More Digital blog

A Neilsen study conducted in December has returned some very interesting statistics on the world’s social media usage. Apparently, it is not the Americans or the British spending the most time on sites like Facebook and Twitter, believe it or not, that title belongs to the Australians.

The global comparison study revealed that despite all the sunny weather and beautiful beaches, Australians on average spend 6 hours and 52 minutes each month on social media websites—some distance in front of the United States and the United Kingdom who spend 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 7 minutes respectively on these sites.

Here’s the full list (h:m:s):

1. Australia – 6:52:28
2. United States -6:09:13
3. United Kingdom – 6:07:54
4. Italy – 6:00:07
5. Spain – 5:30:55
6. Brazil – 4:33:10
7. Germany – 4:11:45
8. France – 4:04:39
9. Switzerland – 3:54:34
10. Japan – 2:50:21

Doesn’t make sense, right? How can Australian’s who have such a major outdoor culture be ahead of these other countries? Well, being Australian and a social media frequenter myself, I think I can come up with a few reasons why.

Firstly, I think the biggest reason for their heavy usage is due to the fact that Australians love to travel. It’s pretty much tradition to fly off somewhere as soon as you finish your education. Actually, Australians will take advantage of any chance to jump on a plane and an interesting little statistic is that around 5% of the Australian population is abroad right now as we speak. Anyway, in the words of Andrew Weiner, “social media is to world travelling as steamed lobster is to hot drawn butter”. It simply is the best way to stay connected and share photos while you are overseas and Australians are making the most of it.

Some other reasons are Australia’s geographical isolation, its mateship culture and, I hate to say it, its laziness. Some people have also mentioned that it’s too hot to go outside while others like andymurd believe Australia’s internet speed is to blame. He writes, “Maybe Australians spend so much time on social networking sites because our internet is so slow – we’re just waiting for the page to load”.

If you want some more reasons, Ross Dawson on his blog has come up with a rather comprehensive discussion on the subject and it is definitely worth a read.

Another equally compelling statistic that came out of the Neilsen study was that social media traffic worldwide had surged 82% over the past two years. The global average of time logged onto social media has jumped to 5 and a half hours—that’s two and a half hours longer compared to the same statistic two years ago. Nielsen also reported that there are now 300 million social media users worldwide and Twitter was the fastest growing social media network.

Very interesting indeed. No doubt these statistics will have digital marketers across the world drooling all over their keyboards.

Back to Mashable again today, it’s quite the addiction, like Huffpost or Apple Rumors. I was reading through the media updates for the day and came across an entry on Bccthis, a new way to incorporate or add BCC conversations to Twitter and Outlook.

I admit I have only come to really use Twitter in the last year, though I’ve had my membership for almost three years. In fact, I just went through my posts (the first from April, ’07), it’s interesting watching the evolution of ‘status update’ a la Facebook to posts with actual content with references and links. I can see from looking at those early day posts that the reason I didn’t use it so much before was because I couldn’t see the point of it when I can use email and FB. I usually find myself asking ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s in it for me?’ whenever something new comes along. And admittedly it can take me some time to come around or find an application useful to me. Certain applications, though, like Skitch, a great screen capture tool that came out about three years ago, I was so interested in I was on message boards trying to get someone to give me one of their invites. Looking back, I can’t really imagine why I was that anxious to have it, though at least I use it often. Come to think of it, I’m a bit of a glutton for new apps, even the ones I don’t use. I loved xoopit (it compiled ALL of your pictures in gmail for easy access), I gave a real shot at using ‘Remember the Milk’ (only I never remembered to use it), and if I could remember that I have Ubiquitous installed and could remember the commands, I am sure I would be a lot more efficient in sending maps, events, pictures and doing random other things. But, yes I am a geek and yes, I have too much time on my hands.

But, here I am again and I’m wondering about this new app, Bccthis. My initial thought was that it looked pretty cool, not difficult to use (though really, do I need yet one more plug in on Firefox so it can crash another two or three times a day) and definitely rates on my ‘cool new tricks’ meter. But. Here’s the thing. Bcc already exists. And, so does forwarding. And, to boot, doesn’t the very nature of Twitter make it seem sort of silly to be sending specific bcc messages? I can see branching off being a cute thing to do once in a while, but if you are going to start a message as a bcc, why not just use email. I mean, people do still use email, right? The application looks more useful within Outlook, where you can add a bcc within an email. In any event, I installed and tested it, but if I have to be on bccth.is in order to see my responses, it’s really not worth it for me. I already tend to have two browsers and ten to fifteen tabs open at any given time. When it comes down to it, I WANT new apps, but I want them to be so integral to the way I work that I can’t live without them. And if they could make my coffee, too, all the better.

There have been a lot of faith-restoring stories coming out of the social media world of late. Last week I wrote about the Facebook campaign that has helped save the life of young British student Philip Pain who fell seven-stories in Mexico and was in desperate need of blood. This week I want to acknowledge the huge effort made by social networking pages to help the people of Haiti.

Only minutes after the devastating earthquake floored the tiny Caribbean nation last Tuesday, the online world was mobilised and ready to help in any way it could.

One of the organisations leading the way was The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) who have now raised over £25 million after their appeal was announced on Twitter on last Wednesday.

The DEC has utilised Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube over the past week and their Chief Executive, Brendan Gormley, has publicly praised the significant role these social media sites have had in their campaign.

Mr. Gormley said, “Social networking has proven itself as a valuable addition to the fundraising machine. I’m thrilled that we have been able to quickly communicate and engage the UK public, who have in turn responded with tremendous generosity to help the people of Haiti who so urgently need our help.

“Their donations mean our member agencies can continue to source and deliver the emergency supplies needed like safe water, shelter, medicine and food. We hope people will continue to give their support so that more emergency aid can be added to what will be a massive humanitarian effort.”

DEC reported on Facebook that Flickr has been used to host images from the DEC’s member agencies, with 34,000 views of the DEC account on Friday, while a video of the DEC broadcast appeal has attracted nearly 4,000 views on YouTube.

Not only has social media been an outstanding tool to stimulate aid and increase donations, it has also played a vital role in spreading news and remarkably, locating victims.

“This is the first example we’ve seen where that sense of global community has been expressed in action, for example using social media technology to get the story out faster, to locate victims, and to give instantaneous donations,” said James Norrie, a media professor at RTS’s School of IT Management. “That’s an amazing use of a social media tool.”

The events in Haiti, while both shocking and saddening, have reinforced social media’s undoubted ability for social good.

I think Tom Brown, writing for The Burlington Free Press, captured it well when he wrote, “I’ve heard critics of social media say that users of communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook only want to talk to, and about, themselves and their friends. The earthquake in Haiti might help change the minds of some of those critics”.

“When people can respond that quickly and in such numbers to help their fellow man, then there certainly is hope”.

To make a donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal visit www.dec.org.uk or call 0370 60 60 900, donate over the counter at any post office or high street bank, send a cheque made payable to ‘DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal’ to ‘PO Box 999, London, EC3A 3AA’ or text GIVE to 70077 to donate £5. £5 goes to DEC. You pay £5 plus your standard network SMS rate.

So Rupert Murdoch has had enough of Google and intends to slam the door on the search engine’s access to his news websites.

Earlier this week in an interview with Sky News Australia Murdoch finally bellowed the words he has been mumbling for years. When asked by Sky’s political editor David Speers why News Corp has not stopped Google users from accessing his news pages, Mr Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Murdoch proclaimed that, “There’s not enough advertising in the world to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites, but paying.”

With these few sentences Murdoch has sparked frenzied debate, as much about his mental state, as the future of online news content.

Has this great man finally lost it? Is ol’ Roop starting to show his age? Or, is this all part of some master plan and a continuation of his genius?

Personally, I’m a little confused on this one. Is there something that I’m missing here? I write this with the utmost respect Mr. Murdoch, but… I can’t see how this could possibly work.

We live in a world where people now expect to consume their daily news for zilch.

We walk into the train station, we get handed a paper, or two, containing all we could possibly need to know about the days news, sports, weather and gossip for free. If that’s not enough, we can then browse through thousands of reputable news sources for free, read through Twitter and Facebook for free, and when the day comes to an end we get handed a freshly printed evening paper for…yep, you guessed it, F.R.E.E!

What does he expect us to do?

Murdoch argues that people will get what they pay for with his websites. He has promised premium reporting for those who choose to subscribe.

“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”

The way I see it is, sure, people do value quality journalism. But they value free a lot more and, to be honest, the reporting standard isn’t half-bad.

According to reports on Techradar, these pay-walls could be erected as soon as April, 2010.

So, will it be premium or freemium?

They say that social media has the potential to make anyone a star, although it’s rare to see this actually happen to your everyday person who is noteworthy for nothing apart from his or her presence on a social networking website. Regular people nowadays can build thousands of followers, but every now and again, social media really does make a celebrity out of normal people. Take Justin Halpern, for example. The 29 year old from San Diego started a Twitter account to document the amusing things his father said. With fewer than 100 tweets sent, the account had amassed over 700,000 followers. And now, the CBS television network in the United States is considering turning the amusing quotes into a television comedy series. The LA Times also reports rumours of a book deal.

The BBC reports, via Hollywood Reporter, that Halpern may well co-write the show. Thus, we have a situation where a 29 year old who lives at home with his aging parents is soon to become a writer for a major television network, all because he began a Twitter account.

Of course, this isn’t particularly common. With more and more individuals and companies signing up to Twitter, being noticed in the crowds become harder and harder, and what was once a high follower count is now relatively normal. However, anything over 100,000 followers is obviously still a very large number, even if quite a few of them are corporate account or, at worst, spam. It is, however, still something of which we could never have dreamt recently: this person doesn’t even have to write for a blog or maintain any sort of public persona outside of posting things his father says onto Twitter. In that regard, Justin Halpern isn’t even the creative force behind the content.

This brings us to another interesting point, however. How much of something’s success is due to the creative aspects of the idea, and how much of it is due to the person who takes that idea and manages to do something with it? One could argue that all the best content in the world would go begging for an audience if it weren’t for people who knew what to do with it. In this regard, Justin is just as important as his father: He knows how to structure his father’s “content” such that it appeals to a large number of people. It probably helps that Halpern has experience in the world of online publishing: formerly a writer for Holy Taco, Halpern is now employed at Maxim.

Even with online publishing experience, it is still astonishing that someone could develop the following this Twitter account has in such a short period of time. To be fair, “niche” blogs are all the rage right now: websites that do nothing but post specific content like Failblog, Don’t Even Reply, and FML document messages all of a similar variety. There are many more sites like this which are doing equally well, and Halpern’s Twitter account fits neatly into this fashion, but is still an amazing story of success.

For businesses, the lesson is slightly thin; however can be summed up as a case of finding a catchy selling point with social media. Often, this appears to involve taking very obvious and common occurrences (such as the amusing things one’s family members say) and turning it into a cult success. Despite the television show and book deals, imagine if Justin had begun the Twitter feed with the intent of directly monetising it, coming to the project with a conversion plan and a secondary product that the tweets served to market. “Conversations” and branding aside, this has to be the goal of the majority of our social media endeavours.