Five reasons why Turkey is one of the hottest Internet markets in the world

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Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocako?lu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook

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Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.

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Business Today: Interview on how business can use social media

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Yesterday I was interviewed on the Business Today program on the Australia Network, ABC TV’s international network which broadcasts across Asia.

The interview can also be viewed along with other material in Business Today’s archives.

Key points covered in the interview include:

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What are the most useful social media tools for small business?

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Most business owners recognise that there are many social media tools that can help them run their businesses more effectively. The problem is sorting through the plethora of tools that are available today to work out what to use, and how to use it.

Mashable has come out with a useful list of 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Business, mentioning:

1. Google Apps for Domains

Online email, calendar and office software

2. LinkedIn

Professional social network

3. Basecamp

Online project management tool

4. Facebook

Social network with fan pages, apps and other tools

5. Twitter

Micro-blogging for relationship building

6. Get Satisfaction

Customer self-support forums

7. MailChimp

Web-based mailing list manager

8. UserVoice

Tracking customer feedback

9. YouTube

Hosted videos for marketing, education and advertising

10. Monitter

Monitor Twitter for relevant conversations and comments

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ABC TV Interview: How business can create value with Twitter

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ABC TV ran a segment a few days ago on how companies are using Twitter to create value, including an interview with me on how businesses can use Twitter effectively.

This should be a topic of particular interest to small and mid-sized companies. If you are interested in learning more, SME Tech Summit in Sydney on 1 December will include specific in-detail coverage of how your company can use Twitter (as well as other social media tools) to build your success.

Comments made during the program include:

* Experts say Twitter is here to stay

* Twitter has become a legitimate business tool

* When you don’t have much money to spend, Twitter can be an excellent way to promote your business

* You need to be conversational and human to engage your customers

* There are ways that companies in any industry to use Twitter

* It is hard to do properly, and you do need to be consistent if you start

* Twitter is here to stay as part of companies’ branding strategy

The immense value of expertise location will help drive enterprise social media

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I have been interested in the field of expertise location for over a decade, from back when knowledge managers were building ‘corporate yellow pages’ and other tools to find the best expertise in the organization.

Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues at hand, it really has no reason to exist. A smaller more nimble organization could do as good a job with lower costs.

I have written about expertise location frequently over the last years, both in looking at how enhancing organizational networks can generate greater revenues and efficiency, and how social technologies can support effective expertise location, including on the role of enterprise social network software and several years ago about the use of blogs to support expertise location.

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Today the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article called Who Knows What? describing the issue of expertise location and explaining how blogs, wikis, social networks, and tagging can support finding the most relevant knowledge in the organization.

This is hardly new stuff, but large organizations are now reaching the point where they understand that social media are important organizational tools, and have begun implementing some of these tools. This means there is in many cases the breadth of uptake required for effective expertise location.

In large, geographically distributed, professional organizations, expertise location can be a ‘killer app’ which provides immense return on the implementation of social computing. We have reached the point at which this could get real traction.

These issues are also addressed in detail in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

[Hattip to @ariegoldshlager]

Why does Aardvark think I know how to learn to be a stripper?

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After a number of requests from friends I signed up for Aardvark recently. If you haven’t t come across it, it’s a social network for search, where your questions are given to whoever in your extended network is most likely to be able to answer them, as illustrated below.

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It’s an interesting idea which has got a lot of buzz though not a lot of uptake yet. I suspect that this approach to social search is more likely to get traction within an existing social network rather than a dedicated one, though it’s possible that it could take off, most likely initially in specific communities.

The nub of how Aardvark works is by using your nominated topics, which can be input either by yourself or others. I entered topics of ‘enterprise 2.0’ and ‘social networks’ and others have tagged me with ‘business’ and ‘social media’.

As such I was rather surprised when I received this email from Aardvark:

(Aardvark) Help someone with a question about *adult entertainment business*

Hi Ross,

Briana/20/F/…..,.. just asked a question I think you might be able to answer,

“What’s the best way to learn how to be a stripper?”

To answer, just reply to this message, and I’ll forward your email along to Briana.

As it happens I don’t know the answer. So why did Aardvark think that I might know?

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Tools for lifestreaming become available

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I have had extensive media coverage this week for my forecasts for social technologies for 2016. One of the predictions that has attracted the most attention is that lifestreaming will become commonplace. Many of us will capture videos, images, audio of conversations and far more. This may be to record for our own purposes, to share with friends or family, or to provide access to teh world at large.

The underlying technologies to do it are certainly available, including cheap storage. However the practical tools that make it easy are only just now getting onto the market. It is not easy to rig up automated cameras or head-mounted video recorders and automatically synchronize with online systems.

The latest is a tool specifically designed for lifestreaming. New Scientist says:

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The Vicon camera will be marketed to researchers initially at around US$820, and be available to consumers next year.

Interestingly, the device has emerged from the Microsoft Sensecam, which has been shown to help people with Alzheimers and dementia to recall the events of the day. This kind of memory aid could be equally as valuable to the rest of us.

Social Media Strategy Framework in 11 languages

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Given the extreme popularity of our Social Media Strategy Framework, we decided to translate it into other languages. The translations have been serialized on my blog over the last couple of weeks, and here they are compiled into a single post.

[UPDATE:] Korean has been added – now 12 languages!

Social Media Strategy Framework in 12 languages

(scroll down for frameworks and links to the full post)

English – Social Media Strategy Framework

Chinese – 社交媒体战略框架

Dutch – Sociale Media Strategie Kader

French – Plan Stratégique des médias sociaux

German – Social Media strategische Rahmenrichtlinien

Italian – Schema della strategia relativa ai mezzi di comunicazione sociale

Japanese – ソーシャルメディア戦略構造

Korean – 소셜미디어 전략 프레임워크

Portuguese – Modelo Estratégico das Mídias Sociais

Russian – Структура стратегии в социальных медиа

Spanish – Encuadre de Estrategia de Medios Sociales

Turkish – Sosyal Medya Strateji Çerçevesi

English – Social Media Strategy Framework

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Futurist proved correct! …and today describes the extraordinary social technologies of 2016 (release)

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This morning Future Exploration Network issued this press release (excuse the hyperbole :-) ) I have already done several radio interviews on the forecasts in the release with quite a few more radio, newspaper and TV interviews lined up for the next days – the ideas seem to have struck a chord.

Futurist proved correct! …and today describes the extraordinary social technologies of 2016

Seven years ago, in his prescient book Living Networks, global leading futurist Ross Dawson accurately described the networked world of today, anticipating social networks, Twitter, corporate blogging, crowd-sourcing, personalised advertising, virtual personal assistants and much else that is now familiar to us.

Today, he offers insights into the extraordinary world of technology we will experience seven years into the future.

Ross’s forecasts for 2016 include:

• Many people will wear video glasses as they commute and walk around, experiencing new forms of television, news updates, and detailed information about the world around them and people they meet.

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Social Media Strategy Framework in French – Plan Stratégique des médias sociaux

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Continuing our series of translations of Social Media Strategy Framework, today we are launching the French edition.

See the original post for the full overview of the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and compilation of the framework in 11 different languages.

SMSframework in French

Click on image to download pdf

Please share this with any French speakers who would be interested.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

NOTA: Puisque j’ai vecu 13 ans a Geneve quand j’etais petit je parle Francais courrament, mais comme vous voyez je ne l’ecrit pas bien et j’ai jamais appris a faire les accents sur un clavier, donc je n’ai pas fais la traduction moi-meme :-).