Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

HTML5 has been around for a while. Yes, it is still in draft form and the formal specification hasn't been published yet, but that didn't stop all major modern browsers from implementing a decent set of HTML5 features. By now, the web is chock full of HTML5 examples showing off everything from latest JavaScript to HTML5 markup tags. But people still seem to be on the edge when implementing them in real-world production environments. This should not be the case. The reality is that HTML5 features already implemented in modern browsers are mostly stable, and the published spec will ultimately not have major changes.

If there is still some doubt that HTML5 is still the "future" and is not needed in the current web, let me throw in some rough figures. Note, these numbers are taken from Wikipedia. So interpret them how you wish. Roughly 54% people still use Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), of that ~ 36% is IE8. Making that 23% globally. About 31% use Firefox, about 80% of which is 3.5 or 3.6, making that 25% of the global market. Safari and Google Chrome take up another 13%, although I do not know what percentage of those browser version are HTML5 capable and in use. It can be assumed that at least half of the browsers out there support the commonly touted HTML5 features. So should we let half the people miss out on great features due to other people still using IE7 and Firefox 2?

Rolling out HTML5 may be easier than you think. Anyone who runs a commonly visited site probably already has different style sheets and/or JavaScript for IE/IE6 users. So pull in HTML5 JavaScript conditionally by checking if functions exists. It is ill-advised to rely on checking the user agent, as some browsers misreport it (i.e., IE8 in "IE7 mode" still has the window.postMessage JavaScript function).

Putting in HTML5 tags on the other hand is tricky. Putting in new tags such as <article> and <aside> won't render properly in older browsers. The best way so far is to insert tags dynamically into the DOM using JavaScript. This isn't practical for simple tags such as <article> but can be used for flashier tags like canvas. Existing libraries are already implemented this way. Cufon uses Canvas to render fonts in most browsers and VML in IE.

Just a quick heads up. We've begun noticing the implementation of the new 'Like' button that will soon be replacing 'Become A Fan' on Facebook pages.

Not only has the button changed, but the '#### Fans' box now displays "#### People Like This"

We've also noticed that the little orange flag at the top of the page that used to let us know we were a fan has disappeared.  It is currently still being used as the Page icon on search pages, however, all 'Become A Fan' links have been changed to 'Like'.

Have you noticed the change yet; any additional differences between Fan and Like that you can see?

More importantly, are you a Fan of Like?

The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn't Prove Influence on Twitter by Sarah Perez reviews a study by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna P. Gummadi* that gives the research data to back up what most social media pros already know - follower counts on Twitter are  "somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence."

One of the most interesting points of Perez's analysis is that the most influential Twitter accounts "hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area."  While many brands on Twitter speak to a particular demographic or topic area; based on this study and the popularity of celebrity Twitter users like Sean "P Diffy" Combs (who tweets everything from concert dates to bible quotes), Twitter influencers seem to be seen as experts on a wide variety of topics.  In fact the study shows that "retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services."

This information is particularity interesting when we as social media pros think about audience development on Twitter. As we look to develop audiences on Twitter when our clients are in a niche area, gaming, sports, retail etc., is it important to make sure that a brand's voice offers (or even re-tweets) authoritative information on a wide variety of subjects? Perhaps it is important that a brand's Twitter voice speaks to what is popular in and around their niche.  For instance, it could make sense for a sports blog to begins discussing a less than popular sport, or maybe they comment on the antics of celebrity athletes, or even the health care debate?

The difficulties in this theory are that it could be hard to reign in "diversifying." How much is enough? What sorts of topics should a brand discuss? How often should a brand jump on a Twitter trend?  No matter what strategy employed it is my opinion that it is always vitally important that the tweets of any particular brand always reflect back not only to the brand's core values but to the goals of that brand's Twitter outreach.  After all, the content aggregation Twitter accounts and news channels are not only speaking on a wide variety of topics but these topics are targeted to speak to a particular niche (current events, politics, sports, etc) and stay on brand message (CNN is the "news leader").

Do you think this study brings up a good point about diversifying content strategies or are niche approaches more effective? I'd love to hear your thoughts below.

Read more on the study here.

*(Study institutions included: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany †Royal Veterinary College, University of London, United Kingdom ‡CS Dept., Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil)

I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the "social web". Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn't pull in "real-time" data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Although not "real-time", the chart still provides some interesting visual cues - for example, note that iPhone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts are being posted!)

If anyone has come across any similar types of charts, please let me know in the comments area below. Thanks!

I fully intended on writing a blog post about this blog post by Umair Haque in Harvard Business Review, but it quickly (very quickly) turned into a seven page manifesto that certainly isn't appropriate to publish here.  I'd lose you three paragraphs in.

In this post, Haque discusses the relationships that are created through all of these social mediums, medias, platforms, networks, and spheres. Are they all super-thin and riddled with layers of doubt? Are they sustainable as long term connections?

His hypothesis:

I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

Interesting.

He continues on through his "thin relationship" rationale (some I agree with, some I don't) and then closes with:

The social isn't about beauty contests and popularity contests. They're a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It's about trust, connection, and community. That's what there's too little of in today's mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn't merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That's where the future of media lies.

While his argument is seemingly about personal relationships forged in the social sphere and not the relationships between brands and consumers in the social space, I think the same rules of engagement and long term evolutionary objectives could apply. In fact, I believe it applies even MORE SO to brands than to people. To me, people connect online socially for varying reasons. To find other people who like to play soccer. To learn how to properly curl their hair. To find a French tutor via Craigslist. Some of these manifest themselves into deep relationships but most are thin just like they would be in real life. These types of relationships simply have a backbone in a "shared interest" or an immediate "need" which usually is more superficial and immediate than not.

However, by nature brands NEED to retain connections. They need loyalty. They need longevity. They need "thick" relationships. The future of media (and of communication) does lie (in my humble opinion) in "thick, strong, more meaningful" relationships.

They need... well... in three letters? C-R-M.

Rather than offer up any analysis or insight, I'd like to point you to the 213 (at press time) and counting comments on his blog post that I spent a good hour digging through. If you have a moment, take a peek at them. Very interesting, indeed.

[image via Wendy Bailey's blog here.]

For those of us working on the front-lines of social marketing, we're often faced with the challenge of clients telling us they are looking for one thing (i.e., "We want to identify and directly engaging 5,000 of our most passionate customers by developing a customer community"), but measuring the success/value of such initiatives against another set of metrics (i.e., "Why has our community only gotten us 5,000 email address for our email database?!"). You can't set out to implement a loyalty/CRM initiative, then hold the results against media-centric metrics. Everything may be "social", but it's not all "media"!

(click the image for an easier-to-read version. Note that this a 'living' chart that I have been soliciting feedback/input on - if you have any suggestions/additions/changes, just post a comment below or at the SlideShare page!)

I've already noted how social media is not the same as Word of Mouth. And as the social landscape broadens, it's simply causing more confusion as the term "social" gets slapped on just about anything to make it sound cool and relevant.

Above is a chart I've been working on that tries to illustrate the "social" landscape in terms of tactics and goals. You should be able to take any social touchpoint/tactic/business model (brand community, Twitter profile, blogger outreach, CGM sweepstakes) and plot them on this chart.

Essentially, this chart segments the social landscape into four quadrants... as a function of:

• CRM (social CRM or sCRM)
• Marketing (social MARKETING)
• PR (social PR)
• Media (social MEDIA)

The horizontal axis represents "owned" social channels (that you own/control) versus "leased" ones (i.e., paying a company for access to their network of consumers willing to try and/or talk about your product). The "partially owned" area represents social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook where yes, you can establish a brand presence but you don't own any underlying data and are at the whim of the service provider in terms of metrics or even having your account suspended. The vertical axis represents the depth of engagement from very 1-to-1/personal to impersonal/3rd-person - i.e., "engagement" vs. "reach":

In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with leveraging the social web to facilitate high-impact, quick hit consumer promotions, but at the end of the day was your goal to "reach" 1,000,000 consumers with a message about your product, or simply "acquire" a 10,000 email addresses into your company's email database? As the social landscape broadens, marketers need to ensure that their success metrics are in line with the tactics they are leveraging. And that unfortunately can't happen until you have properly educated the folks holding the pursestrings.