OCTOBER 9, 2009

Here’s a look at what’s news-worthy in the social media space this week:

Today on YouTube’s official blog, CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley announced that the video sharing site serves well over a billion views a day. In his post, Chad takes a nostalgic look back at the three years since YouTube was acquired by Google.

Yesterday Twitter encountered a problem that caused many users’ timelines to be delayed. While nothing like early August’s denial of service meltdown, the event was certainly an inconvenience. For a few hours in the early afternoon, Twitter users were not able to see real time updates in their stream, but luckily search and the ability to update were functioning properly.

This week Chris Brogan hosted the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. The conference featured some great speakers including Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Valeria says when people ask her what is the most effective form of marketing, her answer is valuable content. You can view her presentation here.

President Obama has been in the social media spotlight as of late. The announcement that the President had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize took 3 of Twitter’s 10 trending topics this morning. Twitter users are congratulating, expressing concern, and commenting on the news.

SNL’s infamous skit mocking the President’s accomplishments this past Saturday has also brought him to the forefront of social media this week. The video has been SNL’s first viral success of the year from online viewers on Hulu and NBC.com.

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

The National Football League has announced that they are limiting the use of social media and social networks throughout the season. These limitations will fall on “players, coaches, league officials, and even the media”, and are meant to prevent play-by-play reporting of the games. The NFL’s reasoning behind this new rule stems from their longstanding policy of requiring accounts of a game to be sufficiently time-delayed so that official, authorized accounts are given exclusive reporting rights. While this policy certainly has precedence in the NFL’s history, does it make sense in today’s environment, where information is treated as a stream of unfiltered live updates? As Brian Solis points out, at the very least, the NFL will inevitably run into enormous difficulties when trying to enforce these rules. Sometimes, simply updating an old policy may not be the best solution to a fundamental shift in the way audiences get updates and information. Instead, it’s likely that the NFL will be forced in the near future to reexamine its entire approach to reporting on games.

For more examples of organizations that have struggled with implementing Twitter policies, check out Mashable’s list of Twitter trends (look for #4).

Technorati has been floundering for a while now, having lost its leadership position in blog indexing and searching to Google. Recently, the site sent emails to a number of its bloggers announcing its next phase of evolution: creating original content. By getting bloggers to write original articles for the site, Technorati could position itself as a reputable blog with a comprehensive list of topics. However, this move does signal a major change in focus - one that seems to fully concede blog indexing and search functions to Google and others. It looks like Technorati has revamped its business model, but how will it pan out?

A report this month from web security company ScanSafe stated that there was a 20% increase in employers blocking their workers’ access to social networks, bringing the total to 76%. This means that social networks are blocked more often than categories like online shopping, weapons, alcohol, sports, and webmail. Additionally,  increases across the board lead ScanSafe to suggest that the economic climate has spurred employers to look for ways to promote productivity. Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove also thinks it’s quite possible that with the rise of phishing and spam connected to social networks, companies are afraid of security breaches. Can social media and real-time interaction continue to grow in tandem with companies cracking down on social media usage during work hours?

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AUGUST 14, 2009

One big news item this week was Facebook’s acquisition of the popular life streaming service Friendfeed, a move that many speculate will aid Facebook in challenging Twitter. One of the most important services that Friendfeed offers is the smooth integration of activities on other social sites into one stream - something that Facebook’s newsfeed currently does with less refinement. Additionally, Friendfeed has a real-time search function that can be immensely valuable when it is paired with Facebook’s enormous userbase. Mashable asks if this move could be the “Twitter-killer”, as Facebook has been obviously building up their newsfeed to match Twitter’s relevance and immediacy. It’s a possibility, but as Brian Solis noted recently in this blog post, one possibility is that multiple networks can coexist, as users define how each fits into their lifestyle and serves a particular need.

In other Facebook news:

Facebook launches real-time search
Facebook is working on a “Lite” version of its site

A recent study by the Association of National Advertisers states that 66 percent of marketers have now used social media in some capacity in 2009. This is a significant increase since the same survey in 2007 revealed that the number was only 20 percent. Top sites being used by marketers are (in order): Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. One interesting finding from this report was that Twitter was being used more often by business-to-business marketers (70%) than business-to-consumer marketers (48%). One reason for this could be the fact that Twitter naturally encourages dialogue among people with similar backgrounds. Link sharing is particularly active among members who build up a following based on topics with professional interest.

Twitter made an announcement this week that it will be beginning phase one of Project Retweet. The project will make the retweet an actual supported feature of the site (like Twitter search or @ replies). In other words, retweets will now show up as a unique element on the Twitter homepage, and have an interface that outside developers can creatively work with to add retweet elements to their sites or programs. The direction that Twitter team has decided to go with this suggests that they value the efficient and personal nature of disseminating information that retweeting brings to the service (not to mention that retweeting is a feature that Facebook and other social networks don’t have much of a handle on yet).

However, Project Retweet will also herald some changes that have caused some concerns. Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove points out that the new proposed format for retweeting will simply publish the original tweet in friends’ timelines with your twitter handle listed underneath as a supporter. This could have the effect of making the retweet seem less personal, as users are unable to endorse the tweet with a their own short comments. As Twitter rolls out more components of Project Retweet, it will be interesting to see how the community reacts and adapts to the change. After all, changes like this and the introduction of “mentions” back in the day were all products of the Twitter team observing unique ways its users were using the service.

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JULY 27, 2009

Mashable writer Ben Parr took a moment recently to reflect on the future of the web as Google continues to pave the way to new and innovative developments for online activity. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that while we are refining the way we use current social networks and engaging in dialogue over its uses, developers at Google and other companies are focused on the next game changer. Parr suggests that Google’s overall strategy is to get people to spend more time online, where it earns most of its revenue. With developments like Google Wave, Chrome OS, and HTML 5 coming up, it’s clear that the most influential web company is poised to do exactly that. Google Wave will allow people to move a great deal of collaborative business work online. Google’s new operating system based on its Chrome browser will help web applications launch instantly. HTML 5 is the newest iteration of the code that structures the web - it will include changes that allow web applications to interact more seamlessly with computer desktops, which will help people share media much more easily. Of course, one of the two core spec editors for HTML 5 is Ian Hickson from Google (the other is from Microsoft). All of these developments help us get a glimpse of how, in the near future, we may be seeing our web usage (and by extension, social activities) become the central component of our computer use.

Digg got hit with a lot of negative press recently because of their decision to direct all links shortened by the Diggbar to an intermediary page on Digg.com - effectively directing a great deal of traffic to Digg.com by forcing users to first visit the Digg story page before seeing the page that was originally linked to. Complaints about this change pointed out that this severely hampered the usefulness of the Diggbar as a URL shortening service. It seemed like an attempt to inflate traffic to Digg.com, not a sincere attempt to grow the community by providing value for Diggbar users.

After the uproar from Twitter users spread, Digg published a blog post that explained how the change brings the Diggbar closer to its ultimate goal of strengthening the Digg community by allowing users to catch up on the conversations on the main site. In other words, the Diggbar is not meant to be a tool for URL shortening, but an extension of the main site. Although this reasoning seems to be made with the best interests of the site in mind, many users are still unconvinced. After all, it seems that the Diggbar’s initial URL shortening service built a lot of goodwill towards the site from users who weren’t already part of the Digg community because it provided a convenient and unobtrusive service. How can Digg’s focus on making the Diggbar a way to guide people back to Digg.com build goodwill quite as easily?

Amazon.com bought Zappos, the popular online shopping site known for its unique approach to customer service. This is an interesting move for the online retail giant, especially because Zappos is known for its relationship with customers and its appealing presence online. Seth Godin comments on this deal, saying that Amazon most likely recognizes that Zappos has the qualities that matter most in today’s market:

What you buy when you spend that kind of money is what matters now. And what matters is:

• A corporate culture that’s not the same (and where great people choose to work)
• A tight relationship with customers that give you permission to talk with them
• A business model that’s remarkable and worth talking about
• A story that spreads
• Leadership

Zappos has proven to be a leader in social media use, setting an example for other companies. Amazon may well benefit from investing in Zappos’ growth.

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JULY 10, 2009

Google just implemented user-generated images in its Google Maps search results. This isn’t a particularly new feature, but it does represent one more step towards making its search more social. In a previous social media summary, I had highlighted Google introducing searchable personal profiles. Adding geotagged images to Google Maps will most likely transform the user experience into something more personal. Street View already entices many users into browsing maps for interesting content; geotagged images will add another dimension of interest because the photographs are creative works by identifiable users. Furthermore, images are not the only social categories available through Google Maps now - searching for a location will also bring up a list of Youtube videos and user-created lists of interesting locations. Some of these features seem to have been around for a while, quietly added without widespread notice. However, as Google expands its offerings in the social realm it will probably keep individual social networks on their toes figuring out ways to keep their users.

Lifestreaming services and microblogging have become increasingly popular as of late, and the people behind Collecta believe that this shift necessitates a different kind of search engine. Collecta gives you real time search results, presented as a constantly updating stream of information. It takes blog posts, news stories, tweets, and even comments on blog posts and puts them all together in your results, with timeliness as the main focus. Clearly, this type of search serves different purposes from ranked search engines like Google, but it fulfills a need for gathering facts and opinions as they are published online.

In order to provide the most comprehensive search results for online conversations, there must also be willingness on the part of the social networks to make the information open. As Brian Solis notes in the comments section of his post on Collecta, Facebook is a huge source of rich conversations– yet status updates are still closed to developers. Facebook has actually been working recently on providing users with options that make their profiles more open - soon, Facebook users will be able to set their privacy settings to allow their status updates to be public, available for anyone to see and for search engines to index. It’s important to note that this is still a far cry from opening up status updates to developers- making integration into sites like Collecta more difficult- but it’s understandably a very difficult process: Facebook has to tread a very thin line by maintaining the sense of privacy that many users enjoy while providing options for companies, advertisers, and the open web that allows them to compete with services like Twitter.

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JUNE 5, 2009

Nielsen just released a chart that compares the shift in total minutes spent on several popular social media sites throughout the last year (April 2008 to April 2009).

As expected, Twitter takes the cake with a whopping 3,712% growth over the last year. Interestingly, Myspace and Facebook have switched places as numbers 1 and 2, with Myspace having a 31% drop in total minutes compared to Facebook’s 699% growth. Brian Solis remarks on the extreme changes and growth in this lineup of websites, saying:

Competition for our attention is escalating and it’s just a matter of time until our experimentation officially leads to distributed and uncommitted presences. Perhaps this will lead to a series of strategic acquisitions to prolong prestige, relevance, and stature.

Solis made a good point about saturation in the social media space. Social media sites can rise and fall siginificantly in the space of just a single year now. It will be interesting to observe the strategies that sites adopt not just to persuade new audiences to join, but also to sustain a sense of loyalty among entire social commmunities.

June 4th was the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and this year it was marked by a censorship blitz by the Chinese government that generated a good deal of commentary from bloggers. In China, popular sites like Twitter, Youtube, Wordpress, Bing, and others were blocked right before the anniversary. Some sources have suggested that the government censorship sparked a veiled protest by Chinese internet users, who staged a “Chinese Internet Maintenance Day” to comment satirically on the situation. China has received significant press coverage in the past for blocking sites, but its actions this week were particularly significant because it highlighted how Chinese internet users could circumvent any effort by the government to cut off an online service - and then comment on it. The fact that this occured around a politically-charged event that is the springboard for a great deal of ideological conflict also intensifies the emotions behind the issue. In the future, I believe that we will continue to see incidents similar to this, in which the spirit of an open web will provide an avenue for continued debate over the political state of the nation. Additionally, the most powerful impact on this debate will most likely come from Chinese users themselves as they react (and rebel) against government censorship online.

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MAY 22, 2009

For this edition of the Social Media Summary, I’m going to highlight the top sites that I usually go to for the latest developments in social media. Since these summaries usually only touch on a small portion of all that’s happening in this field, I thought this would be a great way to point out the resources that I find most interesting and useful.

• Mashable: This site may be the most well-known social media news site, with tons of regular bloggers who cover anything from obscure startups to breaking news about the big guns– YouTube, Facebook, and the like. What I like best about Mashable is how insightful every post is; they always offer a bit of commentary about the relevance and growth of social media. These people definitely know their stuff, and that’s how the site has grown to become a community unto itself, sponsoring hundreds of meetups and events throughout the year.
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang: Jeremiah is well known in social media circles as a great thinker– he works for Forrester Research and is always on top of the latest trends in social media. He has his finger firmly on the pulse of the field, and encourages discussions about social media as a practice, especially for businesses. Owyang also writes his own weekly summaries, which are a quick and reliable way to get the most important developments in one place.
• PR 2.0: Brian Solis is another great thinker, and his blog contains a wealth of useful perspectives and theories on social media that I find indispensable. Although you won’t necessarily find the latest news on this blog, you can generally find commentary that ties a bunch of recent developments together in a way that provokes more thought. Paired with the two sites mentioned above, Solis’ writings are a welcome synthesis of the overwhelming body of social media news out there.

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MAY 8, 2009

Google has launched a service that allows people to create profiles that show up in search results. This would give everyone the option of setting up a profile with specific information that they want to make completely public and easily found through the search engine. This is part of a broader move towards integrating social network features into Google’s services. In the past, we’ve covered Google’s other attempts to provide profile and I.D. storing services that can be used (ideally) on any website. It seems like Google is trying to play in the social network space by simply combining social network elements with its vast and open web services. Saul Hansell makes a good point in this New York Times article, however: this profile integration is fundamentally different from a typical social network, which offers the user far more control over who sees their information. By creating a profile in a social network, you opt to join an existing community. However, by creating a Google profile that shows up in search results, you open yourself up to the entire online population. If user profiles become a standard part of regular searches, it will be interesting to see how Google deals with managing privacy controls and settings that we have come to expect from social networks.

Facebook recently announced that it has opened up the newstream to developers under the Facebook Open Stream API. This is a significant move, as the Facebook stream will be able to compete with Twitter in the realm of desktop programs and other websites that are fueled by its content. What could this mean? Maybe we’ll be able to see more desktop feed programs that can display your Facebook updates right alongside Twitter or FriendFeed. We could also see more third party sites that synthesize the content for a particular use, along the lines of Twitter mashups. By letting more developers in, Facebook also dramatically increases the utility of the newsfeed because it can be adapted to fit any situation or need. Although the open API could encourage users to spend more time on third party sites and programs that fit their needs better than the main Facebook site, I think this could also lead to a revitalization of interest and activity with Facebook, especially since they’ve been seeing a lot of user backlash for recent changes.

Patrick and Corey have already written about the recent news frenzy over the swine flu, noting that there has been a lot of public hysteria that was amplified through the use of Twitter and other social networks. While misinformation and panic was spread through social media, there was also a concerted effort on the part of the Center for Disease Control to reach out through these same networks to calm fears and correct assumptions. In an article in AdAge (registration required to view), Pete Blackshaw details how the CDC has actually demonstrated an impressive understanding of how to reach out through multiple channels to manage a crisis and keep people informed. Just like with the peanut butter salmonella outbreak, the CDC also compiled links to all of their social media efforts on one page. The efforts included widgets that displayed the latest news through an RSS feed, E-cards that included tips on avoiding contamination, a Youtube channel with videos of authorities talking about the outbreak, and Facebook fan outreach that encourageed people to post their thoughts on the situation.

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APRIL 20, 2009

Twitter has been in the news constantly lately, as Kristen reviewed last week in her latest blog post. It appears that Twitter is hitting a defining period that will change its audience and user demographics. Now that major celebrities are bringing in a whole new scale of publicity, the site will have to redefine its business in a way that takes advantage of more widespread and high profile usage. In other words, the micro-blogging site is becoming more mainstream- it is no longer a niche community that consists mostly of early technology adopters. In fact, microblogging itself is fast becoming an expectation from audiences and consumers who expect to have that direct connection to a person or brand. Twitter’s newfound mainstream status will also herald a transformation in the way advertisers use the site to make money; with so many new high profile users and exposure through established mass media (even Barbara Walters has joined the fray while broadcasting it through The View), Twitter must make additional changes to its interface that manage large numbers of followers as well as sponsorships and advertisements.

A great deal of commentary on the recent Twitter news raises concerns over what the hype of celebrities joining Twitter will bring. Both C K at Marketing Profs and Mack Collier at The Viral Garden have made very good points about the hype. However, I see it as an opportunity for traditional mass media to integrate itself with highly individualized media, creating a level of consideration for any single person’s voice (celebrity figure or not) that is unprecedented. Jeremiah Owyang has some more thoughts on the significance of Twitter’s rapid growth in this blog post.

Another high profile piece of news that came out of the social media world this past week or so is the story of the intensely viral spread of the Susan Boyle video on Youtube. Mashable put together a brief analysis of the video’s popularity, which has reportedly surpassed many of the top “viral videos” in recent memory. As far as significance goes, this video has not advanced social media’s profile so much as it has shown exactly how meteoric someone’s rise in popularity can be when fueled through multiple social media channels. Additionally, a great deal of commentary on the Boyle video has focused on studying how it spread online - a fascinating example of how a compact and emotional clip can resonate with millions. The response this online popularity has provoked in the music industry as well as broadcast and print media also brings to light how online communities can now deliver a fast judgement on general popularity and worth, leading to a frenzy of activity and attention from other media.

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APRIL 6, 2009

Welcome to the latest Social Media Summary, covering the last couple of weeks. Below are some highlights from interesting news in social media that illustrate changes and trends in the industry. You can read previous summaries here.

Climate Culture, Smart Power, and the U.S. Department of Energy have teamed up to issue a new eco-focused challenge that pits colleges and universities against each other in a carbon footprint reduction competition. The challenge is called America’s Greenest Campus, and will award the winning schools up to $20,000 to put towards further greening their campuses. The contest makes a simple but powerful statement, and has a lot of potential to spread energy-saving habits. Additionally, this is one of the most aggressive green-themed launches through social media I’ve seen - everything is structured around a social media element. The sign-up on the site features Facebook Connect, the contest taps into existing networks by allowing anyone with a .edu email to join, and the promotional video features social media celebrity Obama Girl. Green blogs and social networks have flourished in the last couple years alongside the rise in general public awareness of global warming, and America’s Greenest Campus could be a good indication of how the green movement online will continue to gain momentum by using social networks.

Digg has released a new toolbar called the Diggbar for use with internet browsers. This toolbar will let users share, view comments, vote, and more while browsing different sites online. As with most other browser add-ons, the toolbar is definitely meant to integrate Digg more seamlessly into a user’s browsing routine. Mashable writer Muhammad Saleem reviews the Diggbar and goes even further, saying that the Diggbar could actually be the site’s best business decision in a long time. Digg is link sharing and conversation tool with a large community, which, as Saleem points out, is an area that Twitter (and even Facebook) has been quickly gaining prominence. With a toolbar, Digg can add a level of convenience to link sharing that gives it an advantage over Twitter - it cuts out the need for url shortening services by shortening links automatically and then makes it easy to send content to an already-established community without having to navigate away. It’s clear that link sharing is an extremely popular activity on social networks and it’s good to see a site like Digg, which is meant to specialize in link sharing, assert itself as a leading service with new tools.

A recent Wired article examined how the U.S. military has struggled with creating rules for how troops are allowed to engage in social networks. After banning access to most social networking sites, the military recently began approving the use of alternate, Pentagon-approved sites such as TroopTube. However, access to TroopTube has been restricted on several bases lately, revealing just how confused the leadership must be on the issue of social networks. According to the article, TroopTube hadn’t even been very popular due to content scrubbing; by exercising too much control over video sharing, the site lost flavor and personality. Governmental organizations naturally have more issues to deal with on the subject of social media because of information sensitivity, but leadership will have to figure out a way to monitor security in a way that still encourages active participation and organic community growth.

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