At the weekend I became weirdly obsessed by following Policemen on Twitter.  I don’t know why or how – but I did.  Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that my grand father was a policeman.

Or maybe it comes from my fascination with the relationship between organisations and individuals – typified by the relationship between the police and the public.  Or more interestingly the bobby on the beat and Joe public.

The traditional trusted position of the local community policeman has undeniably been lost over the last 20 years.  The reasons for this change in relationship are many – however, two things really stick out as the drivers of this change
1) The loss of the hyper-local police station, and local bobby on the beat (which I assume has been down to funding cuts – though admittedly don’t really know)

2) The erosion of the “local community” – largely driven by a change in media consumption and improved transport – meaning people no longer socialise so much at a local level, or access services (shopping / post office) at a local level too either.

So I was interested to discover the phenomenon of Tweeting Policemen – the most interesting subset being the “Beat Tweeter” – those bobbies that tweet whilst out the beat.  The two I initially picked up on are @pc6785lewis and @NYPHaxbySNT.

I was particularly taken by @NYPHaxbySNT as he happens to work in a village neighbouring my home in Yorkshire – so I could really connect with what he’s been tweeting about, and was very reassuring to hear about his work from the frontline.

I find this hyper-local use of Twitter extremely interesting in the wider context of the Police’s organisational relationship with citizens, as I have a sense that social media could become the glue that reconnects communities – helping bridge the social gaps previously created by mass media.

+ finally as a wee experiment I’ve set up a Twibe and Twitter group called “TweetBeat” as a mini-hub for all those tweeting bobbies on the beat!   Check + follow it here: TweetBeat

Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing,
alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams
(@emodkate).

This super-size bumper edition is the last update for 2009 – and all of us at
eModeration wish you a very merry holiday. See you in
2010!

THE HEADLINES
…

A coalititon of privacy groups have filed
a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook’s new privacy
changes, which it alleges constitute ‘unfair and deceptive trade practices’.
While Facebook harumph that it’s all a lot of fuss and bother about nothing,
commentators mainly agree that the ‘Book’s midstream course-switch has been
poorly-explained at best; at worst, occlusive. The real question is, as Peter
Kafka points out, whether advertisers will start to mutter. He notes that
Facebook’s Beacon programme was only pulled once marketers started asking
awkward questions, and wonders whether history might repeat itself.

Over
in China, Microsoft found itself in a rather awkward spot when it emerged that
the resemblance their new platform Juku bore to start-up micro-blogging service
Plurk was so heavy as to be what you and I might call ‘the same’. Embarrassingly
for Microsoft, it was discovered that one of their Chinese developers had indeed
lifted
chunks of Plurk’s code, and the service was suspended indefinitely. The
speed and directness with which they dealt with the crisis earned them mild
praise – but nevertheless Plurk is ominously said to be considering its
legal options.

Twitter found itself under
attack last week by the mysteriously-named Iranian Cyber Army, who it
appears hijacked the site via weak Twitter email security. The group managed to
redirect users to their own site – but Twitterers were left confused as to the
hackers’ message. In broken English, they appeared to harbour anti-American
feeling – but used the image of a green flag, associated with those who oppose
the current regime.

Meanwhile RockYou – the third most successful
Facebook app, with more than 55 million monthly active users – suffered a serious
hack attack which exposed 32 million customer usernames and passwords to
identity theft. The breach is all the more serious because Rock You’s usernames
and passwords – which were apparently displayed in plain text – are by default
the same as the user’s email username and passwords. Worse still, RockYou
appears to have taken a full 10 days to let them know of the risk to their
online identities.

THE LOWDOWN
…

On Saturday, Washington DC’s Twitterers organized an
impromptu street-corner snowball fight – what could be more seasonal or more
jolly? Unfortunately, an undercover cop whose Hummer caught a couple of stray
snowballs was not yet fully immersed in the festive spirit, and rather pooped
the party by getting out of his vehicle and drawing his weapon on the dismayed
funsters – inspiring the instantly viral chant of ‘Don’t bring a gun to a
snowball fight!’

A 15-year-old boy, whose parents took away his Xbox
system as punishment for an unspecified misdemeanour, called
911 to check that they were within their rights to do so. Police officers
who arrived at his house confirmed that his parents are, in fact, the boss of
him.

In what will be the last ‘What Were They Thinking?’ of 2009, three
police officers have been disciplined after a group of inebriated young women
ran amok in their police station. The officers, presumably perfectly capable of
dealing with both fast-footed burglars and angry drunks, found themselves
unaccountably unable to control the young women, who took photos of themselves
in police uniforms posing in, ahem, a provocative manner – shots which later
turned up on Facebook.

A producer from Uruguay who uploaded his short
film – made for a total of £186 – onto YouTube has now been offered a £18.6m
contract to make a Hollywood film. Just three days after the upload, Fede
Alvarez’ inbox was bulging with enquiries from Hollywood; but if you are still
clutching to your secret heart the fantasy that it could happen to you, were you
only to launch your talent on the YouTube-viewing world – watch this, and let
the dream go.

Chris Brown has had what is rapidly becoming known (well,
in my head) as a Twissy Fit. You may or may not know that the singer recently
released a comeback album, part of his attempt to rebuild
his image after his violent assault on then-girlfriend Rihanna. In a series
of increasingly bitter tweets, Brown claimed that retailers were blackballing
his album – causing widespread mockery in the entertainment press, and the
hurried deletion of the account in question.

Last week we had the murky
ethics of lawyers ‘friending’ judges – this week it’s jurors whose questionable
social media activities are in the dock. Jury-members in the mayor of
Baltimore’s trial for gift-card embezzlement made
contact with one another on Facebook – and now the mayor’s lawyers are
examining whether this could constitute grounds for appeal.

If you wish
your kiddywinks to enjoy a Christmas which is both magical and modern, upgrade
your traditions to Yule 2.0 with Mashable’s
list of ways to interact with Santa. There’s even an iPhone app in which the
Big Guy tells them that, unless they shape up in the behaviour department, they
can expect nowt but a lump of coal in their stocking.

IN OTHER NEWS …

On Christmas Day, just after
lunch, Barnardo’s is launching their hugely innovative Teens’ Speech campaign online.
For the last 2 months, Barnardo’s has been encouraging teenagers to upload
videos in which they express their hopes – and fears – for the future. The
project – which eModeration has been delighted to be part of – involved an open
invitation to this much-maligned group to speak out on the issues which are
important to them across multiple platforms including YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the Barnardo’s
website. The campaign also hopes to draw attention to the fact that what
matters to teens should also matter to the rest of us – and it promises to be
touching, insightful, and very honest.

Hot on the heels of last week’s
revelation that Facebook’s demographic is increasingly Gran-shaped, comes the
launch of a new service for granny-bloggers. The NanaBlogs helps Grans to
explore social media, and to start their own blogs. The launch coincides with
news that the older generation is embracing
texting at last – 14% of those aged 45-plus are sending more than 30 text
messages every week.

Two regulatory changes this week: first the
Advertising Standards Authority’s remit was extended to include
digital marketing – bringing brands’ websites under their control for the
first time.

Then the Press Complaints Commission’s reach
was extended to cover online-only publications – until recently those which
had no offline presence were exempt.

An interesting week for online news
content: the Guardian launched
an iPhone app, which for a one-off fee of £2.39 allows users to customise
Guardian content, making it much easier to view on a mobile device. And over the
pond, the Huffington Post is offering sponsored
tweets to advertisers, which will feature in the live Twitter feed on its
site. It’s also offering ad placements within the comments section of its
articles.

Meanwhile, a huge GfK Group study has found that only 13% of
people in Europe and the USA would be prepared
to pay for online content. Worse still, 42% of European and 21% of US
consumers didn’t even want their content to be supported by ads – which would
leave content-providers without any visible means of support
whatsoever.

ON FACEBOOK
…

Aside from the growing privacy brouhaha detailed above,
it’s been an uneventful week for the ‘Book.

They announced the
heartening results of its recent demographic study, which show that the
percentage of Black and Asian users are now approaching those found in the
general US population. But the social giant also faced criticism for pointedly
refusing to share the wider data-set with the public, which caused some
to wonder whether other, less cheerful cultural trends were contained
within.

Facebook also launched a developer
consultant programme, to help confuzzled brands decide who to work with when
building their Facebook presence. The initial roster of 14 companies include
Context Optional and Wildfire, who have worked with brands such as Red Bull,
Chase, MTV and Disney on social media launches.

ON TWITTER …

A light news week also for
Twitter: they launched
in German, which joins Spanish, French and Italian as official
Twitter-supported languages.

And, in a possible step towards a full
commercial offer, Twitter began testing a new ‘Contributors’
feature. It lets businesses have accounts which can be used by several
employees, each of whom would be identified by an individual by-line.

And
finally, Twitter announced their top trending topics of the year: the results,
which put Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle at number one and two respectively,
were entirely
predictable – but like too much gin in Auntie Vera’s holiday egg-nog, were
no less enjoyable for that.

ON GOOGLE
…

Like Facebook, Google launched URL
shorteners this week – and while Google’s is only available through its
Toolbar and Feedburner, there’s nothing to say things will stay that way. Which
must, as MediaPost points out, make uncomfortable reading for Bit.ly et al, as
they watch Google pull out all stops to keep the traffic flowing through to
search.

Elsewhere, ZDNet.com suggests that real-time search is not
necessarily going to be the money-spinner that Google might be anticipating.
They wonder if ‘real-time search moves too fast and is too unpredictable to monetize …
In other words, you need a crystal ball to monetize a real-time stream of
information.’

But most Google gossip this week concerned rumours of an
imminent launch-date for their own-branded smartphone, based on the Android
platform. Unlike other phones, this will be sold directly to consumers, who will
themselves contract with a wireless network. Some
commentators are urging those of you who initially snubbed the iPhone to
view this as a second chance to get in at the off. But others
warn that, at $500, the Droid is a risky prospect in a market where “all
previous attempts to sell directly to the consumer in the U.S. have thus far
have been an abject failure.” Ho hum.

ON
YOUTUBE …

Following reports last month that YouTube was
contemplating iTunes-style rentals for their growing offer of long-form TV
content, Reuters reports that the video-sharing site is considering monthly
subscriptions along a cable-tv provider model. Mashable posits that, one way
or another, we’re looking at some kind of paid-content model for YouTube, since
providers seem unwilling to settle for an entirely ad-supported
model.

Ah, here she is again – Susan Boyle is top
of the pops on YouTube’s most popular vids of the year. Pass the egg nog,
Auntie!

BRANDS GET SOCIAL
…

Marshalls and T.J. Maxx have co-sponsored a festive
YouTube Caroling
Channel. It’s a contest site where singers can pick one of four customized
songs to sing – including ‘Deck Yourself Out’ and “We Wish You a Better Way to
Christmas Shop” – in hopes of winning a $5,000 gift-card Grand
Prize.

Carl’s Junior has hired Kim Kardashian to front a new
multi-faceted digital campaign, the centrepiece of which is an augmented
reality lunch date, in which fans can chat with the star over a virtual
Carl’s Jr. grilled chicken salad.

NBC is launching a fan-driven
campaign to raise the social media profile of its show ‘Chuck’, which
revolves around a geek who must save the world after his brain becomes
accidentally encoded with government secrets. Fans who ‘share the greatness’
through Facebook and other SocNets have a chance at the Grand Prize of appearing
in a Chuck episode.

Samsung is offering 10 teams of bloggers the chance
to zip over to the Winter
Games in Vancouver this February. The teams will face a selection of
challenges, like visiting multiple sites around the city, collecting fan stories
and covering the various events – all of which they’ll record on a Samsung
Mythic mobile phone.

SOCIAL STATS
…

The number of reviews consulted by online shoppers was
up by a mammoth
128% this year, according to a massive survey of UK shoppers carried out on
November 30, the date which marks the unofficial start of the online Christmas
shopping season.

Meanwhile, social media recommendations from strangers
languish at seventh place as a means of discovering online video – verbal word of mouth (41%)
and search (32%) are the top two.

Prompt Communications report that
Facebook (96%) is now the most
popular communication tool, followed by text (93%) and email (91%) – but
consumers use text (37%) more frequently, with Facebook and the phone at
28%.

YuMe reports that under-14s
have the highest click-through rate on pre-roll video ads, at 3.7%. Their
parents – people over 35 – have the next highest at 1.9%, followed by 18 to 24s
at 1.5%. More detailed stats on video ads can be found here.

A recent
study from SheSpeaks finds that the number of US women who have at least one
social networking profile has leapt
by nearly half to 86% – up from 58% last year. The number logging in at
least once a day is now up to a cracking 72%, from 53% in 2008.

eMarketer says US online ad spend figures will show a 4.6% decrease over
last year – a
sharp revision of the growth of 4.5% it initially predicted. The good news
is that they reckon that the cycle has bottom out – for online advertising at
least.

ON MOBILE
…

Smartphones are changing the social landscape, with over
450 million of us accessing the mobile internet in 2009. IDC’s research also
predicts that this already huge number is set to double to 900 million by the
end of 2013.

And Scandinavian operator TeliaSonera is leading
the way, by offering the world’s first ‘4G’ mobile broadband to users in
Norway and Sweden. They’ll now benefit from mobile download speeds an
astonishing 10 times faster than the rest of us 3G
slowcoaches.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES
…

Finally, here’s news that Sony is launching an MMO on
PlayStation Home. The game, called Sodium
One, is sci-fi themed, and is free-to-play for the first five levels.
Thereafter, additional purchasable items will help you continue to
advance.

That’s all till 2010, folks! !

Today started happy. I wasn’t headed anywhere on #Eurostar. Then, TechCrunch made me even happier that I wasn’t Eurostar’s agency.

I’m not linking to all of the blog brouhaha because this post isn’t about Crisis Dos & Don’ts. (My employer has better folks for that.) This is a personal ponder on why us agencies preach so much better than most advertisers practice.

TechCrunch usually writes about web 2 start-ups, but you have to assume their savvy editor knows enough about the marketing agency model to understand we cannot do anything on behalf of clients that they haven’t actually commissioned. Yet it seems the age of transparency means being outed for sins of omission. Harsh.

For literally years now, as one micro example, I have counseled clients to claim back their brand-jacked Twitter urls. Even this small step however, falls in the cracks between corporate departments. My own take-away from this latest #fail case is to work harder to jump those divides.

Clients often ask me who ‘owns’ social media. By which they mean, does it sit in the PR, digital, research, or customer service budget? So I draw my little overlapping Venn circles and explain about the hybrid teams needed, but is that a good answer? Oh, it is the right answer. But is it a useful answer? It would be great to get comments from client side people here (or here).

Frankly, this confusion is all our fault. Although perhaps mostly the media agencies’ fault (sorry mates). Since brands first went online (circa Netscape Navigator), agency enabled clients have marked ‘digital’ as just another ‘channel’ in their marketing plan. (I don’t have the strength in this 20th year of the world wide web to explain how whack that is, but probably you already know.) These new applications weren’t built as marketing channels any more than highways were built for billboards.

And here we are entering 2010 with a new, fairly skinny linear line item on that spreadsheet, misleadingly called social ‘media’. It shouldn’t take a crisis to see that that line should instead be a circle around the whole company. But maybe it does.

Please follow me on Twitter in case we get stuck on a train.

There is a raft of developments that may fundamentally change the way in which consumers interact with the internet.

New media commentator Stowe Boyd believes that the next evolution of the web involves some pretty radical steps:

One of the moves away from a document structure focuses on how the web will evolve into a 3-dimensional environment.

The
technical limitations of internet speeds previously stifled the growth
in more complex visual interaction with the web – but as broadband
speeds really start to increase, due to both BT’s migration to digital
exchanges and the advent of fibre optics broadband, speeds of up to
100mb/s are only a few years away. And we need to put that into context
– only half a decade ago we were still talking about 56k dial-up
connections – a 100mb/s connection is 2000 times faster.

And with that will come a richer interactive experience. Second Life is a great pointer of the direction this will take.

But it’s not simply within the world of entertainment and leisure that these environments are being created.

3B
is a software company developing the next generation of 3D online
experiences. It has developed a platform that enables users to
socialise, shop and browse within a 3D environment. One of its current
developments is to allow users to create 3D environments for their
social networking pages across MySpace, Bebo, MetaCafe, Flickr and
YouTube. And it’s just one of many companies looking to establish a
more ‘real world’ means of shopping in the comfort of our own homes.

Whilst
the majority of online shoppers are now comfortable with the online
experience for purchasing music, DVDs and even electrical items, one of
the main sectors that’s struggled for growth has been online grocery
shopping. This is largely due to the sheer number of different items in
different grocery categories needed as part of the weekly shop. The
current online experience is extremely flat and rather unusable &
clunky. And for FMCG marketers, branding and merchandising is a
nightmare – with brands arranged alphabetically in lists.

The
advent of 3D will create an in-store environment that we’re all
familiar with – store layouts that start with the fresh produce
sections and move through to beers/wines & spirits. Each consumer’s
store layout could even be customised to match that of their local
real-world store so they feel even more familiar with where everything
is.

Merchandising and promotional activity in this environment
also begins to resemble the real-world process – but with data on the
individual consumer and an opportunity to talk to the consumer in a
1-2-1 environment, promotions can be even more compelling and finely
targeted.

So, once again, the careful use of consumer data plays a key role in the development of internet.

And before anyone jokes, I’m not talking about vodka… It’s one week to Christmas now and, I suspect like many others, the panic of last minute Christmas shopping is settling in. How has this happened again? A moment ago it was November and there was sweet anticipation for the festive season and now I’m breaking into sweat thinking of thoughtful gifts.

So today as I write this blog in the midst of my panic, I am wondering “where did December go?” There has been a lot of Christmas drinking. Team dinners, client drinks, company parties. Has it all been parties and hangovers? Maybe, but I am pleased to conclude that there has been a great benefit to all the socialising.

Blending. It’s something that we talk about a lot here at LBi and what we mean is working together with breadth of expertise we have. But it’s no good just talking about it, with the breadth of service we offer a lot of initiative and planning needs to go into making it easy to pull in people from across the agency. And once we’re all together, how do get the most from the team? You’ve got to get to know each other and understand what everyone does. So I think the December parties have been the opportunity to get everyone blending more and my tip for this week’s blog is get out there to celebrate and collaborate.

Celebrate because it hasn’t been an easy year for many agencies. Redundancies. Pay freezes. Budget cuts. But it doesn’t mean it’s been all bad. There is still a lot of interesting and challenging work to get stuck into and now is the time to look back on the successes and feel the appreciation, particularly at a time when many are feeling more confident.

And collaborate because, well, there’s nothing like a party to get everyone to relax and share, to get to know people and to understand what motivates them, what they do and what their perspective is.

Now, this may sound obvious, but once I started thinking about the how the Christmas parties are bringing everyone together I also realised that there are other ways that we can and do promote celebration and collaboration both on a company level and individual level. Take a look at the LBi Mobile Mobile and the Christmas Quiz projects.

These are company initiatives that require collaboration amongst different departments to produce but also reach out to the community as well to create something interactive. And within our own projects there are also all of the opportunities to collaborate with and learn from others within the 2010 account planning process. On an individual level we can celebrate and share our own work and learnings so that we don’t get swept along in the whirlwind of agency life without taking stock of what we’ve achieved and, importantly, how we have developed in 2009.

So, I still have a load of Christmas presents to buy in a short amount of time and I’ll have to pull out the padding so I can hip-and-shoulder my way through the manic Christmas crowds this weekend. But once I get through the gift buying, the gift giving, the turkey and mulled wine and the happy-new-year, I’ll get back to work in January to build on the celebrated hard work of 2009 with big plans to keep the momentum going. Yes, it has been a soppy blog today, but it’s probably my last of 2009 and that’s what the spirit of Christmas can do.

Merry Christmas to all – I’ll be back next year with a new name for the blog but for the same media rants and opinions.

Over the past few years brands have become increasingly engage with using the big social networks such as Twitter and Facebook not only as a marketing and engagement tool but also as a home for their social media community.

For a while this seemed great, a ready built audience, on a platform you don’t need to pay anything for a marketers dream.

Then a few years or so ago something happened. Social media suddenly got corporate. News Corp bought Myspace, Google paid $1.65bn for youtube and Ning is valued at $500 million. As the platforms get more serious and business like they slowly start to alter the way they work.

These platforms had shareholders and corporate owners who wanted to control the future of the platforms.

This really culminated in my mind this summer when facebook announced they would start removing publishing rights to so called “Generic pages”. These generic pages in some cases are a spamming nuisance but in a lot of cases aren’t. Facebook have been proceeding with this “generic page” purge over the last few months ands are in the process of crippling an estimated 500,000 pages. They have not you notice completely removed them merely stopped anyway for anyone who owns a page to communicate. So they still get the SEO pluses for the content and the additional traffic.

The purge Facebook has started has caught up an enormous number of genuine pages (certainly in the tens of thousands) and removed their rights as publish. To make it worse the only way for most page owners to communicate with Facebook is through a blind email with no SLA’s or guidance as to when the page owner will receive a response.

In case you are wondering, I have seen this happen to a genuine page for a national brand and seen Facebook’s lack of response when the issue has been raised with them.

Issue like this are really at the heart of why I don’t believe the community itself should ever be hosted or run from one of the big networks.

If brands are taking social media seriously like Dell, South West Airlines, Starbucks and Bestbuy do then they need to ensure they have control over whether they can talk to their community or not.
Brands wouldn’t dream of hosting their corporate websites in a Yahoo group, so why would you do the same with your community. Brands should certainly be using the big networks as that is where there potential audience is, but it should be where they find new people to part of their community; it should be regarded as a way to introduce your brand and your content.

With the cost of building social networks plummeting and tools like Facebook connect meaning people don’t have to create new profiles or logins the question becomes as social media gets serious are brands serious about social media?

Everyone has an inner-agency-bitch.  Your inner-bitch is most likely to surface when you see another agency’s work.  If the work’s from an agency you like you’ll irrationally love it.  If it’s from an agency you hate – hate stemming largely from the fact that they work in the same industry as you and are not you -  then you’ll irrationally hate it.  If you happen to see the piece of work on YouTube then you’ll be irrationally driven to write some kind of hate-filled illogical bile in the comments section to make yourself feel better.  If you’re even more cunning, in your hateful state you’ll use your secret anonymous YouTube account and make the comment sound like it’s from a real person  – rather than from an irrational agency bitch – making the comment even more hurtful for the maker of the work.

All of which leads me nicely to Publicis’ Christmas video – a tongue-in-cheek festive  take on a classic internet meme.  Or, in the words of YouTube commenters “a bag of bollocks” (Mattycfox) made by “. . .a bunch of talentless c*nts.” (MonsterMozz).  Obviously Mattycfox and MonsterMozz’s eloquent use of language immediately outs them as (not very good) agency copy-writers in disguise . . .

The problem with industry virals outwardly created by agencies is that they’re a magnet for inner-agency-bitches.  Which is annoying, as these kinds of comments are irrational and illogical and a waste of time.  Publicis’ staff Christmas video was just that – a Christmas video made as a bit of fun by agency staff, based on a popular YouTube meme.  Nothing more.

So if I had one wish for the New Year – other than world peace – then it would be STOP ANONYMOUS AGENCY BITCHING AS IT’S FRICKING POINTLESS, a little bit hurtful and not really that amusing.

Last
week Facebook rolled-out a new set of privacy settings. If you’re a
Facebook user you can’t really have missed it. You were forced to at
least review the settings when you logged-in.

It was billed as
putting the user in greater control of their data and the information
that they share with others, with advertisers and with 3rd party
applications.

However, after many months of critical speculation
and reassurance that Facebook was taking privacy seriously, it appeared
that some of the new default settings automatically made personal
information available to more, rather than fewer, people (irrespective
of one’s previous settings). For example the default setting for member
photos and birthdays used to be limited to ‘friends’ however, the new
default setting extends this to ‘friends of friends’.

It’s not
all bad news, however. Where a user wants to review and adjust their
privacy settings the new Facebook controls allow customisation of
almost every element including what information is shared by
applications.

We all understand that Facebook has to evolve its
business model. Its core asset is the data it holds on its members.
However, the fear now is that to drive advertising growth it will start
to push members into sharing more than they want (or more than they
thought they had shared) simply because most users simply won’t want to
spend the time adjusting complicated settings, or they simply don’t
understand the implications.

However, as both behavioural
targetting and social search become the new battlegrounds for both
social networking sites and the major search engines – understanding
what personal information is accessible by whom will become
increasingly important.

 Welcome to eModeration’s round-up of all that is intriguing,
alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams
(@emodkate).

Next update: Friday. See you
then!

ON
FACEBOOK …

Facebook’s road to global domination is
littered with milestones – barely a week passes without us stubbing our toe on
another one. A few weeks ago, 350 million global users –this week 100
million Stateside users, up from 98.1 million a mere week ago.

As
suspected, Facebook’s new privacy settings aren’t quite as private as they might be, and
Facebook’s been getting a bit of an earful from various security experts – some
of whom point to its new search relationships with Google and Bing as possible
smoking guns.

To head off a possible revolt, the social giant took a
few baby-steps
backwards and announced that it will, after all, be possible to prevent your
friend list appearing automatically on your profile – though that info is still
accessible by third party apps.

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
has done the decent thing and adopted Facebook’s default privacy settings on his
own account. So if you’ve always wanted to know what a twenty-something
billionaire gets up to in his downtime, now’s
your chance.  But you had to be quick – because oops, he’s changed his settings to make some of them private again.  Funny that.

The Ethics Advisory Committee of the Florida Supreme
Court has decreed that lawyers are not
allowed to friend judges and so forth on Facebook and other social networks,
lest the public assume undue influence. Blimey – that’s a pretty thin friends
list they’re looking at there, if lawyers are not allowed to friend each other.
It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the poor things.
Almost.

When the world was abuzz with the possibility that teens were
sloping away from Facebook for fear of being friended by their grannies, I
confess I thought we were speaking figuratively. It appears not – users
aged 65 and up have increased by over half in the last 2 years and now make
up 8.2% of their total membership. What’s more, Facebooks’s growth for much of
this year has been driven by females in this age group – it really is
Gransnet.

Bad news for brands – new vox-pops by Brand Republic suggest
that not
many Brits understand why they should become a fan of a brand on Facebook.
Citing the fundamental social purpose of the network, one said succinctly: “I
don’t really care about people’s opinions on what flavour pasty they like from
Greggs.”

ON TWITTER
…

As you know, each member of the Twitter management team
is contractually obliged to answer the question ‘is Google buying Twitter?’ at
least twice a day, and they’ve gotten pretty good at batting it away. This time,
however, co-founder
Jack Dorsey’s response was an enigmatic “There have been no announcements.”
He followed up with an even more non-commital “Twitter is focused on building a
sustainable company,” leaving commentators furiously stroking their
beards.

Meanwhile, the micro-blogging service’s stalled stats could be in
for a boost – they’ve launched a new API which will allow users to sign up
directly from
third party apps. Some commentators are suggesting this might be the
beginnings of a business plan.

A few days ago we reported that many
brands were still failing to embrace Twitter as a customer service channel – but
today comes news from the other end of the Twitter continuum. It seems that
dissatisfied customers who DON’T tweet their grievance risk encountering worse
customer service standards than ever, as companies cotton on to the fact
that a poor review on Twitter and other social networks can lose them 30
additional customers, and therefore pour all their energies into social
media.

ON YOUTUBE
…

YouTube CEO & co-founder Chad Hurley says that
improved search was top of his
Christmas list this year – it’s still too hard to find relevant content, he
says, hinting at discovery tools which will make better use of users’ search
history and viewing habits. Hurley also wants YouTube to become more social, and
to encourage more users to create and share content via their mobiles – as well
as moving towards an improved delivery system for TV-on-demand.

This
coming Spring YouTube is launching ‘Sports Hub’ – a specially-created area of
Google’s video-sharing site which will hold more
than 2,000 videos from SportAccord, the representative of various global
sporting institutions. Sports Hub will show a mixture of clips and long-form
content, including matches, competitions, and behind-the-scenes
material.

BRANDS GET SOCIAL
…

JetBlue, which is king of the skies on Twitter, wants to
up its Facebook stats – rather less high-flying at barely 60,000 fans. Their
All-You-Can-Jet Fan Sweepstakes offers the chance of winning unlimited free
air travel for a year – but only to their Facebook fans.

Chase, the
financial services conglomerate, has developed a unique Facebook app which has
already reached over 844,000 monthly active users. The app, called Chase
Community Giving, allows users to suggest ways that Chase should donate $5
million to charity.

Burger King is offering users the chance to send the
gift of a dollar
cheeseburger voucher to a friend. Users select from a variety of wry
greetings, including “because an IM greeting wouldn’t have been enough. And a
fancy gift would’ve been too much” and “because I care deeply about someone who
looks kinda like you.”

Dell’s Twitter-led sales figures have just zoomed
past $6.5 million, leaving other brands gawping. The figure is the combined
sales from their @DellOutlet Twitter account, which now has almost 1.5m
followers, and their other worldwide accounts.

Waitrose has launched an
online forum to help their customers deal with “Christmas
Affective Disorder”, which it announced, with a semi-raised eyebrow,
troubles 50% of us. It plans to allay the anxiety we feel when faced with
Christmas tasks like ‘finding meat for those with dentures’.

Fox’s Avatar
social media tidal wave continues its
inexorable journey across 15 global markets, including the UK. Two YouTube
‘power users’ will be given LG phones to film the World Premiere red carpet from
a fan’s perspective, and the following day an Avatar masthead will take over the
YouTube homepage, which will also feature a trailer for the
film.

VIRTUAL AND GAMES
…

The Dept of Transport has launched a children’s fantasy
MMOG called Code
of Everand – a Green Cross Code for the ‘Tensies. The game ingeniously
teaches children the fundamentals of road safety – players must cross dangerous
‘spirit channels’, defeating monsters with a range of attacks and spells, while
building their stash of Concentration Points.

Habbo, the virtual world
for Teens, is offering brands a
new measurement tool called Habble. The tool can track conversations and
mentions, and cross-ref with other data to provide an in-depth picture of ad
effectiveness.

A new study by sociologists at the Virtual Worlds
Observatory has found that, amongst hardcore gamers, women
trump men in terms of hours played. The researchers found that the top 10%
of male players put in 48 hours a week which, while jaw-dropping, is nonetheless
dwarfed by the 56 hours a week which the top 10% of female gamers racked
up.

The discovery coincides with news that women
accounted for 30% of all Modern Warfare players on the PC this year. Brands
are also noting the fact that female gamers are more likely to buy branded
clothing or book a holiday online, and are generally more at ease with spending
larger amounts over the internet than other women, according to Marketing Week,
whose in-depth
analysis is well worth a look.

Metaversum, who’ve developed
mirror-world platform ‘Twinity’, launched
Virtual London in beta last week. Citizens of the alternate British capital
will be able to buy and furnish apartments, as well as making real-world
business deals.

And finally, if you’ve time for a little light cogitation
in this busy festive week, here is Ypulse’s interview
with Joe Hyrkin – Gaia Online’s Sales and Business Development supremo – in
which he discusses his experience with engaging older
teens.

That’s all
folks!

We swear social media has more guru’s than Las Vegas has gamblers. This one, David Armano, is heading to global PR firm Edelman to become the agency’s senior vice president of digital after eight months at social media start-up consultancy Dachis Group.

Ad Age reports that Armano will work with Steve Rubel, Edelman’s senior VP-director of insights, and will report directly to Rick Murray, president of Edelman Digital. Read More »