DreamGrow Social Media

Facebook to be worth over $40 billion dollars next year?

As WSJ reported, Facebook will probably go public in 2011, once it has reached a year of $1 billion behind it in sales. So a bunch of investors were polled about what they think the market capitalization would be – The results came to be between $35 and $40 billion dollars!

Although, some brave analysts have even suggested that the amount would be $59 billion in 2011 (a market cap over 2 times bigger than that of Google’s in 2004), and up to $100 billion dollars by 2015.

Priit suggests that the time of poster-boy Google may soon be over. Replaced by the poster-boy Facebook. Over everything else, people want to communicate. And right now, nothing enables us to do it better than Facebook.

What do you think? Would you buy Facebook shares?

What You Can Do With Social Media Now?

A collection of successful social media cases to show the audience on the Capgemini Cloud Computing Conference in Utrecht (February 17th) what social media can offer. And that investing in social media provides a return on investment.

Dunbar: People limited to 150 friends, despite Facebook

Dunbar’s number is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships. Relationships where an individual knows who each person is, and how those people relate each other. There is no precise value for Dunbar’s number, but it’s usually set to 150 and our brains just can’t handle more.

The advent of social networking sites has raised a question, if this number could be higher due to support from technology. Seems like a fair hypothesis.

Professor Dunbar set out to check that. Initial result show that people whit lots of friends maintain close relationships with only a small fraction of those. The Sunday Times quoted Dunbar:

The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.

Another result from the study shows that women network better than men.

There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.

Well, I quess we already knew that, but this suggest that women have a competitive advantage in an environment where more and more business is being done through digital channels and social networking. Combining that with the fact that women rule the social web makes me wonder what’s left fof men?

When thinking about the current state of social technology I still wonder if it can be made more helpful for maintaining bigger or tighter networks. My phone helps me to remember hundreds of phone numbers and even with that information I am able to remember the connections between different people. What would happen if the developers of Facebook or other social networks would singlemindedly focus on helping to increase the Dunbar’s number in their network. Would we perceive that social networking site as better, friendlier?

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero.

Coke: Fans First In Social Media (Case Study)

A really interesting presentation by Michael Donnelly laying out Coca-Cola’s sosial medai approach. Michael is Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola. The presentation was created for the iStrategy2010 conference. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelDonnelly.

Social Media Weekend: TED Videos, News Readers, Evangelist, Career

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media. The best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the website. Mashable highlights a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

Facebook Largest News Reader? Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%.

Turn your employees into social media ambassadors. Develop a policy that outlines corporate guidelines for communicating in the online world. Encourage management to actively spread the message through social media.

Social Media Consulting vs Viral Advertising: Can All ‘Creatives’ Please Go Back to the 80s. Social Media consulting is not an opportunity to go wild with creative-led, viral-inspired, 60-second advertising. A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. What are the key characteristics of all social media evangelists? What make them stand out from the crowd and march toward the “alpha” category?

4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. Want to know what it takes to start, and develop, a successful career path in the realm of social media?

Study: Spending On Email, Social And Search Rising. Email service provider ExactTarget released a study this week showing marketers plan to boost spending in email, social media and other non-traditional outreach channels this year.

Slidecast: B2B Lead Genration Using Social Media

Great presentation with audio. This slidecast is a brief summary of many B2B Social Media lead generation presentations from Kipp Bodnar. The slides are copy light as that is his presentation style.

The important takeaways are:

• Inbound B2B marketing is lead generation
• Leverage your own blog as a way to optimize calls to action
• Take Facebook Fan Pages to the next level with custom offers and lead generation opportunities.
• Social media can help improve tradeshow ROI

And remember you really have to sell stuff to make money!

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

Social Media Weekend: Case Studies, E-Commerce, Social Media Budget, Strategy

7 Key Findings On The Use of Social Media And E-Commerce: New Study. Online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise. A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.

The Compete study overview: Consumers Slow to Embrace Social Media As Shopping Resource.

Where Will Social Media Budget Flow to in 2010. Where will the money go? This post explores some of the avenue where social media budget will flow to this year.

Case Study: Social Networking Does Work. M+R Strategic Services released their 2010 NonProfit Social Media Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Growth and Social Engagement Metrics for Nonprofit Organizations. The findings in the study are quite re-assuring for some of the best practices we already know.

Paul Gillin’s Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools. Most companies have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap and easy way to build their brand and bring in sales? Social media demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough.

B2B Case Study: How to Get Started in Social Media. The second in a series of “How To’s” to help you add social media to your integrated marketing communications program. Integrated Marcom Minute interviewed Katherine Watkins, Marketing Communications Manager, Eastman Chemical Company, to learn how she and her marcom team integrated social media into their marcom mix.

Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise. Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.

400 million users on Facebook and accelerating

Facebook is 6 years old and reaches this week 400 million users. As Mark Zuckerberg announced this is almost twice the number they had a year ago. But the important thing is that the last 50 million users were added in about just 65 days. The growth from form 300 to 350 million took a whole 77 days. The average pace for the last 150 million users has been about 22 million a month.

Last year we predicted that Facebook will hit 700 million this year. We did some calculations and found that this is not entirely impossible. Now, looking back we see that Facebook went from 200 to 400 million with an average pace of 19,1 million users per month. Drawing a straight line from now to December 31 will give us a user base of 610 million. So, our initial 700 million is entirely possible.

The question now is if any of the big non-Facebook countries (China, Brazil, Russia, etc) will start to join up in big numbers. This may speed up the growth significantly. Facebook should start seeding by paying the user to join up in these countries and to reach the tipping point.

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Image credit Inside Facebook

Social Media and Young Adults

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study about internet and social media use among Millennial generation by situating it within similar data for adolescents and adults older than 30. The data on teens is drawn from a survey conducted between June 26 and September 24, 2009 of 800 adolescents (ages 12 to 17). The adult data are drawn from a survey conducted between August 18 and September 14, 2009 of 2,253 adults (age 18 and over). Here are some of the key findings:

Blogging is down among young adults

• One of the findings is that young people are blogging less than they used to. 14% of online teens say they blog, down from 28% in 2006.
• Also the commenting activity is lower as 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.
• In 2009 15% of internet users ages 18-29 maintain a blog —a 9% point drop in two years. However, 11% of internet users ages thirty and older now maintain a personal blog (7% in 2007).

Social networking sites’ usage numbers

• 73% of wired American teens use social networking websites. 55% of online teens used social networking sites in November 2006.
• 47% of online adults use social networking sites, up from 37% in November 2008.
• 72% of online 18-29 year olds use social networking websites, significantly higher than the 40% of internet users ages 30 and up who use these sites.
• Adults are increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience as a majority of those who use social networking sites – 52% say they have two or more different profiles.
• Among adult profile owners 73% have a Facebook profile, 48% have a MySpace profile and 14% have a profile on LinkedIn.

Teens are not using Twitter

• 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. Older teens are more likely to use Twitter than their younger counterparts; 10% of online teens ages 14-17 do so, compared with 5% of those ages 12-13.
• Young adults lead the way when it comes to using Twitter or status updating. One-third of online 18-29 year olds post or read status updates.

Mobile

• Three-quarters of teens and 93% of adults ages 18-29 now have a cell phone.

Internet usage

• 93% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 go online. 74% of all adults ages 18 and older go online.
• 48% of online teens have bought things online: books, clothing or music, up from 31% in 2000.

Image credit Bina Sveda