Social Media Optimization

Internet users in the US watched 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, up 13% over February 2008 and 64% over March 2007, according to comScore Video Metrix. On average we watched 83 videos each during March.

Online video viewing has became a mainstream activity for the majority of us as nearly three-quarters of the U.S. online population watched an online video in March.
The big two video destination sites are YouTube and MySpace. Nearly 85 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube (50.4 videos per viewer), while over 47 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace (8.4 videos per viewer). Including YouTube, Google sites served an average of 50.9 videos per viewer.

Interesting note from eMarketer that they are downward revising their US social network ad spending projections for 2008. They reduced their estimate of ad spend from $1.6 billion to $1.4 billion.

They also reduced their projections going forward. Their crystal ball projects that 2012 social networks ad spending to be $2.6 billion down from $2.7 billion.

The reason for the downgrade is the state of the economy. Or as eMarketer puts it:“Today’s economy, combined with the fact that social networks are still trying to come up with successful ad models, has led to lowered ad spending projections for the next few years.”

Recently I wrote about my new iPhone and how that Yelp was well positioned to take advantage of the mobile component of social networks. eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

Some of the early mobile social numbers are pretty impressive. MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. “It wasn’t until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones,” Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.

I recently upgraded by phone to an iPhone. I have been a long-time Verizon user, but I wanted a phone with a real browser and Verizon doesn’t have anything that browses as good as the iPhone.

It seems that I am not the only one who wanted the iPhone for web surfing. According to Internet Retailer:

A survey by Viewpoints.com, a rating and review site, found 48% of iPhone users frequently use their iPhones to look up specific information online, compared with 5% of other cell phone users. And 45% of iPhone owners frequently use their phones to browse online, compared with only 6% of users of other brands of cell phones.

Heather Dougherty at Hitwise had an interesting post last week about people are spending more time on video web sites and search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic to these sites.

What I found most interesting was this graphic about the demographics of the YouTube audience.

Video web sites have started to attract a more mainstream (older) audience. For the 4 weeks ending April 12, 2008 the percentage of YouTube’s traffic of 18-24 year old declined from 30% to 21%. The biggest percentage jump in traffic came from the over 55 age group. Who would have thought that 20% of YouTube’s traffic came from those over the age of 55?

American Airlines has been in the news a lot recently because of the cancellation of thousands of flights due to mechanical troubles. What has been interesting is watching how AA have approached this PR nightmare. AA first step in conjunction with its PR agency of record, Weber Shandwick, was to immediately initiate a major crisis-communications plan.

AA Crisis Response

• Immediately issued a press release to drive passengers to the advisory section on its website for updates
• Communicated with frontline employees so they were prepared to deal with questions from travelers
• Proactively and reactively worked with media through its news desk

A just released survey, conducted with Compass Partners LLC, illustrates several surprising new trends in social media, specifically that 36.2 million women in the U.S write and  read blogs every week and approximately half consider blogs a “highly reliable” or “very reliable” source of information and advice.

The 36.2 million women who actively participate in the blogosphere is comprosed of 15.1 million who publish at least one post a week and 21.1 million who read and comment to blogs a week

The International Herald Tribune had an interesting article recently about the new wave of Silicon Valley companies who are focused on putting the social back into social networks.

The IHT had this interesting description of social networks:

Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. People visit one another’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It is like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

Interesting article by Reuters discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia.

A typical search result on any of the popular search engines for a band or musician will display the artist’s official Web site, Wikipedia entry and MySpace page — often in that order.

“The interest that people had to go to MySpace to find out more about their favorite band is waning in favor of going to Wikipedia,” Yahoo head of programming and label relations John Lenac says. “In the last six months, it’s surpassed it.”

Mediapost reported last week that American Airlines has launched a new marketing tool disguised as a Facebook widget.
The widget, called Travel Bag, lets Facebook friends share personal tips and experiences American Airlines is hoping that the widget will help them learn more about what consumers want.

“We want to understand how consumers interact with one another,” said Billy Sanez, American Airlines director of advertising, promotions and corporate communications, who admits the widget has become a “bit of an experiment.” Sanez, 34, who has been tinkering with Facebook apps for the past eight months, said: “There’s no controlling a widget. You just put it out there and hope it spreads virally.”