It’s very interesting to see brands that have the strength, passion and appeal to actively involve people in a relationship. They do it through outreach activities and by stimulating people’s interest.

It’s fascinating to follow brands that are able to draw attention and engagement to a level that people are spontaneously willing to be involved. In these cases, people find strategies and implement real tactics to be noticed and involved by brands.

Take a look at this interesting post by Juli Ziv about how bloggers can get in touch with brands to get access to an exclusive experience such as the fashion week.

What do fashion brands have in common? How do they spark this level of involvement? How could this apply to your brand?

A fundamental step is differentiating between a “flat”, non-creative approach that can activate a generic conversation (let’s call it “buzz”) and a deep, personalized, creative and direct approach that can generate a real commitment to be part of a brand’s community. Only one of these generates real, long term, unconditioned involvement.

What are your experiences with these two types of relationship with brands? Do you have any examples? Let us know in the comments.

According to recent research by Sysomos, Twitter users have changed. Not only have they grown in numbers: they’ve grown up and have a more mature approach to Twitter.

It’s a collective acquisition of behaviours and uses that shows clearly Twitter is headed towards more engagement and more interaction between people (and brands, too).

A few insights from the research:

• Many have understood the importance of trust: the use of Twitter “bios” to tell people about their identity has increased (31% to 69%);

• Relevance is also important: having a detailed name helps to show a there’s a real person behind the account. Detailed user names have increased (33% > 73%);

• Differentiation is becoming one of the main challenges in social media, and attributes like location or website URL help develop it. Both these parameters have been communicated by many more Twitter users than last year;

• The number of users has increased, but also the average number of followers has grown, proving that new accounts are interacting well, learning from more experienced people;

What do you think about Twitter’s change? Do you feel its users are growing up and have a more effective approach to networking and conversation?

You may have seen this infographic created by Davide Basile, which shows just how popular FriendFeed is here in Italy (and also other countries like Turkey and Japan).

The facile answer is that Metcalfe’s law took effect with FriendFeed here in Italy, as it did with Orkut in Brazil and India, and hi5 in Central America – there’s a big enough critical mass of users of the service in the country for other users in the same country to get value from it, and the effect is self re-enforcing.

However, there are clearly cultural factors at play – in Italy, FriendFeed has become an extension of the blogosphere, a place where you can share thoughts and content using more than just 140 characters (which is useful if you’re speaking Italian) – a community where you can find professionals, creatives, artists, blogstars or just normal people who want to engage, sometimes arguing but in the end adding value to the conversation.

If you’re just looking at certain data then FriendFeed is not a big deal, even in Italy, with Facebook being a much larger phenomenon. But if you’re searching for high-quality interactions and you want to listen, understand, gather insights or connect like minded people to produce ideas or crowdsource a project, then it is the right place.

Anyway, you shouldn’t just take my word for it. I asked Livefast, one of the most influential and controversial bloggers here in Italy and a FriendFeed rockstar, for his point of view. Here’s what he said:

I think Friendfeed became so (relatively) popular in Italy because it was adopted very early by the previously existing – very strong – community of local mainstream bloggers. This attracted (and still attracts) a number of their readers. The Italian friendfeedosphere (or whatever it’s called) resembles a lot the Italian blogosphere: same people, same main influencers, largely the same subjects dealt with and the same kind of snobbish attitude.

The reason why *I* prefer it to Facebook, however, is different. I like FriendFeed because my contacts there are all people that for some reason I chose: because I like them, because I dig what they say, because I love to argue with them, whatever. My contacts on Facebook, on the contrary, also include a large number of people that just “happened” to me: schoolmates, work acquaintances, relatives and so on, all people I don’t care discussing much with, I don’t like (anymore) the company of and, in general, I don’t wish to share much of my life and opinions with.

Of course, I’m aware I’m on the losing side. Facebook rules and will soon own the planet (for one thing, it already owns FriendFeed), however, and as long as it lasts, I’m going to enjoy every tiny bit of it.

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!

[iframe http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/urbantick/maps/london_ncl_100628.html 500 420]

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.