Is Social Currency Really Relevant?

Not yet. But it may be in time. The initial inkling that “social currency” does have some value is in the domain of human resources. For example recruiters like to use LinkedIn to source candidates for job openings. In a less quantifiable way, as people we often check the profiles of people on Twitter, Facebook etc., to see how many “followers” or “friends” they may have. These are habits driven by our naturally competitive nature. This competitive nature has been a core driver in the development of a number of social media services like FourSquare (become Mayor of a place), Empire Avenue with your personal stock trading, earning “eaves” and as the first example of social currency having some form of value – there’s a great blog post here by Caleb Storkey talking with Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble on the potential values of Empire Avenue for business.

But Who Really Cares?
It doesn’t really matter. Unless you’re on LinkedIn or Plaxo, have little or no engagement, no recommendations from former employers or employees and no references from clients; that may cost you a job interview. Beyond that, “social currency” is interesting to sociologists, anthropologists and perhaps marketing researchers and intelligence agencies or police.

Will Social Currency Become Relevant?
A lot of things need to happen first. A lot. Aside from the stars and moon aligning, for any form of “social currency” to have a real economic impact outside Cyburbia, it needs to become like money is – with some form of regulation that defines its value that is accepted by the international community. Which creates the issue of how to value social currency amongst nations and impacts of “trading” actual peoples values. As new social technologies developed, they would have to find some way of being accepted with a process of approval to be added to a “social currency system”. To have real-world impact it means acceptance by society as a whole, between citizens and governments and with anything that scales, will need regulation to some degree.

Is The Internet or “Cyburbia” Relevant Then?
Discussing “social currency” over the weekend lead to the broader, deeper question of the relevance of the Internet/Web as a whole in our lives. The pundits like Scoble, Shirky and  would resoundingly scream yes, while a more sober tone would come from Evgeny Morazov and that sublime mind of Malcolm Gladwell. The Web is completely relevant, it has helped organize democratic protests, birthday parties, weddings and created a new consumer avenue for shopping that is continuing to increase. It is becoming more pervasive and no longer is location or device dependent. Anyway, it is relevant, social currency however, not so much. Yet.

What do you think? Will social currency have an inherent value over time? perhaps it will play out in a different way than traditional currencies or stocks?

The Hidden Internet in Developing Nations

Internet access is ubiquitous in the developed nations of the West. Penetration is close to 100% and we access the Web not just from a PC but from our smart phones and tablets like the iPad or Playbook. We’ve learned over our years of research that when it comes to developing nations, we in the West or the Global North if you will, tend to think that access in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, India and across most of Africa is minimal and only for the Elites who can afford it. This is a dangerous assumption that may cost governments their power or at least a little troubles. Companies doing business in the Global South may also suffer from boycotts of products to organized protests, especially when it comes to the extractive resource sector.

Governments, larger NGO’s and NPO’s and corporations of the Global North often make their assumptions on Internet usage from generally available data on Internet usage stats. For example the World Bank database on Internet stats and the oft referred Internet World Stats published by for-profit marketing company Miniwatts. While their data is good it tends only to look at numbers published by ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) and Telco’s in those countries. Our research indicates that the gap between official and unofficial online populations in developing nations is as much as 60% in many cases. This is a significant disparity. Here is some data visualized in Google from World Bank data, perhaps the closest to reality, but still not entirely accurate.

The Hidden Internet

What we’ve come to find through our ongoing research projects, is that the number published by most organizations is often just the surface of real access and rarely accounts for mobile device connectivity to the Internet. We call it the Hidden Internet. It’s vibrant, it’s alive and it’s growing. It’s hidden, essentially, because there is no formal mechanism for recognizing or evaluating its presence or that of the people contributing. Here’s how it works;

Pirate Connections: Illegal access through wireless networks directly by hackers. This most often happens for criminal organizations that send out those mass emails about their cousin who died with millions in the bank and only you can help them get the money, with a generous reward for your time of course!

Unofficial ISP’s: We’ve found a number of times that a person may subscribe to service from the local, official Telco or ISP for a broadband connection to their home. They then install a wired or wireless router and resell connection to their neighbours to help cover the cost of access and sometimes turn a small profit. They are unofficial and may even rent out access to their PC in their own homes.

Education System: Then there’s the universities and high-schools with multiple students online. Often times parents and friends can gain access to these services as part of literacy training for the community. We’ve seen this in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Amman and many other cities. These numbers are not officially counted though. We estimate that for every student, two additional community members are regularly accessing the Web.

Internet Cafe’s: One of our favourite examples here is Haiti. The assumption by many aid agencies and some governments has been that Internet access by non-elites is minimal. The reality however, is far different. Shortly after the earthquake in 2010, Internet cafe’s popped up in tents in the tent communities; they remain active to this day. These Internet cafe’s are increasingly popular throughout the developing world and play a crucial role in connecting communities, improving literacy both in ICT and language.

Mobile Devices: With most developing nations building sophisticated wireless networks from 3G to 4G and up, mobile device use of data services is surging. In fact Africa is one of the fastest growing mobile regions in the world. The Congo went from 2% population penetration in 2000 to approaching 50% in 2010. Some research on low income urban youth using mobile devices shows it’s not just texting, but social media use that is growing on mobile devices. Some other research in southern Africa countries shows over 54% of the time mobile devices are used to access social media channels. We forecast that mobile device access for social media services will be the biggest growth sector in mobile data usage, not texting. The role of texting in online communications behaviour is limited at best. Accessing image sharing and the conversation streams possible in status updates and rich content sharing to Facebook, Zoopy or PlentyAfricans.com for example brings a deeper, richer layer of engagement that is a natural element of human communications through digital media.

Summary & Moving Forward
Organizations such as the World Bank and Internet World stats or Africa Analysis have been well done, but the methodologies and the questions have been the issue. We would argue that additional research can be carried out through technologies such as our mediasphere360 and digging a little deeper in on-the-ground research. Even with the capabilities of our technology it is hard to truly quantify the real numbers. But the volume of conversations we measure and analyse for clients and the anecdotal data we collect on the ground is indicative of a larger, more engaged online population in the Global South than we have a tendency to acknowledge. Empirical methods alone are proving inadequate to gain the deeper insights necessary to understand how digital citizens in developing nations are engaging. Different, complimentary approaches will be needed in the future. Traditional methodologies are still and will remain, necessary. But layered online analysis is now vital. The role of digital diaspora is also key to understanding connectivity and engagement.

How Many People Can You Actually Network With Online?

The pundits hollared, the social media guru’s chanted and hummed, the hype-masters hyped – you must get as many friends on Facebook as you can. Search, dig, sign them up! Faster! Faster! Then Twitter and the social media gurus drooled and pontifacted, the MLMers sprang into action as fast as their pinkies could type; you had to have as many followers as you could. Now. Eyeballs. Lot’s of ‘em. They’d make you rich, your social currency would be invaluable. Then you had to tie them all together in FriendFeed or some other aggregator.

Then in late 2009 the trend was “how to unfriend” on Facebook. Wait? Really? There were always some sober voices in there, Chris Brogan weighed in and launched a discussion on the 150 people you could logically maintain some form of relationship with. He was (and remains) one of the sober voices and thought leaders of this emerging world of hyper-connected humans.

Now, today, some are saying it’s time to do spring cleaning on your Twitter account; weed out some of those you follow. Really? Now it’s time to trim down. As Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, the Dunbars Number theory that you can only effectively, cognitively, manage about 150 relationships, holds very much true in social media.

I just enjoy the irony of the current trend to whittle down those numbers and drive for quality. So with that in mind, we set out to look at some of our past research and see if we could gain some insight to how many people an “average” person might engage with online

Our research over the past three years where we’ve conducted network mapping to understand connectivity shows that in reality, people are consistently communicating with about 25 people on average at least once a month. When you tighten this up to how many people we communicate with 4 or more times weekly, that plummets to about 10 on average. This is an average of a demographic average of people who are active online in social media channels at least 10 hours per week and are between the ages of 30 and 45. If we look at gender, naturally, women are higher at 14 people, but that isn’t by much really. Our estimate is that perhaps only 5% of netizens communicate with over 100 people on a regular basis. They are the exception, not the norm.

Since our work is simply to observe and report, we’re just delivering our findings, but more than happy to hear your thoughts…let us and others know…

The Dark Side Of Social Media and Online “Marketing”

Yes, there is, surprisingly, a very active dark side of social media “marketing” in a number of business sectors. For business marketing online, it is a highly competitive place. Witness the large volume of SEO agencies and the vast volumes of SEO “how-to” content. Toss in the rise of social media channels and the perhaps even larger amount of content around how to engage in marketing through social media, it’s little wonder there is a darker side.

We’ve completed well over 200 research reports across a multitude of industry sectors; from consumer goods to ball-bearing manufacturers, finance and tourism. In almost all of them we have encountered what we’ve come to term as Digital Dark Marketing.

These tactics vary, mostly it’s been about companies using SEO tactics, legitimate and black hat SEO means, to push down their competitors in search engines. Increasingly though, we are seeing similar activities across social media channels. Sometimes it is simply the usual aim of improving a company or products visibility over  a competitor – this is fine and is part of the benefits of a capitalist society. A business may also hire, unknowingly, a black hat SEO firm as recently happened to a firm in New York (ironically the article is in Forbes, who has just been accused of link spam themselves – link to article below.)

Where is gets darker however, is when nastier tactics are deployed. These range from hiring people to place negative reviews of a competitors product or service all the way through to using tactics that get a competitor pushed into Google’s “sandbox” or listed as spam for the domains web address and company emails. As we looked back at our data over the past three years of research projects, we estimate about a 11% increase, CAGR, over the past two years and forecast an 14% CAGR increase in the coming three years. Not massive amounts you might think, but enough.

There are no regulations over these tactics. Tier 1 consumer search engines like Google or Bing do not have the algorithms or methodologies to know if a dark marketing tactic is being used. Gathering the evidence of these tactics is also not easy in manual form. To trace the activity and create a path of evidence is a significant challenge and most businesses barely understand social media and are still learning how it can help them in legitimate marketing – even the firms consulting on social media are still learning. It is still a nascent sector of the online world in business terms for marketing.

Some of the tactics we’ve seen are;

Link Spamming or Spamdexing: An ongoing point of pain for search engines who are constantly “tweaking” their algorithms to stay one step ahead of these annoying folks. This tactic can be used to push down a competitor in a search engine or cause the company targeted to be “sandboxed” by a search engine in a reverse link spam operation.

Paid Negative Reviews: This seems to work in two ways. 1) is by a firm or an agency hired by a firm, paying people to slam a competitive product or drive down reviews on ranking/rating services or sometimes staff will of the company will do this themselves and 2) finding existing negative reviews of competitor products/services and “promoting” them across ranking/rating sites and other social media services (e.g. using a false Twitter account to promote a negative instance.)

Pay Per Click Fraud: Some companies will find someone or an organization to click on competitors ads in search engines or other sites/services to maximize their ad budget quickly, then place their ads afterward.

Content Realignment: Fancy term we have for taking a competitors own “content” about their product or service and altering it, then placing it on the same social media channels where they placed it, but your name is mentioned. Slightly obvious but rarely gets detected.

Paid Bloggers: A company may find a blogger willing to provide a highly positive review of their product/service and subtly or overtly “slam” their competitor. They may provide the content and the blogger may admit they are being paid to write the review but may be unaware of how they are being manipulated. There are those who have no scruples at all however, and will do as the company bids and not declare their actions. Some laws are being developed to counter this, although the intent of the law is really to hold all bloggers responsible for their statements as general consumer protection.

Blind Party Linking & Ads: Companies may unknowingly be participating in this kind of action. This is when they are “sold” links or advertising by seemingly legitimate online marketing firms or individuals. The business doesn’t understand what is happening and simply thinks it is buying ads and links. Forbes magazine was recently accused of Link Spamming.

There are a host of other tactics, some as obvious as trying to get a competitor kicked out of a social media service all the way through to “flooding” a competitors hosting service or using bot or DOS (Denial of Service) attacks. The industries where see the most of this activity is financial products (mortgages, investing), insurance (home, auto, life), electronics manufacturers and online retailers. Other sectors however, are not immune.

How do you know if your company is being targeted? It’s not easy. It takes some time and effort, but a digital media research firm that understands social media marketing, SEO and search engine marketing tactics and Web technologies can help. Evidence is hard to gather for legal retaliation we have found, but you can develop strategies to fight back. Some online reputation management services are good, but they are too often just “real-time” and do not have the ability to track history and miss many social media channels.

There is an “information war” taking place in Cyburbia today. From spammers in email and websites for pirated or black label goods through to competitive anti-marketing tactics. Unfortunately this just adds to the challenge companies face with their online presence, yet as time goes by, can ill afford not to understand.

Summary of Atlantic Conversations 3 – Social Media in Atlantic Canada

On Sunday, 23 January, I provided some of our key findings in our ongoing monitoring of social media usage in Atlantic Canada. We also monitor the New England states and Southern UK on an ongoing basis.

Here’s the summary points from Atlantic Conversations III:

- Facebook average age edged up from 53 to 55

- We found a 18% increase in Social Media use by Silver Surfers (those above 55)

- LinkedIn is the most popular business network online and we saw a 72% increase in use in 2011

- We noted Twitter is becoming a localized news source/feed

- New Brunswick saw the largest increase overall in citizens using social media

- Nova Scotia saw the largest increase in business blogs over other Atlantic Canadian provinces

- Urban growth issues featured heavily in all major Atlantic Canadian cities; mostly in St. John’s & Halifax

- Political and discussions over societal issues increased 32% over 2009

- Online petitions increased by 28% in 2010 over 2009

- Surprisingly, we found most newspaper site commenters on average, had an undergraduate degree

What Struck Us Most?

Atlantic Canadians, in fact Canadians as a whole, are starting to leverage social technologies for societal change. Moving from “slacktivism” to more that just signing petitions but driving change by physically taking ideas and concepts and moving those agendas forward in civil society. Our view is that governments at all levels should be listening more closely. We anticipate an increase in this direction of social media in 2011.

While the majority of social media use is still entertainment focused and basic familial and social communications, that is changing. This is a pivotal year of a shift in that direction. What may present a challenge is moving from the keyboard to the street and the volume of “noise” may preclude any viable change as the “signal” will be lost in the clutter.