Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University have recently conducted a research on Print and Web Journalists’ usage of social media for researching and reporting stories. Results are based on 371 responses from September 1, 2009 to October 13, 2009.

There are approximately two thirds of all journalists and writers using social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) for research, only about half of them use Twitter and magazine writers have the lowest Twitter usage.

The graph above shows that there are more Newspaper and Website writers using Twitter for research than the magazine writers.

From the Report:

Corporate websites, press releases and especially PR professionals remain consistently used resources for journalists when writing or producing stories.

The least experienced journalists use information from press releases and PR professionals more now than five years ago to write their stories, and more so than their more experienced counterparts.

Blogs (64%) are the most frequently used social media tool to publish, promote and distribute what journalists write, followed closely by Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook (60%) and Microblogging sites such as Twitter (57%).

I always think it’s interesting to see movies’ online mentions because movie business rely so much on Word on Mouth. I believe that “word of mouse” can somehow reflects how the movies are doing.
You might also want to check out my previous post “Social Media Mentions of Movies predict Revenue“.

Avatar is obviously ahead of the game, but Sherlock Holmes is catching up, I believe mention numbers will grow after it official releases on 24th Dec. See graph below:

I used these 2 movies on this research because they both have interesting social media strategies.
To learn more about their social media tactics, read: Avatar The Movie and Social Media Marketing also Sherlock Holmes Turns to TweetDeck for Film Promotion and Tickets Giveaway on Neon Punch.

I love advertising. I not a fan of American football but I watch Super Bowl only for the ads. I enjoy watching TV ads purely because of it’s form of art and creativity. So I would believe that I’m not a person who get easily influenced by an ad.

A recent research conducted by Synovate shows that 67% think there are too many ads on TV, and only 39% think the same to the Internet. However, they also revealed that 42% would accept even more ads on TV in exchange for discounts on their TV subscription, and 41% would do the same on Internet.

Although numbers are pretty good, and ad channels would likely go for this plan, I still don’t think it would be effective advertising if advertisers can’t figure out a way to deliver extremely relevant and targeted ads.
Would you get more ads for discounts, and actually pay attention to the ad?

Technorati Tags: advertising

Apple iPhone was designed in the US, started in the US, and most of the great features and apps are based around the US. But apparently people in Asia love iPhone more than any other countries.

Source: Google Trends Insight

For a digital product like iPhone, it makes sense to approximately calculate popularity of the product by search volume, the crowds that are interested in purchasing iPhones are always the ones that have at least basic knowledge on the Internet; therefore, the main source of information for these crowds would be through online search.

Google just announced that 17 World Development Indicators can now be searched in Google search.

Therefore you will see this in Google search result if you look for Internet users of a country:

I’ve always been paying attention to World Bank as they have good amount of high quality data visualization and very useful data.
With Google’s power, I pulled up the graph above in no time using Google’s visualization tool. As you can see, 77.1% of South Korea’s population uses the Internet, it’s the highest in the world followed by the States with 72.4%. China went up quickly in 2006 and still growing rapidly.

Play around with this graph

Although I don’t count Twitter as an Instant Messaging service, it’s interesting to see this statistic published by Palo Alto Network few days ago.

In the report, they put Twitter together with other popular IMer like msn, facebook chat, google chat and meebo. Surprisingly, they all went up since Spring this year, and even more surprising is that Twitter beats others as an “Instant Messaging” application. Guys, did we tweet THAT much!?

Feel free to leave me a message for full report.

While marketers are considering shifting funds from traditional media to social media, a recent study done by Ofcom finds UK teens are starting to lose interest in social networking.

Among the age group of 15 to 24, the growth of social networking has been slowing down since March last year. Number of people who created or own profiles on social networking sites fell 5% in the last year and a half. On the other hand, number of profiles created by 35-54 year old adult has an 8% increase since then.

Although it is only a UK focused study, it might be a sign that can wake up companies that are blindly going digital without knowing the social media landscape.

Is social networking not as exciting as before for teens? Will this same group of teens jump back on to more social networking activities when they get to the 35-54 age group?

When there were less competitors in every industry, consumers purchase only for the functions and usability of products. Companies then realized they had to differentiate themselves when more and more competitors came up and shared their profits in the industry. Similar thing is happening in social media.

As the graph above shows, the importance of branding and packaging grew since production era. Many companies these days set prices higher than it needs to be in order to cover their marketing expenses. Although I do think that quality of a product is what matters, many consumers still buy products that they don’t really need, thanks to the smart marketing campaigns!

When people started to build content, visuals/ graphics didn’t matter, all people cared about was text content. Similar to the previous case, increasing amount of social networks and blogs forces content creators to attract attention in a different way. #FFFFFF background and #000000 text don’t impress people as much these days on the Internet.

I had a conversation with Thomas Crampton and Nic Tinworth about data visualization, they are both visualization gurus and we all agreed that many people get overwhelmed by all the blog postings they get directed to each and everyday. Visualized data worth a million words when it is created in a creative, and simple way.

As I mentioned on my other post “Movie Industry should love Twitter“, Twitter is a great tool for movie makers to spread the awareness about their new movies. On my recent studies, I found out something interesting.

I’ve run a search with my listening tool to see the number of mentions of 3 recent movies (Harry Potter 6, The Hangover, and Transformers) on social media in the past 30 days.

Here’s the result:

Now, take a look at the first day revenue of these movies (in million).

The 2 graphs are not exactly the same in shape, but they are quite close. Although I didn’t analyze the content of the social media mentions of these movies, and have no idea whether they were talking negative or positive about them, do you think it’s safe to predict product launches by looking at their “word of mouse”?

It has been a popular topic on how people can engage with the most followers by tweeting at the right period of time. But does it really matter?

What’s your purpose:

People engage on Twitter for different reasons; some people use it as a broadcast medium, some use it to connect with friends, some are just on it for no specific reason. Although I strongly believe that content is what put strangers together on the Internet, I think timing of publishing content does matter for broadcasting if you want to reach more audience.
Before deciding how to improve your online social networking skills, you should from time to time think about what your purposes are on social media.

Daily Cycle of Online Activities in Hong kong

Since I’m currently in Hong Kong, I decided to put together a graph to show how Hong Kong people use Internet. Daily cycle of internet use can give you more information than you think. In this graph for Hong Kong, the Peak hour is at 10pm, so Twitting around that time period might get you more responses and RTs.
Source: HK Internet Project 2008