Links this week – Friday June 18th 2010

The Golden Age of mobile and online advertising is here?

Not just iPhone (though still the giant for mobile Facebook usage) that sees mobile Facebook usage. Android usage for Facebook? 7 Million a month.

Webinar: How can Nokia recapture the Youth market. June 23rd.

The PSFK London conference in September has some early bird tickets available. Well worth going to.

Twithority
. Twitter search with results linked to number of followers.

Ford shows off their new car on Facebook first.

Big spenders on social networks? Heavy users. Wonder why Google, Facebook and the like want you online more?

Content Creation – Some thoughts

In this new phase of communications where earned media is the game then you need to not throw about “We’re great, buy our shit now will ya?” messages but instead become a publisher and advertiser. Creating something of use that can perhaps be reused or resent to people. We live in an age where content creation is a democratic idea but so is distribution of it. If you create good content then maybe the community you’re in online will spread it much further and it has more power as it comes from a person they know.

What do you want to get out of this?
If you’re going to invest time and resources creating content you need to be very certain what your endgame is. You need to figure out that if you are going to change the copy of your website, write some blog posts, work on status updates on Facebook or Twitter, that you are doing it for a purpose. For your business. What is that purpose? With your content, is it a way of showing off your authority, is it a case study of how you helped someone out, is it a direct way of making sales, is it a discount on goods, is it information that shows you care about the wider community? Lots of questions. Look at all the ones the communications bible brings up!

Who are those you want to energise?
Forget demographics, ask yourself who are the people you want to create good content for and as a result of good content, they interact with you and even help spread the word? Who exactly is the market for your products and services and what do they like online, on blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums etc.? Use the likes of the Facebook Ad system to figure out the volume of the people you are interested in interacting with and increase that by perhaps 30% for overall Internet numbers.

Themes
After figuring out what you want from working in an online media and who the people you want to work with are then you need a properly considered plan on when and what to send out. You can’t be doing anything adhoc or randomly. Unstructured might be more fun but a plan keeps you on message, allows you to measure how well you’re doing and makes people more comfortable and familiar by the fact you are interacting them on a regular basis. Themes could be a week long education initiative, a week of special offers/discounts, a week of tips on how to use your products more efficiently etc. Themes allow you to be repetitive with your overall message without using the same enforcing updates again and again.

Tweak their bits, get reactions
Interactions here are key. They might be weak emotional engagements but you every comment on a blog, every reply or ReTweet on Twitter, every comment or the weak but effective “Like” on Facebook is someone taking time out to react to your content. Not job done but certainly a recognition of sorts to what you’ve done. So figure out what people like by past experience or see how they presently interact with their friends on Twitter and Facebook, what content gets them going and see can you provide content like that. Getting interactions too might be as simple as asking for them. Solicit opinions with your content, go away from the broadcast type telling of news and lecturing. Ask on Facebook, blogs, Twitter: “What do you think?” “What do you think should be done?”

Update daily, measure weekly
On a weekly basis, evaluate how your content plan is going. Comments on the blog posts, links to the post. Interactions on Facebook using the Insights option. Views on your YouTube video, links to the video on YouTube. To start with you’ll be in prospecting mode, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. From that you’ll become more experienced with this, making it easier to gear up and plan well in advance and having much better knowledge what will work based on what worked before. The Insights tool especially will tell you what age groups and genders are being responsive and which are not which should give you crucial data on what to change and what to keep.

Content Curation
Knowing what people like, you can be the one that acts like a mini-newsfeed for them. Summarising industry news, interesting blog posts, showing videos they might like etc. Think of the daily papers they have on Newstalk or Morning Ireland, can you do the same with websites that apply to your area? The Fluffy Links blog posts I write are one such example of content curation.

Zeitgeists
Budgets, breaking news, elections, Apple products, volcanoes – They all impact people and all give us the opportunity to share our take and our authority on issues. Also, when you think about it, the marketing for these events has been done by the media already so it’s a nice opportunity to tie in to something relevant if you also have something relevant to add to the mix.

Links this week – June 7th 2010

Clever. Nice iPhone app from the Tate that incorporates fun games too so there’s learning/experiences being created.

So per capita, Ireland is in the top 15 countries worldwide for Facebook penetration.

Tips on how to produce a Webinar that works.

TV shows and Facebook and Twitter. Update as you watch.

The new True Blood Season 2 Blu-ray Disc has a social networking feature that fans of the HBO series can really sink their teeth into: automatic updates to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Making your video news more discoverable: best practices for news publishers. Equally applies to loads of other segments too.

Links this week – May 24th 2010

Want to find mass influencers? Find: Rich, iPhone waving, young people

Games and Apps on Facebook will now be able to send email invites to play the game (and join Facebook)

Online campaigns influenced UK voters, it seems.

Ten guidelines for running an online competition.

Passing the 100+ (genuine) followers on Twitter threshold is good for business.

Is marketing on Twitter a waste of time? Seems not.

Old but fantastic all the same. Watch the real-time purchasing map from Zappos.

Facebook Ireland brings in City Targeting

There are 1.5 Million people using Facebook in Ireland. Almost 1 Million of them use it on a daily basis. There are lots of other stats we can dig out from Facebook and some are below. As of today you can see details of people in cities and get some pretty sweet extra demographics from a system that allows you to get details on age, gender, work, education, interests, birthday and whether they like your brand on Facebook already.

Facebook Ireland City Targeting

Lots and lots of cities and towns, here’s just some for Cork:
Facebook Ireland City Targeting

And the healthy stats as of publication:
1,575,720 people who live in Ireland
920,880 who live in Dublin, Cork, Limerick or Galway

699,800 people who live in Dublin
87,560 people who live in Cork
61,040 people who live in Limerick
70,320 people who live in Galway
90,980 people who live in Belfast

With this we can send targeted ads to people that use Facebook. Examples: Offer Leaving Cert grinds to kids in Cork. Offer last minute meal deals to people in Galway that like Italian food. Offer county themed T-Shirts to GAA fans in Donegal. Little bit of imagination and you can see how much fun it can be.

That’s ads. Expect to eventually do status updates targeted by Cities and location. Facebook interactions and marketing based on location details is around the corner too so stay tuned. Once you digest that and start to play with the ad system, remind yourself about Foursquare too.

Links for the week April 26th 2010 – Stats

By the numbers…

Social networking now more traffic and time than email. Still more people with emails than accounts on Facebook, for now.

Twitter stats. Amazing stats at that.

105,779,710 registered users
600 million searches per day
180 million unique visitors per month
37 percent of active users use Twitter on their phones

Tumblr hits 1BN pageviews a month.

Foursquare and the History Channel adding some history to Foursquare locations.

Fascinating insight into what works on Facebook for marketing.

Links for the week of April 19th 2010

RTÉ versus print news websites. Wrong battle lads and the wrong war perhaps.

Kings College Hospital asks the public to tell it how to improve.

10 tips for non-profits on facebook.

Meanwhile using Twitter for non-profits.

Google and Adwords and remarketing.

Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

Measure it! – May 5th – Dublin

Update: Measure it! takes place in the Odeon Bar, Harcourt Street on May 5th from 10am to 12pm.
Second update: It’s a free event.

Measure it!
One needs an exclamation mark to make your event more exciting. In the spirit of MeasurementCamp, we’ll be hosting an event around social media and measurement and we’ll call it “Measure it!”. Two hours, 10am-12pm. Two ten minute case studies which will concentrate on the measurement of campaigns, we’ll break you into groups to do a task then we might wrap up with a Q&A.

Who’s it for?
PR companies, marketing companies, individuals, organisations, monkey trainers (if you have a Twitter account), people wanting to figure this social media lark out.

Sign up in the comments
If you want to come along, leave a comment over there ->

And yes, there’s space for us all.