All posts in “the economist”

Social Media Round Up for February 10

February 10, 2012 / Comments Off on Social Media Round Up for February 10 / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

Leona Hobbs is Vice President and Partner at Social Media Group she tweets @flackadelic.

Economist Debates Social Networking

The debate about social networks is underway over at the Economist. The assertion being debated, “this house believes that society benefits when we share personal information online.” Defending the motion is Jeff Jarvis and against the motion is Andrew Keen.

From Jarvis’s opening statement:

“For individuals, sharing is a choice; that is the essence of privacy. Today, we have the opportunity to create, share and connect, and 845m people choose to do so on Facebook alone.”

And from Keen’s opening statement:

“In today’s Web 3.0 world of real identities generating massive amounts of data, we are all living in the full digital glare of public opinion. In this world of Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph, of millions and millions of daily tweets, Google+ circles and LinkedIn updates, “publicness” (to borrow a word from my friend Jeff Jarvis) replaces privacy as the core condition of life in our digital age.”

Vote, comment and weigh in through opening, rebuttal and closing as the debate continues over the next week.

Hmm…very Pinteresting

Our very own Kirsten McNeill blogged earlier this week about how Brands can use Pinterest, a social network designed to visually showcase interesting links. Pinterest has captured the attention of millions (over 10 million unique monthly users in the US in eight months according to ComScore, the fastest any social network has researched this milestone). This week, Pinterest was accused of replacing user affiliate links with their own. Pinterest did not disclose this policy to users, which has raised the eyebrows of social media types and made some users feel kind of icky.

Read more:

TechCrunch: Pinterest Hits 10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever – comScore

On the SMG blog: How Brands Can Get Involved on Pinterest

LLsocial.com: Pinterest is quietly generating revenue by modifying user submitted pins. And an update: What was learned from the Pinterest link modification story.

New Trends in Global Internet Behaviour

This week, GlobalWebIndex released new data about both new and continuing trends in the way consumers use all Internet platforms. On the benchmarks side, social networking is still the fastest growing social media behavior online, with 59% of global internet users managing their profile on a monthly basis. Turning to e-commerce, “just over 59% of global internet users had purchased a product online in the past month and 53% had reviewed a product.”

New trends identified in the research:

  • The rise of the Social Brand: nearly one-third of global internet consumers are engaging brands through social media
  • Death of digital: “digital can no longer be seen as a separate “media” as consumers globally are transitioning to media consumption across multiple internet platforms in record numbers”
  • Googopoly: “Google has evolved into the gatekeeper of the Internet, Google has massively improved its position as the world’s biggest controller of information and is starting to dominate all access points to the internet”

The report also details changes to existing trends — the Localised Web, the Post-PC era comes ever closer and Facebook Fatigue continues.

More on this global trends research:

GlobalWebIndex GWI.6 Trends Report

GlobalWebIndex identifies new trends in global internet behaviour

 

Social Media Roundup for December 2

December 2, 2011 / Comments Off on Social Media Roundup for December 2 / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Roundup

 

 

Biggest Social Network IPO in 2012?

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is planning to roll out its long-waited IPO between April and June, 2012. The Journal also reported  that the social network is planning to raise a total of $10 billion by selling roughly 10% of the company’s shares through the IPO. This means that Facebook could be worth $100 billion if the deal goes through next year! According to CBC News, this amount is more than four times the market cap that Google had when they released their IPO back in 2004. Take a look at their poll results that asked readers if they agree with Facebook’s valuation. What do you think?

Facebook has remained private for the past seven years, so why release an IPO now? According to Mashable, one of the major reasons that Facebook decided to do an IPO now is because they have to.

Under the U.S laws, once a company get 500 or more private shareholders, you have to publish detailed data about your company’s financial performance.

The Economist believes that as the social media industry continues to grow,  Facebook will continually see more competition from other networks, such as Google+.

Facebook will want to seek a listing before rivals erodes its lead in the social-networking sphere.

Below is an infograghic, created by Namesake, that documents Facebook’s current status and its IPO path.

 

IPOs Continued

Looks like Facebook isn’t the only one that plans to hit the public sector. Today, the biggest social gaming company Zynga filed IPO documents with SEC (Securities & Exchange Commissions). Shares were priced between $8.50 and $10. If the deal goes through, Zynga could be vaulted to a valuation of $850 million to $1.15 billion (max $7 billion). According to Mashable, The company, which is famous for its popular social gaming series Ville (Farmville and CityVille), originally planned to IPO several months earlier but delayed due to volatility on the stock market. The company was originally valued at around $10 billion dollars.

If everything goes to plan – Zynga will be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ZNGA in mid-december.

 

Google + hangout + Free Voice Calls

Google+ users can now make free conference calls within Hangouts. This was announced by Jarkko Oikarinen, the inventor of the first-ever Internet chat function-Internet Relay Chat, through his Google+ page on Dec 1. Anyone with a phone number can be invited to join the conversation, no Google account required! It looks like Google’s ambition isn’t just to attract more people to Google+, but to improve the way we communicate by integrating internet calling with party lines and conference calls. Oikarinen states:

“We are constantly listening to feedback so that we can make Hangouts even better for Google+ users, and we’re excited by the really cool ways people are using the product”

This feature currently support free calls to the U.S and Canada, and is available within Hangouts . Why not give it a try?

 

YouTube’s Biggest Web Redesign

Google bought YouTube and kept it running as a separate entity for many years. We’ve heard that YouTube has been planning on a site wide redesign for quite a while. Well, on December 1st the new YouTube design finally launched for everyone. Our first impression? The black and red side bar on the landing page looks a lot like Google’s new User Interface that rolled out couple of months ago. Pages also look and function a lot more like a social network.

Below is video demonstration of the new YouTube which will give you a thorough walk-through on the changes.

From the video, it is not hard to realize that the redesign is made for just one purpose – to get users to focus on Channels, whether through subscribing to other people’s channels or creating one by themselves.