Social Media Insight
Key LinkedIn Statistics
The New Conversation Prism
Brian Solis and JESS3 have just released the latest update to their famous and hugely popular Conversation Prism which is a visual representation of all the ways online people connect and the interplay between them.
10 Lesser Known Social Platforms and How Business Can Use Them
A good introduction to some of the less well known social platforms including key stats.
Social Search Starts to Come of Age
This week Microsoft announced some interesting new developments to it's Bing Social service. Does this, combined with Google's recent launch of Google Realtime mean social search has come of age? Predictions at the beginning of the year suggested that by the end of 2010, 70% of all search results will come from user generated content. And certainly as this stand at the moment, at least 50% of the search results of my personal searches over the last week have been UGC. Wikipedia tops the most served on Google's first page, followed by Twitter, blogs and online newspaper sites.
Social Media Influence recently looked at this subject too and did a comparison based on a search for McDonalds. Bing delivered 19 social search results from the last five hours - a mix of Twitter and Facebook updates, though a couple were not actually about the burger chain. With Bing Social, it's easy to opt for just Twitter or just Facebook results. And, another interesting feature is "shared links", which, as the name suggests, organizes the most shared/discussed links among netizens.On Google, a "blog" search of "McDonald's" threw up some 20 results for the past hour alone, with scores more on the Google "forum" search - though the timing of posts here remains dubious. All in all, Google really outperforms Bing in the number of Twitter results it generates, pulling up a few Tweets every minute. (With the volume of Facebook tallies, Bing and Google appears to generate roughly the same number). Another swipe at Bing: Bing Social is only available from its U.S. search site, and it's pretty buggy at the moment. Many times Bing's "shared links" functionality never appears. Our advice: click refresh and it will show up eventually.
Google may have the early lead, but Bing Social is compelling. Its tabbed presentation of the Twitter and Facebook posts is more visually appealing, and user-friendly. But if you want a more rounded picture of what's being said in social media, you'll need to use Google too - at least for the time being.
Meet the new Twitter
Twitter have released their latest reincarnation which is designed to make the micro-blogging platform even more engaging for users. With 16% of all new Twitter users signing up via their mobile phone and the total number of mobile users of Twitter increasing by 64% since April, we will be watching closely to see how these updates impact SocialMobile.
Promising an easier, faster, richer experience, key features (in Twitter's own words) include:
- New design - You will now find @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above your timeline - creating a single, streamlined view on the left of the screen. On the right, you can see the features you're familiar with, including whom you recently followed and who recently followed you, favorites, and Trending Topics.
- View photos, videos, and other media content - Now, it's easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube.
- Discover related content - When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet's content, you may see: @replies, other Tweets by that same user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
- Mini profiles - You can click a @username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.
Crowdsourcing to Tackle London Tube Strike
Under the banner "working together to report disruption", this week, BBC London started to harness the true potential of social media by using those on the ground to provide real time intelligence on developments as they happened during the Tube Strike. In the absence of any real useful information from TFL, Londoners were encouraged to submit reports to the BBC via a number of different digital channels - including email, text, audioboo, use of #TubeStrike on Twitter or by filling in an online form. Reports were then mapped in a variety of different ways including via an interactive map, via pictures and video. The outcome can be viewed here:
http://tubestrike.crowdmap.com/main
Claire Wardle who was leading the project for the BBC has written a really interesting blog post regarding learnings from the experiment which is well worth a read http://clairewardle.com/
Why Social Media Projects Fail
A great piece of insight from Brand Science Institute on Why Social Media Projects Fail.
The Future of Social Media
We Are Social interview Augie Ray, Senior Analyst at Forrester on the Future of Social Media
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