Planning for social.

Almost 13% of viewers tuning in to the Olympic opening ceremonies were also surfing the web, according to Nielsen. The website of choice was Facebook, with an estimated 41% of simultaneous users spending time on the site. Nielsen also found that 14% of Super Bowl viewers spent time online during the game, at an average of 29 minutes per user. Simultaneous use of TV and PC, particularly on social sites, demonstrates the need for multiplatform thinking and strategies for brands. Multiplatform behavior coupled with the growing amount of time spent on social networking sites signals that social media cannot remain at the bottom of the marketing food chain. We cannot simply “extend” the big idea into social media as we once did with digital. It has to be considered much further up stream in the planning process to insure its rightful place in the marketing mix. Pepsi has done an amazing job of this with the Pepsi Refresh Project. Social media is inextricably linked and central to the core idea. 

US Facebook Audience Growth Rates

Collectors of people.

When I was a kid, I collected lots of stuff – baseball cards, GI Joe action figures, skateboards, you name it. Didn’t matter what the “stuff” was, I loved acquiring, cataloguing and admiring it. Take my baseball cards for instance, I didn’t look at them every day. I’d get them out every once in a while and look them over, taking note of which players got traded or were performing better that year. I still have them to this day and dust them off and get all nostalgic.

I feel like social networks are encouraging very similar behavior. We’ve gone from collecting trinkets to collecting people. Take Facebook for instance. How many friends do you keep up with? 100? 500? 1000? Which begs a bigger question – do you even really interact with them? My gut says that there’s a small percentage of your friends that you have super meaningful interaction with, a larger group with superficial interaction and an even larger group with no interaction. But instead of not someone, we go thru painstakingly cumbersome Facebook privacy settings to keep them from really connecting with you.

The point is, we’ve become a culture of “collectors,” where we our social networks are a place to collect people.

“Hi, we met in line at Starbucks.” -- FRIEND REQUEST

“We spoke briefly at Tom’s party.” -- FRIEND REQUEST

“We knew each other for 15 minutes, 15 years ago” -- FRIEND REQUEST

The list goes on. Now, I’m not saying that all of these scenarios are superficial. I’m simply saying that everything has become a reason to request and/or accept friend requests. In this case, I’m picking on Facebook because (in my mind) it is far more personal than, say, Twitter. If you collect people on Twitter, that’s a bit different. It could be your RSS feed.

To illustrate the point further, think about Foursquare. I get invites from people that I have never met in my life, and yet they want access to my whereabouts, email address, mobile phone number, etc. It feels like people simply want to amass avatars, to show “volume” in their friend count. Perhaps avatars are the new collecting cards – I mean, we’ve all got personal stats associated with our constituent avatars on various networks and collectively.

It’s amazing how these little, tiny squares have become so culturally important. 

Report: Facebook Ad Revenue To Surpass MySpace Next Year

The evolution of the Facebook page.

The evolution of the Facebook page.

Top 50 Facebook [Fan] Pages of 2009

Want more friends? Buy them.

Acquiring fans, friends and followers is formulaic these days. And it’s not as complicated as you think. PAID MEDIA.

Brands spend boatloads of money on ATL/BTL media every day. They spend it to get eyeballs on a new message, to create awareness of a new product or to drive traffic into stores. Why should social media be any different.

Sure, if you are the most genuine, conversational, open, community-driven, dynamic and personable brand, perhaps you don’t need to buy media. You simply open your digital mouth and people pay attention and invite friends to hear what you have to say.

But you could be all (or none) of these things and people still wouldn’t know you have a Facebook page. Paid media let’s people know. This could include a TV ad tagged with a Facebook URL. This could be something innovative like Gap’s “Born To Fit” campaign where the URL (www.borntofit.com) redirected to Gap’s Facebook page. But it could also be a paid media buy on Facebook (you know, those sponsored ads on the right hand side).

Many brands are taking advantage of Facebook’s paid media and they’re putting up huge numbers. There are a whole host of new ways to buy fans. Yes, I said it. Buy them. And once you’ve hit a critical mass, that’s when the “viral” growth will come.

Just saying.

U.S. Gross National Happiness

This is ace work from Facebook (I know I’m a little late here). ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ is similar to Facebook’s trend-tracking tool, Lexicon. Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook. To determine if a particular status update is happy or sad (basically sentiment analysis similar to Nielsen and Radian6), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

The graph contains several metrics. GNH represents Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores.

On holidays like Christmas and Obama’s inauguration, we were pretty happy. Conversely, we were sad when Asian stock market crashed and when Michael Jackson died.

It’s amazing what we can do with data these days.

The Twitters are everywhere (and Facebook too).

We’re starting to see ads for nearly everything include logos and mentions of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Ads for hi-def TV’s are touting connectivity to your most precious photos on Flickr. It’s amazing how things are evolving.

 

ABC's "FlashForward" promotion uses Facebook Connect