360DigitalInfluence

According to Comscore, over 25 million users accessed Facebook via a mobile phone in Jan 2010, a 112% year-over-year increase.

With its initial US-based rollout of Places location functionality on the 30+ million iPhone installed base, Facebook joins Twitter and others in embracing the growing use of smartphones for social networking.

Importantly, this change allows Facebook to expand users’ social graphs beyond such items as friends, product/service affinities and demographics to now include location.

Here are three thoughts on implications for marketers, agencies and social location startups:

Location checkins should help drive impulse and, to some extent, planned purchases. It’s clear that coupons, discounts and other promotions will be important for increasing share of wallet — particularly for the impulse purchases estimated to account for 20+% of consumer spending. Companies like Shopkick are already implementing functionality to enable this, and it’s clearly going to be of value in driving revenue for a wide range of companies.

Checkins will provide new opportunities to build relationships and better understand customers. Less promotional location-driven engagement will be helpful in increasing preference and loyalty. If a user must check into a location manually, they’re either doing so for convenience (e.g. to locate friends or offers nearby) or as self-expression. The latter provides an interesting opportunity for a brand to engage — for example, by providing messaging or advice that’s related to the type of location visited.  This also provides an opportunity for B2B brand engagement.

Social network partners may well provide more unique experiences for brands. Much as well-designed social games from companies like Zynga and Playdom have created a powerful draw for Facebook users (consuming ~40% of Facebook user minutes), startups like SCVNGR, Gowalla, Foursquare and Booyah will likely use Facebook graph + location data to create interesting experiences. They’ll have the added opportunity to integrate data across Facebook, Twitter and other non-Facebook smartphone users.

One of the biggest potential issues to consider is user privacy — the current implementation has some issues that have been widely written about. However, in the past Facebook has eventually responded with changes to enable users to manage their privacy in an acceptable way.

Read more about key steps for brands to start taking.

Photo credit: Graph, by Librarian by Day

Of the sectors throwing caution to the wind and making social media integral to long-term communications plans, I perceive higher education as dragging its feet. Fresh off graduation, I can still smell the ink drying on hastily-minted digital plans for universities of all sizes and ilk. That’s why I was surprised after a recent finding from the Society for New Communications Research: higher education is outpacing the Fortune 500 in social media adoption by more than 2 to 1.

We must consider such inferences carefully. The deeper one digs into the study, the more context must be added. In one instance, researchers found 95% of schools use at least one platform to recruit. While the for-profit equivalent of recruiting is acquiring new customers, social media serve many more functions in both sectors. In education, uses include informing current students, communicating with alumni, and promoting curricula, courses, and extracurriculars internally, among countless others.

The study’s broad statements must be examined carefully and, while the rate of adoption may be high, it may not translate to effectiveness. Social media shouldn’t be drooled over solely for external promotion and recruiting, but also for opportunities to create an enriching stakeholder experience. For example, Harvard University has been an early adopter in its use of social platforms to welcome guests with campus tips on foursquare, serve diverse audiences on Twitter, and provide students resources to get involved via Facebook.

“Well, that’s freakin’ Harvard!” one might say. Sure, but it could be any university with the strategic insight to serve disparate audiences through social media. While not every institution can offer a custom foursquare badge to visitors, it can bring a campus, its students, and the community to life with a fuller interactive, multimedia presence. Obviously it’s no cakewalk and schools must address four fundamental uncertainties that inhibit effective use of social media in higher education:

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This past winter was one the snowiest on record in the Lake Tahoe region of California, which was great for skiing but horrible for keeping cars on the road. I skied 28 days in a four months with a full time job in San Francisco — basically, every Friday night I was driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard.  And every Friday night I was glued to Google Buzz for real time updates about accidents and road closures — the results came in about a half hour to an hour before California Highways did. I also was checking for backroads ways around these road closures. Google Buzz saved anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of time each weekend; that’s a lot of precious hours on the snow when you add that up across a ski season.

Each time I used the mobile app portion of Google Buzz on Google Maps, I shared an experience with people normally separated by their cars. Google Buzz, to be just a bit sentimental, brought us together. And we weren’t talking about what we ate for lunch or some random Internet meme but about something actually — sorry Triffle — useful.

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Outside of the Yankees during playoff season,  I find nothing incites my competitive juices like reality television. I’ve been in an American Idol fantasy draft, I’m on the edge of my seat for The Amazing Race, and I’m still bitter over Boston Rob’s early exit on the most recent season of Survivor.  However, minute for minute, no program compares to So You Think You Can Dance simply for the way it combines artistry, entertainment, athleticism, public judging, and public voting.

This season’s So You Think You Can Dance introduced a number of changes in format including: the return of past contestants as partners, a reduction in the number of contestants, and the elimination of the loudest (but most joyful) judge, Mary Murphy.  On top of all of the changes, Alex Wong, arguably the most talented contestant to ever appear on the show, sustained an injury and was eliminated early — arguably the greatest tragedy to ever occur in reality television history.  My own dejection over Alex’s injury was briefly alleviated when I saw Ellen DeGeneres tweet that she was going to “do something special for Alex.”  Unfortunately, Ellen’s gift was not a miracle that would heal Alex so he could dance again as I’d hoped, but it did, however, make me think about social media’s effect on SYTYCD this season and how it’s changed the viewing experience.

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Latinos and Hispanics in Web 2.0 are in the sweet spot. Over the course of the last few days, whether it be at Netroots Nation in Las Vegas, the Bridge Conference in the beltway or within Ogilvy’s own LatinRed professional network during an event in New York City, I have found myself in conversations with various folks talking about the opportunity found in engaging this demographic online here in the States.

So what is the opportunity?

At the end of last year and beginning of this year, I was thrilled to see a couple of recent studies that provided a quantitative backing to what I and others in the industry have been saying for years. Latinos are in Social Media.

According to a report released by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project in December of 2009, internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points from 54% to 64% between 2006- 2008. In comparison, the rates for whites rose four percentage points, and the rates for blacks rose only two percentage points during that time period.

A recent report published by AOL and Cheskin states that the number of Hispanics online has grown faster than the growth of the total US population. Two similarly striking findings of this report are that Latinos have more confidence in online product rating sites than their friends’ opinions (78%: 28%) and that they are earlier adopters of technology, more so than general market users.

Moreover, the AOL and Cheskin report found the percentage of bloggers in the Latino community to be at 21%.

So what does all this mean?

The numbers show that Latinos are:
-A significant presence in the Web 2.0 space and growing
-Content producers
-Early adopters
-Significantly influenced by online product ratings

Although two recent studies, “How Young Latinos Communicate with Friends in the Digital Age” and “The Latino Digital Divide: The Native Born versus The Foreign Born,” just released by Pew report that Latinos are still playing catch up to their non-Latino counterparts online, the reports also state that younger native-born Latinos are embracing the technology enthusiastically. According to the reports:

- 85 percent of native-born Latinos older than sixteen use the internet
- 80 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five use cellphones and
- 78 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five with internet access use social networking sites.

With one out of every four children being born in the US of Hispanic origin, the significance of these findings should not be lost on us as it relates to this market or the opportunity it presents in the private, nonprofit and political sectors.

To not realize on this opportunity would be foolish.

It’s like catching a baseball on the ’sweet spot’ of the bat. If you don’t swing, you can’t knock it out of the park. It’s time to swing and swing now!

It was only a matter of time before we went from using our phones to call or text friends and plan to meet in a certain location to using our smartphones when we’re in a certain location to find out which of our friends are already there.  Social networking, while already popular online, is one of the fastest-growing activities among mobile users.  In fact, eMarketer predicts that by 2013, 43% of global mobile Internet users will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices and 45% of the US mobile Internet population will be on social networks from their mobile devices.  It seems that even when we’re socializing in real life, we want access to our online networks.  continue reading

Word of mouth practitioners often find themselves in uncharted territory. The majority of the digitally led programs being developed or put into the marketplace simply could not have existed two years ago.  Sometimes not even two months ago.

As a result, planners and strategists in our industry rely on piles of research to gain insights into what’s likely to work for a particular audience. Some of that research comes from inside our own walls, sometimes we consult outside experts and publishers to make sure we know as much as humanly possible about a particular topic. The latter can come from peer-reviewed academic journals or independent publishers like eMarketer or Forrester.

Beyond those sources, though, there’s been a sharp uptick in research from a new universe of resources.  Some doing great work.  Some not.

Here are a few warning signs that suggest you could be relying on some shaky data…

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I caught up with our own Thomas Crampton last week in Istanbul. Thomas runs our teams across Asia and one of the big events coming up this year is the Shanghai World Expo.  To help inform our work and our clients who will participate in some way or another, Thomas developed some great research on the current buzz throughout Chinese social media on the Expo. I had a chance to ask him about what he found:

Q: Can you tell us briefly what the Shanghai World Expo is and what it may mean to China, its government, business leaders and even the people there?
A: Shanghai Expo has been billed as one of the largest events of its kind in China. While people outside of China may not have heard of the event, the organizers expect a extremely large domestic audience.

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Social media continues to evolve, shaping not just our thoughts on connectivity and information consumption online, but how it applies to our everyday lives.

This is not breaking news. Still, there are many people, brands and companies that are still dipping their toes in the social media pool, trying to gauge the value of social media platforms and leveraging these sites to connect with their key audiences. As a digital strategist with a traditional public relations background, I can see the value in both online and offline media, but note the increased convergence between the two mediums. Yet many companies still grapple with social media and are tasked with demonstrating “the value” more than ever. What if these same organizations knew that mainstream media reporters were conducting a good deal of their research on social media websites, such as blogs, Twitter or Wikipedia?

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Over the last year, location-based social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite have exploded among early adopters. It’s no question—with increasing adoption of smart phone usage, location-based social networks are rising in popularity every day.

Recently covered in GigaOM, CNN, Ad Age and The New York Times, Foursquare is currently one of the most buzzed about location-based mobile social networks. Intel and Ogilvy recently used Foursquare to drive traffic to and create buzz around Intel’s offline events and activities at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month.

For CES, Intel created a branded Foursquare page, featuring locations where Intel had activity and tips for Las Vegas visitors. Intel also rewarded check-in’s to key events with branded badges, paired with the chance to win an Intel-powered netbook for all badge recipients.

This exclusive collaboration allowed Intel to track and build relationships with online influencers active on Foursquare at CES. With more than 400 cumulative check-in’s to Intel-affiliated locations and events, the collaboration was a breakout success and proved to be an interesting event-based model for brands looking to work with Foursquare.

We interviewed Tristan Walker, head of business development at Foursquare, to learn more about their vision for what’s to come for brands, businesses and Foursquare.

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