Social Media Round-Up #17

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: Google Goggles; Tiger Woods traffic; and America's gigantic info-portions.

Next update is on Monday, when we'll cast a beady eye over Facebook, Twitter, and much more - see you then!


THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...


THE HEADLINES ...

Blimey – the average American consumes a supersized portion of 34 gigabytes of content a day, according to a University of California study. Americans spend 11.8 hours on various media - often using multiple screens simultaneously – and are served a hefty dollop of 100,000 words every 24 hours.

No surprise, then, that IT experts and environmentalists are increasingly concerned about the rocketing energy spend (and resulting carbon emissions) produced by the explosion of social networking, streaming video, and other band-width heavy applications. Google has made and met its commitment to designing reduced energy consumption into its data centres – but much more needs to be done by the myriad media and info enterprises who inhabit the datasphere, experts say.

Elsewhere, much of this week’s news was Google-shaped: the search giant bestrode the headlines, as their deal with Facebook and Myspace completed a real-time search triumvirate (Twitter signed a while back). 40% of Googlers are looking for the latest news about a given search term – the deal means they’ll receive results from all the big social media sites as well as the usual list of results, effectively turning Google into a breaking news service. How time does fly – it seems only a few short months ago that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was languidly up-summing Twitter et al as “poor man’s email systems”.

On the thorny subject of online news, Google this week hinted that they’d found a "potential solution" to the ongoing questions over how news media should support themselves. Their ‘Living Stories’ tool claims to organise news as it develops within each story, summarizing and contextualizing it on one page, and highlighting new content to avoid repetition.

Google hopes to make the tools available to news organizations for their own use – but didn’t expand further on how this would satisfy Rupert Murdoch, whose vocal campaign against Google’s ‘theft’ of his news is creating its own headlines on a daily basis. Mr Murdoch, in any case, seems intransigent in the matter of paid content - News Corp this week hooked up with a consortium of magazine publishers to launch a joint online storefront for their titles.

Finally, Google launched Google Goggles – say it slooowly - a visual search tool which lets you search from your mobile by snapping a photo of ... well, anything on this list: landmarks, logos, artwork, products, businesses, contact info, books, barcodes and plain text. The very cool tool (not to be confused with Google Mail Goggles, an equally cool tool which prevents drunken e-mailing) will revolutionise information-gathering on the go.

You’ll notice, however, that Google doesn’t offer people on its list of searchables - following privacy concerns, Google has decided to blur out individual faces, so you can’t now get the skinny on someone by secretly snapping them.

Facebook, on the other hand, was causing Privacy advocates to suck their teeth this week when it emerged that the default setting of its Transition Tool – which asks members to review their privacy settings — is to make users’ updates entirely public. Campaigners fear “a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”

Good luck with that one, chaps – it appears you may be swimming against the tide. A new study finds that Facebook users will gaily add total strangers as friends – releasing all their personal info in the process. According to CNET, 46 percent of users "blindly accepted" invitations from fake accounts, which had been set up by security firm Sophos for the study.

Got no Twitter love? List of followers languishing in the doldrums? Could be you’re using the wrong words. Social Media Today have done a little poking around with their text mining tools, and discovered that upbeat, ‘social’ words correlate to high follower counts, while negative or sweary words are associated with low popularity. “Thank you” seems to be a winner, as do ‘online’, ‘send’, ‘list’, ‘web’, ‘media’, and ‘join’. Meanwhile words associated with a very low following are : ‘sleep’, ‘hate’, ‘damn’, ‘feeling’, ‘homework’, ‘class’, ‘boring’, ‘stuck’. The only possible conclusion: if you’re stuck at home feeling hatey about doing boring homework for that damn class tomorrow - keep it to yourself.

A viral ad for eco-cleaner company Method has been pulled, following complaints that it appeared to condone sexual assault. The ad is a spoof on the idea of ‘talking bubbles’ - the kind you might see in a traditional bathroom-cleaner ad – but in this case the tone turns sinister, as the bubbles begin catcalling while the householder is forced to take a shower.

THE LOWDOWN ...

“God bless Tiger”, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz exclaimed with refreshing honesty this week. You just can’t beat a good Sleb Scandal for drumming up traffic – which is why Yahoo is down on its knees thanking Tiger Woods with all its heart: the traffic coming in for Woods-related content has "made" Yahoo's quarter.

Poor old Kerry McCarthy MP, Labour's "new media campaigns spokeswoman", who struggled manfully last week under a deluge of surreal tweets, after comedian Ross Noble urged his Twitter followers to bombard her with silly questions. Most were indeed surreal (“If the Treaty of Lisbon were a cheese, what sort of cheese would it be?”) but the overall verdict was a resounding thumbs up for @KerryMP, for taking it all in excellent humour. Challenged to start a Mexican wave in parliament, for example, she responded: "We do it on the Labour benches when Nick Clegg is speaking. You just don't see it happening."

David Letterman – the famously Twitter-averse talk show host – this week caved in to popular demand and reluctantly entered the wonderful world of 140-character bulletins. Using a ‘Twitter machine’ (which looked remarkably like a laptop) and exuding concentration, he carefully crafted his first tweet: “Do you smell veal and peppers?”. Watch the segment on YouTube here.

Two post-grads at a Japanese university have developed a microwave which streams random YouTube videos to an integrated screen, while you wait for your ready-meal to be zapped - positing a world in which media is a constant in every corner of our lives. Damn, those two minutes spent staring into the gamma rays every night were kind of relaxing, in a hypnotic, brain-frying way.

Oh dear me. There are ‘low sales figures’, then there are “bafflingly low sales figures” – and then, quite a long way beyond that, there are iPhone’s Chinese sales figures. The handset, which is the darling of the West, has been available for a month now in China. They’ve sold precisely five.

Sexual health brand Durex is launching an online community for people to 'celebrate healthy sex lives'. So far, so Scandiwegian – we are all grown-ups here, after all. I confess, though, that the details are making my palms clammy: the site is called Ora!, with material by a company called Sticky Content ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...

Talking of branded communities, a recent study has shown that many major brands need to pull their community-strategy socks up sharpish. Only 36% of their communities had high levels of activity, and most brands tended to separate their communities from the rest of their social media initiatives - only 32% of the 135 communities were integrated with social networks. What’s more, few brands had sufficient systems in place for making use of the insights they gained from communities. Must try harder, I’d say.

To make matters worse, a separate study finds that brands are failing, and rather spectacularly, to take advantage of Twitter’s benefits. Nigh on three-quarters of the 500 Superbrands analysed by New Media Age had no presence whatsoever on the microblogging site.

Seems that teenagers are not, after all, the slaves to social media of popular imagination. At least in Europe, TV is still the main time-suck for teens, averaging out at 10.3 hours per week. Only 40% of them regularly use social networks, at an average of 9.1 hours.

First Google, now Yahoo, is embracing online ad transparency. It's launching an Ad Interest Manager tool which allows users to opt-in to interest-based ads, and to control their level of exposure.

Facebook and other networking sites are considering panic buttons to let children alert administrators if they’re exposed to inappropriate material. The button forms part of a new children’s safety initiative, drawn up by Prof. Tanya Byron, and unveiled by Gordon Brown this week. As part of the same ‘Click Clever, Click Safe’ initiative, lessons in internet safety will become compulsory for English primary schoolchildren from 2011. It’s hoped the slogan 'Zip it, Block it, Flag it' will become a ‘Green Cross Code’ for the age of new media.

Over in the States, meanwhile, LG has launched a novel public service ad which warns teens: Don’t Text Pics of Your Junk. Their Give it a Ponder campaign attempts to persuade teens to think before they text – in an cheeky, though unquestionably discombobulating, manner. Worth a look.

Groans all round in the gaming industry: Alistair Darling did not, after all, offer tax breaks for British developers in his pre-budget report, to the chagrin of those who’ve been pointing out that they bring more to the British economy than the subsidised film industry; and that British talent is increasingly being lost to (subsidised) competitor nations like Canada and South Korea.

It’s the time of year for predictions, and eMarketer's thoughts about what 2010 might hold in store are well worth casting your eye over: amongst other nuggets, they predict that social search will yield new opportunities and formats for advertisers – but will also raise the hackles of privacy campaigners.

That’s all folks!