Facebook is accessed by just under 1 in every 13 people in the world. Given the number of babies and old folks (excluding the Ivy Bean’s of this world), as well as complete technophobes (fearful) or techo-illiterate (fearless, but also clueless)  that’s quite astonishing for something that started up as a support site solely open to membership from Harvard students (an approximate audience of 7000 people in total!). The number of Facebook users has now surpassed 750 million… with 2000 employees to manage it in 15 different offices worldwide… Phew!

Over 30% of users are in the ’35 years and over’ demographic. A marked shift from the original college student focus. Raising the question with some audiences whether Facebook has gone from cool to just plain cold… However, to counter-balance this the 18-24 year old audience is once again the fastest-growing segment, regaining the title from ‘women 55+‘ who snagged it briefly in 2009. Take from that what you will!

The average user has 140 friends that they are connected with on Facebook, and sends an average of 8 friend requests per month, during roughly 40 visits per month, in which they create approximately 90 unique pieces of content; 200 million of whom do this from their mobile device whilst on the go… Users have been dubbed the ‘Tell-All Generation’ with Facebook as the platform to air your views, your opinions…and in some cases your dirty laundry 24/7/365.

And that is all just for starters. Before we even mention how many millions of users follow how many thousands of companies in how many different languages, or not if the most recent article is anything to go by. Or the most and least popular pages on the site, and how many fans they gain each week (Texas Hold’Em Poker and the Kate Middleton page are way up there this week!)

Social conversations are unique because they are uncensored; they evolve and can turn into something quite unexpected. They excite audiences and they can bring them closer to a brand.

With emerging trends such as gamification, advanced apps and personalisation becoming more and more attuned to what consumers do online, now is a great time to find your place in the socialsphere. By optimising these platforms you can create a strong foundation to offer your users ‘experiences’ to take away with them.

Engage with your audience

The key, of course, is ‘engagement’. Understanding what your audience ‘likes’ – what will resonate with them and what won’t. Take a look at your competitors! The one thing social is, is open and transparent. It offers up scope to review where brands before you have done it well, and where they’ve failed miserably.

Frame the type of conversations you want to have with your audience. For example, you could entice your users and new audiences to following you with exclusive content that is only available to users that ‘Like’ you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. You could also use gamification techniques such as social badges, loyalty schemes and levelling up to reward users and create long-term engagement with your brand.

Integrate…

It’s important not to think of social media as an ‘alternative’. Social should be integrated to support your ongoing comms and campaigns. It needs to be on-brand – establishing and building up conversations with your audience that are consistent with your tone of voice.

Open up

It’s key to be open and transparent. Rohit Bhargava, inventor of Likeonomics and professor of global marketing at Georgetown University states that ‘brutal honesty, simplicity and being human’ are the three key areas that can affect how a brand is liked and their success online.

If someone is criticising your service in an online community, reply and do your best to resolve their issues. Users are far more forgiving than you may think and actually see it as a positive when brands take the time to respond in an honest manner. Failing to do this, ignoring messages or deleting posts as ‘spam’ are a big no-no. Embrace what you are, and when you do trip up, hold your hands up and make it right. You’ll soon be surprised that these users can soon be transformed into your biggest defenders.

Listen to feedback, suggestions and comments from your users, proactively respond in a timely manner and share updates about your brand and business. This keeps your audience connected and valued. Ultimately, improving their experience.

Set some ground rules

Build a corporate social media policy to communicate with your team, contractors and employees before jumping in. There are numerous templates that can be found online to use as a starting point.

Put a team in place! It’s important to realise that while simple social tasks can be seen as relatively free, they are still time-consuming and require a dedicated individual or team to run them efficiently.

Track & optimise

Set your company up with unique tracking, to measure your social media performance, and make sure you communicate your learning’s internally to build on your performance in the future.

Be visible

Make sure people can find you! For example, on your website and collateral link to your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages. The main aim is to make subscribers followers and fans and vice versa. It’s important to have a visible presence across social platforms so that you can maintain conversations with different types of users. It gives you the opportunity to not only invite people into your brand… But to create and build ongoing, immersive experiences.

Consider mobile use

With research showing us that 70 – 80% of all mobile downloads are games and stats revealing that during 60 seconds on the internet iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times, mobile is a big area to consider, from setting up branded apps to mobile payments in-store, and useful downloadable content / vouchers for mobile use.

QR codes can also be used to provide contextual assistance and enhance your social profiles and campaigns. For example, they could be used to link to a downloadable product catalogue, or a map and contact details of where to find your store. They should be used for educational and entertaining purposes, adding value to a user’s experience and not hindering it.

Reward your fans

Look out for potential brand influencers. These people can be one of the best assets for your online profile. Influencers have a voice in the online community and the ability to spread info, through commenting and sharing to help your message go viral. They can increase reach and impact. The building up of positive relationships can lead to them transforming into brand advocates. But, remember to reward them with inside knowledge, a say in future products and early notification of launches.

Keep it simple

There are continually more and more touch points and platforms for brands to reach consumers through, so while social is by no means ‘new’, there is a still lot to learn in this ever-evolving world… And with vast amounts of messages and information available to tap into and absorb, it’s good to keep things simple, from your logo, to your message and your ideas. For example, take a look below at how big brands such as Starbucks have streamlined and simplified their logo.

Avoid spam!

Make sure you don’t spam your audience! Try not to force your brand on to consumers as aggressive marketing and non-stop messaging will only aggravate users. Respect the fact that they are following you and give them options on what they see. It’s also important to avoid auto-posting on user’s profiles. If they have signed up to your service / app, make sure that you give them an opt-out tick box.

Follow through…

Finally, make sure that your online activities are leveraged and understood within your offline team. If you have a voucher scheme running online, it’s very disconcerting to be looked at blankly when you show a shop assistant a code on your mobile phone. Social activities should drip-feed throughout your entire offerings.

Embrace a social culture…

In a recent study, a huge 97.09% of respondents said that online experience influenced whether or not they bought a product or service from a brand… With the help of an agency, and with solid strategy behind you, it’s an exciting time to find out how social media can fit into your brand… To carve out and position your company in this ever-evolving space, and start to build up your social brand equity.

I’m going to use three APIs here, one from Twitter, Facebook & Vimeo. To make the tool that’s useful for everyone. I don’t want to use any part of the APIs that requires authentication so that limits me a little, but this is meant to be a simple tool after all.

The Basics

Here’s the three API urls that I’ll use. All return a JSON string or object.

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.welove72.com

http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.welove72.com

http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/22889482.json

Core Concepts

All we’re really doing is getting a single intiger from each API call, and showing them on the page. This is how it’s done with jQuery using the getJSON function.

$.getJSON('http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.welove72.com&callback=?', function(tw) {
    $("#twitter").html(tw.count);
});

There’s some other bits of JavaScript that get the form values & place them into the url string that we send to each API, and a total of three API calls

The Complete Code

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head>
    <script class="jsbin" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Number of shares & retweets</title>
    <style>
      div, h1, h3, p {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
      body {width: 400px; background: #eee; margin: 0 auto; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 80%;}
      h1 {text-align: center; margin: 30px 0;}
      #stats {background: #fff; border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 10px 20px; margin-top: 30px;}
      #stats h3 {margin: 10px 0;}
      #stats p {margin: 10px 0;}
    </style>
</head>
<body>

    <h1>Tweets, Shares & Views</h1>

    <form action="" method="post">
        <input placeholder="URL" id="url" type="text" value="http://we-are.welove72.com" size="45" />
        <input placeholder="Vimeo ID" id="vimeo_id" type="text" value="22889482" size="10" />
        <button type="submit">Check</button>
    </form>

    <div id="stats">
        <h3 id="theurl"></h3>
        <p id="twitter">Twitter: <span></span></p>
        <p id="facebook">Facebook: <span></span></p>
        <p id="vimeo">Vimeo: <span></span></p>
    </div>

</body>
</html>

$(function(){

    // Make common elements vars. Speed!
    var form = $("form"),
        button = form.find("button"),
        twitter_stat = $("#twitter span"),
        facebook_stat = $("#facebook span"),
        vimeo_stat = $("#vimeo span");

    // When the button is clicked, get the form values & call the check_stats function
    button.click(function(){
        var url = form.find("#url").val(),
            vimeo_id = form.find("#vimeo_id").val();
        check_stats(url,vimeo_id);
        return false;
    });

    function check_stats(url,vimeo_id) {

        // Make each URL API call a var, for cleanliness mostly
        var twitter = 'http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=',
            facebook = 'http://graph.facebook.com/',
            vimeo = 'http://vimeo.com/api/v2/video/' + vimeo_id + '.json';

        // Zero out the stats
        $("#twitter span, #facebook span, #vimeo span").html("");

        // Put the URL on the page, just for some visual clafication
        $("#theurl").html(url);

        // Call the Twitter, Facebook & Vimeo APIs & append data to page
        // Adding '?callback=?' to the URL makes cross-domain requests work
        // Note that returned object from Vimeo needs [0] to work.
        $.getJSON(twitter + url + '&callback=?', function(tw) {
            twitter_stat.html(tw.count);
        });
        $.getJSON(facebook + url + '?callback=?', function(fb) {
            facebook_stat.html(fb.shares);
        });
        $.getJSON(vimeo + '?callback=?', function(vm) {
            vimeo_stat.html(vm[0].stats_number_of_plays);
        });

    } // end check_stats

});

Note that JSBin automatically adds in the JavaScript for you, which is why a reference to it in the HTML is missing.

You can see and run the complete code here, feel free to edit it & mess around. It’s well documented, so understanding it should be as easy as reading it through. Note that the inout fields default to show the URL & Vimeo ID we need for our stats. Check your own stuff!

Let us know what you come up with in the comments.

Rock, paper, scissors is a simple game and brings back memories of playing Alex the Kidd on the MegaDrive when I was young. Adidas have wrapped a campaign around this simple idea, Danger Makes Legend combining rock, paper, scissors and (what reminds me of) Risk to form a territory based game.

Territories are gained through challenging other players or the City Patroller to a game similar to rock, paper, scissors but using football skills instead. After gaining 50 territories of your chosen city you will then face off against the Legend of the City and then be entered into a draw to win a UFEA Champions League ball signed by the legend of each city.

Simple idea and lovely graphics got myself and Des trying to gain some territory for ourselves. Also a cool video introduces the game at the start. Reminds me of Graffiti mode on Tony Hawk.

Brazilian ad agency Moma Propaganda has just added a Twitter ad to their collection of retro future posters for social media services as part of the ‘Everything Ages Fast’ campaign for Maximidia Seminars. The viral campaign has become something of a hit over the past few weeks.

The campaign which includes posters for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Skype, reminds us that social media is continuously evolving at such a fast speed, that it won’t be long before we’re looking back at what it started as with different eyes…

There is seemingly a “technological revolution” released every second day in the digital industry, however every now and again something pops up which really makes people take note.

With the release of Facebook Places last night, it seems we are really entering the next phase of social media, a more diverse level of real-world interaction, as well as a completely new level of targeted marketing.

Places takes the existing concept of applications such as FourSquare and takes it to where people already are, Facebook.

While primarily aimed at iPhone users for now (Android and Blackberry versions are planned), Places introduces location-based services to the world’s most popular social network.

Places enables users to share their current location with friends, find out where their friends are, and discover new places of interest. Users can also add their own places of interest to the platform, whether it be a business or a residential address.

In the same manner as FourSquare, users can “check-in” to places, as well as tag people who are at a particular place with them.

As with the release of most new technology of this kind, there will always be concerns about privacy. Traditionally,  it was easy to alleviate these concerns by only making the information available to (and from) users who had opted in to use the service. Where Facebook face issues with their implementation is that, by default, a user can “check-in” somebody else (without their approval or permission) into a venue. There is potential for this to get rather messy and I foresee this being one of the first changes made to the privacy settings within the application.

So while this just seems like a new aspect of already existing Social Media technology, it is the “openness” of the Facebook application which is exciting for us in the digital industry.

From tomorrow, Facebook are releasing an API which will enable developers to “pull” data from the Places application, which really does open a whole new world of possibility in terms of targeted marketing. Being able to track people’s behaviours, regular hangouts and social activeness, amongst other things enables us to truly reach the audience whom are most likely to be interested in a  particular product.

While this has huge benefits for companies advertising strategies, it should also benefit the consumer in that they will ideally only be receiving and viewing advertising which is most relevant to them.

Unfortunately for us outside of the U.S, Places is not available to us at the moment. It is intended to be rolled out internationally, however no release dates have been revealed.

We are getting closer and closer to the reality of being able to go to a random venue and meet new people with similar interests via our phones, but I truly wonder if this is a good or bad thing in the long run. We already hide behind technology so much that it would be a real shame to take the face-to-face interaction out of going out in public all together.

I think new technologies such as this are really exciting and enable us, as marketeers, to reach our audience on a new level, whilst on the flipside also enable us as consumers to better connect to both our peers and brands.However,  I believe, as with all technology, it should be approached with considered usage and should never been seen as a replacement to face-to-face interaction.

Reference: Mashable: Social Media News

With the current “keep up or fall behind” state of digital design it is more important than ever to be seen as a leader in the industry.

There is so much amazing technology at our disposal that what seemed impossible 12 months ago is now totally achievable with a touch of creative thinking.

We have to strive to continue pushing the possibilities of what current technologies can achieve. It is about taking the standard information available to us and using it, or presenting it in a new manner.

While Facebook Open Graph Plugins are relatively new to the scene, there has already been some really top examples of putting them to use in a manner that benefits the user (as opposed to using them for the sake of using them).

Levis

Trip Advisor

Simply Hired

The internet is becoming an increasingly social experience. Combining the social opportunities with the traditional methods of storytelling is the future of the web, so now is the time to take charge and start thinking of the possibilities.

Look past what has already been done, and move the web forward. We need to be using what has already been done as a basis for improvement, and as such the door is open for any young, or old, designers to step up and move the industry forward!

A great example of social media and how it can bring people together.

Orange have teamed up with Poke London, to try and set a Guinness World Record for the most tagged photo ever on Facebook with GlastoTag. The site features a massive photo of this year’s crowd at Glastonbury, shot from The Pyramid Stage during half time of the World Cup match between England and Slovenia. People who were there can connect to the photo through Facebook, zoom in and tag themselves and their friends in the 70,000 crowd.

You can even filter the tags to show just your tagged Facebook friends and feel a sense of pride that you were all involved in the event. You might even see friends that you didn’t know were there.

How was it done? The 1,300-megapixel panoramic image was taken in just under a minute using a whopping two Hasselblad H4D-50 cameras mounted one on top of the other and rotated at 10 degree increments, going back 350 metres – to take in the whole crowd. The 36 images were then stitched together – making a pixel perfect memory of Glastonbury.

There are currently 4,200 tags on the photo and over 4,870 Facebook ‘likes’ for the page. With over 180,000 people at Glastonbury, and an estimated 70,000 people in this image, this can only keep increasing, making a huge impact across people’s home pages and conversations of memories on Facebook… as well as creating an association of the event with Orange.

If you were one of the lucky people snapped - find & tag yourself in their HUGE photo:
http://glastonbury.orange.co.uk/glastotag/?mc=1

via USA TODAY (please note: Contextual links below will take you to USA TODAY result pages)

But the early “winner” in buzz is Nike, neither a World Cup sponsor nor partner of the sport’s governing body, FIFA.

Social-media monitoring firm Meltwater Buzz looked at online buzz May 24 through Thursday for 11 top sponsors, partners and other key marketers and found outsider Nike had 26% vs. 20% for Adidas, a FIFA partner, and 11% for Sony, also a partner.

Credit Nike’s “Write the Future” soccer ad that launched May 20 on Facebook, says spokesman Derek Kent. It’s had 14 million YouTube views.

For big-spending marketers who rely upon social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to economically create brand buzz fast, the importance of successfully riding the wave of global events such as the quadrennial World Cup can’t be overstated. “It’s a unique opportunity to tie your brand to the greatest sporting event in the world — in real time,” says social-media consultant Jay Baer. “So much in social media is about brevity, which lends itself perfectly to soccer.”

Cup social-media plans:

•Adidas. In the U.S., the brand is using Facebook feeds from non-soccer sports stars such as auto racer Dale Earnhardt Jr. “We’ll tap the U.S. sports fans’ passion and get them to engage with the World Cup via athletes they relate to,” says Molly Maixner, brand marketing manager for Adidas soccer.

•Coca-Cola. Rather than trying to get people onto its own website, Coke joins them at its YouTube site. “Consumers want to stay in their preferred channels,” says Prinz Pinakatt, interactive marketing manager. “Instead of pulling people to where we are, we’re going where they are.”

•Visa. Social media will be the focus of Visa’s U.S. World Cup marketing, says Jennifer Bazante, global sponsorship marketing head. It is using its YouTube channel for a sweepstakes that asks fans to upload videos of their responses to goals scored.

•McDonald’s. Most of its World Cup social-media effort will be locally based, says Dean Barrett, senior vice president of global marketing. Fans will be encouraged to go online and manage their fantasy soccer teams for prizes.

•Budweiser. The brand is bringing 32 “super fans” from 32 World Cup nations to live together in a Cape Town house for the event and regularly post their interactions on its YouTube site. “It’s social media one-on-one,” says Jason Warner, global vice president for Budweiser.

At the heart of the site design was a 3D interactive space, creating engagement and starting the story of the Sony Ericsson MWC event. Taking center stage were the heroes of the site, the phones themselves, supported by social media feeds that drove users towards established Sony Ericsson Social Media channels – creating more awareness and ultimately extending long term engagement.

Congratulations to everyone involved on a great project, an amazing effort all round and most enjoyable to work upon.

Checkout the Campaign Site, Facebook page and Mobile site