It’s Monday, so as usual, have some Monday Mashup goodness, fresh from We Are Social towers.

Twitter to ban third-party ads
Breaking news from Twitter’s blog – they will be blocking any third-party paid Tweets service from using their API. Services such as ad.ly and Magpie are nascent attempts at direct advertising in Twitter – something we largely regard as unconversational and spammy. Twitter’s recent launch of promoted Tweets hopes to maintain the balance between revenue and conversation, and third-party ad services are an obvious threat. Is this heavy-handed monopolism or an attempt to keep the platform clean and spam-free? My view is towards the latter but no doubt detractors will say this is an unwanted restriction on third-party developers and will harm the Twitter ecosystem.

Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
Today Mark Zuckerberg made his first public comment in the ongoing controversy around Facebook’s privacy controls. In an email to Robert Scoble, he acknowledges that Facebook has “made a bunch of mistakes” but stops short of making an apology. However he promises “an improved product” which they might preview this week. We wait avidly to see what they will be.

Meanwhile, the continuing controversy isn’t distracting Facebook from pushing for expansion, especially in growing markets. Not happy with laying waste to competitors like StudiVZ in Germany, this week also saw the launch of Facebook Zero, a stripped-down version of the mobile site built for pay-as-you-go customers, which is free for users of more than 50 mobile providers in 45 countries – an attempt no doubt to push mobile access to Facebook beyond the iPhone and Blackberry markets, which are increasingly saturated these days. One place however where Facebook may have trouble expanding is Pakistan, which has recently blocked the site after groups encouraging drawing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad proliferated.

Diesel Cam brings social media into the store
A nice campaign from Diesel, providing Facebook Connect-enabled booths in stores to allow people to share photos of themselves wearing Diesel’s clothes with their friends on Facebook. Some of the most innovative campaigns are now blurring people’s “real” and “virtual” lives:

Lifehacks galore
Lots of useful tools received an update this week – Tweetdeck gained some powerful features, including that to filter out certain keywords (so no more being envious of people at #sxsw, hurrah!). Google Wave came out of beta to public use, although I’ve still not yet found a use for it that doesn’t just replicate existing apps’ functionality. And Twitter finally released an official app for iPhone, an upgrade to Tweetie, which they bought out last month (and by far the best and most stable iPhone app for Twitter I’ve used).

Maturing behaviours on social networks
As social networking takes a firm hold in our collective consciousness, perhaps it’s no surprise that people have grown more conscientious of placing too much sensitive information online or being too liberal with friend requests. A new survey out shows 74% of people are now careful about what pictures they upload, although 87% still believe their online and offline identities correspond with each other. There’s some nice detail on differences internationally – Brazilians have on average 360 friends on their profile (no doubt thanks to Orkut’s dominance there), while Brits have just 173. 1 in 3 Facebook users don’t trust the service, while 55% of users are blocked from using social networks at work – perhaps no surprise that personal social networks rather than professional ones such as LinkedIn enjoy more popularity. The full deck is worth a read.

Real-time influencing traditional media
An interesting report from warc on how television advertisers are increasingly becoming more flexible and innovative in producing their spots around live events. After major live events such as the Winter Olympics and Superbowl, American advertisers commissioned and adapted advertisements with the starring athletes – with feedback from social media playing a key part in which adverts got the heaviest rotation. Our friend Chris Stephenson has some further thoughts which are well worth picking through. While we might not have quite that level of responsiveness in the UK yet (although Simon Pegg got a reply to one of his Tweets by an eagle-eyed continuity announcer), with the World Cup coming up who knows what might come up?

Maybe it was a digital election after all
The new government’s boxes might have only just been unpacked but there’s already some studies on the effect of online on the UK election. A third of respondents to a survey said that online content had influenced their voting decision, although perhaps disappointingly for those arguing it was a ‘Twitter election’, only 5% of voters said they read political content on the site. A lack of comparative stats for the TV debates or newspapers makes this survey a little hard to place in the wider context, though.

Twitter reworks trending topic algorithms
And finally… Justin Bieber no longer features in the top ten trending topics on Twitter – something we should all be thankful for.

A nice stat to end the week on: usage of social networks and blogs now accounts for almost 23% of time spent on the internet in the UK, which is a 159% increase over the last three years, according to Nielsen.

The graphic below shows how the typical UK online hour breaks down.

Facebook backlash reaches the tipping point?
We’ve reported before in Monday mashups about the growing Facebook privacy backlash, but it looks more and more like a tipping point may have been reached; May 31st has been declared Quit Facebook Day and “how do I delete my Facebook” has become one of the most-Googled search queries of recent times. danah boyd argues that Facebook is now a utility in the same sense that water and electricity are, and should be appropriately regulated as such, while Ben Parr argues in defence of Facebook.

It’s very easy to boil the whole controversy down into “Facebook should better protect its users” versus “users should learn how to protect themselves”, but the points raised are more complex and subtle than just that. Jeff Jarvis’s blog post on what exactly “public” means is a much more informative and nuanced approach to it.

…maybe not just yet
Don’t dismiss Facebook just yet – those pages could still be worth a lot to you and your brand. And then there’s Facebook’s Community Pages. There’s been some confusion about what they are, but Dave Fleet’s analysis is quite helpful – think of it as “earned media” rather than “owned media”. The difference between a Twitter search for your brand name, and your brand’s own Twitter profile, if you like. A brand owner has no control over these pages – which is a double-edged sword; great for finding out what your consumers think of you in realtime, but without any real control or interaction. Jeremiah Owyang points out it’s an example of Facebook’s “Innovation Means Asking For Forgiveness Later” strategy – and it could by no means last; we already have Groups and Pages, and yet another form of brand interaction may prove too confusing or redundant for it to take. Nevertheless Jeremiah’s advice is well worth taking.

Twitter’s Business Center launches
Twitter has been quietly rolling out business features of its own. The new Twitter Business Center offers facilities for brand owners. It allows multiple users to handle the same account (incredibly useful for anyone offering 24/7 support) and allows people to DM brands, even if they aren’t following them, so that sensitive info such as account details and email addresses can be safely exchanged. Meanwhile, the Promoted Tweets programme that was rolled out last month is reported to have been a success by the advertisers in the US who piloted it, with Virgin America recording its fifth-highest sales day in its history the day it went live.

In a separate move, Twitter is now parsing short URLs for keywords in searches, allowing you to get back not just Tweets, but matching URLs for your query. Great news for publishers but also for anyone gathering insights into what relevant conversations are linking to. In both cases, these are useful and timely improvements to the system, and a prime example of what Twitter does very well – innovating iteratively to meet the demands of the community as they evolve, as this excellent presentation by Jack Dorsey discusses.

Engagement rising as brand loyalty falters
Two very interesting surveys caught our attention this week. The first from comScore charts how brand loyalty is dropping compared to two years ago, with consumers deserting their traditional brands; this phenomenon is now spreading to sectors where it has not been previously seen, possibly because of the economic downturn. It looks like brands can no longer count on loyal customers as a base, which ties in with a separate survey by Hall and Partners which notes a positive correlation between engagement and profits. Of particular interest is the growing emphasis on integrity and corporate responsibility as part of brand identity, something which has been shown as evidence by the recent Nestle palm oil furore; it’s further evidence of how integrity is an important factor in how a brand should engage online.

Travelocity: “ChatRoulette FTW!”
Apparently Travelocity’s social marketing team have been hanging around on ChatRoulette a lot. Although they skimp a little on the details, they apparently entail having their mascot hang around and pitching to random people. Spamming? You be the judge of that. But this is the crucial bit for me:

No one in the wider world will know it was ever associated with those elements, unlike on Twitter or Facebook where a negative or disturbing Wall post or tweet can be read by everyone.

Problem is, this means nothing positive can remain permanent either. So when the person they’ve pitched is booking their holiday and trying to remember, or try and tell direct their friends to it, with no permalink, nor any way of finding it on Google, the recall factor is lost.

Finding the right fit between brand and community
News that Ford [disclosure: a We Are Social client] are testing their new cars with Mumsnet brought this revealing post from Reputation Online, advocating that these tie-ins only work if the audience are a perfect fit. While I don’t think they have to be an exact fit (good marketing should never be just about preaching to the converted), the discussion of iVillage was very interesting – they have turned down offers from several brands as they didn’t feel appropriate to the audience. They felt the importance of keeping the community outweighed the advertising revenue – something anyone considering a buy-in to a community site needs to keep in mind, especially when dealing with more traditional buying philosophies.

TopTable gets flak for censoring reviews
An example of how not to meet your community’s needs is TopTable’s recent admission that they delete negative reviews of restaurants. The reason given is that they could face libel accusations – which is no doubt a possibility if the reviews turn out to be maliciously false. But to censor negative reviews altogether destroys the point of the site – people join a reviews community is to give honest opinions about places; being able to get balanced reviews is central to its authenticity. Whether this is common practice across all restaurant review sites is not clear, but we really hope it’s not the case.

Bloggers disagree with one another; film at 11
A PR blogger got annoyed this week at an ill-advised pitch he received. He blogged about it. A lot of other PR bloggers held a different opinion. They blogged about it too. Heated debate followed. That’s it. Move along folks, nothing to see here. But if this a topic that particularly interests you then I recommend the Inconvenient PR Truth survey that is going round right now.

Choose Your Own Adventure on Twitter
And finally… we really liked this innovative “Choose Your Own Adventure” use of Twitter by French Connection – even though the chap in the background looks a bit like Sébastien Chabal…

We had some great news last week: our Marmarati campaign for Unilever has been nominated for an International Food and Beverage Creative Excellence Award, and shortlisted twice in the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards!

For the NMA awards we’re in the ‘Best Consumer Products and Services Campaign’ and ‘Best Use of Social Media’ categories, and for the FAB Awards we’re shortlisted in the ‘Social Media’ category. Wish us luck!

Another great video, this time from our friend Dan Calladine at Isobar, which balances out yesterday’s Social Media Revolution video nicely…

Last week I was asked to talk at Communicate Magazine‘s first ever webinar. My subject was ‘crisis communications in the age of social media’, something we have real experience of from our work with Skype, Eurostar and others. I was lucky enough to follow on from Hill and Knowlton’s Grant Smith, who gave a great overview of crisis preparedness in general, leaving me to focus solely on the social media aspects.

The challenge however, was that I only had five slides and five minutes to cover a topic that merits a lot more attention and discussion. Hopefully I rose to the challenge – the deck I used is above – please feel free to comment/challenge me on any of the points I covered, or on anything you feel I omitted.

Is Social Media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

An update on last year’s video from Socialnomics, where there are references for all of the stats used in the video.

Hello all. Nice to be back. Here’s my stab at rounding up social media happenings over the last week:

BREAKING NEWS: Major Twitter bug
I’ve just been told no one is going to read this because Twitter has fallen over and the internets are generally freaking out. It’s all down to a bug that lets you control who follows you by writing “[tweet] accept [username]”. More on this over at Mashable.

Twitter influence not linked to number of followers
Although, today’s bug may not matter at all, as according to the latest Twitter research from Meeyoung Cha at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, the amount of followers one has is largely meaningless when it comes to Twitter. In the research paper entitled ‘The Million Follower Fallacy’, Meeyoung writes: “Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions”. Sweet, I only have about 12 followers and they all ignore me anyway.

McDonald’s on Facebook Geo-location
The ever nimble marketing machine that is McDonald’s have beaten a path to Facebook HQ and updated their status to “We’re the first brand to partner with new Facebook location-based status updates FTW – LOL!!!” (possibly). Essentially, this means that McDonalds will probably the first brand to use the new geo-location feature on Facebook. Apparently they’re building an app that would allow Facebook users to “check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder” according to executives close to the deal. I for one am breathless with excitement.

Oversharing
Geo-location is only the latest in a long list of social networking features to be touted as a total godsend to cyber criminals everywhere. eConsultancy posted a rather interesting piece on how naive Facebook users are to posting private information for public consumption. According to a survey by Consumer Reports:

56% of users posted at least one piece of risky information on the site. 42% posted their birthdate, 7% posted a street address. 3% disclosed they’d be away from home. 26% posted children’s photos and names, 23% didn’t use or know about privacy controls. Also, 18.4 milion Facebook members used apps. Of that number, 38% of app users were confident those apps were secure, or hadn’t even thought about it.

Pringles lampoon oversharers
Speaking of which, Pringles have decided to focus their latest social media campaign on people who overshare with boring and/or uninteresting content. Entitled ‘Help the oversharers‘ Pringles’ agency Wunderman have built a website where you can submit your friends most rubbish Facebook and Twitter updates to be featured on the site. In case you’re stuck for anything to submit here’s my Twitter feed.

Facebook privacy issues
While it appears that Facebook users are being a bit naive, those running the social network aren’t really helping any. The Facebook Open Graph protocol backlash is starting to pick up some steam. Matt McKeon has published a very simple but powerful diagram of how Facebook has steadily reneged on it’s privacy promises to its users over the last five years, outlining what areas the social network is choosing to make indexable and visible to the public on standard settings. The answer is: everything. (Panic set in there, just set privacy to highest settings on photos. Don’t even think about looking either).

Wired have gotten in on the act by being incredibly critical of the way Facebook is going and is openly encouraging people to look for, or even build their own open alternative network. As you all know the information super netway moves incredibly fast and Wired’s prayers are already beginning to be answered. Reddit’s technology page has already set down outlines for what this network could look like. Reddit is notoriously well frequented by the programming community and have already built their own private Bit Torrent tracker. They currently have highly developed plans to buy and develop a real-world Reddit Island, so I wouldn’t bet against them.

On the other hand, they may just want to help out  4 young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute with their project. Starting with a dream to build a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” these young whipper-snappers wrote a blog post on the 14th of April outlining how they planned to do it. Naming their project ‘Diaspora‘ they were initially looking for $10,000 dollars to build it before releasing it for free they received the full amount by last Saturday the 8th of May and are currently sitting on close to $20,000. Looking forward to seeing the results.

Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare get bigger (gasp!)
Just in case you haven’t quite had enough news about Facebook this week; here’s some more. According to Nielsen Facebook and Twitter have posted large year over year gains in unique users. I’ll let the graph do the talking:

Only five weeks ago, the total number of checkins on Foursquare had only reached 22 million, but today brought the news that Foursquare counted its 40 millionth checkin, which shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating considerably.

Have a good one.

Yesterday we had a general election in the United Kingdom, and in much of the tradition of British election-watching, the results are counted from the moment polls closed at 10pm until sunrise the next day. A small but enthusiastic clutch of Britons gathered around their television sets and stayed up through the night to watch the results from around the country. Only this time, we had hashtags.

Five years ago, in our last general election, we had blogs, and IRC (I remember being a student, simultaenously liveblogging and chatting), but these communities and the conversations were small and self-contained. This time we had Facebook and Twitter to hand, allowing us not just to talk to our friends, but strangers, journalists, broadcasters and even the politicians themselves.

It’s wrong to say though that we were just using social media – we were armed not just with phones & laptops, gathered round the television watching the coverage, with newspapers to hand telling us the essential statistics and what time to expect results. Elections are media-dominated events, and all we were doing was using every means of media we had to hand.

It was interesting seeing how social and more established media interacted as the night went on. One of the early breaking stories was how an unusually high turnout overwhelmed some polling stations; people were turned away from the polls at closing time, with rumours of polling stations running out of ballot papers. Angry would-be voters were armed with cameraphones and filmed scenes of the chaos. A Facebook group was set up within the hour, by students angry at what they saw was discrimination by election officials. And these were in turn featured and showed on the live television coverage in front of us, with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones showing highlights of what politicians and activist were saying on Twitter.

It wasn’t all so serious – elections are not without their levity either, especially early on. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Kirkcaldy constituency was a particularly high-profile event, and at the declaration of results a rival candidate sporting a beard and sunglasses standing motionless, holding a clenched fist aloft. Quickly he became a cult figure amongst election TV viewers, and a Facebook fan page was duly set up. At time of writing, he has 3,308 fans, which is sadly (for him) 3,251 more than the number of votes he got.

As the election got serious and the first results from important marginal constituencies started coming through, the mood got more serious. The online poll site exitpol.ly reflected the Twitter & social media world’s political preferences, with a slim majority favouring the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats came third in the election, with fewer seats than their supporters expected, and quickly mood changed. One of Twitter’s most popular MPs, the Lib Dem Member of Parliament for Oxford West, Dr Evan Harris, was narrowly defeated. He Tweeted lamenting his defeat, and his supporters and friends on Twitter responded with an outpouring of support, particularly after another candidate from another party mocked his defeat.

These are all small things, but unimaginable even in the last election that we could watch our politicians report live for themselves from the count, or that they’d respond back. And this bypassing of usual channels is no accident – with this election campaign came an ongoing mistrust of more traditional media and campaigning methods – vis the satirical #nickcleggsfault hashtag or the mashups of the Conservative Party’s billboard posters. And as I write, we have most of the results but no one party has a majority, something which is making a lot of people on Twitter consider the proportionality of our electoral system.

Rory Cellan-Jones has a good post on whether this was an “internet election”, and it’s clear that it hasn’t been – we had live television debates for the first time, as well as a very strong push from the mainstream press. But in lots of small ways, social media popped up, from using Facebook to get more young people to register to vote, crowdsourcing election leaflet archiving and collating candidates’ opinions, using Twitter to organise canvassing. Social media never dictated the agenda or created a scoop but instead it became integrated with our everyday business, augmenting and complementing other media and existing practices. It reminded me a bit of Charlene Li’s blogpost comparing social networks to air – ubiquitous and seamlessly integrated with the greater whole. Best of all, it made watching the election more interesting, informative and dare I say fun for those of us who stayed up till 6am – something we all could do with to help fight political apathy.