Social Media

Social media analytics company Simply Measured released a study this week that illustrates the importance of brand presence on Facebook's photo-sharing social network Instagram. According to the survey, the nearly two- year old social network, with its 80 million users, has managed to attract the attention of 40 percent of the top 100 global brands.

Instagram’s adoption accounts for 40 percent of the Interbrand 100, which is actually the lowest in the study, but it has the most impressive adoption rate, when considering the background of the company. Instagram is currently owned by Facebook, through a $1 billion deal announced 4 months ago. The reason why a billion dollars was significant was because Instagram only had a dozen or so employees, and hadn’t generated any revenue.

Although online gambling is essentially illegal in most US states, in the UK it’s both very popular and well-regulated. Facebook has been in discussion with a number of UK-based operators about introducing real-money games to the social network since last summer, and the first of what will likely become a deluge of gambling apps has finally arrived on the site. The new game, from UK-based Gamesys, is called Bingo and Slots Friendzy and will allow British users aged 18 and over (and in possession of a credit card) to play for real cash prizes while chatting with friends. As is the case with most online gambling games in the UK, this one comes with a big cash incentive for new players. Deposit £10 to get £30 to wager.

Commenting on the launch, Facebook’s Head of EMEA Gaming Partnerships, Julien Codorniou, said, "People love playing new types of games with their friends on Facebook and real money gaming is a popular leisure activity in the UK. We’re delighted to be working with Gamesys to enable them to offer their games on Facebook so that people can enjoy playing more games with their friends."

If there is one thing that’s typical of Twitter, it's the long, long, long list of tweets that shows each of your Twitter friends' er…tweets. Slices for Twitter by OneLouder Apps is designed to make your Twitter experience better by adding "Twitter Content Discovery." Simply put, it provides improved functionality over the official Twitter app.

Slices for Twitter comes with five major features: Twitter Directory, Live Events, Timeline Slicer, Bookmarks and Mobile-to-Web.

If you still have a MySpace you likely fit into one of three groups: You forgot to formally delete your account; you are trying to advertise your small-time band to a couple dozen hardcore leftover users; you log into MySpace right after you finish signing into AOL Desktop merely as a matter of old habit.

But I'm not interested in singling out those still using the service, as the droves of users who have dumped the website outright far outnumber the faithful by now. I'm outlining something I'd call the "MySpace Effect".

Yammer, the social network and messaging platform designed to be used within companies, announced on Thursday that Kanjoya's Crane sentiment analytics dashboard now integrates with Yammer, letting managers watch their employees' morale, attitudes, and reactions to procedural changes based upon their Yammer posts.

Crane correlates emotional "profiles" with behavior on the social network, and presents employee sentiment in various ways. Instead of trending topics, Crane shows Yammer's "trending emotions," Instead of finding the most popular and influential people, Crane shows whose posts on Yammer have the biggest emotional impact. It is similar to many content analysis engines, but it is tuned specifically to isolate emotional reactions.

Tucked away in Facebook’s company filings published this week, was an interesting snippet of information. Although the social network had 955 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of June 30, 2012, an increase of 29 percent from this time last year, some 8.7 percent of that figure – around 83 million users - were identified by Facebook as likely to have come from fake sources.

The number of people actively using the service is calculated using internal company metrics based on the activity of user accounts, and Facebook has determined that roughly 4.8 percent of its MAUs may have originated from duplicate accounts, with a further 2.4 percent coming from user-misclassified accounts (that is personal profiles created instead of pages for businesses or "non-human entities," like pets), and 1.5 percent from undesirable accounts (those created by spammers, for example).

Change doesn’t happen overnight at Microsoft, but when the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation simply announced the new Outlook mail service yesterday, it was a big surprise. But surprise attacks can prove advantageous, and six hours after the Outlook team announced the service via Twitter, a million people had signed up for it.

What You Get

The controversy over the suspension of a Twitter account belonging to a journalist critical of NBC's Olympics coverage deepened Tuesday. UK daily The Telegraph reports that NBC officials say Twitter alerted the network first about The Independent correspondent's tweets, which Twitter later confirmed.

Twitter's move will likely upset those already complaining that Twitter's actions were an affront to free speech even more: the social network actually informed NBC's social media department how to use its complaint system, which resulted in the suspension.

Today, Microsoft unveiled the latest incarnation of its popular Hotmail service, and as well as a new look it’s been given a new name, although it’s one that everyone in the business world will be intimately familiar with -- Outlook.

This rebranding is a huge step for Microsoft and signals the death of Windows Live, which never really caught on in the way the company would have liked.

Twitter day. That’s how the past 24 hours can be characterized, and analysis of Twitter accounts and tweets by Semiocast only underscores it.

Semiocast's study reveals that the social network has 500 million accounts with 140 million of them in the U.S. alone in the first half of 2012.

I like to make jokes. In fact so deep is my love of comedy I’ve co-authored a couple of non-fiction humor books. I can see the funny side in most things, but I’m also able to self-censor. That is, if I think up a joke that someone may find genuinely offensive or upsetting, I will choose very carefully whether or not to say it or post it. I’ve learned over the years to think before speaking, although that doesn’t mean I’ll always do it.

Twitter is full of would-be comedians posting jokes and irreverent observations. Sometimes they’ll score a hit, other times a miss. When a joke occurs, they’ll rush to post it in an effort to impress their peers, and score retweets. The speed that Twitter operates at means people often don’t think before they post. When someone tweets something in bad taste, followers will pick up on it, and the sheer weight of disapproval will frequently lead to the removal of the offending missive and a swift apology.

Will you be next?

If you missed the controversy, read colleague Ed Oswald's "NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage", then come back for my reasons why Twitter cocked up. Royally. His headline says it all, if you'd like to keep reading here. For a service often praised for supporting free speech, Twitter suppresses Guy Adams', presumably to protect a media giant and business partner. The suspension should matter to anyone using cloud services or supporting online free speech.

London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.

The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.

After the release of the most recent comScore Media Metrix data, any assertion that Google+ is a "ghost town" can be promptly dismissed. Not only is Google's new social network more popular than ever, its number of unique visitors topped more than 110 million each month, and the data doesn’t even take into account tablet or mobile phone usage.

The comScore data reveals that the number of monthly U.S. Google+ unique visitors increased from 15.229 million in November 2011 to 27.732 million in June 2012. Over a seven-month period, the social network has seen an increase of 82 percent on the number of unique visitors. To put it into perspective, 27.732 million is 12.53 percent of the total U.S. unique visitors.

One of the new features of Office 2010 (yep that’s 2010) was the Outlook Social Connector. This addon brought with it the ability to display social network information within Outlook itself. It took a little while for developers to get on board but last time I checked you could download "providers" to integrate Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Xing data.

Well, Office 2013 is now with us, and the social connector has been improved further. You no longer need to download a specific "provider" for Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply sign in with your existing credentials and Outlook 2013 will pull through the relevant data.