Grounded In Reality

From being a site virtually nobody had heard about six months ago, Facebook has exploded into everyday life in Norway.

Popularity

For a country with a mere 4.5 million citizens, 300,000 members in the “Norway” network is nothing less than impressive.  As a comparison, the “Denmark” network has 13,000 members and the “Sweden” network has 79,000 members, countries with a population of 5.4 million and 9 million respectively.

In fact, the “Norway” network ranks fourth overall on Facebook, after the Toronto, London, and Vancouver networks, according to a story on Gridskipper July 10th.  Since this data was released, the network has grown with another 20,000 members.

Facebook has grown by some 2,700 percent in Norway over the last few months and keeps growing.  Granted, it has been the rainiest summer ever, but the main reason for Facebook’s popularity is probably the hype and media attention.  A news search on the Norwegian search engine Sesam (http://www.sesam.no/) shows that 1,779 stories have mentioned the phenomena, and although the first story was back in 2005, all but two are from the last year, and a majority of these are from the last four or five months.

In addition, Norwegians are both tech savvy and blessed with good infrastructure. The country had 3.14 million internet users in 2006, according to the CIA World Factbook, a number that is still increasing.  Most of these internet users are on a broadband connection and 98.3 percent of Norwegian households have access to broadband services.

Waterwar outlawed

The Facebook group “Vannkrig 2007″ (translation: Waterwar) was started in March, and urged people to show up in the Vigeland Park in Oslo bringing water guns on July 28. After 12,000 people joined the group, and several thousand stated their intent to show up, the group applied for a permit from the county, which was denied.  Apparently, a wedding the same day does not go well with super-soakers. Still, the group plans to show up, considering it is a public park, which again has prompted reactions from the county.  Security guards and an increased police presence is likely to be in place at the end of the month, in addition to one nervous bride.

So is Facebook here to stay? For now it is…perhaps until the next big thing comes along.

Fredrik Johnsen
GCI Oslo

With automobiles being such a community driven and brand loyal product, it’s encouraging to see a car manufacturer finally jumping at the chance to offer a digital media hub for its enthusiasts.

Chevrolet launched a comprehensive social media campaign with the release of Chevynation.com. The site features user-generated as well as branded videos, links to MySpace pages of fellow Chevy owners and six distinct channels of content aimed at different segments of Chevy drivers—all compliments of the Warren, Michigan-based agency, Campbell-Ewald.

OMMA magazine interviewed three digital creative managers about Chevynation.com in their July issue. The trio consisted of Agency.com’s Mat Zucker, Mick O’Brien of Digitas and Atmosphere BBDO’s Arturo Aranda. The results were positive for Chevrolet.

Here are some notable excerpts:
OMMA: What are your initial thoughts?
O’Brien: It’s got a really cool vibe – the feel is almost one of nostalgia. This isn’t the right reference, but it almost has this American Graffiti feel to it where cars are king, and your car is an extension of yourself.
OMMA: Each channel offers a link to a MySpace page. Is this the best vehicle for community, or should Chevy have built a community of its own?
Zucker: I think it’s smart for brands to integrate with existing communities rather than create their own. The Web is an open, interconnected network of communities, and brands are smart to connect. The more you do that, the more successful you’re going to be.
OMMA: Do you see potential for this site to grow and evolve?
O’Brien: Definitely. What’s interesting about the city metaphor is you can put up a new building and take one down. Cities are living, breathing things.
Aranda: Yeah, that’s what’s great about building this idea of community, embodied within a city – it’s modular, you can keep on updating areas and nobody is going to question if a whole building or a whole storefront starts to shift or evolve.

Not only did Campbell-Ewald create a community atmosphere, they did it with such amazing graphics and attention to detail that it would make any true car lover grasp their shamee in delight.

Christy Leger
Austin, Tx

Four weeks ago, Facebook, with 25 million users, launched a new strategy to be a technology platform where anyone can build applications for social computing–with one clever caveat, that all third-party applications, if approved, will be routed through Facebook’s servers. This, together with the carte blanche rights to monetize these applications through ad dollars, are good causes for businesses to revisit their social networking strategy.

Marc Andreessen has a brilliant analysis of the Facebook Platform. Here are my three cents concerning the business implications of Facebook applications:

1. Ease of use: It’s amazingly easy to add applications with a single click, and like widgets, applications serve a single, non-ambiguous purpose. Q: What campaign initiatives might be communicated in such a compact, eye-candy fashion?
2. Applications are intelligent: Because they have to be pre-approved by Facebook, my applications are linked to and have access (with my permission) to the information that I have previously shared. Q: How to build on this consumer behavioral data and design a targeted, personalized campaign?
3. Naturally viral: I am cued to new applications that my friends have added thanks to updates from the News Feed. (Think of News Feed as a wire service for what my friends are up to.) In other words, applications come recommended by “word of mouth” as friends observe each other. Q: What’s a meaningful, mention-worthy application that makes the user look good (think ‘Live Strong’ bracelet) among friends?

Additionally, having likely learned from MySpace, Facebook has provided easy-to-use privacy settings for all applications.

InformationWeek wrote an interesting article this week about the latest generation of college grads entering the workforce and what technology they expect to be made available while on the job.

I can vouch that there have been times I was not allowed to access technology  necessary for me to be fully capable of doing my job…with a Google Toolbar being the simpliest of things.

IDC research numbers show(ing) that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on.

It is understandable that a company would have progam downloading banned from users, but there should be a policy in place for requesting access to relevant sites/downloads.

She (Susan Feldman) told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people’s social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don’t know about.

“We’ll have to deal with the reality of people coming in and using tools that aren’t in the firewall,” said De Beer. “Web 2.0 empowers users beyond creating content. It’s about how we interact. For the next generation, it will be about mass collaboration, using social networking.”

In my opinion, things will morph.  Just as companies had to create ‘blogging policies,’ they will also have to create other Web 2.0 poilicies. 

Recently, a Danish Ph.D. student, Malene Charlotte Larsen, made a list of perspectives on youngster’s online social networking. The list is extensive and contains 35 perspectives all in all. The perspectives differ a lot from the materialistic perspective to the democratic perspective.

Below I have listed a few of them:

1. The Consumer Perspective
Social networking sites are money-making machines creating a need for added value among young people causing them to spend all their pocket money on extra features such as VIP profiles, widgets, gifts for friends and so on.

10. The Branding Perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people learn the mechanism of branding and learn to sell and brand themselves in a positive manner.

11. The Network Perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people learn the crucial importance of being able to network which they can benefit from in their future professional life.

I like the idea of a list like this. I like (and dislike) a lot of the perspectives. Some of them are real and some are simply opinion. But I’m wondering - are they specifically Danish perspectives? Some of the perspectives are generic, but how about no. 21 The Time Consuming Perspectives or no. 22 The Anti-social Perspective? Are they culturally bound? Does an American and South African teenager or teenage parent share these perspectives?

I must admit that I don’t know the answer to this. But from a communication and marketing point-of-view, it would be valuable knowledge when determining target audience outreach.  With this knowledge viral campaigns and other forms of online communication could be optimized to fit the (global) market they are aiming for.

And I’m sure that with so many social networking sites – there MUST be a lot more perspectives than only 35. When I know them, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, feel free to help.

Kristian Levring Madsen
GCI Mannov, Copenhagen

MySpace is in the news again.  The company announced today it will provide data on registered sex offenders who use the site to eight state attorneys general.  It will be interesting to hear what’s reported.  This will surely fuel further debate about teen use of the site and access in public places like schools and libraries.

Check out the latest social networking application called Fidg’t by Santa Monica-based PROTOMOBL. It brings together all your different social networking tags, profiles, friends’ lists and conversations. Similar to Trillion and Pidgin (formerly Gaim) that integrated different chat applications under one roof, Fidg’t makes it easy for users to control and manage their online social life.

The Fidg’t Visualizer is a cool application that needs to be downloaded and works with Macs, PCs and Linux platforms. There is a central magnet where you type your query or tag. There are white bubbles that represent individual users and networks. The magnet is then drawn towards groups and users who are discussing the tag.

The user interface looks protoplasmic and very edgy in an extraterrestrial way. Apart from its cool looks and fun features, most exciting to me is the fact that it could act as the ‘little black book’ for the media community. You now have access to a central nerve control station of people coming together, talking and sharing ideas. Sounds pretty cool to me!

 Check the video of the Fidgt presentation at Innovate! Europe 2007 fromYouTube… 

Social technographics®–a coin termed by Charlene Li at Forrester Research in a new report about how companies should start thinking about their media campaigns by understanding their audiences rather than beginning by considering the different digital channels and technologies available.

Like all things PR: hello common sense! I mean in a social setting, surely, you wouldn’t talk about the same things, or even use the same language while speaking with your parents as you would with your friends, right? Then why do the same with a media campaign?

It’s interesting to see how the communication strategy roadmap is constantly morphing. In school I was taught, don’t start thinking with the execution. First, think about what you want to achieve and then about what you want to say in order to achive the goal. Now, with the exploding societal effect of Web 2.0, you first start thinking about who your niche audiences are, and then you decide what you want to say to them and finally the how you’d do it.

Just as Steve Rubel mentions, it’s fascinating to see how applicable and appropriate this breakdown of communication strategy can be for a PR professional. Advertising is all nice and entertaining like during the Super Bowl half-time. But, it’s not about engaging your preferred audiences in a conversation as only PR professionals are trained to do.

The tricky/challenging part of this approach however, is that there is no one “right” way of achieving and measuring success. Although personally, I think this, by itself, is a reward on the job! How exciting is it that with a smart and thought out new media campaign we can impact not only perception of our audiences, but also the way they interact and experience these brands!

This constantly changing social technographics® landscape pushes us to think differently not only of the message and the product but also helps us to factor in how our key audiences will use these messages.

A call to action is no longer as simple as “please respond to this email.” It’s more like please respond to this email, post it on your blog, then add a widget about it to your social networking page and then finally discuss it with your family over the dinner table! (or not!)

AP published an interesting article about new social networking sites that target Hispanic youth - a group that’s heavily online (67% of 18-27 year olds) and coveted by marketers. 

These social networks include:

• ElHood.com: bilingual site featuring the latest in Latin music
• Quepasa.com : robust online community featuring news, entertainment, shopping and more
• MiGente.com : site targeting English-speaking Latinos with news, online dating, Monster job searches and professional networking
• Hi5.com : global social networking site available in multiple languages
• Vostu.com : a new alternative to Facebook.com targeting Hispanic high school and college students.

Additionally, MySpace launched a Spanish-language site for U.S. Hispanics and a pan-regional site for Latin Americans.  One of the big questions is - can these smaller social networks compete with the MySpace giant?  Many experts say yes, and I tend to agree.  The Hispanic market is largely untapped, and many of these smaller sites will succeed by focusing on a niche segment of that market.

These emerging social networks present tremendous opportunity for companies trying to connect with young, Hispanic customers in a meaningful way.  And for now, the cost of entry is really low compared to MySpace and Facebook, whose advertising and sponsorship deals have shot through the roof.

I’ve been exploring Twitter, and I came across an interesting application: twittering a TV premiere. During the premiere of FOX’s “Drive” last night, the executive producer and director, Grey Yaitanes, twittered his personal commentary.

There might be something to this for companies to use. If you have an interesting, high-profile person twittering the “inside scoop” on an event or product, people might just tune in.