in the aftermath of the #DEBill’s third reading that lets people thank MPs who voted against the Bill. The site shows you which constituencies opponents of the Bill are contesting and suggests you help out with your nearest election campaign.

However, despite all these emergent forms of political campaigning and edemocracy in action, it’s likely that the Digital Economy Bill will become law very shortly indeed.

It’s small comfort that there’s a wealth of great social media case studies being born out of such an ill thought-out piece of legislation. And it’s worth remembering that some of the great examples outlined here of how social media can be used to campaign for greater democracy, such as the video embedded at the top of this post, could in the future lead to sites like YouTube being blocked (as it is already in Iran) due to the creative re-use of copyrighted content. Sad times.