GlobalWebIndex

One of the main challenges an International brand will be facing today is how to roll out a social media campaign on a global scale. Whilst we see Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms being a worldwide phenomenon, it is easy to forget that social media is essentially the ground roots connection to local culture, consumer adoption and behaviour, as it radically varies across markets.

For brands building an active international social presence, this can be especially difficult and requires a very rigorous understanding of their target audience, their audience social media preferences and how their brand translates regionally to effectively use the media to its full potential.

As an example, I have taken the champion of social media and collaboration, Dell. They are often cited for their use of social media to reach new and existing customers, a strategy which helped rebuild their image. One great example is their collaboration website Idea Storm, where anyone can post or start a discussion on their idea for Dell. But the question would be, how does this type of concept translate on a global scale?

 The chart above represents the survey question ‘Which of the following online activities would improve your opinion of a brand in the technology category?’. In the graph we demonstrate these differences using index scores via four different example countries for advocates of Dell (users that would definitely recommend). This is extremely useful data to establish how to build an outreach strategy with influencers in each region. When reading the chart the number 100 is the average, anything above 100 means that the brand user has a higher propensity to agree with the statement than the average, anything below shows a lower propensity than the average.

From Dell’s perspective, we can see that the concept of Idea Storm, launched in the US, isn’t one of the top categories for Americans. Instead, the ability to purchase products on other sites and locations would have been more suitable to improve opinion of the brand. On the other hand, the Idea Storm concept would work extremely well in China considering their score of 152 in this same category, suggesting that a fully localised version would be a great success.

This is just one output but clearly highlights the importance of understanding not only the tactics and social media used, but also the market by market differences that impact the way social media is used and desired.

In terms of nutrition, it is the quality of the food we eat rather than the quantity of it that truly matters when it comes to its nutritional value. In my experience, this same principle applies to brand engagement on social media, but instead, it is the quality of our followers or fans that will directly affect how successful our online presence is for our business. Perhaps the only difference here is that having loads of non-engaged fans or followers won’t necessarily hurt our businesses in the way that eating lots of junk food will make us fat. Essentially, we need the quality fan, the person who wants to engage with our content, the one that shares our brand with their friends, provide others with solid recommendations, etc.

How do we find these quality fans though? And after that, what can we as a brand provide them with that they are willing to share and advocate? The answer may seem obvious; we need to understand who they are (i.e. What drives them, what values they associate with, and where they want to engage with us). It is this understanding of our customer that is often one of the most overlooked aspects of building our online strategies because many of us are guilty of taking a very top-line approach and making assumptions about what our customers are like. By understanding who our quality fans and followers are, we can build a better experience for them, which they in turn will share and advocate in the wider world.

Who our quality customer is, however, changes from brand to brand and country to country. Let us take a selection of different smartphone OS users in the US and UK as our example and examine the type of users each one has. This concept has been parodied many times over, but it would seem that there is often a degree of truth in some of the stereotypes. BlackBerry users in the US, for example, are 134% more likely than the average American to strongly agree that they are willing to sacrifice time with their families in order to get ahead in life. Not surprisingly, they are also extremely career oriented (132% more likely to agree with that view of themselves).

BlackBerry users in the UK, by contrast, are career oriented but are not near as willing to sacrifice time with their families in order to get ahead. This distinction is reserved for UK iPhone users, who are 84% more likely to sacrifice family time for their careers and are 120% more likely to be very career oriented. Going back to the US, iPhone users are by far more concerned with how their peers view them and keeping up with the latest fashions. Both Android users and those who don’t actually know (or care) what their mobile OS is also revealed character traits that set them apart from other brand users.

I encourage you to look at the heat map below to explore the different attributes of different mobile OS users in more detail, but even a quick glance reveals just how much variation there is between not only the types of people using each brand of mobile OS, but also between the same brand across countries, even in markets, as culturally similar as the US is in the UK.

More importantly, we can put ourselves in each of these brands’ shoes and think about how we might go about building our online presence with the greatest effect. If we were Apple in the United States we’d appeal to our consumers’ sense of having the best of the best, as well as taking advantage of their dependence on mobile phones. In the UK, on the other hand, we might want to develop content and experiences that position Apple as a premium and fashionable brand, but one that is also extremely practical for both business and pleasure. I would argue that Apple has done a great job of this.

But what if we put ourselves in BlackBerry’s shoes? Their core customer base in the US is likely to be a person that will sacrifice pleasure for practicality and will put their career ahead of all other pursuits. Is this how we would want our brand to be positioned across the internet in people’s conversations? I would argue that it probably isn’t. Therefore, the key task of our online strategy should be to refocus our positioning and reach out to consumers that share other key attributes that people are more likely to identify with and place value on. BlackBerry users in the US, for example, are 79% more likely to pay for eco-friendly products than the average American, and by building experiences that emphasize aspects such as this will drive those BlackBerry users to share their feelings and thoughts. The goal is that these conversations will drown out those of the workaholic. This is the perfect example of how quality rather than quantity will do so much more for our brands online, but it all starts with knowing who your customers are.

In this table, the blue areas are less likely to agree with the statement, white are the average (100) and pink are more likely to agree with the statement.

After becoming a first time VW owner in the early summer of last year I quickly turned an avid advocate and I have on numerous occasions had to defend the notion that I own the leftover from the luxury sister brand Audi.

This is naturally a claim which I dismiss as an act of immature jealousy since I love my Aurora (yes I have named my car) and I am a firm believer that, despite the sporty nature of the car, buying a VW is a smarter and perhaps a little bit more of a mature choice than the loud little sister AUDI, not just a budget choice.

Looking at the GlobalWebIndex Automobile Brand Data covering VW, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Chevrolet, Ford, Opel (Germany Only) and Vauxhall (UK Only) across UK, Germany and USA I wanted to test my theory about VW Vs Audi drivers and establish how well the car brand I purchase reflects me and the impact it has on my online profile.

Self-Perception (US, UK & Germany)
Despite agreeing on core family values, VW Vs Audi drivers’ perception of themselves is very different. Image and Appearance is equally important for both brand owners although VW owners display a more down to earth persona – they see themselves as less motivated by money and more motivated by personal well-being.

Motivations to influence (US, UK & Germany)
Helping fellow consumers and driving company improvements are main the motivators to post opinion online on brands across the two brands however the insight (see chart below) on VW drivers indicates they have more emotionally driven motivations (sharing good and bad experiences) where Audi drivers are driven by brand commitment and having their voice heard (to be seen as an expert).

Personal characteristic drives brand interactions
These car owners self-perception and influencer motivations shines through their brand interactions. Where Audi Drivers show a higher portion of proactive real-time interactions through Micro-blogs, customer service and branded communities, VW owners are more likely to engage through passive activities via branded websites and social activities such as “Liking” a product or branded page.

In summary, I agree that it is important for me to be respected by my peers (including other VW drivers) and my self–perception is very similar to the VW drivers surveyed. In the end, this has re-affirmed my belief in my car and the brand choice I have made.

Building on a brand’s position in the market, either from a campaign perspective or longer term view, is dependent on understanding the continuously evolving wants and needs of the brand’s customers.

The rapid evolution of technology has propelled brands and their customers into a global marketplace where everyone is provided with a platform from which to share their opinions and positive and negative reviews anywhere and at any time, around the world.  How can brands ensure that they keep up with what their customers are doing, where they are doing it and what they want from your brand?

GlobalWebIndex provides brands with the ability to create a bespoke profile of their customers, advocates and non-customers and deliver a true picture of who they are, what motivates them and how they want to engage with or share their opinions about your brand*.

GlobalWebIndex has substantial and thorough data on a range of brands in all of the main categories and the ability to deliver bespoke brand data:

The new advertisement campaign for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) created some discussion here in GWI Towers recently. The conversation made me think about the brand’s latest ad appealing to a much younger audience than previous campaigns, focusing clearly on a demographic that have abandoned IE and moved to Firefox and Chrome.

This then got me thinking about how our brand data, linked to specific target audience analysis, could have been used to help shape this campaign. By analysing our core brand data, or a combination of data and re-contact surveys, we can determine the best way to interact with brand specific target audiences online within a campaign and even provide information on changes of attitude and behaviour  towards the brand after a campaign has been released. In the case of IE9, we could have derived personas of the different target audience, concentrating on age, location, attitudes to certain brands, behaviours online and device use to find the best campaign for their target audience. For example, identifying Google Chrome, FireFox or Safari users aged 25-34 in professional jobs. This focus can enable a strategy that differentiates activity from the core and current IE audience.

With the IE case study, the first step we would have taken is analysing the target audience and competitors over time to see the trends emerging about both the IE product and IE’s competitors’ products. This would normally be done prior to developing a campaign to help shape it.

When we look at the UK data for the top three browsers we can see a shift away from IE over time, but IE is still the overall leader for internet browsers.

Reviewing the data we can see that even within age groups there is a disparity. When reviewing the audiences that currently use Google Chrome and IE, 39% of people surveyed between 16-24 years old said that they used IE in the last month, compared with 65% of 55-65 year olds. Google chrome users are the reverse with age groups – 26% of 16-24 year olds use Chrome, whereas 11% of surveyed Chrome users are 55-65 year olds. The IE campaign was correct in focusing on a younger audience as Google Chrome encroaches on IE’s younger market share.

Tracking IE users in the UK over the next 3 waves, we’ll be able to see any significant lift from the recent (and subsequent) campaigns (across all channels) in the UK.  Questions we could see IE asking include ‘Will new users be early adopters and younger influencers?’ and ‘Are previous IE users just curious about the fresh new product.’

The sticky ROI question

When looking at a marketing campaign like the IE9 example, you can expect that there are questions raised around the Return on Investment (ROI), although it seems to be a taboo subject, especially when being used to measure social media. The IE9 campaign has had an obvious shift towards a younger market and utilised social media to engage this audience.

The general thinking about ROI in respect to social been limited, where much of the focus has been about analysis of analytics data, click throughs, or the thinking is that ROI for social is so complex that it isn’t possible or meaningful to measure (what does a Facebook ‘like’ actually mean)?  We believe research can help. The example with the IE campaign, GWI would have proposed a number of ways to examine the target audience prior to the design of the campaign and then to measure the campaign’s success we would use both our regular GWI survey data combined with use re-contact surveys. The re-contact surveys can be run at any time to measure baselines and campaign effectiveness.

The concept that all consumers want brands to create an open forum online and want direct human contact is a fallacy.  The rise of mass market social media has brands believing they need to become open and transparent with their customers and their potential consumers. But this leads to the notion that all customers online are the same.

The reality is that consumers and users of particular brands have radically different motivations and needs in terms of how they want to be engaged. Our research confirms not all brands should be acting in a personally engaging way. For some brands, two-way, real time conversation via social media is an important part of communication with consumers. But having social media as part of your strategy does not necessarily mean it is the only (nor best way) to drive engagement. For some brands focusing on building content and digital experiences might work better for their consumers.

Within our survey, we ask different demographics how they want to be engaged online by all brands, asking the question “How would you want a brand you like to act towards you?”

When we explore the data by age group we already see that there is a huge variance in how people want to be engaged, with younger people favouring “entertainment”(55%), and older consumers favouring “knowledge improvement”(64%).

Younger consumers like the idea of brands creating a social connection for them with others (49%).  However being talked to like a real person is at the bottom of the list of motivations (16-24 year olds 13%), but ranks higher for older consumers.

This underlines how the ‘one size fits all’ approach to social media is not always going to work and why ‘me too’ hype driven strategies are very dangerous.

When we explore how different brand users (a selection from the GlobalWebIndex research) want to be engaged with specific brands online, there is a distinct difference per brand. In the graph below we demonstrate these differences using index scores. When reading the chart the number 100 is the average, anything above 100 means that the brand user has a higher propensity to agree with the statement than the average, anything below shows a lower propensity than the average.

For example, current Pepsi consumers are 43% more likely than the average that to want the brand to be part of their daily routine, while TopShop (UK and international fashion retailer) consumers are 28% less likely than the average.

When we analyse Pepsi and Coke consumers the data suggests that they want constant engagement and connection with others; however they really don’t want to be talked to like a real person or be informed about the product. In other words, they want their brands to remain brands and be slightly out of reach, entertaining, inspiring and be a connection between them and their friends. In this case, social media’s purpose is to facilitate connections, create entertaining campaigns and content that makes a connection between the brand and an unattainable, exciting life.

With the contrasting example, Walmart, customers heavily favour “being talked to like a real person”, but really don’t want a social connection. This is a clear demonstration that Walmart could pursue a people focused and direct contact approach with consumers but probably shouldn’t be creating customer communities online.

The summary take aways from this article are:

• One size fits all social media strategy is dangerous – Conversation and people first approach is not always right
• Not all brands need to be “transparent” – some brands will still want to keep a bit of mystery to fit consumers needs
• Getting started in social media is not always about listening – we believe it should start with credible market research
• Understand your target audience and ideally segment brand user types, advocates, potential users etc and build a segmented strategy
• Content marketing is perhaps the biggest opportunity of social media infrastructure: Not all consumers want to converse but they do consume and share. Social media has created the biggest shift in content distribution since the printing press. Brands can take advantage of this.

Over the course of this month we will be exploring brand relationships in detail and focus on local markets and specific target audiences, providing some fascinating insights into the realities of how brands should be approaching social media.

Brands are the company’s DNA. Your brand is a living entity that is created over time with effort and a strong understanding of what the consumer wants from your product. This extends into communication between the brand and consumers online and is being radically reshaped in real-time thanks to the mass market growth of social media.

Unsurprisingly this raises many key questions that we try to answer: : What do customers want from their brands in the social arena? What level of engagement is right for your brand? How will you know what works and what doesn’t?

GlobalWebIndex is taking May to create ” Social Brand Month” . We will focus this month to highlight the core data in our survey that drives new insights into how consumers want to engage with brands. GWI is going to be looking at a range of topics, including:

• How consumers want to engage brands in 2012: The key motivations and behaviours of consumers engaging with brands online
• Category differences online: exploring demographics and markets between categories including auto brands, luxury brands, tech brands and fashion brands.
• Exploring specific brand case studies: Deep dives into key brands that are making an impact in social and comparing this against competing brands.

Each post will be referencing the most recent GWI brand focused data that includes brands such as Coca Cola, H&M, Ford, Starbucks, Walmart, Pepsi Co., Samsung, McDonalds and much more. If you are interested in seeing the range of GWI brand data, contact your account manager or contact us here.

Get ready for a month of exciting insights into Social Brands. For a regular update follow us @Globalwebindex, Google + and Linkedin.

Brett Petersen, Consulting Director of GlobalWebIndex, discuses briefly why mobile should be a integral part of your strategy. 

Yesterday, Tom and I shared some of the latest GlobalWebIndex insights at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Brand and Agency Briefing in London. We discussed some of the most important insights that are coming out of our research at the moment which include:

1) Mobile internet usage continues to grow rapidly
2) There are key internet activities that are becoming device agnostic
3) Applying the target audience lens to strategy is becoming more important than ever

We see that growth and penetration of mobile internet use depends on which market is being analyzed. Surprisingly, we see that people in emerging markets are leading the way in terms of penetration of mobile internet usage. There is significant differentiation between markets as well, but the general trend suggests that mobile internet penetration is continuing to grow quickly around the world. Comparing GWI.5 to GWI.6 data demonstrates this well, especially because the two research waves were only four months apart. The overall message from this research is: mobile matters, and those who integrate it with their existing channel strategy now will gain advantage over their competition and reap significant rewards.

On the final key insight, applying the target audience lens to all aspects of our strategy, including mobile, is growing ever more critical as mobile internet and tablet usage moves out of the hand of early adopters. As we’ve seen in previous blog posts, using cookie-cutter online and integrated strategies can often be counter-productive, and the same applies to mobile as well. Only when target audience insights are applied to mobile internet behaviours will we discover what our consumers actually want from us via mobile and online in general.

Overall, the Brand and Agency Briefing itself was an exciting session with great insights from Groupon and Shazam, in particular information pointing to mobile being an important part of their go-to-market strategies. Multi-tasking, using connected devices while watching TV, was a key point of discussion, and the case studies presented by Miles Lewis from Shazam are a great example of how Shazam has risen to take advantage of these trends. What we can take away from this briefing is that mobile should be integrated your strategy, not set apart and treated differently, because if the consumer doesn’t see it that way, why should we?

Toni Brasting, Head of Marketing for GlobalWebIndex, takes a look at the ‘Kony 2012′ social media phenomenon to provide a marketeer’s view on the campaign and what we can learn from Invisible Children (The group responsible).

With ‘Cover the night’ from Invisible Children failing to move from Internet to the streets, I was thinking about the Invisible Children campaign, in particular the ‘Kony 2012’ video. GlobalWebIndex have seen in every wave of research that the number one behaviour in every demographic is watching video online. Invisible Children used this media so effectively that it became a social media phenomenon and gained the type of engagement that every brand wants from their social media campaign. As a marketeer, I feel there are some lessons we can take away from this socially motivated video campaign and I’ve listed my ‘Top 4’ here:

1.       Get real and personal

If you haven’t watched the video on You Tube, it is incredible that Invisible Children wait till 3min 57sec to mention their cause, instead focusing initially on humorous, emotive and uplifting clips. Why?

You need to engage your audience on a personal level with content that they can directly relate to. Every user’s experience of the Internet is different.

Our research suggests that most segments (creators, reviewers, socialisers) watched a video clip last month (all segments above 80%), whereas these same segments differ dramatically when we look at how many proactively manage their social network profile (creators 87%, reviewers 67%, socialisers 100%). For more information on these segments, see Brett Petersen’s post: How were the new customised segments created?. When creating a campaign for these groups you would need to understand this behaviour.

Lesson learnt: You need to understand your audience and their behaviour, and connect to them before you ask anything of them (this includes passing on your brand’s message).

2.       Make it loveable, watchable, beautiful

15% of people surveyed suggested that they viewed video created by a brand, whilst 39% viewed music videos.  Video is a media that uses imagery, sound and feeling – no other media can do this all at once. Watching Jason Russell’s little boy talking about how to stop Kony, you feel emotion; you keep watching the simple beauty of a child trying to fix this problem. Video is not just visual or audio – it’s emotive.

There has been a rise in more professionally created video, and brands are using this to showcase their products to increase the chance of the video going viral. You Tube states that 98 of AdAge’s top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on You Tube. Video gives brands the opportunity to make an emotional impression on their audience through high quality, interesting and beautiful campaigns.

Lesson learnt: Make the media of video work for your campaign by engaging all the senses you can.

3.       Keep momentum

As of 30 March 2012, the film had over 86 million views on YouTube. It has been aired on ABC News and even Oprah has endorsed it. So why wasn’t it posted everywhere? Where was the hype for ‘Cover the night’? The video audience has a very small attention span and you need to work hard to drive long term attention online. What is more important to brands is to have a permanent online position and commitment and that means creating interesting, regular content that is extended by campaigns.

Lesson learnt:  For a longer lasting online presence, keep the content flowing.

4.       Real world affects the social world and vice versa

There was a great deal of controversy that the overriding message from ‘Kony 2012′ was oversimplified, and that Invisible Children in some instances were reporting erroneous information. For me however, a substantial amount of credibility was lost when the main spokesperson, Jason Russell, had a very public breakdown that went viral. It is ironic that the media that made Kony 2012 also helped to discredit it. People forget that the internet, whilst a different beast, is also intricately connected to the real world.

Lesson learnt: What your brand does offline will most certainly affect it online. An integrated campaign with both offline and online components will capture more of your audience and be more relevant to each segment of your target audience.

All too often people and organisations look at the Internet and mobile as singular, standalone “medias”, adding them into the mix of “TV”, “Radio” “Outdoor” and “Press”.

This typical view embodies the internet as a singular PC browser driven platform dominated by advertising, with mobile and tablets as a separate new media formats added to the end.

However this is misguided, dangerous and underestimates the impact and potential of the internet. The internet today exists across multiple devices and carries every media type possible, with consumers living an integrated online life. Actions on the PC are shared on the mobile and vice versa. My personal internet life happens across 5 devices and I’m far from alone.

Since my last piece on this in November, things have moved on further, with the Facebook purchase of Instagram underlining how the integrated multi-platform internet experience is everything, in particular for users – they don’t see the internet and their social network usage differently between platforms.

A recent project we delivered for a client explored the changing multiplatform, multi-content landscape with the output identifying that consumers were becoming increasingly platform agnostic about the actions and internet behaviour they deliver by device as you can now do anything anywhere. For example, 64% of iPhone users accessed their Social Network profile on their device in the last month versus 65% on PC , 46% watched video on-demand on device versus 80% by PC and 22% have written a blog post versus 30% via PC. This is a concrete indication that the majority of active behaviours are replicated across devices.

Sure, it’s still easier to write a blog post on a PC than a mobile, but not by much, and as content becomes shorter, more about status updates, check-ins, imagery and sharing, the distinctions will increasingly become smaller.

The outcome of this is that internet behaviour and actions are more driven by the consumer, who they are and what they do, as the platform or device is no longer the barrier. This means you need to be going beyond top-line data to really understand your target. If you don’t, your strategy will fall way short and worse, be generic.

It’s time to embrace new internet thinking:

• Never build a strategy with one internet platform in mind. For example, to view “mobile” as a separate entity compared with browser based PC internet is misguided and dangerous. Consumers act out their internet lives across multiple platforms and access points – you need to engage on all touch points.
•  Get beyond “internet advertising” and optimisation thinking. In this multi-platform, all brands will invest in video, apps, digital events and experiences, social customer service, outreach etc. None of which are about buying ad space
• Ultimately agencies and marketing departments need to build content teams that can operate across multiple platforms with the understanding that the audience doesn’t see the distinction, so therefore neither should we.
• Invest in strategy development. Increasingly as a brand you will be investing more money upfront. You can’t just test and learn, this requires detailed audience understanding and proper strategy development

Here at the GlobalWebIndex we embody all these points into our research development, with multi-platform and non-advertising content and experiences at our core.

The recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook has everyone talking: Why would Facebook buy a company that makes no revenue? The GWI office considered this in terms of the frequency of social networking and mobile photo sharing and found some interesting statistics:

Individuals who update their status more than once a day are twice as likely to upload photos online from the mobile phone (61%) compared to 35% of individuals who update their status weekly.  

When looking at these stats, knowing already that Facebook considers mobile revenue key to their future success, with potentially negative effects on revenue as per their Risk Statement from their IPO filing with the SEC,  we can assume that the relationship between Facebook power users and photo sharing translates into Instagram being a very important acquisition, maybe even worth the paid $1 Billion US.

Sebastian Hedencrona, Group Client Director at GlobalWebIndex asks why most strategy is defined by hype, optimisation and not true consumer insight and understanding  

From the day that we are born our perception of the world and ourselves is altered based on the things we see, hear, touch and feel. The ability to understand the factors that influence us and the decisions we make based on these influences should be the first step for any marketing, product or relationship professional to ensure that the resources are placed in the right space with the right message to trigger the desired outcome.

Despite many believing the internet was going to provide the holy grail of targeted advertising it has, for a long time, been about optimisation of web banners, search results and test and learn content. This optimisation approach has been built on limited audience insight, with profiling based on basic variables such as age or gender. Many focused this thinking on a specific set of websites and spent their valuable resources looking at their upstream and downs stream traffic –individual instances of interactions between consumer and brand, which has been at the expense of building out an understanding of what consumer segments are really doing online. However now thanks to the rise of social media, branded content and services investments are less around “advertising” that can be optimised and more around building our major investments in people, agencies and content. This requires a deeper understanding of how specific target audiences are using the internet and why.

This strategy is no longer good enough and the evolving landscape of online, technology and specifically the impact of globalisation and the “invention” of social has highlighted that it’s not a game of 1’s and 0’s mixed together until a product is purchased but that the internet is a network of individuals – making conscious decisions about what and how to connect, share and consume.

Understanding individual thoughts and needs is not a new concept. One of the first forms of market research was practiced in the US during the 1820s by newspapers conducting street surveys to understand current feelings towards political parties. Localised market research meant more papers sold because people were more connected with the content.

As technology propelled us into a globalised community we were provided with the tailor our actions to a specific region, country, device, platform, time of day and even create personalised messages for each individual, constantly changing content and evolving the campaign per second – dependent on the individual’s actions.

But what we are finding here at GlobalWebIndex is that too often online, mobile and social media strategy, in the absence of optimisation data is being built on freely available top line data found through Google searches or provided by a mix of research providers across a variation of formats. This data will tell you a very limited and fragmented story, providing general ideas and broad strategies to capture your market share. Ideas such as ‘Facebook is king’, ‘The internet is a big deal’ and ‘Everybody is sharing content’ might be true (for some), but with everyone pushing or developing the same concepts and focusing on the same platforms, consumers will be bombarded with untargeted messages – how is this going to help your brand stand out?

Let’s consider how *we* want to be viewed – as individuals with unique interactions and ideas, and embrace that thinking with our market research and deliver true consumer centric understanding.  Let’s move our campaigns and advertising to be led by credible segmented data that tells the story for your specific target audience and business category.  Let’s move away from generic and into the future where making decisions are made based on real research leading to unique, interesting and profitable online presence.

The newly updated Version 4.0 of the GlobalWebIndex Analysis Platform is sporting a fantastic new look after its beautiful refurbishment, well done to our great designer Rickard! I thought it would be good to highlight some of the new navigational features of the tool that have helped to create a more user-friendly and visually compelling experience.

1. The layout of the tool is simple and effective with tab buttons replacing the previous navigation so we no longer have to keep reverting to the homepage to enter different modes of analysis. I have found this improvement in itself to save me a lot of time particularly when pulling out data for audiences I have created (example of an audience analysis chart below), along with the enhanced processing time which improves the user experience overall.

2. As a relatively new member of the GlobalWebIndex team, I initially found the interactive grid infographic really useful for familiarising myself with the vast amount of data available.

Rather than taking you to this infographic when clicking on the different analysis views, we are now transported directly to the analysis mode with the option to explore the questions using the infographic by clicking on the 3×3 grid icon next to the search bar. This is how it looks on the pink-coded Demographic View:

3. To locate a particular question in the data we have found the use of the search bar to be more efficient particularly as clients become more familiar with the data and the many questions that the data allows us to answer. Usually when working on projects users will have a particular objective as to the type of data they want to analyse and so the search bar has been made as the sole key function for finding the data. If the question you are looking for does not pop up or if you are unsure of which questions will be useful I would recommend searching through the grid infographic as it may be worded slightly differently, and this is likely to also help you discover other relevant data the GlobalWebIndex can offer you.

4. Another update to the tool is the newly structured Crosstab View formerly known as the “Freestyle Analysis” mode. The Column v Row layout is much clearer than the questionX v questionY arrangement, and the adoption of the more traditional crosstab style means extremely easy usage, especially for those of you who are familiar with crosstab analysis. Like in the Demographic and Audience Views, you locate the questions you need by using the search bar or manually selecting them and create the crosstab by simply alternating between “Column” and “Row”. You also have the option of viewing the universe, responses, vertical %, horizontal % and index figures by highlighting accordingly from the Variables sections above the crosstab.

5. The new version allows for 4 questions to be selected in each mode, making multiple cross-referencing possible and allowing simultaneous analysis using not only the questions but also the demographic options on the splitters.

Enjoy exploring the new analysis platform and we hope you are also finding it a great improvement to the former version.

Mashable’s article ‘Is Google + the number 3 social network’  demonstrates why reliance on free and top line data can be an extremely misleading for strategy development.  In response to this article, our latest GWI.7 reveals some interesting information to help provide a clearer picture:

Clarity: UK GWI.7 Preview

We are providing a sneak preview of results from the UK segment of the research which we have used to validate survey functionality. This table below is the current picture (from the field this week), using a smaller sample size (221) than the final UK sample (2000). This small preview gives a good indication of trends, but means at this stage there are zeros in certain age groups. We predict that the final picture will be very similar.

UK adoption of Social Media services by Age Group: April 2012

Question: Please select the social media services on which you have an account and also to which you have actively use or contributed to in the past month. (% of UK internet users)

Looking back to the article there is :

Publisher data cannot be relied on:

• The continuing smoke and mirrors around Google+’s “official” take up and numbers, ranging from 100m to 170m in the course of the last month show why publisher derived numbers should not be used as a basis as they fluctuate too much for any strategic decision making.
• All publishers hype their active user figures and, as we know from the Facebook and Linkedin IPO filings, active usage is an estimate and can be based on very low levels of engagement.

Referencing numbers without source or methodology means the data could be coming from anywhere:

• In particular, noting that Twitter has 500m is hugely misleading. This number is an estimate from a service called Twopcharts and is so far from credible it’s not worthy of printing. While it attracts coverage and hype, it’s a dangerous piece of misinformation. Our GWI.6 numbers put it at 72m and Twitter themselves only claim 140m
• More importantly, this is an estimate of the total number of accounts ever registered. This is not the same as “users” or “active users”. When creating strategy, these are the numbers you should use.
• In the same paragraph, they reference LinkedIn with 150m members, but with no explanation. Again this is a completely different number to active usage and our latest numbers from GWI.6 put the active userbase at 87m.

Mixing up methodologies does not allow for comparison:

• The Comscore figures quoted are for visits to the URL from their panel of home PC users. This is not the same as people creating accounts and as we know, mobile and work adoption is huge, so the number of active users is larger. Google+ is not a destination service, like Facebook, instead it is more of a social layer users can interact with across the web and Google services  – the different use means different interaction and lower levels as seen in our latest preview data.

Mixing global data and US only:

•  The US picture no longer reflects what is happening elsewhere in the world. Consumer uptake of social services is far higher in fast growing internet markets and the US can no longer be used as a guide of global adoption
• The story is forgetting Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, which are both bigger in scale, on Chinese adoption alone

Most crucially, these very top-line numbers provide no indication of whether your target audience is engaging. Targeted / segmented research will create a more rigorous base to start a plan from. Our previous blog post is a good one to read for understanding why targeted / segmented data is key.

We created  the GlobalWebIndex with one key goal. We wanted to enable clients and users to analyse the reality of how their specific target audiences use the internet.

We found time and time again that there was a huge knowledge gap, being filled by hype and speculation.  We found that brands didn’t have the ability to understand how their target audience is using the internet, a need that is critical when delivering credible strategy and implementation online.

Too often online, mobile and social media strategy is being built on freely available top line data found through Google searches or provided by some of the legacy providers in the market place. This data will tell you a very limited story.. For example; “The internet is a big deal”, “Everyone is sharing content” or “Facebook is bigger than your branded website”.

Freely available and non-segmented data is, in short, a very dangerous thing. It leads to “Me Too” thinking, with everyone pushing or developing the same concepts and focusing on the same platforms. If everyone uses the same shallow data consumers will be bombarded with untargeted messages and generic brand presence, and in social media, will become more familiar and increasingly less effective.

You need the detail of how and why consumers do what they do. For example, if you know that Facebook is key to your target audience and fits your brand, you need to know how they use it, what proportion are contributors Vs. passives and how to engage both, why they do it and how they want to interact with your brand. It is not acceptable just to know that Facebook is important.

Many seem to think a social media strategy starts and ends with whether we have a presence on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. If all your data says is “be on Facebook”, you are stabbing in the dark and investing significant money and resources without a clear view of what conversations, content and services to develop will make you successful and you are selling the breadth and impact of social media short.

This shallow thinking needs to stop and it has to be led by credible segmented data that tells the story for your specific target audience and business category.  Let’s move away from generic and towards making smart decisions leading to a unique, interesting and profitable online presence.

Whilst we were beavering away in the office, Brett Petersen was wowing audiences in Munich at the International Search Summit on the 29th of March.  Brett discussed the rolling out of Google’s new Search plus You World service in which social media will play a much larger role in search marketing and how to succeed in this new environment.

Key takeaways from the talk include:

- Search Plus Your World is changing search as we know it

- Google+ is already a key social network, especially in emerging markets.  What people do and say on Google+ will impact your search marketing.

- Google vs. Facebook.  We are seeing the emergence of “Facebook Fatigue”

- Search and social merge: search and social need to work closely together to ensure success

To download the slides from Brett’s talk, follow the link http://slidesha.re/HoO8MT

From Monday we will be launching the updated Version 4.0 of the GlobalWebIndex Analysis Platform.

Our new version represents a major step change in the tool development providing a far quicker, intuitive and rewarding experience.  If you have used the tool before you will not require external orientation, just play and enjoy. For those not as familar we have a “Quick Start” guide to orientate yourself to the changes.

We will also be providing training which will include webinars and one to one support for our customers. For any questions or help with training please contact your account manager.

Below are some screen shots and an update to what has been changed.

New Navigation and User Flow

• A tabbed based system now replaces ribbon navigation. This makes it easier and quicker to switch modes and move around the tool
• “DEMOGRAPHIC VIEW” now replaces “MARKET ANALYSIS”, the name better reflecting the purpose of the analysis, which is to cross reference questions by core groups of demographics.
• “CROSSTAB VIEW” replaces “FREESTYLE ANALYSIS”, and is simplified to only cover the selection of “COLUMN” and “ROW” questions. Multiple question selections have been integrated into “DEMOGRAPHIC” and “AUDIENCE” views.
• “PROFILE ANALYSIS” has been removed as the analysis result can be easily achieved with “CROSSTAB VIEW”
• You now select questions directly from same page as you view the data, this speeds data selection and process. If you still want to view the data in the old format, this now exists on an explore the question page which can be accessed form the following button.

• You now choose your chart view from below the currently visible charts.

We hope you enjoy the new analysis experience.

If you missed us at Social Media World Forum Europe you we wont let you miss out. Brett and Tom did great guns, so much so that twitter  is running hot for the slides, so I thought we had better get them on here for you. Check them out at slidesha.re/GZWJIg

We are back here again at Olympia conference centre for the Social Media World Forum- Europe. We would love to see you here – come grab a cupcake, check out our new tool and see the rest of this fantastic conference on social media. We also have a competition to win a free customized infographic for one lucky winner!

Come see Tom Smith and Brett Petersen speaking tomorrow at the marketing tech track on:

‘The key to making your business a social media success is knowing your customers – practical insights from GlobalWebIndex’

Can’t wait to catch up with you down here at Social Media World Forum!

Last date for submission: 16^th April 2012

GlobalWebIndex is now into its 3^rd year of research of the global online consumer. We are currently in field for GWI.7 and have introduced four new countries including Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and the UAE, taking our coverage to 31 countries worldwide.

The increasing demand for customising GWI has led us to bring you our latest product launch in our solutions suite, the GWI Omnibus re-contact survey. This product gives our clients the availability to include questions and brands relevant to projects and client in a cost effective format to fit their research budgets. This survey provides clients with a great opportunity to customise questions, with a quick turnaround time linking short re-contact studies to the rich GWI Core Study on a local, regional global level.

To take part in the GWI Omnibus, final submission date is on the 16^th April 2012. If you have any questions or would like to be contacted  to discuss the options available to you just email or call and we will be happy to help you explore the possibilities for yours or your client’s brand!

GWI.6 TrendsWe have been working hard over the past month to put together the latest installment of the GWI Trends series.  This latest report includes data from our latest research wave, GWI.6, which details some updates to previously identified trends as well as covering some completely brand new areas that we think will be particularly interesting for everyone. Below is a brief overview of some of the new trends covered in the GWI.6 report:

The rise of the Social Brand: GWI.6 provides the most detailed view to date of how global internet consumers are interacting with brands in the social media age. While branded websites are still the primary brand engagement point for consumers online, nearly a third are already engaging brands through social media, proving the value of having brands on social media.

In GWI.6, 59% of global internet users had visited a brand website in the last month, 29% had liked a product or brand and 24% had visited a branded social network profile. The preference for social brand interaction is even more marked in emerging internet markets such as Indonesia and The Philippines, where 50% of users had visited a branded social network page in the last month.

Social networking can now deliver mass reach for brands and the trend is most visible among younger internet users with 16-24s much more likely to “like” a brand or product than older age groups, for example. However micro-blogging remains a far more targeted social strategy with just 9% had retweeted a branded post and only 13% had opted to follow a brand on a micro-blog.

Consumers that interact with businesses in the social media space do expect something in return with future discounts, better customer service and personalised recommendations cited by all age groups as the leading motivations. Such expectations are significantly higher in emerging markets with Argentina, Philippines and Brazil indexing highest across a range of areas, demonstrating how consumers in these markets are particularly open to building relationships with brands online.

Death of digital: digital can no longer be seen as a separate “media” as consumers globally are transitioning media consumption across multiple internet platforms in record numbers. This is particularly marked in TV, which is now being consumed at higher levels than music online. In the US, for example, while 90% of internet users watch an hour of TV a day, 27% also watch on-demand TV online, 10% stream live TV online and 8% stream live TV to their mobiles on a monthly basis. In China – the leading internet TV market – the figures are even more dramatic with only 65% watching an hour of TV a day, while 53% watching on demand TV online, 40% streaming live TV online and 19% watching live TV via a mobile.

Increasingly, there is no digital divide for content and consumers are becoming device agnostic. For marketers this means more focus on the content type and not the device.

Googopoly – Google has evolved into the gatekeeper of the Internet: Google has massively improved its position as the world’s biggest controller of information and is starting to dominate all access points to the internet. Its core search product reaches more than 85% of global internet users every month (up from 76.1% in GWI.1). Even in markets where local search competitors are strong, Google has also gained major traction. In Russia, for example it now has 82% monthly reach compared to more than 90% for local champion Yandex.

Other evidence of Googopoly includes the growth of Chrome – it’s now the most widely used browser in the Philippines, Turkey, Argentina and India among others – and significant growth of Android. Android now has 227m active users across 27 GWI markets, up from 161m in GWI.5, with 33% of global smartphone users utilising it. Android is now the leading platform in developed mobile markets such as South Korea, Sweden, US and Spain.

Our data also shows the massive growth of Google+, which is already the world’s second biggest social network. Our data indicates that a massive 22% of social network users now have active profiles – peaking in India at 49%.

With clear fatigue in Facebook usage and stalling Twitter growth there are huge opportunities in social. The integration with search results makes Google+ a central social layer across the internet.

We hope you enjoy the report and share it both internally and with clients!

When Google Developer Advocate Don Dodge stated back at the beginning of December that the “Any numbers you’ve heard are way low” and Google+ VP, Product, Bradley Horowitz claimed in a live hang out in December that the “News about Google+ sign ups will shock everybody”, we were expecting bigger things.

In today’s socially focused global internet , we would anticipate a significantly higher number of new sign-ups  from a service as integral to web users’ daily lives as Google is, than the 50m in three months announced yesterday.

Based on the GWI.6 research carried out in November 2011, which established that 22% of active social network users had an account on Google+, we translated that into 145m active social network users on the network (based on the method we use to calculate our universe sizes).

We understand the confusion this significant difference might raise, but until Google provide some clarity on what a Larry Page’s definition of an active user is – as well as an idea of the source and methodology, we stand by this figure. We are also looking forward to the next wave GWI.7, which will commence fieldwork in February, to provide extra benchmarks on Google+ adoption and growth.

Publishers and services with advertising to sell, investors to keep happy or IPOs to prepare normally look to post the highest number possible and our active user figures are always lower than what is claimed, which makes the Google figure more puzzling.

Of course, sometimes publishers don’t actually know how many users they have, as we discovered in the IPO Prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US by a large social property:

“Given the challenges inherent in identifying these accounts, we do not have a reliable system to accurately identify the number of actual members, and thus we rely on the number of registered members as our measure of the size of our network.”

That is why we run independent research, which is better placed to benchmark consumer involvement and well favoured by advertisers and agencies.

Nevertheless, GWI will deliver updated research throughout 2012 and we will be returning to this topic and reviewing our future results in the same detailed manner as always.

The simple fact for marketers is that Google increasingly owns and controls all key access points to the internet, from browsers, to search, to social, to mobile, something we cover in our GWI.6 trend report, which is out next week. For marketers, Google+ involvement is a must.

Multi-tasking between TV and internet connected devices is now the norm across the world. No figure highlights this better than the GWI.6 finding that less than 20% of respondents had not multi-tasked in the last month. While laptops lead, with nearly 50% of respondents having utilised them in tandem with watching TV in the last month, the really striking point is the multi-tasking adoption of mobile devices, with 40% having used a mobile and 10% a tablet while watching TV. While it’s a little early to develop a robust cased based on the data available, this is yet another indicator of the shift away from PC based internet consumption to mobile.

Which of the following devices have you used while watching TV?

(percentage of internet users globally, Wave 1 July 2009, Wave 6 November 2011)
 

This data demonstrates a number of things:

Some of the new TV technology coming out at CES this week perfectly demonstrates this trend as TV OEMs seek to allow people. We’ve seen the like of Lenovo, LG and Samsung releasing internet –connected “Smart TV” sets that included movement and voice recognition software that will allow users to control their TV set without a remote control. OEMs are also increasing the interconnectivity between other devices and TV sets which is just one more reason that we are sure to see multi-tasking grow around the world.

Since July 2009 we’ve been tracking what motivates consumers to get online. The chart below shows the changes from GWI.1 to GWI.6 for consumers recording the following motivations as “very strong”.

What’s immediately telling is that all the “very strong” motivations are on the rise, this is indicative of growing importance of the internet in people’s lives. The other key aspect is the motivations that lead are all about self-improvement, from “networking for work” to “education” to “promoting something”. We’ve identified a number of reasons for this:

How important are the reasons below for you using the internet?

(percentage of internet users globally, Wave 5 July 2011, Wave 6 November 2011)
 

Throughout 2011 we have been tracking the core motivations for a consumer to follow a brand in a social network. As we can see from the chart below that looks at all respondents across the 27 markets there has been a very fixed picture of what consumers want. Since February 2011, both June and November sets of data see higher scores for all the motivations and a lower score of the “no interest”. This suggests an increase in consumers appetite to interact with brands.

Motivations to follow a branded page on a social network.

(percentage of internet users globally, Wave 4 February 2011, to Wave 6 November 2011
 

The number one motivation is unsurprisingly “discounts for future purchases”. Of course everybody loves a discount, so before you rush out with a couponing strategy you should consider whether it fits your brand, position and desired outcomes.

More interestingly for the advocates of social business (myself included), “Customer Service” has ranked number 2 in every single wave. This is a huge insight to support the idea of extending your customer experience across open social channels. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook service centres work and are valued. This point is echoed by “deliver tracking” and “interacting with staff” at the company scoring highly.

The other core aspect is about insider knowledge and personalisation. “Personalised purchase recommendations” comes third, while accessing new products lies fourth. Consumers like to get something back. This is quite obvious, but also demonstrates how open the relationship can be.

The other really interesting point is the low rankings for social features, such as “connecting with other fans of the shop”, “details of what my friends have brought” and “details of what my friends would like to buy”. This mirrors some of the macro trends that are being coming from the study as a whole including the idea that consumers love and value to interact with brands in social networks and that social technologies are becoming less about peer to peer connections and more about top down ones. In short brands don’t have to bend to fit the social network by enabling peer to peer connections, they can be there on their own right building direct connections.

Still many people question the right to brands being in social networks. This data underlines our position that consumers value it and their growing presence is a positive force.

2011 was a great year for GlobalWebIndex and with developments of our survey questions, country coverage, frequency of delivery, online platform and a very respectable list of new and long-term clients – we were delighted to sign of our latest wave under the new acronym: GWI.6 just before Christmas.

GWI.6 includes a range of updates to the dataset including new questions and increased samples – to find out more, please read our GWI.6 Overview Blog-post. In addition to delivering our first year of standardised 3 Waves per year here is a summary of 2011 in numbers:

3 New Waves (6Waves Total)
GWI set the standard for global online research by delivering 3 waves of research this year – a format that we are committed to delivering in 2012 and beyond.

 10 New Countries (27 Countries Total)
Argentine | Poland | Turkey | Saudi Arabia | South Africa | Sweden | Philippines | Indonesia | Hong Kong | Singapore

71,432 Respondents (122,000 Total)
An astounding number of respondents and with a growing number of countries we are expecting to deliver over 100,00 respondents in 2012

Extended Questionnaire
New questions around Tablets and Mobile as well as online privacy are representative of the times

Insight Reports
The GWI Insight Team has delivered a new range of reports to help our clients to gain a better understanding of the scope that the GWI dataset provides. Starting with US Social Media, Italian Social Media & B2B Social Media Strategy…

New Brand Data
Mobile & Tablet Operating Systems in UK, US &Brazil | Mobile Operators in UK, US & China | Automobile Brands in UK, US & Germany | Retail & FMCG Brands Globally | Soft Drink Brands in Brazil, US & China | PC Brands Globally

New Clients
BCG | Leo Burnett| PepsiCo| Starcom NL/Turkey | Business Compass SMG Dubai | R/GA | Bloom WW| LBi | Performics | AMAZE | Cohn&Wolfe NY/London/Boston| BBC Worldwide | Deutsche Welle | ROSE| Arnold Worldwide | Nokia | Beverage Partners Worldwide | Orangina / Schweppes | Ladbrokes | MRI | Oracle | WeAreSocial |  Havas Digital | Digitas NY/Seattle | Altimeter Group. . .

New Tagline: GlobalWebIndex – Tracking the Future of the Internet: PC | Mobile | Social| Global  

2012 – We have many further developments for product and services due for launch in the next 12 months so stay tuned for more updates.

We would like to wish you all a Happy & Successful 2012!

Since we highlighted this growth yesterday we’ve spent some time discussing how this could happen. In addition to what Brett pointed out yesterday, it’s clear to me that there are a number of other reasons why Google+ is such a success:

Ultimately, it looks like Google+ will become the biggest social network; whether it captures significant activity is the billion dollar question though. Currently, it looks like it will run in tandem with other players still growing. If Google dominates social to the detriment of other offerings, the social landscape will be a far less interesting place, but because the current environment is driving so much innovation, we don’t see that happening anytime soon.

The sheer size of the Chinese internet market can be distorting when we look at global figures and especially when we look at micro-blogging figures.

Which of the following micro-blogging services do you currently use?

(millions of internet users in China, Wave 5 July 2011, Wave 6 November 2011)
 
If we look at active users of micro-blogging services in millions, we can see that GWI 6 estimates that the Chinese Micro-blogging site Sina Weibo has 184m active users, up from 154m in June 2011. This compares perfectly to Sina released figures of 200m.

Compare this to Twitter, and the size of China is clear. As of November 2011, Twitter has just over 72m active users, a difference of 110m active uses compared to Sina Weibo. More crucially, Twitter grew their active user base by just 1m from June to November 2011, compared to Sina’s 30m increase. These compare to Twitter released figures of 100m at the end of October. The slowing growth is probably due in part to the release of Google+, which mirrors many features of the micro-blogging service. We currently classify this as a social network, however we are actively reviewing how we classify these services as we move forward.

Interestingly, other smaller platforms are showing significant usage, with Tumblr recording 15m active users and Friendfeed with 18.6m, while “other sites / services” sits at 70m, demonstrating that the market is more diverse than many of us think.

The comparison of Twitter and Sina us shows three things. Firstly, there are two internets in the world, China and then everyone else. Secondly, while the hype always follows Twitter, we should (and the investor money certainly) all keep an eye on Sina. Thirdly, if you are a brand operating in China, it is imperative that you utilise micro-blogging platforms.

Moving forward, the news that Sina is developing an English language international version will be a real test of whether China, with the scale of its home market, can export its social services in the same way the US has.

This will be a huge challenge but key to seeing how the future of the internet will shape up.

Yes, seeing that number for the first time even surprised us given that the last official Google figure for Google+ was just 40 million users. Given the effort that goes into designing our surveys in each market and the extensive quality control procedures that we and our partners have in place, we always believe what the data tells us and our data is always spot on when compared with other sources.  Hence, this is a case of trying to understand why and how Google+ can actually have 150 million users worldwide. In reality, these are active social network users who at least have an account on Google+; whether or not they are active on Google+ specifically is a different story. When we looked into it further, we didn’t find anyone else who had any type of figures and Google has been suspiciously quiet since their Q3 financial statement that gave us that 40 million user number.

We did find, however, anecdotal evidence that supports GWI findings on the active Google+ user base. Firstly, there was this conversation with Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, where he states that “Any numbers you’ve heard are way low.”  There are also people such as Paul Allen who are tracking the numbers of last names on Google+ to estimate subscriber figures.  Allen says that Google+ subscriber numbers were growing at 2 million a day in September 2011 based on his methodology, meaning there are much more than 40 million Google+ users.

In addition to the evidence above, there are practical reasons why Google+ has surpassed Twitter and is closing in on Facebook.  The main thing that springs to my mind is Google’s ambition to integrate social into everything it does as has been express by Google CEO, Larry Page.  What this means is that Google+ will be a much more subtle part of its users lives than other social networks.  Through the integration of its other services such as gmail, reader, picassa, etc., Google has essentially made Google+ the hub of all of Google’s social activities, and users of any number of Google services now have incentives to have a Google+ profile.

Furthermore, Google has one key advantage over the likes of Facebook and Twitter: Android. Android smartphones have taken the smartphone market by storm, and the more people access the internet through their mobile devices, the more their activity is channeled through Google’s ecosystem. Deep Google+ integration into Android devices provides further incentives for Android owners to utilise Google+ services thanks to the better mobile experience they provide. Click here for more details on how Google+ is being integrated into Android.

Based on what we’ve read, the fact that Google+ has the third highest number of active users of any social network or micro-blog platform is impressive but is, indeed, very likely.  Facebook, which has 474 million active users across the 27 GWI markets, should start to take notice as should Twitter which has a user base half the size of Google+.  Google+ is growing at a much faster rate than Facebook did when it was first launched and is not far from overtaking Sina Weibo as the world’s second most popular social media service. Moreover, Google+ is already a global social power player with only 15 million of its users located in its home market, the United States.

Which of the following social networks do you currently have an active profile?

(million internet users globally, GWI.6 November 2011)

The latest GWI data proves that brands need to take Google+ seriously.  Not only because the service has 150 million users across the 27 GWI countries but also because Google is intent on building social into the very fabric of its services.  This means that everything from search to email to Android will be influenced by Google+.  Google+ branded pages are now beginning to appear at the top of organic search results for example!  If there are any brands out there who didn’t want to put the effort into Google+ because it was just another social network and Facebook and Twitter are enough, I suggest you start to rethink that strategy.

A key feature of our recent trend reports has been the shift away content creation and written word platforms to “real-time” platforms that focus on sharing and light interaction.

As we can see from the graph below that shows % point change in active (monthly) usage of core social platforms, GWI 6 sees no let-up in this trend, and the changes between July 2009 and November 2011 are striking.

% Point Change in between July 2009 and November 2011

(% of internet users globally, Wave 6 November 2011)

Firstly, if we look at blogging, we can see net declines in 11 of the 16 markets that originally made up the GlobalWebIndex. The largest declines are in South Korea and Japan where social blogging had long been the primary form of online networking. Most other markets are stagnant, showing minor drops. There are some exceptions, in particular Brazil and China, where blogging is still a new phenomenon to the tens of millions of new internet users.

The shift is even starker when compared to the massive growth in micro-blogging and social networking. This is most pronounced in China, where the monumental growth of micro-blogging (31 % point increase!), speared headed by Sina Weibo, was followed by a 27% point increase in Social Networking, thanks to QZone and RenRen among others. The massive growth in social networking is seen across all the other markets, although longer term growth in US and Canada is lower as we’ve recently started to see saturation and even decline in active usage.

This is a pattern mirrored in micro-blogging, where Brazil, Russia and Spain lead growth. While these growth levels are lower than social networking, we should also bear in mind that micro-blogging has a much smaller user base and growth comparisons can be misleading of true size. Interestingly, the only market to show a small decline is the US; this demonstrates clearly how the growth of Twitter is being driven by global markets outside their home.

These inter-market differences underline another big macro trend we’ve identified, in terms of how free to access social media is enabling consumers in growth markets to transform the internet. Consumers in growth markets are doing this with increasing appetite, which is driving increased differentiation and an ever increasing localisation of the internet.

An unsurprising trend, but one that’s always worth keeping an eye on, is the continued growth of mobile and tablet internet access.

% Point Change between July 2009 and November 2011

(% of internet users globally, Wave 6 November 2011)

Between February 2011 and November 2011, tablet access grew from 7% to 12% of global internet users, while mobile grew from 47% to 54%.

We expect this growth to continue over the next 5 years until they reach parity with, or even outstrip, traditional PC access points, as internet enabled platform phones continue to dominate sales and tablet devices plummet in price. This interest can be clearly seen in the numbers of people planning to purchase a tablet.

We’ve just released the latest tranche of GWI data, GWI6, collected in November 2011, taking our total number of surveyed internet users up to just over 122K. If you are a client you will now find this in your online tool, with a full GWI6 trends deck to follow. Over the next few days we’ll be pre releasing some hi-lights that will underpin the trends.

One of the first interesting nuggets to come out was how QR Codes are used across the world.  Overall, there has been significant increase in the amount that people all across on the world are doing on the mobile phones, but QR codes stood out as one of the most divergent activities.

The contrast is most stark because QR code usage in one of the areas where the Japanese actually lead in terms of penetration. Nearly a third (29%) of Japanese internet users were using QR codes in November 2011.  This was followed by 22% of South Koreans and 17% of Chinese actively using QR codes in November 2011. We can immediately see how this falls into the bigger trend in the continued localization of behaviour when we compare these usage rate to other countries.  Only 8% of American and British internet users are actively using QR codes despite having significant smartphone penetration.  In other emerging markets, QR codes are even less popular with just 6% of Brazilians actively using them and 4% of Russian internet users.

Which of the following have you done on your mobile phone in the past month? Scanned a QR code.

(% of internet users globally, Wave 6 November 2011)
One concept that helps explain this data comes down to one defining variable: alphabet.  The three countries that lead in terms of QR code usage all have logographic character based written systems as opposed to phonetic alphabets used by much of the rest of the world.  As a result, taking a picture of a QR code is much easier than typing in a search term on a smartphone for a Chinese person.  Europeans on the other hand often find it easier to just type in a quick search term as opposed to snapping a picture of a QR code. Of course Asian (in particular) Japanese mobile users have long had QR readers integrated into their handsets. This is coming belatedly to the rest of the world, but not catching on.

Some major brands are already taking advantage of these local market characteristics.  Coca-cola and their “Happiness Quest” campaign in Japan is a great example of how brands are taking advantage of Japanese QR code usage by using them in gamification techniques. Click here for a bit more on that topic. Tesco in Korea has also started a noteworthy virtual-store campaign

This cultural divergence, in particular, illustrates why brands need to be mindful of certain cultural issues in any given market as it could severely affect the effectiveness of any integrated campaign.

It’s always great for GWI data to be used and cited in books. We see it as a real validation of our research.

So when Sandy Carter, IBM’s Vice President of Social Business Evangelism, asked us if she could cite our data in her new book “Get Bold”, we were delighted to accept.

Unsurprisingly, there is a growing volume of books on social media and we’ve read a good many of them. The collective view here at GWI was that “Get Bold” was one of the books you should pick up first because it focuses on how to integrate social into the fabric of your business, an idea we regard as crucial to a successful business strategy.

To accomplish this, Sandy focuses entirely on implementing a social business by moving beyond the idea that social media as another marketing channel and ensure that social technologies are used throughout a business to improve all aspects of business operations. The power of social technologies to transform the way organisations operate from HR to product development to sales will deliver massive positive benefits for those willing to “get bold” as Sandy says. Embracing social business delivers more consumer focus, happier staff, better products, excellent service and ultimately, greater profits.

Get Bold tackles the huge challenge of implementing a social business via a logical framework, ideas and great case studies.

IBM is often cited as a company leading the way in social business, and Sandy’s energy and passion for social business clearly shows why. You can pick up a copy at Amazon, and it is, of course, available on Kindle.

There is often a common perception that brands don’t really have place in social media. There is a sense they are invading (like an uninvited guest at a party) what we perceive as a consumer driven space.

But if you speak to consumers, the truth is somewhere opposite to this. Consumers love to interact with brands in social media, a reality demonstrated day in day out. The fact that Coca-Cola, Disney and Starbucks have over 30m fans each on Facebook, the hundreds of thousands of consumer created brand fan sites, plus literally 1000s of case studies of successful brand presence on social networks, demonstrate the obvious positive impact and consumer demand.  When you combine this with the constant theme in our data of consumer demand for interaction with brands, the view is even more persuasive.

If you step back there is a much broader story that underlines the consumer demand for brands to be active. It has long been observed that the reason branding has been so successful is due to the fact that brand adoption and association enables consumers to build their identity. We are all judged based on the brands that we buy and associate with. Following brands on social networks or micro-blog services is an extension of this brand association into the online world, and consumers often want these associations to be known and shared. Social Media in essence, makes it easier to build identity through brand association.

This was highlighted in a project we delivered last year in Brazil, where the growing popularity of Facebook over Orkut, was in a large part attributed to the ease of being able to self-promote the latest branded purchase. Countless pictures of Brazilian women, showing off their latest handbag and shoe purchases, made good anecdotes for this trend. Another project in China demonstrated the massive success that premium western brands were having across Chinese social platforms. For example, Mercedes Benz had built an incredible multi-platform presence with huge consumer participation that spanned social networks and video sites. While few of the engaged consumers will be current drivers of Mercedes, the brand association enables them to build their reputation online. At the same time they are advocating Mercedes and one day, they might just buy one. In short, both these examples showed how the growing consumer based society was driving social media adoption.

Furthermore, there are also a number of clear trends from our research that are enhancing the role of brands online.

• Transmitter Ecosystem: now that consumers are shifting from creation platforms such as blogs to lighter real-time sharing or status updates, everybody is looking for great content, news or events to share. Brands are incredibly well placed to benefit, as they have the resources and connections to develop brilliant content. Brands also have an advantage here because they are recognised entities with existing consumer relationships.
• Content Free for All: There are now no barriers to brands creating content, whether that be video, apps or online events, and thanks to the transmitter economy, it’s increasingly easier to distribute. Young consumers say that entertainment is the number one role a brand can play for them. In the future big consumer brands will all have content production teams.
• Return of top down influence: Twitter re-orientates users away from peer-to-peer influencers and onto “top down” influencers. This is why Twitter is dominated by celebrities, pro-sports stars, politicians, journalists and anyone else in the public eye. Google+ and recent changes from Facebook, are mirroring this shift which is again great news for brands.
• Demand for Interaction: The number one consumer demand from brands in social networks is to “be listened to”, followed by a “platform to interact with staff”. Users love the idea that direct lines of feedback to brands or their staff are working. In turn, these actions are increasingly shared to further enhance their personal identity.
• Fast Growing Market Adoption: The fastest growing markets for social network adoption are in places like China, Indonesia, Philippines or Brazil where lower per capita GDP mean that many of the brands that consumers identify with are out of reach in the real world but now completely accessible via social networks. The rapid adoption of the consumer society is being played out online in social media.
• Continuing reliance on advertising support: Social media might be free to the consumer, but of course somebody has to pay for it. Now the major platforms are being demanded by investors to start generating revenue, there will be increasingly focus on brand support.

In short, brands are playing a massively positive role on social media, and consumers value their presence. They value it not only for functional reasons like access to information and service, but also to help construct personal identities.  It’s time we appreciate the positive role they can play in creating great online experiences, communities and content.

I am starting to get really excited by the potential of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology.  Indeed, I very much look forward to not having to carry around my wallet, Oyster card, my array of loyalty cards, etc.   More importantly, however, it will allow me to more seamlessly share and connect with all sorts of people and brands.

I see NFC technology as one of the greatest opportunities for brands over the next two years.  Many of the latest Android, Nokia, and Blackberry handsets are already equipped with the technology already and the next iPhone is very likely to incorporate the technology as well.

From my view, NFC technology is the next step towards integrating the offline and online worlds.  The technology can be used in anything from outdoor print advertising to product packaging to vending machines.  Since an NFC chip can be placed inside almost anything without requiring a power source, it enables a multitude of information to be stored and transmitted over small distances no matter where the consumer is.  It is also easier for consumers to exchange information using NFC technology than say QR Codes.  Nor does the user need an internet connection as one would with QR Codes because a limited amount of data can be transferred from the chip to the device be it a video, a link for later, or a coupon.

Perhaps the true potential of the technology comes when it is applied on top of existing consumer engagement tools to make them more user-friendly and enjoyable.  Many brands are now engaging consumers via social channels by having blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, etc.  The question that most brands face once they’ve set these channels up, however, is how to engage their target market and build meaning relationships that translate into brand advocacy both online and offline. As we saw in GWI 5, however, only 29% of internet users worldwide have liked a product or brand on a social channel, and less than that have even visited a branded social network group. My feeling is that its not that consumers don’t want to do these things; the brands they use are part of their identity after all. But it is, instead, just too difficult or time consuming to have any meaningful engagement with brands under the current circumstances. At the moment, most outdoor brand communications will have a “call to action” that encourages them to go to their website or Facebook page by providing a URL.  It is rather annoying to type in a full blown URL on a smartphone, tablet, or even a PC for that matter!  Besides, one has to rely on people actually remember what that URL was by the time they have access to a device.  The simple fact of the matter is that there are just too many barriers for consumers to engage with offline communications when they’re out and about.

Now, imagine instead that you see an outdoor advert as you’re walking down the street.  Let’s say that it is for an early bird sale at a shop nearby, and its call to action asks you to simply touch your smartphone on a certain point to receive a ticket for the early bird sale and to like the store on Facebook.  The little NFC chip inside the advert sends the information directly to your smartphone once you’ve “tapped” the poster.  First, your Facebook app has opened up, prompting you to like the store.  After that, a coupon is sent to you as a pdf via Facebook or email.  An event is automatically created in your calendar to remind you of the event along with a google maps link that will tell you exactly how to get there.  This can all come from a 1 second tap on the icon on that poster, and has taken you just 5 seconds to like that brand on Facebook and share the event with all your contacts.

This is the essence of the seamless integration between offline and online brand experiences that NFC technology has the potential to harness, and the above example is only one of a million different possibilities.

Quite apart from the fact that digitised media and content now exist for all types of media regardless of whether it’s delivered over the air, in a book or on a DVD, the way consumers are adopting and using the internet, makes the term utterly redundant. To sum up, (if you are online) when was the last time you consumed anything analogue? This may sound trivial, but as we explore below, it has major impacts for the way we view the Internet.

But first there are a number of key trends as apparent in our data that demonstrate why “digital” is disappearing concept.

Increasingly “traditional media” types are delivered through the Internet

We’ve tracked from Wave 1 that TV, video, film, sports and news are increasingly delivered through the Internet.

For example by Wave 5 (June 2011), 51% of 16-24s had watched a film online in the past month. While this drops for older consumers, a substantial 17% of 55-64s watched one. For TV programming, 40% of 16-24s viewed in the past month and a more significant 24% of 55+. These figures will continue to expand.

This trend to consuming your “traditional media” online is even more pronounced in markets like China, where internet consumers view an incredible volume of traditional content online. For example, 62% had watched a film in the last month, rising to 66% for 16-24s. This is driven by the massive choice of professional on-demand content found in platforms like YouKu, lower quality TV content via analogue and a lack of multi TV households.

The Internet doesn’t look like the Internet

As we see above, the Internet is far more likely to deliver all types of media and content. This will explode as packaged internet services and applications become the norm. The way we consume the Internet less likely to be through a browser but an interface that looks far more like a TV electronic programme guide, a newspaper or a magazine on a tablet. As our Wave 5 Trends stated, applications are the fastest growing thing online. The browser (the typical perception of the Internet) will be just one of many windows to online services.

People are evolving into a state of constant connection

Thanks to access through non-PC connections we are increasingly permanently connected to the Internet in some form. And many people are using the same services e.g Facebook, Twitter etc across all platforms, therefore creating an integrated internet experience of total and constant connection.

A number of interesting data points demonstrate this. Just over 38% of internet users globally, use their mobile while watching TV, 49% their laptop and 8% a tablet. Only 19% never multi-task between TV and internet. This demonstrates the constant need to be connected even in dedicated “non digital” media occasions.

In addition, we recently established that 41% of Facebook users used more than one platform access point in the month of June 2011. This is a growing trend, people are adding more platforms and increasing their connection time, rather than replacing one platform with another.

Lastly, when exploring where people typically use mobile internet, we see that the leading usage point is ‘in the home’, with 31% choosing that as a leading access point, over 22% ‘while travelling’. Again, this demonstrates the growing need for constant connection as the Internet itself merges into a part of everyday life.

Fusion of real life into the internet

Increasingly, the Internet is entering real life experience or being fused into traditional offline processes. For example, location based services and geo-tagging were used by 46% of mobile internet users in June 2011. Real data, locations and experiences will increasingly be recorded and referenced into the social internet experience.

As we move into the future, the real world will become searable and indexed online. Thanks to NFC tags, all real world products will become a data point. This will allow you to search for products in stock in a local store, track the location of your lost keys or search the contents of a real book, that sits on your shelves.

Even now you can track the real-time physical location of friends and family. While it’s not popular currently, just 28% like the idea, and only 32% of 16-24s, it will surely grow as a concept.

Why is this important?

Referring to the Internet as “digital” implies that it is a media and a siloed entity. As we’ve shown here and explored before, the internet delivers every media, information and experience. In the future, it will deliver every type of information imaginable to every device.

Even today, “digital” is a dangerous position when building communications strategy or planning implementation. Talking of “digital” implies one mode of thought and skill set rather than viewing the entire online opportunity.

Holistic internet strategy requires a broad view of all media and content types and an understanding of how they connect. It also requires a detailed view of your target customer across all internet platforms and applications.

From a research point of view, it means that understanding one internet platform, without taking into account all of the others, is increasingly pointless. Consumers have an integrated, always connected experience across multiple devices. Also, as internet experience is increasingly about content, social, or apps, understanding behaviour is increasingly more important than URL visits. As you may have guessed, these are some of the principles that underpin the GlobalWebIndex.

This will have ramifications for how companies and agencies build their organisations and staffing structures:

- You need multiple platform internet strategists, people who understand all media types, the big picture and how they fit together

- Increasing focus on insight, strategy and a shift from optimisation and pure play advertising online

- Building teams that can turn the strategy into reality will have increasing specialisation of skill sets, much of which will have come from offline media

- Content focused teams will become key, regardless of delivery point. For example if you plan and buy TV, even now it makes sense to think about TV content that delivers through broadcast direct to the set, satellite / cable, on demand internet, TV programming through apps and mobile and TV services

Last week, LinkedIn announced that it is launching a Japanese version of its service (LinkedIn’s announcement) When I heard this, I was intrigued because social networks in Japan have a much lower level of penetration than other countries around the world and surely there are better markets that LinkedIn could be expanding into. So I’ve dug up a few nuggets that may help shed light on LinkedIn’s potential in Japan:

• Staying in touch with friends is only the 8th most important reason for Japanese internet users to get online.
• Just 18% of Japanese internet users were active on social networks in June 2011.
• Only 4% of Japanese social network users say that networking for work is a very important reason for them to use a social network.
• Mixi is the most popular social network in Japan with a reported user base of 24.7 million in July 2011.  GWI Wave 5 data suggests that just 17.5 million of these are active on a weekly basis, however, representing just 20% of internet users in Japan.

Based on these four points alone, one must question the wisdom of LinkedIn’s Japanese expansion. Not only does Japan have the lowest level of social network engagement out of the 27 countries covered by GWI, but Japanese motivations for getting online are much more focused on e-commerce. Social engagement and network building are not very important online engagement drivers at all.

So what could LinkedIn’s rationale for launching a Japanese service be?  At first glance, LinkedIn appears to be interested in the vast size of the Japanese market.  This is where the true potential lies, and if LinkedIn can figure out better ways to engage Japanese internet users in social networking, it has the potential to be very successful.  This is essentially what Mr. Rajan said in his post, “We are absolutely committed to building the right products and the right experiences for the Japanese market. That is why we are investing in and building a local team based in Tokyo across product, engineering, marketing and operations. Our goal is not only to better understand the needs of the market, but to also enhance the professional lives of our members, partners and customers in Japan.”

To me, this says that LinkedIn hasn’t had the success it thought it would in Japan with its English service, just 330,000 active users in Wave 5, as it had hoped.  Perhaps with better localization of the service to Japanese users, LinkedIn can succeed where it has failed in the past, but the low penetration of social networks in Japan in general leads me to believe that the returns to LinkedIn of its Japanese expansion will be slow to come at best.  What do you think?

The GlobalWebIndex team is constantly striving to add more value for our subscribers and consulting clients. As part of this drive, we are proud to introduce our new Social Strategy for B2B Marketing report that is now available as part of a GWI subscription (contact your account manager for your access code) or is available for purchase to all non-subscribers from the GlobalWebIndex report store.

The report spans more than 60 pages of research, data, and insight specifically geared towards helping B2B marketers plan and implement social media as part of their business, sales, and marketing strategy. The data available in the report includes online and social media behaviour of B2B decision makers, data and insight on engagement techniques for those same B2B decision makers, and a detailed execution framework to implement social media into a marketing mix. In addition, because we know that developing the best B2B marketing strategy requires targeted research and analysis, we’ve added one data insight request from the GlobalWebIndex consulting team as part of this report package. Readers will then be able to take advantage of the vast amount of primary research data contained within the GlobalWebIndex to identify specific opportunities that exist within their industry.

Here are a few key takeaways from the report to wet your appetite:

– One to one conversations online are more influential than traditional marketing activities;

– Having a presence on Twitter or creating a blog for the sake of it, is not seen as influential. Conversations, and enabling conversation is what creates value;

– People want to interact with people, not platforms.

As always, we are here whenever you need us so please don’t hesitate to send through any queries about the report, its contents, or other GWI services.

A story on Forbes referencing a Pingdom post, compares the scale of Facebook, as announced in the recent F8 conference, of 800m active users with the total size of the Internet in 2004.

The comparison is rather pointless. The internet has expanded immensely since 2004, but anyway, it is a big and quite dominating number and one that got us talking.

As we’re always a little sceptical of sign up numbers, which normally include a massive number of lapsed users, duel accounts etc. Add to this the Facebook Fatigue (more to come on that in GWI6 in November by the way) we’ve seen, it prompted us to do a bit of investigation.

As we have numbers across PC, mobile and tablet, and can look at active versus the growing number of passive users, this makes for an interesting comparison.
 

 
Facebook Access Points (GlobalWebIndex Wave5 – June 2011)
 

The first interesting insight is that most users add additional platforms, but do not exclusively jump from PC to mobile or tablet. In total 60% of Facebook users are exclusively PC, which means a massive 40% have transitioned into mobile devices, but the vast majority also keep using the PC version. Another interesting insight is that the more access points you add, the greater the level of contribution.

Looking at the bigger picture. Our survey base of 27 countries covers 78% of the global internet population, according to InternetWorldStats. (A note here, we don’t actually use their universe estimates, as they are always at the extreme high end of predictions, however it is useful for market share). This allows us to forecast a global top-line figure of between 750m to 800m visits across all platforms. For active users we peg this between . We do not apply such high penetration rates to markets we do not cover, as they include many markets starting from a low Facebook base. More crucially we calculate that 72% of monthly visitors actively contribute at least 1 status update, shared piece of content or profile change in a month. This allows us to forecast an active Facebook population between 585m to 624m.

This is a lower (but still hugely substantial population), than claimed by Facebook. What really matters now is how Facebook can work to monetise this audience ahead of any proposed floatation in 2012. The growth in numbers is being driven by emerging internet / low advertising value markets and we have discovered we’re already seeing saturation and slides in contribution in established markets. This means the time needed to find the magic revenue model is shrinking and no surprise why we see a shift towards professional content and services.

The news on Tuesday that the European Union’s highest court ruled that it’s not illegal to purchase set top box decoders from other European markets is a major blow to the current business model of the Premier League (EPL to our non European readers) and potentially has far reaching impacts for the distribution of content online within the European Union.

The decision makes sense. Artificial barriers imposed by content owners (in this case EPL), sit contrary to the aim of the European single market for goods, services and people. The European Commissioner for the digital agenda, Neelie Kroes, vowed to “sort out confusion surrounding cross-border access to film, music and pay-per-view football games.”

The success of EPL has been due the large and guaranteed revenue stream from live TV broadcasting rights in the UK, particularly BSkyB. If consumers can shop around and buy cheaper access rights from other markets, it will impact the price they can charge in the UK, particularly for commercial entities such as pubs where a Sky Sports subscriptions run into the thousands of pounds per month . The output of this is likely to be that EPL will sell their rights on a European basis, with the likely buyer BSkyB (the major live broadcasting rights holder in the UK) selling on the rights in Europe. This will undoubtedly reduce the revenue they can command up front.

More significantly, it opens up the need to sell direct streaming online across the region and further afield so that the EPL can control and create new revenue streams. Currently, the EPL bundles the live online rights with the live TV ones (largely to restrict viewing and maximise the value of the TV ones through lack of competition), however with this ruling comes a very pressing need for the EPL to both control and maximise the potential revenue from online streaming.

We have continually tracked the growing demand for both viewing sports content online and the potential to pay for it.  As of June 2011, over 21% of internet users had streamed a sports program online, in the past month. This equates to about 261m internet users from the 27 markets we survey. This climbs to 25% for under 34’s and up to 34% in India and 32% in China (both markets with avid EPL fans). More crucially online consumers will pay for this content, with 17% prepared to pay for sports hi-lights and 18% for live sports streaming, again this rises among emerging internet users, with 46% Indonesians (again big EPL fans) stating that they would be prepared to pay. If we look at actual payment, only 9% of global internet users have ever paid for a sports stream online and only 7% in Indonesia. The highest levels of payment currently exist in India (18% – primarily Cricket) and China (15% – non legal streaming platforms in the main). In the UK and US this only sits at 3% and 4% respectfully, a clear demonstration of the global potential of selling per pay view matches or subscriptions to EPL games.

In that context to that it is shocking that there is no legal channel to pay to stream EPL games. Where is it available, for example in the UK, it is provided by the BSkyB (The TV rights holder) and limited to games they show on TV. While it’s more risky for EPL, requiring far more investment in digital product and local marketing, the EPL probably has (with the possible exception of Formula 1) the most popular sporting and content globally. If they can’t monetise their product directly through the internet on a multi-market and potentially global scale, who can?

Done right, the EPL could be a multi-platform internet product, delivered through applications and integrated with social and community features, producing far more revenue than local market TV deals.  There is also the benefit of taking control of their brand, currently low end and illegal services are the only potential gateway to live EPL content, that consumers demand online.

In a broader sense, this could be the stick that helps drive cross border selling of digital content. Rather than a threat, content producers should understand the massive scale of demand, as we see in our research and view this as an opportunity to monetise on a global scale. In addition the shifts, that we have reported into packaged internet platforms and applications and the changes in the way consumers are utilising social media (sharing content – not creating) are all driving consumer demand for quality content online.

Today we start a new series of posts where we reflect on real world events with our data set. Unsurprisingly, we’re going to take a look at the most hyped tech event of the year, yesterdays Apple announcement. We’ve long being saying the future of the Internet lies in mobile devices, emerging internet markets and professional rich content. As we can see from yesterday, Apple clearly recognises these trends.

The key outtakes for us from yesterday’s announcement were as follows:

1.     Upbeat predications of growth potential

New Apple chief Tim Cook claimed the iPhone had a global penetration of 5%, demonstrating the potential of massive growth to come. We have tracked a global penetration of 7% in June 2011, rising from 4% in July 2009. Our figure is marginally higher because we’re tracking the Internet universe, however in reality you are unlikely to consider an iPhone if you’re not online, so the market potential is smaller, although still pretty substantial. Also according to our data, Android outranks iOS with a global penetration of 13% of internet users and 25% of smart phone users. Throw in Windows great new mobile platform and the battle for mid-range users will be a lot tougher moving forward.

Verdict 8/10 – there is still massive growth potential, but things will get tougher.

2.     The subtle split between operating system and device

As has been the case previously, Apple has released the iPhone 4S and its new iOS5 mobile operating system as separate products.  This is key moving forward as there is only so much innovation that can come in the device using current technology and software, combined with services, will be the key to consumer adoption and will be the focus for innovation moving forward. It also raises the possibility that Apple can roll out a more differentiated model range, although given the fragmentation problems experienced by Android and Apple’s propensity to focus on streamlining the integration of software and hardware, this is unlikely to happen in the near future. Interestingly, even today in 2011, a massive 23% of smart phone users, do not know what operating system they are running on the phone!

Verdict 10/10 – The operating system will be the key to consumer adoption of the device and is the main battle ground in the mobile business moving forward. The software, apps and content are what will drive adoption. It also places less reliance on the mobile operator.

3.     iCloud and iTunes Match

The ability to access all your content though the cloud is an obvious step for Apple, and iCloud accomplishes cloud integration in a seamless fashion, allowing everything from apps to TV shows to be accessed across all devices without syncing. This is, in fact, a key motivation for consumers to pay for content online, and our data scores the following statement “the ability to view on all my devices” is the number two motivation to pay for content after “high definition quality”. iTunes Match, however, is merely a competitive response to Amazon and could have been implemented better.

Verdict 8/10 – it’s what consumers want, but genuine content streaming (similar to Spotify or Hulu) would be even better, and Apple should have the clout with content owners to get this done.

4.     Airplay Mirroring

The integration between mobile devices and the big screen is an undoubted trend that will revolutionise the way we consume television. This will happen both in terms of consuming real time data and services on the device or sending content from the device to the big screen. Already we know from the research that 35% of Internet users use their mobile while watching TV and the home is the leading place to use mobile internet.

Verdict 9/10 – making sharing easy from the device to screen without wires is the right step in the road to full device and duel screen integration

5.     Deep Twitter integration in iOS5

iOS users are significantly more likely to use Twitter, with 35% using or visiting on a monthly basis (68% above the average), however 65% of users never do so. Also, the key features of Twitter integration, i.e being able to share photos, do not tap into Internet users motivators to share. The vast majority of users want to share photos to connect with friends and family, or update them with their life (lead motivation in all waves), Twitter connects with the wider world and people you don’t know as opposed to immediate networks, a minor motivation for the mass market internet user. One other interesting point is regarding what will happen in markets such as China, where Twitter has a very low penetration of usage, will this be switched out for Sina Microblog?

It is likely that this move will grow Twitter adoption further, however, it moves Twitter further into the category of an invisible technology like email and unfortunately further away from definitive revenue model. Also, interestingly, it means more people will share into Twitter, but probably less people will visit the site, again a limiter on creating revenue.

Verdict 3/10 – Twitter is still a niche technology and fails to tap into the mainstream needs that will help grow the iPhone’s market share.

6.     Focus on China

Tim Cooks speech heavily references developments in China and new Apple stores. The recent stories of fake Apple stores, clearly demonstrates the massive demand, and we can see that in our data. Many people who see our data for the first time are surprised by the high level of uptake of advanced Internet services and mobile devices in China. However, for anyone who has been there, they will not be surprised.

Specifically looking at Apple, our data shows that China is already the biggest iOS market, with 15% of internet users adopting the iPhone. The pure scale of the internet market in China is immense and we estimate the installed userbase at 55m, this compares to the US, with 11% penetration and an installed base of 23m). However, (and a big however), we believe that a significant proportion of the iOS handsets in China are currently fake or imitation devices. Despite this the market is still growing at an incredible rate, so either way it demonstrates the potential for Apple and the roll out of official Apple stores shows that.

Verdict 10 / 10 – there will be 2 Internet markets in the future, China and the rest of the world

We have a great new info-graphic which shows the changing number of social networkers over the last 5 waves, by market and key demographics. Change has been demonstrated by circle size and colour.

Global Divergence of Social Networking

What is immediately apparent growing divergence between markets, which is being driven by a number of factors:

• The online market expanding as a whole (particularly apparent in China)
• Massive adoption of social networking in BRIC markets, in all demographics. Again this particularly apparent in China where local players such as RenRen, Kaixin and QZone have been growing hugely at the expense of blogging platforms or traditional BBS networks. This shift happened later in China
• Saturation of social networking in certain markets and demographics i.e US 16-24s

The core fact is that the online world becomes more and more fragmented, a theme that plays strongly in our Wave  5 trends. We believe that this become more apparent over time as saturated markets, such as US, UK and Germany, flatline or start to decline in terms of social media contribution, while fats growing markets bring new people online who are eager to adopt and use social media.

One key thing to note is that we are only displaying data from markets that have been on all five waves, so markets such as Argentina, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or Indonesia are not included.

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The GlobalWebIndex is 5 days away from submitting the Wave6 questionnaire for fieldwork, which is being delivered in 2^nd week of November.

This presents a window for you as a client to discuss with us about including questions or brands into the survey to broaden or deepen your insight to specific areas or brands and create a unique advantage for yourself and your clients.

Clients currently applying this service have been able to utilise unique consumer segments and strategic insight based on specific P&G, Dell, Lenovo, Compaq, HP & Apple brands & products as well as creating unique consumer segments to deliver Local, Regional & Global insights.

We also currently host a range of brands for clients to plug in to the current subscription to deliver unique client and competitor insight and unique leverage for New Business pitches!

The GlobalWebIndex is proud to publish a new infographic illustrating the Saudi Arabian internet market in depth after launching the GlobalWebIndex in the country in June 2011.

Saudi Arabia Infographic

Here are the highlights:

Saudi Arabia has close to 9 million internet users, most of which are young, well-educated, and male.

VOIP (Voice over IP) services such as Skype or Fring are particularly popular among Saudi Internet users.  The same applies to instant messaging services such as MSN Messenger  and webmail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. The relatively high usage of online communication in Saudi Arabia is not at all surprising when one considers the amount of foreign nationals living in Saudi Arabia, which are estimated to account for nearly 25% of the Saudi Arabian population.

Penetrations of video sharing, social networking, micro-blogging and forum usage in Saudi Arabia are all higher than the global average. The most striking feature of social media in Saudi Arabia is the high-proportion of Internet users that upload videos online which is more than twice the global average. Social media platforms are particularly popular among young Saudi Arabians because they offer a sense of community and interaction that allows a high degree of freedom of expression. Despite the political effects of social media that are making headlines, the majority of young Saudis simply want to discuss the same types of things as other young people around the world from sports to pop culture to fashion.

As promised, GlobalWebIndex is now live!

The GlobalWebIndex team is proud to release the latest Wave of the most comprehensive and detailed study in online and social media ever; conducted at a global level. With five Waves of research, the GlobalWebIndex now offers an unprecedented look at the evolution of internet and social media behaviour. We have now expanded to 27 countries; the five new countries added to the survey are Argentina, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey.

Wave 5 expands the coverage of mobile device behaviour and packaged internet consumption, in particular, to keep up with market trends.

The on-time release of Wave 5 data in our online tool kicks off the “Wave 5 Summer” with the following updates and treats coming for our subscribers:

• Week of the 18 July: the GWI tool will receive a face lift and additional features including crosstab functionality, multiple question selector, a new audience selection interface, new data views and a new look. 

• Around the same time, we will release a “Wave 5 Trends” report to subscribers that will detail the most exciting new trends developing across the world in online and social media. 

• The last week of July will see the release of a new GlobalWebIndex infographic which will provide an intuitive visualisation of one of the new trends coming out of Wave 5. 

• For our IMS and Telmar users, we plan to release Wave 5 data in those platforms during the first half of August. 

• Last but not least, Wave 6 is already on the horizon and the deadline to add in your own questions to the GWI Wave 6 Survey will be August 15th. Get in touch to find out more. 

The GlobalWebIndex team hopes you all enjoy digging into the new data, and as always, don’t hesitate to contact us with any comments or questions!

We are proud to introduce our new GlobalWebIndex Infographic that visualises the global state of social networking in 2011.

Global Map of Social Networking 2011

Designed by Rikard Andresen

The Infographic shows the universe size of active social networkers for each market and then segments users into three behaviour types: Messagers, Groupers and Content Sharers. This behavioural data is based on a number of the variables we have available to discern how consumers are currently using social networks. Because social networking is now so big and touches every aspect of our internet experience, this detail is essential for the effective planning and implementation of marketing activity across social networks. This data reveals that users across the world are very different in how they utilise their network, with more focus on messaging and less on content sharing in established markets like the US and UK but more focus on content and groups in fast growing markets like Indonesia and China.

The March 2011 GlobalWebIndex newsletter is out now.  In this edition, we take a look at some of the cutting edge data that is coming out of Wave 4.  For Wave 4, we added some great new questions to our survey, particularly on the mobile technology side of things.

Because tablets are now all the rage, especially with the recent launch of Apple’s iPad 2 and the flood of Android tablets hitting the market, we have focused this issue of the GWI Newsletter on tablets.  Please take a look for yourself and see what consumers are doing, even thinking about doing regarding tablets.

A Unique Global Tablet Perspective

From Wave 4, Hong Kong is part of the GlobalWebIndex. So here are some quick facts to introduce the country.

• Total Population (2010 census): 7,061,200
• Official Languages: English and Chinese.
• Active web population (2010 estimate): 4,700,000 (66% of total population)

The following statistics are based on the GWI sample collected in February 2011 for Wave 4.

• Sample size: 768
• Mean age: 37.09
• Median education: Trade / Technical school or college (27% of sample)
• Median income: 289,000 to 433,000 HKD (30% of sample. Approximately averages to 28,500 GBP or 32,700 EUR or 46,300 USD)
• Leading social network: Facebook (2,42 millions users; 94% market share)
• Leading Mobile Brand: Nokia (1.74 millions devices)

Image from Wikipedia.

The insight team is very pleased to announce that Wave 4 data is now in the GlobalWebIndex tool!  Data is current as of last week and after a week of stringent cross-checking and verification of the data, all GlobalWebIndex subscribers now have access to the latest data on online trends and social media interaction.

You’ll also find data for the five new markets that have been added in Wave 4: Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Hong Kong. With four waves of trend data over the past year and a half, all GWI subscribers can now see a clear picture on the evolution of online and social media trends.

A critical aspect of the GlobalWebIndex is ensuring that our survey stays current with the latest trends in technology, and there are now a number of new areas in which we have collected data.  Some of the new topics in Wave 4 include tablets and tablet usage, additional brand data for those who are lucky enough to subscribe, as well as a vastly expanded section on the consumption of consumer and pro video, TV and films online. The mobile section has also been significantly expanded and now includes data on mobile site brands, applications, and general access and behaviour.

And we’re not stopping here. Wave 5 preparations have already begun!

At the end of last year, I created this presentation to give friends of the GlobalWebIndex an idea of how consumers are using connected TV sets and how we envision that usage developing in the future.  The presentation centers on Google TV and all the hype that surrounded it at its launch late last year.  Ultimately, I do not believe that Google TV in its present form offers the way forward to connected TV technology.

Google TV undoubtedly has many cool features including the ability to search among all the content available on one’s TV set as well as the Internet to find the content, paid or free, that one wants.  The prospect of an app store for TV is also a fantastic opportunity for developers to unleash a wave of creativity for TV sets.

There are, however, several pitfalls for the current Google TV iteration as well as the idea of pure Internet consumption via TV sets that I believe will be inhibiting factors for the take-up of Google TV and other similar connected TV sets.

Firstly, lets use our imagination and think about how we all use TV in our own homes.  Sure, we all watch TV when were alone at home, but for the majority of people, this is not very often. In most homes, the TV set is often the centerpiece of the living room with more than one person watching at any given time. I simply can’t imagine anyone wanting to go online via the TV set and access their Facebook profile, send a Tweet, or search for products online while their friends or family are watching a TV show. Not only is this annoying for everyone else watching that TV show, but it is also a privacy issue for the person using those Web services. What teenage daughter is going to look at her Facebook messages while her father watches TV?

Another problem is the interface. The peripheral controls for Sony’s Google TV solution are unimaginative and confusing to say the least. Logitech’s are more practical, but still nothing that consumers couldn’t get with a home theater PC set up in the 1990s. Interfaces for connected TV sets need to be simpler and more intuitive in order to drive usage of the Web features of connected TV sets. TV users are inherently very passive. People watch TV to relax, and frankly, searching for content is work while selecting from the on-screen TV guide is not.

I believe that the Kinect for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is a great solution for the interface problem currently faced by connected TV sets. The Kinect is still a bit clunky, but as the numerous developers have shown, the possibilities for the Kinect are limitless, and the Kinect’s progeny will significantly improve the systems performance.

As far as pure Internet consumption while watching TV, I believe we’ll continue to see growth in multi-tasking while watching TV as more people buy tablets, smartphones, and laptops. There are many programs that already take advantage of this, and as Nielsen’s iPad app for ABC’s My Generation in the US demonstrated, there are, perhaps, more possibilities for interactive TV when multi-tasking rather than accessing the Internet directly on the TV set.

I haven’t even gotten started on the problems that Google TV has had with content publishers, but that is a topic for another blog post. Ultimately, Google TV has not done to the TV market what Apple did to the mobile market with the iPhone, and it is still wide open for innovation by tech companies, TV set manufacturers, advertisers, and content publishers. Enjoy the presentation!

GlobalWebIndex just released a new free report full of insights on the state of social media around the world.

Unlike other companies which focus only on single markets, the GlobalWebIndex can provide a truly global perspective built on a wealth of more than 70,000 surveys completed over the past year.

The results are then analysed and commented by an international team of researchers to give you the most accurate view on what’s changing in the social media landscape.

This is one of our presentations for the Social Media Week in London, now free for all to enjoy.

Hello all and welcome to the GlobalWebIndex monthly briefing!

First of all, as a new global analyst, I would like to introduce myself to all friends of the GlobalWebIndex, and I look forward to working together with all of our clients to help everyone develop a deep understanding of how the rapidly changing technology and social media environments affect companies and brands across a range of industries.

To that end, we are introducing a new GlobalWebIndex monthly briefing, this briefing gives friends of the GlobalWebIndex an overview of key topics and trends that come out of the data along with industry news and insight.  The objective is to provide a quick, visual method for understanding these trends and how they fit in with the “big picture”.  Your feedback is welcome and please feel free to share the briefing with your colleagues.

The Evolution of the Packed Internet

Wave 4 data due in at the end of February!

Wave 4 of the GlobalWebIndex will be due for release in the tool at the end of February and for IMS users at the end of March, so watch this space for more insight. We have expanded coverage of the survey this time to cover 23 markets, with new countries Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Turkey. In addition the mobile section has been expanded now covering websites accessed via mobile devices, barriers to mobile internet, mobile applications used and e-reader/tablet device behaviour.

Great success today at the Social Media Week for the conference titled “Apps go social“ where our CEO Tom Smith presented the state of mobile applications with a preview from our wave 4 data which is due to be released in two weeks.

The main finding is the massive importance that mobile apps will continue to have in order to engage consumers. Access to social media on mobile is now on par with desktop access.

Mobile apps are changing the way people access web content linking content to people and location. (part of the “packaged internet” trend).

As opposed to traditional websites, mobile apps are easy to use for consumers and it’s easy to drive revenue from them. Also, apps are the only way to take full advantage of modern mobile phones features like the GPS, the accelerometers and the newly introduced Near field communication technology which according to experts will be the big promise of the coming years.

After the presentation, Simon Callan form Nokia and Ed Lea from Grapple Mobile shared their thoughts on the mobile applications business in an interesting debate moderated by Tim Green, editor of Mobile Entertainment review.

While there certainly are some so called “me-too” apps, Ed pointed out some success cases where the mobile app is part of an integrated marketing strategy that provide a better product/service extending the features of the core offer and delivering value to the customer and revenue to the company like in the Premier Inn case.

Simon also reminded the wide variety of social networks other than Facebook that do exist in Asia and the importance of having offline functionality like in Ovi Maps.

Today we explore what motivates people to use the web and what are the real deep motivations behind 22 possible answers in our survey.

If you want to replicate this experiment using IMS Clear Decisions follow these steps, otherwise, you can skip to the findings section.

Open IMS, open Trendstream codebook and go into motivations & barriers -> Internet usage main reason (By response) -> Web Motivation- Very important.

Now drag the whole set of motivations to both axis of the crosstab (we want to cross each motivation with each other.)

From the top tabs we select Variables-> Coefficient of correlation (we can de-select all standard indicators to un-clutter our table).

Then open the Smart Views tab and select one of the colour scales. This helps us spot extreme values on the table.

Immediately you see a diagonal of very high correlations across the table. This is because each variable is identical with itself. Also, you’ll see that the whole table is symmetric in respect to this diagonal.

Findings:

At a global level we find the following correlations at about 40% strength.

• “Networking for work” with “Research for work”.
• “Keep my friends updated with my life” with “Stay in touch with friends”.
• “Entertainment” with “Find music”, “Find films” and “Fill up spare time”
• “Research how to do things” with “Find products to buy” and “Get inspired”
• “Share my opinion” with “Share content” and “Express myself”.

Overall, nothing surprising. At the very least we can say that our respondents answered with consistency. On the other hand I would have been surprised to find any other strong correlation at a global level.

If we limit our analysis to a specific target, for example married respondents, we find that “Meet new people, “Express myself” and “Take on a different personality” are correlated with each other.

To do this we just need to drag the “Married” variable to the bases in IMS.

Another experiment. Limiting the analysis to people working in marketing/advertising we find that “Organise my life” is correlated with “Express myself” and “Get inspired”. Which might draw a profile of heavy users who use the internet in all aspects of their life.

To have an even clearer picture we can use a factor analysis which groups motivations together according to responses patterns (not available in IMS).


We can clearly see four profiles of users here.

1. The Marketer. Uses the web to meet people, promote ideas or products and for work.
2. The Crawler. Searches any kind of information, educational materials but also news and products to buy.
3. The Spectator. Uses the internet to be entertained by music, movies or games.
4. The social fly. Wants to stay in touch with friends and meet new ones.

Also, it’s quite interesting to look at the negative values which give even more weight to those four profiles. For example the Crawler doesn’t have any interest in games; The Social fly and the Spectator don’t really care about work while the Marketer wants to promote something but definitely doesn’t want to buy.

There are a number of possibilities to export charts from the GlobalWebIndex directly into your presentations.

1. Pressing the PRTSCR button on the top right corner of your keyboard will copy all your visible desktop to the clipboard. Then just go to Powerpoint (or any application) and press CTRL+V to paste. You’ll probably need to crop the pasted image but this method works with all browsers and all versions of Windows.
2. If your PC runs on Windows Vista or 7, you can press the Windows button on your keyboard and type “snip”. This will show you the Snipping Tool. A little application with which you can capture and save portions of your visible desktop.
3. Fireshot. A browser extension available for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. It allows you to capture an entire web page and not just the visible portion. Useful if you’re working on a small screen.
4. In Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox you can press CTRL+SHIFT+Right click over a chart to copy or save it as an image.

The first year of the GlobalWebIndex has revealed three clear trends in the consumer adoption of the internet. In combination they are driving a new age of social entertainment through internet platforms. In this report, we analyse the current global situation and the opportunities for the future for professional media, content producers and brands:

• Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets. The old view of text-based social media, defined by blogs and forums, is being surpassed, moving the impact of social media, from creating content and publishing to sharing other people’s content and ‘live’ opinions about real-world events. In short ‘real-time’ is re-orientating consumer from creator to distributor and moving the focus to traditional media and professional content.
• The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms such as mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms. These packaged platforms are re-engineering the internet and destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity. Crucially for the entertainment revolution, they provide professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models, something the economics of the browser-based web totally failed to enable.
• Professional “traditional style” content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Internet platforms, for hundreds of millions of consumers, are increasingly the entertainment platform of choice. This is due to continual growth of professional content in video sites (legal and illegal), the rise of ‘real-time’, and the growth of packaged platforms.

These trends will revolutionise our view of the internet. In particular, the packaged internet will transform the way we get online, the content we consume, and the ways we can create, share and communicate. Going forward five years it is clear that many people’s internet experience will not be through a browser, but through some form of packaged platform. While many ‘internet purists’ will bemoan their lack of openness, the creation of barriers to entry, and shift in control to small numbers of gatekeepers, packaged platforms crucially enable professional media to create sustainable businesses online without having to change the way that the open web works.

This is as important, if not more important, for a healthy society as enabling consumers to publish and share their opinions or content. The open browser based internet has failed to create the economics to deliver professional media business online, as advertising could not demand the premiums needed and consumers are unwilling to pay for content delivered through a browser. These changing commercial opportunities will capitalise on the consumer demand for social entertainment online. They will however have to change the way that they create and deliver content and make sure they integrate social technologies into their product.

Increasingly ‘real-time’ social will be integrated with the traditional content experience. Imagine live Twitter style messaging around major TV events or programming recommended by your social network. This will extend the impact of social media outside of the browser as well as surpassing the old models of delivering media, such as cable TV, satellite, radio or newspaper

2011 and beyond is a promising to be an extremely interesting period of innovation. Next year the GlobalWebIndex will track these shifts through 26 countries, 3 waves of research and 90,000 surveys.

Like in any holiday season, the travel industry is facing a very busy time, only this Christmas holidays, the severe weather conditions here in Europe are causing problems to the air traffic. Major airports in Europe are cancelling flights and passenger are crying for information.

Here in the UK, airports and airlines are using Twitter to communicate real time information to travellers. Both Heathrow Airport (@heathrowairport) and British Airways (@british_airways) have more than 30,000 followers each and their streams are being updated several times a hour. Nevertheless, hundreds of passengers are camping at the airports wondering when they’ll be able to leave.

Clearly the this real-time information is extremely valuable in these situations. Most people have the same questions and needs and by making open this type of conversation, everyone benefits.

However only 6% of British web users use micro-blogs (99% Twitter in the UK).
If we consider only people who recently purchased a holiday abroad, this figure increase to 7%. This raises questions on whether it is right to rely to heavily on Twitter and external services as being the lead method of communications in this situation.

For comparison we have the same data for the USA: while the average penetration of micro-blogs is slightly higher, what really stands out is the percentage of international travellers who use Twitter: 13%. This is probably explained by the fact that in Europe it’s very easy to cross a country border and therefore, being an international traveller doesn’t really differentiate much from the country average. While to cross the border of the United States takes some serious hours of flying and therefore it might appeal more to an affluent, up to date kind of audience that is more likely to use advanced web services like Twitter.

Making “Real-Time” accessible

“Real-Time” information needs to be taken to the masses, Twitter is limiting the delivery of this information. The method  of delivering information is extremely valuable and clearly of value to all  flyers.

At a minimum airlines and airports should be incorporating Twitter content into their primary websites, so people who do not use Twitter or don’t know what it is can get value from the “real-time” updates.

We would also like to see the integration of this technology in a bespoke way. The posting of live messages and questions could be made open and visible to all, with anyone able to post question and staff at the airport being able to answer in a public and open way.

The networked dynamic of Twitter, is not the valuable asset here. In reality there is little value in this information being networked, you don’t need to know if you contact has been able to find out about a flight, however people who visit the website would find this very valuable – the live and open conversation, is very valuable.

“Real-time” is the future of the internet, we need more avenues and technologies to make it mass market.

Google has built its business on the economics of the open internet. By being the entry point to the browsing experience and providing an advertising solution (AdSense) so cheap to administer (even over billions of web pages), they have been able to drive massive profits by aggregating all those billions of “cents” payments.

However as we know the packaged internet changes everything.

As our research shows, consumers are shifting from the open internet to packaged platforms in their hundreds of millions. Apps, TV, e-readers, games consoles, mobile etc have exploded in the last 12 months and will exponentially grow in the next few years (check our upcoming report: 2011: Welcome to the age of social entertainment). This is bad news for Google:

• Search is not a core dynamic or point of entry: Content is often guided and limited in nature in the packaged internet
• Internal search doesn’t need Google: if you search inside a website, you don’t care what underlying technology delivers those results – this is the same in the packaged internet. We use Google as a point of entry, however the need for Google to help us navigate specific platforms or applications is redundant
• Packaged is one dimensional: Apps or platforms have limited purpose and the requirement for search to link and take us to other content and services is not needed
• Limited or no inventory: Google exists on aggregating unlimited inventory. The packaged web is limited and closed
• Professional / Media driven content: Big media is driving much of the packaged web, they won’t want AdSense on their pages
• Branding: the packaged Internet is more of a visual and branded environment. Google has existing on simplicity and a lack of real brand identity.
• Paid for: If you buy an app, the last thing you want is AdSense on it
• Your social network: Increasingly we will follow the recommendations of your network, contacts or a wider set of users. These networks are being integrated into the packaged internet

There is also a major challenge to YouTube. YouTube is built on the open internet and the principle of allowing anyone to upload – great for traffic, but not so good when you want to turn a profit.  The professional content that YouTube is hoping they can drive revenue from, will also be delivered across a mass of packaged video platforms that do not have the commercial challenge of proving unlimited bandwidth and hosting to the world and their videos.

This is why Android and the upcoming Google TV are so crucial to the future of Google.

Traditionally Google have failed to develop successful commercial models outside of search. Android looks good so far and industry and consumer adoption is high. Google TV and the level of competition from big media players, content companies and the technology companies in that space, will prove to be a tough one.

If we look back, will 2010 be seen the peak of Google? Only time and their adoption of the packaged Internet will tell.

The other big question of course, is whether consumers will continue to turn their back on the open internet. We will be focusing very closely on that other the next 12 months at the GlobalWebIndex.

Even in 2010 we still hear the Internet being called a “media channel” or, “the number one media”.

This is old thinking. The Internet today streams video and TV media content on demand; it powers my radio; it provides access to films, books, magazines or news.

Now the browser based Internet is being replaced by “packaged web” platforms that source their content and information from the web, or are connected by the web, but the front end is nothing like a browser.

 Already in our research, we can see massive consumption outside the browser based environments. As of September 2010, over 37% accessed the web via mobile (normally for most consumers, a limited browsing or app experience) on a monthly basis, 10% via games consoles, 4% through a TV and 2% via an e-reader. This particularly pronounced for high earning, professional segments in saturated web markets like the US. For example, 8% of Senior Managers / Corporate Executives had accessed the web via an EReader in the last month, compared to 4% for the market and 2% globally. Impressive reach. We also know that 39% of web users are interested in adopting, a demand that is consistent across age groups, although peaks for high earners, a demand that shows, we’re just at the beginning of the app economy.

We also see a massive growth in “packaged web” with internet enabled applications that allow access to different types of media. Already today, 25% downloaded an application in the last month, 27% watched TV shows through an on-demand service (much higher in the UK, where iPlayer has transformed the market), while 18% have listened / watched a Podcast and a massive 30% have listened to live radio online, all points that make the concept of the Internet as a singular media meaningless.

The Impact

This is important for brands, because it demands that we don’t just think about “putting some budget in the Internet”. The way that agencies and brands approach the web, should be focused on content types, in a platform agnostic way. It also means advertising through Internet enabled platforms will be less about optimisation of an unlimited pool of inventory online, and more about creating content, or buying media space in a more traditional way (e.g from a limited pool of higher rate inventory).

It also makes it really complex! While marketing investment might move out of broadcast TV and grow in “online”, it can still be TV advertising. Who manages investments in advertising or sponsorship for television content that makes it across the web?

It all points to needing a much stronger strategy and one that focuses on the full communications mix. 

On the other side of the fence, it is a massive opportunity for content producers, primarily because it is much easier to charge for content. As our research shows, there is far greater appetite to pay for online content in closed packaged systems (keep an eye out for a major Visualisation on this later in the year).

It also has an impact on the consumer. Packaged web platforms focus on enabling the consumer to distribute content, not create it. If this trend continues, the consumer will replace the network, but not it’s content.

All in, it’s safe to say in ten years that the concept of a browser will look a bit antiquated.

Perhaps even five.

As we have had a number of emails and enquiries regarding the nature and connection of the Digital Life (DL) report published by our client TNS to that of GlobalWebIndex, we would like to take the opportunity to ensure you of the following:

a)      There is no connection, similarity, or conflicting interest between the two products

b)      Even though Lightspeed research is the panel provider for both products, GWI maintains its independence and autonomy, and utilises only internal  expertise for the survey development, briefing, interpretation, and distribution of the data and output

After looking at the DL website and their product positioning ourselves, we can see the perceived similarities and understand where the confusion might be coming from.  We, therefore, want to highlight the key features that differentiate GWI from all the other industry tools and market reports, including that of DL:

-          GlobalWebIndex is an online strategy and insights tool and not a static report.

-          GlobalWebIndex analysis and output is at the control of the user, not that of the provider.

-          GlobalWebIndex is powered by ongoing market research (from 2011 with 3 waves of data per year) and it is not a one- off or annual market research study.

-          GlobalWebIndex only covers markets that can guarantee statistical reliable samples.

-          GlobalWebIndex follow strict guidelines on acceptable minimum sample sizes (2,250 per market per year) to secure subsequent volume when drilling down to niche audiences and local markets selections.

-          GlobalWebIndex is designed to give you the ability to build completely customised targets as well as drill down in detail into all areas of online behaviour, instead of giving you a “birds eye” view.

We are delighted that all of you have not only renewed but expanded your relationship with GWI, since our launch year. For us this is the biggest confirmation that what GWI brings to the market is what your business needs and that guides how we continue to develop the product. On a similar note, we want to remind you that there are more exciting changes coming to our platform, which we hope will make your research even more exciting and inspiring, and further enhance the user experience to enable you to gain greater insight from the tool.

We are working hard to achieve our goal of being the independent global standard for understanding your audience, brand, and category online.

Looking forward to your questions and comments

The GWI Team!

Yesterday, our Director Tom Smith talked at the Internet Advertising Bureau about social media and online branding.

What happened in Europe in the last year in terms of attitudes towards brands and what can we expect for the future but first of all a short introduction on the state of social media in Europe.

We see now that social media are becoming a mature market with no or little changes in terms of social networks, blogs and content sharing usage. Also, we see that social networks users are shifting to an older age range. Social networks is no more just students’ territory.

Especially when talking about blogging and social networking we se a steady growth in mature users (over 55) during the past year. Anyway, if we look at a country segmentation we see important differences across Europe, especially in terms of video/photo sharing and micro-blogging. In both these activities, Russia is the leading country, followed at a distance by Poland, Spain, Italy and the UK. Also, Russia, Spain and Poland seem to be the most active in posting comments on blogs and forums.

Speaking of social network, Facebook is by far the biggest player in the continent but its share is not equal across Europe. Netherlands, Russia and in a smaller measure also France, Germany, Poland and Spain resist to the advance of Facebook with local social networks. Meaning that in Europe there can’t be a standard social emdia strategy to fit all countries.

If Social networks are mature, Micro blogging and the so called real time web are still niche with very little signals of change. Except for this point, we can clearly say that the social web is becoming part of the mass market and the implication for business is that consumers communicate more with each other, even with strangers and most of all, they trust them.

If we exclude recommendations from family and friends, consumer reviews are the first source of trusted information on products. Even more, although on the low end of the scale, social network contacts not met in person are more trusted than celebrities and politicians.

This means that influencers are changing. In the past year, social network, blog and micro-blog contacts were the only sources to show an increase in the share of consumers trust while newspapers stood still and TV fell slightly.

Speaking of communications strategies this fit in a well estabilished trend now: the need for a real dialogue with the people inside corporations. As consumers get used to communicate with each other online they expect  the same transparency and dialogue from corporations.

Now, although this is clearly a worldwide trend, we also see some slight differences across different industries so before jumping on the bandwagon, think! Passive imitation is not the solution.

What does this all mean for web marketing professionals?

While user generated content might have reached its peak, we see a new form of packaged web rising fast. Mostly driven by consumer electronic devices alternative to the traditional personal computer. Think about people accessing the web from TV, games consoles or mobile phones. Most of these experiences are more likely to fit in the walled garden model where a little number of distributors controls the content and the advertising spaces seen by all its users.

While the open web is traditionally the reign of freedom, once exclusive to a technical audience, now everybody can potentially enjoy the packaged web delivered on mobile applications or next generation TVs.

It’s probably an understatement to say that Twitter together with Facebook is one of the most used buzzwords by online marketers these times. All kinds of firms, large or small around the world are now using Twitter to engage customers. Will it give an advantage over competitors? Will it make me look trendy to the eyes of my customers? And if I don’t use it, will I lose relevancy in my category against competitors?

In this post I’ll use the Global Web Index data to trace some basic profiling of Twitter users in order to better understand its scope in a marketing campaign.

How big is Twitter? (Really)

First of all let’s take a look at the actual popularity of Twitter around the globe. The chart below shows actual Twitter versus Facebook users (at least monthly) for each country. This datum is a much more accurate reflection of usage than the simple user count. The fact is that most of the people who sign up, not only post rarely, many of them never come back.

So who does use Twitter?

Let’s start with a basic gender segmentation. I select frequency of using Twitter and split the result by gender.
First of all we see there’s a slight prevalence of males among frequent users but probably not as much as you’d expect from a technology yet to go mainstream.

Young educated males

The mean age for daily Twitter users is just above 30 showing an inverse correlation with frequency of use. Education on the contrary is directly correlated with Twitter usage (being 30 = College and 40 = University.) In English, Twitterers are far more educated than the average.

This is reflected strongly in the type of frequent users. The blue fields in the left chart represent management positions while yellow and orange are for team members and support level employees.

The striking fact here is that half of daily and weekly Twitter users hold a position of responsibility in their job while non users are more likely to be junior staff. This might be a clue in favour of the use of Twitter in B2B communication.

Twitterers are NOT mainstream consumers

Digging more into the job fields we find a big delusion because a very big slice of daily twitterers work in IT or in marketing. So once again, the medium is the message. People working in IT are likely to use IT based communication tool and marketers are probably talking to themselves more than they are talking to customers.

At this point we have a fairly good set of information to draw some conclusions.

Regular Twitter users are educated, tend to be in their 30s and holding a position of responsibility all of which means that Twitter is good for engaging decision makers and liasing with people in business to business space.

Marketing professionals may use Twitter to communicate with their colleagues, to be updated on the hot topics while the use of Twitter to engage mainstream, FMCG customers appears to be less useful.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our mini tool that provides anyone with the free of charge chance to view and play with the GlobalWebIndex data, and more importantly to start developing unique insights on social media.

With the LITE version you can get a snapshot of what motivates your audience, what they do online, and how they feel about brands in social media.

This data has been extracted from the GlobalWebIndex Wave 2 dataset (January 2010)and it is NOT dummy for demonstration purposes only.

Currently, the GlobalWebIndex clients have access to Wave 3 (July 2010), hence, we can publicise some subscription only data.

Of course, Global Web Index LITE is only a very small percentage of the full set of the Global Web Index data. If you find this interesting and you can see the value behind the data and the online tool in your business, get in touch and we’ll talk you through the main analysis platform, how our clients prefer to use it to build global web and social media strategies and how it is being used to drive business revenue.

Feel free to use the data, embed it and share the tool online and don’t be shy to tell us what you think: globalwebindex@trendstream.net

If you are new to the research and want to find out more about how we do it, please visit: http://globalwebindex.net/find-out-more

To stay in touch @globalwebindex or to register interest in a demonstration http://globalwebindex.net/demo

How it works

You can select country, gender, age bands and an attitudinal outlook (if you want). The attitudes we predefined for demonstration purposes  are based on the people who agree with the following questions:

• Risk taker: “I like to take risks”
• Informers: “I regularly inform friends and family on new products and services”
• Positives: “I feel positive about the global economy”
• Strivers: “I’m always striving to achieve more in life”
• Premium Lovers: “I tend to buy the premium version of the product
• Internationals: “It is important to stay in touch with what is going on in the world”
• Thrill seeker: “I like to pursue a life of challenge, novelty and change”

Once you define your audience you can analyse them against 3 key areas and against the country average:

• Motivations for getting online: What do online consumers consider to be “very motivating”. This question covers all reasons for getting online, but look out for social motivations, such as “staying in touch with friends”, “sharing content” or “promoting myself”
• Social media behaviour: What online consumers have done in the last month online. There are also non social behaviours in there for comparison. In the main research we also cover lapsed usage and non involvement
• Brands in social media: Which kind of social marketing communications “improve the opinion of a brand” in the eyes of consumers. Again there are non social executions for comparison

Remember this is a very small portion of the research, but it still provides you with a unique global perspective on social media trends and impact.

Please get in touch to find out more on the full research and the subscription tool that can provide you access to a globally unique dataset and insights.

In the July-August Issue of the Harvard Business Review appeared a story by associate professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski with an interesting infographic by designer Tommy McCall. The topic: different trends in social media adoption around the world.

Professor Piskorski is currently Assistant professor of business strategy at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and he’s been Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
He has published papers about the use of power in organizational behaviour and he’s been mentioned on The New York Times with an article about social networks Friendster and Myspace.
On his page at the Harvard Business School  we can find many cases about understanding business and users of social networks.

Today we are honoured to be cited in his latest work which main focus is a cross-countries study on the use of social networks.
Professor Piskorski found a clear divide between East and West of the world usage of social networks.
Surprisingly, Asians appear to be much more engaged in the social web than western users.
“Chinese and Indian users, for example, are three times as likely to microblog, or tweet, as American users. They’re also twice as likely to share videos.”

Another interesting point is about the emerging BRIC countries, where users are just approaching the social sphere and hence they face an already developed panorama of social tools while western users had the time to settle their social behaviour gradually over the past years.
This means that emerging countries are more likely to adopt a balanced use of all available social services, contrary to western users which tend to focus on the more “traditional” and established services.

The original article is at http://hbr.org/2010/07/vision-statement-mapping-the-social-internet/ar/1

Tom Smith was in the  IAB Interact Congress in Barcelona yesterday where he talked about  the challenges and opportunities of brands in the current social media world.

A snapshot of the 2010 global social media, an overview of data showing what consumers want from brands in this environment, as well as best in class examples and opportunities were the main areas covered in his presentation.

On the day he received an excellent feedback for the insights and thoughts but we are also interested for your comments!

Let us know what you think

On the day that iPad rolled out its global launch, we thought it would be apt to look at the levels of consumer interest in e-readers.

In the latest wave of our global survey we introduced a question about the potential interest in innovative devices. The following chart shows the breakdown of the answers by countries related to the e-readers category.

Basically if the price is right there is massive demand in all markets.

Interestingly the levels of interest are similar across all markets and broadly in line with the US. At around 35%. This shows a potential market of millions, but not a PC or mobile scale market. Considering that very few people have experienced the device in the first place it is surprising that about one third of the sample shows a strong interest in it.

Unexpectedly, the interest in e-readers is almost evenly spread across all age groups (with Germany being the exception). This goes against the common knowledge that only sees young people as early adopters of technological gadgets. Instead, our research shows that almost all age groups are equally appealed to e-readers and this should be kept into consideration when developing content and applications for the e-reader market.

The first of a series short reports utilising our data to highlight  key trends and insights. We created this series to demonstrate the power of the Global Web Index but this is only a small proportion of the research. Anyone  wanting a deeper dive to the interesting world of social media and technology can access the data at a subscription basis.

The Key Facts In This Report (feel free to share and use) are:

1. Globally, the Internet is still primarily a task based tool serving functional needs. People use it to make more informed purchase decisions, find news, find products, entertain and educate themselves
2. Looking specifically into social drivers, the more involved motivations such as creating content or publishing opinions are still niche
3. Fast growing internet markets are inherently more social and involved, sharing content and opinions across all social platforms such as blogging, micro-blogging and uploading video. This trend is reflected across all age groups
4. Content is increasingly more important motivation for online usage

With the world-cup just round the corner, we looked at the potential for online sports rights.

Our research shows that online rights are massively undervalued.

We strongly believe that many people would choose to watch football online rather than through a TV, however in the vast majority of cases there is no legitimate way of watching live online. This is a major market, that is being completely neglected. This is particularly the case in China, where watching full length programming online is the norm. Think of the potential for streaming EPL (English Premiership League) in China alone. Priced correctly, per stream and by subscription, there is a potential for millions of paying viewers. Integrate this with a community, live chat, peer to peer gaming and merchandise stores and the potential is even bigger.

The following release was sent to the press yesterday. If you have any views on this let us know!

With kick off of the football World Cup less than a month away, the latest research from the Global Web Index, a collaboration between online market research provider Lightspeed Research and Trendstream, demonstrates the massive potential for generating revenue from online sports rights.The survey of 16,000 internet users includes people in many of the countries who will be taking part in the tournament in South Africa including the USA, England, Mexico and South Korea.

Watched online in the last month Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Massive potential for streaming online

This year’s football World Cup will be the first where mass market online video streaming is a reality across the globe. Typically online rights are bundled with the TV deal as an ‘add on’, but the Global Web Index demonstrates that these rights are seriously undervalued, with FIFA potentially missing out on millions in revenue. The research shows there is already massive take-up of sports highlights and full length programming online (Chart 1). The Chinese lead the way where thanks to video platforms such as Youku and Tudou that carry full length programming as standard, 35% had watched full length programmers online in the last month and 27% had watched sports highlights. Other countries are not far behind.

Won’t pay, will pay

More crucially there is huge, untapped potential for monetizing streamed sport content. When asked what method of accessing live sports streams, there are very interesting differences in behaviour by country (Chart 2). Sports fans in India, South Korea, China, Mexico and Italy are most likely to choose to pay for their fix. Indians are most likely to pay to enjoy streamed sports without advertising (37%) followed by South Koreans (32%). In direct comparison, those living in the US and European markets in the study – prefer free access, with ads. However there is still a very large interest in paying, and one that if monetized could be far more lucrative than the advertising revenue. It is a similar picture for watching clips of sporting highlights.

“This research shows that online football rights for the 2010 World Cup are massively undervalued” said Tom Smith Director of Global Web Index. “There is proven appetite for streaming all sports online and more importantly, consumers are increasingly paying for it. There’s a whole new generation of younger consumers, as well as specific markets like China and South Korea where paying for sports online is quickly becoming the norm. This research shows that the days when online sports rights are thrown in as a sweetener with the TV rights may be about to be shown the red card. “

Would consider paying for online access. Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Preferred form of payment. Global sample. Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Last week we headed over to Hong Kong for the second in a series of FutureWeb Events, this time hosted in partnership with Microsoft Advertising.

The night was a great success, with three presentations exploring the picture in Asia and what the rise in social involvement means for the changing marketing communications landscape.

A number of clear trends emerged:

1. Asia is leading the way in consumer publishing and sharing in external open environments. This is clearly the case with blogging, with China, South Korea, India and Japan all making up the leading markets. Asian consumers are also starting to dominate in other platforms, such as Social Networking usage where India now leads Brazil in active involvement.

2. Thanks to their massive internet populations, Asia dominates the social ecosystem in certain platforms. China is the most obvious example; we estimate that there are around 88m bloggers in China out of a global population of 240m

3. Forget the hype, Twitter and microblogging in general are still niche activities in Asia, although micro-blogging is growing in China thanks to a number of local players. As with elsewhere in the world, the users most likely to use Twitter work in IT or Advertising and Marketing! Also traditional platforms like forums or message boards are still the most active social platforms, even succeeding social networks in active usage.

4. Asian web users are extremely open to brand involvement online, both through advertising channels and also social media activities. They are also actively talking about brands.

That is just a few hi-lights, please find the full presentations below:

Presentation 1: Global Social Media Trends – Asia Impact. Tom Smith, Trendstream

Presentation 2: What does it mean for your brand. Jenny Armshaw-Heak, Lightspeed Research

Following the success of our London launch we are delighted to announce our launch event in Asia in partnership with Microsoft Advertising.

Three presentations will highlight key trends from wave 2 of the data around the rise of social media in Asia, the impact for brands, and the future of digital.

The event is free of charge but you will need to register here http://advertising.microsoft.com/asia/GWI

Future Web Asia Invitation

Social Web Involvment - Infographic #001

As part of a new series of infographics we have created a global map of social web involvement. We wanted to provide a clear visualisation of the way in which the world adopts social technologies differently. The map visualises the number of active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo uploaders and microbloggers. The length of the curve represents the penetration and the size represents the universe size. We have also included the actual numbers so you can use and apply the universe estimates.

To download the full size version fit for print, click here

An interactive version is coming soon that will allow you to create an audience segment and understand their web involvement by country.

Just a few of the big trends that are evident:

• The social web is mass market: Hundreds of millions of web users are creating and sharing content every month
• The massive impact of China: The vast Internet population coupled with hugely socially active set of web users, makes for a massive volume of content creators. However due to the inward looking nature of Chinas internet economy combined with the language mean that this volume of content does not impact the broader Internet
• Low engagement in Japan: We also associate Japan with technology innovation, and actual while you might not think it, the low engagement is indicative of progress. Why? Our map shows PC activity and we know from this research that a huge number of Japanese users are bypassing PC altogether and using mobile devices to access social platforms and create and share content. Just over 34% of social network users only accessed through mobile in the month of the research, this is compared to 3% in the UK, a staggering indication of where the future is heading.
• The low level of microblog engagement: Despite the Twitter hype, microblogging is still not a mass social activity and nowhere near the size and scale of blogging.

We also have a nice wall chart version, with a 2010 calendar. For your copy send us an email to: globalwebindex@trendstream.net

On the 23^rd of October I presented to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. The presentation focused on Social Media involvement across Europe, motivations to get online, the impact of social media and the evolution needed from companies and brands. The presentation can be found below, and for subscribers in the client portal (where you can download it and reuse the slides).

Iab Social Media Research October 22nd 2010

View more documents from Tom Smith.

As well as looking at the current picture through the data, the presentation looked at three big future trends that make involvement today a must to evolve for a tomorrow where the social ecosystem impacts every purchase decision made:

The first big trend is that the passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one. By passive we mean the exposure and aggregation of opinions, reviews, ratings and recommendations to impact every web user, regardless of their personal social media involvement. In the short term this is through search; already in 2009, 85% have “searched last month” for information about specific products and 49% for “product recommendations”.  Increasingly these searches are dominated by consumer generated reviews or recommendations. Just try searching for a brand or specific product and you can see this impact. As the volume of consumer content continues to outpace professional, this trend will only increase.

Ultimately this means that consumers will increasingly define the first perception of a brand. In the future this will be dictated by social data being overlaid onto mobile devices through Social Augmented Reality, meaning every consumer getting geo relevant recommendations from their immediate network, distant network and people like them. Social will impact every decision we make.

The next big trends is that we increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network of recommendation and consumer meta data rather than a professionally dictated decision. A consumer recommendation was the top ranked factor for consumers choosing music or videos. For news it was narrowly behind ‘professional’, ‘from a site I know’ and unsurprisingly along way behind ‘it’s recent’.

The future of content will not necessarily be ‘consumer’ created or ‘professionally’ created; it will however be dictated and controlled by the social environment. Take for example your current television service; the likelihood is that you access it via an Electronic Programme Guide. In ten years this EPG will have recommendations from consumers, top viewed programmes and programming tagged with key words. Viewing will be unpredictable and consumer driven. This will also happen with e-readers in the next 10-20 years, meaning that the “social” will eventually impact all aspects of media.

The last big trend we explored was how our digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones, for example in the US, the average face to face network is 21.4 and a Social Network one is 49.3. This changes the nature of our social groups and influences to include people we would have lost touch with, distant friends and people complete unknown to us in real life. This is a first in human history and has a significant impact by familiarising us with strangers and broad networks. This is important as we begin to build trust with other consumers and make big decisions based on what they say and we place less emphasis on what the traditional pillars of society say.

Our inaugural Future Web event explored key trends in Social Media usage, users, and the role for brands from the first wave of data. We had a very lively and engaged audience and excellent presentations from two of our launch clients, Microsoft Advertising and Mediaedge:cia, plus plenty of debate on the merits of brands getting on to Twitter.

The three trend presentations from last night can be found below, so feel free to circulate. The first from the founder of Trendstream and project leader, Tom Smith, looked at the main trends in Social Media behaviour, reasons behind them, and some big impacts on communications, our influences and content. The second from Julian Smith, Group Director Analytics and Insight, at Mediaedge:cia, explored the Active Participants, people who are actively creating content online and influencing large numbers of consumers on and offline.  The third presentation from Anita Caras, Head of Research EMEA at Microsoft Advertising explored the new role for brands, how brands should act in Social Media, and in-particular the need for brands to give consumers more than just static advertising.

Global Web Index Future Web 23rd Of September Final

View more documents from Tom Smith.

Who are the Active Participants

View more documents from Tom Smith.

Future Web, Global Web Index 23rd September 2009. The New Role For Brands

View more documents from Tom Smith.

The night was a great success and we plan to do another one soon. If you found the research interesting and you would like to trial the system so you can take a firsthand look at the data, please get in touch with the team at globalwebindex@trendstream.net to arrange a demonstration.

Our first event was macro focused, however we also collect brand data for a large number of consumer and web brands. This allows us to identify advocates online, establish the digital life of customers and non customers and quantify the role for your brand in social media and online advertising. To see examples of how this data can define the role for your brand in social media and drive your business online please get in touch.

We have data globally on the following brands. If your brand is not here, contact the team to add it to the next wave of the survey, but be quick as the next round of research closes for additions by October the 16th.

Beverage

Coca-cola

Pepsi

Red Bull

Evian

Alcoholic Beverage

MillerCoors

Smirnoff

Guinness

Bacardi

Budweiser

Asahi

Corona

Stella Artois

Jack Daniels

Absolut

Heineken

Carlsberg

Technology

Haier

Canon

Sony

Panasonic

Lenovo

IBM

Apple

Phillips

Toshiba

Microsoft

HP

Intel

Dell

Fashion / Retail

Home Depot

IKEA

Levis

Gap

Nike

Adidas

Puma

Reebok

Li Ning

Finance

HSBC

ING

Bank of America

Bank of China

China Construction Bank

MasterCard

American Express

Visa

Casual Dining

KFC

Pizza Hut

Burger King

McDonalds

Starbucks

Wendy’s

Subway

Domino’s Pizza

Hungry Jacks

Automobiles

Renault

Nissan

Toyota

Chrysler

Vauxhall

Opel

GM

Holden

Ford

Peugeot

Hyundai

Honda

Audi

Kia

BMW

Land Rover

VW

Jaguar

Citroen

Mercedes

Fiat

Seat

Mobile

Samsung

Motorola

Sony Ericsson

Nokia

Blackberry

iPhone

LG

HTC

Gaming

Xbox

Wii

PS3

PSP

DS

Web

MSN

Bing

Windows Live

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo

AOL Search

AOL

Windows Live Hotmail

BBC.co.uk / BBC.com

Bebo

Hi5

LinkedIn

Twitter

Ask.com

MSN Hotmail

Baidu

Google

Yahoo search

Gmail

YouTube

Itunes

Imageshack

Monster

Google maps

Facebook

Netlog

Cyworld

Viadeo

Yahoo Video

Flickr

Tudou

Blogger.com

Google Earth

MySpace

Skyrock

Tripadvisor

Windows Live Spaces

Google Video

Photobucket

Amazon

Microsoft office online

Multimap

Friendster

Orkut

Mixi

QQ

Fotolog

Ebay

Picasa

Windows Live Earth

Wikipedia

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live maps

AIM

Google Talk

Yahoo Messenger

Skype

Rakuten

Tuenti

Yandex

libero

Orange

studivz

Sonico

vkontakte

Odnoklassniki

rambler

Naver

Daum

iPlayer

Hulu

As part of our launch, we are hosting an event on the 23rd of September to hi-light some of the key trends that come out of the research.

This event will give you a unique and very recent persepective of the web in 2009. We will present key insights around some of the big trends, including, the real-time web, social network platformisation and active participants. Full details below on the flyer.

The event is free, you just need to RSVP: gwi@lightspeedresearch.com

Future Web Invitation

As we prepare to open the Global Web Index platform to launch subscribers, we thought we would take the opportunity to share some screen shots of how it looks and how the subscriber can get the most out of the data set regardless of familiarity with research.

Analysis:

Trend presentations are published constantly through the year covering all aspects of the data, providing unique insights and thinking. You can search by tags, download to PowerPoint or Excel and share with your team. These presentations will tackle many interesting areas that come out of the data, including topics such as content creation segmentation, understanding the relationship between traditional media and social media and why Asia leads the way in content creation.

Trend documents

Data Tool:

We have teamed up with Confirmit to create an extremely user friendly data tool, which is as simple or detailed as you need it. You can customise charts, export the data into PPT or excel and you can filter them to provide the focus you need. If you want to go further you can run your own crosstabs so you can build complex audiences, or analyse the relationship between different aspects of behaviour. We will show you more of the data tool as we go live.

Data tool dropdown

Data Tool

The Global Web Index wa always about producing more than just data.

We designed it to be about driving insight, new perspectives, great thinking and developing an understanding of the impact. That is why there is a big focus on creating content around the research data.

Today we are releasing our first in a long line of insight reports called, Online Video: 2009 is Primetime.

This launch report shows you how video has become the quickest growing content delivery platform now comparable to TV. It also substantiates the ultra fragmented eco-system of video and also demonstrates how important consumer distribution will be in the future. We also give you rules for distributing video online and a perspective for the future.

As well as proving you with a good perspective on how big video online really is, it should demonstrate the kind of data and quality of insight that the Global Web Index will deliver. We try to make these reports visual, easy to read and actionable.  Please share this, download it and reuse the statistics.

Stay posted for the  global data releases this summer.

You can download it or view it in your browser:

Video Online 2009 is Primetime

Or find it on Slideshare:

As we near the launch we are releasing more preliminary data from the Global Web Index.

The following deck was presented to IAB Interact on June 12th. It ran through some US and UK data that covered the following topics:

• Motivations for going online: the number 1 reason is to research purchases, a demonstration that the web is an inherently commercial place. Motivations around connecting with people and creating and sharing content are driving social media usage.
• Social Media access points in the UK: Video leads passive consumption and Forums, while not trendy are the mass market home of community. It also shows that the leading way to share content is photos and hi-lights that regardless of the hype Twitter is still very niche.
• In-depth look at the video sharing market in the US: Consumers are transforming content and creating a rival to the traditional TV infrastructure.
• The impacts of Social Media: Network sizes are exploding and we trust opinions from total strangers above any kind of professional source of information (a quite staggering piece of information).
• The role for brands: Consumers value feedback and listening.

We hope this data demonstrates how interesting and useful the data from the Global Web Index will be.

To find out more or if you have any questions, please email me tom@trendstream.net.