Research, Thunking•
on July 20th, 2010•
In its broadest context, Social Media is not an invention of the past five years. Newsgroups, forums, Instant Messaging, email and bulletin boards have existed in various forms since the early 1970’s. By early 2004 platforms such as Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress came along and the need to know how to “code” melted away into the background.
As blogs arose into the wider human condition through traditional news media, so did the pundits and then came the “guru’s” and social media “experts” touting their expertise because they’d blogged a few times.
But then many voices joined that mob. Some hilarious, some idiot and some far more insightful and a few, very practical. I’ve always enjoyed Chris Brogan for his ability to draw people in and truly engage in discussion, Dan Zarella for his more methodical approach backed by credible science and Jeremiah Owyang for his networking and Sasha Halima for her witty insights. But there are many, many more. Hey, we’ve even joined the dialog over the past three years.
So in the spirit of theoretical thunking, it would seem that Social Media in it’s broadest sense truly is a medium developed by many, many voices. Perhaps more than ever before in the history of mankind. After all, just how many people can you fit in a cave to draw pictograms? And you can’t really carry a cave around and show people your work can you?
It’s this massive scalability that is most fascinating and the fact that anyone at anytime can add their thoughts and insights, as long as they have a computer or some form of device that enables connection and interaction with the Web. That’s quite astounding when you step back and think about it.
Social Media as a “medium” then, most certainly is evolved by the people for the people.
As a social intelligence firm, we do a lot of research; that’s our life blood. So naturally, we look at trends and broader “uses” of Social Media technologies. Blogs are a key element in our research and here’s what we noticed this past year in how blogs have evolved.
A recent study by PEW Internet suggests about 11% of online people in the U.S. actively blog and of that only about 23% actually read blogs. Our findings are similar though we note Canada has a higher % of bloggers active. What we wanted to look at however, was the least and most successful blogs; how they have evolved in terms of architecture and usage.
Length: We found that of the most successful blogs, 87% tended to be 250 words or less in length for each posting. The longer the paragraphs, the less successful the blog.
Links: Blogs with higher search engine rankings have more outbound links with an average of 3.5 outbound links per blog post.
Video Blogs: Video blogs (vlogs) over 3 minutes in length tend to be viewed less. Our study group reported they would view a video blog an average of 64 seconds.
Comments: The top blogs in our research saw an average of 10 comments per posting across the board. We noted that 75% of the time these were simple statements of agreement and 8% of the time a form of conversation would take place in the comment sections. We also noted that 22% of the time in comments, they would go off topic. With video blogs, comments tended to be shorter (4-8 words 92% of the time) than on text blogs.
Media Mix: We noted that bloggers who mix images, video and text had a higher rate of comments (31.4% of the time) than plain text.
Business Blogs: Here we looked at blogs written “by” a business, that is, not an individual who is a consultant, but a business with multiple employees, even an enterprise. They averaged less outbound links (1.5) per post and had an average of 3 comments per post and less engagement. We distinctly separated business blogs because they skewed our findings. We also found businesses tended to be less frequent in posting (62% less) than individuals and only 14% of business blogs ever had the author respond to comment strings after a post.
Our summary is that blogs have become shorter and “snappier” as our online attention span seems to be getting shorter as well. The comprehensive data is for clients, but we wanted to share the highlights of our findings.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Media Analysis•
on July 23rd, 2008•
All other issues around metrics, guidelines and methods aside, perhaps a key underlying question around Social Media might be; is there enough people participating in a way that matters to corporations and governments? Part two of that question might be; and is it local enough?
Social Media is part of our business, so of course our objective is to say “yes” to both posed questions. Saying “no” would be shooting ourselves in the foot. Our position is “yes” because we’ve done the research to validate our business case (we’ve identified some niches the competition hasn’t, but we can’t say anything yet on that front.) So why do we pose that there is enough mass? And what do others in Social and Traditional Media think?
Obtaining precise numbers on blogs and microblog usage is challenging at the very least. We can say there’s roughly 50 million blogs and upwards of 200 Million+ people active on Social Networks, blogs and microblogs on a regular basis. Then there’s mobile social networking, where research firm eMarketer estimates roughly 2.7% of Americans use mobile Social Network apps, and our research indicates about 1% of Canadians (Canada has the worlds highest mobile data fees, reducing uptake significantly) use mobile Social Network apps. All of these areas are growing in usage. There are also 40+ companies that are active in the Social Media monitoring market, indicating a growing market segment. of those 40, roughly 95% are less than two years old. Suggesting an early-stage market.
Quickly and anecdotaly then, we can conclude that the mass is there. People are using Social Media and everything points to an increasing use. Patterns are still developing, acquisitions starting to occur and battles are raging over “measurement” and “monetizing” of Social Media. But that’s another topic.
So then, are people participating in a way that matters to businesses or governments? Given the CNN/YouTube Debates in the U.S., the forcing of Rogers to lower it’s iPhone pricing in Canada in less than a week through Social Media pressure, the CEO of JetBlue losing his job due to Social Media reaction – all point to evidence that yes, there is enough mass. Governments and businesses, along with other institutions are justified in their growing concern.
Is it “local” enough to matter to smaller businesses and municipal governments? Soon we think. As “local search” improves and newspapers move more services on line, locally Social Media will begin to matter more and more. There may be other reasons local social media matters as well and we welcome views on this. So yes, the evidential actions and supporting usage statistics would say – Social Media matters. The tipping point has been reached.
Media Analysis•
on July 10th, 2008•
Using our Alpha version of MediaBadger, we’ve uncovered over 200,000 negative comments ( with 43 semi-supportive comments) surrounding the consumer issue of iPhone pricing in Canada. We’ve tracked responses in the online presence of Traditional Media sites (over 150 articles have been written in newspapers), over 15 video sharing sites and 30+ blogs devoting significant time and effort over this issue. All within the past 7 days. This is a significant traffic load surrounding a single issue. It is showing the power of Social Media to drive Traditional Media agenda’s. The story even hit over 40 U.S. news feeds including CNN and Washington Post and of course Infinite Loop. Our U.S. media coverage tracking shows almost similar numbers but little feedback from U.S. consumers, which is anticipated since they aren’t affected. U.S. consumer sentiment that was given is supportive of Canadian consumers gripes with similar feelings towards AT&T in the U.S.
From our findings, we believe the initial Transmission Point for the “viral” spread of this issue was ruinediphone.com, an online petition site started by OilChange.com a Toronto based Web design and marketing agency (no doubt a case study in itself on a viral marketing tactic.) One other petition site was started, but ruinediphone.com became the central point. Our tracking shows this petition site was posted on numerous blogs and moved through IM services, Facebook and email. Traditional media coverage of this site and the story ramped up by 40% within 4 days of the petition site going live.
Rogers response was the issuance of a few press releases stating they would hold with their pricing. Then on July 8th issuing a release stating a price drop, but limiting the “promotion” to a few weeks. While this was positively received it was a mixed bag in sentiment terms and did little to curtail the issue and we noticed a spike in petition signing and the notice by ruinediphone.com of a webcast protest for July 11th, the day the iPhone goes on sale in Canada. We will certainly be monitoring and measuring Social and Traditional Media response and coverage and anticipate a significant spike.
Like the issue with JetBlue last year, we may see that the hotness of the issue in the public mind cools for a week or even three weeks or more, but will likely re-surge. We anticipate this resurgence happening as Social and Traditional Media report on the uptake of the iPhone in weeks to come and consumers provide feedback in the coming weeks via blogs and traditional media websites that encourage feedback in real-time. We will be monitoring the online protest rally on Friday July 11th being hosted by the ruinediphone.com group as well.
Our initial summary on this very topical issue is the increasing convergence between Social and Traditional Media on high-interest issues. Traditional Media picked up this story very quickly and while Social Media garnered significant interest, the responses on Social Media channels increased 48% within 24 hours of coverage by Traditional Media – are we seeing a trend towards equalization or normalization of Social Media as a viable medium of news and information? Possibly. Certainly this puts more pressure on corporate PR and PR agencies to both monitor and respond differently than in the past to these issues. Rogers said very little through this issue in the Mediasphere, it was traditionally handled, but as always the threat of consumer dollars is a powerful and motivating force.