• Facebook has 250 million active users to Twitter’s 19 million (eMarketer research via Mashable)
• A large number of users quite within the first month (Nielsen)
• Twitter has no revenue stream

So, is Twitter the new attention dashboard? I have my doubts. I think that’s a very limited view of the conversations that are occurring online.

Will the real-time Web be a major influence on communication in the future? Absolutely.

The focus on the newness of things, the tool and its features and the immediacy of information (Twitter beat CNN to the Tiger Woods story this week by 45 mins) is compelling – but only to a point.  Beyond that point, Twitter discussions tend to become rather sycophantic, repetitive, tactical and/or theoretical.

This stuff is important though; The immediacy of micro-blogs like Twitter influences the way that we value information and perceive it.  It speeds up the news cycle and makes information even more of a commodity.

In a presentation at the recent Media140 event in Sydney Barry Saunders spoke about the danger of not considering context when we use the real-time Web as a primary source of information.  This is among the most insightul and interesting things that I’ve heard said about this space.  Its a very valid point, which is – along with others -  being overlooked in a plethora of hype fuelled conversations about Twitter.  Mr. Saunders make some additional points on related topics here.

The Twitter purists consider Twitter to be a conversational tool but many organisations are, in my experience, approaching it is a broadcast medium, as research that we are releasing tomorrow will show.

I will leave you with this analysis from BlogPulse, which shows comparative mentions of ‘Twitter’, ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Iraq’ in all forms of consumer generated media over the past six months:

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/blogging/just-home-much-air-time-does-twitter-actually-deserve/feed/ 0 http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/is-the-social-networking-star-waning/ http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/is-the-social-networking-star-waning/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:59:40 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=783 Is the social networking star waning?

This graph shows the Traffic Rank for the three biggest international social networks since mid-2007, courtsey of Alexa.

Traffic Rank compares all websites and ranks them from number 1 up in terms of traffic figures. Facebook has been the fourth most Trafficked website on average over the last 3 months.

MySpace has gone from 6 in mid-2007 to 11 today. Twitter has enjoyed a steep ascent from around the 3,000 mark in mid-2007 to 15 today.

Google.com is number 1, at the time of writing. The number 1 spot rotates between Google and Yahoo.

This graph shows that total social networking activity peaked in Q308.  It shows the percentage of total daily page views for each of the three sites.  MySpace has been on a steady decline since then.

The MySpace experience suggests that social networks have a limited lifespan or that they need continual re-invention to motivate their members.  The challenge lies in making changes and re-inventing without alienating users, as Facebook has found to its cost.

News Limited is about to embark on a new strategy for the loss-making site . The site will re-cast itself as an “entertainment portal” following a spate of redundancies and cut backs.

In 2008, U.S. ad spending on MySpace was $585 million, up 15% from 2007, and on Facebook was $210 million, up 50%, according to eMarketer.  Facebook generated $210 million in ad revenues in the same period.

Ad spending on Facebook is expected to surpass that of MySpace in 2011. This will be a good indicator of the overall health of the social networking market.

Twitter has dominated the headlines in 2009 thus far. Facebook – which was today valued at $6.5billion – continues to be the star of social networking but I feel that there are signs that it’s star is waning.

Anecdotal feedback from friends suggest that the novelty factor has worn off. Photo sharing seems to be the primary function of the site for most users who tend to interact inside Facebook with the close circle of friends that they hang out with in real life.  The re-design hid many applications and services behind tabs meaning that users have to go and look for content rather than have it come to them.

There are signs of an emergence of editorial ruminating about the future and usefulness of Facebook. In this article for Mac World, Hillary Rhodes asks: Is Facebook past its prime? Hillary makes the point that ‘the quality of the content that people share at Facebook may contribute to the longevity of the site far more than the sheer number of people who connect with each other’.

Negative editorial can only serve to speed the deterioration of the Facebook brand as a cool go to place. We always knew it was geeky but perceptions of the site seem to be edging into ‘un-cool’ or at least ‘old-hat’.

A recent study covered by The Australian identified a reaction to digital lifestyles. It found that the younger demographic longs for simpler times, it interested in retro and vintage (comes as no surprise if you live in Surry Hills) and has a desire for more authentic real-world relationships. The study found declines in the time spent on the Internet amongst 1,600 young adults (16-30 years old).

My view is that Twitter has a relatively sustainable lifespan because of its simplicity and its diversity.  Twitter seems to have m0re potential due to the fact that it connects people that don’t know one another creating many more opportunities for users to refresh, grow and evolve their networks, exposing them to new sources of information and opinion.

It seems inevitable to me that the traditional / new media pendulum would swing back towards the reality of physical offline media.  Like the dotcom bust, this process will redress the balance and bring a sense of reality to what has been a massively over-hyped area. I’d be a nut to argue that social media has had its day. We’re still in the formative phase of social networking and the chances are that Facebook will be superseded by something else in the short to medium term, in the same way that it has overtaken MySpace.

What does this mean for marketers?

Firstly, for online campaigns leveraging social networks and the Web. Marketers must ensure they have a presence within all major social network. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.  It must be possible for the customer to engage with the brand and participate in the campaign within the social network of their chosing. This ensures maximum reach. Post campaign analysis will provide some interesting insights as to where  your audience participates, which can be weaved into future campaigns.

Secondly, social networks will come and go. What’s important is that brands interact with their target audiences online in an authentic and credible voice.  Its not about Facebook, MySpace or any other social network per se, its about understanding your customers and engaging them via the Internet and other forms of media in meaningful and valued interactions and conversations.

My first impression of the new new design was that it felt more like an enterprise application. I think the tabs have added a sense – imagined or real – of complexity.

I don’t understand the justification from moving from the one profile page to the tabbed format. A service which made a huge amount of information and interaction readily available has become much more cumbersome to use.

With the old version, you didn’t know what was new, but by scrolling down the page – the new content was revealed to you. Now users must click on tabs and literally find content and updates – it’s much less fun and much more effort.

Facebook won’t be supporting the two versions, unlike Yahoo!, for example, which continues to support ‘Classic’ and ‘New’ Yahoo! Mail. This is despite the fact that 1 in 4 users prefer the old design (Facebook data).

The Inside Facebook blog is a great source of info on – you guessed it – Facebook.

People have an emotional connection with Facebook and they tend to be resistant to change in general so it’s inevitable that there would be a kick back to the re-design.

This Facebook group ‘1 000 000+ to bring back old facebook’ has 369,810 members.

I feel that FriendFeed represents a big threat to Twitter.

I found out today about the launch of a new network; ’YouAre’ from Spain. I applied for beta access today. 

This is a micro-blogging platform with aspects of LinkedIN, del.icio.us and others combined with a secret sauce, which hasn’t been revealed as yet. Screenshots available here.  

I am keen to trial the new service and will cover it here. I have been told that my access will come through in a few weeks.

The beauty and irony of the social networking is that I found out about YouAre on FriendFeed via Duncan Riley’s post. That would be like the Sun newspaper in Britain running a story on the launch of the Today newspaper and suggesting I check it out or me placing a classified ad in the window of my local newsagents suggesting that passers by check out the newsagency down the road. 

Consolidation in this space is inevitable. We’ve seen it in most industry sectors, take the ERP market in recent years. Most industries mature before they consolidate but the social networking sector will get there much more quickly surely.

The issue of monetization is one spanner in the works still.

Now it’s my turn to experience a social networking glitch…

Plaxo (Pulse) is telling me I’ve done things that I haven’t done. It’s giving me credit for the content creation of my connections.

For example:

I see that I recently uploaded some pics from a trip to Paris. 

Weird!

I haven’t been to Paris since ‘97 but my colleague Ed got back two weeks ago.

I was also surprised to see that I had added a couple of notes to Facebook in the last few days. The first was a link to an NYT article and the second a post on the LaGrange Point blog (see below).

The funny thing is: It’s not my blog. It’s not my article.  

You can see what’s happening here:

Plaxo is BETA so maybe they are due the benefit of the doubt.

The network seems to be gaining traction with a professional audience. There is a gap here - Facebook falls short and is poorly positioned for business users.  These discrepancies only relate to Facebook notes and updates, so maybe it’s a Facebook problem. I have no idea.

The bad news is that glitches like this and the resulting coverage can un-do months of good work in  minutes and hours resulting in serious reputational damage to emergent brands.  

Anyone else experiencing this? 

For the two connections that I reference in this post – thanks. I hope you don’t object to the reference.

Papworth’s presentation provided an overview of well known social networking sites and blogging platforms and instructions on how bloggers and content creators can promote their product via social media. It dealt with some of the implications for the freelance journalist community.

The content was relatively rudimentary but well matched to the level of knowledge and experience among the audience of freelance writers.

I have seen Papworth speak a few times. Tonight, I again learnt about some new stuff, fact and figures:

• The biggest concern for 50% of the journalists that participated in a PEW survey (State of the News Media) ranked economic concerns as their biggest professional issue  
• MySpace = the third largest country in the world
• More on corporate activity within Facebook: Salesforce has created an application that links Facebook activity with its CRM application. More on this here.
• Glassdoor: A site that provides an environment for employees to anonymously rate their employer. More from Ms. Papworth here.

The take away was basically: Freelances need to get theirs head around social media and learn how to use it to their advantage because in the future an editor is just as likely to commission a blogger with a ready made audience and some degree of authority on a specific topic.

I don’t think there is any doubt that this is true.

The evening got me thinking about journalism and how this compares to blogging. Surely good journalism is mainly but not totally about objectivity, as defined by Yahoo! Education:

The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.  

Clearly, journalists and publishers have biases and political leanings but famous papers got that way because they were objective. The skill in journalism comes from researching and understanding an issue before gathering credible sources together to present a balanced analysis of that topic.   

Bloggers have an agenda. They shoot from the hip and more often than not they promote themselves and their point of view. There is no requirement for objectivity. They know that their audience either already has an interest in their favoured topic or agrees with them or just finds their personal going-ons interesting. 

They operate within echo chambers (at least to some extent) and their success and the degree to which they entertain and inform is rarely determined by their ability to deconstruct relevant and topical issues.

This begs the question: Is it better to have an understanding of what’s going on or to know what somebody else thinks?

A combination of Opinion and Objectivity would be ideal but as Papworth said during her concluding comment the US newspapers are placing more and more blog content on their home pages and she expects this trend to be repeated in Australia.   

The last questioner of the night pondered the issue of time; where might freelance writers find time to blog and manage and extend their social networks? A valid question because now it’s my bedtime.

You’ll find the presentation from tonight’s event here (soon).

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School defines Enterprise 2.0 as:

The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

These social software platforms would include: wikis, blogs, social networks, prediction markets, RSS, links, search and tags.

Dawson opened the event with a presentation on business value creation as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. Dawson presented recommendations for Enterprise 2.0:

• Make governance an enabler
• Start from business applications, not tools
• Make work easier
• Build strategies at the architecture level
• Allow experimentation
• Create pilots that yield useful lessons

The last two points here have come through as strong themes from all of the presenters as has the need to ‘ask for forgiveness rather than asking for permission’.

The over-riding message is that Enterprise 2.0 platforms need to be allowed to develop and emerge organically within an organisation. Managers should resist the tempatation to apply structure and to act as administrators, style guides and editors.

McAfee referred to email as the incumbent collaboration technology and pointed to research that shows that users tend to under-estimate the potential of new collaboration technologies and over-estimate the benefits of platforms that they are already acquainted with.

There has been some talk about demographics and the experience that difference groups have had with technology – Boomer, Gen X and Y.

Email may have lost relevance among the Gen Y group, who are more familiar with social networks, but the consensus is that email is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

My question: Will MicroHoo (should it happen) result in the resurgence of email based on the convergence of email and social networks. I, for one, would like to access my Yahoo! email account via Facebook (that’s not going to happen but the convergence of social networks and email must be on the agenda for this potential merger/acquisition). Web based email services remain relevant as people’s email addresses often function as the user name login for many third party sites.

The most entertaining presenter – thus far – has been Nathan Wallace, associate director – Technology at Janssen-Cilag, one of J&J’s subsidiaries. The company has 340 employees and a great wiki story to tell, which is now the channel for all internal news (saving approx. 250,000 internal emails). The take up has been very impressive and the company just added a Twitter like application for its staff, many of which are in the field.

The event has been a great advert for Confluence, it has been the sole wiki provider referenced by the presenters.

The power of predictive markets has also been a dominant theme – more on this later.