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