Here you are, a late christmas present from Pingdom has been delivered: “Internet 2011 in numbers” (in comparison with 2010). And – guess what? – Internet is still growing. The Internet users grew with 14% to 1.97 billion 2010. And have continued to grow with 6,6% to 2.1 billion in the end of 2011. In Europe the numbers of Internet users is status quo, though, unlike the growth in Asia where the users did grow with 12% from 825.1 million to 922.2 million users. Just China showed a growth of Internet penetration with 36.3% during 2011.
The most conspicuous is the growth of websites worldwide – from 255 to 555 million – a growth of amazing 117%! I wonder what did happen in question? Could it be due to the strong growth of social media? According to Pingdom, there are now 2.4 billion social networking accounts worldwide. Just Facebook did grow with 33% from 600 million users 2010 to fabulous +800 million. But I guess that’s not affecting the numbers of sites?
Please give me an explanation of the enormous growth of websites.
I also would like to turn my blog into complete darkness today. But I’ve got no clue how to do it. There’s no particular theme for this purpose, I guess? But SocialMediaToday is a role model. They went into the dark in protest of SOPA. And they deserve some respect for that. Because, from my point of view, SOPA is scary shit. And takes us to the dark side of Internet.
On SocialMediaToday’s darkened site, they left a short but very clear message to their audience about their opinion in this matter:
“Today Social Media Today joins others in the Internet community by going dark in protest of SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” We respect the rights of every creative person to profit from their own work, and we deplore the mindset that digital media somehow free us from an obligation to respect the livelihoods of content creators, but SOPA is a misconceived bill that shouldn’t even go back to the drawing board. Although it now appears that the SOPA bill is dead for this term, we are confident that its well-funded supporters will be back to fight again, and registering our displeasure with ill-considered measures to restrict innovative content contributors remains important. We agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) when it says, “this bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed.”
“Behind the almost unreadable (yet truly scary) text of SOPA (and its Senate doppelganger, PIPA, or the Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a desire, likely fueled by powerful media conglomerate backers, to take us all back to the thin-pipe, content-distribution days of 1994 — right before the World Wide Web launched.”
Finally – I do share Jeff Jarvis concern “that The Times’ tech guy, +David Pogue, would see the SOPA fight, in some quarters, as about free movies when it’s really about freedom, about not mangling the architecture of the net for one industry’s aims and in the process limiting speech and our greatest tool for speech ever.” (The quotation is taken from Google+). When it comes to David’s article: “Put Down the Pitchforks on SOPA“.
Hey hey, wait a second! Why is everyone judging Google so badly and fast? Just a few hours after the launch of Google Social Plus Your World, the criticism of all kinds just hails from the sky. Most of them pure critical. I bet most of them haven’t even tried the service properly before they’ve made up their minds and shared their thoughts into posts and articles.
Frederic Lardinois at Memeburn – tech-savvy insight and analysis – was one of them who damned the service after what seemed to be a quick evaluation. He wrote: “Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ doesn’t improve your search”. And continued:“…the simple question of whether this update actually improves the search experience on Google. Google … said that it is “transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.” After testing the update, though, it feels like Google doesn’t quite understand the “people and relationships” part well enough yet to make it such an important factor in its flagship product.”
“I decided that instead of just doing artificial searches for the sake of it, I would just go back to my search history and retry a day’s worth of searches from last week and compare the personalised and regular results side by side.”Frederic’s quick conclusion was: “Too Much Clutter, Too Many Irrelevant Results.”Matt Rosoff, at Business Insider, is even more crass, and does not mince the words: “Google May Have Made The Worst Mistake In Its History…”, where he also refers to Gizmodos angle: “Google Just Made Bing The Best Search Engine.“
It goes on and on. But of course, I’ve been journalist by myself and know the rules pretty well: You’ve got to get a piece of sensation out there as fast as possible.
And – yes – there’s a lot to wonder and question. For an example why Twitter didn’t renew their agreement with google last summer, if that’s the reason for why Google doesn’t present the Twitter data in their new social search results? And if that means really bad user experience? Well, Eric Schmidt says the door is open for Twitter:
You might also argue whether social search should be opt in or opt out. Etc etc.
But in the bitter end – hey – look what Google really did for us?! They’ve been working with their social platform and the social search, since many years. And everything seems to take of now with Google+. This is nothing but at great opportunity for most of as both as individuals and businesses.
So for you guys that would like to find out what Google Search Plus Your World is all about and in particular could do for you. Take your time, check out the opportunities – and ignore the threats.
David Meerman Scott says “It’s ridiculous that executives require marketers to calculate ROI (Return on Investment) on one form of real-time communications: Social media like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.” Especially when they do not require measurement of the use of mobile phones.
David call these executives hypocrites. He recommends pr practitioners and marketers who are faced with these executives, who demand them to prove social media ROI, to point out the hypocrisy by asking them to show you the ROI of their Blackberry’s.
He says that “modern higher education systems are increasingly driven by numbers – management information, liquidity ratios, key performance indicators, workload models, student (and staff) satisfaction scores, research assessment grades, citation indices, media league tables … Everything, it seems, can be reduced to a number. But can it – or should it?
“Anything can be measured. If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before. And those very things most likely to be seen as immeasurable are, virtually always, solved by relatively simple measurement methods.”
I wouldn’t say that executives, who demand you marketers to prove social media ROI, are hypocrites. I think pr practitioners and marketers 1) should strive to measure everything they can measure, but handle the result of the measurement with a grain of salt, and 2) to some extent continue to engage with people even if they can’t measure the result of their activities.
“The BlackBerry solution provides users with a host of tools to help them work and communicate more effectively, including email, phone, internet, organiser and business critical applications. The benefits and ROI of BlackBerry smartphones have been illustrated by research from Ipsos Reid that shows that BlackBerry smartphone users can save up to 60 minutes a day, by increasing efficiency.”
It’s not the influential people with great Klout Scores that matters and affect us, but the influence of social movements in general. We know that we all are influenced by others far more now than ever before. That the social capital is the currency of our time. And that the very first mover could be a nut as well as a celebrity, or both. So if we want to change something, maybe we should stop fumbling for the innovators, and just join the social movement whit great influential score?
We’re all social. We’ve all got a social graph of people connected to us and each other. And we do influence each other. Some of us are more influential than others, but we’re all influential. And some of the influence might be “hidden”.
He discovered that we’re all more or less affected of our social graphs. For an example if your friend is obese, the risk is 45% higher that you will suffer from obesity, than if you wouldn’t be friends (connected). If your friends friend is obese, the risk is 25% higher that you will suffer from obesity, than if you wouldn’t be friends.
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is an internist and social scientist who conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity. He is Professor of Medical Sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and has a range of other assignements.
His lab at Harvard is currently focused on the relationship between social networks and health. His thesis is that people health is inter-connected when they’re also inter-connected within social networks.I think one of his points is that you can’t just treat obese from an individual perspective, but also as a social phenomena.
He also says that this thesis is valid for many other contexts but health. For an example the spread of product adoptions or the spread of “idea virus” that Seth Godin is talking about.
And I think this is worth considering for us who’s working within PR and marketing. You might think, “No shit”, because this is what you’ve done for years, right? To find out who has the power of influence and treat them with stories and goodwill, for publicity and buzz.
I guess you’ve all read Seth Godins book “Purple Cow” where he refers to Geoff Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” where he outlines how new products and new ideas move trough a populations. Seth writes: “They follow a curve, beginning with the innovators and early adopters, growing into the majority, and eventually reaching the laggards.
Moore’s idea diffusion curve shows how a successful business innovation moves from left to the right – and affects ever more consumers until it finally reaches everyone. The z-axis, along the bottom, shows the different groups and idea encounters over time, while the y-axis shows how many people are in each group.
In “The Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwellclearly articulated how ideas spread through populations, from one person to another. In “Unleashing the Ideavirus”, I pushed this idea even further, describing how the most effective business ideas are the ones that spread.I was also kind of interested of Techcrunch guest writers – Aileen Lee’s – post “Social proof is the new marketing”recently.She says she’s “increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web”.
She writes:
Social proof is “the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence. Wikipedia describes social proof as “a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect the correct behavior for a given situation… driven by the assumption that the surrounding people possess more information about the situation.” In other words, people are wired to learn from the actions of others, and this can be a huge driver of consumer behavior.”
And she mention some thought-provoking examples like this one from Professor Robert Cialdini, a thought leader in social psychology: “In one study, his team tested messages to influence reusing towels in hotel rooms. The social proof message –“Almost 75% of other guests help by using their towels more than once” had 25% better results than all other messages. And adding the words “of other guests that stayed in this room” had even more impact (also an example of how A/B testing of small details matters).”
Aileen Lee says that “in the age of the social web, social proof is the new marketing. If you have a great product waiting to be discovered, figure out how to build social proof around it by putting it in front of the right early influencers” like experts, celebrities, crowd, users, friends and others, and these might be role models for a social movement.
And I guess we’re not talking about individuals anymore but the power of the crowd; the power of social context and behavior. My point is though, that I’m not sure a social movement starts with an influencer like a celebrity, or an expert, but with a social movement in itself, and that we all could be a part of that movement if we’re able to contribute in any way. So when Klout says their Klout Score “measures influence based on your ability to drive action”. Maybe you should take a broader view of point and just not focus on individuals as influencers but at the social movements in general? Because who could imagine that this nut would start a movement? So let’s overlook where it all starts and take the opportunity to figure out where it all happens and join these movements instead.
Founder of Mynewsdesk.com. Co-founder of Mrjet.com, SF-anytime.com, and in a way Spray.se. Media entrepreneur – loves communication, journalism, social media.
