The deal with Amazon follows Facebook’s announcement that it would allow publishers to contact users who ‘like’ a particular story - another development with significant implications for marketers.
Analysts always grasp for analogies to explain Facebook’s tortured relationship with its users. Facebook has been called the sterile suburbs to the gritty urban Internet; it is a “walled garden” in the organic messiness of the Web; it is Russia under Vladimir Putin; it is (and this one stings in tech circles) today’s AOL.
But perhaps the most telling metaphor compares Facebook to the other companies lurking at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index: cable companies, wireless telephone service providers. Utilities. Here are services everyone uses, no matter how much people dislike the companies that provide them.
Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues that Facebook fits that mold.
If you are interested in Digital & Social Strategy you’ll want to bookmark 25mins to watch this video (or flip through the Slideshare pres below), it’s the keynote presentation by Alexandra Wheeler (Digital Director of Starbucks) that opened the recent Social Media Influence 2010 conference in London. And for those of you who don’t know, Starbucks was the first consumer brand to reach 10 Million fans on Facebook… you thought it was coke right?
Exactly what is Word of Mouth?
Our creative team has been beavering away on a handy little infographic for your viewing pleasure -
Click here for a larger image of the graphic.
Blogs. Status updates. Family photo albums, political tweets, viral videos. In the age of the social web, many people broadcast themselves to the world, but not everyone does it in the same way. Using fresh data from the Trendstream Global Web Index—a recurring survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 markets—we mapped by country how people are sharing information about themselves online. We looked at five broadcast behaviors: blogging, managing a social-network profile, sharing photos, sharing videos, and microblogging.
The map that emerges shows an East-West divide in users’ broadcast behavior. Asian users are more engaged with the social web than users in the West, where social networks are popular but other behaviors lag. Chinese and Indian users, for example, are three times as likely to microblog, or tweet, as American users. They’re also twice as likely to share videos.
Here is what I’ve pieced together from some reliable sources:
- This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
- They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
- Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
- They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.
You can read more responses to the question on the Quora thread here
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The most common elements included by companies with a social media communications plan were resource-allocation guidelines for ongoing activities, registration of branded usernames on social sites and research into competitors’ use of social media.
Statistics
Twitter The Better Business Social Tool?
Running through the statistics, it seems that Twitter is a more favorable business social tool. A higher proportion of people are more receptive to brands on Twitter than on Facebook, though I do admit that this isn’t an apple-to-apple comparison.
The Social Marketing Hub was designed to make the social media management and tracking responsibilities manageable for large enterprise organizations. The platform does so by presenting users with the ability to create content — photos, blog posts, video, files — and automatically post it to all or select social sites with just a few clicks.
These destination sites are referred to as channels, and the Hub supports updates to all of the following: Facebook (), Twitter (), YouTube, WordPress (), Flickr () and Awareness-branded online communities. Of course, the Hub includes management for multiple accounts on each of the various channels.
