Air Force Blog Assessment

The image above is of the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, put together by the United States Air Force - not an organisation you would expect to have a great blog engagement policy.

Better, in fact, than many organisations that claim to be experts in this area, as a recent article in Web Ink Now shows:

"In an environment where many corporations are scared witless about social media, here a huge global organization firmly committed to social media communications to spread messages, stories, knowledge and ideals. Capt. Faggard says that the focus is on: "Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media)."

The Air Force also has a number of presences on the web, including the official blog, Air Force Live, a YouTube channel, a Twitter profile, and a number of other "new media", including widgets and podcasts.

Take a look at the Air Force's social media policy and see if you can use it to enhance your own thinking around social media with, ahem, military precision.

Top 20 Social Media Sites in 2008

Following on from yesterday's post on the rise of social media, another piece of research just released shows which sites have been visited the most. Comscore has released a list revealing the top Social Networks and Social Media sites in 2008. The graph above shows the total unique visitors for the top 5 sites from September 2007 to November 2008 (click to enlarge).

Although the list doesn't include figures from December, it does list the Total Unique Visitors as of November 2008:

1. Blogger - 221,503,000
2. Facebook - 200,189,000
3. MySpace - 126,168,000
4. Wordpress - 113,661,000
5. Windows Live Spaces - 86,760,000
6. Yahoo! Geocities - 69,159,000
7. Flickr - 63,866,000
8. Hi5 - 58,069,000
9. Orkut - 46,446,000
10. Six Apart Sites - 45,606,000
11. Baidu Space - 40,276,000
12. Friendster - 31,325,000
13. 56.com - 29,171,000
14. Webs.com - 24,230,000
15. Bebo - 24,149,000
16. Scribd - 23,524,000
17. Lycos Tripod - 23,350,000
18. Tagged.com - 22,300,000
19. Imeem - 21,889,000
20. Netlog.com - 21,1777,000

Blogger, Google's blogging platform, comes out on top. But Facebook is rising quickly and if the numbers continue will take the top spot and further stretch its lead over its closest social network competitor, Myspace, which comes in at third place.

Wordpress, a blogging platform that takes a more professional take then Blogger's 'push-button-and-publish' approach, comes in at a close fourth, demonstrating its rising popularity among bloggers.

Scribd, a social network for the sharing and discovery of documents, continues to grow and is likely to become more popular in 2009 as it becomes the premier destination for document sharing.

It's also interesting to note some of the lesser known sites - lesser known in the UK, anyway. For example, 56.com, one of the largest video sharing websites in China, and Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, each have strong userbases which are only set to rise further as more of China comes online.

Surely it's only a matter of time before Twitter enters the Top 20? What sites do you predict to be in the Top 20 next year?

The Rise and Rise of Social Media in the UK

Over at the We Are Social blog, Robin Grant points towards research from Hitwise showing that 10.09% of all UK internet visits over the Christmas period were to ‘Social Networking and Forums’:

"The successes of Facebook and YouTube, along with similar sites, meant that social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week. For the week ending 27/12/08, our Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 10.09% of all UK Internet visits, the first ever time it has passed the 10% threshold."

Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK

Here's the graph showing the rise in internet traffic to social networking sites over the past 12 months:

UK Social Media traffic Dec '07 - Dec '08

The trend also applies to Twitter:

UK Internet visits to Twitter Jul '07 - Jul '08

The post on We Are Social pulls out another quote from Robin Goad that highlights the key facts about the rise in visits to Twitter:

"UK Internet visits to Twitter have increased by 631% over the last 12 months, with 485% of that growth coming this year. Twitter is more popular with Brits than Americans: last week the site’s share of UK Internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Twitter cannot yet be considered mainstream in the USA, but in the UK it’s getting there."

It all makes for positive reading for those operating in the space and I'm sure it won't be long before Twitter becomes one a 'mainstream' social network, as many are predicting.

The full set of in-depth data is available in Hitwise’s UK Social Networking Update. Thanks goes to Robin Grant for flagging the research to me.

The End of Embargoes?

Michael Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch today that proclaims the "Death of the Embargo":

"All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories... One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first."

But the digital world means that embargoes have long been dead in this PR specialism.

Bloggers don't work 9 til 5 - well, not on their blogs anyway. Most of them will have day jobs with all of the responsibility that entails and so will only get the chance to blog in their spare time. This means that they just don't have time to sit and wait on an embargo.

If they do get paid to write for a blog or online news site, they are getting paid to get the news first. In the world where a hit on Digg can increase traffic by ridiculous amounts, or - as Arrington points out - being the first to break a story to gets you on the front page of TechMeme and another substantial increase in traffic, it is against the journalist's best interests to wait on an embargo, especially if they know that another publication is getting the same story with the same embargo.

As anyone who has seen Will Ferrell's Talledega Nights will know, "If you're not first, you're last".

This isn't a solution, but if a PR agency wanted to get their clients on a wide range of blogs and online news sites, they wouldn't bother with an embargo - ever. Instead, they should spend time on actually making their announcements newsworthy and targeted at the right publications, time that would have otherwise been spent explaining to journalists and bloggers what the embargo was. This means that the journalist will want to break the story before anyone else and therefore you'll get a range of publications who are actually interested the news writing a piece on it.

But Arrington does give an exception for when embargoes will be honoured:

"We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful of people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes."

So the solution is to build up a trusted relationship with the journalists and bloggers that you are conducting outreach to and give them a strong story so that they can guarantee that the news will be of interest to their readers. Isn't this the case with traditional journalism? When did the rules change for digital PR?

Newsworthy announcements given to journalists that you have built trusted relationships with. Just because embargoes may now be extinct, it doesn't mean that the basic rules of PR are.

There's more excellent discussion on this subject in the comments of the original post and over at Mahalo. Drew Benvie also covers the post here (complete with reference to grey hairs!) and Brian Solis gives an insider's perspective here.

Update: Jonathan Hopkins pointed out this delightful little site this morning, The Embargo Killer.

GoodGym's Social Innovation Camp Presentation

Those good people from the Good Gym have put up their good presentation that was presented to the good people at Social Innovation Camp.

Take a look through the presentation and if you fancy doing some, er, good yourself then get in touch with the guys at Good Gym - I'm sure they'll like to hear from any keen runners out there!

GoodGym's SICamp presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sicamp goodgym)

Social Innovation Camp – 5-7 December 2008

Wow, what a weekend!

Social Innovation Camp 2 (The Revenge!) was an amazing experience – tiring, draining, seemingly unending, but fun, fulfilling and infinitely rewarding.

Around 60 people descended onto 7 different ideas trying to make positive social change to bring them from the glint of an idea into a project that could be taken on past the weekend. The key idea was to bring together those with the ideas for social change together with the people with the technical knowledge to bring those ideas to life using the web.

I was part of the Carbon Co-Op team, led by Jonathan Atkinson, a 32 year old environmentalist from Manchester. I think that our group had an excellent balance of ideas people, front end developers, back end developers, project managers, facilitators, designers, creatives, copy writers, and business strategists. That's quite a lot of roles between just 7 people, which shows how we all wore various hats over the weekend. The finished project was great, the presentation went well, and - despite technical difficulties meaning we weren't able to show what the guys built over the weekend - we were all really proud of what we had achieved.

The final presentations were played to a packed house on Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The room wasn't filled just by those who gave up their time for the weekend but also a wide range of supporters, well-wishers and those curious to find out what the end results were.

The judges were assessing the projects on three criteria:

1.People power
2.Technology not just for geeks
3.Proof of potential

I won't go through how each presentation went, as most presentations had technical difficulties during the presentation which meant that some of the projects couldn't be shown in full. Instead, here's a list of the projects, a paragraph describing the idea behind each one, and where you can go to find out more:

Access City - www.accesscity.co.uk
Getting round London can be difficult for anyone, whatever your obstacle - mobility, buggies or heavy bags. Search AccessCity for the easiest routes and help build the real view by adding your own experiences.

Carbon Co-Op - carbonco-op.sicamp.org
The Carbon Co-Op is a social network that connects people who want to buy low carbon technologies together. The project aims to help cut carbon emissions and energy use from people's homes by bringing people from local communities together to bulk buy the renewable energy resources that they need.

Post Post - postal.felixcohen.co.uk
This site makes it easier to stop junk mail. Users enter their name, address and a password, and when they enter they state which company has been spamming them. The site does the rest, sending a polite letter to the firm asking them to remove your details.

Useful Visitors - www.uvisitors.org
How many of us went abroad this year and had some spare time? This site aims to connect travellers with a spare hour or two while travelling to volunteer for local projects that need their skills. The site isn't live yet, but it should be soon as it was one of the most developed projects over the weekend.

Own Grown - owngrown.sicamp.org
An online community for people who want to eat and grow ultra local, real food. It's an alternative to the ethical black hole of supermarkets and the worthy but overpriced farmers' markets.

We-Need.org - http://metade.org/code/weneed/
This is an assessment system for people who need social support and care, where results from user generated data could be plotted on a national map that will give a localised picture of regional need across the country.

And the winners...

Good Gym - www.sicamp.org/?page_id=270
The idea is for runners to visit hosuse bound disabled people during their runs. Athletes run useful errands instead of pounding a useless treadmill in the gym, and the disabled people act as 'coaches', getting the benefit of human interaction and a newspaper, or fruit or their National Lottery numbers done.

The Guardian have written two articles about the weekend here and here, which make for interesting reading even if you weren't able to make it along.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend with some truly amazing projects taking shape over the weekend. Congratulations to everyone involved, the eventual winners, Good Gym, and a big thanks to those good folks who organised the whole event. I'm looking forward to following the progress of the projects after the weekend and look forward to going to Social Innovation Camp 3!

Tweeple at Social Innovation Camp

This weekend, I'm down at Social Innovation Camp, an experiment in using social technology for social change, where lots of geeks and social entrepreneurs are coming together to try and bring 7 ideas to life, all with the aim making real social change.

At 2gether08, I found it useful to create a list of all the twitterers attending to try connect people, help meet new people and keep track of all the chatter on the Twittersphere about the event. Lots of other people found it useful too as I got lots of request fro people who wanted to be added to the list.

So here (with the help of our friend Twitter Search) is a list of tweeple at Social Innovation Camp. Hopefully people will start following each other, join in the conversation,and ultimately add to the event.

You can follow the event on Twitter Search here and the main Twitter stream for the event is at www.twitter.com/sicamp.

Here's the list, but if I've missed anyone out, let me know and I'll add them on!

@benrmatthews
@greenman
@chrishuer
@dominiccampbell
@kalv
@ferrero_rocher
@louisecampbell
@chris_d_adams
@mrperplexed
@sicross
@lowwintersun
@accesscity