My jaw dropped though, when I saw the number of morons readers retweeting it to people that couldn’t possibly read it.

By the time I had mocked up the image in Paint and uploaded it to Buzzfeed.com (maybe 10 min?) another 100 had retweeted it.

Smashing.

• Facebook is continuing its steady rise in popularity
• Twitter has experienced exponential growth over the last 12 months but user numbers are now steadying
• MySpace plateaued, and its popularity is on the decline

Importantly, these trend graphs measure ‘unique visitors’ as opposed to simply restating the total number of registered users. That’s important because it indicates how many people actually decided to login in a given month.*

In this light, the downward trajectory of MySpace looks bad indeed. What’s also interesting is the steadying of Twitter’s growth. I would wager a guess that this illustrates the high rate of churn from people who saw Twitter as the next big thing because of all the media hype, signed up, and then tuned out.

A final word on revenue streams, or lack of them in Twitter’s case. MySpace has a couple. Facebook is now profitable. And Twitter will ‘roll out premium accounts this year’.

Oh dear.

[Sources: Comscore, Chicago Tribune]

* I doubt these numbers reflect people who access Twitter via 3^rd party clients though.

The Jackenhack Awards 2009 are just over a week away, and over the past couple of days the nominations have been coming thick and fast. So far, we’ve seen shortlists for:

• The Year’s Biggest Losers of Clients/Talent
• Biggest Fuck-Up Of The Year
• Digital Refusnik Of The Year
• Twitter Twat Of The Year

All the nominations are quite funny, and the ‘one to watch’ in my opinion is the Twitter Twat category.

That said, what most caught my eye was the Digital Refusnik Of The Year category. This one is designed to award those who are ‘making the best bid to stay retro’ and ‘refusing to acknowledge carnage in their business and the wider industry’ as a result of things moving digital.

The Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday are among the nominees, and The Jackenhack’s summary for them borders on sublime. Here it is verbatim:

“Anyway, we thought we’d nominate the Mail for suggesting that use of Facebook and Twitter will…

• increase your chances of getting cancer
• make you eat too much
• deprive you of the ability to feel compassion
• fill you with jealousy
• incite you to stalk your partner
• make you immoral (if you weren’t already)
• cause you to dishonour the memory of Winston Churchill
• result in your becoming addicted to friendships (but only if you are a woman)
• make you like Charles Manson
• result in your children being exposed to pornography
• result in your children being exposed to prostitution
• result in your children being exposed to drugs
• damage your child’s brain
• turn your children into criminals
• increase the risk of being branded as a prostitute and having your life ruined
• cause you to fail to relax on holiday
• make you run amok, destroying an award-winning garden in Leeds
• cause your partner to go into a coma after crashing a motorbike (but only if you are Lauren Booth, and only if you change your status from “married” to “single” after a domestic)
• increase the chances of your husband hacking you to death with a meat cleaver (but only if you change your status from “married” to “single”)
• put you at risk of online crime
• make you sufficiently vain to retouch digital photographs of yourself
• prompt you to befriend imprisoned criminals
• waste British businesses £132m every day
• make you laugh about serious car crashes
• turn you into “a foolish Facebook mum” (but only if you are Suzanne Moore)
• cause you to lie about serving with the SAS
• turn you into a ‘hypocrite’ (like Jim Knight, the former schools minister who “lectures parents on computer-obsessed children – but has 900 online friends”)
• turn us all into a nation of introverts”

Every now and then (ok, daily) The Daily Fail gets taken to task for it’s over the top headlines or hysteria-inducing editorial.  Chris Applegate’s Daily Mail-o-matic app and Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project are probably among the nicest examples of this on the web. But I had no idea how utterly insane it was with respect to Twitter/ Facebook until seeing that list.

But anyway, my tickets are bought and hopefully I’ll see you there next week?

Now, back to online crime, drugs, prostitution and pornography…

The Jackenhack Awards 2009

• Blog: http://thejackenhacks.wordpress.com
• Twitter:  @thejackenhacks
• Where: The Dust Bar
• When: Wednesday 14th October 2009-10-07
• Tickets: £37.50 from here: http://jackenhacks.eventbrite.com/

[Photo credits: B3ta, Jackenhacks]

In James Gordon-MacIntosh’s words:

“This film sums up exactly how I feel about too much social media talk… all you social media specialists could do with watching this because, too often, it’s exactly how you come across.”

Harsh, but fair. Watch and you’ll see why.

I think that anyone who has taken an interest over the past couple years in how social media is impacting the ways brands communicate online would be lying if they didn’t feel slightly uncomfortable at one point or another while watching this video.

But that’s probably a good thing. We should feel uncomfortable if this is how we come across as an industry, and don’t address some of the underlying criticisms in the video.

I spent a lot of time online collecting all of the data that I could about usage trends and service popularity in the regions mentioned. The most relevant stuff I think for the UK, is the Facebook stuff below. Plus, I have been on a bit of a Facebook kick as of late so why stop now?

CheckFacebook.com

Bookmark this site now. It was developed by Nick Gonzalez, a web analyst specializing in social media and former writer for an obscure blog called TechCrunch.

Each day, CheckFacebook.com tracks data reported from Facebook’s advertising tool to help marketers and researchers understand how Facebook is spreading across the globe.

Mouse over country and up pops an up to date user figure. Select said country and it will give you a demographic breakdown of users. It also tracks the Top 10 Largest Countries on Facebook, as well as the 10 Fastest Growing countries over the past week.

With Facebook hitting 250 million users on 15 July, then cracking 300 million users only two months later on 15 September, this is a handy resource to have.

O’Reilly Research – Active Facebook users by country & region (August 2009)

This presentation is only a month old (or is it a month out of date?) but provides a comparative analysis of Facebook users worldwide. It goes into some depth, providing a global overview of users by age and gender, as well as diving into things at a regional level.

Combine the CheckFacebook.com stats with the presentation template laid out by the O’Reilly Research slide deck and you’ll be well on your way to creating up to date bespoke Facebook research.

Not bad eh?

GBH worked with the PUMA retail team at their Carnaby street store to make a Ferrari F1 car using nothing more than PUMA Motorsports clothing, caps, shoes and bags.

A brilliant idea well executed, capturing the interconnection between the brands and the motorsport.

And from the buzz online, it looks like this story played well right across the automotive, lifestyle, fashion, and design titles.

115,000+ views of the YouTube video so far. File this one under inspiration. Hat tipped.

Link:

• PUMA Motorsports

Now, this could have been a post examining journalistic integrity in the United States, or the absurdity of ultra-competitive local news there. Or it could have delved into the 24 hour news cycle with its constant need for content and on air ‘filler.’

But it’s not.

Instead it’s a chance to reflect on the following:

That some lucky member of the Hooters PR team (possibly a young AE, hopefully male) gets up in the morning, goes to work, and gets to pitch the ‘Infamous Hooter Girl Rodeo Barstool Trick.’

God bless America.

The best bit? This stunt pushing a wings night that happens every Tuesday… for kids.

Who would you rather be Batman or Spiderman?

Rachel Hodgson from Fleishman-Hillard was in the Spiderman camp, and Tim Hoang of Porter Novelli was representing Batman.  Neither side would give in, so we agreed to disagree. And then Tim and I agreed that Rachel was wrong. Batman is awesome.

The banter carried on to Thursday over Twitter:

In an attempt to put this baby to rest, I created a poll on POLLpigeon:

Modest results came roaring in, and the POLLpigeon app sent a few public tweets on my behalf like so:

I expected the app would do this much, which I was alright with. Then I shut down the laptop for the evening, and went to the world premiere of Rage with Skype, the world’s first interactive multi-venue film premiere (I’ll post on that later).

Unbeknownst to me though, while I was offline and at the movie, POLLpigeon was sending DM’s to anyone following me begging them to enter this stupid poll. Add that to the public calls for participation and I began to look spammy indeed.

Flash forward to Friday morning, when slightly worse for wear, I fired up my laptop to find evidence in my inbox and on Twitter that ‘I’ was indeed spamming people by DM.  I was pleased though that people were either concerned my account got taken over by spambots or reassuring me that they would do the poll by DM. Both reactions, I find quite sweet. A taste:

So WTF happened? Well, apparently when I signed in with my Twitter username and password to create the poll, I must have authorised them to send out DMs to the people nice enough to follow me. This doesn’t really appear in their terms of service or anywhere else on the site.  And it’s particularly embarrassing when one creates such a completely ridiculous poll, as I did.

A couple public apologies later during my morning coffee, and a bit of access revoking for POLLpigeon (Settings > Connections > Revoke Access) and order was restored.

I know it’s not the end of the world, and probably not worth a whole blog post. But there was a weird feeling in my stomach as I read the concerned DMs and replies on Friday morning, worrying that people might get the impression that I would purposely spam them.  Not a great reputation to have for people in my line of work.

I was happy I got the benefit of the doubt though, so thanks.

In closing, screw POLLpigeon. I don’t mind coming off like a bell end sometimes, I just like it when it’s in a manner, time and place of my choosing.  On a more serious note I worry that seemingly harmless apps like this will take Twitter the way of Facebook 1.0, when you couldn’t log in without being informed you’ve been bitten by a zombie.

Oh, and since you’re dying to know, Batman FTW.

[Big honking disclaimer, Skype is a client]

At first I thought that it was pretty decent, especially if you like numbers and stats and all that (which I do).

But a few things just didn’t seem right at first.

It might have been the use of a Moby as the backing track, which is enough to make me suspicious of pretty much anything. Or perhaps it was the opening teaser question ‘…is [social media] the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?’ Um, no. That’s just nonsense.

But I looked past all that, and enjoyed the video. It was the sort of thing I could picture myself pulling up in a training session. I even jotted down what I thought were some of the most noteworthy stats, which were to form the basis of this blog post.

But focus of this post has shifted completely since I began looking into some of these grand stats more closely. It seems that Qualman has fudged or completely misrepresented a few numbers which makes the video now look a bit sloppy.

Read just a few comments on Erik’s blog and on the original Mashable article and you’ll quickly see what I mean.

Robert Cole has written a fantastic blog post about his reaction to the video and some of those duff stats, and the following summary bears repeating:

…we have accurate statistics mixed in with a bunch of hyperbole that inadvertently undermines the credibility of both the presentation and social media. The video is a perfect example of social media at its worst.

So what’s the big deal? Well, a couple of things.

1. Some of the stats are just plain wrong. This not only takes some of the shine off the glossy-techno-social-media-love-fest, but also arms those who watch it (and don’t question it) with incorrect facts to perpetuate. By way of example, the Mashable article has been re-tweeted over 450 times.
2. At a time when social media enthusiasts from PR/Ad/Media circles are trying to determine the best way of measuring effectiveness and ROI, the last thing we need is someone overstating the case for effect (or to sell more books). It’s counterproductive for a start, but also gives anyone who thinks this area is a little flaky the ammunition they need to be, well, right.

I’m sure Qualman’s intentions were good and completely genuine. And I do agree with one of the closing lines of the video: ‘[social media is] a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.’

But huge numbers in social media – like Facebook cracking 300 million users this week – though impressive, tell only part of the story.  I worry that by overstating the numbers to inflate the impact of social media, the Qualmans of the world let the side down a bit.

Related Articles

• Robert Cole – Socialnomics Should Not Be Voodoo Economics
• Mashable – 30+ Impressive Social Media Stats Visualized [Video]
• Erik Qualman – Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think
• YouTube – Social Media Revolution

Twestival Local

• Date: Thursday 10 September 2009
• Time: 7:00PM
• Location: Vinopolis, Stoney St, London Bridge, London
• Twitter: @twestivaluk
• Web: http://london.twestival.com/
• Tickets: Available  on Amiando, 1 for £15 or 2 for £20

Off the top: Twestival. An obvious choice for the Twitterati here, and I don’t know many people who aren’t going. If you haven’t yet got your tickets – buy them now! The London Twestival will be in support of ChildLine, ‘the UK’s free, 24-hour helpline for children in distress or danger.’ Every single penny goes there. There will be free drinks and great entertainment including music from The Hours. Massive shout out to the organisers who have again pulled off something truly global, and great.

Measurement Camp

• Date: Thursday 10 September 2009
• Time:  10am – 12 PM
• Location: Dare Digital, 13-14 Margaret St, London, W1W 8RN
• Twitter: @measurementcamp
• Web: http://measurementcamp.wikidot.com/events

The monthly open source movement for knowledge sharing and industry collaboration for social media types, from across the marcoms spectrum: Media, Ad, Digital, Social Media and PR agencies.

Tech PR Drinks

• Date: Wednesday 23 September
• Time:  From 6.30pm
• Location: The Savoy Tup, Savoy Street
• RSVP: Email Will Stugeon
• Web: http://sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com/2009/09/tech-prs-who-fancies-drink.html

The brainchild Will Sturgeon from Lewis  PR, it’s a meet up for ‘the great and the good of the UK tech PR industry’. Missed the last one, so looking forward to this one.

MOO’s 3rd Birthday Party

• Date: Tuesday 22 September
• Time: From 7:00 PM
• Location: The Queen of Hoxton, 1 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, EC2A 3JX
• Tickets:  Free
• Web: http://mooparty.eventbrite.com/

You can’t seem to go to any networking thing in this city without being slipped a Moo MiniCard, and the funky online printshop is celebrating 3 years in the business. Happy birthday Moo, love your cards.

[Cross posted on: hyperTEXT London]