The Killer Attitude

Facebook Ads goes social and useful (?)

2010-01-15T14:19:00.003+01:00

When I went into Facebook today I noticed this ad:

Two things struck me as interesting, which I hadn't noticed in Facebook ads before:

Govermental information related to society
The ad (for those who don't live in Sweden) tells you that you don't need a little sticker on your number plates from now on. (The sticker was a way to show that you had paid the taxes related to the vehicle).
This highlights the value of Facebook Ads for other messages than the pure commercial that have been the main part of the ads so far.
When you click on the ad you end up at the Swedish Transportstyrelsen.
Social recommendations
Notice the "like"-button, and that two of my friend have "liked" the ad.
I hadn't noticed this before, but apparently this was announced in August by Facebook.
(One reason I hadn't noticed might be because there wasn't any ads "liked" by my friend before?)
This is obviously a way to ensure that the ads as such become more personal relevant for you, in two ways: They are "filtered" by your friends, thus the content might be more likely to be relevant for you and they are "recommended" by your friend - you noticed your friends names and look twice.

That you start to see this type of "useful" information, rather than pure "spam ads", in Facebook leads me to some observations:

Facebook starts to be seen as a valuable platform for information spreading
As the Facebook penetration in Sweden continue to grow, now with more than three million users, it's becomming a mainstream channel that is useful not only for businesses.
A targetable information channel
With Facebook ads you can target the demographics of your receivers quite well, so local information, information for a specific gender and/or age group, information for specific interest groups etc can be effectively spread.
It adds further value to Facebook
I get more value out of this specific ad than most others than I have seen so far.
More natural placements than Google ads
My initial reaction was that this specific ad found a better placement through Facebook than it would have if included in the Google ad platform.

What do you think? Will we see more information spreading through Facebook ads, as opposed to commercial messages?

Three million Facebook users in Sweden - statistics and demographics

2009-12-21T12:02:00.003+01:00

The number of Facebook users in Sweden have now passed the three million mark.

This number have been close for a while, already in the end of October this blog mentioned the 3-million users in Sweden.
However, since October the number of Swedish Facebook users has oscillated around three million users and regulary gone back below the three million mark. But now it seems to be stable above.

Since I had a closer look at the statistics and demographics of Facebook users in Sweden when the number passed the one-million mark and the two-million mark I will once again drill down in the numbers. Enjoy.

The growth
The first million users in Sweden was reached in November 2007, the second million of users was reached in March 2009. Now, end of 2009, the third million users are reached in Sweden.

Based on the graph of the number of Facebook users in Sweden it doesn't look like the trend is flattening yet. Will the growth continue, or is the user base saturated?

When you look at the number of users per age you get the following distribution:

Most users are between 14 and 24 years old.

The genders
The Facebook users in Sweden is evenly distributed between male and female users: In all age groups there's a small surplus of female users (except for the 65+ group; perhaps male persons are more likely to fake their age?) The penetration
The current number of Facebook users in Sweden means that one third (33%) of the population are using Facebook. Out of the age group 15-64 years old nearly half of the population (47%) are on Facebook. In the group of people between 15 and 39 years old three out of four (73%) are on Facebook.

When you look at the penetration for each age you get this graph: Note that the 19-years-old have more than 100% penetration. Obviously there's some errors here (I discuss a few possible reasons in the end note).

It is also interesting to note that the reach is close to 10% even among the older part of the population. I'd say that there's plenty of room to grow towards four million users - as we have a notable part of all ages on Facebook it might continue to grow.

Compared with the one-million and two-million mark...
When you compare the age group penetration today with the previous distribution it is obvious that Facebook has got a foothold among the people above 35 years of age, and that this is where there has been a growth in the number of users. Note also that the highest penetration is in the age group of 15-19, which is a change from earlier this year. Facebook is no longer a place only for people in the early twenties, but a place where you'll find individuals of all ages.

Notes:
Are these numbers correct? What is meant by a Facebook user - someone with an account, or someone with an active account?

The numbers in this analysis is from the Facebook ad system and the Swedish demographics is from SCB.

There is definately some errors involved, but as an indication of the penetration and demographics these numbers might be used.

The age and gender is self-stated. Especially the age contains error sources. Eg. no doubt that the youngest Swedes, those below 13, also have found Facebook. (To a large degree this is probably driven by all the social games (eg Farmville) that can be played on Facebook.) But since the minimum age in order to register a Facebook account is 13 there is a number of kids who have stated an age of 13 or above. And the birth year can not be changed for an account, so this error might still be in place even when the user have passed the age of 13.

"Facebook Ads uses IP address and a user's profile information to determine a user's location." - it is not exactly clear how Facebook uses this combination to determine which users are Swedish. You might very well have individuals logging in through a Swedish IP, but who are not "part of the Swedish population".'

Further more, Facebook has the information of exact birth date, and the SCB numbers is an estimate of the age distribution for the year, not at the current date specifically. Thus the mapping of age information towards the Swedish demography from SCB have some errors.

Active users or not? - This is not clear, but my educated guess is that Facebook lists accounts which have been accessed in the last 30 days in the ads utility, thus the answer to this question is probably "Yes, active users".

CBO & CCO: Brands, Culture and a book

2009-11-26T16:08:00.003+01:00

CBOs and CCOs, interesting development!

Ericsson now has an appointed Chief Brand Officer. Read more at this blog, or have look at the Wikipedia article on the topic. Not the first one in the world, but a fairly new corporate title.

So, what's next? I just saw that there's a new book coming - "Chief Culture Officer"

With the subtitle "How to create a living, breathing, corporation" it looks interesting. Have a look at the table of contents, the pages available as preview and the reviews so far.

I will definately add this to my list of books to potentially get and read.

It is also interesting to notice that not only is it released on Kindle first, it is also more expensive to buy the Kindle version. Are we seeing willingness to pay a premium price for non-paper versions of books?

(D&D; Disclosure and Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson in my daily profession. However I do not blog on behalf of Ericsson; all opinions expressed here are my personal views)

Phone as PVR - learn from the kids

2009-04-02T15:06:00.003+02:00

The industry is pushing the TV experience out to the phones, and in general there is an interest in this use case. However, the next generation consumers are already defining how they will embrace TV and moving images on the phone.

I found my son watching the Simpsons, and at the same time recording it for later viewing. On his mobile phone.
As his phone usage budget is low, he and his friends doesn't use the mobile network that much. Yes - some phone calls and SMS's, but not connecting to the Internet. Mostly using the phone as a gaming platform, and also for various media consumption and creation.

In this case he uses the phone as a PVR, instead of a VCR or other more stationary solutions. By capturing the Simpsons episode the "analogue"way he solves the hazzle of later transfering the file to the phone. And he will be able to enjoy past episodes whenever and wherever he likes.

Oh yes, a bit cumbersome perhaps. But it definately solve the needs of my son. And with a 4 GB memory on he phone he can store a lot of shows...

The quality? Surprisingly good I'd say. And as long as he can keep his sieblings and parents quiet and out of the way the audio is acceptable also.

So - keep an eye on the kids, they define the future. Now.

What are your kids up to? Any stories to share?

Nokia and some "swiss army knife" applications for phones

2009-03-16T14:31:00.006+01:00

More and more functionality is moving into mobile phones. You make calls, SMS and browse the web. Phones are also your MP3 player and your camera. Not to forget your address book and your calendar. You name it...

I just noticed another functionality from Nokia Betalabs. Phones as your magnifying glass. Perhaps an obvious application, but I haven't heard of it before. Simple and potentially useful. When the cameras gets better and better, as well as the screens, this is yet another addition to the swiss-army-knife set of functionality. Have a look at the video:

When I browsed through the Nokia Accessability site I also noticed the text-to-speech (TTS) application. Neat.

The obvious (?) combination of these two applications would be to have the phone reading out text you view through the phone's camera. Just add a bit of OCR. Shouldn't take long before this application appears, or is it already available somewhere?

Two million Facebook users in Sweden - here's the demographics

2009-03-09T21:31:00.008+01:00

Sweden now has over two million Facebook users. That's a lot.

(Update December 2009 - now more than three million users, read more here)

It took Sweden around 16 months to go from one million users to two million users. This means that the overall penetration of Facebook currently is 22% in Sweden.
As you can see from the chart below the growth rate started to increase in August last year, and doesn't seem to decline yet.

Just a week before Sweden broke the one million mark that I looked into the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users. So - let's have another look at the demographics and see what have changed.

Age of Swedish facebook users
This is the age distribution from Facebook:

If you combine this with the population in Sweden for each age group you get a similiar curve indicating the relative number of users within each age span:

You can notice a very high penetration (over 80%) among the population between 19 and 24.

From the chart below you can see that the media age is around 25 years, you find the first 25% of the users below 20 years of age and 75% of the users below 32 years of age:

Gender of Swedish Facebook users
When we look at the gender distribution we see that there is more women than men on Facebook in Sweden:

The female users are in majority across all age groups:

Also, when you compare the similiar graph from 2007 you notice that the "undefined" gender group has gone down. I believe Facebook no longer allow the users not to state gender?

And while we are comparing with the numbers from 2007, let's have a look at the penetration per age group side by side:

You can note that the population age 35 and over still has room for growth, but percentage wise has grown more than the 20-24 age group since 2007.

That's enough of graphs for now. Let's wait for the 3 millionth user in Sweden for some more graphs...

As a last note - when Facebook hit one million users in Sweden I noted that Facebook was the second most visited site in Sweden according to Alexa. Now, when the number of Swedish users has doubled the same Alexa lookup only put Facebook as number 5:

Twixdagen and some Twitter videos

2009-03-05T17:09:00.005+01:00

It seems like the microblogging site Twitter has started to get some momentum in Sweden. Still not a mainstream usage, it will be interesting how far microblogging will spread in Sweden.

Twixdagen
In Sweden most political parties, and quite a few individual politicians, have started to use Twitter. No doubt they are influenced by Barrack Obama's Twitter account.

In the overall mashup tradition a site, Twixdagen.se, has created a feed of all Tweets from Swedish parties and politicians. I find this rather neat and interesting, as it definately increases the visibility and transparancy of the daily work inside politics (disclaimer - I haven't valued the quality and information value of the resulting strean ;-).

Twitter videos
Also recently, two videos with Evan Williams has surfaced.

The first video is from TED. Evan tells the story behind Twitter. I kind of like the statement "I learned to kind of follow hunches, even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're gonna go". Also, what takes place after Evans talk is a great example of the backchannel concept.

The second video is from the television show Charlie Rose. (The Twitter part starts a approx. 33 min 40 sec.)

So, what are you waiting for? If you are not on Twitter, join today. You'll find me at twitter.com/johan.

The past, present and future of Internet

2009-01-13T12:24:00.002+01:00

Time flies. It's almost two weeks into 2009. And it has been a while since I posted here.

I will not start of by summing up the past year of this blog, as I did last year. Instead let's have a look at the past, present and future of the Internet (OK, perhaps not that much of the present, but anyway...).

When I scanned my overloaded feedbox in Google Reader I found a post on the CommonCraft blog, highlighting a video about the history of connected computers up to the birth of Internet (or the Web as we know it today).

This reminded me about a video from TED, where Kevin Kelly reminds us that the Internet as we now take for granted is only 5000 days old (I haven't done the calculation, but you should add a few hundred days to that number by now). In the video Kevin Kelly goes on and looks into the next 5000 days. Some of the predictions feels very much "yes, that's what's happening now".

So, here are the two videos. A nice way to spend the next half hour of 2009:

First video: History of the Internet:

Second video: Predicting the next 5000 days of the web:

(And it's funny how you come across things multiple times when you look around. While thinking about this post I went into Jaiku for another reason, stumbled over a Jaiky-thread on .SE domains which lead me to Binero. Once there I looked at the Binero blog, and found two posts containing the same two videos...)

Rock´n´roll in Excel, or excel in rock´n´roll

2008-10-30T13:20:00.003+01:00

Although I think Excel shall be used with care, and though AC/DC might not be my favourite music, the combination somehow rocks.

AC/DC has released a music video. As an Excel file. You will find the details and download here. There is also a Youtube-video of this:

Even if I don't know the demographics of the AC/DC fan community it seems to make sense. AC/DC have been around for a while, and I suspect that a part of their original fans now are white-collar office workers, using Excel daily.

Anyone who are able to see how they achieved this in Excel?

I also notice that AC/DC both have a MySpace page and a Facebook page. And an RSS-feed. They are also promoting an AC/DC game for Playstation, Wii and Xbox. Didn't find them om Twitter though (twitter.com/acdc does not seem to be them...). But still, overall quite a good social media marketing approach.

Hello Turkey

2008-10-20T10:17:00.007+02:00

Last week I was approach via Facebook by Erdem from Turkey. He is about to write his master thesis on "public relations and promotion" and needed some statistics on Facebook usage in Turkey.

So Erdem, here is some numbers and further pointers. Always happy to be able to help out, and it will be nice to look at your thesis - even if you write in Turkish perhaps Google translate can help me understand...

The numbers
I created a spreadsheet with all usage statistics I have for Turkey. Enjoy.

The discussion
So, what does the numbers reflect? There's two sets of data - one is from the Facebook ad utility and one is from the Turkey network.

Facebook ad utility (see further down for more on how to use)
Although it is not fully clear what exactly is reflected in these numbers, a guess is that:
a) The country you belong to is fetched from your account settings. However, when I just checked this setting seems no longer available, so it might be that Facebook are rather using eg IP mapped to country? Any guesses?
b) The number indicates the number of user from the country logged in over the last 30 days (for an earlier discussion on this, please see this post, scroll down to the heading "What do we measure?")

Network
The implementation of country networks has changed a bit lately. Since mid September no numbers are available.
The country network membership is something you choose yourself. The numbers most likely indicates how many Facebook profiles (users) that are registered for a specific country network, regardless off last login.
As this is a separate action to register, it is fair to believe not all users will hook up to a regional network.

The nest step
If you are looking further into a specific country (as I did with Sweden here), the Facebook ad utility is a great tool for demographic breakdown. Just go here, create an ad and then select the target group.

Here you can dig into the demographics in detail. (As for the gender part, please note that a portion of the profiles does not have a gender specified!)

So, Erdem, good luck with your thesis. Hope this helped.

And if anyone is interested in a coordinated effort to map the detailed, global, demographics let me know...

Olympics is over. Now run for yourself, and set your own rules!

2008-08-28T17:51:00.011+02:00

Today I scanned my feeds and found a blog post that got me thinking. Read it (you need to scroll down "below the fold" after following the link to see the post).

The post is by an interesting person who's blog I have had in my feedreader for some time. Dr. Mani is "a heart surgeon using his Internet marketing business to fund heart surgery for under-privileged children in India". Quite an unusal and interesting combination...

The post is about not looking at your competitors. Run your own race. Compete with yourself.

There's a lot of insight to gain along these lines. Of course you shall have an idea and insight in what your competition is doing. But if you would like to be really good at what you do, and be a forerunner - you need to dare to run your own race. By this you will achive some specific values:

Do things, instead of looking at what others are doing
Too often we tend to spend too much time to watch the rest of the world. Both in a competitive situation, but also in non-competitive situations. As an example - I do have tons (1000+) of unread items in my feedreader. When I feel I have some time for a blog post, and a pretty good idea of what to write about, I still tend to just "peak at the feeds" for some additional inspiration, or to make not to miss something.
If I instead took the time to write those blog posts that have been cooking a while in my mind, and has a more or less complete outline ready, you would find new posts here more frequently.
This can be appleed in many areas. In other words, put just some extra affort on "execute", and things will start to roll a bit faster. I'm sure you will still have all the information and knowledge you need available.
And don't get me wrong, I value all the feeds I subscribe to. They are (more or less :-) carefully selected, and a great source of inspiration, knowledge and recreation.

Set your own rules, define the game
If you set the game rules yourself, you have all the possibility to define a game which you both enjoy and are very good at. Even the best!
Again, this applies to many areas. Again I will use my blogging experience as an example:

This is my blog. I set the rules.

Among the rules are that you are invited. Please leave a comment if you agree to what I write in a post. Even better, leave a comment if you disagree! You may comment on anything. You may wish for posts on a specific topic. Just leave a comment. Or contact me any other channel you find that seems to lead to me. Approach me in person. Look me up on Facebook or other social networks. Part of my rules is that you may influence me, interact with me and my blog. Part of my rules is that you can influence my set of rules.

Where does this put me and this blog?

Well, to you it might put the blog among tons of similiar ones. You might follow it regulary, drop by occationally or just happen to pass by. Doesn't matter to me, you are welcome whatever type of visitor you are. That's part of your game, it's your rules. It is your rules that decides if you will return or not. Your rules decides if you will comment or interact with me and this blog in any way. Your rules decides if you would like to influence my rules.

But to me it puts my blog, and my activity here, as best in class. My class.
And I have a number of other blogs. All with their own set of rules. No written rules in most cases (one excpetion is obviously the rules I just defined above :-)

Not all rules are mine...
...after all. Rules that you can argue are not my own. These are to a large degree defined by the context.
As an example I also have a blog on the intranet where I work, and clearly there is a set of applicable, written, guidelines and rules not set by me.
Another obvious set of rules are those of "common sense and good behaviour". These are to some extent set by my judgement, but to a very large extent set by the society as a whole.

And in some games you can't set all rules yourself, at least if you would like to participate. Going back to the Olympics - you can't invent the rules yourself.
But - you can influence them! Some of the Olympic rules are solely in the mindsets of the athletes (you did read Dr. Mani's post that I referred to in the beginning, or?).
And the rules of some sports do change over time. Often influenced by an individual athlete who in an innovative way bent the existing rules.
Finaly I believe the host country for each Olympic Game are allowed to add a sport of their choice (correct me if I'm wrong) - effectively influencing the overall rules of the game.

I strongly believe that this applies to most areas one way or another. I have used blogging, and this blog as an example. There's two reasons for this.
First - of course the context (and my rules ;-) - this is a blog, and to blog about blogging is a good blog topic for me as a blogger (on this blog at least :-)).
Secondly - today I participated in several good discussions around blogging. Much about why, how, what rules etc. But also about who. At one stage the question "who do you like to see blog?" was raised. My answer is simple. You.

Go out there and run for yourself. Set your own rules.
Start a blog. Start small. Start several times with different rules until you find a game that suits you.
And if I like the game I will gladly participate. On my rules.

Now, this post turned out a bit different that I intended when I started to write a few hours ago. Doesn't matter, my rules...

Finally, if I would take Dr.Mani's post litterally I would hit unsubscribe now in my feedreader. I haven't yet, again my rules apply, not the rules of Dr. Mani.

Now go out and set your rules. Run your own race. You don't have to, it's up you you. And your rules.
I bet we will meet in the race track one way or another, just as we just met here. But remember, blogging is not a competition (unless you decide to make it one). It's a social activity.

Randy Pausch: Time Management and The Last Lecture

2008-07-26T12:46:00.004+02:00

Have you heard about Randy Pausch? I hadn't, but this Friday I noticed some ripples on the Internet mentioning him. I ended up viewing two long lectures by Randy Pausch.

Good stuff, I highly recommend you to spend some time on them. The one on Time Management might be the best, but as the situation is you should probably watch The Last Lecture first.

And as an introduction to Randy Pausch you should watch the shortened, Oprah-version, of The Last Lecture. That will set the scene for you:

Here is the long version of The Last Lecture:

Now, over to the lecture on Time Management:

The slides from the lecture is available in PDF format.

I took home a few things from watching these videos, hope you found something for you as well.

I also found a version of the Time Management lecture from 1998. I haven't had time to look at the whole video yet, but it is fascinating to compare the same person giving the same lecture ten years apart.

The Alice software Randy Pausch mentioned can be found at http://www.alice.org/ - sounded like something that can be useful at some point in time.

Some more resources on Randy Pausch include Wikipedia, his homepage at Carnegie Mellon and this page which lists a number of other videos as well.

A few month ago The Last Lecture was published as a book.

And the ripples that reached me this Friday was the news that Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th.

Facebook statistics and Google Motion Chart

2008-06-04T17:45:00.005+02:00

Time again for an update of the statistics of Facebook usage, penetration and growth. What has happenend since I last wrote about this in February? (And here are all my posts about Facebook statistics, including this one.)

The news includes:

Statistics for more countries
During May Facebook added 26 countries to the SocialAd tool, bringing up the total to 81 countries.
New countries are: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Jamaica, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and finally Uruguay.
Facebook translated into more languages
Spanish was first out, followed by German and French. Now a total of 16 languages are supported, including all of the Nordic languages. See list to the right.
New numbers used for population and Internet usage
I updated the country population numbers used with the July 2008 estimate from the CIA Factbook. And also for the numbers on internet penetration I used the latest information from Internet World Stats.
Gapminder tool available as Google Motion Chart
Since I started collecting the Facebook statistics I have been waiting for this. You might recall my post about Statistical Storytelling, where I mentioned the Gapminder tool that was acquired by Google. Now this tool is available as a graph option inside Google Spreadsheets, and naturally that's what I now use to present the information.

So, on to the statistics! This time I only made a chart for a single date (March 30th, 2008), but naturally the next step is to take advantage of the Motion Chart capabilities by adding historical data, so we can see how the patterns changes over time.

Below you will find the interactive chart. (If you are reading the feed of this blog the embedded chart might not turn up, go here instead).

A larger version is available here. Play around with it and see what you find, to guide you I have made some screenshots further down. Also an explanation of the available indicators are below.

If you find something interesting, or have a suggestion for further data that might be interesting to add, let me know!

The chart should initially look like the screenshot below, except for the country names. You can get the country name for each bubble by hoovering over it, and by clicking on a bubble the name will stick.

This view has the number of Facebook users per country on the x-axis, and the Facebook penetration (of country population) on the y-axis. The size of the bubble is the population of the country, and the colour is simple which region the country belongs to.

US, UK and Canada are the top three countries when you look at numberof Facebook users. looking at the Facebook penetration among the population in a country the top three are Canada, Norway and UK. The two large blue bubbles bottom left are India and China.

Now, let's keep the data for the two axis (each country will keep its position) and change the colour to represent the relative growth the last two weeks, and the size to represent the absolute growth the same period.You see three rather big bubbles (Canada, UK and Chile), representing the countries which added more that 400 000 users since March 16th. And notice the red colour of Chile, indicating the highest relative growth (close to 60%) - the blueish colour of UK and Canada represents a relaive growth of only 4.4%

To dig further into where the Facebook growth is at the moment we keep all settings but for the x-axis, which we make represent the rank of the relative growth (each country get the position of its current relative growth, meaning the highest growth (#1) is the leftmost bubble). To further focus on the high growth countries we turn the scale of the x-axis into a log scale.

This makes it easy to see that the current high growth countries are Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay and Lebanon. Note that the US seems to be at the bottom (far right) - actually US ens up on position #79. Iceland and Jamaica have lower growth, but their bubbles (in this case) are too small to be visible.

This way you can visualize up to four parameters in the same graph and look for patterns and trends. It is easy to create scattered views that not really adds any value, so be careful.

You can also have a look at a single parameter only. Below we used the region as the colour and set the size to be the same for all bubbles. On the y-axis we map the penetration of Facebook users among the internet users in each country, and on the x-axis we simply used the rank of the same indicator (no log scale this time). This makes it easy to study this single parameter.

Here you see Panama and Trinidad and Tobago in top before Canada.

In a similar way you can view the two parameters we used initially (Facebook penetration per country population and the number of Facebook users) separately.

Notice that Sweden has lost one position when looking at the penetration (down to 5th place with Denmark closing in) and lost 3 positions when looking at the total number of Facebok users (down to 10th place with the high growth country of Chile ahead).

Now it's your turn. Play around and find some facts! There's more parameters available than the ones we used above. When you find something worth noticing leave a comment here. Also let me know if I shall add any further data to play around with.

And stay tuned for next post, adding the historical data will make this even more fun.

Here is an explanation of available parameters:

(As the tables will not get indexed I add this: Facebook statistics, usage, penetration for Turkey Israel France Malaysia Singapore China Switzerland Colombia Italy Germany India Spain Ireland Netherlands Australia Saudi Arabia New Zealand Mexico Egypt Lebanon United Arab Emirates UAE Pakistan Dominican Republic Japan Sweden South Korea, Republic of Korea United Kingdom UK Norway United States (US) South Africa Canada Philippines Indonesia Russian Federation (Russia) Greece Denmark Finland Chile Belgium Argentina Venezuela Austria Jordan Peru Kuwait Thailand Panama Brazil Croatia Hong Kong Nigeria Poland Serbia Taiwan Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Jamaica, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Morocco, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Tinidad and Tobago,Uruguay)

Social Media explained by CommonCraft

2008-06-01T04:05:00.002+02:00

Another video from CommonCraft, this time about Social Media. Or rather Social IceCream...

(Link to video as well)

Monoblogging

2008-05-27T21:11:00.003+02:00

One. Word. Is. Enough. Or?

I guess it was due to happen. Today I spotted adocu.com - a monoblog (thanks @technoweenie for the term).

An evolution of the microblogging concept which Twitter (that I like...) made popular. But now limiting the updates to one word instead of 140 characters. And by the way, there's no limit to he length of the word as it seems.

What's the next step on this road?

?

(And for the record, find and follow me at http://adocu.com/johan)

Ads, brand and brandy

2008-05-02T20:04:00.001+02:00

I was browsing a Swedish newspaper online the other week when I noticed this banner ad:

Now, what's special with this?

To the left you see the text "Ta bort alkoholmonopolet och se vad som händer!" (Take away the (state) monopoly on alcohol retail sales and see what happens!).

To the right there's a tab with the text "Dra i mig" (Pull me)

Note that behind the tab you see the logo of the the mobile operator 3.

I was a bit puzzled over this, so I pulled the tab in order to "remove the monopoly".

This revealed the text "Här börjar kalaset" (The party starts here). Right, makes some kind of sense I guess...

But was the intended message? No. This ad was actually two banner ads placed side by side.

The left one was from Systembolaget, "the Swedish Alcohol Retail Monopoly" which "exists for one reason only: To minimize alcohol-related problems by selling alcohol in a responsible way, without profit motive". If you clicked throug it the proper way you got to this campaign site. (Which is in Swedish, but a report is available in English)

And the right ad is from 3, obviously. The party advertised is their five year anniversary.

So, the way the combined message came out due to the placement was not the intended one.

For Systembolaget it was a totally loss, I'd say. The message came out the other way around.

For 3 you can discuss the value. In one way the combination enhanced the message. From another viewpoint the sum was perhaps not a politically correct standpoint.

What do you think? Was it a win or loss for 3? Was it perhaps even an intended placement of the ad..?

Silence...

2008-05-02T18:58:00.005+02:00

If you have looked for new posts the last couple of months - sorry for the silence.

I hope you have missed me, I have missed you...

I have been (and still am) out of town, and have not focused on the blog in a while. I still have a number of topics on my ToBlog list, waiting for a post to be written. And there's plenty of new stuff after that to discover and cover.

So, if you are a returning reader - stay on the line. If you are a new reader, why don't sign up for a subscription using RSS or email (look to the right on this page).

Now off to a new blog post...

Coffee, viral marketing and social media

2008-02-29T12:20:00.003+01:00

Earlier this week I was involved in a Jaiku thread on free coffee.

And yesterday this campaign caught my attention. Perhaps it doesn't solve Annika's need for "instant" coffee, but anyway.

I guess I fit the target audience. And as social media, viral marketing and free coffee sounds like an interesting combination I of course signed up for the beta. And got accepted into the test. Hooray.

And now I am blogging about it, probably together with some of the other bloggers that signed up. Obviously the campaign works ;-)

Looking around a bit it seems like the initial seed was placed the 26th. In three places, including a Java forum, of course...

I am a bit surprised that they didn't use other Social Networks. But looking at this site which appears to be run by the seeder you find:

The seeder runs one of the seed sites.

He doesn't like MySpace or Facebook.

And it seems like this PR agency is behind the campaign.

Now I have two questions while waiting for my coffee:

When was the alpha test?

Will they ship to Sweden? I looked hard, but couldn't find any limitation. But perhaps they understimated the global reach of todays media?

I'll be back with an update and review of the coffee eventually. Until then I'll continue with the free coffee served at my workspace...

Facebook statistics - an update

2008-02-26T13:15:00.003+01:00

It has been a while since I last posted a updated statistics about Facebook usage, growth and penetration. But now it's time again.

If you have missed my earlier posts please have a look here for all posts on Facebook stats (including this post).

Please note - all tables and graphs might be missing if you are reading the feed of this blog. Please go to TheKillerAttitude.com to ensure you see everything.

This time I post a number of "top ten" lists to highlight some aspects. In the end I enclose a complete table, all countries, all statistics.

Recently there has been a number of posts around declining usage of Facebook in the US and UK, based on figures from eg. comScore and Nielsen Online. It might be partially because of a saturation among the users for Social Networking activities. Read the update in this post though, where Facebook states they are measuring active users, not unique visitors.

Also recently, Facebook launched a Spanish translation in the beginning of February. Will non-english versions help continue to drive the growth? Read on for an indication.

And finally, Facebook just added a few countries to the SocialAd utility. Brazil, Croatia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Poland, Serbia and Taiwan was added. When I looked at the numbers last week these countries where represented, but did not have any data yet.

What do we measure?
But first, some thoughts on what numbers we are following.

I have been looking into the numbers provided by Facebook through the SocialAd utility. As the target group for these figures are potential advertisers I believe Facebook are keen to keep the numbers as accurate as big as possible but also as accurate as possible.

As indicated both in the post from ReadWriteWeb I mentioned above, and in Robert Scoble's interview with Marc Zuckerberg, Facebook seems to define a "active user" as someone who has signed in over the last 30 days. Thus I do believe the SocialAd numbers reflects "active users".

But then, in this post Michael Arrington quotes Matt Cohler (VP Facebook), stating that there's 600 000 active users in Germany. The number in SocialAd is 480 000 currently. Oh well...

I have also used the member count in some country networks. Not for all countries, see overall tabel at the end to find out which countries.

The "networks" are something each user selects to join or not. Thus not all users based in a country is expected to be part of the country network. Also, a user can join a different network than the home country.

On the other hand, I do believe the country as stated in the SocialAd utility is based on the country the user selects when signing up for Facebook.

We should also note that the "network" figure probably are not taking into account which users are considered active or not.

If you look at the growth week per week, and compare the growth in SocialAd's numbers and the networks, you see this:

The networks I have looked at (yellow bars) shows a growth every week. The SocialAds data (blue - all countries, red - only countries with "network" data) are more bumpy. Every second week or so you see a growth, in between you only see minor changes.

And last, when calculating benchmark figures I have used population data from the CIA factbook and data on internet usage from Internet World Stats.

Enough introduction, on to the stats.

Countries with highest usage
So, which country is "most Facebooked"?

Depends on how you define it, of course. We'll use the data from the Social Ad utility.
If you look at number of user you get this top ten list:

US in the top, no surprise.

If you on the other hand look at Facebook penetration per country population you get this top ten list:

US falls down to #8. Note that several Nordic countries are among the top ten.

If you however use the penetration among the internet users ina country as benchmark you see a few countries which might be unexpected:

Canada ranks high whatever metrics you use though.

Where's the growth?
It is always interesting to see where the growth is. Let's see the top ten list of growth rate since beginning of the year, using Social Ad data.

So there is still growth according to the numbers. But of course the highest growth potential is where the penetration is lower.

What if you look at the growth in absolute numbers?

Well, US and UK in the top. So this is where most users are added, according to SocialAds. Not the same message as in the articles referenced in the beginning of this blog post.

Translation matters?
Before we look at all countries in one table, what about the Spanish translation? Did it have any effect?

To give an answer I turn to the "networks" data. As seen in the graph above no significant changes in the SocialAds data can be seen the last few weeks, so we will probably not see the potential effect here. Let's have a look at the top ten networks with regards to growth rate. (Note that I have not looked at all networks, but it is an indication.)

Hm, what's the language in the countries on the top half of the list?
It will be interesting to follow how this evolves. For Spanish, and for other translations as they are introduced. Stay tuned for next update.

The big picture
And for you who would like to see all countries. Here is a table to look into.

(As the tables will not get indexed I add this: Facebook statistics, usage, penetration for Turkey Israel France Malaysia Singapore China Switzerland Colombia Italy Germany India Spain Ireland Netherlands Australia Saudi Arabia New Zealand Mexico Egypt Lebanon United Arab Emirates Pakistan Dominican Republic Japan Sweden South Korea, Republic of Korea United Kingdom Norway United States (US) South Africa Canada Philippines Indonesia Russian Federation (Russia) Greece Denmark Finland Chile Belgium Argentina Venezuela Austria Jordan Peru Kuwait Thailand Panama Brazil Croatia Hong Kong Nigeria Poland Serbia Taiwan )

SIME Innovation Day

2008-02-18T10:14:00.003+01:00

I had the opportunity to take part in the SIME Innovation Day on the 7th of February.

A day when around 100 innovative companies met with each other and Ericsson, Google and Telenor to present and get new contacts.

The format of the day was quite hectic. Surprisingly enough it all went rather smooth. During the day close to 200 individuals circulated in one room filled with tables.

The agenda was a mixture of:

Short, on stage, presentatons by a few of the attending companies.
On stage presentatons by the co-hosts (Ericsson, Google and Telenor)
One hour sessions of "table talks" where the participating startups sat together (around seven at each table) with one representative from a co-host and a moderator to meet, present and discuss.

One-to-one meetings between a startup and a co-host representative, scheduled in parallel with the table talks.

Innovators on stage
A number of the startups had the opportunity to present themself from the stage. The presentations where limited to 6 minutes, so they had to make their point very concise. And I would say they all did, altough some slides used had quite a lot of text and bullets.

Below is a summary of the companies that made a "6 minutes elevator pitch" from stage. Many more where at the SIME Innovation Day, but I will not mention all of the around 100 companies. Simply to many, but they where all interesting!

Whatamap
The first company on stage was Whatamap.com - a Finnish company providing you with the maps that matters to you. Not only the common Google Maps type of maps, but all the site specific maps that might be relevant for you at the moment. They seem to distribute each map as a small Java app. to the phone, interesting approach.

Floobs
Floobs.com provides the means for you to set up your own video channel on the internet and on the mobile. Stream video live from your mobile or use pre-recorded material. A crowded arena where eg. Qik, Bambuser and others are active.

Moviestorm
"A computer game without a game" - Moviestorm creates a virtual world where you can create movies. Think machinima. If the process is smooth enough it might appeal as a way to create content.

Zyb
Zyb is a social address book, focused on the mobile scenario. Partly similiar to Plaxo, but more focused on the mobile user. As I am a great fan of "social address books" I of course have a Zyb profile, connect if you are there!

Mobile Sorcery
Development of mobile applications for the multitude of phones out there is a burden. Will the application work on every phone model? On every revieion of a specific phone? What phone models will be launched next week? How to keep up? Mobile Sorcery claim to have the answer with a number of tools. MoSync is one.

SkyCash
A way to use your mobile phone to pay. Connected to your credit cards. Apparently SkyCash is their new brand name, see Betala.se so far as SkyCash.com does not seem to be live. The feature that you get a bar code on your mobile phone, only valid for a few minutes, that should be scanned at the cashier in the shop was interesting.

Momail
"The worlds smallest mobile email", Momail is an email service for mobile phones. It utilizes the email capabilities in the phone, and makes it really easy to configure. You can direct all your email accounts to your Momail account. Momail also optimizes the data traffic usage by adapting the content. Especially media attachments like pictures are scaled down to a fraction of the original size, which both saves data traffic and download times.

Nexos
Nexos from Summit Tech is an IMS based gaming platform. The Nexos platform makes it easy to develop games that takes advantage of the IMS architecure.

Zkout
Zkout from Wichro is a social network with location information. I am still waiting for my beta invite to have a closer look.

Wuzzon
Wuzzon.nl is a Dutch service where individuals can open their own shop. In the shop users can create and sell mobile content such as ringtones and wallpapers. User Generated Content on the mobile, and a way to make money on what you create. "Fight the ringtone maffia", and take the content back to the users was their message.

Polar Rose
Polar Rose has a way to tag people in public photos on the Internet. In this way they are building a database with people and their photos. Create an account and start tagging people! I joined a while ago (my profile is here), but as the plugin only is available for Firefox (which I don't use that much) I haven't been very active.

RTGI
rtgi.fr is a French company that have a solution for mapping out the social web. See who is blogging about your company and who is referencing to who.

ippi
ippi from InView is a device that you connect to your TV. ippi is actually a phone, and receives MMS, SMS and email. The messages are dispayed on the TV set, and you can reply to the messages. Here is a demonstration video.

TownKings
TownKings, and the sister site TownQueens, is another social network site with a local touch. Also inculding location information of some kind. I signed up for an account, go ahead and find me and connect. As they are from Germany that's where they currently have the majority of users

Adimo
Adimo is active in the field of mobile media. They view the mobiel as a natural extension of old (or current) media channels used by companies.

Mobiento
Mobiento works with marketing through the mobile channel. They have also a mobile ad network called Adiento.

WunderLOOP
WunderLOOP has a solution for harvesting user behaviour across multiple sites and of course do data mining based on that.

Zoomorama
Zoomorama is a way to present photos and videos. You create an album page, just as you would do in a traditional photo album, and the visitor can pan and zoom around. Useful for many things.

Yubico
Yubico has perhaps the smallest USB based keyboard - only one key. It is used for security certification. A press on the button generates a security token. The idea is that all computers have support for USB keyboards, and thus no extra drivers are needed.

The co-hosts
The three co-hosts, including Ericsson, also had a stage presentation to outline both what they are looking for and how they work in this area.

Google
First out was Google. Anil Hansjee presented Google's view of how to work with innovation. He also discussed how working with partnerships and acquisitions drives and extends Google's core business.
Anil had this slide with three books that somewhat defines the whole area of this "new internet".
You have read these three books, haven't you? Otherwise you should. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, The Wisdom of Crowds and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. (I must admit I have not read all three yet. Working on it...)

Telenor

Michael Bergman from Telenor taked about Telenor's service Mobilstart. An easy way to get started with new mobile services, and to target the whole customer base in eg Sweden, not only Telenor's subscribers.

Ericsson
Kurt Sillén talked about how Ericsson puts focus on consumers, and how Ericson works with partners. The changing business enviroment and the more and more complex value chains is a part of this. Kurt also gave a number of examples where Ericsson have worked with partners to create new services and applications.

The awards
At the end of the day three prizes where handed out. A jury had selected three out of the hundred companies. The winners, all mentioned as "number 1" (all the others where "close second"), where Zyb, Polar Rose and Jaycut.

Here is a video from the award cermony. As Jaycut did not present themself from stage earlier they got the opportunity to do so. Watch the video:

Other coverage
The blog disruptive.nu covered the event by liveblogging from the room. See all posts from disruptive here (in Swedish though). It is worth mentioning that I first got to hear about the Sime Innovation Day from a blog post at disruptive.nu

Björn Falkevik from lidne.com captured the event on video. I have not seen the films uploaded yet, but will add a link later.

If you covered the event in your blog, please add a link in the comments.

And what could be more suitable than to upload the rest of the pictures I took to Jaycut? Now you can tag the people using Polar Rose and make sure they are in your Zyb address book...

All in all - a very interesting day. I hope all participants felt the same. My general comment is that "There's no killer app, only a killer attitude" is a very valid quote. All of the applications presented was fun, nice and interesting. Maybe also potential "killer apps".
But having a useful application is not all. Being able to tweak the scope, find new niches and in general adapt to the ever changing playground is crucial.

(Double-D; Disclosure and Disclaimer: I attended SIME Innovation Day on behalf of Ericsson. However I do not blog on behalf of Ericsson; all opinions expressed here are my personal views)

Ahlgrens bilar: Volvo and more

2008-02-06T11:44:00.000+01:00

Some time ago I wrote about Ahlgrens bilar. The highlight was how they made three products out of one by simply packing each colour in separate bags.

I also listed some other related candy that was manufactured under the same brand.

Volvo + Ahlgrens = TRUE
The main reason I write this update is the news that Volvo and Ahlgrens are launching a joint campaign. Candy cars in the format of the Volvo model V70 are launched as "Sweden's most environmental car".

I like this type of cross-brand campaigns. And what can be more natural than a joint effort between two of the biggest car brands in Sweden? And at the same time surfing the environmental wave.

But why did they mix all colours in the bag? Shouldn't all cars be of the green flavour?

One size doesn not fit all
Also, as a follow up to my earlier post. I failed to notice that the main product (Ahlgrens bilar) is available in multiple sizes. At least five different bags (30, 55, 70, 125 and 160 g).

Now also "sweat and sour"
And finally. Yet another sub-brand of Ahlgrens bilar is spotted. The "sursockrade" version.

Hm, some candy anyone? I'll probably stick to the mainstream version myself, but will at least try the new alternatives. What about you?

Freeconomics

2008-01-29T12:09:00.001+01:00

Is the saying "there's no such thing as a free lunch" becomming obsolete?

There is a clear trend, especially on the Internet, that more and more services are free of charge. This has become possible mainly because the marginal cost of adding yet another user to the service is essentially zero.

Take some time and watch this video with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. (Sorry, no embedded version available.)
Update May 22nd, 2009 - sorry, the video I linked to above is not available any longer, try this link instead!
He discusses the drivers behind the "free" business model, and especially how the decreasing marginal cost of processing power, storage and bandwidth has transformed the Internet.

This is great for the majority of users. As we say in Sweden - gratis är gott.

I almost wrote "many people will never sign up for a service that would cost them, regardless how small the fee might be". This is not entirely true. There is plenty of examples where people pays for services, and are happy with that.

And in many cases people will continue to pay for high quality content and services. The "free" business model will not take it all.

But I still believe that the trend of free services are here to stay. And many free services are good. Really good. You probably uses a number of free services yourself.

Of course any (or at least most) services or products that are offered for free, without any other revenue stream, are doomed in the long run. If the business is not run by a true philanthropic there is probably a business model that will monetize the business one way or another in the background.

There is a number of business models that might apply. On Chris Anderson's blog you can read this post for some ideas and discussions.

Some of the models that can be identified includes:

Ad revenues
Very common of course. With several sub-types that can be outlined.
Get bought
The dream of many start-ups. Provide a service, get popular and get bought (for big money) by someone. Yes, we have seen this several times. But a truly gamble.
Freemium
This is my personal favourite in terms of attitude change. As opposed to (earlier) models where you could get a demo version or a version with very limited functionality for free, the Freemium model provides a free, fully functional, version for the majority of users. But for a small group of power users some extra features are unlocked for a fee.

Now, what about this blog? Oh yes, I do have ads on it. And for this post I created an Amazon Associates account. So please click on the ads and buy the book from the link above...

I truly doubt that I will make any revenue though. With a bit of luck I might cover the fees for the domain name and web hosting. Maybe.

What do you say? Would you pay to read it? Or pay to get the posts 24 hours before non-paying readers? Probably not (or? - let me know otherwise...).

The value for me to blog here is something else. And as you have read to the end of this (free) post, you hopefully found some value in it.

Now off to a not-that-free lunch.

Google is now an OpenID provider

2008-01-21T17:58:00.000+01:00

With the current trend to open up it seems like everyone is competing to provide bits and pieces to the overall equation. Now Google has become an OpenID provider.

This happened shortly after Yahoo announced their upcomming OpenID support. Yahoo will go public beta end of January though. Google's OpenID works today.

The Google support is through Blogger.com. Meaning that the OpenID URL you submit to login is a URL to one of your blogs. At the moment you need to login to Blogger at http://draft.blogger.com/ - then update your Blogger profile. Currently it only works for blogs with a blogspot.com URL.

This is not a big surprise, especially since Blogger earlier enabled OpenID for comments.

And I just tried it. Did the trick for Dopplr login.

One question - what about blogs that are maintained by multiple persons? Will the blog URL be possible to use by all users who are registered to the blog?

The answer seems to be yes - if the other individual is admin of the blog. This means that such blog URLs will be possible to use by multiple persons, using each persons individual blogger login credentials.

By design or a "feature"? Guess it comes with the architecure. Might be a handy feature in some scenarios, but be aware that granting other people admin access to a blog might open up some OpenID sites for them.

Update 080129: Just noticed from a post at BloggerInDraft that the Blogger OpenID service can be used by any domain you own. This by using a delegate feature. Nice.

Facebook profile - time to tidy up

2008-01-16T15:34:00.001+01:00

Today Facebook enabled the profile clean up tool that was announced a few days ago.

When I visited my profile page a few minutes ago I was presented with this box:

So, let's start the year with a fresh Facebook profile page. I selected some applications I do not use frequently and went ahead.

Sure enough - now at the bottom of my profile I see this:

And when I expand it I see the applications (they are not expanded since I manually minimized them).

So - a way for people to keep the applications on their profiles, but ensure that the main profile page does not appear that cluttered. Definately needed with the abundance of Facebook apps that gets installed.

Now - it would be nice if the tool procatively proposed when and what to move to this extended profile. And no, I do not have a proposal for a guiding rule for when to propose what.

Twitter goes to Japan

2008-01-15T13:57:00.000+01:00

Twitter is about to launch in Japan later this year according to this source. Also mentioned here.

This seems to be a localized version. The first non-english one.

Twitter.jp is already registered, but it doesn't look like it belongs to Twitter? Or does it? Do you know japanese? As the text on Twitter.jp is enclosed as images I can not run it through a translator.

Here is a japanese news story. And here is the translated version.

Update 080117: ..and here is the Twitter blog post covering this...