Social Media Report 2012

Nielsen's 2012 Social Media Report is out this month chock full of growth statistics (compare to last year's report, 2011 Social Media Report, Q3 2011). It will come as no surprise that mobile platforms and app usage are huge drivers in all of this and that trend shows no sign of slowing. The report ranks top social networks with Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr and Wikia vaulting up  the list of "regulars" (Facebook, Blogger, Twitter). While there is some demographic data  provided for sex, age and race in the report, it's spotty--for instance, you can get a real demographic profile of Pinterest but not the same for Tumblr or Twitter. Nielsen only gives us samples of data in these free reports but we'll take what we can get. The report also tracks simultaneous usage of mobile platforms with television viewing and finally, takes a global view of usage. Definitely worth checking out if you work in this area and the data fact you need is there for you.

From Nielsen Wire:
Social media and social networking are no longer in their infancy. Social media continues to grow rapidly, offering global consumers new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them. According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile.  Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011. The recent proliferation of mobile devices and connectivity helped fuel the continued growth of social media. While the computer remains as the predominant device for social media access, consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web has increased 63 percent in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

Search & Social Media Survey Report

Greenlight, a digital marketing agency based in London, has created some buzz with its Search & Social Media Survey 2011/2012.  You can read the report from the survey at the link below.

From the Foreword:

Our annual Search & Social Media Survey 2011/2012, is based on questions we posed to 500 people from all over the world – students, law enforcement professionals, medical staff, accountants, lawyers, the unemployed, and everyone in between. We wanted to hear directly from them about how they engage with online advertising, search engines, and social networks, in the hope that we could gain some insight into how people engage with us as marketers today, and also help us formulate some views on what the future might hold.

For instance, our research found that, of 500 respondents, 5% would ‘definitely’ use a future Facebook search engine if the firm were to launch one to rival Google’s . The other extreme, those categorically saying that they simply would not use a future Facebook search engine, totalled 26% of all respondents. Those responding in the ‘definitely’ and ‘probably’ camps totalled 17%. Those responding ‘no’ and ‘probably not’, totalled 48%.

These stats therefore suggest that Facebook could capture around 22% of the global search market by simply launching its own search engine tomorrow morning (the ‘definitely’, ‘probably’, and half of the ‘don’t know’ respondents combined). It wouldn’t need to be a spectacular engine either, just well integrated into the Facebook experience and generally competent. This 22% market share would make Facebook the second most utilised search engine in every major market except for China, Japan, and Russia, where it would occupy an uncontested third place.

 Direct link to document (PDF; 2.5 MB)

IJoC's Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age

From the latest ICA newsletter: The International Journal of Communication (IJoC) is pleased to announce the publication ([April 11, 2011] of a Special Section, "Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age," coedited by Manuel Castells, Peter Monge, and Noshir Contractor. Human communication networks, like those typically found in the network society, are highly complex and relationally rich in that they often connect different types of objects with multiple types of relations. This special section presents seven articles that explore the implications of this network multidimensionality. The articles cover a broad array of issues including network sociomateriality, network power, network exclusion, the semantic web, network fuzziness, and network spheres. The theoretical implications of network multidimensionality are explored and a number of relevant social examples are examined including the degrees of freedom in WikiLeaks networks, the kinds of power in societal networks, and the network changes that occur when technologies and other sociomaterial objects are brought inside the network. The keynote article by Bruno Latour argues that network multidimensionality eradicates the long-standing theoretical distinction between individual and society. Collectively, these papers provide a rich compendium of ideas and arguments on the theoretical and practical implications of network multidimensionality.

January CommQuote

Our quote this first month in the New Year is from Zadie Smith's meditation on Facebook via The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto in The New York Review of Books (November 25, 2010).

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued¹), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget...Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation...We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible...

Lanier wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are “locked in.” Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn’t limited?

...Software may reduce humans, but there are degrees. Fiction reduces humans, too, but bad fiction does it more than good fiction, and we have the option to read good fiction. Jaron Lanier’s point is that Web 2.0 “lock-in” happens soon; is happening; has to some degree already happened. And what has been “locked in”? It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)

ComScore Data Mine

comScore, a leading source of digital market intelligence and most preferred measurement service, has the goods when it comes to internet usage trends. But like Nielsen, comScore data is proprietary. Both release valuable “crumbs” to the public—more general less client-centered data in the form of reports and posts. The place to find such data for comScore is their Data Mine site that boasts "colorful, bite-sized graphical representations of the best discoveries we unearth from our data."

Recent and/or popular topics include: Smartphone Penetration by Age, Visitor Demographics to Facebook.com, Twitter.com Top 10 Global Markets, Share of Global Internet Audience by Region, Top 10 Ad Networks in U.S., and Orkut, Facebook and Twitter Growth in Brazil. These aren't really articles or reports but rather abstract length summations that usually include graph and pie chart data, just the sort of info you can't find when you need it. Notice these releases aren't limited to the US market.

The site is divided into these categories so far: Advertising, Africa/Middle East, Asia/Pacific, Banking/Finance, Coupon, E-Commerce, Engagement, Europe, Latin America, Mobile, North America, Online Video, Search, Social Networking, and U.S.

You can sign up for email updates or RSS feeds. Or just bookmark the site for future consult.

October CommQuote

Malcolm Gladwell writes provocatively on social networks and activism in the October 4 issue of The New Yorker ("Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted"). He acknowledges the power of Facebook and Twitter to mobilize large groups of people to engage in causes but he makes a distinction between weak and strong tie connections in relation to risky (often bodily) activism, such as the Greensboro lunch counter protests in 1960, and safer Facebook-orchestrated activism. The article has received a fair amount of pushback in the blogosphere, all the more reason to check it out.

"...But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro."

--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, October 4, 2010

Digital Future Report

The Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School has just released the ninth report of it's Surveying the Digital Future, The Digital Future Project 2010, "nine years of longitudinal research compris[ing] an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and social networking. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data."

You can access summary data at the site or avail yourself of the whole 203- page report in the ASC Library. Among the study's findings:

* Americans on the Internet -- For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans -- now 82 percent.
* Weekly hours online -- The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
* Gaps in Internet use in age groups -- Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
* Low adoption of new media -- Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
* Does technology make the world a better place -- The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
* Internet and Political Campaigns -- although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
* Buying online -- 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
* Internet impact on traditional retail declines -- 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores -- down from 69 percent in 2008.
* Top 10 online purchases -- 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).

New e-Journals in Communication

Penn is a subscriber of three new ICI Global journals in the field. They are:

	International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications (IJEHMC)
	International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP)
	International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking (IJVCSN)

In additional, from MIT we now subscribe to:

The International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM) is a ground breaking online-only journal devoted to the examination of the changing relationships between learning and media across a wide range of forms and settings. While retaining the rigorous peer review process of a traditional academic journal, IJLM will also provide opportunities for more topical and polemical writing, for visual and multi-media presentations, and for online dialogues.

These titles are all available from the ASC Library homepage.

Social Media Revolution Video

If you want to indulge in a sort of hype-experience about social media, check out this popular YouTube video put together by Erik Qualman, an online marketer and author of the upcoming book Socialnomics, comprised of stats about the growth of social media. If you don't want to sit back and digest your stats with cool music you can view them (36 in all) at his blog site (link above).

New Papers from the Shorenstein Center

Recent papers from The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:

Sandra Nyaira, Mugabe's Media War: How New Media Help Zimbabwean Journalists Tell Their Story

Rory O'Connor, Word of Mouse: Credibility, Journalism and Emerging Social Media

Eric Pooley, How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change

A full list of papers since 1989 can be searched at the site by author or date.

Twittering Away Election Day

Here's a fun way to introduce yourself to the world of Twitter if you aren't a Twitterer yourself or know someone who is. What is Twitter? A combination of social networking and micro-blogging that enables you to post "tweets" of up to 140 characters or less, a sort of bloggers' Haiku (which, unlike Haiku, seems to be a waste of time!).

This site, Election 2008, filters thousands of tweets per minute and feeds you just those that have to do with the election so you get an instant public opinion meter passing before your eyes, as fast as you can read. You can also choose a more sorted view, for example, receive only those posts about Palin or Obama. For what it's worth.

Keeping Up With Social Networking

If you want to keep track of the latest happenings in the world of social networking add Gary Price's social networking category of the Resource Shelf to your feeder. The Archive for Social Networking represents a growing collection of related resources.

But hey, since we're in this area of the world, he also has a media and entertainment category, Archive for Media and Entertainment.

The entire Resource Shelf is always useful reading for information professionals. If you're already on the receiving end of too many blogs and listservs know that I try shuttle its more communication-related pearls your way here in CommPilings.

Pew Reports: Teens and Social Media, Digital Footprints

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has recently published Teens and Social Media (December, 2007), a report that describes how teenagers make use of social networking tools to communicate. The full 35-page report is freely available, along with the five-page summary of findings preceding it. From the summary:

64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004:
--39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
--33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
--28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
--27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
--26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
The percentage of those ages 12-17 who said "yes" to at least one of those five content-creation activities is 64% of online teens, or 59% of all teens.

Another Pew Report, Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency, is also available in full. It reports that "most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online."

Complexity and Social Networking Blog

There are too many blogs out there for this blog to even pretend to cover, but this one jumped out of the bushes at me. If you're interested in social networking in a heavy duty way put this one into your feed reader: the Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University As stated by the blog's maestro, David Lazer, Associate Professor of Public Policy at John F. Kennedy School of Government Director, "the objective of this blog is to offer a forum for the discussion of the intertwined subjects of network analysis and complex systems theory."