socialmediocrity

AllFacebook.com yesterday launched it’s monitor of Fan Pages on Facebook.

Of over 600k fan pages it tracks, less than 10% have more than 1,000 Fans.

Perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, and of course recent events, is that Barack Obama’s Fan Page is the most popular, with over 4.5m fans. That’s still less than you might expect given his poll ratings, and given there’s around 45million US users on Facebook, but having been Mr President for less than a week, perhaps we should give him some time.

Facebook’s fan page comes in at a lowly 7th in the overall rankings, although we can probably take their 150 million users worlwide as eveidence that they are in fact more popular than that amongst Facebook users.

Food features heavily in the top fifteen, with Coca-Cola (2nd), Nutella (3rd), Pizza (4th), Chocolaaaaaaaaate (9th) and kinder surprise (10th).

Evidence also of Facebook’s growing popularity in non-english speaking territories. Anyone that’s ben using the ad platform to reach users anywhere other tan the US or UK can’t have failed to notice the rapid rise in users in some parts, and looking at the fastest growing pages this is also reflected. 12 out of the 15 fastest growing pages are written in languages other than English (UK) or English (US).

“Masturbation!” is amongst the fastest frowing English-language pages. I guess with all this online social networking to be done, people aren’t getting out so much.

I’m not sure whether or not to believe the latest post on the Groundswell blog, People dont trust corporate blogs. Some sort of oxymoronic joke by Josh Bernhoff?

Does a forrester blog even count as a corporate blog? As a newbie-blogger perhaps I should count myself in the 39% that would trust it even if it was. And should we even be worried about the opinion of people who don’t read blogs?

On that last point, and taking a quick review of some of the figures published, and combining that with the Groundswell background, if 69% of US users are Spectators, according to their social technographics profile tool, then take the fact that 24% of (US) blog readers (or Spectators) trust them, then the lower figure of 16% “of all users” is roughly the same users diluted by the additional 31% of users. It could be that it is underplaying or masking the actual trust amongst people who actually read blogs.

Reviewing the rest of the survey through this lens would place corporate blogs somewhat nearer direct mail or corporate email, and this feels intuitively more likely. Compare the results for the Blog Readers groups in each example. I am not sure that the insight here is that blogs are any more or less trust-worthy as a medium of corporate communications, but that trust in corporate messages is low regardless, it seems, of the medium through which it is delivered. The same holds true for social network sites or profiles from a company or a brand.

Of course, without full access to the data (nor the time to evaluate it more thoroughly) I would never claim authoritatively that the insight is wrong. But as they say, there’s lies, damn lies, etc….

Anyway, for the sake of argument, let’s assume (most of) it can be trusted. What the survey, conducted in Q2 2008 (pre-koobface virus, et al), also tells us is that the medium trusted most by all groups is the email from someone you know.

What I then find remarkable is that all groups claim to trust consumer ratings and reviews (presumably these are largely from anonymous people or user IDs) more than they trust social network profiles from people they know, and more than they trust information from search engines.

Most pointedly here, for me is that communication between two people known to each other is affected by the medium (email versus social network profile), and apparently quite significantly. Perhaps this is syptomatic of the recency of social network profiles, and users still becoming familiar with them. It would be interesting to see if these trust figures improve over time as SocNets become an increasingly familiar mode of communication between friends, and of course what, if any, negative impact the recent security issues on sites like Facebook will have on users’ trust.

Let’s hope Josh and the Forrester team follow up this study, and allow us to revisit with a comparable study in 6 or 12 months time so that we can see what happens to user trust as the social mediums mature.

With the financial crisis bringing the cost of celebrity sponsorship sharply into focus for many brands (Brand endorsement under pressure, MarketingWeek.co.uk, 3rd December), what implications could this have in the increasingly social web-wide-world we live in today?

Ever since the first TV reality show, we have witnessed the rise of the everyday celebrity. Think Jodie Marsh, Jade Goody, the slightly camp guy from Airport, amongst others. All of them have come from very normal backgrounds, but acheived celebrity status largely through reality-based shows. But ultimately they have all become celebrities in their own right, and have gone on to be managed and promoted as such.

So what impact have global-reach social networks brought about? Well, the debate about conumers as influencers has raged since Gladwell’s The Tipping Point gained such popularity, although the debate’s origins go back much further. But what we are beginning to be able to observe through social networks is the influence users exercise over each other, and by serving this we can begin to observe the context of that influence between any two nodes (or friends) in the network.

In essence, we are beginning to see the rise of celebrity within private networks. It’s always been there, and I do not suppose social networks have altered it’s occurence. But social networks have allowed any one user to exaggerate their celebrity status within their own network. Think about it. When you login to Facebook, you see a newsfeed, a summary of what your friends have been up to (on Facebook). And assuming you haven’t already carefully fine-tuned your notification settings, you probably filter these messages sub-conciously, reading updates from the friends you consider celebrity, and ignoring, or taking less time over those you don’t.

So imagine reading a review from two people in your network. It coud be about a new film, a new shop, a new album. Anything at all. But which one exerts most influence over you? Would it be the passionately written, more vociferous damning review by someone you barely know at all (and may never have met in person), or would you pay more attention to the moderately positive, slightly favourable review given by one of your networks own celebrities – your best friend?

Social actions attached to ads on Facebook certainly seem to take this into account: “click here, because your friend Joe did”. Or “become a fan of product X, because 5 of your friends are already”. It’s a compelling evolution and an interesting behavioural change for marketers to keep a watching brief over, and a keen eye on opportunities to genuinely amplify their advocates through these new mechanisms.