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Ozometer by Play
The campaign was created to celebrate Foster's famous ‘No Worries’ attitude. In creating the campaign, Play searched for some of Britain’s most, and least, ‘No worries’ people, celebrities and places. More on Play's award winning campaign.The definition and role of social media
by Fraser Rattray, Trade Marketing Manger at Fox Interactive Media
Social media, web 2.0, widgets, tag clouds... Just some of the terms that are fast-becoming part of online vernacular. But where did these terms come from, and more importantly what do they mean?
Social media is more than the collection of sites that have entered the mainstream through the phenomenon described as web 2.0. It represents a wholesale change in the way the internet is used by the consumer. What differentiates web 2.0 from the web as we used to know it is not any notable advances in technology, but instead the application of technology. It’s about people connecting, not just to each other, but through a shared interest such as a new album, a funny clip, a movie that’s coming out,a video game, a car, a party, a local venue, anything. This defines the content and culture that’s important to them. No better is this illustrated than by social media - the process whereby information is dynamically created and shared to maximize collective intelligence. But hasn’t the internet always been social? Instant messaging has been around since the 1980s, customers of Amazon have long enjoyed making purchase decisions based on customer reviews, and what was Friends Reunited if it wasn’t a precursor to Facebook?
Social networks are the most prominent of the social media offerings due to their phenomenal growth and considerable media attention. The immediacy of the internet combined with the ease of communicating to a massive audience with a strong desire for self-expression has been instrumental in this growth.
Social networks offer advertisers reach and engagement at an unprecedented level, combined with clear branding opportunities. The music industry has been quick to exploit these opportunities with MySpace artist profiles swiftly replacing official band websites. As brands themselves, the artists benefit from a frequent dialogue with a loyal audience, allowing them to communicate the latest product offering, exclusive content and events, as well as providing tools to dissipate these marketing messages virally amongst their fans’ individual communities. The relationship is further enhanced through blogs and one-to-one communications between the band and their fans.
The adoption of social networks is clearly changing the way online is consumed. Rather than a passing trend, social networks are fast becoming the default destination for all aspects of the online experience - from email to film, search to music downloads. Indeed, when 18-24 year old Brits were asked how they would spend 15 minutes of free time, 45% claimed they would check out their favourite social networks. And they aren’t just killing time. These sites are being used to put cultural, creative and commercial skills to profitable effect - as seen by the growth of socioenvironmental networks, new businesses (750,000 of them) and fanzines on social networks.
This behaviour has not been lost on the portals and search engines who are either developing their own social media offerings or snapping up the emerging players. Yahoo! started the ball rolling with the purchase of the online community GeoCities back in 1999 in a $3.6 billion deal which gave an early indication into the perceived value of social networking. The Sunnyvale company then went on to acquire Flickr in 2005 and video editing site Jumpcut a year later. By this time the likes of MySpace and Facebook were attracting considerable attention and keen to be player sin social networking, Yahoo! developed Yahoo! 360, although it failed to trouble these new start-ups.
Nevertheless, social networks were firmly on the map and for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp the $580m acquisition of MySpace’s parent company Intermix Media in 2005 provided a valuable online addition. This purchase signalled the start of a scramble for a foothold in social media with the established media owners buying up the likes of YouTube (Google, $1.65bn), Bebo (AOL, $850m) and a 1.6% stake in Facebook (MSN, $240m - valuing the social network at a mind boggling $15 billion).
Whilst a huge amount of media is uploaded onto social networks (17 million photos and 105 thousand videos are uploaded onto MySpace each day alone) there are of course specific photo and video sharing sites.
Flickr is one of the earliest social media applications. Renowned for its wealth of quality photographs, this site has evolved from a tool for sharing photographs into an online community, with users prompted to find friends and view/comment on their images (as well as those from the whole community). It is credited with being one of the first sites to implement tag clouds which provide access to images tagged with the most popular keywords.
YouTube has singlehandedly turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of internet culture. Although much maligned for poor quality content, 100 million videos are watched on the site each day, 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute and in 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in 2000. This consumption only looks like increasing as sites such as these continue to exploit other channels such as mobile (including the iPhone) and TV.
Many social networkers are so dependent on their online communities that they rarely use webmail accounts like Gmail and Hotmail, meaning that friends not on the same social network can fall into a communication desert. They frequently use their mobile phones to log into social networks such as MySpace - which launched a new mobile page with Vodafone in August 2008 and saw UK page views double. In fact of the UK’s 21 million mobile phone subscribers who belong to a social network 25% visit a social network each month (1). This has prompted Vodafone to launch the “Vodafone to Connect Friends” application on Facebook, enabling all UK mobile users to send text messages from their Facebook profile to friends, whether they are on Facebook or not.
Online forums, wikis, podcasts and blogs are fundamental to social media. A blog is essentially an online diary or notebook which generally focuses on a certain subject and invites readers to leave comments. The speed at which they can be created and the low cost to entry means that blogs are often the first source for information and as such the better known ones generate a lot of interest for media professionals. Tech Crunch, Valleywag and mashable are established blogs for the industry they support and blogs, of course, have their own search engine – Technorati. Another favourite social media application is Twitter. Whilst blogs are confined to online, twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to send and read posts (tweets) of up to 140 characters via the Twitter website, instant messenger, SMS, RSS, email and through applications such as Twitterrific.
One of the most notable characteristics of social media is the amalgamation of content from different sources on the same page. This movement has been spearheaded by the consumer and media owners have learnt not only to let go, but also to encourage developers to create applications to host external content on their sites and more importantly port their content elsewhere. For example, the BBC has long provided RSS feeds of their news items for consumers to paste into the personal profiles and Yahoo! is looking to open up its music offering to Apple’s iTunes and Amazon. This practice is due to an agreement known as OpenSocial – a set of application programming interfaces (API’s) for web-based social network applications developed by Google, MySpace and a number of other social networks as an alternative to the facebook platform. Bebo, Friendster, hi5, orkut, Linked In and Yahoo! are amongst those supporting the platform.
Advertisers must learn from this and accept that with social media it’s all
too easy for their brands to be interpreted in different ways through ‘mashups’ and talked about on blogs, networks and offline communications. Consumers are incredibly brand-savvy and expect more from advertisers particularly when they appear on their own personal web space. If they get it right, they can harness the power of this movement quickly and with minimal effort - as Chris Moyles did when plugging his radio show Facebook page, rapidly attracting 500,000 evangelists of the show and influencing countless others through their individual communities. Through this viral marketing how many of these friends will become listeners and how many listeners will become super-listeners?
What makes one blog, video or social network profile an overnight sensation whilst the next disappears into the abyss? Naturally the relevance of the content and the offline vehicles for its promotion help greatly. There is a great deal of overlap between the Chris Moyles Show and the Facebook audience but the main driver is of course the content. As mentioned before people are connecting through a shared interest, in this case the fabric of the show itself and their ability to determine the content moments before it goes on air. But there is also a science to it. It is known as social media optimization. No discussion on social media would be complete without mentioning Wikipedia and its definition of
SMO is “a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.” In short it is about keeping your content fresh, linking to those who link to you, making it easy to tag and bookmark your content (through Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us etc) and finally letting go of the brand a little. It’s their brand now so encourage them to take your content and play with it.
(1) 1 Nielsen Mobile Advertising Report; 3/08
Social media, web 2.0, widgets, tag clouds... Just some of the terms that are fast-becoming part of online vernacular. But where did these terms come from, and more importantly what do they mean?
Social media is more than the collection of sites that have entered the mainstream through the phenomenon described as web 2.0. It represents a wholesale change in the way the internet is used by the consumer. What differentiates web 2.0 from the web as we used to know it is not any notable advances in technology, but instead the application of technology. It’s about people connecting, not just to each other, but through a shared interest such as a new album, a funny clip, a movie that’s coming out,a video game, a car, a party, a local venue, anything. This defines the content and culture that’s important to them. No better is this illustrated than by social media - the process whereby information is dynamically created and shared to maximize collective intelligence. But hasn’t the internet always been social? Instant messaging has been around since the 1980s, customers of Amazon have long enjoyed making purchase decisions based on customer reviews, and what was Friends Reunited if it wasn’t a precursor to Facebook?
Social networks
Social networks are the most prominent of the social media offerings due to their phenomenal growth and considerable media attention. The immediacy of the internet combined with the ease of communicating to a massive audience with a strong desire for self-expression has been instrumental in this growth.
Social networks offer advertisers reach and engagement at an unprecedented level, combined with clear branding opportunities. The music industry has been quick to exploit these opportunities with MySpace artist profiles swiftly replacing official band websites. As brands themselves, the artists benefit from a frequent dialogue with a loyal audience, allowing them to communicate the latest product offering, exclusive content and events, as well as providing tools to dissipate these marketing messages virally amongst their fans’ individual communities. The relationship is further enhanced through blogs and one-to-one communications between the band and their fans.
How the portals have reacted
The adoption of social networks is clearly changing the way online is consumed. Rather than a passing trend, social networks are fast becoming the default destination for all aspects of the online experience - from email to film, search to music downloads. Indeed, when 18-24 year old Brits were asked how they would spend 15 minutes of free time, 45% claimed they would check out their favourite social networks. And they aren’t just killing time. These sites are being used to put cultural, creative and commercial skills to profitable effect - as seen by the growth of socioenvironmental networks, new businesses (750,000 of them) and fanzines on social networks.
This behaviour has not been lost on the portals and search engines who are either developing their own social media offerings or snapping up the emerging players. Yahoo! started the ball rolling with the purchase of the online community GeoCities back in 1999 in a $3.6 billion deal which gave an early indication into the perceived value of social networking. The Sunnyvale company then went on to acquire Flickr in 2005 and video editing site Jumpcut a year later. By this time the likes of MySpace and Facebook were attracting considerable attention and keen to be player sin social networking, Yahoo! developed Yahoo! 360, although it failed to trouble these new start-ups.
Nevertheless, social networks were firmly on the map and for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp the $580m acquisition of MySpace’s parent company Intermix Media in 2005 provided a valuable online addition. This purchase signalled the start of a scramble for a foothold in social media with the established media owners buying up the likes of YouTube (Google, $1.65bn), Bebo (AOL, $850m) and a 1.6% stake in Facebook (MSN, $240m - valuing the social network at a mind boggling $15 billion).
Photo and video sharing sites
Whilst a huge amount of media is uploaded onto social networks (17 million photos and 105 thousand videos are uploaded onto MySpace each day alone) there are of course specific photo and video sharing sites.
Flickr is one of the earliest social media applications. Renowned for its wealth of quality photographs, this site has evolved from a tool for sharing photographs into an online community, with users prompted to find friends and view/comment on their images (as well as those from the whole community). It is credited with being one of the first sites to implement tag clouds which provide access to images tagged with the most popular keywords.
YouTube has singlehandedly turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of internet culture. Although much maligned for poor quality content, 100 million videos are watched on the site each day, 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute and in 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in 2000. This consumption only looks like increasing as sites such as these continue to exploit other channels such as mobile (including the iPhone) and TV.
Social media goes mobile
Many social networkers are so dependent on their online communities that they rarely use webmail accounts like Gmail and Hotmail, meaning that friends not on the same social network can fall into a communication desert. They frequently use their mobile phones to log into social networks such as MySpace - which launched a new mobile page with Vodafone in August 2008 and saw UK page views double. In fact of the UK’s 21 million mobile phone subscribers who belong to a social network 25% visit a social network each month (1). This has prompted Vodafone to launch the “Vodafone to Connect Friends” application on Facebook, enabling all UK mobile users to send text messages from their Facebook profile to friends, whether they are on Facebook or not.
Blogs
Online forums, wikis, podcasts and blogs are fundamental to social media. A blog is essentially an online diary or notebook which generally focuses on a certain subject and invites readers to leave comments. The speed at which they can be created and the low cost to entry means that blogs are often the first source for information and as such the better known ones generate a lot of interest for media professionals. Tech Crunch, Valleywag and mashable are established blogs for the industry they support and blogs, of course, have their own search engine – Technorati. Another favourite social media application is Twitter. Whilst blogs are confined to online, twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to send and read posts (tweets) of up to 140 characters via the Twitter website, instant messenger, SMS, RSS, email and through applications such as Twitterrific.
Media owners have learnt to let go of their brand and advertisers must follow
One of the most notable characteristics of social media is the amalgamation of content from different sources on the same page. This movement has been spearheaded by the consumer and media owners have learnt not only to let go, but also to encourage developers to create applications to host external content on their sites and more importantly port their content elsewhere. For example, the BBC has long provided RSS feeds of their news items for consumers to paste into the personal profiles and Yahoo! is looking to open up its music offering to Apple’s iTunes and Amazon. This practice is due to an agreement known as OpenSocial – a set of application programming interfaces (API’s) for web-based social network applications developed by Google, MySpace and a number of other social networks as an alternative to the facebook platform. Bebo, Friendster, hi5, orkut, Linked In and Yahoo! are amongst those supporting the platform.
Advertisers must learn from this and accept that with social media it’s all
too easy for their brands to be interpreted in different ways through ‘mashups’ and talked about on blogs, networks and offline communications. Consumers are incredibly brand-savvy and expect more from advertisers particularly when they appear on their own personal web space. If they get it right, they can harness the power of this movement quickly and with minimal effort - as Chris Moyles did when plugging his radio show Facebook page, rapidly attracting 500,000 evangelists of the show and influencing countless others through their individual communities. Through this viral marketing how many of these friends will become listeners and how many listeners will become super-listeners?
Why is Chris Moyles so big?
What makes one blog, video or social network profile an overnight sensation whilst the next disappears into the abyss? Naturally the relevance of the content and the offline vehicles for its promotion help greatly. There is a great deal of overlap between the Chris Moyles Show and the Facebook audience but the main driver is of course the content. As mentioned before people are connecting through a shared interest, in this case the fabric of the show itself and their ability to determine the content moments before it goes on air. But there is also a science to it. It is known as social media optimization. No discussion on social media would be complete without mentioning Wikipedia and its definition of
SMO is “a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.” In short it is about keeping your content fresh, linking to those who link to you, making it easy to tag and bookmark your content (through Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us etc) and finally letting go of the brand a little. It’s their brand now so encourage them to take your content and play with it.
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(1) 1 Nielsen Mobile Advertising Report; 3/08
