Social Media Clutter Grows

Social media is more popular than ever (81 percent of U.S. online users engage with social tools at least once per month), but that popularity also increases "clutter" in the space, making it harder for marketers to stand out in a busy environment, says Nate Elliott, Forrester Research analyst.

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The average U.S. Facebook user has 135 friend connections on the site, and MySpace and Twitter users aren’t far behind, with MySpace users having an average 107 connections and Twitter users an average 77 connections.

In addition, nearly 75 percent of online users consume other social content outside of social networks, like blogs posts and YouTube videos. Younger users are even more active than the averages suggest.

Also, most users don’t check their social feeds that often, Elliott says.  Despite the lingering stereotype of Facebook and Twitter users being tethered to their computers, the average social network user logs in only every few days, with Facebook users checking in less frequently than users of other popular networks.

From a marketing standpoint relatively few online users become "fans" of brands’ social networking pages. With more than 500 million people around the world using Facebook, and with nearly every business having started its own Facebook page, you probably could’ve guessed that social networks are by far the most common social technology through which consumers engage directly with brands.

But even this type of engagement remains disappointingly rare. Just 18 percent of U.S. online users have become “friends” with or “liked” a brand on a social network in the past three months.

Users are even less likely to engage with brands on less-popular social platforms. For instance, only eight percent have been to a brand-sponsored social network recently, while just six percent have read a brand’s blog. Only five percent of online users have followed a brand on Twitter in the past three months.

If such low levels of engagement continue, it will become difficult for marketers to justify dedicating budget to social channels. In fact, this challenge is already becoming evident: The majority of the large interactive marketers we survey say they’ve chosen not to increase their social media marketing budgets from 2009 to 2010.

With clutter growing, and with social networking users much more interested in engaging with each other than with brands,  interactive marketers have two options for reaching their audiences through social media: cut through the clutter, or  avoid it altogether.

And though many marketers try to fight through social clutter, this strategy is fraught with danger because most marketers simply aren’t interesting enough. Unless a marketer is blessed with genuinely unique content or a breakthrough creative idea, it remains tough to cut through the clutter.

It also costs money to get users’ attention on popular social networks. Although many marketers still think of social media as a “free” strategy, we rarely see successful social programs that didn’t involve some form of paid promotion, says Elliott.

Nothing is ever too easy in the online and mobile marketing business, it seems.

Twitter Users Want News, MySpace Users Do Not, Unless it is Celebrity News

Twitter is a social networking medium, but it also is a news distribution mechanism, it appears. A new stydy by Chitika shows Twitterers mostly consume news while MySpace users want games and entertainment.

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Facebook also is a news site, but less so than Twitter is. About half the traffic (47 percent) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users’ interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebook users by nearly 20 percent, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for news-focused users.

MySpace users, on the other hand, seem to have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead, MySpace members seem to prefer video games (28 percent) and celebrity and entertainment content (23 percent).

more detail here

Outshouts Launches Voice Mashup Service

Outshouts has launched the beta version of its Web service allowing users to create introductions of their favorite audio tracks with their own voice before sending the files to anyone with an email address or mobile phone.

Outshouts can be sent to one person, or a group; marked public or private; or posted as a widget on blogs or social sites like Facebook or Myspace. Recipients do not need to be registered to receive Outshouts and the service is free.

Outshouts supports targeted, personalized micro-casting by making it easy to mash together your own commentary (recorded by phone or computer) on top of your favorite MP3s, and send or posted.

Tracks uploaded from a computer are accessible for sending directly from a mobile phone using an Ineractive Voice Response system.

MySpace Opens Platform; What About IMS?

MySpace plans to open up its platform to external developers in the next few months, company CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe says. So here's the question for you: as global service providers creep towards IP Multimedia Subsystem as their next generation platform, who is going to develop for those IMS platforms if all the developers already are working for Facebook, MySpace and Google?

In fact, here's a prediction: by the time most global carriers have fully functioning IMS networks in place, the compelling applications IMS will enable already will exist someplace else. So the issue will be: what value to the application owners and distributors will accrue as the result of a business relationship with a carrier? Or can carriers create their own versions of these already-popular applications in a walled garden setting?

MySpace Adds Skype

MySpace will offer one-click Skype service to its 110 million users, beginning with users in 20 countries in November. MySpace will share revenue from the deal with Skype.

PC-to-PC phone calls will be free, with fee-based personal phone number, voice mail, call forwarding and calls to public network devices or mobile handsets.

More than 25 million MySpace users already have installed the My Space IM program, which will be Skype enhanced.

Users who set their MySpace profile to "private" won't receive a Skype call from someone who is not on their friend list. Users may also selectively add individuals to their Skype personal contact list, and any call can be blocked at any time.

Aside from potential commercial benefits for Skype and MySpace, the move contributes to a trend: embedding of communications inside popular applications and experiences.

MySpace Mobile Phone Coming....Sort Of

Social networking Web site MySpace is launching free, advertising-supported cell phone sites next week as part of a wider bid by parent News Corp. to attract advertising for mobile Web sites, according to the Associated Press.

Fox Interactive Media, which oversees News Corp.'s Internet properties, said it also plans to roll out versions of FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen and its local TV affiliates in the coming months that will work on cell phones that can access the Internet.

The company already offers subscription-based versions of MySpace through at&t and Helio wireless services. Those versions include special features integrated into specific handsets, such as uploading cell phone photos directly to a user's profile page.

The new version reportedly will work on all U.S. mobile carrier networks and will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends.

So I suppose we now have to add "social networking in my pocket" to the expanding set of mobile device niches. Not a phone, though.

Facebook, MySpace, Friendster Loyalty

Researchers at Parks Associates say social networking users are not loyal, citing stats showing that nearly 40 percent of MySpace users keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, with more than 50 percent of all users actively maintaining multiple profiles.

These trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services, say Parks Associates researchers. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site; one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets, and the users themselves.

I'm not sure I think this "lack of loyalty" is a problem. Communities aren't federated because the people you know are not all federated. It's just like IM systems. Not everybody uses the same client, so one is forced to use multiple clients, or a client that federates all the clients for you. Social networks are no different.

And of course smaller site users are on multiple sites. The problem with smaller sites is that no single smaller site has lots of people you want to stay in touch with as members. The point of registering with any smaller site is that somebody you might want to stay in touch with might join that particular site and not the others you are a member of.