The Digital Tipping Point – The Future of Branding and Social Media

I can say that 'back by popular demand' Adknowledge are having their second social media conference. The last one in September 08 launched Adknowledge into the Australian market as well as setting the current social media landscape. The Digital Tipping Point - The future of branding and social media (in Association with Digital Media) is Adknowledge's second event running in Sydney (17th February) and Melbourne (19th February) and brings together industry specialists from different backgrounds to share their work on what works and what to avoid with branding in SM.

Speaking again is Brett Brewer (Adknowledge President, Co-Founder of MySpace)who is also bringing with him Brian Garrett. Brian is the Co-Founder and MD of Crosscut Ventures a VC that specialises with technology start-ups and has been at the front line of the emergence social media. Filling the roster is Alistair Henderson (Director, OMD Fuse), and two leading SM strategists with Fi Bendall (Director, Bendall's Group), and Laurel Papworth (Social Networking Strategist)

The last event was received extremely well and judging by the RSVP's so far (almost double the last event) this promises to be just as good!

Myspace secretly building webmail product

Hot off the press and all secret squirrels at this stage but Myspace are building a webmail product to rivel hotmail, Yahoo! mail, gmail etc. It's a big step given that only 6% of users spend time with social networks mail products. But if users were to migrate to use their Myspace mail as their main account this would be huge for Myspace. Traffic would increase to perhaps double / trebble the current numbers and also increase dwell time massively giving them a huge advantage over Facebook.

Applications are here to stay

Who would have thought that applications were not even 'born' 18 months ago. Since their arrival in May 07 when Facebook opened up their platform, applications are now serving 35 billion ads each month worldwide. To put that into context 56% of Facebook visitors visit a Facebook application, 1 in 5 minutes on Facebook is on an application, and 1 in every 3 page views on Facebook is on an Application (Nielsen Oct 08).

There are 40,000 developers fueling this growth by attracting users with fun and engaging applications and keeping them on the site for longer periods. This relationship works very well as the developers get to keep the revenue and Facebook get more users attracted to their site with increased dwell time that they intern monitise. It was a very bold and genious move. This has meant that applications have grown faster, increase in user time and ad's shown, than any other sector within online advertising during 2008.

Brett Brewer, (President of Adknowledge and co-founder of Myspace) mentioned to me that Myspace wanted to do something similar a few years back but couldn't get a business model to work and in the mean time Facebok beat them to the punch.

On the right is the top 20 fastest growing mid-sized (100K - 1 M monthly user range) applications on Facebook from AppData for January 2009. The top app is Appear offline, an app that allows users to who are not logged on to facebook chat to see their friends online. The number 2 app of the moment is Social Chatrooms. This app connects users from other social netoworks outside Facebook.

At number 4 is an app after my own heart...'Team Great Britian Fans'. Users showing their love for GB. Though for all the brits now living in Sydney ( half the media industry) the app should read ' I love Great Britain but not as much as Bondi Beach' :-)

Lets not forget we are not just talking about Facebok and Myspace. Applications are now across all major social networks, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut. At the end of 2008 Yahoo! opened up it's mail platform to host applications and the evidence is clear to see: apps increase users to a site, keep them there for longer, increase site functionality and enhance user experience. What does this all mean? - increased revenue! it also means that applications are here to stay!

To keep up to date with the latest apps and the monthly gainers and loosers check out these two sites Appdata and Adonomics (recently aquired by Adknowledge).

Whopper Sacrifice: Ditch 10 Friends, Get a Free Whopper

We all from time to time look at our growing friends list on Facebook and think who are all these people and think about getting rid of a few. Well Burger King have thought about our predicament and have launched the Whopper Sacrifice Application. The application gives users a coupon for the new Burger King burger when they delete 10 friends.

The kick in the teeth for your banished friends is that they are sent a message via Facebook's news feed explaining that the person who has chopped them has a greater love for new Whopper. Before you go mad and delete 50 odd distant friends it's only 1 coupon per user. There has been over 10,000 users who have so far added this application so it looks like it's taking off...let the culling begin!

Social Media is changing at great speed

I've put this blog together to keep everybody (that's everybody who's interested!) up to date with all the latest developments and news within the social media and specifically the Application space.

In 18 months applications have become the most talk about aspect within social media networks. Users now spend more time engaging with applications then they do with looking at profiles and reading mail.

To put it into context I read recently an arcicle by Alex Burmaster (Comms director, UK & EMEA, Nielsen Online) in NMA stating that ' if Facebook Applications was a brand it would be the eigth biggest brand in the UK by time spent, ahead of the likes of YouTube, all Microsoft's properties, and all of Apple's, Virgin's and Sky's.

...watch this space (or I should say Blog!)