Time Magazine has come out with a list of bad inventions, which includes both the location based network Foursquare and the (very successful) Facebook game Farmville.

Foursquare finds itself on a list that includes Betamax, Asbestos and Agent Orange, with Time Magazine calling it “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism, with which you can earn badges for checking into your local Starbucks more than anyone else.”

In fact, Foursquare is arguably a prime example of a network where the hype far outstrips the actual usage.   Mashable says Foursquare is nearing one million check ins a day.   Sounds impressive, but compare that to Twitter where the number of tweets a day was around the 53 million mark in late March according to Sysomos.

Is Foursquare a colossal waste of time?  Certainly, it seems to attract even more criticism than Twitter did in the early days.  This post by my former colleague at Cow PR, Mark Perkins is a fairly typical reaction to it.

And from personal experience, when I went to see Flight of the Conchords at the Hammersmith Apollo the other month, a measly five people had checked in (the venue has a capacity of 3600+), from an audience you’d imagine would be much more likely than the average to be smartphone users.

3-4 ways Foursquare can be more than a gimmick
The thing is, Foursquare can be useful, it’s just that most people don’t realise how.   Really there are three concrete ways it becomes a utility as opposed to a gimmick:

1 – There are circumstances when you are in a large group of people, where it’s good to see where they all are.   At the March SXSW geek fest in Austin, it was useful to find out who was attending what talk or seminar in quite a large area around the conference centre.   A lot of people I know specifically used Foursquare to let others know what they were up to.

2 – It can work well as a location based guide in self contained communities.   Harvard University’s Foursquare deal where both students and visitors can use it to navigate the campus is interesting – it serves a real purpose

3 – Retail promotions can work.  In his post Mark jokes about people whose ambition is to be ‘Sheriff of Nandos‘ in Uxbridge (Nandos = a Portuguese themed fast food chicken chain / Uxbridge = an anonymous outer London suburb).   Yep, being Mayor of Nandos in Uxbridge would be pretty sad…unless Nandos made it worth your while of course.

So, I’m one of those suckers spending £20 ($30) or so a week in Starbucks.    If I got 50p or £1 off each time I went in for being Mayor, would I do it?  Sure I would, over the year it would add up to quite a tidy sum.

It’s also a way for smaller retailers, or groups of retailers, to promote themselves.   Our local coffee shop, opposite the DLKW (and Rabbit) offices, Bou Tea, has a free pastry before 10am promo.  And I could completely see a scenario where somewhere like Spitalfields or Greenwich market in London launches a badge where you get some kind of freebie for checking into X locations.

Then there is a fourth benefit:  As a brand is that Foursquare can help with SEO, at least temporarily.

In the first three months before we’d established any real online footprint at Rabbit, our Foursquare location was on the first page of Google when you searched for us.   And back when we were still working with Cow PR in January, we immediately created a Foursquare location for the ‘pop up’ Heinz Cafe.   In the week when it was open and people were searching for it, that location was one of the first things they saw.  Without it, it would have been invisible online during those crucial first 1-2 days.

In fact ‘what’s the point’ is a question that’s asked more so outside the US.   Laurence Borel has an interesting post where she reports back from a recent visit to the US.   Checking in, says Laurence, is completely different over there to over here.     On Facebook and Twitter, as well as Foursquare, Laurence observes that business are far ahead of us in making social media check-ins both useful and interesting.   It remains to be seen how long we’re going to be playing catch-up…

Flickr Image Credit – Marshall Astor

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The PBS Media Shift blog has some interesting points about the UK web election that wasn’t….well once you get past the 1st paragraph anyway (“The British still consume high tea and scones….” enough said).

PBS links to BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan Jones who says, “this was not an Internet election, and all those who suggested it might be had got it completely wrong.   It was a television election, and all of those tweeters and bloggers were sad political obsessives talking to each other.” Guilty as charged, those of us pontificating on Twitter about the election were largely preaching to the already converted.

Actually the following chart (produced before the election ended) by Echo Research should be a wake up call for all of us who make a living out of predicting the death of old media.   Sure, 48% of UK voters were influenced by the Internet…while 60% were influenced by newspapers and 85% by TV.

At the same time, the websites of all mainstream media outlets – TV and newspapers, saw a rise.   This points towards something that I for one believe is true – the delivery mechanism of the news might be different, but ultimately people still want it from trusted brands.

Spoof campaigns such as the Facebook group ‘vandalised Conservative Billboards‘ were more popular than the official party efforts, but you wonder to what extent they didn’t just amplify what was coming out of the echo chamber.

Social media effort from the UK election - vandalised Conservative posters on Facebook

As Jaron Gilinsky who wrote the PBS piece says, “now is the time for the various players to absorb the lessons from this election, and get back on the bike.   Perhaps in five years time, the training wheels will finally come off.”

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• After the election: Did the Internet make any substantial difference? (sluggerotoole.com)

After showing a slight drop in US (Compete and Comscore) and Worldwide (Comscore) Facebook visitor numbers in February, both metrics firms now confirm that it’s business as usual with the social network growing in popularity again.

Comscore says that Facebook had 472 million uniques in Jan, 463 million in March and 484 million in Feb.   However, Comscore seems to suggest that the February blip was to do with social media as a whole as both MySpace and Twitter also saw drops in February and a rise again in March.

And the stats from Facebook itself?   At the beginning of February Facebook had itself down as having 400 million active monthly users. Inside Facebook then estimated it at 436 million for March using the Facebook advertiser tool.

Inside Facebook mentions Facebook staffers in saying that it’s now passed the 450 million active user mark.   To put that into perspective, there are now more Facebook users than there are people in South America (382 million).

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The million dollar question we (and other agencies like us) are often asked, is ‘how can you evaluate social media’ or more directly – ‘will it impact the bottom line.’

At Rabbit we’re shortly publishing our favourite 20 – free that anyone can use – social media sentiment monitoring tools, but a report published in emarketer is also useful.

According to a US study, more than half of Facebook fans (of a brand) are likely to make a purchase, while 67% of Twitter followers reported the same.

6/10 Facebook fans also said they’d be more likely to recommend the brand to friends, among Twitter users that increased to 8/10.

And the main reason people followed brands on Facebook?   To receive discounts and promotions, so though not the most creative tactic in the book, straight forward Facebook competitions and give-aways can work.

This is one of the items in this week’s Rabbit Feed newsletter – more info here!

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The other day journalism professor Jay Rosen had the following to say about a Venture Beat story discussing some Hitwise stats showing that relatively few people get news from Twitter.

The article was given fairly prominent billing as it goes against the grain of Twitter breaking and helping to develop news.

Instead, Venture Beat reported that Hitwise’s figures showed that “the micro-blogging site comes in at No. 39 on a list of where people go for breaking stories. Surprisingly, Facebook is No. 3 — a second victory for the site, following yesterday’s revelation that it has surpassed Google as the most visited web site in the U.S. Google News.”

Good for Facebook, but as Jay Rosen pointed out the Twitter stats are close to meaningless.   Why?  Because most regular Twitter users no longer access Twitter through the web using a client instead.

The figure below shows that 80%+ of users don’t update via the Twitter website – it was a TwitStat snapshot taken at 7am UK time, but it’s consistent with what TwitStat showed during the day yesterday (and peak US log-in times).

It also tallies in with figures published in Tech Crunch 1+ year ago, which showed web access at 32% – and in the past year the Twitter market has both matured more, Twitter clients themselves have become better known, and smartphone usage has increased.

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The other day I posted about Nielsen’s stats showing that the over 25s (and over 35s in particular) are the most active on mobile social networks, as opposed to teens.   The other giant metrics firm, Comscore (via Marketing Charts), has now produced figures about the growth of mobile social networking in general.

Looking at the US, Comscore worked out that access to Facebook via mobiles grew by 112% over the past year, while mobile Twitter access went up 347%.

At the same time, MySpace continues to decline on mobiles as well as on the Web, with 7% less users accessing it via their mobile devices.

Unsurprisingly, the growth in mobile social networking comes from smartphone users – hence the over 35s that Nielsen talked about who are both more likely to be able to afford one and also get one via their jobs.    30.8% of smartphone users accessed mobile social networks, compared to just 6.8% of more run of the mill ‘feature phone’ users.

Kirk LaPointe’s media blog points us towards this report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which takes a look at news consumption in the United States.

Bearing in mind that the whole death of print trend is arguably more advanced in the US than in the UK or Australia, it’s worth a look.   Key points:

• The young are least likely to be regular news consumers.  35% of 18-29 year olds follow the news all or most of the time.   For people aged 65+ that rises to 70%

• However, it’s impossible to blank out the news completely and 99% of Americans do admit to getting news, at least casually in some shape or form.   Local (78%) and national (73%) TV leads, followed by the Internet (61%).   By contrast, 50% read a local paper, 54% listen to the radio, while 17% read a ‘national’ newspaper (the latter stat would be different in say the UK, due to the stronger position of national newspapers)

• News is also consumed across several channels simultaneously, 46% of Americans use between four of the six news platforms

The report also looks at Internet news consumption in more detail.    Less than four in ten (38%) Americans rely solely on news from offline sources, the majority (59%) rely on both on and offline sources, while 2% only get their news online.   It’s worth remembering however that ‘offline’ includes TV and radio as well as print.

Tying into some of the stats mentioned above, the research found that online news consumers were by and large both better educated and younger than the average.    So, the median age of all news consumers was 58, but for people who get their news online it was 40.

Finally, and this is a stat we mentioned in the recent ‘Rabbit Feed’ (our weekly newsletter over at Rabbit), news is now much more of a social phenomenon.   Three quarters (75%) of adults that get their news online say they get it forwarded to them through email or social media.

And it works in a virtuous circle.   News gets forwarded online via social media from people who at the same time deepen their engagement with the news.  97% of American social network users read the news online, and 51% of that 97% get news forwarded onto them via friends on places like Facebook on a typical day.

Strengthening the role of Twitter as a network that has influence and importance beyond its 10-15 million worldwide active user base, it’s also worth noting that the study found that 99% of Twitter users are online news consumers.

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A well known rule of thumb in business is the so-called Pareto principle (or the 80/20 rule) that 20% of participants will account for 80% of the activity.   Metrics firm Nielsen decided to test out if the same applies to Twitter – do 20% of tweeple account for 80% of what takes place on Twitter.

The answer is no.   At least in the UK, an even smaller number – 7% – account for 79% of Twitter activity.

Nielsen found that ‘light’ users (less than 2 minutes per month, actually broken across 30 days that is pretty much zero) account for 67% of the audience, medium users (22 mins per month, so still less than a minute a day) account for 26%, while heavy users (1hr+ a month) account for 7% of UK tweeple.

Nielsen’s stats confirm previous ones by Canadian research firm Sysomos, which showed that there is a group of 5% of Twitter power users who are responsible for 75% of Twitter activity.

Similarly, in January, RJ Metrics produced a report saying that only 17% of Twitter accounts had sent a single tweet over the month, which would put Twitter’s ‘real’ user base at around 10-15 million worldwide (with perhaps 700-900k in the UK) as opposed to the 75 million registered users.

Again, the fact that there are probably less than a million people in the UK making habitual use of Twitter shouldn’t matter.   News often breaks on Twitter and, due to the large proportion of bloggers and journalists that listen in on the network, moves elsewhere.

As the founder of spoof political website mydavidcameron.com (lampooning ads featuring the UK Conservative Party leader) found, chatter about his website started on Twitter and then quickly moved on from there to Facebook and finally to the media at large.

Finally, it’s also worth bearing in mind Nielsen’s observations that other networks similarly have a core of power users who dominate.  Three percent (3%) of MySpace visitors account for 63% of time spent on the site while 5% of LinkedIn visitors account for 50% of LinkedIn activity.   A challenge for marketers targeting those networks is obviously to zero in on, and find out who those three or five percent are.

Linking in with its role as a network, which according to Reuters is rapidly gaining ‘tech lock in’, Facebook however has a higher participation rate -  52% of users account for almost everything (98%) that goes on.

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This fascinating chart from Silicon Alley Insider (via social media optimization), goes through the current Twitter demographics.    With Twitter traditionally having been seen as the preserve of the over 25s or even over 30s, it’s interesting to see that the highest rate of growth comes from the under 24s.

At the end of 2009, tweeple 24 and under accounted for 30%, up from 20%  at the end of 2008.   A sign that it might slowly be broadening its appeal from 30 something bloggers and early adopters?

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‘Where do stories come from?’ asks an article on Media Post.   While previous research showed that online media only accounts for 4% of what you might call ‘new news’, journalists definitely do use it to supplement and build on stories and find out additional information.

A study by George Washington University and Cision found that 89% of journalists turn to blogs for research, 65% to social media sites like Facebook, 52% to Twitter.   And Wikipedia?  Over 6/10 (61%) consult it.

Overall 55% of journalists thought that social media was either somewhat or very important.   However, at the same time 84% said it was ‘slightly less’ or ‘much less’ reliable than traditional media.

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• The New Media Relations (proactivereport.com)
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