Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures.

Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

I’m very honoured to get a speaking slot. The SXSW organisers whittled down over 2300 applications to just 300 based on public votes (if you were one of those that voted – thank you!) and their own judging criteria.

The trouble is, I’m not going to be there. Despite some of our friends taking the whole company to SXSW, with the speed things are moving here in Europe for We Are Social, right now I simply can’t afford five days away from the office.

Thankfully, our friend Peter Bihr (@thewavingcat), one of Germany’s leading social media thinkers, has agreed to step into the breach and lead the talk, but he’s not had much time to prepare. So, we need you your help – I’m going to talk below about what I was planning to cover, but please chip-in in the comments if you have any insights to add of your own. Peter’s relying on you!

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media
With over 10 pan-European social media campaigns under our belt, we feel like we’ve got a handle on the nuances of European social media, but it’s very hard to sum-up in a few words. Let’s take things step by step.

For those needing to get up to speed, Forrester’s social technographics profile tool is a good place to start. To save you the trouble of playing around with all the drop-downs, here’s a presentation I put together based on the data from it:

As you’ll see, there’s a lot of variation between age groups in each country, with different generations in different places using social media in different ways. Germany really does seem to be lagging behind, with the Netherlands and Sweden leading the way.

However, the data doesn’t support the deliberately provocative proposition in my preamble that “Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media”. Well, Forrester is only one source of data, and others paint a different picture.

Nielsen’s ‘Global Faces and Networked Places’ report from March last year showed Spain, Italy and the UK ahead of the US in terms of social media usage:

And others often show similar findings. Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker Wave 3 showed the vast majority of Europe ahead of the US in terms of blog readership (page 18), people starting their own blog (page 22) and membership of social networks (page 36). Sysomos has shown that London is the captial of Twitter (in fact, it could be argued it’s the social media captial of the world), and more recent data from Neilsen shows that people in the UK and Italy spend more time on social networks each month than those in the US:

Aside from the detailed look at European social media usage that the Forrester data provides, there are other reports worth looking at. Our friend Tom Smith of Trendstream put this really useful deck together based on his first round of Global Web Index data:

And IAB Europe’s Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected data is really useful when trying to understand what’s happening in some of Europe’s regions and smaller countries. Here’s a summary of their findings:

So far, I’ve concentrated on European social media usage and behavior, but it’s worth remembering that Europe has a rich landscape of social media services, despite Facebook’s merciless and continuing rise to world domination.

The FT recently carried an article by Maija Palmer that’s essential reading if you want to understand this landscape – ‘A future alongside Facebook’, looking at the fate of services like Skyrock in France, StudiVZ in Germany and Tuenti in Spain now they’ve been eclipsed by Facebook. Meanwhile it seems that Hyves in the Netherlands, Vkontakte in Russia, nasza-klasa.pl in Poland (which famously was more popular that Twitter in the UK this time last year), Lidé in the Czech Republic and iWiW in Hungary are holding their own against Facebook in their respective markets.

So where does that leave us? Europe is a complex and varied continent, and it’s no surprise to find that its social media landscape matches this. From our pan-European campaign experience, we know it’s important to treat each country differently, and we always make sure we either have a native of each country working on the team in London or Paris, or we work closely with local partners. Despite the varied uptake and usage of social media in different countries, we’ve found if we respect the local social media culture, it’s possible to run successful social media campaigns in any market in Europe.

Goa Hippy Tribe is using Facebook in a number of ways: as subject matter (in particular the re-connection of the eponymous Goan Hippies via the social network); in part for research, production and content, and also as a platform for marketing and distribution.

Whilst the story behind the film itself highlights the role that networks such as Facebook play in creating new stories for documentary to cover, what’s really interesting is the way Facebook is being used to shape the content and format of the work.

The filmmaker, Darius Devas, has been interacting with the community of people who were part of the scene in Goa as he makes the film, not only shaping the way the film evolves, but building a community that is a part of the filmmaking process.

Interviews and other items of ‘micro-content’ have been posted over time, sparking conversations, building shared connections between the audience and involving everyone in the journey of the filmmaker and the film. There’s even a lively discussion on a separate Goa Hippy Tribe Group page considering the role of Facebook as an enabler, versus the inevitable privacy concerns when old photos and stories are made public.

This kind of collaboration would not previously have been possible, and it’s a particularly effective way of increasing the emotional involvement of the audience, who will be more likely to share links and recommend the film to their friends, especially as Facebook provides the means to easily do so.

All of this starts to change the way we think about broadcast. This project has an obvious community interested in the subject, but there are just as many niche audiences outside of hippies in Goa. As CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein puts it: “The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.” As these “trusted sources” – our friends – become our audience(s), and we involve them the narrative of our own status updates, the relevance and role of the one-way broadcast media comes into question.

Arto Joensuu, Head of Digital Marketing at Nokia, and the rest of his search & social team are spreading the message that conversations are the new conversion across Nokia and beyond:

Smart brands embrace the notion of co-creating social practices with customers and listen carefully to when these come to life in specific usage contexts of a particular product. These conversational conversions are the future for brand success as they are fueled through advocacy. Conversations are thus the new conversion metric smart brands will start to measure.

PR Week’s video podcast sparked some debate last week on the state of blogger relations in the UK, when Cate Sevilla, founding editor of BitchBuzz.com, told the publication that she wanted PR professionals and bloggers to hold a serious discussion, rather than simply ranting about one another all the time.

It seems that (some) PR practitioners continue to miss the mark when outreaching to bloggers, and have been accused of bad pitches, not doing their research, not reading the target blog, or generally not ‘getting’ bloggers in some cases.

The call for honest and professional feedback by Sevilla is an important one, in order for the industry and this debate to move forward. “Professional bloggers and PROs need each other, so instead of ranting about one another on Twitter, we need to have a serious discussion.”

Bing’s Facebook Page Gets 400,000 New Fans in a Day Through Ad Offer in Farmville
Microsoft ran an advertising offer for Bing within Zynga’s hit game FarmVille, which according to Inside Facebook, netted Bing over 400,000 new fans to their Fan Page in a single day.

Gamers who became a fan of Bing on Facebook earned 3 Farm Cash (the virtual currency used in the game) and caused the page’s popularity to skyrocket from 100,000 to more than 500,000 fans in 24 hours. For those unfamiliar with FarmVille, the Facebook game has over 83.1 million monthly active users, and 28.7 million daily active users according to AppData.

To be sure, the tactic was wildly successful but has attracted criticism from some. Griffin Farley points out:

[the success of the incentive was] very impressive but what is the value of the fan that was bought? Sure the cash was only virtual money but don’t you want true advocates in a Facebook community? I don’t want to have to pay my loyal fans every time I want to engage the community. I want fans that want to be fans of a brand or a branded movement for the sure pleasure of being involved with a bigger community of people.

The Bing Fan Page now has over 592,000 fans. It will be interesting to see what they do with them.

UK ad industry to extend self-regulatory remit to social media
Today it was announced that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are extending their self-regulatory rules for non-broadcast media (known as the ‘CAP Code’) to ensure that: “marketing communications on advertisers’ own websites and other non paid-for space online, such as in social media, comes within the scope of the code.”

As Mark Sweeney from the Guardian puts it: “the extension to the ad code will ensure that all online marketing will have to be responsible, legal, honest and truthful under the same regulations as, say, press and poster ads.

The new rules are expected to come into force during the third quarter of this year and have the backing of the whole advertising ecosystem (including us!).

Facebook and Twitter mobile users soar according to comScore
Access to social networks via mobile phone has increased rapidly in the last year, according to new research from comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

Much of the growth of mobile social networking has been driven by smartphone users, as better functionality enables millions to access social networking sites via a mobile browser or dedicated apps.

Also see Coca-Cola: A social media case study (disclosure – Coca-Cola is a We Are Social client).

And although it seems a little obvious to point out, if you need help developing a social media strategy of your own, do get in touch…

Burson-Marsteller released the findings of their Fortune Global 100 Social Media Study which looked at the social media usage of the 100 biggest companies on the Fortune 500 list. The study found that 79% of the companies use at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.

Like the Fortune 100 study found, Twitter is the social media platform of choice among the Fortune Global 100. The study found that 65 percent of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter, 54 percent have a Facebook fan page, 50 percent have a YouTube channel, and one-third (33 percent) have corporate blogs. Only 20 percent of the major international companies are utilizing all four platforms to engage with stakeholders.

Social media participation by companies varied globally by region, and it appears that large firms are getting more comfortable using social media and are broadcasting less, and engaging more. You can download the complete analysis of these findings as a PDF.

Sony generates over £1m in sales through Twitter
Speaking at the Marketing Week Social Media for Brand Building event, Sony revealed that they generated over £1m in sales through Twitter. Nick Sharples, head of corporate communications has said that Sony sees Twitter “as a viable sales platform, as well as a tool to amplify PR activity.” This revelation by the tech giant echoes the headlines made last December, when Dell announced they had driven US$6.5 million in revenue thanks to Twitter.

Facebook page updates to appear in Google
Last week, Google began indexing status updates from Facebook Pages and including them in its real-time search results. This marks the first time that Google has integrated information from Facebook, and follows similar announcements in recent months that Google had integrated Twitter and MySpace updates in its results.

The information it is allowed to integrate is more limited than the deal the social network has in place with Microsoft’s Bing. Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are ‘for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner’, according to the network’s own definition, and act more as marketing tools.

Yahoo! signed a deal its own last week with Twitter, “which not only takes in search, but also a deeper integration of the microblogging service’s tools.”

The fact that these days it’s not just mainstream media who are being given the opportunity to attend has caused quite a stir this fashion week. You may have seen the articles in the Times and on Brand Republic, referring to bloggers as ‘liggers with laptops’, going to any means to get front row seats.

The Times article states “last February, 22 per cent of the total press accreditations granted by the British Fashion Council to LFW were given to bloggers. This year, the number has increased to 33 per cent”.

As you can see from some of the great posts about London Fashion Week from bloggers like The Style PA and Coco’s Teaparty, to label them all this way is patently untrue.

But we did see some of this when we took several fashion bloggers along to London Fashion Week, on behalf of glaceau vitaminwater, and we experienced first hand the ‘scrum’ to get in to a number of the shows.

The fashion blogging community is growing and evolving everyday and as with any industry there will always be new kids on the block. So it is important for brands involving themselves in London Fashion Week to be prepared and not be ‘blagged’.

They should look to talk to bloggers that not only have reach and influence, but also who are relevant to their brand. We help our clients do this with a well defined methodology and proprietary tools to measure influence and reach.

As the market evolves, brands are going to need to become as professional in their approach to bloggers as bloggers have already become in their coverage of fashion.

I popped along to represent We Are Social at The Albion Society’s latest breakfast debate on Wednesday. Up for discussion was ‘Digital Democracy’ and, boy, what a panel we had: Guardian Editor, Alan Rusbridger, Mumsnet founder, Justine Roberts; Tess Alps of ThinkBox and Dan Thain from Blue State Digital.

Alan was up first and didn’t disappoint. He stated boldly that the media industry was undergoing a massive upheaval that’s splitting the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dichotomy of traditional journalism and changing the model of media from one of expected Authority to public Involvement.

Driving this shift is, of course, the Internet – and social web in particular. It’s empowering people to no longer be the passive audience it once was but to want to get involved.

Alan suggested this was a massive, almost inconceivable challenge to journalists but is ultimately leading to better things.

As examples he contrasted the traditional model of foreign affairs reporting: usually written by one ‘expert’ but non-native correspondent. Now we can call up multi-media news content direct from people on the ground with first-hand experience.

Travel news no longer relies on a journalist traveling to a country for three days and writing up their experiences as the average trip. Travel reporting can turn to other traveler’s experiences and those living their lives in the destination.

Complex issues such as tax avoidance which is often too complicated for the average news journalism can be exploded into dramatic news by throwing the investigation and analysis process open to a better informed public.

All of this leads to newspapers becoming focal points for involvement and following Jeff Jarvis’ famous maxim: ‘Do what you do best, link to the rest.’

So how this link to democracy? Well, drawing an analogy with the Authority vs Involvement model, Alan suggested that the attitude some MPs have that they should be trusted because they’re MPs and they deserve our vote is broken.

Smart politicians and parties will understand that political and democratic value in the future will lie in the involvement model. Social media and networks will create a new politics, imbued with greater trust generated through peer-to-peer involvement.

Adapting the concept of online news paywalls, Alan also suggested that while openness was key to fostering involvement, closed (i.e. paywalled) content and networks reinforced perceived authority  and critiqued parliament for still being too closed off from the rest of society. This, he argued, was fueling the crisis of trust being experienced.

Justine Roberts from Mumsnet approached digital democracy from a similar perspective and revealed some fascinating inside facts about politicians courting – and even infiltrating – the leading Mums community.

Justine questioned why so many politicians were keen to get in front of Mumsnet members. She suggested that unlike Twitter which is still largely mysterious to a lot MPs, Mumsnet is an easy concept to grasp: 95% female community; 1m uniques a month; on the media’s radar (since the media claimed the election will be the Mumsnet election) meaning their opinions are more likely to be reported.

Given this high-level of awareness does Mumsnet have any real political power, Justine asked?

Firstly she dispelled he myth of a block vote. Their own internal surveys of members how’s that party support is fairly evenly split across the three main parties. Despite this the BNP was actually caught trying to infiltrate discussions and shape debates towards a fascist/far-right agenda.

Where Mumsnet real political potential lies is through driving single-issue campaigns relevant to members. Justine gave an example where members had vociferously opposed plans by the Government to change the childcare voucher scheme. The campaign eventually caused Gordon Brown to change the unpopular policy.

Given this effect on policy Government was now engaging the community proactively. The wisdom of the community is being exploited by the Department of Health who are involving Mumsnet community members to help develop its policy towards women that have suffered miscarriages.

What this all adds up to, Justine suggested pragmatically, was that while Mumsnet may not have political power in the traditional sense, it certainly has power to mobilize its members in the same way organisations such as 38Degrees can.

“Mumsnet,” she concluded, “is a non-aligned mouthpiece for its community. It’s not a union bloc vote; it’s more like an octopus with pre-menstrual stress.”

Tess Alps from ThinkBox took on the counter-argument by suggesting that without professional media internet conversations would just be “noise”. In terms of democracy she als suggested that while we think that unmediated access to politicians is a good thing when its Obama, what happens when its Nick Griffin. I kind of thought that was undemocratic in itself, but didn’t challenge her.

Tess also suggested that politicians are lazy when they turn to Mumsnet because it’s easier than visiting a working men’s club. Of course, no-one was suggesting politicians shouldn’t visit other communities of voters so this point fell rather flat.

You could equally make the same argument when politicians first clocked that visiting working mens and other social clubs was a good thing to do instead of just talking to the local chamber of commerce when voting rights were extended.

Finally Blue State Digital’s Dan Thain, presented a case study from their anti-BNP Hope Not Hate campaign (it seems the far-right was a recurring theme of the morning).

Dan argued that the campaign, like most political campaigns, was driven by email marketing and reinforced their prowess for all things email – the same strategy that mobilized Obama’s votes in the US election.

Unbelievably the Hope Not Hate campaign has an email database greater than any of the UK’s main political parties – although I wonder how it compares to the BNPs? If you like data driven, transactional email campaigns it’s a great case study.

All in all it was a great breakfast briefing and good coffee too. My beliefs fall firmly on the side of Alan Rusbridger and Justine Roberts.

I was chatting to Justine afterwards and we both agreed that single-issue communities are likely to be powerful tools for political organisation in the future. They are built on social capital and work together to achieve shared goals regardless of traditional party affiliation. While the mainstream media may have coined the term Mumsnet election as a short-hand for the power of that specfic platform, they probably don’t realize how close they are to the truth.

On Wednesday last week, we moved into our new home in Golden Square. We’ve got the whole of the first floor of no. 37 (the building behind us in the photo above – you can see the entrance to our left).

As you can see from the contrast between the photo above and the one from when we moved into the Qube just under a year ago, we’ve grown considerably since then. There are now 24 of us here in London (Jamie is missing from the photo above because he and his wife had their first child yesterday, a beautiful baby girl) and despite Sandrine and Camille kindly freeing up some space by moving to Paris, we needed a place where we have room to grow further. We’re going to miss the plush surroundings of the Qube (and the amazing event space we had there), but we’re looking forward to making Soho our home, especially over the summer months.

And now we’ve got some spare desk space, we’re extending an open invitation to anyone who’s interested in or works in social media, to drop by, grab a coffee, a desk and use our WiFi.

Our full address details are on our contact page – do pop in and say hi if you’re in the area!