The Social Web and its Implications

“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy.” – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web

Media is an “attention economy”; every product - book, television show, website, etc. - vies for attention, and tries to derive financial benefit from it – through advertising, subscription, increased sales, ancillary sales, new members, etc. And, users’ attention has become the scarce commodity. As Bruce Sterling puts it, “In the Information Economy everything is plentiful -- except attention.”

Social media is dramatically changing the fundamental forces of that economy: who pays attention to what, who influences such decisions, how that is tracked and measured, the speed of response, and how it’s monetized. If you think about it, the word “viral” hardly existed in our vocabulary before social media? Now it’s in constant use without the slightest reference to illness.

Just as an example, Google, the uncontested titan of attention monetization on the Web, with $4.2B profit in 2008 and ads on millions of websites, is seriously threatened by Facebook, with their 300M+ user (one of every four Internet users) who’s highly personal activity is outside its reach.

The Social Web is not just a fad; it is a fundamental shift in how humans communicate, interact, collaborate, create, inform themselves, prioritize, organize, buy, sell, and play. It is your customers, your friends, your family, your employees, your constituents, your shareholders, and, like it or not, you.

Social media is to the Web what electric motors were to electricity, the quantum leap in utility that took a magical new technology and transformed society. Rapid innovation is making a reality of what Berners-Lee called, in 2007, the Giant Global Graph (GGG), the "social graph" connecting everyone everywhere independent of platform or application.

This market study is designed to help you understand this transformation, how it affects you and the world around you, and most important, how to use the changes it brings. It covers a broad range of uses, behaviors, and applications; provides detailed statistics on many of them and the space overall, concisely describes and connects key concepts; and provides signposts for further investigation.

Executive Summary
Introduction and scope
- Why care?
- Organization
  - Executive Summary
  - Overview
  - Common Behaviors
  - Twitter
  - Impact on the Enterprise
  - Going Deeper
- How to use this study
Key Findings
Methodology
Intended Audience
Market Sizing
- How to profit from it?
Overview
- What is social media?
- Key Concepts
- Summary
Common Behaviors
- Sharing
- Signaling
- Collaboration
- Networking
- Social Signaling
  - Broadcasting
    - Blogs
    - Podcasts
    - Facebook Updates and Twitter Statuses
    - Lifestreaming
    - Social Bookmarking
    - Location sharing
    - Related services
  - Receiving aka “Following”
  - Content Sharing; User-generated Content
    - Photos
    - Video and news
    - Music
  - Opinions and Reviews
    - Recommendation
    - Rating
  - Collaboration and Crowd-sourcing
    - Wikis
    - Collaborative Data
    - Emergency Response
    - Citizen Journalism
    - Collective creation
    - Affinities and Niche Networks
    - Answering questions
    - Peer-to-peer lending and donation
    - Travel
    - Innovation Challenges
    - Virus Forecasting
    - Bull detection
    - Smart Mobs
    - Art Curation
  - Miscellaneous
    - Politics and Government
      - Real-time translation and inter-cultural dialogue
      - Government 2.0; E-Gov
      - Petitions
    - Recruiting
      - Military
      - Creative
    - Gaming
      - Massively multi-player online games
    - Virtual Worlds
    - Digital Identity
    - APIs
  - Facebook –
    - Facebook Connect -
    - Twitter
    - Friendfeed
  - Analytics
    - Twitter Analytics
    - URL shorteners
The life span and the potential; TAM and forecast
Twitter
- Understanding it
- The Platform
- Reality Check
- Ambient Awareness
- Business model
- The API
- URL shortening
- Practical uses
  - Attention
  - Search
  - Trend research
  - Human resources
  - Work
  - Brands
  - Shopping
  - Journalism
  - Public sphere
  - Social
  - Conferences
  - Collaboration
  - Travel / Location
  - Family
  - Humor and Art
  - Data Mining
  - Software tools
- Issues / Problems
  - Reliability
  - Signal to Noise
Within the Enterprise
- Expectations
- Selling it internally
- In short, social media is where the growing action is, and ignoring it is simply no longer an option.
- Social Market Forces
  - Changing landscape
  - Vendor Relationship Management
  - Customer Service
  - Behavioral Advertising, Permission Marketing, and Infomediaries
  - Real-time accountability and transparency
- Out-bound: Communicating with Social Media
  - Best Practices
  - The Basics
    - Basic Case Studies
  - More advanced
  - Getting creative
- In-bound: Brand Monitoring and Tracking
  - Best Practices
  - Examples
  - Tools
    - Overall traffic monitoring and comparing
    - Social media monitoring
    - Source aggregation
    - Blog search
    - Microblog search (Twitter, Jaiku, identi.ca …)
    - Multi-source search (blogs, microblogs, Google News, …)
    - General Utility
    - Engagement analytics
    - Aggregation of search results from multiple sources
    - Dashboards
    - Miscellaneous
- Risks/Problems
- Lost productivity?
Conclusion
Appendix A
- Bibliography / links to sources
Appendix B
- Key Statistics
  - Overall Internet use
- International growth
  - How we spend our media time
- Distribution and Growth of Social Media sites
- Behavior of Social Users
- Statistics by application
  - YouTube
  - Blogs
  - Twitter
    - Unique visitors
    - Demographics
  - Facebook
  - Wikipedia
- Additions

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Ad revenue of various media in their early years (source PricewaterhouseCoupers, Universal McCann)
Figure 2: US Internet user’s hours per week (source Jon Peddie Research)
Figure 3: Projected US Internet user’s hours per week (source Jon Peddie Research)
Figure 4: Estimated on-line usage of Internet for entertainment (Source Jon Peddie Research)
Figure 5: Elf Yourself captured over 100 million visitors during the Christmas season. The results were even better when Office Max sponsored Elf Yourself
Figure 6: Comparison of website traffic (Source Alexa)
Figure 7 - from Visual Complexity via ReadWriteWeb
Figure 8: Who are the real friends? (source: Beth Kanter @kanter)
Figure 9: the Long Tai – users vs. time (source: Wikipedia)
Figure 10: Social Networking is evolving through the intersections of people’s interactions– as more people become involved, more content created, applications developed, then intelligence is gathered and distributed. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
Figure 11: Facebook is the current leader – for the moment. However early data from Comscore and traffic tracking sites suggest that traffic on Facebook is leveling off.
Figure 12: According to Comcast growth in Social Networking is relatively stable in the U.S. and it is happening much faster worldwide.
Figure 13: Worldwide access to the Internet is estimated to be around 1.5 billion people.
Figure 14: The world is getting interested in social networking and opening up opportunities for new sites. Comscore reported these figures in 2008 – they are similar to the data published for growth for individual sites and for the growth of broadband access.
Figure 15: Top Twitter users
Figure 16: flickr.com/futileboy
Figure 17: Leading URL Shorteners
Figure 18: Twitter’s capacity message
Figure 19: U.S. socila media marketing
Figure 20: The importance of social networking skills in job application
Figure 21: Reasons for blocking social networking (source Sophos)