Nielsen: Facebook best in reach, MySpace in ads

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The recent Nielsen study ‘Global Faces and Networked Plazes‘ focuses on the increase of social networks in terms of worldwide reach and extension. The results emphazise the rise and importance of communities but also the dynamic of the intention to grap more market share.

Talking of reach, Facebook -the worldwide leader in the social network market- is showing the strongest user base and has replaced MySpace as the world’s most popular social network. Classmates comes in third, followed by Orkut and LinkedIn. The reasons for the facebook success are obvious. According to the study and Nielsen measurement, the win of the Facebook tactic is based on the ‘simple design, broad demographic appeal and a focus on connecting’.

Reports estimate that in 2008 Facebook earned around $US300 million in ad revenue compared to around $US1 billion for MySpace. If Facebook has made a conscious choice to go for the quantity vs. quality strategy it has yet to overtake MySpace in the all-important revenue metric.

So, monetization is still not Facebook best business activity. MySpace attracts more advertisers and gets twice as much campaigns than the ‘Zuckerberg team’.
The Nielsen view on the reasons is that “MySpace’s offering possibly makes its inventory – of which there is a lot more compared to Facebook – easier to monetize, particularly in terms of immersive advertising.”

Finally important, the use of social networks has outdated email as the first way of online communication: 67% of the users show a regular activity in communities.

News Update – Best of the Day

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The fifth annual Digital Outlook Report from Razorfish helps marketers make smarter decisions about their digital media spend – especially in a recession. The latest executive summary of the 2009 DOR summarizes three main statements: Portals continue to lose their grip, social media becomes social influence and long tail TV rises.

Measurement on the spot: How effective are your social media programs? Want to know the ROI of your social media campaigns? Need data on how to make strategic decisions to refine your social media programs? Robin Broitmann has created a ‘Social Media Metrics Superlist’.

Will our business of the future be without email communication, simply done by social networking? Adam Ostrow finds new stats from Nielsen Online showing that social networking has overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach already at the end of last year.

News Update – Best of the Day

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One advice how to find brands and companies on Twitter. Lee Odden knows of 11 advanced and more productive ways that might be helpful when connecting with other brands and marketers on Twitter (via a managed list).

One question every blogger thinks about is ‘Submitting Blogs in Blog Directories’? Ted Demopoulos enlightens the background on this philosophy with some nice insights on how many directories should you enter and what is the benefit.

One post every ‘onliner’ should have in mind in recession times is Nicole Ferraro’s: How to Lose Your Job by Being an Internet Idiot. A lot of good examples that might kill your status of employment. We all do a lot to defining our digital dna but we should be aware that social networking is not everything in our lives…

News Update – Best of the Day

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What’s Google’s next big revenue driver? Capturing one of the biggest markets owned by platform owners? If so, there are 3 things Google needs to make display ads a big business, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt…

“The first problem if you have a display property, it’s very difficult to figure out which ad to show. Because there are multiple vendors who show you these ads. We’re in the process of building the equivalent of an ad exchange which will allow you to do that automatically and do it with scientific measurements. So today what people do is they use heuristics, and the heuristics in that space are terrible.”
“The second issue in display has to do with the standardization of ad formats. There’s not agreement at the level that it needs to be on the standardization of the delivery of the display, and especially around interactive and video ads. The future of display ads is not a static picture, but an ad that brings you in. That tells you a narrative.”
“Third in our case is the construction of the business relationships with the large advertisers, which we’re still working on.”

What’s the future of direct mail spending like in the U.S.? One of the latest reports on ‘A Channel in Transformation: Vertical Market Trends in Direct Mail 2009’ by marketing consultancy Winterberry Group says, the outlook is not positive… Reasons are: recession, rising postage rates and marketing trends – combination is affecting direct mail spending.

What is the new idea on response driven advertising? Barcoded ads! At least Volvo shows a very interesting approach for the launch of their C70 series. The pan-European advertising campaign will include print ads with a specially integrated QR (Quick Response) barcode and uses the print ads to provide readers with instant access to additional web content on their mobile.

News Update – Best of the Day

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Today, we will be serving the ‘How To’-Help – Enjoy it!

How to start a blog and make it effective … Jamie Herzlich knows facts about your competition (130 million blogs on the Internet – according to Technorati) AND has some very good advice that you are not getting lost with your blog.

How to start a corporate Twitter account…. Evelyn So has some interesting ideas on considerations before you dive into Twitterville, taken from a corporate, communication and customer point of view and background. Read comments also…!

How to Get More Out Of Google Docs… It’s on you! If you have the right input, just contribute, log in and add them to the page. Help writing this article. Yes, this is the power of a wiki.

PS: How to Present While People are Twittering? Years ago, people were whispering to each other at conferences, today they are ‘twittering’. Olivia Mitchell knows how to adopt and get attention when you are a speaker.

News Update – Best of the Day

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Wer twittert, läuft schnell Gefahr, die Effizienz und Produktivität seiner Arbeit mit Twitter an den Abgrund zu bringen. Manche trennen sich daraufhin von 20.000 Followern. Es geht aber auch anders. Lee Oden hat 12 Twitter-Stream Aggregatoren zusammengestellt, die aus Twitter einen Freund und keinen Zeitdieb machen.

Enterprise 2.0 ist in aller Munde. silicon.de schreibt mit ‘Gut geplant ist halb gewonnen’ über RSS, Blogs, Tags, Wikis, Intranet und Co. Doch was ist, wenn es um die Umsetzung geht? Unternehmen wissen dann oft nicht mehr weiter. Dr. Berit Jungmann und Stefan Ehrlich zeigen Ansätze, wie Web 2.0 erfolgreich in Unternehmen umgesetzt werden kann…

… und in Krisenzeiten können Unternehmen mit Web 2.0 noch viel mehr erreichen. Wie man strategische Applikationen für das erfolgreiche Business in Krisenzeiten einsetzt, beschreibt Dion Hinchcliffe im ZDNet Blog.

This is a Twitter wake-up call! Well done, Jim…

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Some days ago, I read a comment on another blog moaning “OMG – not another Twitter post!” Bearing this in mind, I now reply with a post to Jim Connolly’s clever decision. The marketing expert who deleted over 20.000 followers some days ago.

So, my comment is…’YES, a critical Twitter article – finally somebody did it.’

One of our editors asked me the other day: ‘Why would you use Twitter?’ I replied…

Imagine you have a mobile phone.
Imagine there is nobody in your address book.
Imagine you have forgotten all numbers.
And, what is the value of your mobile phone in this case? That’s were you start to twitter…

So, I thought about the comparison and came to the conclusion. There is a big benefit of a mobile phone compared to Twitter. The communication barrier which is called the ‘Dial’ button. Although you have a lot of people in your business ‘communication network’, you just talk to them actively when it’s the appropriate time. But people love to listen to Twitter in a passive mode. This is becoming a critical efficiency issue…

Jim summarizes about his future Twitter balance… “BUT this time, I am only following friends, clients and contacts, (which will be quite a large number in itself.)”. Yes, he is popular and back at far more than 500 followers again…

Spot On!
Let me ask… Do we all know what the critical topic with Twitter is? It can be a ‘time thief’ where we spend hours killing the efficiency of our productive work output by trying to invest in our knowledge, in our vanity, in being the first to know and in our ‘trendsetter image’? Ah yes,we can learn a lot from Jim’s decision. It’s a wake-up call, not only for the Twitterati…

News Update – Best of the Day

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Die richtigen Strategien für Social Media zu finden, ist derzeit ein Versuch von zahlreichen RP- und Marketingexperten. Geoff Livingston, ein bekannter amerikanischer PR Stratege, bringt die Komplexität der Thematik in seinem Post ‘Five Social Media Strategies‘ kurz und prägnant auf den Punkt.

Es gibt viele Leitfäden für die Planung einer Webseite – aber nicht viele für die Planung der perfekten. MintTwist, eine Internetberatungsfirma aus UK, hat eine sehr interessanten Planungs-Leitfaden abgeliefert. Einfach mal durchlesen und selbst prüfen, ob die bestehenden Elemente der Planung, dem Design und der Aussagekarft der Webseite entspricht.

Nach seinem erfolgreichen Post über Personal Branding 101, hat der Autor des Buches ‘Me 2.0’, Dan Schwabel, nun seinen zweiten Teil abermals bei Mashable veröffentlicht. Personal Branding 102. Wer sich diesen Post durchliest, macht sich danach sofort an das Auffrischen seiner Digital DNA und seiner Kontakte in seinen Social Media Netzwerken.

______________________ Spot On!

Wenn Sie einen aktuellen Report zum Thema Social Networking haben möchten, bietet diese Studie Ihnen die Option dazu. Die Studie will herausfinden, wie wir Social Networks im Business-Kontext nutzen, welche wir bevorzugen und wieviel Zeit wir dort investieren. Nehmen Sie sich die Zeit und sein Sie einer der ersten, der die Studie bekommt.

Safer Internet: Social Networks want to protect children

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Let’s hope this was kind of a historical day, yesterday… The day against ‘Cyber-Mobbing’ was called the Safer Internet Day. One reason why 18 companies signed a new kind of declaration of a self-imposed obligation named the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU contract.

In order to prevent the misuse of new technologies companies go hand-in-hand on their social networking future. Probably, much appreciated from parents is that big social networks have signed the agreement, i.e. MySpace, Facebook, Habbo or Bebo – but also Google and Yahoo belong to the group of signatories.

Spot On!
Children and young people face many risks with new technologies: i.e. cyber-bullying, grooming, privacy violation or exposure to harmful content (pornography, racism, etc). The contract is like a company-grouped agreement to protect young people online more than European legislation already does. As a dad of two kids I definitely appreciate the effort and will keep an eye on it.

News Update – Best of the Day

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– Das Business-Netzwerk LinkedIn hat seinen Einstieg in den deutschen Markt offiziell verkündet. Den Angriff auf XING startete Reid erstmal mit einer PR-Tour. Oliver Voss (Wirtschaftswoche) hat mit dem Gründer von LinkedIn Reid Hoffman ein Interview geführt. Darin sagt der LinkedIn Chef, warum es zwei Jahre dauern wird, bis XING die Folgen spürt und er gibt Tipps, wie Unternehmen durch die Krise kommen. Und Dorothee Fricke (Handelsblatt) gegenüber erklärt Reid im Interview, warum er gerne Barack Obama wäre.

– Es gibt viele Studien, die einem die Zukunft weisen. Manchmal muss man aber auch einfach mal seinem Bauchgefühl vertrauen. Das funktioniert nämlich. Glauben Sie nicht? Ist aber bewiesen. Lesen Sie selbst die Meldung zu einer Studie, die das Nature Neuroscience veröffentlicht hat.

“We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too,” said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and co-researcher on the study. “Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level.”

– Der Tag wird kürzer, die Ablenkungen nehmen zu – ob technisches Spielzeug oder Internet- und Handykommunikation, ach ja und auf Business-Events und soziale Treffen sollte man auch nicht verzichten, usw. Wem das alles zuviel wird, schafft sich entweder seinen Personal Web Manager an oder orientiert sich an David Allens Buch Wie ich die Dinge geregelt kriege – Selbstmanagement im Alltag. Und wer sich das Buch gut einteilen will, der folgt Oliver Gassner, der das Buch in 14 Wochen als ‘Taktgeber’ und Art Moderator gemeinsam mit seinen Lesern durchgehen will. Interessanter Ansatz zur Leserbindung…

PS: Die BILD ist übrigens Online Milliardär…