This week New Media Age released its annual guide to the UK’s top 100 interactive agencies. We Are Social is proud to be listed as one of the “Ones to Watch”:

Agencies that we think are worth keeping an eye on. They have either made a promising start or done particularly notable digital work. In every case, we think you’ll be hearing more about them in the coming year.

Thank you NMA, we’re extremely chuffed!

This infographic from Jess3 shows the relative size of social networks and online services such as Skype, Gmail and Hotmail, and the proportion of their user base that access the service via a mobile device. Wowzers!

Facebook goes global with location
In the week that Mark Zuckerberg gave an extensive interview in the New Yorker Facebook has extended the availability of its geo-tagging service Facebook Places to the UK and Japan. Previously only available in the US the service allows users to check into locations via their iPhone, applications for Blackberry and Android devices are in the pipeline. Michael Sharon, product manager of Places, was keen to point out that the firm has made Place’s API available, allowing existing location services such as Foursquare to integrate with them. The release of Places in Japan, where only 1.1% of the population are signed up to Facebook, is seen as a move to further spur recent growth in a market with a high saturation of smart phones.

Google going social, slowly
After the failure of Google Wave and a fairly timid start for Google Buzz we could forgive Google for sticking to what they do best and cutting short their escapades into the world of social-networking. Unlikely, as chief executive Eric Schmidt announced this week that “layers” of social-networking features wil be added to the search engine later this year, focusing on their core aim of “providing more tailored recommendations”.

Flickr reaches five billion images
Flickr reached the dizzy heights of 5 billion images this week with this snap from yeoaaron:

Indian brands flock to Facebook
Having overtaken Orkut as the most popular network last month, Facebook continues to grow in India, breaking the 12 million users mark this week. With a population of over 1 billion and a high level of English literacy India is considered a prime target for the future growth of social networks reaching saturation in their home markets, and brands clearly want a piece of the action. A report by local web strategy firm found MTV-India to be the most liked brand with the highest daily growth and highest amount of daily interactions. The most active brand, interestingly, was the Delhi Traffic Police, with an average 12.8 posts a day.

Candidates leading on Facebook win in elections
Unsurprisingly winning candidates in the American senate primaries had more Facebook Fans than their losing opponents. Although likely more a reflection of their popularity than social media anointing political winners this should at least allow politicians and their campaign teams to gauge the distance between candidates in the run up to elections, and relax/panic accordingly.

Sporting Tweets
With cricket stars two a penny causing controversy on Twitter the English Cricket Board is considering writing into players contracts a blanket ban on the social network. Azeem Rafiq was banned for a month and fined £500 for calling an ECB manager a “useless wanker”, while Kevin Pietersen called the decision to drop him from the one-day squad a “fuck-up”, which he was promptly fined for. Owen Gibson has a detailed look at these and other sporting Twitter mishaps in a great article in the Observer. Looks like they need a social media strategy to me.

Ford wins big with social media
In May of this year Ford officially launched the Fiesta in the US, but they had been engaging target communities across social media with the Fiesta Movement long before the first car rolled off the assembly line. Compete has been measuring shopper data and new vehicle demand on third party sites, and the news for the Fiesta social media campaign is startlingly good.

Inside Gatorade’s mission control
Gatorade is one of the most popular drinks in the US, but is locked into a three years sales decline. In an ambitious move, PepsiCo (which owns the brand) has invested in a glassed in converted conference room converted into Gatorade’s social media mission control. The Wall St. Journal covers this in depth, with Gatorade monitoring social networks 24 hours a day, tweeting encouragement to high-school athletes before big games and tapping out responses to Facebook queries such as when to use a new protein drink.

Tipp-Ex outreach campaign
Our colleagues at We Are Social Italy are outreaching for a great new campaign from Tipp-Ex and have been generating high praise for their approach.

MTV VMA Twitter visualisation
Watching TV with Twitter has been a revelation to anyone that’s tried it, a throw back to a time when limited choice encouraged more conversations about the few shows we all watched. MTV went a step further than this and created a beautiful site tracking tweets of and around their video music awards last week, well worth digging around for some choice comments on Gaga’s fashion decisions.

Content comes to Foursquare
The Metro will become the first UK newspaper to put their reviews onto Foursquare. Users will be able to check-in and view location relevant restaurant and film reviews from within the network.

Coronation Street – the social game
Following an Ofcom study showing media consumers were increasingly splitting their attention across multiple devices ITV has commissioned a social network game, Corrie Nation. The game is likely to be aimed at the 16-24 demographic who are spending less time watching TV and more on a multitude of other devices.

Archers fans launch ‘spontaneous’ Twitter campaign
You’ll be aware that The Bull pub is under threat of closure now Sid Perks has died and his partner Jolene doesn’t want to take it on (if of course, you listen to the the Archers, the world’s longest running soap opera). A storyline in the show even discussed whether a social media campaign should be launched to save the pub, possibly a cheeky ploy as now fans of the show have ‘spontaneously’ launched a campaign to do just that, using the hashtag #savethebull.

Social media may cause death by drowning
An Australian plant that was hooked up to be watered in relation to interaction with its Facebook Page has been a victim of its own success, drowning in too much water as it got more and more fans. A new, more water resistant species, has been hooked up in it’s place. Wish it luck…

[via]

a faster, easier, and richer way to discover what’s new in your world

Changes to the new Twitter.com include:

• New design – The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.
• Media – Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter.
• Related content – When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
• Mini profiles – Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

There’s more detail on Twitter’s own site and Forrester’s Augie Ray has an excellent analysis.

Recently we received a speculative job inquiry from Graeme Anthony (comms_anarchist) in the form of his ‘C.V.I.V’

As you can see for yourself, it’s possibly the best job application, ever. I’ve shared it here with his permission, as we don’t have any open roles at his level, but you might…

As ever, the Mashup is here to to soothe you into the working week and massage away your gaps in social media knowledge.

Liking a brand not the same as liking its marketing
ExactTarget have published a report entitled “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” which found that Facebook users are more into showing off their brand choices to their friends on Facebook than those following brands on Twitter or subscribing to their emails. ‘To show support for the company to others’ was the second top reason for liking a page on 39%, beaten to first by ‘To receive discounts and promotions’ by a mere 1%.

Consumers who “like” a brand as a means to self-expression are according to eMarketers reading of the report “are by definition brand advocates, and the earned media potential for marketers among these enthusiasts is high”. Which leads us nicely on to…

I want to be ‘Liked’ by you
AdWeek published a story yesterday outlining some of the lengths brands are going to to get Facebook users to ‘Like’ their page. Since the switch from fan pages to ‘Likes’ in April of this year (only April!?! – feels like a lot longer than that) coupled with the ubiquitous presence of ‘Like’ buttons everywhere across the net (over 350,000 sites to be exact) there has been a massive gold rush to gain more fans. Borders, Mentos, Playboy and Lionsgate are some of the brands that have been pursuing pretty aggressive ‘Like’ campaigns to gain extra fans. However they point out (and we’d agree) that some of the recruitment strategies can end up backfiring due to the fan being less interested in the brand long-term as they are simply being attracted by content or offer they’d like to avail of in the short term.

Facebook ‘Like’ button news
Last Thursday Facebook launched a brand new way for apps and websites to use the Facebook ‘Like’ button, to summarize:

1. You can now ‘Like’ specific pages or objects within an application; that last point is particularly important as it means you can now share specific in-app content rather than having to simply ‘Like’ the whole app itself
2. Open graph enabled third party sites can now include a ‘Like’ button on their page that creates a connection with their Facebook page
3. There’s a new, larger like button that allows you to see how often something has been ‘Liked’

Facebook adding ‘Social context’ metrics to it advertising analytics
Facebook also have recently updated their performance advertising analytics tool to now enable users to understand the influence of ‘social context’ on ad performance. ‘Social context’ is what they call that bit under their social ads that tells you what friends have already ‘Liked’ that ad, application, event or the fan page it’s advertising. It will be interesting to see how accurate Nielsen’s assertion is that adverts with ‘social context’ achieve significantly better results than standard banners.

Facebook Places update and Context Optional’s Facebook fan ranking app
We also have some updates on how Places is being integrated around the site. Check-ins are now being listed on the events home page, news feeds and Places pages, as well as in the right sidebar in a module called ‘Recent Checkins’ which shows you the name of the place that’s recently been checked into as well as the profile pic, name and the time stamp of the person doing the checking in. For those that have access to Places, if you go to your ‘Events’ home page you will see a ‘Happening now’ section that allows you to see the most recent check-ins with time stamps attached just in case you and your mates are in the same area at the same time.

In other news, Context Optional have just built a Facebook app that claims to be the first product that enables brands to recognise users who check into Places. Effectively making Places more like Foursquare in terms of functionality as it enables brands to reward top fans with promotions and special offers.

Things not so funny down on the Farm
SF Weekly has published a rather scathing piece on Zynga, the developer of Farmville (social game played on some social network I’ve never heard of) outlining it’s dodgy business practices of ripping off other developers content (this is not new news) as well as relaying quotes from former employees talking about how miserable it was to work there. One describing the MD Marcus Pincus’  business model as: “Steal somebody else’s game, throw millions of dollars at it, and then, if it doesn’t have it already, add virtual coins”. What makes this approach even more galling is Zynga’s trigger happy attitude towards suing competitors and former employees who may or may not have breached contracts or stolen IP. Still though, when they are rumoured to be making $500 million dollars a year you’ve got to think they are doing something right.

LinkedIn usage around the world
Comscore have just published a study about the countries with the highest penetration of visitors to LinkedIn. The Netherlands just edged out Ireland to first place. 5 of the top 6 countries are European.

Blogger outreach still pretty rubbish overall (except for ours)
Gary Andrews has written up the discussion from the recent London Bloggers Meetup – The PR Edition. It appears that when it comes to PRs pitching bloggers it’s a case of ‘plus ça change…’. There’s not enough research being put in up front to understand what the bloggers are interested in or whether or not they would be likely to write about the brands they are being pitched with. This is backed up by Darika Ahrens great set of blog posts on Blogger outreach, directly asking bloggers their thoughts on how they are currently being pitched to. Of course, this is a subject we helped write the book on, and don’t just take our word for it.

Nike continues to do cool stuff
Dan Calladine made us aware of a recent bit of activity from Nike in Portland, Oregon. Placing a Koi Fusion food truck near Portland university they Tweeted their followers to come along, check in using Facebook places and ask for the ‘Destroyer Burrito’. They received a rather large looking burrito wrapped in the usual tin foil within which they found a free Nike jacket. Tasty.

We get to work with lots of very cool stuff!
We are very proud to announce The Conran Shop as a client. We are in the very exciting position of being able to help the brand develop all aspects of their social media programme, from strategic advice through to blogger outreach. The news was covered in Marketing last week and we’re particularly grateful for Liam Butler’s, The Conran Shop’s global head of e-commerce and online marketing, comments:

There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the space at the moment, with everyone jumping on the social media bandwagon, but many ‘experts’ lack the understanding that We Are Social has proved time and again.

BBC experimenting with delivering user-generated news on Tube strike
The BBC’s progressive use of Twitter across its news channels and wider programming went one step further last week during the Tube strike by aggregating Tweets using the hashtag #tubestrike and plotting them on an interactive map.

Claire Wardle, one of the people behind this initiative, has written a detailed account of the project. It’s a really interesting insight into the sheer amount of work that was put into it and the learnings that came about as a result. We hope that more projects of this type get support from the BBC going forward.

Twitter good for understanding what people hate about commercial banks
Everyone hates banks. However a study of 5 months worth of Tweets about Australia’s top 4 shed light on how much, and it turns out it for a variety of reasons, however customer service came as the worse offender across the board. Christine Walker of Alliance Strategic Research who carried out the research said that that majority of tweets were negative and as such, it was beneficial for banks to be on Twitter in order to manage negative word of mouth about their brand. If there are any banks listening out there: here’s our details.

Twitter also good for getting money off Uniqlo
A rather clever piece of activity from Uniqlo who continue to do really good work in social media. The concept was pretty simple: upon entering the Uniqlo website, pick an item that you like, re-tweet it. The more you re-tweet it the cheaper it gets until it gots to the 9th of September dealine.

Tony Blair latest to feel ‘wrath’ of social media
A guy called Euan Booth has set-up a Facebook fan group titled ‘Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops’ which gained over 1,000 members in a day last week. The Facebook group now currently stands at over 12,000 members, however I think he would probably have had more success if he replaced the word ‘Subversively’ with ‘Cheekily’. Or something.

Bloke behind @BPGlobalPR outed
Speaking of social media snowballs, it turns out we finally get to find out who was behind the outrageously successful BPGlobalPR Twitter account doing the rounds during the height of Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. Not surprisingly he is a comedy writer and drafted in a number of people to help him out with writing jokes for the account. Full interview on The Awl. Seems like a thoroughly nice fellow, very dapper too.

We need your help
A one final thing, this time a small request for your help – We Are Social are in the running for the “Most Admired PR Agency: The People’s Choice” ‘award’ and we need your votes in order not to lose to the evil Ketchum or the nice people at Cake. OK, so it’s not an award, just a poll on some bloke’s blog, and yes you’re right, we’re not a PR agency, but still, we want your vote!

See you next week.

Luke Brynley-Jones is a co-founder of Influence People, which runs social media conferences in the UK, Europe and USA. His next event, Social Media Advertising is on Monday 20^th September in London.

So you have a social media strategy. Congratulations! The big question now is: have you integrated social media advertising?

It’s fair to say early experiments with social media advertising failed to deliver. Back in November 2007 when Facebook launched its Beacon ad network, it truly failed to light. At the same time banners and text ads on social networks produced derisory returns from lots of traffic.  The upside of these failures was the boom in engagement marketing, with marketers setting out to meet consumers halfway by making adverts more fun and interesting.

Companies like Lotame, the US-based ad network, pioneered the ROE (“return on engagement”) ad model, billing advertisers according to the time spent viewing, clicking and sharing their content, rather than on clicks. In fact, Lotame claims to monitor over 160 user actions – so they get lots of opportunity to charge.

We’ve also seen new approaches to profiling and targeting consumers. By mining and analysing publicly available social media data, then identifying known “connectors”, “influencers” or “mavens” within market segments and targeting them with fun and interesting adverts, some marketers have been able to increase engagement (especially sharing) and improve ROI.

At the same time social networks and, crucially, their users, have been evolving. A recent report from The Nielsen Company and Facebook demonstrated how adverts with just a tacit endorsement from a Facebook friend achieve significantly better results than standard banners.

Equally, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, for which success depends on the popularity of each advert, offer an element of natural selection that puts control in the hands of users.

After a slow start, social media advertising is coming of age. Facebook is set to make $1 billion from advertising in 2010 and 100 million Farmville and Mafia Wars social gamers have created a huge new ad market in the last two years alone. If your social media strategy doesn’t include paid media – it’s probably time you took another look at social media advertising.

Luke has kindly offered our readers a 2 for 1 offer on tickets to Social Media Advertising 2010 until 10^th Sept (that’s tomorrow!). Just email your booking confirmation with the name/email address of your guest to moc.elpoepecneulfninull@ofni and they’ll be issued with a free ticket.

ASA extension to digital remit
The online remit of the ASA, the UK’s advertising watchdog, will be ‘extended significantly’ to deliver greater consumer protection and cover social media campaigns.

The ASA’s current online remit includes ads in paid-for space and sales promotions wherever they appear, but the new remit will now cover:

• Advertisers‟ own marketing communications on their own websites and;
• Marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Though the news was ‘widely welcomed’ last week, there were some unclear areas such as “the perceived ‘grey area’ between what constitutes editorial and marketing copy”.  To help marketers better understand the reasons behind and implications of the ASA’s new remit, the IAB has published a list of FAQs on its website, and you can expect a more detailed post from Robin here soon.

Apple launches social network ‘Ping’ as part of iTunes
Steve Jobs and Co. have launched a social network as part of the latest version of their iTunes software. The network called Ping allows iTunes users to build a network of friends and follow musicians in a similar way to that of Twitter. Many believe it will be a direct challenger to existing music-based social networks such as Myspace, Spotify and LastFM.

Ping was due to launch with Facebook integration, allowing new users to find their Facebook friends who were also using Ping. However, Apple refused to agree to Facebook’s “onerous terms” causing Facebook to block Apple’s access to the platform. Apple subsequently disabled the feature completely. If this sounds a little familiar, it’s because a similar thing happened to Twitter back in June, when it released an upgrade to its Facebook application, and had such functionality revoked by Facebook.

Twitter’s Evolving Ecosystem
Last week, Twitter CEO Evan Williams posted a number of interesting stats that highlighted the growth and evolution of Twitter. For instance, the following chart shows the top ten applications people have used to access Twitter in the last 30 days:

It’s worth noting that while web access through Twitter.com still dominates usage, mobile is becoming an increasingly important way for users to connect, as evidenced in the number of mobile apps in the top ten list. In fact:

Total mobile users has jumped 62 percent since mid-April, and, remarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now, as opposed to the five percent before we launched our first Twitter-branded mobile client.

Twitter now boasts over 145 million registered users and around 105 million tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day.

Social traffic more important than search traffic

The marketing team behind Gawker Media have published a series of stats that illustrates the blog network’s traffic from social media sites. It’s should come as no surprise that referrals from social media, for the most part, have risen over the last year and that Facebook is way ahead of the competition. The vast implementation of the Facebook Open Graph has no doubt sped up this process. What’s more striking, however, is the decline of Digg according to Peter Kafka:

Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik et al. Now it has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and, a little surprisingly, StumbleUpon.

The main takeway? “Social traffic is becoming as important, or more so, than search traffic from the likes of Google and Yahoo”.

Check-in bonanza? It could be just around the corner
Despite geo-location being on the minds of many marketers over the past few months, a new study from Forrester Research suggests that only a small segment of users are actually interested in the ‘fad’:

Only urbanite techies and marginally employed twenty-somethings are interested. Just 4% of Americans have tried location-based services, and only 1% on a regular basis. And apparently it’s only for the kids, as 70% of those who tried it were between 19 and 35.

Brian Skepys is quick to point out however, that Foursquare is proving to be just as popular as Facebook – and even more popular that Twitter – when it was first launched.

Three-quarters of Marketers plan to increase investment in social media in the next 12 months
According to a June 2010 survey by King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42, 75% of companies planned to increase their social media budgets in the coming year.  The research surveyed 457 US marketers and managers, which also found that 72% of US companies already had a social media strategy in place. Both findings suggest that a more mature approach to social media from marketers, and a movement from one-off social media ‘experiments’.

Sales still an important factor behind brand social media efforts
Research from social media monitoring service Alterian reveals that ‘new customer acquisition’ was the number one objective behind setting up a social media strategy (30%), followed by ‘driving brand awareness’ (26.5%) and ‘retaining existing customers (24%). ‘Customer service,’ unfortunately, was considered the main social media objective by only 1.2% of the marketers surveyed.

The King gives in to the Green lobby… and wins back his crown
It happened a few months ago with Kit Kat. Then Greenpeace did it again, this time with Burger King.  A few months ago the environmental organization launched an intense social media campaign against one of Sinar Mas (pulp-paper-and-palm-oil conglomerate) highest profile customers: Burger King. It encouraged fans of its Facebook page to voice their discontent on the Burger King Facebook page.  It took one month of pressure but Burger King has just announced that they’re dropping the palm-oil producer.  The fans are delighted and Greenpeace even saluted Burger King’s actions by encouraging fans to say thanks.

The Guardian launches science blogs network
The Guardian is launching a new science blog network, aimed at getting readers to discuss ‘science’ in all its forms, “from palaeontology to extraterrestrial life”.

The science network will comprise of four regular bloggers sharing their expertise on the latest in evolution and ecology, politics and campaigns, skepticism and particle physics. A fifth blog will act as a window into other discussions going on in the science world and will also host the Guardian’s first science blog festival.

The Guardian had already adopted a similar strategy for their Law Network.

Track the Coca-Cola fairy in Sydney
Our friends down under will be pleased to know that Coca-Cola is organizing a Foursquare treasure-hunt just for them called the Coke Machine Fairy.  The Coke Fairy won’t turn your pumpkin into a coach but help you win prizes like gift certificates and concert tickets.  So how does it work? Well, the fairy will be checking on Foursquare in at specific Coke machines in and around Sydney. The first users to find that machine after a check-in, to push the magic button to retrieve the magic bottle and shout about it on Foursquare will see the Fairy magically appear in front of their eyes, arms loaded with gifts! You can friend the fairy on Foursquare and Twitter but be warned that the fairy only officiates in Australia.