Archive for January, 2010

List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010

Categories: Community Manager, Industry Index, Social Media, Social StrategistPosted on January 30th, 2010

Update Jan 7, 2011: I am no longer updating this list, instead, find the more updated list for 2011 for Corporate Social Strategists.

As an industry watcher, I look at trends, data, spending, technologies, yet what’s really important is watching the trend of professionals as they grow into these roles managing disruptive technologies. Update: Brian Hayashi has created a spreadsheet of this with additional info –like Twitter handles. We’re staying coordinated so the data is matched, follow Brian on Twitter.

[Connecting with customers using social technologies is deceptively challenging, as most outsiders don't recognize the leadership to change internal cultural. Now, in public, let's recognize those who are paving the way]

Methodology: About this List
This 2010 list is an update from the original I started in 2008, it was woefully out of date as people moved around. This list is updated, as I’ve separated the large technology section in HW vs SW and am only linking to LinkedIn accounts.

A majority of this data is based off submissions in the 2008 post, which most which are self-submissions or from their fellow colleagues and we only link to their already public profile in LinkedIn for verification. We’ve spend days compiling this data, but due to the content ever changing, we expect there to be some inaccuracies, leave a comment if you see something that needs fixing. Thanks to Sonal Mehta a student at American University who I’ve hired helped me in this research.

Read Carefully: How to get on this List
In a world of noise, curation becomes very valuable, as a result, there are very specific requirements for this list, which include: 1) You must have a public LinkedIn profile page, as this is one of the best way to verify employment. 2) The profile indicates that social media is part of your full time employee role at the corporation–not just for personal or casual use. 3) You must work at an enterprise class corporation with more than 1000 employees, 4) Must be on brand side 5) You’ll kindly leave a comment below with the submission for review. Due to excess volume, submissions by Twitter and emails or other channels will not be included, kindly leave a comment in this centralized area below.

In an effort to keep information in a tight scope, I’m not able to include folks who are doing great work in other sectors. However, if you decide to create a list for other sectors, I’ll prominently link to it from this post. Update: Here’s a growing list for non-profits.

Sign Up For Upcoming Free Report: Skillset of the Social Media Strategist
The Altimeter Group is developing a free research report, on “Skillsets of Social Media Strategists” and will identify the attributes, backgrounds, experience of this emerging role, if you’re interested in receiving a copy, please register on this form. We will use portions of the data found in this post for the research report, so thanks for helping to update it.

Social Media Strategists at Corporations
The strategist is a program manager, who mainly focuses internally rather than being the external public face like the community manager. They are primarily responsible for resources, processes, teams, they are usually internally focused and ultimately, return on investment.

Airline

Automotive

Business Services

Consumer Product Goods

Electronics, Devices, Mobile

Financial Services

Health and Life Sciences

Hospitality, Food Service

Government, Armed Services, Education

Media and Entertainment

Retail

Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer

Technology, Software, Internet

Community Managers at Corporations
The community manager is primarily externally facing, and interacts with customers as the public face of the company. They are primarily customer advocates, evangelists, bloggers, community moderators, and experts at using social technologies to communicate. We honor them every fourth Monday of January on Community Manager Appreciation Day. To keep the focus tight, this list is only of corporate community managers, and not those on contract at community platform vendors or service companies on contract.

Automotive

Business Services

Government, Armed Services, Education

Hospitality and Travel

Katie Hamlin Community Manager, Fodor’s Travel

Electronics, Devices, Mobile

Financial Services

Retail

Andrew Flynn Social Engagement Specialist, Sears Holdings

Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer

Technology, Software, Internet

Social Media Researchers and Social Media Product Managers at Corporations
When I started this list in 2008, I didn’t have a specific slot for researchers and product managers who are creating these products. These roles are not folks who are using the technologies for marketing, support, or other business use cases (end users) but instead are researching and creating the products that the above professionals will use in their jobs.

I’m passionate about what these folks do, as I, myself, was a strategist/community manager at an enterprise corporation a few years ago. Update: Thanks to Altimeter’s Andrew Jones for the assistance on the updates.

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Expect Rapid Evolution of the Branded Support Community

Categories: Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on January 28th, 2010

Companies With Support Communities Not Ready For Changes To Come
For over a decade, with simple BBS systems to community platforms, support communities haven’t undergone much innovation. Often a silo and tucked away in a website, these communities are going to take center stage. With social technologies appearing on every webpage, and more existing systems starting to connect, expect to see interesting use cases evolve. Support focused communities will evolve to touch marketing, sales, channel partners, CRM systems, and even become a thriving platform in the next few years. Let’s explore the rapid changes coming together.

A Support Community, Defined.
Take a look at Microsoft’s media centric Channel 9, VMware communities, or even AAA’s travel tips. These branded communities are offered by companies and encourage members to self-support each other, or the company will support them directly. The members are often customers, developers, or implementation partners. It’s not limited to them alone, prospects of a company may peer in to see how vibrant –or angry–the community is. There are over 100 technology vendors offer these commodity features.

The Opportunity: The Support Community No Longer A Cost Center
New forms of monetization for the brand are going to emerge. Support communities won’t just be a cost-center, we should expect to see new forms of value that meet the needs of the community members themselves, the brand, and the partners. To kick start the discussion here’s a few ideas of where I think the support community could evolve to:

Become a thriving marketplace of buyers and sellers. Not just through discussions, but through automated matching of buyers and sellers using reputation systems, and needs analysis tools. See how the concept of VRM is slowly taking hold.
New forms of value from third parties will spur innovation. System integrators, consultants, and other vendors who have services to offer community members will want to offer training, webinars, or other campaigns. Branded communities can monetize this as an intermediary.
Formalized advocacy programs will take hold beyond the organic evangelist. Some communities will offer features and programs that encourage members to join an unpaid army and reach out to prospects –and ready them to arms when the brand is under attack.
Communities members will ideate and start build new products with R&D. In some cases, they may help the brand define new products and be very involved in the R&D process.
Developer platform will let community create their own experience. Taking a nod from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, someday, support communities will offer platforms that will enable the members to create new applications, tools, and even products within the context of the community.
Connecting to CRM systems to offer better service. Community platforms will connect to CRM systems identify upsell, crosssell, and underserved accounts, increasing the efficiency of support.
Connections to other systems yield new experiences. Support communities will no longer be a silo but will connect to brand monitoring tools. ERP systems, business intelligence systems, web analytics, and social analytics tools.
The walls of support communities crumble as they connect to the public web. There are support communities in existence all around the web (see Get Satisfaction, UserVoice or even a customer created community). Expect to see branded communities tie to these off-domain systems.
Leave a comment below with your idea. The opportunities are abound.

A Key Constraint: Members first, Company Second
Despite the many opportunities for innovation of communities, first and foremost, the sanctity of the community members must not be broken. Companies have learned, often the hard way, that the members are in charge, so this needs to be a win for them first, the company second.

Join The Discussion and Upcoming Roundtable
I plan to hold a no-fee “Community Innovation” roundtable in Q1, to ideate the evolution of the branded community beyond support. Should you be interested in attending, I look forward to hearing from you in the following web form. I’ll be extending an invite to some key thought leaders in this space, to really spur the thinking from the top minds.

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Growth at Altimeter Group: Supply Chain Management, Government Innovation

Categories: Altimeter, Social MediaPosted on January 26th, 2010

Two Key Additions In Growth Areas: Lora Cecere, Alan Webber
We’re pleased to announce that we’re expanding two new partners Lora Cecere (full bio), Supply Chain Management and Alan Webber (full bio), Government Innovation. Founding partner, coauthor of Groundswell, Charlene Li discusses the hires and the changes in the market. At the Altimeter Group, we’re not forced into limited topic areas, but instead look at the intersection of major themes. Each partner has a unique perspective, and we are constantly talking, sharing, and pushing our ideas by collaborating, you’re starting to see this manifest as Ray (CRM) and (Social) converge on Social CRM. We know that customers demand a holistic experience, so organizations will follow suit, here’s how our world of social technologies merges with these two new topic areas:

Supply Chain Management: Intersections with Consumers
In my area of focus, customer strategy, it’s important to expand the thinking to ‘where the customers will be’. With the rapid adoption of simple social technologies, they’ve caused great disruption to marketing, PR, media, and customer support. With customers and prospects explicitly giving off signals of what they want, don’t want, or intend to do, it gives companies the opportunity to anticipate their needs. We see this opportunity to tie these customer signals in social media and getting the right products to customers –when they need it most. So what’s next? Beyond social media marketing, or supporting customers with social technologies, an upcoming trend we see is tying social technologies with supply chain management. There are three areas where social and supply chain management start to converge:

Demand signals by empowered consumers using social and mobile technologies. As consumers indicate their demand for new products or intentions, these signals will be transmitted to companies, their distributors, and sellers to anticipate the needs of consumers. Companies can reduce their inventory, shipping, an risk of spoilage of limited shelf-life products.

Co-innovation of new products between consumers –and engineering. We’re already seeing some companies like Uservoice, SalesForce ideas power Nokia, Dell, and Starbucks to ask their customers what they want built, but we expect this trend to continue. Aside from reducing time and cost of the R&D process, companies can produce just the right amount of inventory, and benefit from an army of engaged advocates that participated in co-creation.

We’re pleased to bring on Lora Cecere from AMR, where her domain knowledge of supply chain management will cross over with many of of our areas of focus. Learn more about her on her bio on the Altimeter site, or on Twitter.

Government and Education Connect With Communities
Open government, citizen media, and social media used to organize and rebuild after a crises have all touched our lives in one way or another. Undoubtedly, government agencies are realizing the power of these tools to understanding their citizens, learning from them, and influencing them. As a result, expect disruptive technologies like mobile and social to quickly move into the government limelight, such as the TSA adopting a blog to connect with travelers.

Build better relationships with communities. We’re already seeing government organizations benefit from understanding these tools, and using during campaigning practices. As citizens have already adopted these technologies, government organizations can benefit by listening, understanding and responding to citizens using social tools.

Use social technologies to innovate programs. It’s not just about using these tools for campaigning purposes, but also improving existing programs. Take for example, San Francisco uses Twitter to located troublesome potholes, reducing the costs for city workers to find the areas to fix –instead relying on citizens to reduce costs. Expect new forms of innovation to emerge that will improve cultures and where people live.

It’s a pleasure to welcome former colleague Alan Webber from Forrester Research, who’s got a strong background on web user experience, and a focus on government innovation. Together, we’ll be crafting frameworks for government agencies, educational institutions and those that serve them on how to harness social technologies to improve their missions. Learn more about Alan from his blog, Ronin Research, his bio on the Altimeter site, or on Twitter.

Growth At the Altimeter Group
Back in late August when Ray, Debs, and myself joined Charlene, we were excited to try a new model. Now, four months later, we’ve over 40 clients on retainer relationship, that’s little over 2 companies signing on board with us per week and are about a dozen employees. We’ve previously announced new hires, recently we hired Valerie, our operations manager, who will keep the gears going as we help our clients tackle ‘wicked’ problems.

Although we’re best known for our focus on disruptive technologies like social, web and marketing, the Altimeter Group has a wider offering that expands to enterprise applications and innovating new products.

Related Posts

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Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD (Every 4th Monday of Jan)

Categories: CMAD, Community Manager, Community Marketing, Social MediaPosted on January 25th, 2010

Every fourth Monday of January, let’s take the time to pause, recognize, and celebrate the efforts community managers around the world to improve customer experiences.

Passionate About Customers
The title matters not, whether it’s online customer advocate, online customer support, company evangelist, disgruntled customer handler. Instead, focus on what they do: A customer advocate willing to help regardless of where they are online. Learn more by reading the Four Tenants of Community Managers.

Yet, Community Managers Don’t Have it Easy
Yet despite their admirable intentions, we know they face several uphill challenges:

Many challenges are internal: Most companies want to hide customer issues, and shuffle them into existing support systems. Additionally, measuring ROI in new media when a company wants to keep the kimono shut, increasingly becomes a challenge.
Seemingly never ending job: Customers never stop having problems, and with the global internet, the questions, complains, and inquires never stop.
Emotional drain impacts lifestyle: The sheer emotional strain of dealing with a hundreds of yelling customers and the occasional trouble maker will take a strain on anyone.
Privacy risks in the world of transparency: In an effort to build trust with customers, they expose their real name exposing their personal –and family– privacy forever on.

Now, Recognize A Community Manager, Every 4th Monday of January
While we agree with common manners to always thank someone after they’ve helped you, just take a moment to pause.. and think. Why would someone willingly go through the above mentioned challenges? Because of their passion to improve the company, and help customers have a better relationship. In many cases, a genuine ‘thank you’ can mean more than a yearly customer satisfaction survey. Take the time to recognize and thank the community manager that may have helped you while you during your time of need.

If you’re a customer, and your problem was solved by a community manager be sure to thank them in the medium that helped you in. Use the hashtag #CMAD.
If you’re a colleague with community manager, take the time to understand their passion to improve the customer –and company experience. Copy their boss.
If you’re a community manager, stop and breathe for a second, and know that you’re appreciated. Hug your family.

This isn’t just about a single role, but a bigger trend of making product and services more efficient, and thereby our world a little bit more efficient and sustainable. The comments are wide open if you wanted to share your experience working with community manager, or as one, feel free to thank them below.

Supported by Bill Johnston, Connie Benson, Rachel Happe, Jake McKee, Sean O’Driscoll, Lane Becker, Dawn Foster, Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Jeremiah Owyang, as we recognize and salate community managers!

Related Links

HRZone recognizes Becky Midgley

Jake McKee says this is (just about) the loneliest job

Bill Johnston, recognizes community managers

Amy Muller, Get Satisfaction contemplates where community management is and where it’s heading.

Amy also asks the community to showcase her community management heros.

Dawn Foster asks if you’ve thanked your community manager today.

Dawn shouts out to community managers.

Sam reasons why the community manager role is essential.

Connie Benson, a great friend, shouts out to community managers.

Rachel Happe gives reasons why we should pause and thank community managers

Connie Bensen of Alterian sent me this screenshot of mentions

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Slides: Four Social Media Trends for Business in 2010

Categories: Web StrategyPosted on January 22nd, 2010

Companies Must Approach Social Programs In A Coordinated Effort
Many companies are enthralled by the opportunity to use social technologies to connect with customers, yet many lack a plan or coordinated effort. Additionally, things are going to get more difficult as they don’t realize that as consumers and employees rapidly adopt these tools the level of complexity increases across the organization. While it’s easy to get caught up on the specific new technologies that are constantly emerging, companies should focused on business trends and themes in 2010. In particular, companies must develop a business strategy based on customer understanding, put the baseline resources in place to get your company ready, deliver a holistic experience to customers –and build advocacy programs and anticipate customer need.

Social Media Trends for 2010

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Open Research: You can download the slides from slideshare, and use with attribution for non-commercial reasons.

To Be Successful, Companies Should Focus On Four Key Trends
While there are many themes in 2010 for companies, II focused in on the four key themes companies must focus on:

1) Don’t fondle the hammer. Understand customers, focus on objectives, not develop strategies based on ever-changing tools. Companies really need to understand their customers first, see our recorded webinar to learn more.
2) Live the 80% rule. This is a movement: get your company ready. 80% of success is getting the right organizational model, roles, processes, stakeholders, and teams assembled –only 20% should be focused on technology.
3) Customers don’t care what department you’re in. Customers just want their problem fixed, they don’t care what department you’re in. Yet, now, nearly every department can have a direct relationship with your customers using social tools. As a result, provide customers with a holistic experience Start to investigate how brand monitoring, community tools and CRM systems are merging.
4) Real time is *not* fast enough. Companies cannot scale when it comes to social media, for most companies, you cannot hire enough people to monitor and respond to the conversation, As a result, lean on advocates, by building unpaid armies, and anticipate customer needs through advanced listening techniques.

This event was hosted last night at the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association nice redesign, and hosted by Adobe (disclosure: an Altimeter client). I was later joined by Jeannette Gibson, social media executive of global marketing at Cisco, Ed Terpening, VP of Social Media at Wells Fargo, Maria Povermo, leading Social Media in Marketing at Adobe, and Rob Fuggetta of Zuberance to have a lively panel on how they are using these technologies. The event was recorded, I’ll add a link as soon as it becomes available.

Translations
Text translations now in Japanese

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Socialgraphics Help You To Understand Your Customers: Slides and Webinar Recording

Categories: Altimeter, Open Research, SocialgraphicsPosted on January 21st, 2010

Companies should have a ‘Customer Strategy’ not a ‘Twitter or Facebook Strategy’. To start, first understand your customers social behaviors, below are the slides and recorded webinar featured yesterday by Charlene Li and myself.

We know that customers are adopting new technologies to communicate with each other –and companies must change their own behaviors to reach them. Yet, to often, we hear of companies ‘fondling the hammer‘ where they have knee-jerk reactions to which ever technology emerges. The problem with this strategy is that new technologies are emerging in rapid iterations due to low-cost of innovation. As a result, focus on their behaviors, which we cover in detail in the Engagement Pyramid.

While using surveys is an effective way of getting a strong baseline set of knowledge, you must be constantly monitoring and updating the changes your ever-changing customers are having, and encourage you to partner with brand monitoring companies like Visible Technologies, Techrigy by Alterian, Radian 6, TNS Cymfony, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Crimson Hexagon, and even simple easy to use tools like Twitter search and Google Alerts.

We focus on disruptive technologies, and know we don’t have all the answers, so we want to work with the community. Like the Opensource movement and creative commons, we’re embracing ‘Open Research‘ which means we want to share what we learn so others can build on top of it. We like Creative Commons, and hope you use this content for educational purposes and to share with others with attribution. Stay tuned, as we plan to share more about the socialgraphics methodology and other frameworks.

Understand Your Customers’ Social Behaviors

View more presentations from Charlene Li.

Above: Access the slides on slideshare (you can download them in PPT format)

Above: Listen and watch the recoded webinar, there were over 600 attendees in real time, making it interesting to watch the discussion in the chat and in Twitter.

Here’s the link that I mentioned comparing Toyota’s shotgun approach and Ford’s laser-like approach. Next, join the conversation in Twitter and beyond, see the many tweets tagged #socialgraphics. Last but not least, thanks to Christine Tran, for her research expertise and rolling out our new powerpoint design.

The Social Strategy Trilogy

Part 1: Socialgraphics help you to understand your customers
Part 2: Developing a Social Strategy (You’re here now)
Part 3: Getting your company ready

Now in Russian, thanks.

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Microsoft Makes Work Fun: Office Launches “Ribbon Hero”, A Social Game

Categories: Social Gaming, Social MediaPosted on January 19th, 2010

Forget Farmville or Mafia Wars, Microsoft wants you to play Excel –pivot tables FTW.

Most software training and help resources are painful experiences written by technical publication editors. We know that most tutorial and help sections within applications are horrible to work with (I’ve shaken my head in frustration quite a few times using Microsoft’s own tutorial tools), and not every office worker can afford to attend a powerpoint training class.

Click above image to see my notes: Powerpoint users are given challenges, like this artistic effect, to win points which are used to brag on Facebook.

Learning game encourages social sharing
First, click on the image to see my additional notes. I rarely get excited at briefings, however big-enterprise Microsoft is doing something interesting. In an effort to make learning fun and increase usage of Microsoft office products, they’ve launched a pilot program called “Ribbon Hero” (read blog, or watch video). Much like a game you’d find on Facebook, Ribbon Hero lets users of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other office applications score points by unlocking challenges –then touting it to their friends.

Microsoft staff creates ‘challenges’ in the software, and encourages users to play to learn. As users unlock challenges (see screenshot above) they can earn up to a max of 300 points per product, and can choose to share their scoring with their Facebook friends on the Fan page. Don’t think there’s any social captial here? well if people can brag about their fictitious mafia wars scores, we should expect them to tout their real-world workplace proficiencies.

Innovation exposes challenges
There are ~~three~~ four major hurdles as I see it: 1) I’m not confident that this launch will reach a wide audience in the workplace, it may skew towards Gen X and Y. 2) Secondly, they’ll need to overcome the barriers of those who score low being bashful about their scores, and not wanting to share with others. 3) It’ll take some studies to show that professionals that complete the challenges (300/300 points) are better workers, then get HR to promote, 4) Lastly, like all games, they can be cheated, like gaming hint websites, expect there to be a ‘tip blog’ for Ribbon Hero.

Microsoft most tap into new opportunities:
Although we’ve not tried Ribbon Hero, this is an innovative way to encourage users to learn about a typically single person product -and then share with their friends. Microsoft sharing data with Facebook (who they’ve invested in) doesn’t seem like their typical big box culture, kudos for them for doing something out of their normal engineering culture. Yet despite these upsides, Microsoft must:

Harness reputation points to grow the program. has just scratched the surface in using this reputation data like they have with the Microsoft MVP advocacy program to create a non-paid growing army of Microsoft Office experts.
Add features to enable game to scale. 1) Q&A features that allows members to pose questions to each other and answering them, gaining more points, 2) Challenges to be created by the members themselves, growing the game at a scalable pace for high achievers. Never letting the game end.
Develop a global leaderboard of top users. Allow them to build profiles as true ‘Office Heros’ and how they succeed at their job on a separate website, and encourage them to share their achievements on their blogs, resume and LinkedIn pages.
Measure based on new benchmarks. 1) Top line adoption curves skew up 2) Reliance on existing support features goes down 3) Ten solid case studies of people getting new jobs or promotions in part because of their proficiency at the game.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this from Microsoft –and maybe other traditional enterprise software companies like IBM, Oracle, and social fearful, Apple, will follow suit. I gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one, they’re finally making work fun. Lastly, ya know I gotta ask, but will Clippy make a cameo in the game?

Disclosure: Microsoft is an Altimeter client. We want you to trust us more by being upfront about our relationships, read our disclosure policy.

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A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010

Categories: Industry Index, Social MediaPosted on January 19th, 2010

For the third year running (see 2008, 2009) I’m going to aggregate stats in the social networking space on a single blog post, and update it through the year. Data fiends should bookmark this post for future reference.

Stats are important –but on their own, they don’t tell us much
Stats on social networks are important, but don’t rely on them alone. Data is like fire, it can be used for good and bad, proper insight and analysis is always required. Beyond that, you’ll often see conflicting stats across the industry as everyone has different methodologies, as a result, this listing will help you to see the greater trends –not numbers without context.

How to interpret stats
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. Put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010
I’ll be updating this post throughout the year, bookmark it, and share it with others.

Comparison: All Social Networks

“The data doesn’t deny that Facebook has come to dominate social networking in the US, and overtook MySpace in 2009. But MySpace’s 57 million US unique users are nothing to sneeze at – it’s still a top web property with users who are highly engaged. The second tier networks, such as Tagged, Hi5, MyYearbook and Bebo, still receive an impressive 3-6 million uniques per month, and users spend a fair amount of time on those sites. BlackPlanet users spent 3.6 minutes longer interacting with the site than the average Facebook visitor. MyYearbook and Tagged users were on these sites more than 3 minutes longer than the average MySpace visitor. There is definitely addictive behavior occuring on these other sites.” LeeAnn Prescott (Someone I personally trust), Feb 2009
Nielsen published stats showing that “three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.” Nielsen, June, 2010

By Region and Geography

Japan: This slideshare has data on Japan’s mobile behaviors, and demonstrates how most social networks are accessed through mobile devices, and discusses Twitter, Facebook, and other social network adoption. Japan’s Cellphone Edge, 2010.

Facebook

Facebook keeps it’s stats page updated, and boasts over 350mm users. Facebook, ongoing
Facebook has announced 400mm users, Feb 5, 2010.
Infographic on Auguts 2009 Facebook stats, including usage, size, adoption rates by Mashable, on Feb 12.
Facebook demonstrates growth in total number of visitors (now over Yahoo, for second place) and a high degree of attention (time on site) “Facebook has surged past Yahoo as the number two most popular site in the U.S., drawing nearly 134 Million Unique Visitors in January, 2010. It’s been two full years since we’ve seen a shakeup at the top – In February, 2008, Google overtook Yahoo as number one, and never looked back.” Compete, Feb 18, 2010
Usage of casual gaming (Farmville, mafia wars) is suggested to be by moms. A PopCap survey reports that “The PopCap study showed that 55 percent of all social gamers in the U.S. are women, as are almost 60 percent of those in the UK. The average age in the U.S. is 48, which is substantially older than the 38-year-old average in the UK, and 46 percent of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared with just 23 percent in the UK. Only 6 percent of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.” Via GigaOm, Feb 18
Facebook visitors to other sites are apparently more sticky at least by a few margin points: “To offer one example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.” One could argue that these Facebook users are more engaged, or content that is recommended to them by friends is more relevant. Hitwise, March 18
Facebook has cross the 500mm user mark, see blog post from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, July 21, 2010
Top countries adopting Facebook: United States, UK, Indonesia, see stats from Royal Pingdom, August, 2010

LinkedIn

Now has 60mm users, “Over the past year, network has seen a significant amount of growth, especially internationally. As of last December, the network had 55 million members, so its grown by 5 million in less than two months. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international. ” reports Techcrunch, Feb 11

Tagged

All data told to me by Tagged directly on March 24 by ssarner at tagged.com
Statistics: Total Registered Users: 100 Million
Global Monthly Unique Visitors: 16 million
USA Monthly Unique Visitors: 6 million
Daily Users: 3.5 million
Monthly Page Views: 7 billion
Attention USA (comScore) Average Minutes per Visit: 12.2 – #1 social network
Total Monthly Minutes: 796 Million – #3 social network
10 million new friend connections made everyday
Tagged “Meet Me” application produces 40 million daily page views
Over 100,000 user generated virtual gifts, TAGS and skins available.
Average of 75,000 – 100,000 new daily registrants

Twitter

Hubspot luanches a report of Twitter.com registrations and shows a decrease in rate of adoption. There’s also useful data within the report about followers and their behaviors based on a sample methodology. Hubspot, Jan 19, 2010.
Sysmos launched a report about global usage of Twitter, with most adoption in US. Interesting that the key nugget is “… the number of U.S. unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% in June. This suggests the use of Twitter outside the U.S. has experienced significant growth over the past six months.”, Jan 14th, Sysmos. Thanks Jean in the comments for the submission.
Data indicates that many Twitter users are not active. read “The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive” ComputerWorld, Jan 28
Twitter themselves finally publish numbers indicating there are 50mm tweets created each day. ”Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)” Twitter, Feb 22
Twitter co-owner Biz Stone has revealed that the site now has 105 million registered users. He revealed the startling number at a Twitter developer conference, aptly title Chirp, and also mentioned that 30,000 people a day are signing up to tweet. Techradar, from Twitter, April 14
Black people, who account for about 12% of the population in general, make up 25% of the Twitter population. Business Insider May 2010

Yelp

As Yelp has grown from fledgling start-up to critical mass website, serving over 30 million visitors a month. Brainstorm tech, April .

YouTube

Find out who is creating the top YouTube videos and who is embedding them. “The study also looked at the demographics of bloggers who embed these videos. In general, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers embed most of the videos (57%), followed by teenagers (20%) and bloggers over 35 (20%).” Including stats on average number of comments, duration and other tidbits, Read Write Web, Feb 15.

Mobile, Desktop and Social Networks

There’s a sea change in more people using social networks from mobile devices rather than desktop clients “more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.” Ruder Fin via Read Write Web, Feb 2010

I’ll continue to update this page over time, please leave a comment if you have 2010 submissions, I’ll credit you.

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People on the Move in the Social Media Industry: Jan 16, 2010

Categories: Career, On the movePosted on January 16th, 2010

From an industry perspective there were significantly more hires this month, than last. This is due to two pieces: 1) It’s traditional for new roles to be filled during the new year, 2) An uptick in the overall financial space and a continued focus on the social and open web.

In an effort to recognize the changes in the social media space, I’ve started this post series (see archives) to both track and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

Chris Messina who’s been a leader in the open web and standards joins Google, where he’ll be focused on leading the open web initiatives. I’m certainly going to be following his work regardless of where he goes.
Joseph Smarr, via product team at Comcast’s Plaxo also joins Google, both of these gentleman have a focus on web standards and the ‘Openstack’ so it’ll be interesting to see how this unfold. I’ve been friends with Joseph for a few years now, and it’s great to see him continue to grow.
BL Ochman, a force of great positive energy who I’ve known for over 5 years, has joined Proof Digital Media – the new digital marketing arm of Burson-Marsteller. She’ll report to Proof CEO Jay Leveton, and have been given the opportunity to help guide the agency into the forefront of new media agency.
Johannes Neuer joins the The New York Public Library as the eCommunications Manager where he’ll expand and promote eCommunications and social media initiatives at The New York Public Library (both internally and externally).
Kati Driscoll lands at AAA Mid-Atlantic as a Social Media Community Specialist Working within existing and emerging AAA Mid-Atlantic communities to engage members, providing information and conversation to help them receive the full benefit of their membership and our community.
Karthik S joins Edelman as Head of Digital Strategy (India) Create and frame Edelman’s social media PR offerings in India, help clients integrate social media and digital communications within existing PR programs.
Greg Meyer joins Gist Customer Experience Manager where he’ll be providing VIP Support, Building a Customer “Power Tips” channel, and generally doing whatever necessary to make users successful.
Jennifer Polk has been promoted at Sears Holdings as the Director, BU Social Strategy Developing and leading community and social networking initiatives for SHC BUs, including building strategies and programs to help the BUs achieve greater customer engagement. She’ll be ensuring social programs align with BU business objectives and promoting partnership between Social Media, Online, Marketing and the BUs.
Robert Lommers has been promoted at Rabobank as the online media specialist focused on social media, online media, mobile, webcare, and social networking.
Joel Burslem is now with 1000watt Consulting as Associate of Social media marketing and strategy for the real estate industry.
Shara Karasic has been hired at Appolicious as the Director of Social Strategy developing community engagement and managing social strategy.
Judith A. Mod is at Social Gastronomy as a Principal where she’ll be focused on enabling organizations to leverage social media for marketing, customer relationships, operations, employee engagement, and partner management.
Matthew Rosenhaft also joins Social Gastronomy as a Principal where he’ll enable organizations to leverage social media for marketing, customer relationships, operations, employee engagement, and partner management.
April M. Williams is now with Cyberlife Tutors as the President of Coaching: focused on career and social media
Eileen O’Brien joins Siren Interactive as the Director, Search & Innovation at a social media lead for agency’ clients.
Paul Miser has been promoted at VML Senior Social Marketing Strategist where he’ll be creating dynamic Social and Mobile strategies for VML clients as they tie in with their digital and interactive strategies.
Kurt Abrahamson joins SocialMedia.com as the CEO, Leading the SocialMedia.com team to deliver our new social advertising platform for publishers.
Heather Strout joins the Farland Group as a Director of Community Services, there Heather will be helping companies discover ways to establish and sustain customer communities. She comes from a great family, her brother Aaron is a friend and constituent.
Ari Lightman has a teaching appointment at Carnegie Mellon University as an Adjunct Professor teaching a case study class on measurement and analysis of social media initiatives.

How to connect with others (or get a job):
Several people have been hired because of this blog post series, here’s how you can too:

Submit an announcement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, fill out this form.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

This list, which started with just 8 names continues to grow as folks submit to it. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Professionals.

Job Resources in the Social Media and Web Industry

Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (Post a job there and be seen by these blog readers, these affiliate fees pay for my hosting)

Read Write Web keeps announcements flowing at Jobwire, although is broader than just social media jobs

Facebook group for community manager group in Facebook

Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Teresa has a few jobs, some around community

New Media hire has an extensive job database

Social Media Headhunter

Social media jobs

Jobs in social media

Altimeter Group’s list of social media consultants and agencies

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, please)

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Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

Archive for January, 2010

Slides: Four Social Media Trends for Business in 2010

Socialgraphics Help You To Understand Your Customers: Slides and Webinar Recording

People on the Move in the Social Media Industry: Jan 16, 2010

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