Wieden+Kennedy have released a nice video case study of their recent Old Spice social media campaign, calling it

the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history

Some of the things they highlight are:

• More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech
• Total video views reached 40 million in a week.
• Campaign impressions: 1.4 billion.
• Since the campaign launched, Old Spice Bodywash sales are up 27%; in the last three months up 55%; and in the last month up 107%

Since our recent birthday we’re entering our third year of success. We Are Social is going great guns and now we’re looking for more Account Directors to join the team.

To help take us to our 3^rd, 4^th & 5^th birthdays and beyond we need outstanding ADs to join the team in London. You’ll need a strong online PR or digital agency background with a real passion for social media. You also need to be bright, hold exceptional client management skills and have a whole host of large consumer clients under your wing. With a true understanding of social media, you don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk. At We Are Social we don’t just discuss how to put social media to work for a brand, we make it happen. You’ll need to show us that you can do that too.

As an Account Director you’ll be part of our senior management team, leading client groups and internal teams to deliver across our core service areas: consultancy, research and insight and engagement. You’ll need to be able to show us top notch leadership skills, creative campaign experience combined with a sharp commercial acumen. Lots of our client work involves working in collaboration with other agencies, whether they be Media, Creative, Digital or PR, so some experience of that is also important.

We won’t take any of this for granted and our interviews will be rigorous. We won’t just be looking for you to sparkle, we’ll be asking you to present against a brief and come up with some creative ideas, you’ll talk to some of the senior team and together we’ll make sure that you are fully clued up on the way it works here.

In return what will you get? You will be part of a hugely successful company with the opportunity to work with amazing clients. Your skills will be refined with the help of the senior team and you’ll have the chance to inspire the people working into you. What could be better than working with an award winning team of people advancing the state of the art and having lots of fun along the way? And whilst we’re sure that you’ll want to be doing this just for the love by the time you’ve met us, we’ll be paying you a competitive salary too.

Does this sound like you? If you think it does, drop us an email in confidence with your CV and a little bit of narrative on why you think you’re right for We Are Social (and we’re right for you). Don’t forget to include links to your own social media presences.

Google axes Wave
This week, Google announced that they would cease any further development on their real time collaboration tool, Google Wave. When introduced at Google I/O 2009 to a mass of surrounding hype, Google Wave looked set to revolutionise the way groups communicate and function with features such as real time media sharing and intuitive spell-checking.

However, one year down the line, disappointing adoption figures has forced Google to pull the plug on Wave. They state that they will continue to ‘maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects’, whilst the central code and other aspects of the Wave are open source, leaving the window open for future development.

Brand advertisers spend 10 times more on Facebook than they did last year
Having recently reached the 500 million mark, it seems that brands now fully acknowledge Facebook as a prominent and profitable advertising medium. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg states that some of their biggest advertisers have increased spending ‘by at least 10-fold in the last year’, whilst highlighting that the time for experimenting with advertising on Facebook is over, and major brands now seek to go ‘big’ with the social network across a number of their product ranges.

Facebook Profile and Page roadmap update, new Insights for Page admins
Facebook recently announced forthcoming changes will see application boxes and application information sections making an exit, and custom tabs can expect a reduction in width from 760 pixels to 520 pixels wide. It is likely that the change has been commissioned to optimize pages more neatly on smaller screens, and Facebook has enabled the ability to preview custom tabs with the new width restrictions, scheduled to take place beginning the week of August 23rd.

Meanwhile, a new insights product has been incorporated by Facebook into Pages, allowing page admins a clean view of their daily users and interactions. The product is now visible to all page administrators.

Retailers are learning to love the “Like” button
Online retailers reportedly love the “Like” button, with more than 350,000 websites incorporating the Facebook “Like” button on their respective websites. It seems about time too, as it was found that users spend 20% more time browsing a website if directed to it from Facebook.

Heavy Twitter Users Bring Social Activity to New Height
eMarketer highlights that whilst Twitter users are made up of a relatively modest share of total Internet users at 14%, the voice of heavy users is ‘disproportionately loud’. This means that they are more heavily involved with social networks and interactions across other mediums online, meaning that due to their influence online, there are especially important to marketers.

What makes a tweet influential?
HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab has released new research, which measures influence through an ‘algorithm that automatically identifies particularly influential users’. Placing importance in engagement with their networks rather than their number of followers, the algorithm places a score of a user based on their ‘passivity’ and ‘influence’. Other interesting points of the study found that the correlation between popularity and influence was weaker than expected.

Tuenti looks like it will go to Telefonica for $99 million
Hailed as the ‘Spanish Facebook’, Tuenti have reportedly sealed a deal with Telefonica for $99 million for 90% of the share capital. This paves Telefonica’s pathway back into social media, after a previous failed attempt with their platform Keteke back in November 2008.

Nestle Fights PR War On Facebook
Food giant Nestle has recently been running ads on Facebook that highlight their corporate social responsibility, and their approach to the subject of ethics. It is widely seen as a rebuttal to the controversy surrounding the company earlier this year, as videos were released online that saw Nestle’s use of palm oil in chocolate production and involvement in the deaths of orangutans – causing uproar from thousands online.

Sainsbury’s runs recipe challenge on Facebook
In order to encourage parents to think differently about the food they give to their kids during summer holidays, Sainsbury’s has launched a Facebook challenge. Four videos posted once a week will feature parents and grand parents who create a creative recipe for their children. A panel of 9-year-olds will judge the meals and the recipes that “The Tiny Taste Team’ likes the most will be posted online for other parents to copy.

Outdoor brand brings EveryTrail’s GPS-tagged routes to the iPhone
Outdoor apparel brand North Face has teamed up with GPS-travel community EveryTrail.com in order to create an iPhone app. The Trailhead app will track users’ route, distance, speed and elevation as they trek, allowing them to share and store trips, photos and tips for friends and fellow community members on social networks. The app also includes weather forecasts and recommends North Face gear based on how unkind the elements are set to be.

Not unlike Foursquare where users can unlock badges, special offers can be unlocked on Trailhead by completing and logging the North Face Challenge.

Track the beers you drink and check in on foursquare at the same time
But if that all seems like a bit too much hard work, and you’d rather be down the pub with your mates with a pint in your hand, then you might want to try Beerby.

The Beerby app for iPhone and Android helps you keep track of your beers and venues by letting you select the beer you’re drinking from a database of more than 30,000 beers. It also asks for your location and automatically checks you in on Foursquare. This will later help you (and others as it gets saved to the database) to remember what the name of that delicious beer was and where to find it.

How is social media evolving? What trends are developing right now? Few people can answer this question better than Augie Ray (augieray), Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, who focuses on “Social Computing”.

Augie was kind enough to let me interview him for the We Are Social blog: it was a great opportunity to talk about the future of social media and a few of the hot topics he’s been thinking about at Forrester lately.

Here’s what we covered:

• Foursquare has some critical aspects in the US market, mainly because of the way brands are approaching this social network, through some logic near to a concept of advertising and paid media. The solution could be an approach that is more focused on the concept of “conversation”: location based social networks are still in their infancy and have many unexplored opportunities. Augie also refers to an imminent launch by Facebook of geolocation;
• The value of a Facebook fan is zero. Unless you do something with them and for them. Augie explains how only strategies that build value work on Facebook and how it’s useless to give a monetary value to a fan;
• About the future of social media, according to Augie, it’s impossible to think brands will have a unique single role on social media, but each brand will need to find its own way of “being social” to be really relevant to people;

Here’s the video: there are subtitles, so if you’re in the office without earphones, you don’t need to bother your neighbour.

As usual, your comments are very welcome. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing by email or RSS to keep up to date with the latest We Are Social posts.

Following on from yesterday’s post highlighting the growth of social media in one of the worlds most mature markets, the US (Social media usage up 43% in the US), I thought it worth illustrating the potential for growth elsewhere in the world.

As you can see from the graph below, the US is second to China amongst a long list of countries with large internet populations, 8 of which have over 50m internet users:

As Royal Pingdom points out:

• The tenth largest country on the Internet is Nigeria. So although Africa as a whole is often considered to be a bit behind the curve on the Internet, it does have a presence among the top countries.
• Seven out of the top 20 countries are Asian.
• Five out of the top 20 countries are European. Six if you count Russia.
• Three of the top 20 are English-speaking countries. Four if you count India.

However, when you overlay each of the countries’ total population size, it becomes clear where there is potential for massive growth:

And when you overlay social media usage on top of these two datasets, a very interesting picture emerges, with the BRIC countries of China, India, Brazil and Russia, along with others like Mexico, already massively ahead of mature markets like the US and the UK in terms of their internet population’s use of social media, with plenty of room for growth:

click through for full image

Which paints a pretty convincing picture, for me at least, that points south and east to the future of social media…

According to research just released by Nielsen social media usage has gone up by 43% in the US over the last year, meaning Americans now spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs.

The graphic below shows how the typical US internet user’s online hour breaks down:

Other highlights of the research include:

• Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks – accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent.
• Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of US activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for US online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

What’s interesting about these stats is how precisely the amount of an hour’s time online a US user spends in social media matches that of UK users (both 13m 36s – see the Nielsen UK data from May), although US users spend almost 50% more time playing online games.

Gartner: Social networks influence purchase decisions
Research by Gartner confirms that social networks influence the purchase decisions of a majority of consumers. Gartner surveyed around 4,000 consumers across 10 markets and split behaviour into 6 groups, the most influential of whom they named ‘Salesmen, Connectors and Mavens’.

According to Gartner these three groups influence the purchasing activities of 74% of the population, however for marketers, it’s not as simple as trying to target each of these segments. Individuals play different roles within different social groups, and Mavens in particular may be more likely to share negative information about a brand.

As Mashable commented:

none of this is really new information – it just reinforces the fact that when online, consumers behave pretty much as they did prior to the Internet age.

If anyone’s got their hands on a copy of the report and wants to share any further insights, please let us know in the comments. Visit the Gartner website to pick up a copy for only US$1,295.

UK time spent on the internet rises 38% in two years
The IPA has released headline figures from its third TouchPoints survey that describes a week in the life of the average person in Great Briatin over 15. We’ve pulled out a few stats we found interesting but do read the post for a full rundown:

• The percentage of adults claiming to use the internet in a week now stands at 75% rising from 53% in TouchPoints2.
• The growth in internet usage has been across all age groups but is relatively larger for 15-24s ie. +43% compared to 20% growth amongst those aged 55+.
• 16% of all adults and 34% of 15-24s use their mobile phones to access the internet each week.
• 37% of adults claim to social network each week — as we know, this group is particularly skewed towards 15-34s particularly 15-24s, and those either still studying or working full-time and also has a slight female and ABC1 bias. The incidence of social networking also has a strong regional bias towards London and the South East: with the notable exception of the North West, the rest of the country are much lighter social networkers.
• Social networking takes place throughout the whole day but peak time for people to social network is between 6.30pm and 10pm in the evening when 3 to 3.5% of adults claim to be active — about a third of these also claim to be watching the television at the same time. Only a relatively low level of people claim to be social networking at work and this peaks over lunchtime.
• 35% of all adults claim to use Facebook each week — up from 16% in 2008. For 15-24s Facebook’s weekly reach is 79% – up from 39% in 2008.
• Only 4% of adults claim to use Twitter once a week or more whilst the comparative weekly reach figure for Linkedin is 1.4%.

Gawker stalks Zuck, Facebook courts journos
Over at Facebook, whilst Mark Zuckerberg has been dodging the paparazzo whom Gawker hired to make a point about privacy, the Facebook Developer Blog has shown just how keen they are to get on with the media, with an extensive post highlighting all the ways media organisations can use Facebook to increase traffic and engagement levels. Their media page has a good overview of “Best Practices for Journalists”, but their recommendations can be applied to any blog or website.

Amazon implements Facebook Connect
When two of the biggest internet brands are involved in one story, and that story involves social media, there’s bound to be an excess of speculation. Did Amazon and Facebook make some sort of deal? No, Amazon simply implemented Facebook Connect, which has been around for a while.

But it’s still big news, as Amazon pioneered ‘collaborative filtering’ technology to provide more relevant recommendations. By adding Facebook Connect, Amazon can now start to see which customers share not only a preference for early 20th Century crime fiction, but also friends and networks. Individuals who opt-in will be able to see what’s popular with other friends who are using the service, which will certainly make gift buying easier, but will everyone want their Facebook friends to know about their shopping habits? Some of the commenters in this Mashable post certainly don’t.

Facebook Questions launched
If that’s not enough Facebook news for one week, you’ll be pleased to know that a new application allowing users to ask questions to the Facebook community is currently in beta in the US and UK. Brand pages will automatically be given a new questions tab, where they cannot delete user questions at their will (like the wall) and where they can answer questions either as the brand or as the personal profile accessing the page. We’ll be eagerly watching how this changes user interaction with brand pages, as it is planned to come out of beta and be available to all users in the near future.

20 billion tweets reached
Twitter has grown massively in Japan, so it was only fitting that the Tokyo graphic designer who goes by the catchy handle @GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, was the one to reach the milestone. As the BBC notes:

Twitter took four years to reach its 10 billionth tweet, in March this year, and less than five months to double it.

Xbox offer support via Twitter, sending 5,000 tweets per week
The Xbox customer support team are offering dedicated Twitter support via an “Elite Tweet Fleet”. According to Social Media Examiner, they are responding 91 hours per week, including nights and weekends when users are most likely to be gaming. And they don’t shy away from language that may be inappropriate on a telephone support line.

“When people are passionate and they use that kind of language, a lot of times there’s legitimately something wrong with our service,” says McKenzie Eakin, program manager, Xbox LIVE Service Delivery (also known as @XboxSupport Elite Tweet Fleet Sky Captain).

Bump and share
A few days ago, Mashable reported on the new release of Bump; Bump 2.0:

Bump, the app that makes it super simple to exchange information with other users by bumping phones, has just released Bump 2.0 for the iPhone. The app features an updated and refined interface plus the ability to compare calendars, instantly connect on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, and the ability to send messages back and forth without another Bump. Like its predecessor, Bump 2.0 is free.

StumbleUpon drives nearly twice as much traffic as Digg
Web analytics companies Woopra and StatCounter have uncovered a “silent social media success story” in the form of StumbleUpon:

It now has 10.6million users and… according to a new analysis by web analytics company Woopra it drives nearly twice as much traffic than Digg. Statcounter uncovered a similar trend recently, with StumbleUpon second only to Facebook among social media traffic drivers

Those of you needing a handy visualisation to grasp just how much traffic StumbleUpon generate can feast your eyes on the below pie chart from Woopra, which shows the top social bookmark referrers.