Amsterdam, 31 mei 2010 – Na een periode van intensieve voorbereidingen gaat de IAB Taskforce Social vandaag officieel van start. Dit voorjaar werd met belanghebbenden in de social media markt geïnventariseerd wat de voornaamste behoeften zijn en welke activiteiten daarin voorzien. Het resultaat is een toegewijde groep IAB-leden met een ambitieuze agenda.

John Meulemans, eigenaar van Some like it social en voorzitter van de Taskforce: “Ons voornaamste doel is om decisionmakers van merken te helpen bij het nemen van de juiste beslissingen op het gebied van social media. Daarvoor moet kennis worden vergaard en ontsloten en de Taskforce bekleedt daarbij een gidsfunctie. Je ziet nu dat kennis nog vaak gaat over wat social is en we willen juist naar het hoe. Dan heb je het bijvoorbeeld over effectiviteit van social op branding, response en conversie. Daarnaast zijn we bezig met een aantal richtlijnen waar merken op dienen te letten bij het inschakelen van een adviseur of bureau. Er zijn nogal wat specialisten bijgekomen het afgelopen jaar.”

Naast Meulemans hebben mede-initiatiefnemers Nicole Niemann, Raymond de Coninck (Tribal DDB) en Paolo Martorino (Primitivi) zitting in het bestuur. De overige leden van de Taskforce zijn werkzaam bij Buongiorno Digital, Zylom, Blutarsky, NieuwOndernemen, Talentsmedia, Isobar en weed & seed media.

Activiteiten in 2010
De Taskforce heeft de komende maanden een aantal concrete activiteiten gepland waarmee ze merken zal ondersteunen in het bepalen van hun social media strategie. Meulemans daarover: “Op korte termijn leggen we de focus op kennisdeling en onderzoek. Daartoe organiseren we meerdere executive sessions, besloten meetings specifiek gericht op executives, waar de implicaties van het sociale web op de gehele organisatie besproken worden. Deze sessies worden ondersteund door een besloten LinkedIn groep, waar continue kennisdeling door executives zal plaatsvinden. Daarnaast zijn we in contact met een aantal onderzoeksbureaus en uitgevers om te komen tot een Social Monitor. Ons staat een maandelijkse publicatie voor ogen die zowel in kwantitatieve als kwalitatieve zin best practices op het gebied van social laat zien.”

Daarnaast wil de Taskforce een onderzoek initiëren naar de impact van social media op branding en conversie en is daartoe in gesprek met een aantal merken. Ook ontwikkelde de Taskforce de Social Checkup, een quickscan van de social media initiatieven van een merk door een panel specialisten die als plug-in op diverse evenementen te ervaren zal zijn, zoals bij het IAM-evenement op 2 en 3 juni in de RAI.

Not really surprisingly for us but real conversations seem to be going on amongst brands and their audiences says a recent study form Burson-Marsteller. Eight out of ten of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune Global 500 index uses one or more popular social media platforms.

Global brands find value from engaging in social media. Twitter seems to be very popular with 65% of the brands having a presence here. Notable is that European brands have the same Twitter presence as the US brands, 70%.

Facebook and Youtube channels are also valued as important by half of the top brands because the use them quite seriously. Most brands use multiple accounts, channels, blogs, fan pages, names when using these social media. Most striking is that they really engage in conversations with their audiences in different varieties of conversations styles.

For an effective business approach to social media, they suggest the following approach which also reflects the way we at PRIMITIVI like to embedd social in your organization:

1.  Monitor your own, and your competitors, social media presence.

2.  Get top management “buy-in”.

3.  Develop a social media strategy.

4.  Define and publish a social media policy.

5.  Develop internal structure.

6.  Contribute to the community.

7.  Participate in good times and in bad.

8.  Be perpared to respond in real time.

9.  Beyond monitoring, measure the impact of social media engagement.

Check the slideshare underneath for more details on this social media survey.

Location based services such as Foursquare are booming right now. You can check in on locations and earn points by doing so. Foursquare just crossed the one million user mark.

A new initiative along these lines is the application CauseWorld. Instead of checking into locations you can check in by just walking into a store and earn karmapoints by doing so. You can even scan products in stores that enable you to earn more karmapoints. These karmapoints actually turn into money which you can donate to your the cause of your choice. The next step is sharing your activities with your friends.

Karma works both ways, because the app is sponsored by large retailproducers such as Kraft foods. The checking in and scanning of products gives consumers the incentive to buy that specific product more easily.

It is a very interesting cause marketing collaboration where commercial and good cause come together in a social context. Unfortunately the application is available in the US only, but it demonstrates how location based applications are used in a creative way. We will definitely see more of these initiatives sprouting in the nearby future.

In the recent years more and more people have become active online, and the use of social media has shifted from creating to sharing. One of the reasons is that new technologies enable a large group of people to engage in online conversation. Not everyone is willing to blog a whole article, but sending a comment or a re-tweet is easily done and integrated in online behaviour. The illustration below from Flowtown and Postrank depicts this shift of the last three years. The conversation is taking place online and that’s the place where you can learn the most.

Demographics help you to get an insight in who is using which social platform. It helps you decide where you should focus your social media strategy on, depending on your market. We at PRIMITIVI love info-graphics and Flowtown came up with this wonderful one. Social networks have experienced an explosive growth and this info-graphic gives you a good overview of the demographics of the users.

For instance, women represent more than 55% of the population on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, whereas men use more reference sites such as Digg. What is also remarkable is that the age group from 35-54 is mostly represented throughout all the mentioned social networks.

The demographics of online social use are always dynamic, but can be helpful in deciphering trends. View the full-size info-graphic.

A short update on the latests stats om social media usage worldwide. 72% of the connected population are member of at least one social network, which translates to 940 million users worldwide!

Below you can the check the full report dorm INSites consulting om the latest figures.

Our marketing hero Seth Godin pulled it off again. To launch his new guru-crowdsourced book What Matters Now he decided to go viral. And it worked

A deluge of ideas include Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com), Jason Fried (37signals), Gary Vaynerchuk (garyvaynerchuk.com), Chris Anderson (Wired), Gina Trapani (Lifehacker) and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) is the result. Get the book for free here

What Matters Now

This month Facebook announced that the social network site has got more than 350 million active users. Each user spends an average of 55 minutes each day on Facebook.

This month Facebook announced that the social network site has got more than 350 million active users. Each user spends an average of 55 minutes each day on Facebook.

In 5 years Facebook has grown from 1 million users to an impressive 350 million users. 300,000 Facebook users helped to translate the platform in 70 different languages.

Each month users upload over 2.5 million photos to their Facebook profile and share more than 3.5 million pieces of content (weblinks, news stories, blog postings, notes, etc.) each week.

Currently there are over 350,000 active Facebook applications, built by 3rd party developers. 250 of these applications have more than 1 million monthly active users.

Approximately 20% of the active users access Facebook through their mobile devices. These users are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

Will Facebook grow to 500 million users in 2010? If Facebook does, they will be bigger than Microsoft’s Live network that currently has got more than 500 million users.

Some brands wonder in which manner the can apply social media & communications to their business-to-business marketing strategy and operations. Businesses start to realize that they need more than the latest CRM software update to be effective in their relationships. Luckely social business-to-business marketing works essentially the same as social business-to-consumer marketing. The only differences between B2C and B2B are represented specifically by the influencers, communities, conversations, questions, interactions and their place within the buy and value cycles.

To get a deeper view at B2B social media marketing in 2010, eMarketer graphed the results…

Conveying thought leadership is a clear and promising chance for social brands. 60% of polled B2B marketers reported that thought leadership was at the top of the list for reasons they would engage in social networks. Generating leads and customer feedback served as the second and third top motivators for participation with 49% and 46%.

We can conclude that the dynamics of doing business and the role of influence share similar attributes that significantly benefit from socialized media and participation. So start being a social brand with thought leadership today.

We spend 8 billion minutes on Facebook each day. Surely social brands want to be part of that. But how easy is this?

Since 2007 it’s possible to create Facebook Brandpages. According to a just released report titled Inside Facebook Pages most Facebook brandpages look like normal profile pages. The difference is that social brands added functionality.

According to this report, the average Facebook page has 4,596 fans, and only 4% of the 600,000 pages analyzed have more than 10,000 fans.

Only 300 Facebook Brandpages have more than a million fans and those pages have three times as much owner-generated content than an average page.

Successful Facebook branding isn’t easy. So, don’t forget to really add something brilliant to your fans.