Google+ Gets a Check+ Part 1

The Fourth of July holiday weekend was ruined for most of us by the launch of Google+. In just 4 days the new social platform by Google has exploded. Of course many have still not seen it as it is in real beta (as opposed to Gmail’s multi-year beta status) and the company was so overwhelmed with invitation requests that they’ve had to bottleneck entrance to the system.

WTF?!

Google+ was launched on June 28 following a little over a week in which slight changes to Google were spotted. It is essentially a status/content wall similar to Facebook’s that aggregates Google+ content from people you’re connected to in Google apps, Gmail, etc. You can visit the home page to request an invite and I think they’re giving priority to those who request an invite that have already been added by multiple people already using Google+. That would seem to be the case considering how many of my social media colleagues are signed up but few non-industry friends are. It would make sense from a marketing standpoint as we’re all early adopters and influencers to some degree.

Functionality

Keep in mind that this is beta and some nice folks from Google have already told us they’re taking feedback and making changes rapidly as we go.

The Navigation Bar
The first thing you’ll notice is that the new Google bar that you’ve been seeing now begins with +Michael. You can still reach your Gmail, docs, etc, but the +Username will take you to Google+. The right side of the bar gives you an account dropdown with an alert box that turns red when you have a notice. The Share field allows you to post a quick note (like a Tweet or status update), followed by more in-depth settings. It’s an efficient and compact design. It reminds me of something.

Stream
The Stream is similar to Facebook with far more control and is your main Google+ UI much like your FB Wall. You can view your stream with all of your contacts or, with a simple click, see only content from the Circle, or group, you want. More on Circles in a moment. You essentially get the same functionality with your stream as with Facebook Groups or Twitter Lists but with a far superior user experience.

Email
A quick word about Google+ and it’s effect on your email: Once you sign up for Google+ go into the settings quickly and change what you wish to receive alerts on. Every comment in your stream will send an alert to your email. So, unless you want your Gmail account to blow up, make this change soon.

Circles
Google+ allows you control over your contacts like never before. With Facebook you get a few settings that give you the ability to lump contacts into one of a very few categories with no overlap. The problem with this is that human relationships and communications are much more complicated. I’ve written and spoken in depth about this, theorizing that the next big social network would take more realistic human relationship dynamics into account, even going so far as to begin building out the concept behind a possible startup. The fact is that Facebook’s founder and many of it’s young programmers don’t have the depth of experience with human relationships that us old folks have, especially those with some background in psychology, sociology, or mental health.

Circles allow you to create custom groups and organize your contacts into them. Not only can you put a contact into a group, you can out them into multiple groups, say, co-workers AND colleagues, or client AND friends. Once a contact is in this group you can control what content they see and don’t see. I’ve attempted to load 100+ into a circle at once and the platform froze. I haven’t figured out the exact limit but more than 20-30 at once is fine.

 

Simply drag a user into a Circle to add them, the number in the Circle will change. You can drag a user to the gray Circle to create a new one, or just click on it.

You can click on a Circle to open it to add members this way, remove members or rename the group or description.

You can sort users of a single Circle by first name, last name or relevance.

Make sure you’ve updated your Google profile with an avatar or you look like one of these faceless gray icons.

Profile
Your Google+ profile simply pulls content from your existing Google profile. If you’ve been too busy with Twitter and LinkedIn, you might want to go back and clean up your Google profile. You don’t want to be one of the graphic heads as seen above! Your G+ (I”m getting sick of typing Google+) profile has several sections:

Posts – what you’ve posted.

About – this is your Google profile content as Introduction with fields for Bragging Rights, Occupation, Employment.

Photos – you can create albums here just like in Facebook. It automatically creates an album for all photos from your posts. I haven’t tested the file limit yet but will soon.

#1′s – this are posts that you’ve #1′d or Liked, or whatever we’re calling it.

Buzz – this is essentially everyone that you follow or that follows you.

You will see a smattering of people you’ve put in Circles, and those that have added you. On the right you can add as many links as you want, the major ones like Facebook and Twitter come with icons.

 

As delve deeper I’ll show you more of the UI and functionality behind Google+. Stay tuned!

Search Versus Social Media Results

Few companies are willing to post numbers or results from their search engine and social media engagements. This leaves a ton of forums full of people asking what works, what doesn’t, what kind of results they can expect, etc. and no one is sharing answers. Some numbers can’t be shared for competitive reasons: how much you spent on a campaign, your exact numbers, elements of your strategy, etc., but some can. In the charts below the actual volumes have been removed but there is still some very strong data that I’d like to share with you that will hopefully help inform brand and agency strategists.

Data

This data is very specific to my current employer, a financial software company, and some very specific tactics that have been undertaken. The company has a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presence. While we Tweet, Facebook, and Linked at least once a day, based on some of the earlier number we received we decided to run ads on LinkedIn. Leveraging these channels as well as spending a good amount of time creating content and optimizing our website for search engines has led to the following findings:

Our Unique Visits from LinkedIn far outweigh traffic from other referring sites. To be clear, these results are outside of direct visits or referring sites like outside blogs, portals, even traffic from our own newsletter. They are merely focused on the traffic from Google, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Very often people swill stop investigating here. Focusing on the site sending them the most traffic. But, that traffic isn’t always qualified traffic. In the chart on the right, it’s clear that while our Page Views from LinkedIn users outweigh those from Facebook and Gmail, we get a much larger number of page views from Twitter and Google. To me, this means these sources contain visitors that are much more engaged, qualified and interested in our content.

As you can see above, LinkedIn represents our greatest percentage of new users. Gmail may sound a bit strange except that my company uses Gmail as our email tool so any clicked link in our email signatures or included in the body of an email  shows up as a visitor. This is very important since it remains one of our primary sources of communications and sales. Combined with data concerning Unique Visitors we can differentiate which sites give us more repeat traffic versus which sites give us more new traffic. An important distinction when deciding which marketing messages go to which sites. Bounce Rate isn’t a huge concern primarily because our site is information, not ecommerce. This means that our Call to Action (CTA) is for the user to call or email our business intelligence team rather than visit another page. However, when combined with Page Views and Time on Site, it is a good indicator of user interest or qualification.

Time on Site indicates how long a person spend on the site. It’s interesting to note how closely this mimics the number of page views. The first observation is pretty obvious since reading more pages would take more time, but then again, you could take more time reading a single page.

Findings

Initially Twitter looked like a bit of a loss for us. We got a minimal amount of traffic, and to be honest, our audience isn’t really that prolific on Twitter. However, if you look closely, even though visitors from Twitter were minimal, they had the largest amount of page views and a close second for number of pages visited. This means that we’ll continue to cultivate traffic through Twitter hoping for a growth in visits.

I mentioned that we ran a set of 3 ads on LinkedIn for the company. Despite the hype around Facebook ads, based on earlier numbers concerning bounce rate, time on site, pages visited, and contextuality we decided not to run ads on Facebook. LinkedIn ads allowed us to zero in on a highly defined group of users based on industry (we’re a very small niche of the financial industry), countries, states, even gender. LinkedIn best practices says “good ads have a CTR greater than 0.025%“. Our rates were .056%, .074%, and .087%. Our ads worked. We opted for a CPC (Cost Per Click) model rather than a CPM (Cost Per Impression). It’s a good thing, our impressions were 1300 times what our clicks were. Since clicks show interest, and impressions may not even be seen, this made sense to us. In addition our average click cost was actually half of what our click bid was!

Recommendations

Clearly this data is not going to define your strategy. It is unique to our company, not even our industry. I do hope that it will help inform you. You may decide we are nuts not to be advertising on Facebook, or convinced that we’re just not using Twitter effectively enough. All possible. Unfortunately digital strategy, for all of it’s data, still requires much experimentation. I encourage you to experiment, track your numbers (but don’t get wrapped up in daily results, look at trends), and define a respectable schedule to gather data over. Decisions shouldn’t be made over a few days’ worth of data, but over a few months, keeping in mind global events, holidays, etc.

Good luck.

A Visualization is Worth a Thousand Words

The phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words” is one that I’ve heard and used thousands of times, mostly to convince clients that  the right image, or diagram can convey pages worth of text content. We can learn a lot from an image: messaging, intent, emotion, value, connection, etc. It’s easy to tell what we can learn from a diagram, they are merely illustrations to convey a specific idea or process. Recently LinkedIn launched a beta feature called InMaps. InMaps are essentially a visualization of your LinkedIn network.  I posted a screenshot on the SoMe Friends group I started on Facebook and got a mixed reaction. Mostly folks thought it was interesting but ultimately useless. Oh, but how I disagree!

Everyone’s InMap is unique as it represents their network. Each node represents a person, each line a connection. As you click on each user you can see how they are connected to other people in your network. The larger their circle, the more these folks are connected to others you know, and others you don’t. Their color defines which group they belong to. You also get a side pop-up showing more details about that user including a mini-profile and a few shared connections. I’d love to be able to click on these shared connections to locate them on the map but unfortunately clicking on them only launches their full profile.

Details
Clicking on a node in you InMap while highlight that connection. It draws lines from that connection to other shared connections. You also get a pop-up in the right of the map that gives you a brief bio that includes their current position and employer, a brief list of previous employers, a snip-it of their education and a link to their full profile. You also see a list of a sampling of shared connections with their associated group colors.

Colors
Different groups of users are assigned unique colors. You can label these to better understand where each portion of your network lies. In this image I’ve clicked on friend and former colleague Amy Greenlaw. She and I met as the first hires at a small Boston ad agency. You can actually see most of the team we built if you follow the pink lines including my friend Steve. More on him later.  As you can see, Amy also has orange lines because she is one of my close social media friends (we spend a lot of time drinking together at social media networking events and SXSW), and orange lines because she is part of my list of connections that I consider Social Media Heavy Hitters including Chris Brogan, Scott Monty, and C.C. Chapman.

Size
As you zoom in on specific contacts you can see some size differences in your connections. This indicates a couple things:

• How connected they are to the rest of your network
• How many connections they have in general

How does this help you? It’s a great way to visualize who your most valuable connections are. In this case you can see that Chris Brogan’s circle is almost as large as Amy’s. Now, I am connected to many of the same people as Amy, but Chris is connected to a lot of folks I’m not connected to. He becomes a valuable gateway to people I may want to connect with.

Relationships
Knowing how your connections are related is very helpful. In my case, I have a large group of contact that aren’t very well connected within my network. In this case my boss, Dave Dupre, has many connections to my colleagues at Boston Technologies but only 4 connections outside this group to my network, one of whom is his wife. This may be a great opportunity to introduce Dave to other members of my network or request that introduce me to members of his network. Looking at my InMap I can also see I have some holes that should be filled. Luckily I can see a few people in these holes that may have other connections I can leverage beef up my connections in these areas. One thing that the visualizer doesn’t offer is the ability to edit contacts and their group relationship. My friend Steve worked with me at 2 agencies and is now at Monster.  He’s also a good friend of mine a a pretty close neighbor. I know all of this because he is a friend. For contacts I don’t know as well it would be supremely helpful to be able to reorganize them by geographic location, or where they work now, or where I know them from.

My Wishlist
The only negatives I feel about this visualization are that you can’t change colors of certain contacts or groups of contacts to further organize them. You can see that there are a lot of dark blue connections marked Miscellaneous.  This is a massive group I’d like to break into my connections in PR, in startups, those I know through LinkedIn Groups (how great would it be to organize those connections according to Group?), or through specific companies. I can see this visualizer adding a lot more value as I can get really microscopic in managing it.

• More Colors
• Ability to change a contact’s color
• Overlays to show better relationship status such as Companies, Groups, Location
• Ability to click on color code to isolate groups

I doubt we’ll see too many improvements as this is merely just an experiment the good people at LinkedIn have allowed their staff to create as part of their LinkedIn Labs initiative. Hopefully they’ll keep it around for awhile though, I hate it when companies add a beta feature then yank it. It’s like seeing cool concept cars that will never make it to production. LinkedIn has a few other interesting experiments and beta functions I’ve been playing with like Company Products & Services, LinkedIN Swarm, and Resume builder that I’ll try to review in the coming week or so.

I’m sure the smart folks at LinkedIn can explain InMaps better than I can:

Joe Versus the Volcano

One of my favorite Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movies (that is a category right?) is Joe Versus the Volcano. Hanks plays Joe, an ordinary guy with an ordinary life until he’s told by his doctor that he is terminally ill with a “brain cloud”. A wealth benefactor offers to make his dreams come true in the final stages of his life in exchange for sacrificing himself to the god of tropical islanders. The god is of course the island volcano and the wealth benefactor would get oil or mineral rights from the islanders in exchange for appeasing it’s god. Meg Ryan is in the film merely for comic relief and eye-candy.

The premise of that film has nothing to do with this post but it’s still a fun movie I recommend.

I’m using the title as an illustration of 2 very different geographic locations: Hawaii and Wyoming (and to a degree North Dakota).To me, Wyoming and North Dakota are home to the Average Joe, while Hawaii is of course home to big men with little ukulele’s and tan beautiful women in grass skirts, living at the base of a volcano. Let me qualify the previous generalization by saying I’ve never been to any of those states.

A recent Webtrends overview of Facebook advertising performance offered a few interesting numbers, specifically around the difference in users from Hawaii and those from Wyoming and ND. It found that the Click Through Rate (CTR) of Hawaii was .05% while that of North Dakota was 2.25% and Wyoming 2.9%. That is a pretty wide statistical gap. How else to the 3 states stack up?

State	Hawaii	North Dakota	Wyoming
CTR	.05%	2.25%	2.9%
FB  Population	519,000	287,740	217,940
Population*	532,796	267,621	220,683
HHI	$61,055	$49,450	$52, 010
College Educated	29.7%	25.6%	22.7%
Average Temp	83.9°	53.1°	57.5°

*represents the population 15-44 as the average population on Facebook is 36.

So, there are more people on Facebook in Hawaii than in Wyoming and North Dakota combined. This pretty much matches their population density. Hawaiian household income (HHI) is about $10,000 higher and their percentage of college educated is higher by 4.1% (North Dakota, and 7% (Wyoming). None of these are much of a gap. The largest gap is in the temperature which averages about 30° higher in Hawaii than with of the other states. Could it be that the folks in North Dakota and Wyoming click on more ads because the weather outside sucks and they have nothing better to do (like surfing, swimming, ogling the opposite sex in swimwear and other natural delights)?

Other fun stats include:

• Fans that didn’t attend college click more.
• Fans that attended college are twice as likely to click if a friend does.
• Women are women likely to click on an ad than men, especially as they get older.
• BTW, you know that golden target of 18-24 year-olds that everyone targets? They have the lowest CTR. The highest is 45-64. But that’s another post.

I’m often asked where I get my statistics. Usually for one of two reasons: so someone else can let me do the work of tracking all of this stuff down then posting it on their site without a link back to me or because they think I’m making it up. I’m not sure which is more insulting. Either way, other than the links included in the content, here are the rest of the sites I used for statistical reference:

Facebook usage stats by state
Average weather by state
Household Income by state
College education by state
Population by state

Why Best Practices Are Not

I hear the terms “best practices” and “think-outside-the-box” quite a bit, from colleagues, to vendors, to clients. The problem is, even thought I hear them in the same sentence, they are exact opposites. “Best practices” is a set of standard to be applied to any scenario, in other words: a cookie cutter solution, or an off-the-rack suit. Outside-the-box thinking is a new solution not based on existing standards, a custom suit. While I often find that clients and vendors say “outside-the-box”, they don’t really mean it, they mean something clever that is still very much in-the-box. I get it. I don’t blame them, an economy like the current one isn’t exactly a fertile place for people to take risks.

“Best practices” is a bit more disturbing. The term is being used as a value proposition or a differentiator more and more. The problem is that the world has changed. Social media has changed it. I’m not talking about Twitter and Facebook, or any of the technological aspects of social media, I’m talking about users. How a consumer interacts with a brand or vendor has changed, not just online, but in every facet of their lives. Consumers want communications on their terms. Users won’t just watch your commercial and go to your stored to make their purchase. They’ll Google for reviews, they compare prices, they’ll tweet for feedback, they jump to another brand because they had a better mobile site or switch stores because they got a coupon in the mail that day. People understand the power of the Internet and understand that they can get personalized attention. That understanding has led them to be more critical of customer service not just online or by phone but in brick and mortar stores.

How do you stand by “best practices” when there is so much diversity in the abilities, needs, and desires of your audience? How do you do it when your brand is not like other brands? I read a recent blog on “best practices” that claimed the optimal screen size for a web site’s design should be 1024×768. Well, my mother’s computer would only support 800×600, my go to web browser is 320×356. So, which is  the standard? The fact is, none are. Lazy developers, designers, and marketers like to fall back on “best practices” so they don’t have to do the work of getting to know their audience, or to avoid developing multiple options for different audiences. This blog is set up for 1024×768 as well as 320×356. That’s because I know my audience has a fairly new computer (2-3 years old) or a mobile device.

This is just an example of the problem with “best practices” from a technical web design standpoint, now think about social media. Twitter has alot of trouble telling us how many active users they have. Some access Twitter via www.twitter.com, others through any number of third party sites, desktop and mobile apps, and some through SMS. If this creates a nightmare of technical issues, think about the millions that use Twitter, their interests, their lifestyle, their content, their intentions, their networks. Think about the idea of transparency. That’s a big buzz word among social media experts. It is claimed to be one of the tenants of social media best practices. I just had a lengthy discussion (lengthy for Twitter anyway) with another Boston social media strategist about content of social media. He claimed that venting publicly about your insecurities was a sure way to lose business. In that respect, transparency is not a best practice, clearly you should not be transparent about your insecurities. But as another user commented, this is hypocritical. The originator of the comment claimed that it was fine for Twitter but not for a corporate blog (though Senator McCain would probably disagree with transparency on Twitter being okay). Even just in this one opinion there are significant differences in what is considered best practices on Twitter and best practices on a blog. However, if you’ve found that being honest and open is actually goof for business, how does best practices apply? It doesn’t.

The fact is that everyone is becoming a marketer, if not for their business, then for themselves. And everyone is a consumer, even businesses. Each has to define it’s own strategy according to it’s audience, goals, mission statement, desires, etc. What works for some on Twitter doesn’t work for others on Twitter. Your Facebook widget isn’t going to work on QZone. What feels comfortable for some individuals and brands in social media, doesn’t sit well with others. A soft-sell marketing strategy works for some industries but not others.

So, take your “best practices” and put them back “in-the-box” where they belong because some times you DO have to reinvent the wheel.

Give Your Customers What They Want

While work continues on Gathr.me, I spend alot of time thinking about what users, my customers, will want out of the product. I often blatantly ask, sometimes I just listen. My goal is to develop a product that my users will love. There has been alot of talk among the partners about the need for a desktop version of Gathr.me. Sure, beyond the web and mobile versions, a desktop version seems less important, but it will be important to the users who want a desktop version. That is why we are building Gathr.me in such a way as to accommodate any current platform and device, as well as trying to imagine future ways in which people will want to interface with us.

To make my life easier (or to keep me working everywhere), I’ve been looking at netbooks. Since I’m unemployed, pricing is a huge consideration or I’d just buy a MacBook Pro. Instead, these $2-400 netbooks will fill the gap and allow me to work without being chained to my desk. Of course, I’ve already researched which I can hack and load the Mac OS onto the easiest. Sounds extreme huh? To buy a perfectly good computer, whipe out the Windows OS and replace it with the Mac one? Not if you’ve used the Mac OS, or all your other devices are Mac. But this isn’t the point. The point is, that because Mac doesn’t make a netbook, and I can’t afford their laptops, I’m going to put in the extra work to create a Macenstein of my own. From my research I’ve found this to be a VERY large community. Which begs the question, why isn’t Mac making a netbook? Mac has said they don’t want to play in this space, because it is immature and the current product offerings suck. Odd, I don’t remember their being alot of great mp3 players before the iPod. Sure there were some, but they all kinda sucked. So why isn’t Apple giving their customers what they want? Maybe they just don’t know them well enough?

Speaking of which: I’ve thought for a long time that brands need to get to know their customers better. Social Media provides a great opportunity for this. My car manufacturer, sends me a notice every time I need to check something on my car. But retailers I use, like Target, iTunes, Home Depot, Borders, have ramped up their emails to sell me stuff. Don’t they know I’m unemployed? Facebook, MySpace and other social networks I belong to beat me over the head with singles ads, despite the fact that I’ve been with the same woman for 10 years. Do they know something I don’t, or do they just not know anything?

Even smaller groups targeting me don’t know me well. Today I got my ubiquitous email from Chris Brogan. He is one of a handful of blogs I am subscribed to. Oddly, this email was a subscription drive. If I’m already subscribed, after all, h has my email, why would he need to push me to subscribe? I’m assuming this is some kind of technical glitch, after all, he’s a pretty savvy web2.0 kinda guy.

All of these cases represent the same issue: not giving customers what they want, or giving them what they don’t want or need. This is usually caused by demographics, shallow research, or basing your business model on the “average customer”, not all of your customers. It’s obvious that brands, large or small, need to look at their customers, get to know them better, and deliver products, solutions and communications that they’re asking for.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Marketing

Until very recently business followed a specific plan of engagement with consumers. Beginning with print, then radio, television then the Internet, communications were a one way street. Over the last 15 or so years, all of the existing channels were used to drive traffic to a brand’s website.

As web2.0 behavior and technology evolved brand engagement has changed. It is no longer centered around the brand but around the consumer. At this point the consumer is still receiving your brand messages through the traditional PR, TV, print, radio, web channels, but mostly they are interacting with the web and mobile. They are interacting with radio, TV and PR, rather than just receiving messaging. They are also interacting with social networks, text messengers, blogs, media (video, images, audio) all through desktop applications, web browsers and handheld devices.

Smart brands are engaging consumers at each of these points. As everyone knows, there are more channels of engagement as well as more brands, making it a fight for attention.

This makes it as important as every, to not only be EVERYWHERE your customers are, but to not cop out and do what the other guy is doing. I’ve met with dozens of brands and heard the same reply: who else has done it, prove the outcome, that’s too risky for us, it’s just a fad. Sure, you can wait for the other network to do a Facebook app, ou can wait to see if another manufacturer fails or succeeds on Twitter, but where will that get you? The brands that take the risks, that try the new things, that don’t just follow the crowd, are the ones that grab mindshare by the handful and leave you trailing in their wake.

So, be the brand that stands out, or be the one that gets left behind.

Who’s Responsibility Is Social Media?

15 years ago, when web sites began to appear on the horizon of corporate agendas, there was a great deal of confusion as to who should be reponsible for them. At the time, graphic designers weren’t technically savvy enough and IT specialists didn’t understand design and communications.

It’s around this time that people like me were entering the communications field. We came into web design when it needed a hybrid of design and programming. Of course, a decade later, there are entire departments and companies built around web design manned by highly specialized experts.

Social media is at the same place web design was in the early 90s. There are experts from PR, marketing, and web design all adding social media to their list of responsibilities. Few companies are dedicating positions or departments to social media. Many agencies are adding social media services to their offering, generally giving the responsibility to staff that has shown interest in SoMe. In these companies and agency, even in the industry in general, there is much discussion of who should be responsible for social media: PR, marketing, web design, etc. As a matter of fact, there are articles popping up all over the place discussing what makes a social media expert or poking fun at the idea of a social media expert at all.

In the coming years SoMe will no doubt me staffed by teams of specialists in analytics, character Twitterers, Facebook community managers, and more. It may be some time before social media becomes a must-have of a company’s marketing and communications plans. Until then social media will no doubt be helmed by the same type of jack-of-all-trades types that were there for the explosion of the Web.

What I’m getting at is: Should an existing profession be the one to take the reigns of social media for their employer or client? Or, should a new profession emerge, just like the webmasters of the 90s, to focus on pulling all the SoMe bits together? At least until they can afford to staff their department with specialists!

The SoMe Pro:

So what do we call these hybrids? “Social media expert” already has a bad wrap. Online Communications Consultant? Digital Community Ambassador? Anyone? Bueller?

Image by Rafa Llano.

Facebook Increases Traffic, Losses Traction

According to a December 2008 report by comScore, Facebook, who had been trending upward as Blogger was trending flat, should have now surpassed Blogger for social media traffic. At the same time, Facebook fell behind SoMe competitor MySpace for actual user engagement. MySpace users spent an average of 90 minutes more on the site than did Facebook users. MySpace also continues to succeed in page views with 579 per user in January versus Facebook’s 337, the former showed a 10% increase in pages views compared to the later’s 3% increase.

How, one might ask, is this possible? Everyone knows that MySpae is for college dropouts and pedophiles and Facebook is for all of the beatiful smart people right? Actually, while Facebook may have begun as a SoNet for college students, it has quickly ecome populated with a varied audience, including non-college and business-minded types. Many of these are engaging withother social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, dividing their attention. At the same time MySpace, which is most likely more attractive to users just now dipping their toes in social media, is seeing a less distracted crowd.

Any other theories on the shift?

See the numbers at TechCrunch.

US Airways’ Hudson Crash Begets Social Media Flight

Senior US Airways pilot Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger was gaining 215 fans a minute on a Facebook page set up to honor him, within days he had 300,000 fans and 14,000 wall posts. According to Virtue’s Social Media index, US Airways reached a 3-day average 0f 135%. Most know by now that the first image of the US Airlines Hudson River crash appeared on Twitpic via Twitter. The photo, taken with what looks to be an iPhone by a passenger on one of the ferries that rescued survivors, beat out the major media as usual.

While this is a great story of survival, it is also an educational story for businesses. It took eye witnesses to report the crash first, it took consumers to launch fan pages on social networks. In a climate where people are frustrated by big business’ lack of transparency and communication, their excess and greed, a story like this should have been a top priority for US Airways. Where were US Airways on Facebook, Twitter, etc?

Even now that all of the information is coming out, a quick trip to US Airways site (usairways.com), and you’ll find that clicking on the link for “Information about flight 1549″, pops up a page with nothing in it (I’ve since retried the link and it works). The first public report of the crash was on January 15th, at 12:36 pm. US Airways’ website’s press release is from January 19th, at 12:11, almost exactly 4 days later. To their credit, a video statement was posted on the 15th, crew names released on the 16th, but the first statement from US Airways was 4 hours after the incident.

Companies are going to have to start being better prepared for emergencies such as this. With millions of camera phones and Internet access, consumers will be distributing the news at lightning speed. In order to be in control of their brand’s news, corporations will need to be able to get their news out in record time, not just on official websites and to the mainstream press, but through the social networks that the rest of us use.

Image by Janis Krums

Addendum:

The recent crash of a Turkish airliner in Amsterdam was again reported first on Twitter. @nipp first reported the crash. Unfortunately, unlike the Hudson River crash this one did not provide a link to a first hand, first-on-the-scene picture. These just goes to show that consumer generated content is quicker to the draw than big media.

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