Tag Archive for 'social networks'

Nielsen Online Top 10 Social Networks for April 2008

Published on May 20, 2008 in analytics, consumer insight, digital, marketing and social networks. 0 Comments

Some data from my company, the latest information on social networks. Enjoy.

NIELSEN ONLINE PROVIDES TOP U.S. SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND BLOGS FOR APRIL 2008

Nielsen Online provides April’s top U.S. social networking sites and blogs for your reference. They are ranked by unique audience and rounded to the nearest thousand, so LinkedIn had 8.7 million unique visitors in April 2008, growing 361 percent over April 2007.

Please note that these are custom lists compiled by the Nielsen Online PR team with the help of our media analysts. While these lists are not meant to be exhaustive, they provide a good idea of the significant players in each space.

We periodically review the lists and add new sites, so the results may change accordingly. Please source data to Nielsen Online.

London Mayor’s Race Analytics

Published on May 6, 2008 in analytics, blogpulse, buzz, digital, social media, tools and websites. 0 Comments

Building from last week’s story about the London Mayor’s election, I wanted to look at some baseline analytics behind the race. Keeping in mind that Boris Johnson eventually wins the race all these charts seem to take on an interesting look. Is it possible to predict an election based on buzz, volume and traffic? If you believe these charts the answer is yes.

Buzz

First look at the below Blogpulse chart (query here) showing the buzz leading up to the May 1, 2008 results. Conversations appear equal through the second week of April but after that they begin the initial spike in Boris Johnson’s favor. The old adage goes “no publicity is bad publicity” and although I have not looked at sentiment it seems to bare true here as Boris peaks much higher than Ken in the buzz chart. (Additionally, Boris Johnson also shows up on the Key People chart here at number thirteen.)


Volume

Volume is an interesting metric online. Ultimately it is about your brand popularity and reach. Or how much the press is talking about you. This Google Trends chart shows that Boris Johnson outpaced Ken Livingstone in news volume too. How did an incumbent so quickly lose press mentions? Did all the online squatters have an effect on Mr. Livingstone’s ratings?

Traffic

Finally, looking at traffic can show you interest about a candidate’s platform. Compete.com’s analytics tool shows backboris.com getting much more traffic than kenlivingstone.com. Which actually did not even register on their graph. Does this mean people were just not intrigued enough about the incumbent to check his website?

Buzz, traffic and volume metrics give us different insights into online behaviors and working in tandem they can help complete the story. They give us an interesting look at the Mayor’s election in London and how a candidate swung the tide in his favor. Was it his online savvy or the help of other’s acumen that helped Boris Johnson?

Social Networking Users

Published on April 7, 2008 in community, consumer insight, digital, personal, social media, social networks and websites. 0 Comments

A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.

Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.

But, have they reached critical mass?

This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.

Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.

Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:

Social Networking Users

Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.

Further refining your chart to something like this:

Social Networking Users Profile

Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.

In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”

Social Media and Ad Spend’s shift to Digital.

Published on April 1, 2008 in ads, consumer insight, digital, engagement, marketing, social media, social networks and websites. 0 Comments

Yesterday eMarketer reported that online advertising spend is approaching 10% of all media spending and will be there by 2009. Considering the accountability, that digital commands and traffic quality it should come as no surprise that money is shifting to online at a quicker pace than other media. But what are some of the social media trends that this move will precipitate? Here are three that I think will be important part of my work here at Nielsen Online.

1 - Social Media become increasingly salient as connection hotspots - As trust continues to erode in traditional media, consumers will look increasingly to social media as a trusted opinion for all sorts of decisions, from which restaurant to eat at or what jeans to buy. Malcolm Gladwell describes, in his book The Tipping Point, “weak links” as influential to humans for making connections that make ideas tip. These individuals will become even more important as online migration triggers even more diverse and larger groups of connections who will exert overwhelming force over trends and ideas. (As I write this, I have over 100 twitter friends most I do not know but they shape many of my opinions on any number of things)

2- Brands continue to fortify their digital positions - With dollars shifting to the internet so quickly, brands will rush to keep up with the digital consumer migration. Brands will increasingly face the tough questions about social media and what they should do in this new platform based web. Corporate blogs are not for everyone but opening up the lines of communication can benefit brands. The question is, what is the best way to leverage social media, to empower your consumers and gain valuable insights.

3- Web trust factor becomes site currency - Inevitably, web sites will come that try to game the system and erode consumer trust in social media. From this, will arise a digital trust factor that will eventually become a web currency. It could come in an organized fashion or maybe it will just be semantic based - meaning you don’t travel far from home on the web. You have a few sites you visit and trust based on history, promotion and recommendations and only visit them frequently. This trend will hasten the move to platforms that portalize you to the web at large - Facebook applications are a good example of this in action.

As we see all media continue its move to digital, these three trends are one to watch. Any I missed?

Facebook Notification Spam & The Emergence of a Model

Published on January 14, 2008 in digital, engagement, reputation, social media, social networks, viral and websites. 0 Comments

Why are my so-called friends spamming me? I open my notifications in Facebook to find this monstrosity and it is only a portion of the tower! The really amazing thing is that most of these notifications come from the same 2 or 3 people. As I think conscientiously about my social connections managing them will become ever more important as I seek to filter the best data from this spam.

Which part of the importance filter are you? Our reputation economy is eroding quickly and I suggest you stay on the side of value. Needless notifications will only serve to invalidate your reputation and further erode your social networks trust. Its the essential “boy who cried wolf” model.

Think about the content you choose to disperse and make it useful to your network. We are all dealing with so much information and your reputation will be the defining factor of whether you wind up being a digital loudmouth or important addition to a network.