The end of search is a theme that’s been talked about a lot in the past – as long ago as in Feb 2008, Ben Kunz of Media Associates produced a series of graphs from Google Trends showing that search volumes were significantly down for a range of what you might call staple terms – music, furniture, office supplies etc.

Some of it is wishful thinking as many of us wish for the age of Google to start drawing to a close (whether the age of Facebook is any better is of course a different matter altogether).

And the latest Nielsen search stats from the US show that Google is as dominant as ever, controlling almost 2/3 (64.2%) of the search market – a share that’s hardly changed since last year, despite all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft’s Bing (on 13.6%) has been rolling out.

It’s the second table from the Nielsen post however that makes for more interesting reading. Over the past year, search activity is down 16% – 17% in the case of Google. Yahoo! (-30%) performed particularly badly, though despite it’s still small share Bing (+28%) has done well. So all those extra features are paying off after all.

OK, so with almost nine million searches being conducted in the US in July, search is certainly not dead. But a drop of close to a fifth year on year is still significant, and one explanation has to be that people get more and more of what they need and want via social media. There is that research from earlier in the year after all about Facebook now driving more traffic to major news and entertainment portals than Google.

At the very least it reinforces what Comscore found last year – that search and social media campaigns now need to work very much in tandem, with a paid search campaign supported by social activity being 2.23x more effective than if conducted on its own.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Search Market Isn’t Always What it Seems to Be (webpronews.com)
• Google starts its own Rocketboom (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Google starts video series showcasing hot searches (news.cnet.com)
• Numbers Game: Bing goes up as Google’s search share drops (econsultancy.com)

That’s a question Hitwise’s Robin Goad asked earlier this week when he showed that – in the UK – Facebook was now getting one in six page views, or 16.73% of the total.   That puts it in front of Google UK (8.22%), ebay (5.39%) and YouTube (2.64%).

Robin makes his observation by pointing out that Facebook’s UK growth rate is starting to slow.   Just like in the US, where last month, Facebook user rates among 18-44 year olds dropped (but grew among over 45s), Facebook saw a slight dip in its UK page view share last month, which could of course be seasonal due to colleges and Universities breaking up for the year.

Facebook does of course have 500 million worldwide users, hence the question of whether it can realistically grow much more.   And of course, it raises the other question of whether it will really ever be replaced (the same question constantly asked of Google in search)?

An interesting piece over on Flowtown says no, giving various reasons from the fact that a lot of people genuinely use it to manage their online lives, the applications market, and the fact that brands and businesses gravitate to it now almost as a default.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook nears saturation point in UK (newstatesman.com)
• Facebook’s UK growth tails off – where now for Zuckerberg’s Billion? (thenextweb.com)

While doing some research into the insurance industry and social media for one of our clients, I decided to look sideways to see what was going on in other sectors where there are consumer facing finance brands  – in particular in banking.

I mean, you’d think that with all the bad press they’d had over the past two years that UK banks would want to open up Twitter as another customer engagement channel.   And over in the US, there’s a Computer Weekly article from over a year back talking about how banks over there have indeed been getting on board.

Sadly the banking industry might well be another example of where we lag behind the States in brand social media adoption.   Check out some of the examples below.   A quick search on Google and Twitter search for their Twitter handles produced the following.

First of all Royal Bank of Scotland, the recipient of an enormous bail-out and now majority owned by the UK tax payer.   Well…they have at the very least put up a Twitter feed to advertise jobs.  

But a feed for the group as a whole?  Doesn’t look like it, and old Roe Serrano, whoever s/he is, is sitting happily on what should be the group ID.   As a result I suspect that the Twitter RBS jobs ID was something established as a freelance effort by someone in their HR team, rather than as part of any coordinated strategy.

Then we move onto Lloyds, now also the owner of a group that includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland.   No, various searches for Lloyds Bank or the Banking Group produce nothing on Twitter.   And if we look specifically at the Lloyds TSB part of the operation?   We get this:

Um…somehow I don’t think that’s the real Lloyds TSB!  However, someone/somewhere within Lloyds did obviously plan at some point to take a few IDs and do something with them:

So how about Barclays?  Not much going on there:

Then I thought about Smile Bank, an Internet bank here in the UK that was something of a pioneer ten years ago or so and likes to think of itself as progressive (it’s owned by the cooperative).

Nice one, Dongchan Park, I wonder whether you specifically wanted to reserve Smile’s name or whether you just nabbed what thought was a generic ID that would be of general interest to a bank.

And finally moving onto HSBC, which on its website has published an article all about the joys of businesses using Twitter: “A really effective way to get your website seen is to create yourself a
twitter account. It is free and you can post links and talk about your
business and show off your expertise.”

Like Royal Bank of Scotland it has a careers Twitter ID.   And it’s also currently running a promotion on Twitter about ‘fresh business thinking’ called 100 thoughts (essentially tweet out your business pearls of wisdom).

However twitter.com/hsbc is currently suspended, which might mean it was brandjacked and HSBC has tried to get it back.   It’s also difficult to see what the score is with twitter.com/hsbc_com.  Is it an official account?  If so, it hasn’t been used since August.

Hats off though to HSBC’s subsidiary company First Direct, where Amanda Brown and Rebecca Hirst seem to be one of the exceptions to the UK Twitter rule:

Note, this was a fairly unscientific look at what banks do just by going into search.

Some of them might have feeds somewhere that have a customer service or PR orientation, but the point is if I can’t find it, neither will the average consumer.      And though I took a cross section of bank brands, a look at others such as the Cooperative Bank or Banco Santander produces similar results to the ones above.

Update – thanks to @cashquestions for pointing me to the ING Feed in the UK, which is at @ezonomics

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

Related articles by Zemanta

• Foursquare Nearing 1 Million Checkins Per Day (mashable.com)
• Foursquare Is Awesome For My Small Business (businessinsider.com)
• Dominos Pizza launches a nationwide promotion on Foursquare (sporkings.com)

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook beats Google for visitors: Tracker (windsorstar.com)
• Google VS Facebook – and the winner is… (sowetan.co.za)
• Hitwise: People get their news from Facebook and Google – not Twitter (venturebeat.com)

Was the subject of a presentation I gave at today’s Social Media World Forum at Olympia (London).

With me having, perhaps too ambitiously, crammed in both SXSW and this event in one week, I’m aware that I rattled through this at great speed – or as one tweet put it – presented an information red bull!

As a result, the presentation is embedded above.   I’ve also included supplementary points / facts / stats with links below:

• Demand media pushes out 4000 pieces of content a day - an article from Wired that’s a good intro to possibly the largest and most notorious of the content farms
• UK national newspapers have lost 1.2 million in the past two years (slide six).  I compiled the table from the ABC figures Jan 08, 09 and 10.  3.1 million lost readers is more than the population of Wales
• Since 1951, the UK population has increased by 25% but newspaper circulations have gone down 30%
• 96% of ‘new’ news is broken by the legacy media
• The latest Pew State of the Media report, out yesterday and worth reading, it includes some good (and recent) pointers about the direction the media as a whole (and not just newspapers) is heading
• Danny Sullivan’s interview with Eric Schmidt of Google, where Schmidt speaks up for the essential role major newspapers have in society
• Most journalists consult blogs for research – according to George Washington University and Cision
• PwC in a report last year said we should stop talking about the death of newspapers and talk about the rise of media brands

Any other questions, please do email me (dirk at the rabbitagency.com)!

A feature in Campaign asks the question of whether clients need specialist social media agencies. Though that’s not what we call Rabbit (we do a lot more than social media outreach), we’re aware that we’re often grouped in that ‘pot’, so we thought we’d respond.

Sure, we have a vested interest, but actually our take is that clients don’t need specialist shops per se. What they do need is specialists who know what they are talking about and have some first hand experience of the tools they recommend.

And at the moment at least, the latest breed of social media and digital agencies just happens to be where a lot of these specialists are to be found and where a lot of the, what you might call skills development, takes place.

It’s an open secret that given varying levels of client education in what’s still quite a new space, that it’s been possible for just about anyone to set themselves up as an ‘expert’ and roll out a presentation containing a few buzz-words.

Social media marketing isn’t just ‘online PR’
As a result, last year blogger (and now a senior executive at Edelman in the States) David Armano questioned whether as he put it, social media practitioners should “eat their own dog food ” – this followed a number of organisations in the US appointing people to social media positions who didn’t actually have any kind of significant track record.

That might have worked a year ago, but clients are increasingly buying into the idea that social media marketing isn’t simply ‘online PR’ (transferring offline habits online). Instead what is it?

1 – It’s being able to come up with a winning idea and concept, that definitely hasn’t changed. The other week, the creator of spoof website mydavidcameron.com, in a post on the five lessons you can learn from his site, admitted that number one was the fact that he had a winning idea – everything else stemmed from that.

2 – It’s having an understanding of how whatever you do can translate throughout the rest of the marketing mix, rather than sitting in a digital silo.

3 – It’s having an appreciation of how things evolve online, where the gap between items being talked about on social networks and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

4 – It’s having an understanding of metrics. Part of our job is a numbers and planning one, and being able to make sense of the various sentiment and influence analysis tools out there.

5 – But finally, it is knowing about the right tools to use to get the job done, and there nothing beats first hand experience.

Just Google the team

Recently, a client googled both fellow-Rabbit Louise and myself as individuals to see if we had any kind of online footprint. Fortunately we do, and we shouldn’t really be in the space if we don’t.

That seems like good practice going forward. If an agency comes up and presents ‘social media’ or any kind of digital strategy, google the individual team members just you would a job candidate. What do you find and what have they done? Do they use whatever they are recommending in a personal capacity, and do they also interact with their peers online?

In response to David’s post last year, one of the few comments in disagreement pointed out that media planners don’t always have experience of using the products they work for. A better analogy would be this – would you allow someone who doesn’t actually watch much TV to advise you on your TV strategy?

Image – Mai Le

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?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Launching Twitter-Killer For Gmail! (GOOG) (Nicholas Carlson/Silicon Alley Insider) (techmeme.com)

Two charts from the current Economist special report on social networking. First of all, according to Nielsen, “measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy.”

By comparison, Americans spent on average six hours a month on social networks in October, almost 3x as much as in October 2007.

Secondly, a chart that again confirms the dominance of Facebook as being for social media what Google is for search. The other day I mentioned a Reuters article questioning whether Facebook was achieving technological ‘lock-in’, becoming a default that’s difficult to shift.

As well as Google, Reuters actually compared Facebook with the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard – introduced in the 1870s as the default for keyboards, and not the best or most logical solution out there but simply the one that stuck.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Australians world’s biggest users of social media (mumbrella.com.au)
• Blame Canada: Facebook Being Probed Over Privacy – Again (gigaom.com)
• Gangster Prisoner ‘Issued Facebook Threats’ (news.sky.com)
• Time Spent on Social Networks Increases by 82% in 2009 (rotorblog.com)
• The social network juggernaut rolls on (theequitykicker.com)

Back in April there were comparisons of Twitter = the new Second Life (i.e the hyped network of 2009) when Nielsen said that 60% of users lost interest after registering, leaving their accounts dormant.

Though Twitter won’t be heading into obscurity like the virtual world (this New York Times article gives some good reasons why), it’s still the case that Twitter’s actual user base is small compared to the number of registrations as some new stats from RJMetrics show.

In fact, according to RJMetrics, Twitter’s rate of churn isn’t 60% as Nielsen found in April, it’s 80%+, with only 17% of Twitter accounts sending a single tweet over the past month.

By comparison, back in 2007 when Twitter was much smaller and really just for tech early adopters, 70% were making regular use of it.   RJ Metrics boss Robert J Moore says that the key period really is the first week – if someone gets to grips with the micro-blogging service in the first seven days, the chances are that they will stick with it.

Based on that churn rate, rather than 75 million registered Twitter users, RJ Metrics says that the real number of people who actually use it is more like 10-15 million worldwide.   And based on earlier research by Sysomos, 51% of that user base is in the US, 9% in Brazil, 7% in the UK, 4% in Canada and 2% in Australia, so roughly speaking the number of active of active UK tweeple is around 700-900k.

RJ Metrics says that users who do make use of it are increasingly engaged.  This mirrors the report by Sysomos last year about Twitter’s power users – the most committed 5% who account for 75% of tweets.  

Sysomos found that they were more likely to work in tech, the media and so had the ability to take things that they saw on Twitter elsewhere.   Indeed, the gap between something breaking on Twitter and hitting the mainstream media can be as little as four hours.

Reuters yesterday posted an article that with its worldwide user base of 300 million Facebook was approaching ‘technological lock-in’ and becoming a new Google – a default Internet technology that’s difficult to ever shift.   Based on the numbers above, Twitter is not remotely about to reach that kind of status, but while it doesn’t tick the ‘reach’ box, it does tick the influence one.

Image – FotoSpawn

Related articles by Zemanta

• Analyze people, not sites (nettakeaway.com)
• Will the Real You Please Stand Up (blogs.secondlife.com)
• Twitter activity at all-time low, only 17% of users actually tweet (downloadsquad.com)