Who is in control of your brand?

Google+ hit 20M users in three weeks smashing all targets and overloading their server capacity.

I hope these points bring some kind of sanity to the current public debate about how G+ is going to solve global warming and dramatic demise of Facebook.

And if I’m being a completely hypocritical ass tell/punch me.

** I’m not saying G+ isn’t great and plays a role, but anybody predicting anything about what’s going to happen is lying.

LinkedIn third social networking site used by Marketers

What I find interesting about this study of how marketers are using social media is that over 80% are using Facebook & Twitter, followed very closely by LinkedIn at 78%. Why I’m surprised is that from my experience LinkedIn is a very difficult channel to achieve the objectives they listed in the diagram above (right). LinkedIn is mostly a place to improve your personal career, not your employers brand.

Social Bookmarking a priority over MySpace

It’s also funny how we’re all still interested in social bookmarking site but so bored of MySpace, when the ability to use Social Bookmarking sites to achieve marketing outcomes at any scale is extremely hit and miss and you can build a MySpace page, buy some media and have an effective reach of 100,000-1,000,000 in Australia. Maybe it’s because it was once so mighty and now that it’s not number one we’ve all moved on.

The full report is available here in video and PDF formats, thanks to Social Media Examiner.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2010

Thanks to Flowtown for turning data into pictures, again.

The Age reports that Gillard tops twitter’s list today and that

It is a result Julia Gillard will hope repeats itself on election day.

Being popular isn’t just about noise

Getting high volume on Twitter doesn’t mean you’re going to sell more widgets, or get more votes, it just means more people are mentioning you.

What you’d want to know is how much of that volume is positive, if it’s mostly positive that’s a good thing, if there’s lots of negative that’s a bad thing.

How do you track sentiment?

It’s something the social media industry has been struggling with since social media listening tools we first created. Each of them has their own patent pending sentiment algorithm that somehow tells you if a particular mention of a brand is positive, negative, neutral or mixed.

We’ve been doing listening for clients for a couple of years, and still to this day have found NONE of the sentiment tools reliable, so we take a large sample, read and categorise them.

Why’s it so hard?

Slang, sarcasm, jokes, responses to positive, saying one brand is crap but the other is better… and the list goes on.

So I’ve run a few tests, using some freely available tools, to illustrate the point, but you should decide whether Julia’s achievement is actually a good thing or not.

Twitter Search – The latest mentions of Gillard

Twitter Sentiment by AppSpot

Social Mention (Searches more than just Twitter)

TweetFeel

Twitrratr

Twends

So don’t blindly trust the latest sophisticated sentiment algorithm, test the heck out of it and probably just do it manually.

I must preface this post with the fact that I love the concept of FriendFeed, bringing all my online world together, hence why I jumped on ages ago. Jimmy Wales also named me “more famous that scobleizer” a couple of months back thanks to a conversation I had with him on FriendFeed AND I do & will continue to use the service…

There has been SO MUCH NOISE about Facebook buying FriendFeed which makes FriendFeed seem like a fantastic service. However,  since I’ve been using it I’ve realised it’s fairly useless in a real & practical way; i.e. if I removed my account today, my life wouldn’t be any different.

So here are the three reasons why I think Friend Feed sucks:

• It’s cluttered
  The fact that everything is in one place makes it noisy, confusing and cluttered
• It’s soul-less
  There’s hardly any dialogue between users (or you can’t see it), which is WHY we use social media
• It doesn’t drive traffic
  Twitter drives 20-30% of traffic to my blog & in the last 30 days Friend Feed has delivered 1 visitor

If you do like FriendFeed, tell me why & how I can use it differently to realise it’s awesomeness.

If you haven’t tried it, maybe give it a go.

Here’s my profile http://friendfeed.com/simontsmall/

And here’s FriendFeed’s biggest advocate and international nerd superstar, Scobleizer, on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer. Clearly he’s doing something I’m not.

In a recent report prepared by Sysomos and it indicates that we’re beating massive countries like Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, France, Indian & South Africa in terms of new user sign ups on Twitter.

Full report here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/appendix

I visited a site where lots of people are able to contribute content about Twitter. I posted the content below on the 14th of April and to my surprise there haven’t been any since.

1. Twitter should be an extension of your social media communications plan, and a connector throughout the plan

2. Just because you’re followed by 45,052 people, it doesn’t they all want to buy your product

3. Aim to be followed by ONLY people who could buy or influence to buy your product/service

4. Twitter is becoming more populated, everyday there is more quality content for you to compete with

5. It won’t be the marketing magic you’ve been looking for, but it will extend your current activity

Twitter is certainly raising the profile of social media, although marketers/brands don’t know what it is, it does get them asking questions – which is a win for social media generally.

However, I and lots of other pessimists doubt Twitter’s phenomenal growth and how it’s changed the world. For me it’s profile is partly due to it’s value to the publishing community – basically it helps journalists find stories quick, which makes their lives easier, so they write about it lots.

However, a Hubspot report, which surveyed 4.5 million Twitter accounts gives us a good indication of the uptake of the new craze.

Some of the key stats from the study are:

• Currently 32.1M users, up from 1.6M 12 months ago
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738
• 24.14% of users have a bio in their profile
• 31.32% of users have a location in their profile
• 20.21% of users have a homepage URL in their profile
• 45.12% of users have tweeted at least once
• 47.29% of users have at least one follower
• 44.50% of users are following at least one account
• You can read more here: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf

On the surface there’s been a growth in user-base from 1.6M (12 mths ago) to 32.1M (now) – a 2000% increase in 12 months – not bad. But as we all know not all the users are active, so lets consider the inactive accounts – inactive account could be defined many ways, I’m using ‘have not followed anyone’ as a broad measure. Hubspot tells us that 55.5% of people aren’t following anyone, which brings the active user-base down to 14.2M.

Assuming all of the original 1.6M users were ‘active’ the growth year on year is 787%. Now which ever way you want to skin that, or define ‘inactive’ that’s still impressive growth. Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook or MySpace, but how often do MySpace & Facebook get press based on their ‘active users’?

I still believe that Twitter is an over-hyped application, however, it is changing the game – and making marketers & businesses sit up and atleast ask questions.

Other discussions on the report

• GigaOm: Ironic But True – Many on Twitter are Just Silent
• SFGafe: Most Twitter Users are less than Twitter-obsessed
• VentureBeat: Twitter Study Finds More Lurkers than Active Users
• Mashable: Are Twitter Users Inactive?