the molife of crappy booze

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

U.S. Growth in Average time Person on Facebook and Twitter Outpaces Growth of Overall Category

People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009. Year-over-year growth in average time spent by U.S. users, for both Facebook and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth for the category, increasing 200% and 368%, respectively. Among, the top five U.S. social networking sites, Twitter.com continued its reign as the fastest-growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors, increasing 579% year-over-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. However, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%

Australia Leads in Average Time Spent per Person on Social Media Sites in December

When narrowed by individual country, with 142.1 million unique visitors the United States had the largest number of social media and blog users in December, followed by Japan, which had 46.6 million unique visitors during the month. Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December. The United States and the United Kingdom came in a close second and third, with 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 8 minutes, respectively.

*Global data takes into account the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy

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The connected customer leaves brands in the dust.

As we close out the year, it’s important to look back at what happened in social marketing in order to plan for the future. There were four key trends in 2009 that CMOs should reflect on, starting at the macro level then shifting down to micro real-time updates. They are:

The Recession Spurred Consumers to Adopt Social Technologies. Humans are social creatures and, as a result, they tend to band together in hard times. During financial crises, this same behavior is evident: People connect to one other, share, learn, and communicate. What’s more, with unemployment at record highs, those with internet access have more time–and need–to connect with others. It’s evident through Facebook’s 350 million global users. For brands, it’s interesting to note a study by Razorfish, which indicates that 52% of consumers have blogged about a brand’s product or experience. Don’t expect this to change as the recession lifts, as it is the preferred method of communication for young people.

Some Brands Followed Suit With Social Marketing. Marketing budgets are pinched during tough times. Recent data from eMarketer indicates that companies are slashing print budgets by 37% and TV by 21% as a response to the recession. Yet marketers know that tough times also spur innovation, as they experiment with mediums such as social marketing. Social marketing promises lower costs and bigger returns. In fact, word-of-mouth campaigns encourage consumers to do the marketing on behalf of the brand themselves. Yet despite the opportunity, research conducted by the Altimeter Group (where I’m a partner) and Wetpaint found that while brands like Starbucks, Dell, eBay, and Google interact with their customers, most brands do not. Still, we’re seeing a noticeable increase in social marketing budgets, as brands find ways to innovative marketing.

Social Networks Share Data, Spreading Social Influence. A key trend across the technology vendor space in 2009 is that social networks are connecting with other systems. Much like how Apple’s iPhone developer program enables third parties to build and create new applications, many social networks are doing the same. Take for example, LinkedIn, a business network that recently began allowing third party sites to connect with the LinkedIn platform to share data. Similarly, Facebook Connect allows users to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID. There have been over 80,000 connections since this time last year. So what does this data availability mean? It means that consumers’ social experience will spread from site to site, and that wherever they go online or off, they can access their friends’ opinions, experiences, and recommendations in real time.

Consumers Move Faster By Sharing Real-Time Data. In August, 2009, blogger Heather Armstrong, who boasts over a million followers on Twitter was miffed about a shabby customer experience and tweeted about it. Although the company, Whirlpool, responded within hours, the damage had been done–Armstrong’s real-time feedback about her company experience spread quickly through her network and beyond. This spread of customer experiences in real time is a trend, in fact, status updates are a feature found not just in Twitter but in many social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Recently, Twitter signed a deal to allow Microsoft’s Bing and Google access its real-time data, displaying real-time tweets which appear along side traditional search results. So what is the impact of this increase in real-time data? It means that consumers can instantly give feedback about their product experiences and tell their friends. For brands, it means they have to move faster to keep up with consumers who are sharing.

Takeaway: This year, consumers are more connected, and moving faster than brands. It’s essential for senior marketers to use the past to plan for the future, and these four trends indicate that people are connecting and sharing with each other–at an increased pace. Brands need to develop a strategy and a plan to respond–not simply react–to the latest technology. In our next piece, we will discuss the key trends to watch in 2010 to help with strategy planning.

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That’s for today till after Christmas! Have a safe holiday!

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To anticipate what will shape 2010, we need to understand the TENsions that will define the opening year of the TENsions decade. The TENsions that are most prominent will evolve during the course of the decade. However the accelerating pace of change means that TENsions will inevitably define the decade, in myriad forms.

These are the 10 TENsions for 2010, the opening year of the TENsions.

1. Optimism – Fear

Many companies and workers are now daring to be optimistic as they put 2009 behind them, look forward to opportunities, and worry about getting left behind if things improve rapidly. Yet with the shock of the onset of the financial crisis still fresh, any optimism is subject to being shattered, resulting in wild swings in confidence.

2. Institutional work – Independent work

While many lost their jobs in 2009, sparking a rise in home-based work such as direct selling, many others gave up self-employment to return to the workforce. Over the long term more people are making the shift to work independently, by desire or necessity. However the temptations of self-employment can be replaced by desire for a steady pay packet, pulling people both ways.

3. Hyperconnected – Disconnected

The mobile Internet will explode with Google Phone and Android adding to iPhone’s success. For many work and play will happen wherever they happen to be. Others will reject the always-connected world, while some are being left behind due to the cost. The gulf between the hyperconnected and disconnected will increase.

4. Openness – Privacy

Young and old are getting used to sharing thoughts, photos, videos and more with the world at large – there is an inevitable and powerful trend to more openness and sharing. Yet the backlash is strong, with some choosing to pull out of social networks, pushing for greater privacy legislation, and crying out against pervasive government surveillance.

5. Youth – Experience

In the workplace there will be a premium placed on switched-on young people, who have high expectations of reward for their contribution. Yet many organizations are trying to work out how they will survive the loss through retirement of the massive contingent who have decades of experience. Many companies will not manage the generational tensions well.

6. Death of Media – Birth of Media

Literally hundreds of newspapers around the world have shut their doors in 2009. Broadcast TV is struggling. Advertising has slumped. Yet as traditional media staggers, a new world of mobile media, social media, video everywhere, and new business models are opening a new era in which media is at the center of the economy.

7. Immigration – Borders

Virtually every developed country is facing a natural population decrease with dire implications for fiscal policy and the economy. The tension between immigration, backed by the business community who want to drive growth, and borders, by those fearing social fragmentation and ecological impact, is becoming a key issue in almost every wealthy country.

8. Climate Activists – Climate Doubters

The gulf is widening between those who believe everything we can do to avert disastrous climate change may not be enough, and those who don’t believe or don’t care. The chasm will yawn wider between countries, between companies, and between individuals.

9. Innovation – Copying

In a global economy in which almost everything is a commodity, the only source of real value is innovation. However every innovation is copied almost instantaneously, all content flows outside commercial channels, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the original and the copy. The faster the pace of copying, the greater the drive to innovation.

10. Me – Everyone

In 2010 people who were born after the creation of the World Wide Web will first join the workforce. The nub of generational change today is about the tension between personal opportunity and expectations, and acting with the greater good in mind. How well can people focus both on their own well-being and that of society and the planet?

And the above 10 TENsions should keep your mind crunching for a while.

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Update: All photos of Shellie’s son was taken off upon her request.

I had intended, today, to focus solely on coding and site issues, as I have been doing for the last 36 hours (aside from a brief nap). I made the mistake at glancing at the headlines a few minutes ago to see what parts of the world had passed me by, and I caught a story from Kim LaCapria over at the Inquisitr that really caught in my craw, and I couldn’t let pass without comment.

In case you hadn’t seen it, Shellie Ross, the author of the fairly popular Blog4Mom mommyblog, tweeted out yesterday: “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” She has since protected her tweetstream, so while I can’t get a direct screenshot (I’ve borrowed this one from Kim’s post), I remember seeing it retweeted a number of times the other day.

About five hours after the initial tweet, she said on Twitter: “Remembering my million dollar baby http://twitpic.com/tkt9t.”

It’s a tragic story, though not particularly worthy of note in the grand scheme of things, particularly on a blog dealing primarily with “grand picture” of technology news, trends and analysis. There are a million tragedies a day in this world, and many of which are routinely documented on social networking sites.

Tuesday morning, though, is when insult was quite literally added to injury. Unable to let a woman grieve in community with the assemblage of friends that had come to support her in her hours of tragedy, segments of the media and the mommy-blogosphere saw fit to publicly flog the poor woman for allowing an accident like this to happen, and put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Shellie’s “addiction to Twitter.”

From Kim’s Inquisitr post:

Those of us who use the internet daily for work or maintaining important relationships may not find that shocking- and stay at home moms (or dads) are a group in particular who rely on the godsend of internet companionship to alleviate the loneliness that can settle in when parenting small children. So when tragedy visited her family, she reached out to her friends- and was reminded cruelly in her time of need that everyone on the internet isn’t always your friend.

Kim points to one mommy blogger in particular, Madison McGraw, who has taken it upon herself to not only blog a dissenting opinion on the topic (which, while not in good taste, is certainly her right), but reach out to the media and offer her armchair analysis as to why Shellie deserves no time to grieved. From Florida Today:

Madison McGraw, who does not know the Ross family, tweeted about the incident and also posted an item on her blog, at http://www.madisonmcgraw.com, titled “Mom Tweets While Son Drowns.”

“The person that I have compassion for is her son – who might still be alive if (Ross) interacted with her son like she interacted with people on Twitter,” McGraw wrote. “To me, that shows the repercussions for social media gone awry.”

McGraw’s Twitter account lists her hometown as being Bucks County, Pa., which is near Allentown.

Asked by FLORIDA TODAY if she thought it was appropriate to attack a woman she doesn’t know who just lost her son, McGraw responded, “If she didn’t want questions raised at such a painful time, perhaps she shouldn’t have tweeted immediately after her child died. A child is dead because (of) his mother’s infatuation with Twitter.”

This story hits particularly close to home for me as a work-from-home father.  My son is roughly the same age, and he’s at a stage of development where all it takes for him to get into trouble is for him to be out of site for literally two minutes.  Just this morning, I was on a video conference with Michael Sean Wright, and I stepped out on the back patio for a quick smoke, and even with my son in plain sight, he still managed to lock the back door without my noticing (which is why, incidentally, I always keep a spare key to  the front door in my wallet).

Twitter addiction has nothing to do with it – as a mommyblogger (just as in my situation), using Twitter is a very important part of what brings home the bacon, and two year olds are generally rambunctious trouble-seekers.

McGraw is certainly right about one thing: social media has gone awry.  I understand that when you’re a blogger and twitterer with a wide following, you’re open to rebuttal in the same way that many celebrities find their private lives open to scrutiny. The difference is, here, is that in the pursuit of attention and internet-fame, bloggers like McGraw feel it necessary to create a three-news-cycle item, cashing in on the tragedy of one of her peers.

Since McGraw has turned Shellie’s son’s drowning into an international incident, Shellie has taken both her blog and her twitter stream offline (as well as removed postings from TwitPic of her son’s memorial photos). McGraw has, in essence, caused Shellie to withdraw from her community in the same way that a few rotten apples caused Kathy Sierra to withdraw from the blogosphere two years ago.

The impulse to share with people who care about you that a major tragedy has occurred isn’t social media gone awry.  Feeling it’s incumbent upon you to demonize in the news media a mother, and one of your peers, who’s going through her life’s greatest grief is social media gone awry.

Social Media Gone Awry: When Mommybloggers Attack is a post from: The SiliconANGLE

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Google announced their own URL shortener. Great.  But some startups may be panicking.  The TechCrunch title says it all: Bit.ly Just Got Fu.kd: Facebook And Google Get Into The Short URL Game.
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