Wired : The Buddy System

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Christakis and Fowler realized that this obsolete list of references could be transformed into a detailed map of human relationships.

Here some of the highlight findings:

• Having an obese spouse raised the risk of becoming obese by 37 percent. If a friend became obese, the risk skyrocketed by 171 percent
• On Facebook, the average user has approximately 110 "friends"
• When smokers quit, their friends were 36 percent more likely to follow suit
• Each happy friend increased an individual's probability of being happy by 9 percent. An extra $5,000 in income raised it only 2 percent
• Each student had 6.6 close friends in their online network
• We end up staying in touch with more acquaintances. But that doesn't mean we have more friends
• The impact of networks disappears abruptly after three degrees of separation
• People, in other words, need people: We are the glue holding ourselves together

Their Book: : 'Connected - The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives'

What makes us human -- for good and bad -- is our social nature. Nowhere is this complex, wonderful, and sometimes dark part of us more clearly revealed than in Connected.

In a social world exploding with new ways to interact, Connected is a user's guide for ourselves in the 21st century.

 View the electronic version of 'Article'.

Information Is Beautiful

b1 blog

Over the last couple of weeks, B1 has been working to produce an at-a-glance map outlining some of the main options B2B marketers face in using social media to engage their audiences.

 View the electronic version of 'B2B Social Media Marketing Map'.

Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle - NYTimes.com

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign. Picturing the News Cycle The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.

While most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, the study found that 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media.
The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.

Social media, especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network. “Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter."

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.

  View the electronic version of 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle'.

Daily SEO blog

If you’ve been wondering how effectively have you been communicating with your followers, here are nine great tools that will help you find out your reach, communication effectiveness, popularity and analyze your twitter usage statistics:

1. Find out whom you Re-Tweet most / active hours etc: TweetStats
2. Find out your Reader Outreach Power: Twitter Analyzer
   
3. Find out which Tweet gained you followers and which made you lose them: Tweet Effect
4. Find your Social Capital, Velocity and Centralization on Twitter: Reach, Velocity and Social Capital. Twinfluence
   
5. Find out who’s the popular Twitter user in your country/ region: Twitter Grader
6. Find out your average Twitter usage over a period of time: Tweet Rush
7. Find out your Twitter Rank: Twitter Rank
8. Find out how many people you reached via your tweets: Tweet Reach
9. Find your influence, signal-noise ratio and velocity: Twitlyzer
   

   

Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey

Global - The most trusted forms of advertising globally are personal recommendations and online opinions, with text ads on mobile phones the least trusted, according to a new survey by Nielsen. The Global Online Consumer Survey found that nine in every 10 internet consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every 10 trust consumer opinions online.

Interestingly, the next most trusted form of advertising was brand websites (70%), followed by editorial content from media (69%), brand sponsorships (63%) and TV ads (61%). The least trusted forms of advertising globally were mobile text ads (24%), followed by online banner ads (33%), online video ads (37%) and ads served in search engine results (41%).

"The explosion in consumer generated media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," Rebecca Tan, executive director, media group, The Nielsen Company Singapore, said in a statement.

"However, we see that all forms of advertiser-led advertising, except ads in newspapers, have also experienced increases in levels of trust and it's possible that the CGM revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers."

Study by Altimeter Group and Wetpaint

What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below.

The study scores the engagement level of each of the top 100 brands across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. Starbucks scored the highest, with 127 points. The top ten brands are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)

 View the electronic version of 'ENGAGEMENTdb'.

By Brian Solis and JESS3

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report « Amnesia Blog

Razorfish has just released the inaugural issue of Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing report.

This report highlights how Social Influence Marketing encompasses every part of marketing and every dimension of an organisation, as well providing a new metric for the measurement of SIM.

Convergence of Social Media and Traditional CRM - Next Generation Listening and Engagement

Social Media Monitoring systems now offer social CRM solutions. Social media, customer support, and sales teams can use these capabilities to associate and cross-reference social web content with customer and prospect information.

Enhanced capabilities and features to help companies and agencies answer the question: "How well is our brand performing across the web?"
Some of the benefits of the integration:

• Enable social media and community teams to see a customer's entire service case history from a dashboard, providing context for outreach and engagement
• Build new contacts, leads, or service cases and push them to the sales team for follow-up actions to streamline workflow
• Link social properties like blogs or Twitter accounts to existing CRM contacts, or create new contacts or leads from social properties discovered through monitoring
• Automatically capture social conversations mentioning your brand generated by your customers or prospects in social media
• View your team's engagement notes from a dashboard within each customer or prospect record

Post written by Paul Greenberg on How a Social CRM System would work and how it would relate to channels like Twitter:

“Twitter's benefit and its relationship to CRM is that it is a location, a community of people who are engaging with their peers in honest open discussions about things that benefit or hurt specific businesses, among many other things. Because there are operational CRM tools and will be new tools that can potentially tie business rules and workflow, processes and systems to communities of prospects and customers who are conversing, then a channel or location like Twitter becomes eminently valuable. The first reason? Because a problem can be monitored, noticed and acted upon. The second reason? Because gathering data on the actual discussions around brands - both yours and competitors is invaluable.”

The McKinsey Quarterly

Consumers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should.
Marketers commonly think of consumers’ purchase decisions in terms of a funnel: customers start with many product options and systematically narrow in on a decision, based partly on marketing messages directed at them.

But a more sophisticated approach is required to help marketers navigate today’s environment, with its proliferation of digital channels and increasingly discerning, well-informed consumers. This new consumer decision-making process is less linear and more complicated than the funnel suggests and must be understood by marketers if they are to reach customers not only at the right place and time but with the right message.

The decision-making process is now a circular journey with four phases. The number of brands added for consideration in different stages differs by industry. Two-thirds of the touch points during the active-evaluation phase involve consumer-driven activities such as Internet reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family.

Watch the Video: The Consumer Decision Journey

Social Radar April 2009 | Buzz Study

The April 2009 Social Radar Top 50 measures the brands with the most active Web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the Top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web during April 2009.

 Download the electronic version of 'Rise of the Silver Surfer' Presentation.

Primates on Facebook | The Economist

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”.

Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Full Version

Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Social media is seen by many marketers as the next gold rush. Michael Stelzner set out to uncover the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing with this report.  Nearly 900 of your peers provided the kind of insight that previously has not existed.

 Download the electronic version of 'Social Media Marketing Industry' Report.

Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox by Sean Corcoran - Forrester Research

Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation. To succeed, you should get to know the bloggers you plan to work with and set expectations across your organization.

Forrester's Sponsored Conversations Matrix

Altimeter Group

Includes a granular exposition of the advertising formats that are emerging/yet to emerge around next gen social media.

Download the electronic version of Future Of Social Networks Presentation

History of Advertising

Great presentation about the history of Advertising and today's challenges. It was used for Bilgi Masters program on Marketing Communications

 Download the electronic version of History of Advertising Presentation

aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Great list of free tools to measure, analyze and predict soclia buzz.

15 Social Media Policy Examples

So you finally convinced your organization to get on the social media rocket… but what about all of those questions? What happens when an executive posts photos of the corporate party on Facebook or the mailroom guy loads a video of the entire office on YouTube? No worry… everyone has to have a policy.

“Can Brands Have A Social Life?” Ogilvy One

The research covered 12 countries in Asia with insights and a practical approach to formulate a Digital Social Media Strategy.

All brands can have a social life. Social media is democratic by nature and the barriers to entry are relatively low.

The sMedia™ Planning Process provides a framework that looks to identify the right influencers and promotes them into genuine brand evangelists using creativity and innovation. It also recognises the need to continuously monitor and optimise the dialogue to ensure the relationship stays alive.

 Download the electronic version of 'Social Life in Asia' Study.