MySpace Are Back

MySpace announced this week that they’ve clocked 1 million new users in 30 days! Since new management, Specific Media, have taken the reins things have certainly been looking up for the once shunned social network. The chief executive, Tim Vanderhook has said the new idea is to provide a space for users “to share and discover the music they love.” It seems to be working too. Their Facebook app saw 700,000 new active users this month and their library of free music is nearly three times that of Spotify!

Swap-Sees

New social commerce site, Little Black Bag launched earlier this month and they’ve certainly made an impact with the social-savvy-shoppers among us. The idea, says CEO Dan Murillo, “is to bring the real-world thrill of discovery and shopping with friends to the Internet.” Users can sign up for a single purchase or a monthly fee and when you join there’s some questions to answer about your style, likes/dislikes etc. From your answers you’re sent three items in; yeah, you guessed it: a little black bag! Customers can then go back online, share their purchases and swap items with other users – a sparkling example of social integration.

Do You Speak Google

This week we’ve become aware of The Google Puzzle, an idea designed to improve your searching abilities and a great opportunity for Google to show us all, yet again, how far ahead of the competition they really are. The game really highlights the power of the Chrome browser and the bar has been set rather high by their almighty programming team.  Although the answers to the questions aren’t particularly impossible there’s certainly a very specific type of lateral thinking involved. How very Google of them!

And So It Begins
This week marks the soft opening of Lady Gaga’s social Network: Little Monsters. It’s an online space which brings Gaga fans together and gives them a forum to post pictures, share events and rate the activity of other users. It’s the first creation of American start-up Backplane, who’s CEO and co-founder Matt Michelsen told mashable; “We think we can really change the world.” A bold claim by anyone’s standards, but with a look like Pintrest and functionality like Reddit they’re definitely onto something. Change the world? Only time will tell…

Power to the People
In tough economic times we love to see someone doing well while helping others do the same and that’s exactly what Etsy, the online marketplace are up to. Etsy is growing fast! So fast, in fact, that they now have 37 million unique visitors each month, have established themselves as the best of the best at empowering independent designers and provided them a platform from which to sell. But they plan to do even more. They plan to help small independent creative’s to grow, giving them support and helping with any teething problems. Have a look at this article from Gigaom. The future’s bright for Etsy and it’s designers.

#StuckForValentines
It’s nice to see something a little different during the, ever so predictable, Valentines marketing season. KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese have announced their plans to give a little back this Febuary using a very interesting social campaign. They call it “The Golden Voice of Love”. You write a message with #VoiceOfLove and you could be in with a chance of having Ted Williams read it to your loved one. Each tweet will see KRAFT donate 100 boxes of mac’n’cheese to the hungry.  What better way to say I love you..?

Facebook Goes Public

So as we’re sure you all know, along with more-or-less everyone else that uses the internet knows, Facebook filed their initial public offering this week. All the noise has been around the figures and the in-comprehendible amount of money involved but what does it mean for us; the user? Wall Street investors aren’t likely to hold dear the same values Zuckerberg has been striving for. Will the need to show investors return over-power the ideals that Facebook started out with? Have a look at this article from Read Write Web and decide for yourself…

Do you have Pinterest?

As Pinterest, reaches over 7 million unique visitors it becomes the 5th largest social media platform to refer traffic. Monetrate have pulled together this useful infographic highlighting how the photo bookmarking network is reshaping e-commerce. Forward thinking retailers have caught on that social influences their customers and drives their business – which is more than they can say for Google+! We rather like Threadless and Nordstrom as great examples of Pinterest and e-commerce.

Community Manager Confessions

Did anyone clock that it was Community Manager Appreciation Day last week? So what exactly is a Community Manager you might ask. Never fear, The Social Practice’s very own CM Lizzie Gold did an interview with Social Media Citizen this week. It covers some of the nitty-gritty issues that come along with building an online community both in-house and agency side.

Spread Your Wings with Social
Air China recently produced a a brilliant campaign using social media to spread the word that their service was available in Sweden and throughout the rest of Asia. Partnering up with some of the best Asian restaurant in Sweden they encouraged customers to check-in on Facebook as they sat down to eat. A leader board on Air Chinas’ Facebook page produced one winner each week, with two free tickets to Asia. A sparkling example of simple social integration.

Recipe for Success

We’ve caught wind this week of a great new social initiative Halfsies. Their idea is to reduce food waste, feed the hungry and improve people’s diet, all in one go. How, we hear you ask? They plan to pair up with restaurants and offer customers the option of “going halfsies.” The customer gets a half portion, improving their diet. The other half goes to feed the hungry and, in the process, food waste is greatly reduced. An inspired three-pronged approach.

A New Way To Consume Media?

Since last week’s launch of Open Graph Timeline integrations on Facebook there has been a fabulous array of applications launched. Recently InsideFacebook has given us a nice little break down of what’s out there and we’re impressed. SoundCloud joined the likes of Spotify on the music front and Huffington Post already has 1 million active users sharing stories. The question raised here is if regular media consumption will be replaced with Facebook’s social recommendations. We’ll let you decide.

Let’s click together

Lego fans rejoice, you’re not quite as alone as you once thought. Introducing ReBrick, Lego’s community platform where you can embrace your inner Lego-love by sharing, bookmarking and tagging great Lego content around the web. You’ll also be able to download a little widget to make it even easier to share your finds, as well as adding your own tags and following other Lego lovers. It’s rather refreshing – there are no flashy ads or marketing messages, just the coolest and newest Lego content, chosen by its fans at your fingertips.

Google introduce “Me on the web”

FourSquare have been busy this week rolling out a new feature, FourSquare Explore – making search more personal. Using Check-in data from your friends, it finds places you’ll enjoy ‘exploring’. It’s intelligent too; learning which friends you share interests with and pushing their recommendations further up your list. Because Explore works in this way it means searches can be specific: instead of typing ‘pub’ into the search and being overwhelmed with places you’d never go, you can search for a brand of beer, or a genre of music. This is also available on desktop too!

Exploring the New Age

RBC Capital research to crack Amazon’s profit model has shown a Kindle Fire customer is spending an average of $136 (£90) on content. Since Amazon released the new Kindle, there’s been a stir over it’s profitability on the Tablet market – the hardware itself generates virtually no revenue. The study shows 80% of Kindle owners have purchased an e-book and 58% had purchased more than three e-books within 15-60 days. The Fire acts as a shop window, with regular deals and bundles driving renewable subscriptions and removing the temptation for customers to shop around. Amazon seems to be chasing content revenues rather than hardware profits.

We’ve been sharing a hand-picked selection of the week’s biggest social media stories with clients, colleagues and through our newsletter for some time now and have decided it’s high time we blogged about them too. So welcome to The Social Stories #28. Enjoy, share and send us some of your own.

Words with friends-Life saver
Alec Baldwin recently landed Words with Friends in a bit of hot water. When he refused to pause his game, on an international flight, the staff decided to eject him from the plane. This week though, an Australian man owes his life to the game. His wife, a fellow WwF addict, was playing with an American doctor and happened to message him explaining that her husband was complaining about a sore chest. The doctor advised him to go to hospital and it turned out he had a 99% blockage near his heart. It was fixed, and he is alive and well. Three cheers for Words with Friends!

Social Media Ace
The Australian Open Tennis Tournament is, once again, leading by example in social media. They already have real time updates on qualifying and a system which lets fans reminisce about the good old days with a database of classic matches. Today the tournament begins and there will be 24 hour updates on the Twitter feed and a fan leader board, listing fans in order of buzz. They even have a team of “fan-bassadors” who keep feeds interesting with facts and figures. This could be a taste of things to come in sport, game on London 2012!

A Braille-ient Idea
This week we’ve caught wind of quite an unusual idea that the clever people at Wimpy, the burger chain, came up with in South Africa. The idea came from Wimpy SA wanting to spread the news that they offered Braille menus for the visually impaired. They set up shop in the three biggest Blind Institutions in South Africa and used sesame seeds as Braille. It went down rather well and word spread. In the end they reached 800,000 people by making only 15 burgers! Have a look at the video.

I’ve been mulling Google + over for a while now. In the early days, I seemed to change my mind every few days on what was most interesting about the service. So at the very least, we can say it’s thought provoking. Perhaps more importantly, it’s slippery. Mutable. I’m not 100% clear on what it wants to be and how it wants me to behave.

At first, I thought that mutability was a flaw. Aha, I thought-there’s a lesson here on how to design a new service for rapid, mainstream adoption. Restrictions help. Simple, self-contained tasks show us what’s expected of us in a new environment. I still think that’s a worthwhile lesson but I’m confident the folks at Google need no help from me on user experience.

Having wrestled with a few of these themes, it finally occurred to me that my discomfort was caused by the fact that Google +, despite the “huh, it looks just like Facebook” carping, doesn’t behave very much like a social network at all. It doesn’t show me what’s expected. It’s nuanced and dynamic-and it’s increasingly baked into my browser and, eventually I assume, my devices.

What struck me as I pondered it was that it doesn’t matter to Google whether Google + becomes a destination social network in the way that Facebook is and MySpace was. What Google + is doing, in it’s infinitely nuanced way, is capturing the data that (I hope) will build an infinitely smarter, more intuitive and more dynamic social algorithm. Which is why I suspect the various declarations that it’s over (already) are premature.

This for me is the key philosophical tension between Facebook and Google as the battle for the social web unfolds. Facebook, philosophically, is about Destination social: drawing every on-line interaction back to Facebook-the one site to rule them all. Despite the Open Graph, Facebook Connect and the ubiquitous “like” button, the company’s primary impulse still seems to be to take the web to Facebook.

Google, philosophically, seem to me to be much more about Dispersed social-bringing social context from Google + to every interaction you have on-line. It’s the difference between bringing the web to a social networking site and bringing social context to the web.

The reason for this very different approach is in part a commercial one. As of now, the only place where Facebook can monetise the social graph is on Facebook. Google, on the other hand, have vast advertising revenues without ever needing to sell a single ad on Google + and the effortless ability to monetise smarter, more effective, more social search. Google + has no commercial need to be a destination network.

So which approach will be more effective in the long term? Instinctively, it seems to me that Dispersed social is much more in line with the long term shift away from self-contained social networks and towards a truly social web. I’ve been fascinated for some time by Jonathan McDonald’s thinking on centralised versus decentralised systems and I suspect dispersed, decentralised social networks are where we are headed if social media is to realise its true potential of being “like Air” and if today’s networks are to avoid going the way of MySpace.

Who knows which of these two Titans will most effectively deliver on this vision? Facebook are attempting to capture increasingly nuanced data about our propensity to share what with whom whereas Google, while not primarily concerned with + as a destination will nevertheless need to build a critical mass of social data. In the Slate article linked to above Farhad Manjoo observes:

“A social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts.”

As I’ve made clear, I don’t think a social network needs to be a place-but there is no question it needs critical mass. In the place of Google + however I think the place is a means not an end.

Either way, the winner I believe will be the company that most effectively delivers a social web that is:

1. Ubiquitous: effortlessly omnipresent in every aspect of our lives, on-line and off-line
2. Dynamic: responsive to real time data, from location to time to pricing. Aware that groups, closeness and relevance are not fixed concepts but fluid and mutable
3. Intuitive: innately aware of context and nuance. Intuitively aware of where and when I want particular kinds of social context
4. Hard wired into business models: enables companies to give consumers a social stake in their success
5. Seamlessly integrated into devices: effortlessly integrated into the desktop and mobile OS
From destination social to dispersed social: 10 trends in social media

View more presentations from The Social Practice

I’ve explored these five themes in a bit more detail here-let us know your thoughts: is Google + a Trojan horse or lame duck? Is Dispersed Social a genuine possibility and what does it mean for brands? How can brands manage their profile in a world where every interaction on-line (and perhaps off) comes complete with social context? It will undoubtedly be more complex and more multi-faceted than maintaining a presence in the age of destination social.

 

There have been sweeping statements and government gaffes to spare in the last week as politicians of every persuasion have attempted to make sense of the riots which started in London and spread across the country. I’m reluctant to comment on the politics of the situation, which is a complex and tragic one, with no easy answers.

In the government’s response to the riots, however, they have made the medium the message. David Cameron has suggested restrictions on the use of social media among those plotting violence or disruption-that might be valid if it were in any way enforceable, although it undoubtedly sets a problematic precedent set against the backdrop of the role social media played in the Arab Spring.

Other politicians have, however, suggested taking social networks down altogether in crisis situations, which is a much more troubling suggestion.

Clearly, like any other medium social media can be used for good and for ill.

We’ve talked before about the 3 ways Clay Shirky outlines in which social media drives social change, by enabling individuals to:

1. Synchronise: To share, and therefore consolidate opinion

2. Co-ordinate: To come together to act as a group

3. Document:  To show the world what is happening

Inevitably, groups can synchronise dark and angry opinions as well as altruistic ones and can co-ordinate violent as well as positive action. Why the idea of taking social networks down during a crisis troubles me so much is the fact that around the world, in crisis situations from earthquakes to uprisings, social media has proved to be a powerful force for good. A force that helps citizens in their thousands document incidents in real time, come together and develop extraordinarily useful tools and services to help the afflicted.

In recent weeks and months Londoners (and citizens around the world) have used social media as a force for good in times of crisis in four key ways as I see it:

1. Crisis Mapping
2. Real time news
3. Citizen journalism
4. Co-ordinating positive action

1. Crisis Mapping:

I’m a huge and unashamed fan of the Ushahidi Platform, a word meaning “testimony” in Swahili and a crisis mapping service that uses citizens’ tweets and texts to map incidents and flash points in crisis areas around the world. The original platform has recently expanded to include the CrowdMap Platform which allows individuals to be up and running on the Ushahidi platform in minutes without the need to install it on their server. The platform has been used in situations from the Kenyan elections to the earthquake in Haiti to the “Snowpocalypse” in New York. It uses individuals’ testimony to create a data set far beyond what any one government, or non governmental organization is capable off. While I didn’t see this particular platform in use last week in London and while it would be no means claim to be flawless, both The Guardian and The Telegraph, as well as various citizen developers including @jamescridland created equivalents, mapping geo-tagged tweets about the riots to provide both analysis and utility. To shut down social media in times of crisis would be to shut down the ability to document real time incidents and provide timely warnings, analysis and calls for help.

Using Social Media for Crisis Mapping

2. Real time news:

A mere glance at twitter’s trending topics for the UK last week provided a real time update on the areas of greatest violence and disturbance.  Searching twitter also proved to be a useful street by street level guide to the areas worst afflicted, providing individuals with advice on how best to navigate their way home. Admittedly, the noise to signal ratio was a problem and there was probably as much inaccurate commentary as helpful. This is a problem the social web faces across the board and we undoubtedly need to get better at filtering commentary based on reputation-a real challenge for the algorithm writers.  Yet by focusing on the clearest and most lucid voices, genuinely helpful information could be extracted.  One need only look as the visualization of twitter coverage of the Japan earthquake to note how, for many, twitter has become their primary source of real time news coverage in times of emergency. I can think of nothing more calculated to inspire fear and anxiety at times of emergency than withdrawing access to news.

3. Citizen Journalism:

One of the most uplifting aspects of social media is the ability it gives ordinary individuals to capture images, stories and moments in time that broadcast news organizations may miss. This was true of the Arab spring, as some of the most powerful images to emerge came from individual citizens using basic photo sharing services and it was true in London last week. The defining image of Londoners’ response to the riots-to come out in their hundreds and begin the task of cleaning up the streets was captured by lawyer Andy B (@lawcol888 on twitter).

"Broom Army" by Andy B (@lawcol888)

4. Co-ordinating postive action:

After days of fear and anxiety, it was truly inspiring to see that by Tuesday morning #riotcleanup was the second trending topic in the UK, while @riotcleanup had almost 40,000 followers-now well over 80,000. Organised by Dan Thompson (@artistsmakers) the movement caught the public’s imagination with such an overwhelming response that in some areas clean up volunteers exceeded demand. Other groups rallied to the support of individual businesses affected by the riots, with interns from BBH London rallying support to the #keepaaroncutting cause-raising funds to help an 89 year old hairdresser from Tottenham whose shop had been ransacked. It’s worth noting that the police have also turned to social media to help identify looters and rioters, co-ordinating their efforts via Flickr.

So do these uplifting activities outweigh the potential for harm? We could debate that question for a long time-personally I believe very little is “worth” loss of life or livelihood- but I suspect it might be the wrong question. The question for me is this: Could these activities-both the harmful and the helpful-have happened without the intervention of social media?

My answer, when it comes to the riots is, unfortunately, yes. Riots and protests, violent and peaceful, have been co-ordinated for centuries without access to twitter or Facebook. Those who take to the streets are a minority, and it is relatively easy for a minority to communicate using closed or indeed broadcast channels. Reading Vanity Fair this weekend I was struck by a quote from designer Agnes B on her participation in the 1968 student uprising in Paris:

“We marched. There was the radio and we always knew where it was happening”.

That dangerous and subversive medium, the radio.

When it comes to the stories of real time news, citizen journalism and citizen activism, however, my answer is “no”. Perhaps I want to have my cake and eat it-it wouldn’t be the first time. My argument, though, is this: co-ordinating the riots required a relative few to be able to communicate, largely via a closed network. Co-ordinating the coverage, and the clean up, required thousands to be able to make their voices heard, in real time, with locations attached, via an open and accessible channel. It was the cumulation of those voices that was helpful-the sheer scale of real-time, on the ground updates. Making those voices heard, useful to others and actionable simply would not have been possible before the advent of social media.

This is a debate that will no doubt run and run. There are arguments to be made on both sides. We should be careful, however, that in the search for easy answers we do not switch off what is for many an ally in times of crisis.

Much as we pine to be sipping Rose on the Croisette, we are in fact back at Social Practice towers, in the midst of a flurry of pitches and projects. To cheer ourselves up, we’ve been contemplating this year’s Cyber Lions-the winners, the shortlist and the nominees-and asking ourselves what the key trends emerging from this year’s festival are. Some are relatively familiar themes reaffirmed by the year’s most successful campaigns, some more emerging ideas touched on by festival speakers such as John Battelle.

1. Social TV: As Edward Boches outlines in this excellent post, everything is social now. What no-one could have predicted even a year ago is the impact of social media on linear TV and the resurgence it has triggered in event TV. The campaign that has tapped into this movement most effectively is undoubtedly Widen & Kennedy’s Old Spice Guy Response campaign, a Cyber Lion Grand Prix winner and surely a front-runner for a Titanium Grand Prix. While many will doubtless follow, we predict few will execute as flawlessly-and as Malcolm Gladwell told the festival audience, Implementation is all.

2. Digital Storytelling: Jeff Jarvis threw down a gauntlet to the newspaper industry some weeks back when he declared the article to be a luxury, or by-product of the journalistic process. John Battelle intrigued the festival with the notion that all brands must become publishers. If that’s the case, we look forward to seeing more brands embrace storytelling as a collaborative and social process-moving beyond elaborate Transmedia narratives for the few and towards simple social narratives in the Storify mode.

3. HTML 5 and the rise of web apps: With details emerging of Facebook’s Project Spartan, a rumoured HTML 5 based app store, and the emergence of compelling HTML 5 magazines and e-readers expect app like experiences in browser to grow and grow. The glorious Wilderness Downtown, a worthy Grand Prix winner, demonstrates the potential.

4. Collaboration and Co-Creation:  Jon Wilkins and Casper Willer of Naked Communications and Stuart Wells of Nokia outlined the 3 Cs of modern creativity: Crowd-Sourcing, Collaboration and Co-Creation. As John Windsor and Ben Malbon observed, it’s extraordinary just how quickly ideas that were anathema have become mainstream.

5. The Power of Real Time: Real-time responsiveness is becoming a cost of entry for many brands and an exercise in damage limitation for others. However, when brands combine real-time responsiveness with wit, charm and built-in social spread it becomes something much more joyful, as Budweiser Ireland and Uniqlo Tweet Counter demonstrate.

6. The Rise of Social Business: We’ve talked about this at length before and it’s not something we saw a huge amount of in the Cannes submissions but we look for this to be a much bigger influence next year. We were slightly disappointed not to see the ASOS marketplace, a genuinely radical piece of democratised distribution, not go further.

7. Designing for Networks: Again, we’ve talked before about this as a critically important discipline for the industry going forward. A campaign that illustrates this beautifully and has been rightly celebrated is the “Pay with a tweet” initiative from R/GA’s Christian Behrendt and Leif Abraham. The campaign originated the beautifully simple and powerfully disruptive idea of allowing users to “pay” with their social influence-an idea which, given the new opportunity to customise Facebook pages based on users’ Klout scores can only be on the rise.

8. Seamless integration across devices: The Holy Grail of the screen-based society moved a step closer with the announcement of the iCloud. Some interesting initiatives emerged this year in terms of building apps which synch with TV programming or indeed with advertising but telling seamless (or divergent) narratives across screens still feels like a largely untapped opportunity.

9. The Power of the Tangible/Creating Social Objects: In an increasingly digital world, both Cripsin’s Baby Carrots campaign and the hugely successful Romanian campaign for Rom chocolate reminded us of the power of the tangible-and that analogue objects can be social objects too.

10. The inexorable rise of the Tablet: Did you spot anyone at Cannes without one?

11. Getting creative with browsers and players: Both Google Chrome Fastball and Tippex “A Hunter shoots a Bear” demonstrated the rich potential of thinking disruptively about the constraints of a screen or window. As with the rise of HMTL 5, this suggest we can expect to see more and more interesting things happen in browser.

12. Socially connected objects: The internet of things continues to excite, with the promise of  ”a social network for devices”. A lovely example of this, and indeed of designing for the power of networks, was the Mercedes Benz tweetrace. Again, the idea of real world objects controlled and steered by the crowd via social media is something we expect to see much more of this time next year.

So that’s it from us-let us know what you think. Any other trends, themes or embryonic ideas catch your attention this year? What are your predictions for 2012? (Ours include that bottle of Rose with our names on it…)

Recent events have led a number of commentators to question whether social media has grown so anarchic and disruptive that it needs, somehow, to be regulated. One of the more bizarre catalysts has been not the extraordinary role of social media in Egypt and Libya- the revelation of its truly revolutionary potential- but the role of twitter in unveiling the sexual predelictions of a premiership footballer.  It seems we are comfortable with twitter undermining the rule of law, as long as it is not our law, comfortable with transparency as long as they are not our secrets.

There are legal, ethical and logistical questions to debate here. As with the furious polemic that greeted the release of the Wikileaks Iraq files, these are complex questions without easy answers as our desire for transparency meets our need for privacy and security (personal and national).  As Clay Shirky pointed out in a recent edition of the New York Times, freedom of speech comes with implications we must acknowledge-put more simply “Free speech is not a pony”.

I realise as well that comparing the situation in Egypt with our fascination with the Giggs family drama is comparing the sublime (truly sublime if we consider this extraodinary shot from Nevine Zaki) to the faintly ridiculous. What’s best in us with what’s grubbiest. Yet perhaps that’s what the behaviour of the crowd reveals-sometimes vox populi is vox Dei, other times it’s a angry mob. Social media doesn’t change the crowd’s behaviour, it simply (and radically) amplifies and accelerates it, the superinjunctions giving us a Spartacus moment for the 21st century that’s somehow appropriate in its absurdity.

So, the situation is complex. I think complexity is okay. I like nuance. I think we’ll get somewhere as long as we recognise that there are grey areas and we’re willing to discuss them.

I’m not a lawyer though, or even much of a philosopher and I don’t propose to go there in much detail.  The questions I want to tackle here are:

• What do uprisings and superinjunctions tell us about how social media drives change?

• Is social media truly beyond regulation-or are the superpowers within social networks sowing the seeds of a more centralised (and therefore more easily regulated) web?  Read the rest of this entry »