South Carolinians use Social Media to March on State Capital

Mar 22, 2010 by Dan Taylor    1 Comment     Posted under: Social Media

Thousands of South Carolinians are expected to capitalize on and use the power of social networking tools to stage an online rally aimed at voicing their opinions to state legislators, particularly in regards to the importance of sex education and access to publically funded counseling and clinical services.

Organized by the 6,000 advocacy group ‘Tell Them’, South Carolinians will use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to tell politicos what’s what, and what they want. This rally format will be the first of it’s kind in South Carolina.

“We were looking for a modern way to engage citizens in the political process. This virtual event gives voters a convenient way to demonstrate their shared beliefs on these issues and to ask their legislators to support and fund responsible public health policies,” said Emma Davidson, Tell Them program manager.

The rally stems from a growing health issue in the state. Teen pregnancy rates in South Carolina are up for the fourth year in a row. Add to this growing issue the Center for Disease Control and Prevention have listed South Carolina as one of the Top Ten HIV “hot spots” in the United States. And while being listed as a “hot spot” on the HIV chart, South Carolina also has a number of other notable statistics:

• #2 in cases of Gonorrhea
• #3 in cases of Chlamydia
• #8 in pregnancies among 15-to-19 year olds

“With lawmakers looking to reconcile budget shortfalls, it’s more important than ever that they understand the social and economic implications of the state’s health policies. For example, here in South Carolina one-third of publicly funded family planning clinics have been closed over the last few years due to budget cuts. This makes no sense when we have epidemic-level rates of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV,” said Bonnie Adams Kapp, Executive Director of the New Morning Foundation.

And it’s not just South Carolina that’s hurting, literally. Research from the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa found that family planning services to teenagers can save more than $17 for every tax dollar invested over a five-year period.

“So many of our state’s challenges, issues like poverty and poor education, are rooted in inadequate health policies that hinder our young people. We must move beyond abstinence-only programs and provide age-appropriate sexual education and access to clinical services for our youth,” said Tell Them member Deborah Billings, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Health Promotion, Education and Behavior at the Arnold School of Public Health; Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina.

The online-social-media rally will commence at 12:00 PM EST, March 23rd, and run for 24 hours. Naturally, all residents of the Great State of South Carolina are encouraged to voice their opinions, pro or con.

What could prove to be either a highly effective “Pro” rally, may however, be overshadowed by yesterday’s historic (like it, or hate it…it’s historic) passage of the Health Care Bill in the American Capitol yesterday. Those in favor of the may feel the sense of relief; a win, while those opposed may make the South Carolinian initiative as a platform to air their grievances.

Whatever the outcome, it’s interesting to see these types of grassroots organizations and movements using the power of social media to bring people together in an open and honest discussion, all the while, making sure that those that have the power to make the changes are listening.

Social Networking usage: South Africa

Feb 8, 2010 by Dan Taylor    4 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

When it comes to social media usage stats, African countries usually fly below the radar. However, Africa’s southern most nation, South Africa currently ranks number 29th on Facebook’s global user list, and demonstrates a number of similarities with much larger using countries.

The recent South African Friendship 2.0 survey found that the average South African Facebook user is in their 30’s, employed full time, and describe themselves as sociable and outgoing. The survey sampled South Africans aged 16 years or older.

With a massive 82 percent, Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in South Africa. Again, South Africa ranks number 29 on Facebook’s global usage statistics (by country), and has an estimated 2.6 million users per month that generate over 1.1 billion page views. Over half of Facebooking South Africans access the site via their mobile devices, 1.58 million. To put this in perspective, of those surveyed, only 18 percent responded that they have a MySpace profile.

From here, popularity numbers make a steep decline. While not specifically a social networking site, YouTube take the number 2 spot for South Africans, garnering a 32 percent response rate, South African mobile IM service MXit taking 29 percent, with Twitter landing a close 28 percent.

South African broadband services provider, and sponsor of the survey MWeb Connect’s general manager Carolyn Holgate comments, “Social networks have become the garden fence of the 21st century and are used for the same purposes as community meeting places. We’re at the end of the early adoption phase, which was dominated by young people, and social networking is now a mainstream activity enjoyed and used by all age groups, particularly those in their 30s.”

Additional findings from the Friendship 2.0 survey:

• 74% go online specifically to visit social networking sites
• 74% access Facebook at least once a day
• 25% of participants have met more friends online than they have in real life
• 24% have gone on a face-to-face date with someone they met online
• 36% have used a pseudonym on-line
• 36% have used the Internet to find out what a past partner is doing
• 21% have experienced a breach of their privacy on the Internet
• 16% use social platforms to promote their business
• 37% believe they spend too much time online

The Friendship 2.0 survey, sponsored by South Africa’s MWeb Connect can be found here.  Download the Friendship 2.0 survey results here (pdf).

[note: data sourced from MWeb Connect and Times Live.  MWeb places South Africa in position number 29, however, Nick Burcher's Facebook stats place South Africa in the number 23 slot.]

Social Media Statistics

Feb 2, 2010 by Dan Taylor    9 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

Opinions abound on Social Media. How it works, where it works best, how individuals and businesses can use it best, etc. Each of these opinions have their own intrinsic value, but sometimes, nothing beats cold hard numbers. As Joe Friday said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,”- let’s take a look at some Social Media statistics.

• Facebook receives and shares more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (links, news stories, blog posts) on a weekly basis.
• Facebook pages have generated more than 5.3 billion fans.
• Approximately 700,000 local businesses have active Facebook fan pages.
• Approximately 70 percent of Facebook users arrive from outside the United States.
• Over 250 Facebook applications have over 1 million combined users each month.
• Since December 2008, more than 80,000 websites have integrated Facebook Connect. More than 60 million Facebook users actively use this service across any number of these 80,000+ sites that offer the feature.
• 55-65 year old females make up the fastest growing segment on Facebook
• Facebook paid $0 to have their entire site translated into Spanish via a crowdsourced Wiki. The site was translated in less than 4 weeks.

• LinkedIn has approximately 11 million active users in Europe.
• The largest growing geographic region for LinkedIn is India, with over 3 million total users.

• At the close of 2009, the average tweets per day was over 27.3 million, making the average tweets per hour 1.14 million.
• If the current tweet per time ratio were to remain constant, this would generate over 10 billion tweets per year.
• 80 percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.

• 70 percent of bloggers engage in corporate brand discussions.
• 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• 38 percent of bloggers regularly post brand or product reviews.

• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 web activity.
• 12.5 percent of all couples married in the US last year met via social media.
• comScore data points to Russia as having the most engaged social media audience with participants spending 6.6 hours view 1,307 pages per month. The leading social networking site in Russia is NOT Facebook, but vKontakte.ru.
• YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine.

One-quarter of all search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands point to user-generated content.

Obviously, these are some serious numbers for serious business. Corporations spend millions of dollars in advertising annually, but yet, 25 percent of all search results on these corporations yield user generated content. Social Media is everywhere, making Brand image and the associated conversations surrounding this image vital to today’s business.   What does this say about the way YOU are advertising and managing YOUR online image?

If you’d like to learn more about how and what a Social Media Campaign can do for your company, please get in touch!

Baby Boomers flock to Social Networking in 2009

Feb 1, 2010 by Dan Taylor    3 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

There’s no arguing that 2009 was a banner year for online social networking platforms. Obviously, the big players in the field, Facebook and Twitter, saw a healthy increase in user activity. A new report from eMarketer might just point to the reason why: Baby Boomers went from online consumers of digital media to social busy-bees.

The report analyzes 4 unique market segments, Millenials (14-26), Gen X (27-43), Baby Boomers (44-63) and Mature (63-75). Not surprisingly, both Millenials and Gen X ‘ers (myself included) have maintained consistently high levels of social media profiles over the past three years. Conversely, Baby Boomers and Matures saw a massive growth rate in 2009.

Looking at the numbers, 31 percent of Baby Boomers and 14 percent of Matures actively attended to (i.e. status updates, photo uploads, etc.) their profiles in 2008, while one year later, these numbers have seen a significant jump: 46 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in 2009.

With data drawn from both comScore and Anderson Analytics, Facebook came out on top as the primary social network used by Baby Boomers. MySpace took second place, but appears to be more popular with younger users (ed: still?). Third and fourth place went to Twitter and LinkedIn.

“Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” said Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Boomers and Social Media. “Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and better lives and keep them connected to family, friends, co-workers and, eventually, healthcare providers.”

What is, and should be, of interest to marketers is how this growth has scaled, and what or how do we target this influx of a completely different demographic? Targeted advertising immediately comes to mind, but my guess is that there are a number of opportunities waiting to be mined with this new information. Social/Casual gaming has been a major driver of social network use in the ‘younger’ set – is there a way to replicate this same success for an ‘older’ demographic? A recent study by Q Interactive points to the fact that female gamers make up a sizable portion of all social games played, AND that they’re brand engaged, loyal consumers. My guess is that over the course of 2010 we’ll see a new breed of applications, games, tools, etc. appearing on social networks that will try to appeal to this new-comer demographic.

Think Social Media is a Fad?

Aug 17, 2009 by Dan Taylor    12 Comments    Posted under: Social Media, Video

If you, or someone you know, just doesn’t ‘get it’, i.e. “Twitter is a waste of time,” please take 4 minutes and 23 seconds out of your busy day, watch this outstanding video from socialnomics.net and rethink the, “What’s the point?” attitude.

Top 10 examples of Data Visualization

Jul 5, 2009 by Dan Taylor    11 Comments    Posted under: Technology

With the tremendous amount of data circulating the internet at any given moment, it’d be nice to see some graphic representations of what’s actually happening, instead of just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s.

Add to that the what would most certainly be a maddening exercise in trying to find related content to the mix, and data visualizations become all the more important.  These data visualizations below represent to me the most meaningful and useful tools available.  They cover everything from Digg activity to Network connectivity, to simply watching the world tweet the day away.

Music and Movies

Liveplasma is movie and music visualization app that allows you to see related musicians and movies you might enjoy based on your initial input.  Enter the name of your favorite band, film, artist, or director and Liveplasma will map corresponding links to other similar artists and represent their relevance by size.

Fidg’t uses both last.fm and flickr tags to allow you to visualize your network and their tagging activities.  A rather handy tool, as I noticed most people that photograph flowers also like classical music.  Perhaps this is just my network, but interesting to correlate the data.  You might be surprised at some of the trends you discover.

Digg, Twitter, and Flickr

Arc has been my screensaver for quite a while.  Not only does it track the latest stories on Digg, but also shows the relationships between users that are submitting and digging these articles.  Arc offers two different modes, one a blitzkrieg of (semi) real time output, and the other (my personal choice) is a bit slower, allowing you to actually read the story headlines.

Stack takes the functionality of Arc a bit further and shows stories with the most recent activity across the bottom of the screen.  New digs drop from the top of the screen and load on top of the most recent, and a real time graph visualizes the activity patterns.  As activity for one story or another increases, those decreasing in activity are brushed off the bottom of the screen.

TwittEarth is pure twitter joy.  This one uses geotagging of tweets to visualize a worldwide conversation.  Using a global map users are represented by cute often armless, pixar-like mosters, with their tweet visualized above their heads indicating user name and geographic location.  Maybe not the most productive of the visualization, but certainly one of the most fascinating to watch.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser is a might handy feature when either trying to narrow down a flickr search, or when simply flipping through the massive collection of images.  Using a chain-like sequence, by clicking on one related tag (those circling the original tag), users are presented with a Polaroid type image containing a selection of images that have been tagged with the search word.  A circle then surrounds the collection of images with associated tags.  If firehouse didn’t quite give you the image you were looking for, chances are Dalmatian is a related tag, and from there you might also explore sporting dogs to find that perfect Golden Retreiver image you were searching for.  On the flip side, expect a laugh or two when you realize others’ similar tagging preferences can lead you down a rather interesting path.

Teh Internetz

The Twingly Screensaver, which I use on my windows (only, sorry OSX peeps) machine pulls rss feeds and visualizes blog activity from around the world.  I always know when it’s 8am on the East Coast without even having to look at a clock.  Quite fun to watch America wake up and hit the ‘publish’ button.

The Web Trend Map 4 reminds me a bit of the Los Angeles subway map on a quiet day, and something akin to the Moscow subway system on a busy day.  While this is the fourth version of this tool, I only became away of it via twitter, where I regularly watch internet trends via twitscoop.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a screenshot last Thursday, but as you can imagine, all roads lead to Michael Jackson.

Others

The TED Sphere is one of the most enjoyable ways to navigate through the tremendous amounts of offerings from TED.  The 3D sphere allows for navigation from either outside or inside, and presents videos based on semantic relevance and compatibility.

The We Feel Fine tool provides a visual representation of the overall feelings of the the blogosphere at any given time.  Users can filter results based on age, location, sex, weather, and many others.  We Feel Fine isn’t just limited to one presentation either, but provides users with sex different options: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.  Each of these unique visualization provide a different portrait of real-time events.

After playing around with close to 50 online data visualizers, there were the 10 that struck me the most.  Naturally, I didn’t list them all, but something tells me there are probably even a few that I missed.  What’s important to you in data visualization?  What are some of your favorites?  Let me know in the comments below.

Burton Group Survey: Enterprise not quite grasping Social Networking

Apr 3, 2009 by Dan Taylor    2 Comments    Posted under: Productivity, Social Media, Technology

In a recent report published by the Burton Group, analysts’ found that attempts to replicate social networking (facebook) and their associated tools (twitter) aren’t really taking off within the corporate structure.

The report, social networking in the enterprise is based on detailed interviews with 21 companies spanning a wide variety of industries including utilities, consumer goods, technology, and finance.

With the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston bearing down on us, this report from Burton couldn’t have come at a better time, as businesses are struggling to not only understand, but utilize and maximize the technologies potential.  The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is a gathering of tech vendors that create social applications similar to facebook, twitter, etc., but specifically tailored for business usage.  In addition to the old standbys such as IBM (Lotus Connections) and Microsoft (SharePoint), new players including Socialtext, Jive, and Six Apart are slated to be in attendance.

But according to Mike Gotta, a principal analyst with the Burton Group, it’s not a problem with vendors’ product offerings that are the stumbling stone, but rather the corporate culture itself.  Gotta says that the challenge is in addressing specific generational differences, and getting them all on the same page.  Specifically Baby Boomers have demonstrated that they’re not inclined to embrace social technologies in the workplace (although they’re flocking to them from a consumer perspective).

According the Burton survey, the problem may not lie with the Boomers, but rather in how their employer presenting the tools to them.  Many companies have used social networking tools to share expertise, collaborate, and connect with others, especially in multi-location global enterprises.

“Some vendors are saying employees will go in and naturally fill these enterprise social networking profiles out, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Gotta says. “If you’re an employee, you have questions. Why should you maintain it? What are you going to do with it? Those questions still need to answered.”

What else does Gotta see holding corporation adoption back?

• Creating a business case is difficult for people who don’t understand the technologies or have rigid ways of defining their success. Your CFO might want hard ROI, which social tools have a difficult time showing because they aren’t necessarily replacement tools. So, for instance, if people begin trading information on a wiki, that maintains a document’s changes in real-time. This is generally better than sending around reply-all e-mails with messy attachments. But while you know the wiki has helped your collaboration efforts, it might be hard to figure an exact dollar amount in savings since e-mail isn’t being replaced. “For that person that who wants blood on paper ROI , it’s a hard conversation,” Gotta says.

• Getting the proper players involved. Gotta says it’s essential to have a presence from HR in getting these technologies off the ground. If, for instance, you want to turn your corporate intranet into a social network with employee profile pages, you need to help people feel comfortable to share and know the ground rules. If people feel awkward about inputting information, it’s as good as dead. In addition, stakeholders (often department heads) must show they believe in the adoption of the technology by using it themselves and encouraging adoption. If they use it, it’s not guaranteed their employees will use it, but it’s more likely.

• Traditional corporate communications structures and etiquette. More old, conservative organizations communicate in a top-down fashion, which runs counter to social networks, where people collectively weigh in and discuss issues. Burton quoted one participant who noted the following: “We have a classic company — we communicate ‘at’ people rather than ‘with’ them.” On the upside, the proponents of enterprise social networking say that the technologies, if used effectively, can uproot that type of communications model.

Pimp the Scooter

Mar 10, 2009 by Dan Taylor    40 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

Ah, the wonderful world of Twitter and Social Media alive and well, and yet again affirming my faith in the method.  I happened to catch a tweet this morning pimpthescooter.com.  Having been a big fan of MTV’s Pimp My Ride (back in the day, ya’ll…the new stuff – not so much), I thought, hmmm…who’s doing what to a scooter?

Well, low and behold, pimpthescooter.com has pretty much nothing to do with MTV, Xibit, or dropping the ride a few extra inches.  What it DOES have is an awesome social media powered concept by Big Jon Evans.  The story breaks down like so:  Jon Evans is a small business owner in Greenville, SC.  Due to a series of unfortunate events, Evans finds himself without modus transportatus (homeboy no longer has a car).  In his search for a solution to the ‘Crap, how do I get around?’ question, Jon found a perfectly acceptable spring/summer solution: a scooter!

Ok, so a guy with out a car in Greenville, SC wants to buy a scooter.  So what?

Now here’s where things get interesting.  Instead of plucking down the $1500 and driving his new scooter off the lot, Evans is conduction a social media experiment.  Conceived with an obvious nod to the Million Dollar Homepage, Evans is selling off 150 1 x 1 squares for $10 each, where contributors get their picture plastered on the scooter, and a mention on Jon’s wall of gratitude.  Businesses can also get their logo on Jon’s hot ride with a 2 x 2 sticker for $50.  Thus far, he’s raised $530 or 35% of his goal.  With 21 days remaining, my money is on Jon successfully completing the experiment, and driving away a happy camper.

But why should I pay for some guy’s scooter?

Besides the obvious benefit of ‘hey, that’s cool…I want to be a part of it’, Jon is using a ChipIn widget, making donations incredibly easy for anyone with a paypal account, and doing his part to reduce his carbon footprint.  Still not enough?  This just in: Jon will be auctioning off the scooter at summer’s end (September) with all procedes going to a charity of his choosing.

Maybe we could let the contributors choose the charity via a poll on pimpthescooter.com Jon?

Anyway you look at it, a great idea and great execution on Jon’s part.  So let’s get homie some wheels, and do it all for a good cause at the end of the day.  Visit pimpthescooter.com and get your picture reserved right next to mine.  And yes…you can choose any picture you want.