DreamGrow Social Media

Do You Feel On Top Of Things And In Control (All The Time)?

This is not a social media post. It is about something I don’t know anything about.

Why our neurons make us think that other people are better than us? First off I have to admit that my knowledge about neurons is limited and can be compared to a cave man’s knowledge about cell phone. Still, I will give it a shot. May be some neuron people would like to use it as a research subject.

Yesterday I stumbled upon this interesting post about empathy, Gandhi’s Neurons: The Practice of Empathy. In that post is a link to a really good video about mirror neurons.

In that post one of the pointers on how to flex our empathic muscle is that:

Understand this Universal Human Fear. A fundamental fear experienced by most is the hidden fear of not measuring up. Recognize this and do your part to genuinely make those in your circle of influence feel that they are enough. It’s a powerful act of interpersonal philanthropy.

Now, why is that? If everybody is having this fundamental fear of not measuring up then we should measure up just nicely. This is where it occurred to me that when we actually do stuff then there are a lot more neurons in play than just watching something done. Doh! This is obvious! Here’s the idea, besides all the useful neurons also a special kind of neurons gets active when we do something. Lets call those omg-i-hope-i-don’t-screw-this-up-and-get-laughed-at-neurons or fumbling neurons for short.

When we see someone doing something then our mirror neurons get activated but the fumbling neurons do not. We feel and understand how the speaker speaks or snowboarder makes a jump. So we see others as skillful and confident. We think to ourselves, how can they make is seems so easy. But that’s the point, it only seems that they are at ease and confident. In fact their fumbling neurons work overtime to make them feel incompetent.

For many people fumbling neurons paralyze them and they will do a poor job at their task. I think there is a simple way to overcome this degrading effect. First you have to understand that fumbling neurons will always be there. Second, ignore them! I haven’t read Seth Godin’s Linchpin, yet but seems that the lizard brain that he’s talking about is made of fumbling neurons. The pat of the brain that makes you double check endlessly, postpone and not to speak up.

Just ignore the fumbling neurons and do stuff.

OK, let’s tie this to social media and social networking sites. I believe that if you can create an environment or community where people can feel they are enough and share their experiences then you will have a very good chance of making it a lively thriving system. If you find a way to communicate the fumbling part then people will feel closer together.

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Image credit lumaxart / Scott Maxwell

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.

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

Gartner: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality

Gartner released a report “Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality” in which analysts offer predictions for the next five years. Concentrating on social software Gartner stresses five key points.

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This prediction is matches our own view of changes brought on by mass adoption of social networking sites. (Social Media Replaces Email and IM and 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010). Gartner predicts that by 2014 about 20 percent of business users will use social networking sites as the hub of their business communications. We believe this number to be even higher as social networking companies will push to make this happen. On the other hand email provides will seek out ways to turn their user-base to social networks. These trends will blur the line between social and email.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Our view is that in-house corporate microbloging platforms will not see wide spread adoption. The main reason for this is that small user base will not generate enough social chatter to keep the interest up. The second obstacle in the adoption of private microblogging platforms will be the resistance from employees who see it as another “time waster”.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

Well, this is a bit of a no brainer. We have seen it in our work and we firmly believe that IT-people should be kept away from making decisions about marketing communications. As Gartner puts it:

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value.

Social media communications is a business process. This process needs tools that come out of IT-department, but they do not define those processes. Business side must be very careful not to bend under the pressure from IT about what can or cannot be done.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

Yes, mobile is big! It will get BIGGER. But the user experience on different devices will (hopefully) be driven by delivering the best user experience, doh. Gartner suggests that people are more productive on smartphones than on PCs due to better user interfaces.

The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use.

We believe that small devices have inherently worse user experience than their desktop counterparts. This ensures that full size computers will continue to provide superior user experience. This will hold until we have perfected voice commands, HUD-glasses and other wearable computing technologies.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

The Gartner’s number 25 percent seems reasonable, but the reasoning does not. Privacy concerns will not hold people from analyzing social data. Lack of knowledge and initiative in the enterprise will do that. Our personal information is mined and analyzed in countless places and most of us don’t care. Agreed, social is more personal than that, but we believe that a lot of the benefits can be dug out from anonymous statistical analysis that doesn’t invade privacy. For more sensitive information consumers can trade privacy for benefits.

Social networking is in it infancy and the next few years will see a lot of change. How we communicate with friends and businesses, new business models and processes, new hardware technology, user interfaces, etc. But at the core of it is our need to communicate and belong. So, there.

Who rules the social web?

I found this really cool infogrphic. Gender balance in social networks? Chicks Rule! Women seem to be in general more sociable. This would make the social networking sites more appealing to them as places where to connect and share experiences.

I believe that the number of users may equalize in future. However, if we would look at the activity on the social site my guess would be that women rule even more.

Marketers must understand that women are directly or indirectly behind most household spending decision. Also, women lead 4 out of 5 stages of the buying process. Three of these stages are closely tied to social media sites: research, ownership and word-of-mouth.

To summarize: in social networking sites it is a good idea to target women and try to influence the non-purchasing stages of buying process. Women don’t buy brands. They join them (Understanding Women — Eight Essential Truths That Work in Your Business and Your Life). From the marketers point of view this is very important. So, adapt and get some women in your marketing team.

Here are some more facts about women spending (via she-conomy.com):

• Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth. – MassMutual Financial Group–2007
• Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband. The Boomer woman is a consumer that luxury brands want to resonate with. – Claire Behar, Senior Partner and Director, New Business Development, Fleishman-Hillard New York
• Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care.
• 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others.
• 76% want to be part of a special or select panel.

And still women feel misunderstood:

• 59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers;
• 66% feel misunderstood by health care marketers;
• 74% feel misunderstood by automotive marketers;
• 84% feel misunderstood by investment marketers
• 91% of women in one survey said that advertisers don’t understand them.

Our Most Read Social Media Post For 2009

Happy, happy, happy new year to everybody! 2010 will be the best year yet. Social media will integrate into our lives and we stop counting how many times someone is checking their Facebook. Here are our most read post from the 2009.

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. It’s a good strategy to see first what free has to offer and the try to find tools that fit in the gaps you need to fill.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. This is what we think will be important in social media in 2010. The slide show in the post was featured on Slideshale and got more than 2000 views in first week.

Market Share of Social Networking Sites 2009. What is going up and where should I participate? These are questions everyone is trying to answer.

Facebook More Visited Than Google. Facebook has a good chance to become THE site people visit and a new poster boy to replace Google.

A Simple Social Media Platform. We drew a picture just to get a clear vision how a simple social media platform should look like.

8 steps to social media goodness. Blindingly obvious for some but I still felt that it’s good to write down the basics and revisit them from time to time.

World Map Of Social Networks. People are stat junkies, as with the firs post on the list, everyone wants to see the numbers.

Social media weekend: Seth Godin, relationships, marketing is dead. All our social media weekend link post got a lot of readers, but this one stood out. We’ll continue to give you links every weekend.

The Mobile Internet is Bigger Than You Think. I wa really blown away by the numbers. The mobile is BIG. Really, really big.

Social media helping to spike up Mercury sales in New England. Our take on sucessful social media case.

We’ll try to keep thing interesting. Every post we make should be useful to our readers. Please let us know what matters to you and we’ll try to cover that. Thank you for reading.
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Image credit Tibor Fazakas

Research: Student Grades Not Affected By Social Networking

The study “Social Networking Usage and Grades Among College Students” (PDF) finds that students who heavily engage in social networking do just as well academically as students who are less interested in keeping in touch with the medium.

The study indicates that social media is being integrated with rather than interfering with students’ academic lives. College students have grown up with social networks, and the study shows they are now simply part of how students interact with each other with no apparent impact on grades. – UNH adjunct professor Chuck Martin

It seems that most of the time that is used for social networks comes from TV, idle surfing, and gaming. This way the time spent on social networking sites could be said to be a “higher quality” activity. The time for studying and other important thing stays the same.

The research shows that there is no correlation between the amount of time students spend using social media and their grades. Grades followed similar distributions for all colleges.

63% of heavy users received high grades, compared to 65% of light users. 37% of heavy users of social media received what were defined as lower grades and 35% of light users fell into same category.

The study showed that Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media sites, with 96% of students saying they use Facebook and 84% saying they use YouTube. 20% said they use blogs, 14% use Twitter, 12% use MySpace and 10% use LinkedIn.

89% of students use social networks for social reasons and 79% use them for entertainment. 26% of students use social media for educational reasons and 16% for professional reasons.
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Image credit Mary Gober

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

After reading Avinash’ post about cool Twitter tools I tried to find out what tools are availabe for free to monitor Twitter and other social media.

Who does what, where and how? Are you measuring up against your competition? There’s a lot of social media buzz going on. What are they talking about your brand and your company? We have compiled a list of 46 free social media monitoring tools. Some of the tools have free basic plan or free trial period but most of them are totally free. The list is sorted alphabetically. Enjoy! If we missed any great tools please post them to comments.

Addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

Backtype
BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so you can find out what people are saying about the topics that interest you.

Blogpulse Trend Search
Create graphs that visually track “buzz” over time for certain key words, phrases or links. Compare search terms/links in isolation, or use all three fields to compare search terms/links against others. Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.

Blogpulse Conversation Tracker
When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. From those seeds sprout links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

Boardreader
BoardReader can be used to find and information on the forums and message boards. Boardreader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously.

BoardTracker
A search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with BoardTracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.

Compete Search Analytics
Paid and natural search trends, historical search referral data, and customized filtering that let you focus on top performing keywords and traffic for thousands of websites. Enter a keyword and get a list of sites it refers traffic to or enter a site or a category; get a list of keywords referring traffic to it.

Compete Site Profile
Provides free information for every site on the Internet (not really, doesn’t work for smaller sites) including site traffic history and competitive analytics. Gives site-specific trust scores based on up-to-the-minute data from Compete and third party services.

Facebook Lexicon
Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

Google Blog Search
Blog Search will help users to explore the blogging universe more effectively. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. You can select the time frame for the posts and set up alerts.

Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It also predicts the future for one year.

Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool gives you insight into interest levels of different topics. It also suggest alternative words and phrases that might be tied to your filed of interest. You can segment results by location or language.

Google Trends
Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

GraphEdge
GraphEdge helps you make sense of the Twitter. How many of your followers you’re really reaching? How quickly your network is growing? Who’s dumping you? Who your most influential followers are, and how to reach them?

HowSociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites.

Icerocket
Trend Tool, enter up to five items to see mentions trended over time. Search feature finds blogs that mantion the phrases you enter.

Keotag
Tag search multiple engines, tag generator and social bookmark links generator. Buzz Monitoring.

Klout
Klout measures influence on topics in Twitter to find the people the world listens to. It analyzes content to identify the top influencers on given topic.

Monitter
It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Just type three words into the three search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

Omgili
Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. The Buzz is the percentage of the term out of the total number of discussions Omgili covered on a specific date.

Quarkbase
You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase ‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’, which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more.

Retweetist
Find out who is retweeting you or other Twitter users. Discovering trends, popular topics and popular people by tracking retweets across Twitter.

Samepoint
Samepoint crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Our categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google.

Surchur
Surchur is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows you how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter.

Technorati Search
Search Technorati and note the authority and rank of the blogs listed in the results. Authority measures the site’s standing and influence in the blogosphere. Rank shows what position this authority gives the site.

Techrigy SM2
SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. As businesses and consumers increasingly utilize and rely on social media, your agency needs the best tools and expertise to stay competitive.

Topsy
When you search on Topsy it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. The results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Results are ranked based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.

Trackur
14 day trial. Trackur is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums–and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Trendrr
Trendrr allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating this comparison across a variety of sources. Free for 10 trends

Trendpedia
Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics and organizes the articles in a trend-line that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trend-line from three months ago up to today.

TweetPsych
TweetPsych uses linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets. It works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.

Tweet Scan
Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Status.net-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, and JSON.

TweetVolume
Enter words and phrases to find out how often they appear in tweets. Compare up to five different keywords.

Twitalyzer
There are a variety of uses for the Twitalyzer, but most people use it to track their use of Twitter over time, benchmarking themselves against other Twitter users, and helping to determine which social media strategies are working (and which are not.)

Twitrratr
Twitrratr built a list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords. It searches Twitter for a keyword and the results are cross-referenced against adjective lists, then displayed accordingly.

TwitterCounter
Track your Twitter follower count up to three months into past. Compare your numbers with other Twitter users. You can also see statistics of whom you are following and your tweet frequency.

Twitter Grader
Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile. It looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level to which you are engaging the community.

Twitter Search
Searching Twitter gives you insight into what’s hot at the moment and helps you find who is tweeting about the topics you are interested in. Advanced search lets you specify dates, languages, people and even attitudes.

Twitter StreamGraphs
The Twitter StreamGraphs is a content visualization tool to let you create StreamGraphs from the latest tweets containing a given word or from a particular user.

Twitturly
Twitturly tracks the URLs flying around the Twitterverse and provides a quick, real-time view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Each time someone tweets a URL to their followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes note of it and applies it as a vote for that URL.

Twendz
Twendz gives a glimpse into what’s on people’s minds and their emotional reaction. Mining Twitter conversations alerts you to brewing trends, conversation topics and points of view.

UberVU
Find out what people are saying about brands, stories or events. And follow the comments all over the social web on blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed and many more.

Usernamecheck
Does wht it says. Check your user name across 68 social networking sites.

What’s the Buzz?
Type in a keyword below and find the buzz about it in blogs and social bookmarks. It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days and the Google Trends chart for the keyword. It finds blog posts tagged with and containing the keyword. It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

YackTrack
Enter what you want to see comments for and f there are comments on any of our supported services, you should see them.

If you know other tools we have missed, please post here in comments.
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Image credit: David Basson

Market Share of Social Networking Sites 2009

I have had a lot of people asking me about market shares of different social networking sites. So I went out and searched for most resent data I could find. While there’s really not much information freely available I compiled this list of sources that are all dated some time this year.

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums October 2009, the Hitwise data is based on US market share of visits.

A Map Of Social (Network) Dominance. Really cool interactive map application with data from June 2009. Which social network is the most popular in each country?

Facebook statistics by country. Gender, age groups, percentage of online population. Very useful site. Updates frequently with current data from November 3, 2009.

Whee! New numbers on social network usage. Compete.com data from January 2009 showing uniques visitors and monthly visits of 25 top social networks.

Global Faces and Networked Places (PDF). A Nielsen report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint. March 2009. Putting the growth of social networks, popularity and engagement into context.

How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks. What are the reasons different generations are in social media and which social networks they use. US data from May 2009.

Facebook Growth Increases in Latin America, Argentina Now Largest Country in Region. Brazil growing at a rate of 33 percent per month. Data from November 1, 2009.

Facebook Is Now the Fourth Largest Site In The World. ComScore data of worldwide audience from June 2009.

Top Twenty Five Social Networking Sites, May 2009. Number of unique visitors with yoy change the data is actually only for top 20 sites. Top 10 of display ad impressions and projected ad income of Facebook, MySpace and other destinations in social media.

Chinese Social Networks ‘Virtually’ Out-Earn Facebook And MySpace. Facebook and MySpace are 17 and 13 respectively among social networking sites in China. Data from around April 2009.

China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated).

If you know of any good resources with up to date data then please share in the comments.

• Related article Social media statistics and data for the weekend

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Image credit: spekulator