An almost unbelievable couple of graphs from Robin Goad at Hitwise, the first showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits last week were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’.

And the second showing Facebook’s inexorable growth.

There’s some more in depth data available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update
from July this year, and it’s worth remembering these sort of growth
curves apply across social media, with this graph showing a similarly
stratospheric rise in UK blog traffic.

As Robin Goad said at the time:

over the last 3 years UK Internet traffic to out Blogs
and Personal Websites category has increased by 208%, compared to 70%
for News and Media. Another interesting fact is that the market share
of blogs is greater in the UK than the USA: 1.09% and 0.73%
respectively in May.

The trend also seems to apply even to Twitter

Again, a nice quote from Robin Goad:

UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631%
over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year.
Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s
share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in
America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in
the UK it’s getting there.

I’d also point out that the Twitter data above pre-dates the Stephen Fry effect (disclosure: Stephen is a client of We Are Social‘s and we helped him get going on Twitter).

Roll on 2009…

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Philip Buxton, the former editor of Revolution, has written a great checklist for brands choosing a social media agency:

1. A new approach – since everyone claims to ‘do’ social, look for those seeking to develop new models for approaching it, not those seeking to map on their existing models
2. Technology – everyone claims to have unique talent, to be ‘leading’, to have great clients, and real expertise. Technology, fortunately, can’t be faked, demonstrates genuine investment and expertise, and really can be proprietary and unique. So, which agency has developed/is developing their own technology to support their new approach?
3. Measurement – the true value of real engagement by brands in social media is really hard to measure. I’ll be dropping my bank as soon as I don’t need them anymore because of the way it treated me when I was a student – good social media strategy will have a similarly long-lasting effect. Nonetheless, some agencies are having a very credible stab at it. Just steer clear of the ones who claim it’s that simple
4. Existing credentials – being good at something, in my view, is a transferable skill. Muhammad Ali liked to say that if he’d been a dustman (I’m translating of course), he’d have been the best dustman in the world. I believe him. So, is the agency now claiming to be brilliant at social media brilliant at what it already does?
5. Case studies – trade journalists will tell you that finding people to talk about social media is not a problem. Finding people that have real projects to talk about is a good deal more difficult. What has the agency really done in this area?

My shortlist would be made up only of agencies that tick all five boxes

At We Are Social, we would agree with him…

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I never thought I’d hear the two words together – but the National Year of Reading has developed a series of YouTube videos to promote reading amongst young people.
The videos are based around a series of dares designed to promote information retrieval in the form of reading.
It’s interesting to see the government using YouTube in this way.

As I said, I’d never have put “reading” and “YouTube” together – however it seems to work quite nicely. The main driver of the films seems to be charismatic presenter Garron, whose enthusiasm pushes the films through making them feel like a “Why don’t you” for the naughties . . .

It’s Christmas and ‘tis the season for banging out emails and so amongst the work mail and penile related spam my inbox attracts are an increasing number of commercial offers from retailers I shop with regularly.

A lot of these are welcome – offering discounts on goods I often buy, from traders I respect. However there is a problem. Some offers are starting to arrive so frequently as to appear desperate and as any person being courted will tell you, the cologne of desperation is not an attractive one.

In contrast to the retailer offering hourly discounts on everything from their granny to the kitchen sink are those absent who won’t or can’t compete in the currently rampant discount market – their brand value stubbornly intact, at least until the year’s profit figures come out.

Of course it’s proving hard for retailers to steer a straight ship in these unusual trading conditions – the route is somewhere between the rocks of discounting in the short term and the hard place of not devaluing your brand over the long term.

To do this takes resource – one of the prevailing myths is that email is cheap – it isn’t, at least not to do well and it also takes long term strategic thought. Some retailers may be in the fight for Christmas but what about January, February & March? Rather than the 12 days of Christmas, retailers should be thinking in terms of the 12 months of Christmas.

 Wishing everyone a happy holiday, with a nifty viral piece from the folks at Sonic ID –

 click here to play sonic snowflakes. 

 Thanks to Martyn Ware (founding member of 80′s pop bands Heaven 17 and The Human League and head of The Illustrious Company) for the tip about this holiday treat.

 Signing off ’till next year,

-Lisa

Econsultancy have published a good overview of the economic outlook in 2009 for the digital marketing industry, with one of the data sources quoted being Wednesday’s eMarketer report predicting 7.2% growth in UK online ad spend.

Just like the Group M report earlier this month, although there’s bad news for those in the industry who have yet to wake up to the changes that social media is bringing to people’s behaviour, there’s good news for those of us that have:

Time and time again, when we meet with companies, we are asked about social media marketing strategies. Whilst this covers social networks, it is likely we will see a rise in businesses actively trying to engage with users through other social means online.

Tying in with the forecast that social media will continue to grow, is that despite a recessive economy, online marketers will look to alternative ways of measuring success – rather than just a standard ROI model.

This has been mentioned before, but to recap: measurements of success also include customer retention and satisfaction (all the more important in a recession), the rate of customer acquisition and the net promoter score.

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Little did I know that setting up We Are Social would lead to such glamorous opportunities. For example, yesterday I was asked to appear on Small Business Advice TV to talk about social media marketing and in particular, the example of Wiggly Wigglers, winners of the inaugural Global Dell Small Business Excellence Award for their use of social media. You can watch the show here:

It’s well worth watching the segments where Heather from Wiggly Wigglers talks about their experiences – they really did deserve that award and it makes a great case study for businesses large and small.

It was a fun half hour. Thank you to Russell Goldsmith and Dell’s Kerry Bridge for inviting me to contribute.

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{margin-bottom:0cm;} Emerging experts in the PR field are shaping new ways of
communicating brand messages and figuring out the best way to navigate through
social media, online and with new trends like Twitter.

Content and Motion is a
content optimisation and online PR agency that offers up five tips for applying
social engagement to PR. They suggest:

1)     
Listening to audiences

2)     
Being interesting

3)     
Looking for your audience

4)     
Giving away free content

5)     
Being socially useful

Applying C&M’s five observations will help anyone using
online PR to manage the scene better, and the advice is really based on common
sense. You wouldn’t want to go to a party and over-network the crowd, so why
should you do it online?

Read the full blog post here.

Being a better social PR networker,

-Lisa

That’s it, the 5th edition of LeWeb, the largest web 2.0 conference in the world, is now over; much has already been said by the likes of The Guardian,
about the nonexistent wifi at the event or about how the place was so
freezing cold they had a sauna installed at the back. What you probably
don’t know yet though is that on the basis LeWeb’08 was taking place at
the newly refurbished 39,000 sq meter artistic hub Le 104,
which used to be a Parisian mortuary, an historic place where you could
find more than 600 coffins and 150 hearses on the move, it’s not such a
surprise the place was so cold…

But LeWeb was so much more though than a cold place and it’s no
wonder that for the past five years more and more entrepreneurs, web
2.0 people and brands alike have registered to attend the conference…

Recession was pretty much on everyone’s mind during this 2008
edition of LeWeb, as was the search for investment from young
entrepreneurs wishing to launch their new big ideas. What’s interesting
is that all speakers actually seemed to agree on the fact that the
economic downturn will ignite many new ideas and that it is very likely
that those companies that will be the most known in 10 years or so will
most likely have been created during this recession.

Take Viewdle, for
example. A couple of hours before Viewdle were announced as the Gold
Winner of LeWeb’08 the start-up competition, Marissa Mayer, Google VP,
Search Products and User Experience was talking about video face
recognition and explaining how recognizing a human face as a person on
a video was still a few years away. Marissa mentioned that technically
it was possible but because of the sheer volume of videos now available
on the Internet, and how many people look alike, it was proving
difficult. Viewdle won the start-up competition with their facial
recognition digital platform which allows you to easily index and
search video assets. A pretty amazing technology and a proof that it is
still possible to come up with great ideas and technology.

Marissa Mayer also covered the notion of social search: when you go
to a conference for example, you ask like-minded people about where is
the best place to have diner, which hotel to stay at. Those are ’social
searches’, they happen all the time in real life but right now there
isn’t a simple way of doing this online and it seems that this is going
to be a focus for Google.

Social searches, using Twitter to talk about the conference, L’Oreal mentioning that brands are part of the conversation, Paolo Coehlo explaining how he uses his social media to interact with
his fans and how he even invites some of them to have diner with him;
it’s interesting to see how technology is enabling us all to refocus on
the most human thing: conversations. And I guess this is the strength
of LeWeb: it’s all about being able to meet a network of over 1,500
people from 30 countries, being able to share our vision of the
Internet, the Web 2.0 and the future alike with those people.

LeWeb’08 is over and I’m already looking forward to the 2009 edition!

ps: check out Loïc Le Meur’s blog post about the organizational issues encountered at LeWeb.

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HM Customs & Excise invited me to a small business workshop recently – the idea was to ask small businesses, who everyone in government agrees are extremely important to the economy, what we would like to see in terms of improvements in the way HMRC worked with small businesses and their view of the corporation tax system. Sounded like a good idea so I went along.

Actually none of us at the workshop had any problem with corporation tax but we did agree that we found HMRC quite rude to deal with and that the VAT system was rubbish. If any other supplier were to ask for money in the way they did, we’d bin them immediately we explained – we’re not treated as customers.

As if to prove our point, the workshop organisers then moved on to try and sell us a series of ideas on how corporation tax could be simplified and improved, none of which looked like they were going to make our lives any simpler.

We began to realise that the workshop we thought had been set up to listen to small businesses was actually a platform for the HMRC to peddle tax scheme proposals to improve a system we’d already said we didn’t want.

The decision had presumably already been made that change was needed and we were part of a farcical ‘consultation process’ to justify those changes.
I should have guessed from the now disabled URL they used for the ‘simplification’ workshop website that we were entering a parallel governmental universe unrelated to the commercial world.

Unfortunately if you click on that url you’ll now be taken to a 404 error page, I’m sure there is some sort of irony there.