Bart De Waele with some excellent home truths for social media:

A great infographic from Flowtown, based on data from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report ‘New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press’.

Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center
Mashable was given a behind the scenes look at the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters: “a room that sits in the middle of the marketing department and could best be thought of as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media.” Exciting. So exciting, in fact, that the war room comes armed with its own (music) video:

While mission control is visually stunning and certain to give geeks tech-envy, it does raise the question as to how the ‘war room’ is being used in practice – a point considered by NMA’s Vikki Chowney:

We see monitoring, yes. We see inspirational imagery, yes. But engagement? No. At no point in the entire video do we see the brand responding to any of the mentions they’ve tracked online. There’s typing, which suggests the team is doing something, but we can’t actually see what’s being said.

With the goal of becoming the largest participatory brand in the world, it will be interesting to watch how Gatorade puts its tools and processes to use.

Financial watchdog warns banks about social media promotions
A recent study conducted by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has found that the use of social media channels lacked compliance with industry rules.

Companies posted Twitter updates or commented on discussion forum threads without the proper disclaimers and risk warnings, the FSA says, and engaged in promotional behaviour without complying with all the FSA’s rules.

The watchdog warned companies that all their communications will come under scrutiny, and that promotional and non-promotional communications must be “fair, clear and not misleading.”

AOL Unloads Social Networking Site Bebo

Bebo has just been sold. For a ridiculous price. Is this 2008?

So was the reaction from TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr to the news that Bebo was sold to Criterion Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Los Angeles, for a reported $10 million. Of course, the ‘ridiculous price’ paid by AOL in 2008 to which Carr was referring was $850 million. In recent years, Bebo has fallen on difficult times as it was eclipsed by Facebook, and Criterion Capital Partners will attempt to engineer a turnaround to the social networks fortunes and return it to its glory days.

Habbo Hotel Turns 10
Meanwhile, Habbo Hotel, one of the world’s largest virtual communities, turned 10 last week. With 40 million monthly user hours and 15 million monthly unique visitors, it appears to still be going strong.

Twitter Launches “Places” Feature with Foursquare Integration
Twitter Places marks the microblogging services’ foray into geolocation, and will highlight tweets at a given location as its rolled out in 65 countries around the world:

Twitter.com desktop and mobile users can tag their tweets with existing Twitter Places and add new Twitter Places, too. Twitter Places can be explored and will reveal a list of recent, public tweets from that location. Twitter will also show you nearby locations and points of interest, including restaurants and shops.

Continuing its tradition of openness, Twitter plans to release an API that will allow developers to play with Twitter Places in their third-party apps. It will also integrated with Foursquare and Gowalla.

Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad
Last week, Twitter began testing Promoted Trends, the second phase of their ad revenue model which follows on from the launch of Promoted Tweets back in April. Toy Story 3 was the first brand to try their hand at Twitter’s new ad slot:

Just as with Promoted Tweets, the functionality for these Promoted Trending Topics is the same as the regular Trending Topics — clicking on it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about Toy Story 3.

Users that might be worried about advertising messages muddying trending topics, should note that each promoted trend has a big yellow box beside it letting you know that it’s a ‘promoted’ Trending Topic. Moreover, “the Promoted Trending Topic has to resonate or it will disappear.”

Twitter a hit in Japan as millions ‘mumble’ online
Succeeding where other social networking imports like Facebook have failed, Twitter has become a hit in Japan.  The Japanese language, advanced mobile handsets and greater sense of individuality among younger people in Japan have contributed to the social network’s boom:

The proportion of Japanese Internet users who tweet is 16.3 percent and now surpasses the ratio among Americans at 9.8 percent. Twitter and Japan’s top social networking site, mixi, have been running neck-and-neck with monthly visitors between 9 million and 10 million but in April Twitter squeaked past mixi, according to ratings agency Nielsen Online.

Is it time to reconsider Google Buzz vs. Facebook or Twitter?
After launching last October to great fanfare and an almost immediate backlash, Google Buzz appears to have caught a second wind, according to Robert Scoble. He notes that he is starting to get more engagement on items in Buzz than he currently does on Twitter or Facebook, and cites 9 reasons for its apparent comeback (and another 6 areas for improvement).  The ease with which one can conduct conversations and Buzz’s early adopter community are seen reasons for “brands and geeks” to put Buzz into their media mix – though its in no way “a Twitter or Facebook killer yet.”

Flickr Releases “Request to License”; Anyone Can Easily Sell Their Photos
Flickr has made it “incredibly simple” for any user to make their images available for inclusion in the Getty Images catalogue.

Last year Flickr entered a partnership with Getty Images to allow Getty Images to contact Flickr users and ask them if they would like to include their photos in Getty’s massive stock photography database. Now they’ve introduced a feature where you can proactively tag your photos to alert the world and Getty Images you’re interested in selling them.

Meaning if anyone should wish to license your photo a Getty editor will contact you to help arrange things. So get snapping.

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is launched
WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is the thirteenth major release from WordPress and is the result of half a year of work by 218 contributors. Since you’re wondering, it’s named after one of the giants of American jazz, Thelonious Monk, whose “improvisational wizardry inspired [them] to new heights of customization.”

With over 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, the world’s most popular blog software will be welcome news to theme developers and network admins. It’s now available for download at wordpress.org.

David on Demand
And in closing, something a bit lighter. The Twitter bio for @DavidonDemand reads as follows:

Leo Burnett is sending me to Cannes on one condition – I have to do anything you tweet. 24 hours a day, all week long. David on Demand, starting June 21st.

And so begins what should be an entertaining week for David Perez, who has been shipped out to the Advertising Festival in Cannes to act as an online puppet. In true web form, his exploits are being chronicled online,  with a live Justin.TV feed, as well Foursquare and Facebook integration.  With evidence of David getting a tattoo of the FAIL Whale tattoo (along with two usernames), we expect this could be fun to watch.

For those of you slightly overwhelmed by the densely packed slides of Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends deck, I thought it worth sharing this video from Jesse Thomas on the current state of the internet (it’s a few months old now, but still worth watching):

The World Cup fours years ago in Germany still seems like yesterday. It’s been an amazing time for us in Italy the last four years, holding the trophy in our arms. And now the World Cup is back!

We were so excited at the thought of the Azzurri back on the pitch, that we decided to do our part, and create something with a bit of We Are Social Italia magic for the South Africa 2010 tournament.

This World Cup will be remembered as the first in which people changed the way they followed the tournament, adding social media to the rest of the media mix. That’s why created Parole Mondiali (“World Cup Words” in English), a place where people can follow the World Cup from a different point of view: the one of players and influencers. The project is sponsored by TeleTu, one of our clients.

On Parole Mondiali you will find tweets from the players that are taking part (just to mention some: Kakà, Chiellini, Anelka) and commentary from journalists, official accounts, football associations etc. People can also interact via a Facebook widget, sharing their passion (or addiction, in some desperate cases like mine).

There’s also a blog where we’re providing daily updates about what’s going on down there, and a Twitter account that will cover all of the games live.

We hope you’re all going to have a look at it. And of course, we also hope for the World Cup to end just like 4 years ago!

Demos Associate Anthony Painter has written a nice and readable analysis of the Internet’s impact on last month’s UK General Election:

The paper breaks down into three main sections that investigate and record political parties’ use of digital ideas and tools in their campaign strategies, creativity and voter engagement.

Anthony also provides a short introduction and analysis of what the mainstream media heralded as the ‘Internet Election’ and I thought I’d unpick this to try to get to the bottom of what real impact the Internet, and social media in particular, had on the voters.

To begin with Anthony rightly suggests that the question the media should have been asking was ‘how did the internet influence voters, campaigners and the media”

In answering this he suggests three ways:

• You can hear political conversation online
• Political conversation can be amplified  online
• Political conversations can drive political change (this point is slightly unclear to me but I’m reading it as driving the campaign or news agenda)

This election, according to the paper, was successful in achieving points 1 and 2 but failed to achieve the third point.

Broadly speaking I wouldn’t dispute that. But I would suggest that in terms of influencing voter behaviour the increased opportunities to access a wide range of political content online and in particular the ability to do so within a social community is much more powerful than Antony acknowledges.

For example, in support of this argument the paper draws on YouGov data commissioned by Orange (who published the report, and also are a client of ours) indicating the majority of election content online was consumed passively rather than actively. Voters were receiving content rather than creating or participating in conversations.

This finding isn’t massively surprising. We know that the 1:9:90 rule exists online, i.e. the majority (90%) of the online audience are passive receptors of content and conversations, compared to Critics (9%) and Creators (1%).

But this argument looks at the delivery and receipt of election content. It doesn’t take account of the credibility of that content.

I’d argue that what makes the crucial difference in terms of influencing voter behavior is the fact that source of political content and conversation is a friend or family member who you trust, not a media outlet or political party.

But don’t just take my word for it. Academic research shows that “personal experiences, conversations with trusted others all provide … alternatives to media guidance.”

Not only that but, “When these personal factors come into play, they often overpower decision criteria provided by news stories.”

So, yes. While it’s possible the traditional media drove the election campaign agenda and the Internet merely reported or amplified the wider campaign, the fact that social media and peer-to-peer networks acted as sources for campaign content may have had a much greater impact on influencing voter behaviour than Anthony’s report suggests.

The “social gaming” category is driving a lot of traffic on Facebook. How social, in the conversational sense, is up for debate, but as the infographic below shows, Zynga are making good money out of it (with Facebook, of course, taking its share).

New York Times bans the word “Tweet”
The New York Times has reportedly issued an internal ban on using the word “Tweet” outside of what it (quite elegantly) calls “ornithological contexts”. While this might get some mockery from social media quarters, in many respects the NY Times has been one of the leading newspapers in embracing social media, with its range of blogs and embracing of Twitter. However maybe in this case, those up top aren’t yet willing to relinquish control of the English language to neologisms just yet – but it can’t be too long before “Tweet” finds its way into the OED?

Twitter get into the URL shortening business
The rise of Twitter has led to an explosion of URL shorteners, and yet oddly Twitter themselves haven’t fully dived into the URL shortening market themselves. That might change soon, with the launch of a new Twitter URL shortener (t.co) and a promise to use it wrap all URLs sent on Twitter. One reason is to prevent phishing – something that can bedevil even the most seasoned of geeks, as Cory Doctorow found out earlier in the year. “Ultimately, every link on Twitter will be wrapped” comes the promise, so maybe this is the start of a Twitter landgrab on other URL shorteners’ turf – but will they offer the quality of insights and data of, say, bit.ly?

If rumours are to believed, Google is experimenting with importing Tweets into display ads. Twitter are also working more on the monetisation front with plans to start “Promoted Trends” just like “Promoted Tweets”. While they may well be an easy way to integrate social and traditional marketing, both will have to remain relevant and interesting to the community rather than just unresponsive and spammy, especially as news comes this week of just how untrusted advertising is in the contemporary environment.

Google launch Caffeine
Google have announced a shakeup of how they index the web. Traditionally their search engine operated on a layered model, treating all the web as the same kind of page; with the growing variety of content and types of information on the web comes closer and closer to realtime, the way they’ve developed a more parallel architecture that treats different different parts accordingly, updating some more quickly than others. We’ve already seen some aspects of it already, like Google Updates for search Twitter & other social network updates, and no doubt they’ll be rolling out more specialised features over time.

Facebook and how it grows value
Some interesting findings on the power of Facebook. Adding a Like button to Typepad blogs was found to increase Facebook referral traffic by up to 50%, as readers shared the sites with a whole new audience. And the value of a Facebook fan has been calculated at US$138 on average, according to Syncapse – but the big big caveat is that it’s a highly variable figure, depending on how engaged you are with the page and your community; as the report puts it: “for some very successful social marketers the value can be dramatically higher, while for some less successful companies it can be virtually zero”. It just as well then that Facebook has just rolled out improved analytics to help us all get our heads around it.

Spotify records social success
Spotify seem to be going from strength to strength – with the launch of their slick and featureful Spotify Social client, they have managed to double the Premium member subscription signup rate – even though you don’t need to be a Premium member to enjoy the social features. And they’re optimistic of even more growth with their intermediate Unlimited subscription that has been launched since their last set of figures.

Corporate social media use visualised
Here’s an excellent visualisation summarising how the world’s top 100 companies use social media – with some interesting trends pointed out – in the US & Europe it’s all about Twitter but in Asia they’re blogging instead. Twitter comes out as the top tool used by all, but surprisingly only 20% use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs in their corporate comms. What would be great however is some data on engagement versus brand perception and sales to paint a more three-dimensional picture.

Geolocation sites slated on security
Slightly scaremongering headline on a story about how geolocation services such as Foursquare are “riddled” with bugs – although actually the number of bugs found was no more than expected. Gowalla seems to have won out for accuracy and trustability, thanks to the extra checks it makes to make sure you are actually at the place you say you are. However, Foursquare makes up in the ease of use stakes – their much larger userbase (a million compared to Gowalla’s 200k) perhaps shows that users are less concerned about accuracy and more about the experience. Foursquare seem to be pouring their efforts into extra features, such as premium badges and World Cup tie-ins.

Speaking of which…
The football is well and truly on and there’s a rich variety of social media resources – like Twitter’s official World Cup centre, paper.li’s World Cup newspaper, and the Guardian’s awesome Twitter match replay app. Nike look like they have been the biggest winners so far in social media so far – their epic “Write The Future” TV spot doubled their number of Facebook fans. The biggest losers though might be the players themselves – there are quite a few on Twitter but many of them have been banned from using it by their managers. Never mind though, FIFA President SeppBlatter is now on Twitter and you can follow him instead. And remember, if you can’t get enough of those vuvuzelas (you might be in the minority) then you can even follow livevuvuzela on Twitter as well.

For those of you wanting their football stories a little more parochial, you could do worse than read Nick Emmel’s stirring tale of the social media savvy of Crystal Palace FC’s new owners.

Kraft Foods are having a Nestlé moment. As of 11:13am Eastern Daylight Time Thursday, their Facebook page has been overrun with negative posts about something found inside a pouch of Capri-Sun:

The story starts back at the end of May when Melissa Wiegand Brown posted these photos to Facebook, commenting:

when we opened a new box of the drinks my husband pulled the top pouch out, it was sticky and immediately started leaking everywhere… he went to drain it in the sink and felt something LARGE inside the pouch… that’s when he got out a kitchen knife and sliced it open as he was yelling for me to get the camera and document it!

It seems that Melissa informed Kraft about the incident and some sort of dispute ensued, leading her to start posting disgruntled comments on the wall of Kraft’s page, which went largely ignored. However, things changed dramatically at 11:13am EDT on Thursday, when Kraft’s page became flooded with comments about the issue (including the video above):

Kraft, who view their page as “a fun, family-friendly community where fans of Kraft Foods products and recipes can join the conversation”, posted a response on their wall at 6:06pm EDT Thursday, almost seven hours after the incident began, and, at the time of writing, appear to have done little since to address the concerns of their customers. Meanwhile their page is a maelstrom of negative comments, visible to their almost 300,000 strong fan-base and to the world at large.

Kraft clearly have a crisis on their hands, and we know from painful experience it’s not nice to be second guessed in situations like these. They’re obviously right not to react in the way Nestlé did, and although there are a few lone voices on the page coming to their defence, we trust Kraft are focusing on establishing a human and apologetic position of their own. This could take the form of a status update with a link to their latest response, so it’s there for all to see at the top of their page, and them responding individually to customers as comments are posted.

Unlike Nestlé, who’s crisis was stirred up by a global pressure group with hundreds of thousands of members, what’s interesting about this situation is that this seems to have been brought about by a few genuinely upset moms, savvy about the power of social media, much like Motrin’s 2008 crisis.

Brands of all stripes should take heed, realise that their Facebook pages and other social media presences are not just marketing channels and make sure they’re prepared for situations like these.

Update: The crisis still seems to be raging for Kraft, although they have taken some interesting steps over the last 24 hours.

At 4:15pm EDT on Friday Vinay Sharma, Director of Capri Sun Beverages at Kraft Foods, posted this very personal message from the official Kraft Foods account:

While well received, it soon got lost in the flood of wall comments from concerned consumers (probably not helped by the Consumerist picking up the story).

However, at around 7pm EDT on Friday, Kraft created a new Capri Sun tab on their page with a much more comprehensive response, along with an update to their profile picture with a bright pink box drawing attention to the new tab (although it’s worth noting that Kraft have chosen not to use a status update to draw attention to the tab). It does seem to be appreciated by some of the people on the page:

It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops from here…