When you compare this to real-world social behaviour, it’s not at all surprising. We all have our hobbies and activities; sports, travel, photography, community service. A number of social technology companies have seen this, it’s nothing new from an availability standpoint.

What is new as a trend we’re seeing is that these services are expanding. It’s changing how broad social networks like Facebook, are being used. We call social networking services like Facebook “Open Loop Social Networks” – meaning they are more open. You can form groups in Facebook, with group and fan pages. There are millions of them, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the activist.

In our analysis of these communities and social group behaviours online though, we’ve seen a 42% increase in use of “Closed Loop Social Networks” over the past 6 months from a sample size of 54,000 profiles. Facebook will always see such group and fan pages being built; but we note that 96% of Facebook groups that are formed are active for only 3 weeks on average. Highly active group pages in places like Facebook tend to be those that are more focused; such as kayakers or mountain bikers.

Specialty group social networking service like Grouply or Ning however, are much more active since the participants are all like-minded. For those looking to market to those groups, look beyond just Facebook and look at other Closed Loop Networks to truly reach your target.

But as predominantly English-speaking Western nations see ever increasing numbers of immigrants, language will be an issue in Social Media – for monitoring, marketing and engaging. Another challenge as part of this challenge is the use of the English language, it’s nuances, slang and context.

In our ongoing research into Social Media use, we have found increasing use of ehtnographic-centric Social Networks, such as AfricanZone (there are several others) for Africans in and outside of Africa. Or Biggada for Indians.

For large Social Networking companies like Facebook or NetLog, this can mean lost eyeballs for ad revenue models. For marketers it represents adding yet another social technology channel into the mix. For monitoring companies it means they’re missing potentially key information.

Just adding new language capability in Facebook is not enough. Beyond language are uses of colours and more specifically the forms of content. Bigadda and Bebo in the UK add their own content and engage with those communities because of their added content. More on this in another post.

Suffice to say, language and subsequently culture will be an issue in Social Media development in Western nations in future years.

Step forward to today. Internet access reaches over a billion people around the world. With the advent of Social Media, we can create content and distribute it globally in just seconds. Never before, in the history of mankind, have we been able to do that.

Media content such as Where The Hell is Matt opened up our eyes to the shared human experience of music dance. The music he used by one Indian artist, Praan, resulted in that musicians exposure to the world increasing his sales and popularity beyond India unlike ever possible before. The there’s Playing For Change, again using music as a cultural learning tool. Susan Boyle’s performance came out of England and flew around the world. As did the said and fatal shooting of Nadia in Iran (warning: this is a very graphic and sad video). All items that point to how Social Media is expanding global cultural awareness.

Humans have moved all over the planet in the past 100 years and very much so in the past 40 years. Some are refugees forced by war and political upheaval to leave, others for economic reasons and some because they can. This has created a large population of immigrants in many Western and other nations – the diaspora of these countries are producing content. And sharing it. And we’re all consuming it, because it’s easy to access.

In all democratic and free nations where diaspora reside they form communities. This is natural after all, being in a minority in a new culture is hard. Over time, that community shares it’s culture with it’s host community (sometimes it’s rough, sometimes not.) Now these communities can reach out and engage and share unlike ever before.

In the end, Social Media allows us to experience other cultures, understanding we have far more in common with each other than not. The diaspora and immigrant communities can strengthen the ties in their host community and back to their home nation.

What do you think? Can Social Media strengthen cultures? Is it going to help shape a new global culture? Reduce wars and conflict? Grow more democracies?

(Author: Giles. Crouch, Managing Director)

As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.

This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.

We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.

Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.

So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?

1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.

2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.

3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.

4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.

5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.

So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

The space is well established now. The leaders are Facebook and NetLog followed by MySpace and MyYearbook among others. Perception-wise Facebook is leading internationally. The others vary by country (these come from a simple but good site for this data.)

One might and I emphasize “might” succeed with a micro-Social Networking site that caters to a specific ethnic, cultural or special interest group. But often those are well supported by services like Ning. Of course it’s one thing to build it, then you need to attract people. Even in ethnic/cultural group terms, they’ve tended to have found their piece of turf inside Facebook or other services. For clubs and organizations there’s services like Qlubb – well, there’s over 60 of them out there. In the business world it’s a fight now between LinkedIn and FastPitch.

Only about 5% of people spend more than a few hours a week inside a Social Network and less than 3% belong to more than one Social Network (our research, March 2009). Once they have established a presence and entered their personal data and made connections, it’s very hard to move them. Porting the data over is hard enough to do, but porting their connections? Almost impossible.

Venture Capital companies are not financing Social Networks. Raising debt to finance them is personal financial suicide. And quite frankly, you’ll need at least $40 Million to build a presence. If you can figure out a very compelling reason to switch for a person (porting over data and friends included) then you might have something. Over time, opportunities might present themselves. The one sector we see some opportunity through our research is better ethnic/cultural focused Social Networks in countries like America, Canada, England and Europe. Possibly. But there are services for those markets (BlackPlanet and Migente are two) and the revenue opportunities may be limited based on demographics and adoption.

Our advice then is, work within a Social Network to build community if that’s your goal (here’s an example). For big brands, I’ve yet to see a sustainable model – the reality is, once the brand has accomplished it’s marketing objective, are they really going to want to spend the money required to maintain that presence? Not likely.

I started hearing the word “citizen” as a replacement vernacular for “consumer” a year or so ago and decided to put our research engine on it. Researching over 300 prime blog entries where this has been discussed, the “volume” of discussion over the past 12 months has increased by 78% over August of 2008. A significant uptick happened just after the primary market crashes last year.

Based on reading 46 of the 300 blogs I tagged here’s what it seems “citizen” has come to mean. Essentially, the “consumer” is now able to self-define who they are and what they want. Social Media tools like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Ning etc., have given the Post-Industrial defined consumer a voice. This “voice” has caused significant upheaval in the traditional marketing and communications aspect of corporations in the developed world. The Motrin Moms issue, the most recent Honda/Facebook mess and more. CEO’s have lost their jobs, stocks have plummeted or shot skyward.

As the population increasingly engages on the Web, they are drawn to Social Media tools. About 3 years ago some research by PEW Internet showed people went online to browse, buy products (consume) or do research. There’s was little to actively “do” there. Now, with Social Media tools and services, people are finding there voices.

As a result of this, consumers are re-defining the way they have been seen by the Corporation. Yes, we are still in the true sense “consumers” for we buy. This is changing, but it is far too early to truly define “how” and to what degree – we simply lack any historical or empirical evidence. Yet.

The other word that “citizen” is replacing is the old early computing days term “user”; people don’t see themselves as “users” they are (as we’ve called them for years now) participants. Should we perhaps use the term “neo-citizen”? To describe the rise of the New Citizen? Or are we just ignoring reality and we’re still just the same old consumer with a fancy name?

So the concept of “citizen” has become a societal meme; we say citizen because in this wonderful democratic world of developed nations, the concept of “citizen” implies having a voice and rights.

From my anecdotal research and not being a social anthropologist, what the evidence points to is a significant shift in consumer perceptions – the “people” do not want to be voiceless consumers anymore. The general population that is connected and has shared, created, collaborated, has begun to define themselves.

This is perhaps a “tipping point” for corporations and any large organization to be cognizant of. I don’t presume to have any suggestions on exactly how things will turn out…but I’m sure that together, as citizens, we’ll figure it out.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)