Since we opened the doors of the We Are Social Sydney office earlier this year, we have been very, very busy. We have signed up a broad range of amazing clients who present their own unique opportunities for development of social strategy and immersion into the digital realm.  We’ve been quietly growing our team, but the time has come for us to cast the net wide and loud in search for some of the best innovative thinkers, strategists, community managers and all-around-awesome people to help us keep on bringing our vision to life.

If you live and breathe social media, have a strong digital, PR, marketing or communications background and can demonstrate these talents, we’d like to talk to you about joining our team. Ideally with the roles we have available you are cross-modal in experience, quick on your feet, a capable multitasker and have a voracious appetite for knowledge. The space we work in is changing fast, and the importance of not only keeping up, but staying ahead of the curve is mandatory. It’s why we love it. As has been said about us in the past -  We Are Social don’t just discuss how to put social strategy to work for a brand, we make it happen. You’ll need to show us that you can help us achieve that too.

We’re not promising an easy road to glory – we are historically picky when it comes to applicants, because it’s a combination of the right people, with the right mix of skills that allow us to deliver the successful overarching offering we do. We will challenge you to show us what you can bring to the table. You will have to walk the walk. The successful candidates will, however, be a part of an exciting, global team and will be offered the ability to carve their own career path within our organisation. Your skills will be refined with the help of the senior team and you’ll have the chance to inspire the people around you, as well as partnering with some of the best clients to work with in Australia.

If this sounds like it’s up your alley and you’d fit in a community management, or digital/social strategist role, we’d be keen to meet you. Drop us an email in confidence with your CV, your social media presences and some narrative on why you think We Are Social Sydney can’t live without you. We look forward to meeting you!

Since meeting Lindsey from the Londonist at the recent launch of Eurostar Culture Connect I’ve been keeping up to date with everything happening on the Londonist site and this particular post caught my eye. This ‘New City Landscape’ has been created for the Urban Tick blog by Fabian Neuhaus from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and displays London’s Twitter traffic on a contoured map.

Just like a relief map, the peaks in traffic are displayed with different colours representing different ‘heights’ in traffic. There’s also the nice touch of themed place names such as Peckham Crag and Clerkenwell Ridge.

The We Are Social offices are North of Piccadilly Circus (Piccadilly Rock) and just West of Soho Square (Soho Mountain) so we’re smack bang in the middle of the highest peak. Are we the one’s propping up Soho Mountain? I guess it’s possible with the entire company tweeting throughout the day on our own profiles as well as multiple client accounts.

I agree with the suggestion (in the comments of the Urban Tick post) that it would be great to see an interactive live version of this on a Google map like the London Underground Live Tube Map we saw a couple of weeks ago. Then we could really work out who the key contributors are.

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

A great deck from Brandon Murphy of 22squared, which proposes another way of measuring the ROI of social media:

Return on investment = Return on interaction + Return on influence

And then details the research they conducted which backs-up their theory. Pretty convincing stuff…

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.

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.

Very nicely timed with the announcement by CNN’s President that he’s more worried about social networks than FOX, the first video installment of a unique Facebook documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe has been released.

Goa Hippy Tribe is using Facebook in a number of ways: as subject matter (in particular the re-connection of the eponymous Goan Hippies via the social network); in part for research, production and content, and also as a platform for marketing and distribution.

Whilst the story behind the film itself highlights the role that networks such as Facebook play in creating new stories for documentary to cover, what’s really interesting is the way Facebook is being used to shape the content and format of the work.

The filmmaker, Darius Devas, has been interacting with the community of people who were part of the scene in Goa as he makes the film, not only shaping the way the film evolves, but building a community that is a part of the filmmaking process.

Interviews and other items of ‘micro-content’ have been posted over time, sparking conversations, building shared connections between the audience and involving everyone in the journey of the filmmaker and the film. There’s even a lively discussion on a separate Goa Hippy Tribe Group page considering the role of Facebook as an enabler, versus the inevitable privacy concerns when old photos and stories are made public.

This kind of collaboration would not previously have been possible, and it’s a particularly effective way of increasing the emotional involvement of the audience, who will be more likely to share links and recommend the film to their friends, especially as Facebook provides the means to easily do so.

All of this starts to change the way we think about broadcast. This project has an obvious community interested in the subject, but there are just as many niche audiences outside of hippies in Goa. As CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein puts it: “The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.” As these “trusted sources” – our friends – become our audience(s), and we involve them the narrative of our own status updates, the relevance and role of the one-way broadcast media comes into question.

It’s time for We Are Social’s Monday Mashup, our pick of some of the web’s finest social media developments.

PleaseRobMe.com reveals dangers of social networks
If you’re a heavy user of Foursquare and Twitter, you might want to take notice of PleaseRobMe.com. The website made the headlines by highlighting in real-time the whereabouts of people who checked in on Foursquare and shared their location on the web via Twitter. The goal of the three Dutch developers who set up the site was to highlight the dangers of publicly telling others your location on the Internet because it “ leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.”

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

Facebook become America’s second most popular website, beating Yahoo!
Compete.com revealed that Facebook had surpassed Yahoo as America’s second most popular website.  Facebook drew nearly 134 Million unique visitors in January 2010, compared to Yahoo’s 132 Million visitors.

While traffic figures are important, the blog notes that the real story is around user engagement and on this front Facebook wins hands down:

Check out how monthly Attention (time spent on Facebook.com as a percentage of all time spent online each month) ramps over the past year for Facebook, while both Yahoo and Google show a decrease. In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).

The recent launch of Google Buzz is no doubt aimed at eating into the amount of time that users spend on Facebook, but time will tell if Google can be successful here.

MySpace real-time search goes live on Google
MySpace announced on their blog that Google search now picks up publicly available updates from MySpace users in real-time.

… when you search for anything on Google, as part of your search results you will see live updates from MySpace users, including news, photos, and blog posts that they have chosen to publically publish. Further, all of these updates will be ranked to reflect the freshest, most relevant results, making it easier to find the latest information on anything you’re searching for on Google, including the music and artists you enjoy most.

MySpace now joins Twitter as one of the services that are now live in Google’s real-time search, announced last year.

Outlook gets social with LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace
Microsoft announced a number of major developments for Outlook, including a public beta of LinkedIn for Outlook and partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace. The highlights of LinkedIn for Outlook include:

• The ability to connect to your LinkedIn account directly from within your Inbox, and add connections
• The ability to view status updates and photos from connections next to an e-mail message they have sent
• The ability to receive automatic updates to Outlook contact information directly from LinkedIn
• The ability to synchronise mobile contact information with information from LinkedIn

Meanwhile, the Facebook and MySpace partnerships for Outlook 2010 will enable users to more easily connect co-workers and colleagues, as well as friends and family within their Outlook Inbox.

The LinkedIn public beta is available now, and Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as the official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Update: a more nuanced look Foursquare from Charles Arthur, Russell Davies and John Willshire, an interesting experiement from Harvard using Foursquare and one from Bravo on a seemingly much larger scale, and here in the UK, news from Marketing of Debenhams and Domino’s Pizza use of Foursquare.

Update 2: Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns.