Fastest Growing Brand: Gillette

Among the top 20 brands, Gillette managed to become the fastest-growing brand in social media over the last two months. We wondered if the fact that the New England Patriots play in Gillette Stadium is a factor here, but Sysomos told us that most of the mentions were generated by Gillette's campaign for its new Fusion razors. Strangely, though, 13 brands in Sysomos' top 20 saw their social media mentions drop in the last two months. Car manufacturers like BMW (-31%), Honda (-25%) and Toyota (-24%) saw the largest declines, though even Google registered a 13.4% drop.

Sentiment Analysis

The fact that a company was mentioned often on social media sites like Twitter, however, doesn't really tell us a lot about how exactly people interacted with this brand. To deal with this, Sysomos also did a sentiment analysis of all the mentions of these 20 companies. Here, we see some interesting changes to the list. Samsung, for example, comes out on top here, followed by Nokia, Intel, IBM and Cisco.

The social media mentions of McDonald's, Marlboro and Toyota, however, were generally negative. According to another survey by PR firm Wildfire on behalf of Tealeaf that was published yesterday, 74% of all British adults said that negative comments about a product or brand negatively influence the likelihood that they would want to do business with this company.

According to the study, which looked at 150,000 tweets, 11.1% of the brand-related tweets were information-providing while 18.1% were information-seeking. The latter of these two is especially useful to companies looking to understand what questions and concerns customers have about their products. However, the large majority of the tweets - 48.5% - were simply comments made in passing which mentioned the brand but whose primary focus was something else.

The remaining 22.3% of tweets were sentiment-related, meaning tweets in which a user was expressing an opinion about a brand, either negative or positive. What was surprising about this subset was that users were more likely to express positive tweets than they were to complain.

Why So Cheery, Twitter?

This seems odd, actually, given that the Internet has typically been a place for disgruntled consumers to rant and rave more so than it's been a place to praise what works. You can see this type of negative sentiment expressed everywhere from online forums to whiny blog posts about how such-and-such company "did me wrong!" In fact, the desire to express a negative opinion even seems to dominate feedback systems like blog comments, for example. Rarely does a writer receive comments like "great post" or "I totally agree" - rather, more comments resemble "you're wrong and here's why" or "how could you not mention X?"

That's why it's strange to hear that on Twitter, it's positive sentiment that reigns. What makes this platform different from the rest of the Internet as a whole? Are Twitter users simply happier people? Or has the data been skewed by marketing campaigns where Twitter users are encouraged to tweet nice things about the company in order to win a prize?

Perhaps it's because Twitter simply makes it easier to express yourself, allowing for a better balance between negative and positive sentiments. Typically, sharing your opinion on the web meant exerting a good deal of effort. Writing a blog post, recording a video, or leaving a blog comment are things that take time. For the most part, busy, information-overloaded web surfers aren't going to take that time unless something really gets them fired up. Twitter, on the other hand, is so quick and easy to use, you can post a missive of joy in only seconds. And the 140-character limit allows you a no-pressure way of doing so.

Four "Engagement Profiles"

The study grouped the brands into one of four engagement profiles that related to the number of channels they're involved in and how deep that involvement is. At the top of the list are "mavens," the brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels - like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. "Butterflies" are like wannabe "mavens," and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. "Selectives" focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they've chosen. Finally, there are "wallflowers," or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.

Out of the top 10 brands engaged in social media, the mavens dominate the list. All of the top 10 are mavens and have seen financial success even in a down economy:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

$$$ Does Social Media Pay? $$$

Of course what everyone really wants to know is whether or not social media actually pays off in terms of dollars and cents. This study seems to show that it does. The most-engaged brands are significantly outperforming their peers across numerous industries in both revenue and profit performance. They have even sustained strong revenue and margin growth in spite of the economy, notes the report.

Whether this correlation is actually a causation cannot be proven with the data on hand, it can only make the implication. Given the large number of companies analyzed and the consistent findings, it seems probable that social media has had a major impact on the companies' financial success.

It's also worth noting that the level of engagement appears to be a factor, too. The companies deeply engaged in fewer channels ("selectives") delivered higher gross and net margins than those only lightly engaged in more channels ("butterflies"). It other words, as the report says, "it's not about doing it all, but doing it right."

The ENGAGEMENTdb Web Site

Along with the complete study, available here, an accompanying web site has also been launched at www.engagementdb.com. On the site, companies can compare their social media efforts with the top 100 cited in the report. They can also opt to detail their social media efforts for inclusion in the online database at the site for future research and study.

At first glance, these numbers for Twitter look a bit low, but after looking at how people use Twitter, these numbers do make a lot of sense. According to another recent study from the Conference Board, the top reasons for people to tweet are "connect with friends (42%), update their status (29%) and look for news (26%)." The study also found that two out of three Twitter users use the service to interact with friends.

It is also interesting to note that another recent study from the NPD Group found that Twitter users are more likely to buy music than non-Twitter users. Chances are that this is also related to the demographic makeup of Twitters user base which tends to skew a bit older, but it also clearly shows why Twitter could be such a valuable source of traffic for retail sites.

In many ways, it is probably a good thing that brands are still trying to figure out how to best utilize Twitter. If brands want to make good use of Twitter - which, for many would mean driving traffic to their sites - they have to become part of the community. We would love for Twitter to find a viable business model so that the service can stay afloat even as it grows, but in the end, most of us use it as a personal communications medium and unless brands can find a way to become part of that in an authentic, non-creepy way, they won't be able to profit from Twitter's rapid growth - and maybe that's a good thing, too.

1. You're in a high-ticket business:  The article recommends that businesses with only a few customers who each spend tens of millions of dollars with the company each year are better off not using social media. Instead, face-to-face interactions and phone calls will still work better.
2. You fight with your employees: In some businesses, management and employees are constantly at odds. (An example was given of a unionized workforce where management-labor strife was common). This is also not the type of company that should encourage employees to communicate directly with customers via social media.
3. Management skepticism: If management doesn't believe in social media, then employees who have been told for years that public communication needs to be filtered will be hesitant to try out a new medium which requires them to speak openly. In this scenario, management needs to encourage and reward participation to make social media work. If they don't, it will fail.
4. Strategic Vacuum: Don't do social media just to do social media. If a company doesn't know what they're trying to accomplish, then there will be nothing to measure and no way to determine success. Just as with any other initiative a company takes on, there needs to be an objective...and that objective shouldn't be to distribute a press release.
5. Privacy and regulatory concerns: If you work for a company where what you say in public could send you to jail, proceed with caution. You'll probably even need lawyers involved (sigh).

But Don't Be Afraid to Try!

All that being said, outside of a handful of scenarios, there is still plenty of room for growth when it comes to social media. For example, the results of a recent survey put out by marketing intelligence specialist WebTrends found that only 2% of businesses are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Only 2% - can you believe that?

Perhaps the problem is that businesses are hesitant to dip their toes into the water because they're unsure of how to proceed. Social media community members, such as those on Twitter, can be very critical of the companies they think are "doing it wrong." The backlash can be brutal...and not necessarily good for your brand, either. In other words, businesses thinking of getting involved with this platform should definitely think before they leap.

As it turns out, that was the exact advice Sarah Milstein gave at last week's Web 2.0 Expo out in San Francisco. At her session, "Effective Twitter," she recommended that companies consider the following questions before diving in:

• What will be different in 3, 6, 12 months as a result of our Twitter account?
• Who are we hoping to connect with?
• What kind of information is interesting to them?
• What might go wrong? What expectations might people have of us?

(Her session also had a number of other good resources - you may want to check out the PDF summary here.)

During Milstein's presentation, audience members were furiously scribbling down her every word as if this was the first time they had ever heard this information! Of course, it probably was. Although the right and wrong ways to use Twitter and the tools that can help you use it better may be old hat to some of us who live and breathe this stuff, but it's clear that to many people out there, this information is incredibly new...and intimidating.

This is unchartered territory for a lot of companies and many of them are just now beginning to think about their strategies and levels of involvement. You could literally see this trend in action at the Expo. There, some of the top sessions, the ones so jam-packed that it was standing room only, were specifically about social media and marketing. Twitter, Facebook, community building, etc...people just couldn't get enough.

This makes us wonder if 2009 be the year that social media really goes mainstream? Or, will the experimentations continue? We think it's possible that it will be both. Companies will try new things using social media. Some will succeed and some will fail, but in the end it will be these experimentations, led by the big brands, that will help push social media further out into the limelight than it is now.

Of course, having more Hollywood celebs sign up for Twitter couldn't hurt either.

According to Facebook's director of product, Chris Cox, in the new version of Facebook "profiles and pages become the same thing." During last week's presentation where he and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the changes taking place, Cox was quoted as saying, "now users can open up their profiles for other users to subscribe to. That means pages will become more like the profile."

That couldn't be further from the truth.

Pages Didn't Get the New "Publisher" Box

After testing the new public profiles for hours on end last night, we discovered there are still a lot of issues with these pages. In some cases, the problems we encountered have existed for some time, but in other cases it's just a matter of pages not getting the same updated features as the personal profiles did.

For example, one of the most exciting changes to the new Facebook is a box called "the Publisher." This feature brings new functionality to what was once just the status update box. Before, that box prompted you to finish the sentence that began with your name and ended with "is...". Users could then type in a quick thought and post it to their wall.

Today, the new Facebook Publisher box asks you "What's on your mind?" The change is a nod to the rapidly growing social network Twitter where users answer the question "what are you doing?" and then respond with text, links, photos, videos, and more, thanks to an ecosystem of integrated third-party applications that let users share more than just a simple thought.

Since the Facebook upgrade, however, the Publisher box permits users to share updates that go beyond text-only notes. Users now can share photos, links, and videos. Some applications are also publisher-integrated, appearing below the box and in the drop-down list beneath it.

Here's what the Publisher box looks like on a personal profile.

Unfortunately, Public Profiles don't get this feature. Instead, this is what the Publisher box looks like on a public profile.

Clearly, public profiles are not the same as personal profiles in this area, but the differences don't stop there.

Most Applications Don't Work on Pages

If you don't run a Public Page, then it probably never occurred to you to think about how Facebook applications work with Pages. As it turns out, Pages aren't able to run most of the applications you can run on your personal profile. This is not a new issue, but it was not corrected in the major upgrade that supposedly makes "public profiles work like personal profiles."

After creating a Public Profile, you have the option to browse through the available applications on Facebook to find apps you want to add to your page. There is not a separate list for Page-aware applications so you'll find that many apps just don't work. You're often only provided with the option to add an app to your Page's list of "Favorites" - a move that serves as nothing more than a list of recommendations to your fans. While this is a great way for a company wanting to promote their other public pages and applications (like the New York Times does here), it limits the functionality of the profiles themselves...especially since it's the applications that often make profiles so dynamic.

So Broken: No Twitter Apps for Pages

A notable example of this problem is with Twitter applications. Although there are multiple Twitter apps available on Facebook, the current ones either don't work with Pages at all or they don't work all that well. The most popular of these apps, for example, only works with personal profiles or pages - it doesn't work with profiles and pages.

You can follow this thread on the Twitter app's discussion board where people are talking about the various workarounds for the lack of Twitter integration on Pages. To date, the best workaround for this issue is using the Facebook Static FBML application to display a Twitter badge on your Public Profile page. This is a poor substitute as the badge just reads "follow me on Twitter" and includes a link. It can't update your status.

To add the badge, you must first add the Static FBML application which lets you copy and paste code (HTML or FBML - Facebook Markup Language) into a box. That box can then be added to your Profile page.

Another workaround would be to add your Twitter's RSS feed to the Notes application, one app that does work with public profile pages. However, the Notes application only allows for the import of one external feed so you have to make a big choice here: do you import your Twitter updates or your blog?

If you're savvy with services like Yahoo Pipes or Xfruits, you can combine RSS feeds into one master feed and use that in the Notes application instead. Yet this still is not an ideal solution because the RSS updates from these services are slow. In fact, in testing both Pipes and Xfruits, updates were so delayed that using either feed was almost pointless. Definitely not great for sharing information on a real-time web.

You should also be aware that if you put the Notes box on any other page of your public profile besides the Wall page, it will not be able to update your Wall with posts. So much for customization!

Apps Get Confused Between Personal Profiles and Pages

Another major issue with applications is how they get confused between your Pages and your Profile - like the Twitter issue referenced above. When you create an account on Facebook, you're automatically given a Facebook profile. That causes problems with some applications as they don't seem to know whether to link to your profile or to your page. Again, with Facebook's own Notes application, clicking through the Notes link on the "Page Manager" (the area where you edit the settings for your Page's apps), you're taken into the Notes application where personal and public notes are merged. Although you were working on your public profile page, once you arrive in the application you'll be surprised to see that it's already linked with your personal profile. All the links you've been sharing on your personal profile are also found here on this page, intermingled with your public notes.

This is confusing since most people would assume that, since they had arrived at the Notes app via their Public Page, this would be a separate instance of the application that's associated only with the page, not the profile. But that is not the case. Even more confusing is the fact that imported RSS feeds you set up on your Page will also import to and post to your personal profile. Disaster!

Other applications, like the popular "My Flickr" app for example, don't even work on Pages even though they have a button that says they do. Perhaps the reason this app failed in our tests was because it was already on our personal profile, but it's hard to say for sure.

Don't Think Problems Can be Solved with a Separate Login, Either

After reading through all these issues with applications you may think the easiest solution is to just create a whole new login for the sole purpose of managing a page. Not so fast!

If you're a public figure and not a business who wants to create a page for fans in addition to your own private profile, you have to do so under the same login or you're in violation of Facebook's Terms of Service (TOS). According to the site's help documentation:

"Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts."

Either Create a "Business Account" or Don't Bother with Public Profiles

That sounds to us like Facebook doesn't want individuals to set up separate accounts. The other option - and one we did not test - was to set up a "business account." Business accounts are designed for companies that need to set up a page without a personal profile associated with the login. Although these business accounts are still limited by the lack of page-aware applications, they are more customized to a business's needs. For example, the Facebook business account for bands comes pre-installed with a music player, video player, discography, reviews, tour dates, and a discussion board.

Companies operating on Facebook through business accounts may not have all the same problems as a public figure who creates a page in addition to their personal profile, but there are still issues to be had. But for people, not businesses, it's almost as if Facebook doesn't want them to really take advantage of the Pages feature.

In fact, we think Facebook might even be actively discouraging people, be they public figures or otherwise, from setting up pages to represent their public-facing image. There seems to be an undercurrent of thought at Facebook that people should just open up their private lives to the world. You can see this belief in action when you examine how difficult and complex Facebook's privacy settings are. Those settings are so granular and there are so many different areas to adjust, one has to imagine that perhaps Facebook doesn't really want people to adjust them at all.

If Facebook made Pages easy for personal users to create and keep separate from their personal profiles, then nearly everybody would go use them - especially when it came time to "friend" people you didn't really want to friend - people like business colleagues, the boss, and followers (if you're a public figure).

As a "normal" Facebook user, you may not ever run into these issues, but for public figures, it's becoming a real problem. And by "public figure," we don't necessarily mean major celebrity - small communities also have their own micro-celebs that attract a lot of friends and followers. Even adding as many as 100 or 200 of these so-called "friends" can dilute a public figure's ability to use Facebook effectively, despite the new friend filtering features introduced in the upgrade.

This problem isn't just limited to the tech bubble where everyone tries to friend Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte - it's a growing trend in every industry. It's also an issue we've encountered before - back then it was called MySpace.

MySpace's core belief is also centered on this idea of openness. Profiles are open by default and gathering the most friends practically became a contest in MySpace's heyday. But that also may be, in part, what led to its decline among users. (Well that and those garish profiles with glitter text).

By not duplicating the extreme openness of MySpace, Facebook had a chance to differentiate itself. Sadly, it seems that they haven't figured it all out yet. For public figures, a choice still has to be made: "do I friend everyone who wants to follow me and dilute my network or do I keep Facebook for private connections only?" An upgrade to public profiles should have offered a better option than this, but it did not.

Why Is It So Hard for Individuals to Maintain Public Profiles?

We're not sure why it needs to be so difficult to let some users (users that is, not businesses) maintain a public profile on Facebook. Why can't status updates and other posts just be checked as to whether they get posted to a public page too? Why can't applications be built with different settings for personal profiles and pages? Why can't "Share on Facebook" pop-ups have a checkbox that reads "also post to my public profile"? Are the technicalities of implementing a simpler system really all that difficult?

Or is it that Facebook doesn't really care about the people who want to build a public profile page - only the businesses that want to build pages and buy ads, too?

If Facebook can't strike the right balance between public and private sharing for public figures, it leaves the door open for someone else to do it better. At this point, we would welcome that challenger. Actually, that challenger may have already arrived. It's called Twitter - the social network that gets one-way friendships right. And the one Facebook has now tried, but failed, to copy.

Some of Ning's most popular networks include Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, a network for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network. While Ning has a number of competitors, including KickApps and Crowdvine, Ning clearly leads the pack in terms of its user-base.

Ning is also very popular among academics and teachers, who often use it to set up networks and blogs for their classes instead of relying on more commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace or having to use cumbersome class management software.

Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

The Beijing Olympics started this week and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but this week, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. This week, Microsoft re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future. Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

The Olympics & Social Media Marketing

This week we looked at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In this post we check out how some of the world's leading brands are using social media tools in their Olympics campaigns. Our first post discussed how online video will be a big part of this Olympics, which is great for consumers. The Web can also be a boon for brands too, when it comes to major sporting events.

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Cuil: Good, But Not Great

This week a new search engine called Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google's announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil's main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil's team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google's search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.

See also: Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?! and Yahoo BOSS Should Capitalize On Cuil Damp Squib Launch

Why British Telecom Bought Ribbit, The Web Telephony Platform

Communications company British Telecom (BT) has acquired innovative web telephony platform Ribbit for a reported $105 million. BT has been sniffing around the Bay Area for startups to acquire for some time and this one is a great fit. Not just because both companies are in the voice market but because as a means of folding click-to-call functionality into any web application - Ribbit is fascinating. BT was supposed to be a big mover and shaker in the communications industry of the future, but it hasn't worked out that way so far. Can Ribbit move the needle for BT? We think it could in a big way.

Google Acquires Omnisio

Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube this week, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and mashup company Omnisio. According to Google, the acquisition of Omnisio will allow them to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with online video. Neither Google nor Omnisio have commented on the price of the acquisition, but it is clear that the Omnisio team is going to join YouTube.

Yahoo Music Does The Right Thing: Issues Refunds to Customers

Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.

The Bigger Questions Behind The Scrabulous Shutdown

As of this week, Scrabulous, the wildly popular Facebook Scrabble game, is no more. If you try to login to the app now you'll get the message "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice." You have the option of entering your email address to receive further information about developments in the matter. While Scrabulous fans are certainly angered over the app's shutdown, the unanswered question still looms: did Hasbro have to do this?

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Some Web Apps Work Better Together

How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember. Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

Peering Into Microsoft's Cloud

On July 24th, Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), an event where many of Microsoft's top executives come together to talk about the company's progress and achievements. At this year's meeting, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie hinted at Microsoft's cloud initiatives, a part of their Software + Services (S+S) strategy. While Ozzie did not reveal either codenames or ship dates during his speech, there is still some information we can piece together to help determine what Microsoft's cloud will look like.

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who's Doing It?

If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps. Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming. It defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand". According to a recent report, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.

What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami

Alex Iskold is a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The genius of Murakami is in his discipline, focus and determination. He seems him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom, passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master.

The Google Knol Threat to Content Businesses - a Wiki Plug-in Might Level The Playing Field

Does Knol (our review) make Google into a “content company”? Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis made a compelling case this week. You can say he is conflicted, because his Mahalo venture has a lot to lose if Knol succeeds. Or you can say that he knows of what he speaks, because he is in the eye of the storm. Jason’s view that Google is the closest we have to an operating system for the web makes sense. His comparison to how Microsoft, an earlier generation operating system vendor, invaded the application market that had belonged to their partners, rings true. This is what dominant tech companies have always done.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

UPDATE: On August 16, 2008 ReadWriteWeb was sent a letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term 'brandstream'. Accordingly we acknowledge here that Pheedo did not coin the term, as we initially thought.

Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming [Update: Brian Solis notes in the comments that Pheedo probably didn't coin it]. Pheedo defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand".

To back up its case for brands using lifestreaming tools, Pheedo points to a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.

Can Companies Really Use Lifestreaming?

Alex didn't mention FriendFeed in his post, perhaps because FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps are relatively new to the Internet scene. But Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who follows how companies use social media more than most, has been looking into how brands will use FriendFeed. He discusses the concept of the "Social Media Press Release" (SMPR), which he defines as more than just a company announcement - it also "provides links and assets to social media: blogs, images, videos, tags, etc." He cites Ford's Social Media Press Release room called "Digital Snippets" as one example.

But let's step back a moment and look at brandstreaming from the user's point of view. It's fairly obvious why companies want to get their brand out into social media sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and then wrap it up into feeds. It's to get their brand out beyond their website, to engage users and entice them into discussions about their products. But what's the motivation for users to subscribe to those 'brandstreams'?

Realistically, brandstreaming is probably going to work best for consumer brands that have a high lifestyle appeal. Ford would fit into that category, although it's not a beloved consumer brand like say Apple or Sony. I did a search around FriendFeed tonight to see if I could find an official presence from Apple, Sony, Coca-Cola and a few other popular brands. But so far at least, those popular consumer brands aren't doing much brandstreaming.

Pandora Experimenting

One early adopter company though is the online music service Pandora. Lucia Willow, the Pandora Community Manager, has nabbed a presence for Pandora on many of the trendy social media places. She left this list in the comments to Jeremiah Owyang's post mentioned above:

http://twitter.com/pandora_radio (which Lucia says has been "a *fantastic* resource for us")

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pandora/5919726343

http://getsatisfaction.com/pandora

http://flickr.com/photos/pandora_radio/

http://www.myspace.com/pandoraradio

Pandora's FriendFeed site has about 70 people subscribed to it so far. Lucia admitted that Pandora is just testing it, and by the looks of the recent activity it's being used in much the same way that Pandora is successfully using Twitter - to communicate with its user base and encourage them to use Pandora.

Cisco's Advertising BrandStream

Another example of brandstreaming is Cisco. In the post linked above, Pheedo sings the virtues of brandstreaming as a way for companies to get their brands in front of consumers, but also as a new kind of advertising tool.

Pheedo ran an ad campaign for Cisco which, in their words, was "designed as an integrated Social Media ad network campaign with the goals of driving 1) traffic, 2) newsletter sign-ups, and 3) RSS subscriptions." The Cisco brandstream included video, press releases, customer stories and product updates. [disclosure: Pheedo has run some RSS ads for RWW, via FM Publishing. It's possible that the Cisco campaign was one of them, but I am not sure]

Conclusion

Clearly it's early days for this so-called brandstreaming. Whether people will want to subscribe to brands in lifestreaming apps like FriendFeed is a question still to be answered. I can see the attraction for consumer brands with a cult following, like Apple. Other brands, including the likes of Ford and Cisco, will probably struggle to interest consumers in highly social apps like FriendFeed.

Let us know in the comments any examples you've come across of companies 'brandstreaming'. Do you think it will work for most companies, or is it yet another social media trend that you'd prefer companies to keep their fingers out of?

It's a simple but elegant and interesting experiment. The tag cloud for Walmart, for example, shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger! We've embedded the site below in an iframe if you want to try it out yourself.

One of the nicest touches here is how Brier displays the tags in oversized font. By requiring users to scroll down the page, we get to enjoy thinking to ourselves "surely this is the largest tag for this brand" - only to scroll on and find that another term is even more frequently associated with that company!

One thing that would be nice would be to have comments be enabled at the bottom of the tag cloud screens. That way people could explain to those who don't know why, for example, the word "racist" is so large on Tommy Hilfiger's page.

BrandTags may not be the kind of site that consumers regularly return to, but it's fun to try out once. Obviously it's something that companies would have a real interest in checking out, especially if it takes off. Brier reports that it's recieved over 77,000 tags in the first weekend it was live.

We've got it in an iframe below, just because if iframes are good enough for Google Friend Connect then gosh darn it, they're good enough for us too. Click through some brands on there...you just might find ours and get to offer a little feedback!

If you're reading this post by RSS you can click through to see the iframe or visit the full BrandTags.net site itself.