Social media – Page 23

Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)

Well 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 Dawson

Some 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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Top Twitter nations: USA, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, UK, New Zealand, Australia

By Ross Dawson

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.

Effective strategies for a rapidly changing media industry

By Ross Dawson

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you’re interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

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Trends in the Living Networks hits the AdAge 150

By Ross Dawson

Over the last couple of years the AdAge 150 has collated a dynamic list of the top blogs in advertising, media, and marketing. The list actually covers over 1,000 blogs, and ranks them daily by prominence, using a variety of sources including rankings from Alexa, PostRank, and Collective Intellect, as well as a subjective ranking by the list developer Todd Andrlik. These sources have changed throughout the history of the AdAge 150 list, in trying to provide a balanced view of blog authority

This blog was added to the list a couple of months ago, having previously not come to the attention of the list creators. While I write about other topics, including enterprise technology and the future of business, a large proportion of this blog is about media and marketing in their many guises. In fact I have often described the future of business as the media economy, in which almost all economic activity is a form of media.

The AdAge rankings are highly dynamic since they emphasize recent activity. At the time of writing this blog is ranked #97, which is pretty solid given many of the blogs on the list are professional blogs.

I’ve written before about blog rankings, notably about Wikio’s approach, and I’ve been intending to write about Technorati’s recent changes in authority ranking. I’ll try to get to a broader overview of the blog authority systems before long.

Where is privacy heading and who is driving it?

By Ross Dawson

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that “obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside,” meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg’s comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others – including Zuckerberg – have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

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Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities

By Ross Dawson

I very rarely find the time to write magazine articles, but I was delighted to write the opening feature article for MediaTitles 2010, an annual publication which covers the media and magazine industry.

To see the article in the full splendor of the print version, go to the MediaTitles website, which has the full publication viewable using Realview Technologies (with the article reformatted to take out the lists of four, which I think is a pity). My article is on pages 7-10.

The (original) text of the article is below.

CREATING THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times. The global economic crisis, coming on top of a dramatic transformation wrought by the rise of the Internet, is creating the swiftest change in media industry structure ever experienced. Newspapers and magazines are being shut down at an extraordinary pace all over the world, journalists are losing their jobs, and broadcast media are under threat as sliding advertising revenue hit an unmoving cost base. Yet as the world shifts towards what will be truly an all-encompassing media economy, there are extraordinary opportunities ahead for media organisations.

This is a critical juncture to examine the future of media. Magazines have and will continue to be central to how we learn, socialise, entertain ourselves, and make buying decisions. Yet the magazine industry will undoubtedly look very different scant years ahead. It is our role and responsibility to create the future of media, rather than to let it happen to us. To do that, we need to examine the most central driving forces, strategic issues and capabilities in the evolving media landscape.

Four Driving Forces

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The future of video and man-machine interfaces

By Ross Dawson

The Institute for the Future has shared its Future of Video project using the presentation platform Prezi. This is a great way of giving access to the rich visual frameworks that are the trademark of IFTF – it’s well worth a browse just to see part of what Prezi can do.

The presentation wraps up with some nice videos from Microsoft and Sixth Sense showing visions and demonstrations of the role of video in how we interface with the external world and information. Which illustrates how man-machine interfaces – one of the primary mechanisms for the birth of the living networks – are in fact largely driven by video.

The trends that are highlighted in the presentation are:

– From scarcity to abundance of digital video

– From passive to hyperlinked, interactive video

– From keypad to gestural and tangible interaction

– From limited to ubiquitous video interactions

– From camera-captured to synthetic CG video

– From 2D to immersive HD, 4KHD, and 3D video

The proliferation of crap content and the rise of content reputation systems

By Ross Dawson

For a number of years I’ve talked about how we are effectively reaching a world infinite content, and the implications of that. That is becoming more real by the day, as in an economy increasingly driven by search and links, people find new ways to generate content that participates in this new information infrastructure.

I wrote last year about Philip Parker, who created programs that have automatically generated 200,000 books by aggregating and structuring content on the web. I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m told that they are – unsurprisingly – pretty poor, though of possible value to some people. However this is probably at the quality end of the spectrum of auto-generated content. For many years blog spammers have been auto-generating blog posts which have plausible language constructions, so they are picked up by search engines, but in fact are nonsense.

Adding to the morass of content are non-native speakers who lack background and context writing articles that are far more coherent than anything generated by computers, but which are still basically crap i.e. a waste of time to read.

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