Twitter stats don’t tell the whole story

March 11th, 2010

As you might have seen, an interesting Twitter stat has been doing the rounds recently: ‘21% of Twitter users are active users’ ,a stat that you’re likely to see regularly from now on.

This originated from the Barracuda Labs 2009 Annual Report, which was released earlier this week, revealing data from Twitter trends and tracking, as well as Web threats and trends, and email spam and viruses. The report is also available at the company’s portal.

The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts, and started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times.

Looking back, the data shows interesting usage trends and reveals that 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more, in fact 51% of users were following less than five people.

The report also confirms that 34% of Twitter users hadn’t tweeted once, while 73% had tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets on the social network were coming from about 1/4 of the user base, and it is these users that the report refers to as ‘power users’.

So, are these revealing stats going to spell the end of the myth that Twitter is going to be the new communications platform for all? Hopefully, because i doubt even the quarter of Twitter users that are using it consistently thought it was going ever to be that.

If you’re not trying to make money out of Twitter, the importance attached to the amount or frequency of Twitter’s usage should not be as important as one might first assume.

The most important element of Twitter is the conversation, not the brand, not the technology and not the potential, but the conversation. That conversation doesn’t just happen on Twitter, it happens across many social networks, messaging platforms, via SMS, even in email and person-to-person, and Twitter allows part of that conversation, bringing communities together that choose to share information with each other.

If Twitter stopped tomorrow, the conversation would still continue, and my bet is the majority of Twitter’s ‘power user’ base, that Tweet the majority of the conversation, use other platforms to continue the conversation in other ways.

So is this the end of Twitter and the Twitter success story? No, Twitter is a massive success story, but it has been blown out of proportion in some ways. It is, as the research says, a valuable tool for ‘power users’, but in the world of social media we all have freedom of choice, we all communicate in different ways and some of us will find our preferred community on Twitter while others will look elsewhere for a better fit in terms of relevance. However, the one common theme is the conversation, and the ability to share; knowledge, content, news, excitement, sorrow, whatever.

We’ve seen the ‘no-one reads blogs’ headlines before, which again i don’t believe to be the case. Of the millions of blogs only a small percentage are useful and interesting, and those blogs are well utilised, the others quite simply are not. Does that make blogs any less useful though?

What we are seeing is Twitter maturing, as the study says, Twitter recently reported it had reached approximately 50 million tweets per day.

In the beginning of 2008, Twitter was growing approximately 0.31% per month. By November 2008, that growth increased to 1.95% per month.

After December 2008, Twitter’s growth exploded from nearly 2% per month, rising to approximately 4% per month, before finally peaking at nearly 20% per month in April 2009. Growth appears to have normalised, dropping back to 0.34% in December 2009.

We can also see more evidence of Twitter users finding their feet. A full 79% of users had less than ten tweets in June 2009, but that number dropped to 73% by December. 80% of users had less than 10 followers in June 2009, but that percentage dropped to 74% by December.

So, little by little, Twitter is finding its place in the role of conversation. It’s not going to change the way we communicate radically, but it is helping us to communicate more effectively, with those in our chosen community.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Journalism, PR, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research, Useful resources | 1 Comment »

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Developing a social strategy

March 3rd, 2010

As you may have seen, the team at Altimeter Group have been holding a series of social media-focused webinars titled:

1. Understand Your Customers’ Social behaviours

2. Developing A Social Strategy

3. Social Strategy: Getting Your Company Ready (Taking place April 14th)

The second Webinar, focused on social strategy, took place last week, and the slideshow deck is available below.

For anyone interested in social media and communicating in a social environment this is a must read. The  Altimeter Group has carried on the excellent work of the likes of Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang, as well as many others, who have been offering their insight on the area going back to their days at Forrester Research and earlier.

You may be thinking; ‘oh no not another social media presentation’, but as you will see by the content, it makes sense to take notice of these suggestions. Why? Well, not only because you’ll probably see these points repeated in many agency presentations in the future, but because they make sense, and aren’t focused on one particular sales pitch, other than the obvious consultancy sell.

The first point that grabbed me is a point we’ve been making to clients for many years; social media isn’t about the technology, it’s about the conversation. The technology is merely a conduit for the conversation, and to be fair a conversation starter, but too many people are hung up on this technology or that service, without fully grasping the nature of social communications.

I won’t go on, as the slides will tell their own story, but if you’re looking for a presentation that gives you a full overview of the issues that you need to consider when developing a social media strategy, this should go to the top of your list.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, PR, Social media, Trends and research | No Comments »

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What will Facebook do with its News Feed patent?

February 26th, 2010

This week Facebook was awarded the patent for the News Feed - a feature common to Facebook as well as other social networks such as Twitter and MySpace, and a number of social media apps and startups.

The patent refers to the method of displaying stories/news items relating to online activities to a predetermined set of viewers, and “assigning an order to the news items”. According to reports, the patent also covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.

It’s true that Facebook pioneered the News Feed technology back in 2006, and so on the face of it deserves to own the patent…but what does this mean for the rest of the social media industry? Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, and so if it’s going down the road of seeking patents for its technology, this could really hamper innovation and progress within social media, and render networks such as Twitter useless.

It’s currently unclear what Facebook plans to do with this patent. It could take the hard line and pressure Twitter, MySpace, Google etc into taking down their News Feed features, or at the opposite end of the scale it could choose not to exercise its patent.

The reason why social media has evolved so quickly is all down to collaboration, the mashup of content and technology and the sharing of creativity. Patents are arguably not a good thing in this space, but what can we do to stop them?

At the moment this is primarily an industry story, but should Facebook choose to make use of the patent, it’s likely to reach the attention of a wider audience. Ultimately the power rests with individuals to stop Facebook from agressively patenting its technology - if the business becomes too commercial in its focus, it will lose popularity, and could suffer massively in terms of online PR.

Posted in Blog, Digital communications, Emerging technology, Social media, Social networking | No Comments »

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What will the internet-connected world look like in 2020? Pew knows..

February 25th, 2010

As you may have seen last week, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published the findings of its fourth ‘future of the Internet survey’ carried out between December 2nd, 2009 to January 11th, 2010.

If you’re not familiar with The Pew Internet & American Life Project, it focuses on surveying ‘web users and experts’ to help predict the future of the internet. The 895 respondents, 371 of whom were considered ‘experts’, were all opt-in, self-selecting and broken down as follows; scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers, along with Internet users screened by the authors.

The respondents were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovations that will occur. The survey required them to assess different “tension pairs” - each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes - and to select the one most likely choice of two statements, some of which are overviewed below.

The survey has its fans and its critics, and certainly shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but I think it offers an interesting insight into current thinking on future issues and theories, which are often used to fuel related ‘future of the Internet stories’ as has been the case in the last week.

So, now we’ve done the introductions and the disclaimers, what about the juicy stuff?
Well, the “Is Google Making us Stupid?” meme that famously sprouted up in 2008 via the cover of Atlantic magazine, originally attributed to technology scholar Nicholas Carr,  features heavily. He argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. This line of argument was not supported by the survey as 76 percent of respondents believe that the Internet will make people cleverer in the next 10 years, while also improving reading and writing abilities. For a full run down on this question, look here.

The graphic below, which was taken from the research, shows the distribution of responses to the paired statements. The first column covers the answers of 371 long-time experts who have regularly participated in these surveys. The second column covers the answers of all the respondents, including the 524 who were recruited by other experts or by their association with the Pew Internet Project.

You can see the full report here, with responses to the following questions:

Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now?

84% of experts say most innovations come out of the blue and will not be predicted

Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years

64% of experts say yes

Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

42 percent of the experts believe that in the next 10 years, anonymous online activities will “sharply decrease” due to the stricter Internet safety and identification system, but 55 percent of people believe it will still be easy to scan web pages anonymously.

Overall, the survey is a good guide, sure it doesn’t exactly offer a revolutionary window to the future, but it perhaps confirms a deeper change that many have previously suspected in the way the human mind and behaviour is reacting to the community approach of the web.

It could be argued that the web is returning us to our original human characteristics of community values and shared intelligence but on a much larger scale, with the bonus of this shared knowledge available 24/7, at least to those that have access.

It is this difference in terms of the way we gain and measure intelligence that should be the fundamental issue of the ‘Is Google making us stupid’ question, rather than trying to measure intelligence or learning in a traditional way, we need to consider the changed landscape and that future generations simply won’t be constrained by the memory-focused approach to intelligence that some still have.

Posted in Blog, Digital communications, Digital media, Emerging technology | No Comments »

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Pondering the lost hours

February 19th, 2010

At Liberate Media, just as at any other agency, we are regularly invited to pitch/meet/propose on a number of campaigns, and each year a percentage of those campaigns will be what we all unaffectionately refer to as ‘time wasters’, or perhaps if we were looking at it as a more sinister act, the thieves who invite you to pitch simply to hear your patter and steal your ideas. We’ve all been on the wrong end of this approach, no matter what business you are in, and sympathy certainly isn’t the purpose of this post.

So why bring it up? Well, as part of a business planning session we did at the beginning of the month I looked into 2009 new business successes/failures as a learning exercise, and I was pretty flabbergasted by the results and the amount of work we had put in with little or no return over the year. To be clear, by return I don’t mean purely winning the campaign or getting paid, I mean no result what so ever. Either the client mysteriously went quiet, said the budget had disappeared, the campaign was never awarded to anyone, or the real killer; we win and it never goes ahead.

Okay, last year was pretty terrible in terms of the economy, so the budget excuse maybe valid, but the opposite is also true, with little or no budget why would you call a pitch/meeting if you weren’t 100%. That makes me suspicious.

I haven’t quite come to the conclusion that 2009 was a back stabbing fest with companies turning agencies over for their ideas, but from our experience there was certainly more of these unexplained losses than usual.

‘You should have been more aware’ I hear you say, ‘the ones that are out to steal ideas are easy to spot’, and to some extent or other I agree. I used to pride myself in spotting the odd chancer who’s just looking for ideas, having been involved in PR pitching for coming up to 12 years I’ve seen quite a few examples, but either my radar is on the blink or last year was an exceptional year.

So, looking back at the outcomes of some of these pitches, many of which were with big brands, I see a whole host of outcomes, such as; ‘we’ve decided we’re not quite ready’, ‘one of our directors is on board but the other isn’t', ‘budget has gone/been pushed back’, ‘campaign has been put on hold or stopped’, the list goes on.

In fact doing a rough calculation of the campaigns in question, and looking at those that I know have gone ahead, only 10% that we were not successful in went to another agency, or went ahead in some guise. That means 90% are either still waiting or have fallen into the ‘unknown category’.

So what are we to do? I’m not considering the whole ‘charging for pitching/ideas’ argument that pops up every now and again, but would like to establish why the surge last year? Yes we can chalk a certain amount up to the economy, we have to take a fair hit for not spotting the time wasters, but that still leaves a good percentage with a motive as yet unknown. Am I being unkind in suggesting they did this deliberately, or is it something deeper?

Is there a part of this ‘unknown’ that felt, or were told, that social media/digital PR is something they needed to be involved in as part of their 2009 remit? And when they understood the situation, or when they realised the scale of the opportunity, discovered that they hadn’t budgeted or resourced sufficiently? Could it also be that some people needed to just investigate this area and bring in agencies to talk it through, well if discussion is the focus, fair enough, but please don’t hide behind the promise of a campaign if you want to talk. Education is part of what we all have to do, and most of us are happy to do it, but not to be duped into doing it.

So what has this review exercise taught me? Well, thinking practically, this tale should not just be one of woe, we’ve also had the great fortune to meet some brilliant new clients during 2009, many of which were won in an open and often quick process which has fostered a great relationship that has continued to this day. I hope that if the education barrier was an issue that we’ll see less of these problems in 2010 or at least more openness in discussing the problems.

Please let me know if you have any insight or experiences that you would like to share in this area, as i think there is more to be explained.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, PR, Social media | No Comments »

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