kullin – Page 39 – Media Culpa

Top reasons for unfriending on Facebook

Do you post all your Gowalla and Foursquare check-ins to your Facebook profile, as well as your tweets, Delicious bookmarks and TripIt travels? Chances are, you are starting to become as dull as dishwater to your Facebook friends. Sharing is caring, but oversharing might not be the ultimate way to add value to your network. A new study by Christopher Sibona, a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Denver, investigated why people unfriend someone on Facebook. The study, which surveyed some 1,500 Facebook users, found that 57 percent of those surveyed unfriended for online reasons, while 26.9 percent did so for offline behavior.

The number one reason for unfriending someone on Facebook was “frequent, unimportant posts”.

“The 100^th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,” he said.

The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics. Third reason for being unfriended was posting inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments.

Footnote: Hat tip to @jeanlucr

TV brands are the most followed brands on Foursquare

Traditional media make up the majority of most followed brands on the location-based service Foursquare. Metro, the global daily newspaper of Swedish origin, is one of the 30 most followed brands, for example. More specifically, it is the Canadian arm of Metro that holds that position, with in excess of 9,000 friends on Foursquare. By following Metro News, users can find tips and places that Metro recommends and they can also unlock a Metro Foursquare Badge.

According to Fanpagelist.com, the most followed brand on Foursquare is Bravo TV, with 70,000 friends, which is not a whole lot out of a total user base of 3 million.

A blog post on Aboutfoursquare.com suggests that there are two main reasons why not more people follow brand on Foursquare. First, the site doesn’t do a good enough job promoting sponsored badges, leaving brands with the only option to market them through their own channels. The second reason has to do with privacy concerns. Most people aren’t very fond of the idea of letting brands know where they check in.

As you can see, the top 10 list of brands on Foursquare are dominated by traditional media and especially tv shows/stations:

Bravo (tv)
MTV (tv)
Zagat Survey
History (tv)
Bastard Jeans
VH1 (tv)
Bon Appétit Magazine
TLC (tv)
Wall Street Journal
The New York Times

The value of a “like” on Facebook

Facebook has released some statistics about people that click on the Like button on for example media sites. Apparently people who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user. The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

Working Together to Build Social News

Findings from the Social Media and Online PR Report 2010

According to the Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 by Econsultancy and Bigmouthmedia, 95% of surveyed companies (mainly in the UK) have been involved in social media. But only 18% say they are heavily involved. 40% have experimented with social media but not done much.

The most common PR activities in social media are online traditional media relations (62%), press release posting sites and wire services (56%) adn blog relations (45%).

Other findings include:

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the most widely used external websites/services.
When asked how organisations are using Facebook, more than two thirds of companies (67%) are using Facebook as a marketing channel.
Around a quarter of company respondents (26%) said their most senior managers were “very interested indeed” in social media, compared to 19% who said there was “very little interest”.
Social network profile creation and management is still the most widely used social media tactic, although the proportion of companies who do this has decreased from 65% last year to 56% this year.
Direct traffic (72%) is still regarded as the most important metric for assessing social media activity. Almost three-quarters of respondents say this is one of the three most important metrics they use.
45% of responding companies don’t have any policies or guidelines for the use of social media.

A sample report can be found here.

Sky Italia quotes fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter

For some celebrities, social media has proven to be very useful communication channels that reach fans directly. They can communicate their point of view without running the risk that traditional media misinterpret or distort the message. When actor Jim Carrey announced that he and Jenny McCarthy would break up, he didn’t issue a press release. Instead, he simpy tweeted:

“Jenny and I have just ended our 5yr relationship. I’m grateful 4 the many blessings we’ve shared and I wish her the very best! S’okay! ?;^>”

With a simple tweet, he could reach millions of readers before traditional media had time to react. But not everything on Twitter is what it seems to be. Carrey has a verified account on Twitter, which certifies that it is actually The Jim Carrey that is tweeting (or someone he has hired to do so). So if a celebrity doesn’t have a verified Twitter account, you should probably think twice before you assume it is the real thing.

I have blogged before about how AP, Al Jazeera and a bunch of other media quoted a fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic account on Twitter. It didn’t take much work to prove it was fake. And yesterday it happened again as media started to cover the Champions League game tonight between AC Milan and Zlatan’s old club Ajax. Italian tv channel Sky Italia quoted @therealZlatan11 in an article that suggests that “Ibra” had tweeted “I cheer for the success of Ajax, but not tomorrow”.

Of course this is not the real Ibrahimovic. He has never been active online and certainly not on Twitter. You would only need to click on the link in the Twitter bio to see that the link is not to an official site, but to a rather poor fansite from the Netherlands.

If traditional media are going to use celebrities in social media as sources for news, they need to put a little more effort in to research to verify that the source is correct. Otherwise they will look pretty foolish.

Footnote: Thanks to http://twitter.com/ItalianMeetup for the scoop about Sky Italia.

Don’t mess with Sweden on Twitter

Now and then we read stories about businesses that use Twitter in ways that are creative, but not considered to be according to Twitter etiquette. Perhaps you remember when Habitat UK spammed several Twitter hashtags like #iPhone or #Mousavi, a tag associated with the Iran election, with tweets promoting their furniture? It created an uproar among Twitter users and gave the company lots of negative publicity.

Update: After a conversation with @dohop and checking the ID numbers of each tweet, I see that the tweet from @swedense came seconds before the first tweet from @dohop, giving this story a slightly different meaning. In other words, the tweet from @swedense was not directed to @dohop at all, but to several other comments on Twitter. Sorry that I hadn’t discovered that before.

Sweden on Twitter
Today I found another interesting example (hat tip to Johan Hedberg) from a website called Dohop.com, a “flight search engine”. It tried to generate business out of a very sensitive topic, namely the Swedish election. On Sunday last week, Sweden for the first time elected an anti-immigrant party into the Swedish parliament. The Sweden Democrats got 20 seats in the parliament, sending shock waves through the entire Swedish society, and the election results are not even final yet. So obviously this is not a topic that Swedes would take lightly, but it did not stop @dohop from publishing the following tweet.

However, Sweden.se, the official web presence of the Swedish Institute, would not take that kind of tweeting about our beloved country. So it sent out this rather upset tweet.

Which got picked up by @dohop, who apologized.

I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, but if you are trying to be funny on Twitter on someone else’s expense, be prepared that they might be listening and talk back. Way to go, Sweden.se!