The Sunday Times ‘Social List’ – like a rich list for geeks - what number are you?

The Sunday Times Social List is a nice idea from The Sunday Times, giving 'the people' their own rich list of sorts. It's visually well done and as is the case with a lot of things like this at the moment, it's the data that paints the picture. Give it a go here.

Facebook launches Facebook Studio for marketers

Facebook has launched a stand-alone community site where creatives can share ideas, comment on campaigns and learn what it takes to create a successful page for a brand.

Facebook Studio is a sortable gallery of marketing campaigns and it looks like it will be very useful to digital marketers and creatives.

You can search for the most liked campaigns, the most shared campaigns, by language, region and other criteria, and it’s been created because Facebook has been asked for examples and tools for social media campaigns.


You can also search by brands and by sector, and in the Learning Lab tab are detailed explanations of all the Facebook marketing tools available, so it’s easy to keep up to date (or even get up to speed if you’re a complete beginner).

And even if you’re one of those people who derides any borrowing of ideas, it can also be a good way of checking out if you’re idea truly IS a first for Facebook.

Anyone can look at it. You can also upload your own work for others to admire (agencies and clients are credited).

I know it’s an ill wind that blows no good, but are there winds that blow no bad? Facebook benefits because it gets more brands signing up for campaigns; consumers benefit by getting more entertaining campaigns (hopefully); and agencies benefit from sharing intelligence. Go and explore!

facebook-studio.com

Source: The Wall

A fascinating and awesome video of social media stats

And here are the stats mentioned in the video:

- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old

- 96% of them have joined a social network

- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.

- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

- Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…

- Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

- iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

- We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”

- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India

- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%

- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.

- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts

- Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets

- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…

- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

- While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube

- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English

- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

- Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.

- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them

- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

- Only 14% trust advertisements

- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do

- Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas

- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation

- 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily

- We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

- We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media

- Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate

- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second

- The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

- Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Source: Socialnomics Social Media Blog

What's more social than sitting on a sofa and having a chat, face to face with real people?

American family's web photo ends up as Czech advertisement

When the Smiths of Missouri – an all-American family with the regulation two blond children – posed for their Christmas photo, little did they know they would end up on a billboard thousands of miles away in the Czech Republic.

Just under a fortnight ago, a family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith was travelling in Prague when he spotted some familiar faces beaming out of a poster advertising a grocery store's home delivery service.

He took a photograph and emailed it to his friends in St Louis – kindly translating the caption that promises "we will prepare and deliver your requests in two business days".

The picture was indeed of the admirably white-toothed Smiths and their two smiling children. Danielle had been so proud of the image taken by a photographer friend, Gina Kelly, that she had not only sent it out as a Christmas card to family and friends, but also posted it on her blog and other social networking sites, including Momlogic where she identifies her children as "sweet and sassy Delaney" and "loveable and crazy Cooper".

Danielle has expressed her surprise at the news of their international fame: "Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose. But quite creepy."

The shop owner was equally shocked. Mario Bertuccio, who runs the Grazie store in Prague, said he found the image on the internet and thought it was computer-generated. He has promised to remove it and email an apology to the Smiths – and said if they lived nearer he would send them "a bottle of good wine".

In her blog on the Extraordinary Mommy site, Smith reflects: "So this is the price we pay for indulging in social media, I guess."

She had no idea the image could be used, she said, and would not have given her permission, but admits she was naive in putting up a high-resolution version on the website. She won't be doing that again – but said she would continue to post images of her family.

The smiley Smiths have now gone global. The site has registered 180,000 hits but Danielle writes that she is blocking the small percentage "who are commenting only to say that a member of my family (or all of us) are ugly".

From MediaGuardian

Tell your boss: social networking sites are "good for businesses"

Good news for workers addicted to Facebook - a British think-tank says bosses should not stop their staff using social networking sites because they could actually benefit their firms.

See the Reuters article for full details.

Facebook

Some of my friends tell me that they've signed up to Facebook . It's a bit of silly fun, they say (although some take it all too seriously). So I've signed up too.

Facebook (for the uninitiated) is like a streamlined, refined take on MySpace . No fluorescent backgrounds and hideous customised cursors, just crisp whites and calming blues. You create a profile for yourself, locate other people you know, and add them as "friends". You can then swap messages, share photos, invite one another to events, and so on. There's also a status window you can easily update, so if your friend Zoe is feeling listless, she types "feeling listless" in and you see a little bulletin saying, "Zoe is feeling listless." For some reason, this is endlessly amusing. My friends were right: it is a bit of silly fun.

From a freelancers' point of view, being part of an online networking site has a business focus too. Now even the politicians are using it in the race to be Labour deputy leader.

What's your take on the phenomenon?