Archive for the ‘Useful resources’ Category
A deeper look at the demographics of Social Media Users
February 19th, 2013
The Pew research Center has recently releases its U.S.- focused social networking report
which highlighted some interesting trends on who’s using social media most and which social networks are most popular.
You can download the full report here:
In summary: “The Demographics of Social Media Users 2012” study found that the most frequent social media users are women aged 18 to 29. Women have been significantly more likely to use social networking sites than men since 2009. In December 2012, 71 percent of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 62 percent of men.
Overall, 67 percent use Facebook, and 16 percent use Twitter, which is especially appealing to adults in the 18 to 29-year-old category. Key demographics are charted in the images at the bottom of this post.
Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent of adult U.S. Internet users.
Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated.
13 percent of U.S. online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent say they use Tumblr, and 20 percent of U.S. online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012.
40 percent of mobile phone owners use a social networking site on their phone, and 28 percent do so on a typical day.
The report also looked at Creators and curators, defining them as follows:
As of August 2012:
• 46 percent of U.S. adult internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. We call them creators.
• 41 percent of U.S. adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and re-post them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. We call them curators.
Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities studied and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities.
Interestingly, not using social media may be an elite thing. Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college education to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent).
2012 a year in social network numbers
December 21st, 2012
As we quickly approach 2013, many people are in reflective mood as they look to round-off their year with a 2012 summary post.
I’m going to keep it simple and avoid the fluff by hitting you with some of the statistics that evidence the ever-widening reach of social networks.
So sit back and spend a few minutes taking the numbers in while we rejoice in the fact that the world didn’t end today, at least not yet:
- 25 percent of users on Facebook don’t bother with any kind of privacy control. (source: AllTwitter)
- Monthly active Facebook users now total nearly 850 million. (source: Jeff Bullas)
- 488 million users regularly use Facebook mobile. (source: All Facebook)
- More than 1 million websites have integrated with Facebook in various ways. (source: Uberly)
- 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook. (source: Business2Community)
- 56 percent of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. (sources: AllTwitter)
- 32 percent of all Internet users are using Twitter. (source: Marketing Land)
- Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014. (source:Web Analytics World)
- In 2012, 1 million accounts are added to Twitter everyday. (source: Infographics Labs)
- 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using Twitter. (source: Digital Buzz Blog)
- Instagram was one of the largest acquisitions of a venture capital-backed consumer Web company since Zappos was bought by Amazon for $1.22B in 2009. (source: Factbrowser)
- According to Followgram’s research, 37 percent of Instagram users have never uploaded a single photo and only 5 percent of users have more than 50 pictures. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- It took just 10 months for Instagram to reach the milestone of 150m pictures uploaded. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- 80 percent of Pinterest users are women, while 50 percent of all Pinterest users have children. (source: Search Engine Journal)
- The average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. (source: Arik Hanson)
- The Google +1 button is used 5 billion times per day. (source: AllTwitter)
- Google+ pages appear in search results for 30 percent of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5 percent in February 2012. (source: Bright Edge)
- 48 percent of fortune global 100 companies are now on Google+. (source: Burson-Marsteller)
- Google+ cost $585 million and took 500 employees to build. (source: Social Media Delivered)
- Google+ is expected to attract 400 million users by the end of 2012. (source: Remcolandia)
Source – Huffington Post
Taobao.com achieves $3 billion sales in a single day
November 15th, 2012
Earlier this week, a rather impressive online sales record was set by Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce service owned by Alibaba, one of the world’s largest ecommerce groups.
Taobao reported $3 billion of sales in a single day (November 11th).
That’s not a typo, the day’s sales were recorded at $3 billion and according to Chris West, blogger at West is East and owner of the Min River Tea Farm, in Fuzhou, China the closest competitor to this sales figure was 2011 Cyber Monday in the US, where total sales across all retailers was $1.25bn according to comScore.
So why such a massive sales figure on this date?
Taobao.com held a discount promotion to celebrate what’s known as ‘double sticks day’ in China, a Chinese holiday for singles similar to Valentine’s Day.
Here is a breakdown on the figures from the day’s trading, and if further proof is needed on the growth of Chinese ecommerce; last year’s “Double Sticks Day” saw $380 million in sales for Taoboa, so this year’s sales have grown by just over 360 percent.
• $3.06 billion in sales
• 109 stores with more than $1.6 million USD in sales within 12 hours
• One brand (Tmall) with more than $2.1 billion in sales
• 213 million active accounts
• 105 million orders
• 7 million mobile accounts active in the first hour
• $84 million in sales via mobile just by 2 p.m.
We wait to see what next year brings.
November 8th, 2012
There was an uplifting item on the Today programme this morning about the healing power of silence which is well worth a listen.
Graham Turner, author of the just-published book The Power of Silence and Sister Anne Morris, deputy director of St Bueno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre were interviewed about how taking a short time to live in silence has very positive effects on mental and physical health.
Having been in silent retreats myself, I can vouch for the extraordinary healing power of being completely quiet. It’s not an easy experience because I think we are tuned to noise in our daily lives, and its absence reveals the busyness of our minds.
But the effect of even a five-day silent retreat stays with you long after you re-enter the world of noise. It is a wonderful experience.
Neither Graham nor St Bueno’s are clients but you can find out more about the book here and also learn more about the retreat centre through this link.
You can hear the interview here.
Content 4.0 – what we will pay for [infographic]
November 5th, 2012
I spotted this excellent infographic on what content we would pay for and thought it might be useful and relevant to you.
Business Insider (not a client) produced the infographic (click on the image for full size) believes that “Media” no longer encompasses merely content, but also commerce, payments, and platforms. It says that in a post-cash, networked, and mobile-enabled society, there are new business models work for digital publishers and digital companies.
Business Insider‘s New York city event  on November 27-28th - IGNITION: Future Of Digital – is a two-day conference that will explore the successful and emerging business models of digital media.
It has lined up a truly impressive speaker list and I think it would be well worth following. More details here
The themes of the New York event chime with our ideas at Liberate Media. We believe that sharing useful, timely and relevant content is now the most important element of any PR campaign. It has a clear and measurable value for brands.
While we work in the Earned Media world, where free content is used to build brand authority, reputation and trust, we can also see the rise of content forms, provided by savvy publishers that people will pay for, particularly on mobile devices.
For example, we’ve seen the recent launch in the UK of 12ahead, led by editor Andy McCormick, a young veteran of the digital marketing sector.
12ahead provides quality information that is not easily found anywhere else on the web and has a subscription business model. Early signs are that people are more than willing to pay for this information.
The new title, which I hope thrives (they’re not a client), is part of Content 4.0.
Content 4.0, says Business Insider, is the rise of “Awesome to Many”, where technological advance and maturity of online culture combine to give content providers the opportunity to charge for these assets again.
I think that the Content 4.0 proposition is very strong and is still in process as an idea. But I agree that the online commercial landscape has changed fundamentally over the past few years.
The driver for that was Steve Jobs. Through iTunes, he made buying content online cool again. He then enabled this facility through the iPhone so mobile handsets became purchasing devices.
When buying through mobile becomes cool, the economics of the internet are transformed. We owe Steve Jobs a great debt.
The Future of newspaper publishing – Orange County Register offers a different path
October 17th, 2012
As you may have seen in the excellent Greenslade blog on Media Guardian yesterday:Â a U.S. newspaper has broken with the trend of staffing cuts, and instead hired dozens of reporters to focus on quality journalism and ultimately boost its print readership.
The title in question is the Orange County Register, published in Southern California, which has recently employed about 50 editorial staffers to add to its existing staff of 180.
As an example of this quality local focus, the paper recently sent 40 journalists and photographers to cover high school sporting events in one weekend.
That’s some serious investment in quality content, but why this change from the usual path of online first?
According to a report in NiemanLab the new focus is due to a change in strategy since the paper was acquired by investment group 2100 Trust.
The Orange County Register’s Editor, Ken Brusic said “Think about a Starbucks model. If each day you went into Starbucks and plunked down $4 for a latte, and the cups got smaller and the content got weaker, chances are you’d stop going to Starbucks. That’s basically what newspapers have been doing as a way to deal with decreases in advertising revenue. The new guys are attempting to reverse that trend, and are attempting in a variety of different ways.
“In the meantime, we are moving as fast as we can to increase the quality of the print edition, because that really is where so much of the revenue comes from.
“The new owners have decided that the way they want to proceed with a business model is to really move from solely an advertising-based newspaper model to a subscriber-based one, and in order to accomplish that – basically, what we need if we’re going to charge more – is more quality in the newspaper.”
The strategy includes increasing subscription prices and a paywall, which is likely to go up before the end of the year.
This move seems to make sense, and counters the failing of some traditional media that falter because they reduce quality to focus purely on web-based services. This approach fails to take into consideration why readers, or anyone for that matter, would access content online if the quality is reduced?
In the Niemanlab piece, Brusic confirmed that improving print first doesn’t mean abandoning digital. It does, however, mean cutting back on “things that seem to be distracting the staff from the basic mission, which is to increase quality first in print.”
“The staff still file breaking news to the web, still understands the importance of mobile and digital, but we really have pulled back from chasing empty pageviews and are focusing really on – whether you’re dealing with print or digital – the core mission should be to build quality in content and build a core audience.”
It maybe seen as a risky strategy in the longer term, but it’s a strong differentiator.
By investing in quality, the Orange County Register is giving its loyal and hungry audience exactly what it wants, focusing on the news that they can’t get elsewhere.
It is also adhering to the number one rule of content marketing, which is quality over quantity, and although the investment may not be rewarded in full, it shows a brave approach to solving the traditional vs. digital publishing question.
The FT recognises a necessary evolution for the PR industry
October 8th, 2012
As you may have seen last week, the FT published a story titled ‘PR and news boundaries are being redrawn’ and it was refreshing to read a piece on the PR industry, written by someone outside of the sector, that focused on a future beyond media relations alone.
The piece by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson overviews the evolution of PR and highlights the development of press release distribution services such as PR Newswire and BusinessWire. These services have a reputation as a channel to reach journalists, but are now being re-born as content distribution platforms.
This change mirrors the way the PR industry is changing as a whole, and this is now beginning to be understood from a wider business perspective.
In my opinion, the media relations tag attached to PR, or should I say shackled to PR, has limited its growth and wider potential as a strategic communications advisor. The PR industry should never have been defined by one tactic alone, and in fairness PRs should not have been willing to go along with the hacks / flacks story. This single minded approach contributed to PR’s slow reaction to the digital and social opportunities of the past 10 years, partly because it had been guilty of misunderstanding the relevance.
The simple truth is that PR has the potential to build the story of a brand, and by story I don’t mean misleading the market in the time honoured tradition of ‘leading solutions provider of industry x’, nor do I mean developing stories in relevant media to convince audiences that brand x is the one they should choose.
I simply mean understanding a brand, its offering and its industry, and translating that understanding into conversations supported by useful content that can help it to communicate the brand’s true potential and vision.
The tactical implementation of that story telling is really where the industry has been hung up for too long, but the PR industry’s strength is that it can build and tell the story, regardless of the method in which it is delivered.
This isn’t a question of tactics, the story is the interesting element, it’s the story that builds interest in a brand, it’s the story that drives conversation and it’s the story that will bring results.
But I digress, back to the piece, which for me came to life in the final paragraph:
“Producing readable, watchable corporate content will not be easy. It will also require much closer integration of advertising, digital marketing, PR and investor relations. But search and social media trends suggest corporate content will only grow. Whether media outlets like it or not, every company will have to become a content company.”
Sweet words of wisdom.
Quality content delivered by the integration of so called ‘channels’ that can no longer live separate from each other. That for me is the future, don’t focus too heavily on the implementation but tell the story.
After all, isn’t that what the PR industry should have been doing all along?
Wayne Rooney, quiet products, Poppy Elliott and Radio 4 You & Yours
October 4th, 2012
Sitting in the BBC studio this morning with Poppy Elliott, prepping for her interview on Radio 4 You & Yours, I learned that Wayne Rooney can’t go to sleep without the hoover on.
Amazing what you learn every day.
Anyway, Poppy is MD of Quiet Mark (www.quietmark.com) which is the commercial arm of the Noise Abatement Society.
During the interview, she told Winifred Robinson about the work of Quiet Mark, set up at the start of this year to actively promote the development and production of quieter products.
It’s worth a couple of minutes of your time – and it’s definitely a good sound:
radio4fm_2012_10_04_12-40-53_12-44-54
The whole programme is worth a catch-up: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n1rbz
Best bit for me was the text from a listener raging about the noise from leaf blowers. I’m fully with them on that one. Stressful, annoying, intrusive and pointless. As the texter said, what’s wrong with a rake?
Traffic referred to FT.com from social media up 20% in the last 6 months
September 28th, 2012
Earlier this week the FT released the results of a survey that it carried out on the social media behaviour of its readers, or more specifically an online survey of 1,128 FT.com readers.
The results of the survey are illustrated in the infographic below and accessible here.
If proof of the influence of social media is needed, the survey confirms that social media is growing faster than every other traffic source to FT.com and traffic referred from this channel has grown by 20% in the last 6 months alone.
Furthermore, the FT has a global combined social media audience of 3.9m. 49% of which is based in the UK or US, with the remaining 51% coming from the rest of the world.
Finally, and perhaps most impressive, 58% of the FT social media audience agree social media enhances its reputation and 40% read the FT more as a result of it.
Plenty of other interesting stats below:
IJT Direct really get online engagement
September 21st, 2012
IJT Direct really get online engagement – they care and want to make money in the best way.
Short post tonight because it’s late on Friday and the weekend is nearly here. I just wanted to share with you a most excellent example of online CSR, perhaps one of the best I’ve experienced.
I checked out prices online for printer cartridges this week and went through the IJT Direct buying process to confirm the total price to be paid for six Black cartridges to use in our Dell printer.
I stopped the process at the sale point so I could confirm the spend with the accounts team.
Early next day, I received an email from IJT Direct asking whether I had found any problem with the purchase process. The email was not an auto-response, and it was from a real person. That’s rare.
I replied to check whether this was an auto-play from the company, who, for reference we do not represent and have not association with.
The personal reply came back quickly , with full contact details. More, the IJT contact offered an exceptional deal.
This kind of engagement is so rare, in my experience and from where I’m sitting shows that IJT Direct understand the very crowded online market they work in. Beyond that, they really know how to engage with their customers.