Erik Qualman’s music-enhanced, statistics-based video of social media’s wildfire growth was one of the B2B viral video hits of last year. With social media moving so quickly, he’s already updated it for May 2010 with yet more revelatory intelligence, including that Facebook has now overtaken it’s own country of origin as the third largest by population in the world, behind India and China. When Zuckerburg was programming ‘the facebook.com’ – as described in David Kirkpatrick’s new book, he knew he was on to something big, but this!?
BP is using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Flickr, ahead of traditional media, to publish updates on the Gulf of Mexico clean-up and organise press calls.
News that the massive containment dome to be placed over one of the leaks had arrived above the leak off the Louisiana shore appeared first on the popular social media sites. So did word that controlled burns of the oil slick would go ahead on Wednesday after a week of bad weather.
A Facebook page launched by the joint U.S. and BP spill response team, has more than 12,000 followers.
They have access to photos, spill-trajectory maps generated by the government, video on topics including the controlled burns by BP, and summaries of daily news briefings.
BP America’s Twitter site, has over 2,800 followers.
“We want to ensure that we can get out information about the response to this incident and spill as rapidly and widely as possible,” David Nicholas, a BP spokesman wrote in an email.
Last night, pictures of the containment chamber BP has developed to plug the spill, being lowered into the water, were released on their Deepwater Horizon Website.
As the final week of campaigning draws to its close, WPP’s chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, has told The Financial Times that none of the UK’s political parties have managed to balance old and new media in their election campaigns as well as Barack Obama.
Highlighting once again the fact that this election race has proven the power of traditional media, Sorrell also stressed that the televised debates were often viewed through the prism of social media.
“Our attitude to the performances on these programmes has been conditioned by the polling, tweets, Facebook and Google responses we have seen as a result,” he said. “None of these elements can be isolated anymore.”
According to the Financial Times, the Liberal Democrats have had most success with new media channels: “In their most enthusiastic moments some Lib Dems believe that they can replicate the surge of voting by young people that helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008.”
The Lib Dems now have more than 59,000 Facebook members, compared with more than 58,000 for the Conservatives and about 28,000 for Labour.
Unmeasurable ROI is seen as the main obstacle to implementing a social media strategy, a new poll of US marketers has discovered.
35% of marketers in the R2integrated survey said there was not enough data or analytics available to measure ROI of social media, which the majority would like to use for lead generation.
Getting buy-in from senior management was seen as the second biggest obstacle, 23% citing this reason, followed by 21% who believed their audience were not yet active on social media.
35% of the companies surveyed believed they were making money as a result of social media activity with those who have a formal strategy in place, twice as likely to be making money from the new channels.
An overall majority of marketers stated that social media is ‘invaluable’ to their business, but measuring just how valuable and convincing the upper echelons seem to be the main sticking points.
Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance‘ is now the most watched YouTube video of all time, with 180 million views, overtaking the home video phenomenon “Charlie bit my finger.”
Last month Gaga became the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube with the combined views of three hits -’Poker Face’, ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Bad Romance’.
The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.
Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.
The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1) and webinars (1.8).
In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38% and Facebook for 33%.
Starbucks’ 6.5 million Facebook fans are worth the equivalent of a $23.4 million annual media spend, according to calculations by social media specialists Vitrue, reported in Adweek.
The firm has worked out that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates to at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year, or $3.6 per fan.
Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month.
Vitrue analysed Facebook data from its clients’ 41 million fans and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed. More »
The internet has overtaken TV as most essential medium in Americans’ lives, according to an Arbitron/Edison research study and social media use is becoming mainstream.
For the first time, more Americans say the internet is “most essential” to their lives when given a choice along with television, radio, and newspapers. 42 percent chose the internet as “most essential,” with 37 percent saying television, 14 percent choosing radio, and 5 percent nominating newspapers. While television still leads among those over the age of 45, the internet dominates among younger persons age 12 to 44.
Evidence that social media is moving into the mainstream is revealed in the number of Americans over the age of 12 with a social network profile, which now stands at 48 percent – double that of two years ago.
The study also reveals that consumer use of social networking sites is not just a youth phenomenon. While nearly eight in ten teens (78 percent) and 18 to 24s (77 percent) have personal profile pages, almost two-thirds of 25 to 34s (65 percent) and half of 35 to 44s (51 percent) also now have personal profile pages. More »
Increased website traffic is the main metric marketers use to measure the success of social media campaigns, according to a report by eMarketer, underlining that social media measurement remains a fairly blunt instrument.
Only half of those marketers in a Datran Media study believe social media will generate quantifiable results in 2010, with 37% unsure and 12% saying no.
“For the few marketers who do attempt to apply quantitative measures to their social marketing efforts, the metrics they use are not terribly sophisticated,” said eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey. “Most marketers today do not invest sufficient time, effort or money on social media measurement.”
Datran’s respondents, who are heavily invested in social media, 72% having Facebook and Twitter profiles, prefer to measure online campaigns based on clicks (72%), conversions (59.2%) and impressions (58.4%). Conversions were considered the most important metric to track.
Stella Artois has launched a Facebookcentred campaign to promote its 4% brand in the build up to the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The idea, developed by advertising agency Mother, is based on the premise that a famous french film director, Jacques d’Azur has gone missing, presumed dead and his estate has made an appeal to the public to find his heir.
The really clever social media bit is when you sign up to the competition through Facebook, your profile picture becomes integrated in a film taking place in his solicitor’s office about the possible beneficiary of the estate – very cool.
The winner of the competition takes Jacques’s place as a VIP at the Cannes Film Festival.
The campaign is supported with a Twitter page and a FlickR photostream of Jacques’s life.
The preposterously glamorous life of Jacques More »
Stella Artois has launched a 