Software firm Sysomos has provided some more interesting research on Twitter usage.
Using this data, we have analyzed which countries use Twitter the most on a per capita basis, shown below.
I did the same analysis from Sysomos’ report in June, showing the most prominent Twitter nations on a per capita basis at the time, according to the data provided.
While the results are fairly consistent between the June 2009 and January 2010, it seems that neither set of results is complete. Norway, which ranked as the third highest per capita Twitter nation last June, had no data provided on it in this survey, while Singapore – now the second highest ranked nation – and Ireland – now ranked fourth – were not included in the June survey.
On a relative basis New Zealand has gained ground, catching up with Australia and the UK, while Germany appears to have moved ahead considerably compared to other countries such as France.
Sysomos doesn’t give details on its “proprietary” methodology for identifying the location of Twitterers, however it very interestingly says that only 0.23% of tweets are tagged with location through Twitter’s geo-location API tool. I may have a play with getting some of this data directly at some point.
The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent
By Ross DawsonA few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang’s move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.
This is a long-term secular trend – in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:
In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:
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Tapping the power of crowdsourcing for good
By Ross DawsonI am not that keen on the word “crowdsourcing”, because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.
I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.
One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.
An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:
The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:
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7:30 Report: the social impact of the population boom and Australia’s future
By Ross DawsonLast week the ABC’s 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.
It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC’s website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.
The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.
Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.
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Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)
By Ross DawsonWell there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!
To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.
Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.
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Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?
By Ross DawsonSome very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.
However the data point that struck my interest most is that…
Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media
This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.
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We are fast learning how to create “enhanced serendipity”
By Ross DawsonSerendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of “the Three Princes of Serendip”, which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).
For the last decade I have been talking about the idea of “enhanced serendipity”. For example I wrote about how I used social networking software to create enhanced serendipity at a Living Networks event that I ran in New York in 2003, used the term to describe what was done by mobile social networking platform Dodgeball (the first attempt in the space by the founders of today’s success story in the space Foursquare), and a longer post about Creating Enhanced Serendipity in 2006.
In today’s New York Times, Nick Bilton writes a post titled ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web. He writes:
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How reputation measurement will transform professional services
By Ross DawsonEarlier this week I did the opening keynote at the AMP Hillross annual convention, with the title of Embracing the Future. Hillross, one of the most upmarket of the wealth management networks, is seeking to lead the rest of the market by shifting to a pure fee-for-advice model, and rapidly developing a true professional culture. My keynote was designed to bring home the necessity of individual and firm leadership at this key juncture in industry structure.
One of the central themes of my talk was the increasing importance of reputation for professionals. Clearly reputation has always been critical for any professional, and there are some parts of professional services markets where reputation is already highly visible, such as prominent M&A lawyers, who are identified by numerous client surveys. While clients of other professional services (for example audit or management consulting) tend to be more focused on engaging firms rather than individuals, there is a fundamental shift from corporate to individual reputation under way.
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Who is most influential in Enterprise 2.0?
By Ross DawsonOver the holidays Mark Fidelman launched his 2010 Enterprise 2.0 All-Star Blogger Roster. Mark says:
The list of 22 people includes Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has recently launched his book by the same name, sits at the top of the tree, with five termed “Most Influential” (where Mark has kindly placed me, presumably partly due to the success of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0), five “Highly Influential”, ten “Influential”, with as a special extra Dennis Howlett, who believes that Enterprise 2.0 is ‘a crock’, as “Enterprise 2.0 Referee”.
Click on the image to see Mark’s post including a larger version of the image and the data used to assess the influence of the all-stars.
Creating Knowledge-based CRM initiatives
By Ross DawsonI am running a two-day executive program on Relationship Management for Financial Services in Kuala Lumpur on 28-29 January, organized by IBN International. The workshop will be attended by executives from a variety of local and global financial institutions in South-East Asia.
Over the last few years I have spent less time on these issues as I’ve broadened my scope to look at the future of business, however much of my earlier career was in financial services, working at Merrill Lynch and Thomson Financial, and my focus was for a number of years on high-value client relationships, best expressed in my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. As such , in the late 1990s and the first years of the following decade I did considerable work with major financial institutions on enhancing their client relationship capabilities.
Increasingly, the key client programs applied in corporate and insitutional banking and the CRM initiatives implemented in retail and private banking are coming together. The shift to online and data-driven relationships has facilitated that shift.
To help explain some of the key drivers of CRM programs from a “knowledge-based” perspective, I have created a Knowledge-Based CRM Framework which I will use in the executive program in KL. This will complement my existing content and frameworks on high-value relationships, which are summarized in Chapter 6 of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. Hopefully the framework below is largely self-explanatory, however I will try to find the time at a later stage to explain the framework in more detail.
Click on the image to download Knowledge-based CRM Framework
Top Twitter nations: USA, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, UK, New Zealand, Australia
By Ross DawsonSoftware firm Sysomos has provided some more interesting research on Twitter usage.
Using this data, we have analyzed which countries use Twitter the most on a per capita basis, shown below.
I did the same analysis from Sysomos’ report in June, showing the most prominent Twitter nations on a per capita basis at the time, according to the data provided.
While the results are fairly consistent between the June 2009 and January 2010, it seems that neither set of results is complete. Norway, which ranked as the third highest per capita Twitter nation last June, had no data provided on it in this survey, while Singapore – now the second highest ranked nation – and Ireland – now ranked fourth – were not included in the June survey.
On a relative basis New Zealand has gained ground, catching up with Australia and the UK, while Germany appears to have moved ahead considerably compared to other countries such as France.
Sysomos doesn’t give details on its “proprietary” methodology for identifying the location of Twitterers, however it very interestingly says that only 0.23% of tweets are tagged with location through Twitter’s geo-location API tool. I may have a play with getting some of this data directly at some point.