The 10 biggest brands on Facebook
Just look at this list. Personal brands – or people as brands – beat businesses as brands in terms of Facebook. The question here is what makes them “biggest”.
I’m not sure followers or likes are the best of metrics. Sure, they are metrics but should we be really looking at engagement at a deeper level – or revenue? Does their success on Facebook afford them more margin or customer loyalty? I like Joe Tripodi’s ideas for measuring Expressions.
So, in addition to “consumer impressions,” we are increasingly tracking “consumer expressions.” To us, an expression is any level of engagement with our brand content by a consumer or constituent. It could be a comment, a “like,” uploading a photo or video or passing content onto their networks.
It is stunning to me that 33,764,986 like Coke on Facebook… (including me). We’re on our way with some 55,370 people liking CBA.
For more, read… The 10 biggest brands on Facebook- what’s hot and what’s not – TNW Facebook.
Another Tipping point
According to Comscore: U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.
A Great Message For Kiwi Companies
Are you an exporter or a global company? It’s a subtle but very important difference. NZ tech companies have been confused on this one for too long.
Brand NZ does little for the NZ technology enterprise, so trying to derive some advantage in our clean, green, pure image is a waste of time. If anything it reinforces distance, remoteness and high cost. That’s not to say those values don’t work for our dominant industries – like agriculture and vodka production.
Don’t get me wrong, there is lots to love about being a NZ company with a bunch of dedicated Kiwis powered by Kiwi values. But that doesn’t mean you need to feature it.
At the end of the day, what we export in tech doesn’t weigh nearly as much – often it’s lighter than air. And more than often, while the IP is generated in NZ, the product is normally made in all the usual places. We in effect export ideas to people who make things for us and then export them to our customers who in term export the final product to their customer. You get them idea, if we are all exporters, why make the point?
Al Munroe of Next Window hits this on the head:
"It’s important that New Zealand start-ups see themselves as global companies, because it may sound good to be a leading high-tech exporter [in New Zealand] but to the rest of the world it sounds pretty naff," he said.
Monro said being a New Zealand exporter gave potential customers and investors overseas the impression that their focus and scale was at a low level.
"I rail against the term export," he said.
Asked how New Zealand start-ups could escape being categorised as lowly exporters, he said they needed to be careful how they positioned themselves.
"If you position yourself as an emerging global company, it sends a completely different message."
Next Window is poised to become to of NZ’s tech giants. (And they are a supplier to Dell.)
WHat the Web Will Look Like In Five Years
Some interesting comments from Eric Schmidt….
- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
- "We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.
- "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
- "We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?"
- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
THE TWITTER EFFECT
Wherever Web 2.0 goes, so ends the traditional communications hierarchy. The sooner organizations realize that transparency is better than controlled opacity, the better. Here, the NFL is attempting to prevent players from streaming their lives.
For the first time, fans aren’t dependent on media reports for training camp updates. Players themselves are divulging certain details, from the humorous to the inconsequential, using Twitter feeds
In all, 10 Redskins players use active Twitter accounts to keep in touch with friends and fans through 140-character bursts. It’s part of a revolution that has touched other sports, but one that didn’t boom in the NFL until after last season’s Super Bowl. Since then, dozens of players throughout the league have opened Twitter accounts, giving fans an intriguing look at the offseason — previously a period in which most players essentially disappeared from public view.
The league sent out word almost immediately that it has a pre-existing rule barring the use of mobile devices from the bench area. Ochocinco, who has nearly 79,000 followers, immediately responded on his Twitter page: “Damn NFL and these rules, I am going by my own set of rules, I ain’t hurting nobody or getting in trouble, I am putting my foot down!!”
Rather than trying to block conversations, the NFL and its owners would be better off engaging in the stream of consciousness around its games and players. Rather than attempting to disable when and where it can occur, they would be better to encourage it where appropriate.
