Mike Brown from Twitter International Growth said that "Australia is a priority market for Twitter".
The event focused on sports and featured Wendell Sailor and Omid Ashtari from Twitter sports and entertainment.
I'll write up some more of my thoughts later when I'm not on an iphone but here are some photos from the Sydney Cricket Ground event this morning.
1. Facebook – 11,500,000 Australian users/accounts (steady - Facebook).
2. YouTube – 11,000,000 UAVs (steady)
3. Blogspot – 3,700,000 (down 100,000)
4. WordPress.com – 2,900,000 (steady)
5. Tumblr – 2,900,000 (steady)
6. LinkedIn – 2,400,000 (up 200,000)
7. Twitter – 2,114,000 Active Australian Users (steady, below formulae/ calculation).
8. Instagram – 1,510,000 Active Australian Users (steady) – using Facebook estimate, see calculation below.
9. TripAdvisor – 960,000 (steady)
10. Flickr – 800,000 (steady)
11. Pinterest – 650,000 (up 10,000)
12. MySpace – 390,000 (steady)
13. Google Plus – approx 377,500 (see calculation below).
14. Yelp – 200,000 (steady)
15. Reddit – 150,000 (steady)
16. StumbleUpon – 100,000 (steady)
17. Digg – 50,000 (down 15,000)
18. Foursquare – 53,000 (down 5,000)
19. Delicious – 30,000 (steady)
* All figures above are UAVs unless otherwise stated.
Facebook in Australia
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) the Australian population is 22,798,149.
Facebook has 11,500,000 Australian users.
This means approximately 50.4% of the total Australian population is signed up to Facebook. Consider that those under 13 years of age are technically not allowed to use the service.
This figure has been continuing to climb over 2012.
Instagram User number Calculation
For a long time the Australian Facebook population was about 1.51% of the total global Facebook user base. If we use this metric to work out how many Australian Instagram users there are:
1.51% of 100 million users globally = 1,510,000 Australian Instagram Users. There is no doubt this service is getting a lot of attention in Australia and we haven’t heard from Facebook any recently updates figures past 100 million global users.
Twitter User number Calculation
Twitter has reported that they have 140 Million Active users globally. If we use the same formulae as Facebook whereby 1.51% of the global population are Australian users – this equates to Twitter having 2,114,000 Active Australian Users.
Twitter hasn’t released any new stats for a couple months, and their ‘Twitter Australia’ Twitter Account has no interest in sharing any specific stats.
Google Plus user number Calculation
Google recently reported that they have 100 million monthly active users on Google Plus. This is actually down on previous figures reported of 150 million active users. Using the Facebook formulae of 1.51% of the total audience being Australian – this simple calculation means there are 1.51 million Australian’s as active users on Google Plus. From my experience and research this level of users is far too high and the true figure would be around 1/4 of this number – 377,500.
Average Time per Visit
1. Facebook - 27 minutes 50 seconds
2. YouTube – 21 minutes 16 seconds
3. Reddit – 15 minutes 58 seconds
4. Twitter – 9 minutes 17 seconds
5. Tumblr – 8 minutes 17 seconds
6. Pinterest - 8 minutes 17 seconds
7. LinkedIn - 7 minutes 41 seconds
8. StumbleUpon - 5 minutes 46 seconds
9. Flickr – 5 minutes 10 seconds
10. Blogspot - 4 minutes 38 seconds
11. TripAdvisor - 4 minutes 18 seconds
12. WordPress.com – 3 minutes 50 seconds
13. Delicious – 3 minutes 15 seconds
14. Foursquare - 2 minutes 56 seconds
15. MySpace – 2 minutes 51 seconds
16. Yelp – 2 minutes 34 seconds
17. Instagram – 1 minute 57 seconds
18. Digg – 1 minute 47 seconds
19. Google Plus – no data.
Key Points to Note:
Stats via http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/
Customer insight has always been valuable but now, social technologies make it possible for companies to engage in realtime with individual customers.
Traditional market data shows how a customer interacts with your organisation-loyalty card data, POS scan data, demographic info.
Social technologies now make it possible to add how customers engage with the rest of the world through Facebook likes, blog comments and Youtube 'most played' lists.
As companies in a customer's ecosystem improve their social muscle, their expectation of how customer service should work will increase. To say 'we're not Zappos' or 'we're not equipped for 24/7 social support" is not going to matter to a customer.
The IBM 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, shows that organizations are still focused primarily on understanding markets, not individual customers.
More than 80 percent of CMOs rely on market research and competitive benchmarking to make strategic decisions. While these traditional sources of information are still valuable, they offer little insight into individual customers. In contrast, blogs, consumer reviews and other unstructured online sources can reveal customer sentiment at a personal level, in context. However, relatively few CMOs are exploiting these new sources: only 26 percent track blogs, only 42 percent track third-party reviews and only 48 percent track consumer reviews.
The gap between technology and adoption will always exist. However, continuing to treat 'social' as a subset of marketing and not understanding the magnitude of the changes required will cause many strong companies to run aground as agile competitors emerge and set new standards of customer servicing and product development.
The Guardian is doing a lot of work on 'data journalism' to drive traffic and clicks to site.
Most companies have a lot of raw data and some have software that can group and benchmark (Media Monitors, Google analytics, Radian6), but raw data sets aren't very helpful.
Have a look at some of the work that they've done for the Olympics and think about the resourcing requirement you need to publish this kind of content.
From a functional perspective, you'll need a data analyst, a journalist or editor and a graphic designer.
You'll need a data analyst to receive the brief from the journalist about the story they're trying to tell e.g. "I want to see the top 12 things the data is showing us from the Olympics."
The analyst can then pull the data and decide with the journalist the best way of presenting the information e.g. infographic.
The analyst and journalist can then brief a graphic designer to produce the infographic or charts in time for the deadline-you need to make sure the information is timely for the news event.
Once the final visual is agreed, then the journalist can write the story around the data and publish to site. Online and social teams can push out the story and drive conversations and traffic across company channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google +.
What does your company do with its data and how do you tell the stories around it to add value to customers?
The global advertising market is expected to grow from $434 billion in 2010 to $588 billion in 2015, increasing on average by 6.2 percent per annum (2011-2015).
The correction is welcome after the hard trading of 2008-09.
The PWC segment categories are a little confusing with digital and social grouped into the generic category of 'internet' which doesn't provide a lot of insight; focusing on the channel rather than the device.
The Forbes VSS Industry Forecast 2011-2015 predicts 5.7% growth with consumer internet and mobile fueling spend at 18.1%. PWC predicts around half this at 9.6%.
The PWC newspaper growth rates between 1.0 and 2.5% seem optimistic considering the revenue drags experienced throughout the US and major restructure announcements in the Australian industry. The Forbes VSS Industry Forecast 2011-2015 predicts a global decline of 3.8% which seems more realistic.
Static numbers in outdoor and trade media support the theory that digital will continue to extend the media mix rather than cannabalise it-encouraging news for both media companies and agencies.
The challenge now is for the media companies to redesign their organisations as quickly and painlessly as possible so they can deliver advertising products that work. Traditional revenues are still well behind what's needed to transition to digital and the people managing the heavily siloed structures are not designing products that reflect consumer media consumption.
How fast newer players such as Google, Facebook and Twitter can design and sell ad products that will compete for significant amounts of spend (10%+) still remains uncertain.
Many brands today are posting on Facebook as a means of connecting with their customers and prospects. However, very few have mastered the basics such as the ideal post length, use of imagery, use of color and linking. When used correctly, these small improvements will add up to increased engagement on your posts and extend the viral reach of your messages.
So, what makes a perfect Facebook post? Let this blueprint be your guide.
I love this first image showing a lone, stone-throwing protester going up against an armored vehicle.
An anti-government protester throws objects at a riot police vehicle in the port city of Suez, about 134 km (83 miles) east of Cairo, January 27, 2011. Police fired rubber bullets, water cannon and tear gas at hundreds of demonstrators in Suez on a third day of protests calling for an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year-old rule. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El-Ghany.
I've gone through and grabbed a couple of screens I saw throughout the night as the overthrow continues.
New sources use a Tweetdeck screen and Trendsmap to show citizen journalists reporting live.
The Egyptian government cuts internet and mobile phone access yet Al-Jazeera is determined to keep Tweeting; broadcasting through landline conveyed messages until their satellite is restored.
Someone offers medical assistance via Skype and users share screens so that locals can see international, non State-controlled media via the web.
Egyptians organise around Facebook groups and the world supports their profiles with messages of solidarity.
User mock the Eqyptian regime and work to restore communications and send out information.
Welcome to the brave new world of social media.
There’s a new phrase that’s going around and I’m not convinced that it’s a good thing. The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”
Shaquille O’Neal
Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.
“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.”
In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.
But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.
Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.
Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Facebook. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he has hired two people to update his blog. “It’s just like how a designer would work,” he said.
It is not only celebrities who are forced to look to a team to produce real-time commentary on daily activities; politicians like Ron Paul have assigned staff members to create Twitter posts and Facebook personas. Candidate Barack Obama, as well as President Obama, has a social-networking team to keep his Twitter feed tweeting.
The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.
The basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, for example, is a prolific Twitterer on his account — The Real Shaq — where he shares personal news, jokes and occasional trash talking about opponents with nearly 430,000 followers.
“If I am going to speak, it will come from me,” he said, adding that the technology allows him to bypass the media to speak directly to the fans.
As for the temptation to rely on a team to supply his words, he said: “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”
Athletes seem to be purists. Lance Armstrong, only hours after breaking his right collar bone, tweeted about it, using his left hand. Charlie Villanueva, a forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, tweeted at halftime from the locker room on March 15 about how “I gotta step up.” (His coach, Scott Skiles, was not pleased with his diversion, but the Bucks did win.)
But for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain. During the presidential campaign, said Jesse Benton, Mr. Paul’s campaign manager, “we assigned a staffer to each social network site. Each was used to generate the same message as a way to amplify the message and drive people back to our site.”
He said that in rare cases, however, supporters would read more meaning in the online relationship than was intended. “On a bunch of social-networking sites, we would get some sincere written notes that would say ‘thank you for letting me be your friend,’ ” he recalled.
Many online commentators are appalled at the practice of enlisting ghost Twitterers, but Joseph Nejman, a former consultant to Ms. Spears who helped conceive her Web strategy, said there was a more than a whiff of hypocrisy among critics.
“It’s O.K. to tweet for a brand,” he said, remarking how common it is for companies to have Twitter accounts, “but not O.K. for a celebrity. But the truth is, they are a brand. What they are to the public is not always what they are behind the curtain. If the manager knows that better than the star, then they should do it.”
In the last couple of months, the Britney Spears Twitter stream has become a model of transparency. Where the feed once seemed that it was all written personally by Ms. Spears — even the blatantly promotional items about a new album — lately it can read like a group blog, with some posts signed “Britney,” some signed by “Adam Leber, manager” and others by “Lauren.” That would be Lauren Kozak, social-media director of britneyspears.com. (Ms. Spears’s management team declined to be interviewed for this article.)
An unabashed user of ghost Twitterers is Guy Kawasaki, chief executive of alltop.com, an aggregation site. Mr. Kawasaki, with more than 80,000 followers, is full of praise for the two employees who enliven his Twitter feed, often posting updates while he is on stage addressing a conference.
“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”
Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago who is one of Mr. Kawasaki’s ghost Twitterers, said she judged her performance based on how often her postings for Mr. Kawasaki are “retweeted,” that is, resent by other users of Twitter.
Recently, she said, she had a coup when the actor Ashton Kutcher repeated her post about a YouTube video showing someone getting high from a “natural hallucinogen.”
“Facebook is like ‘Cheers,’ where everyone knows your name,” she said. “Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people.”
She said she had been considering trying to get other ghost Twitter clients. “I don’t think I could ghost Twitter for 100 people,” she said. “More like 10 clients. I think I would have to get to know them.”
