Last month I had the pleasure of sitting on a "Social Media for Business" panel discussion with Louise Clements, the Director of Sales for Facebook Canada. She shared with me some of the latest data on Canadian Facebook users that I would like to pass on. The most staggering figure that I was presented with was that "16 million Canadians spend no less than 1 hour a day on Facebook". Wow Canada has a population 33,212,696~ [stats Canada July 2008]. That's an amazing 48.48% of Canadians in total. This is why they have been working on making fan pages more useful to business and brands. With that level of Canadians engaged daily on Facebook having a fanpage for your brand is more important than ever.

 

I am just going to post the statistics and will provide some analysis later this week.

• 54% Female
• 46% Male
• Each has an average of 220 friends
  
• They make up 12% of the Facebook population.
• They represent 80% of all online 12 - 17 year olds†

How are they using Facebook?

• 77% use it more than email
• 44% use it more than cell phones
• 40% use it more than any other communication tool
  

13-17 year old Facebook behavior (in the past week):

• 57% add/use an application
• 41% become a fan of a page
• 62% upload/view/share a photo
• 39% RSVP to an event
• 47% share/post/watch a video
• 58% read their news feed
• 13% send a gift [that surprised me!]
  

• 48% Female
• 52% Male
• Each has an average of 247 friends
  
• They make up 29% of the Facebook population.
• They represent 93.8% of all online 18 - 24 year olds†

• 82% use it more than email
• 43% use it more than cell phones
• 45% use it more than any other communication tool

• 52% add/use an application
• 33% become a fan of a page
• 63% upload/view/share a photo
• 56% RSVP to an event
• 47%share/post/watch a video
• 67% read their news feed
• 20% send a gift

†Statistics are  from Comscore July 2009

Want to get your story or product description out there in the lifestream of others in more controlled and branded way? I have discussed,  in the past, the fact that referral traffic of social networking/media sites is rivaling that of Google and Yahoo search. It's because of this your headline needs to be able to play nice in these applications if you don't want the referrer to change your carefully crafted message. Just as you take the time to create key words for maximum search ability so should you take the time to ensure that your headline will fit in these often character limited sources of referral traffic.

More and more people are using javascript "Post this to blank social network " browser buttons and site side "tweet this" functionality to quickly get the story they are interested in promoting into the user's preferred social networking news feed or lifestream. The scripts are designed to grab the page or h1 story title automatically and use it as the base of the post or tweet. Many times when I post there is a bunch of unnecessary copy that needs to get weeded out in order to fit the space. I will use my personal blog as an example of what not to do "Jaypiddy's Blog  >> Blog Archive   >> Winners for the first annual Canada Day photo contest. http://ow.ly/hN0N" See how the headline now becomes a bread-crumb trail? This is unnecessary because there is a shortened URL that the users will click and it takes up valuable space in the post. This is a built in trait of Wordpress and I need to look at how to build a work-a-round. Now the user will be tempted, or forced to, edit the copy in order to make the post fit the stream. This means that there maybe the removal of your brand name, typo or personal spin put in the headlines place. Personal opinion granted can be great if the comment is flattering but if possible why not get the headline into the stream as you planned it. Another thing that looks odd when people post into lifestreams is when the post has capitalization throughout the entire headline. This make the headline feel unnatural or more obviously a branded message and will lose the sense that the headline originated with the original poster. Witting in a natural language with proper capitalization will always work better for posting into someone's lifestream. A headline should quickly discribe your story, product or severice in less than 125 characters so that it can fit into a Twitter stream or Facebook News Feed. The reason for 125 characters maximum is that in Twitter there needs to be room for the story's URL without the need for the headline to be truncated. This means the message flows into the stream as you intented it to.

The strategy may seem simple but with the lifestream and newsfeeds of real people being where your brand is being advertised so heavily, every step must be taken to reduce the accidental mucking of your hard earned and consistent brand message.

In celebration of the Obamas recent announcement to build more fuel efficient cars. I thought it would fitting to give away a wallpaper of a hot rod and a hot chick. Why a hot rod? Well I wanted to use a Prius but found that it just did  not look good decaled up!

This photo illustration I did a quite some time ago, and was in a group Hot Rod show at Vancouver's now defunct Moon base Gallery run by Atomos.

There are lots of sizes and even included an iPhone size so that you can add some sas to your mobile desktop. Let me know if you would like a Blackberry size and I make that too.

Wallpaper Sizes [Preview]: 1024x768, 1200x1024, 1280x800, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, and the iPhone

I had the pleasure of being able to participate in Wolf Blass' 75th birthday celebration last Monday at the Hotel Vancouver. I had intended to write about it on my personal blog but after hearing Wolf speak about his early days of guerilla marketing, I realized the story belonged here instead.

II was not sure what to expect for this around-the-world birthday celebration, which was part PR for Wolf Blass Winery, and part lead-up to the launch of Blass' new book. We tasted wine and ate appetizers for nearly an hour before he and his travelling partner George Samios, from Fosters Wine Estates, hit the stage. In a thick Aussie accent, George introduced him as "Wolfy," and I quickly understood that this was a man who liked to have fun, make great wine, and knew how to sell it in every way.

Born and trained in winemaking and viticulture in what was then East Germany in 1934, Blass immigrated to Australia's Barossa Valley in 1960 with only 100 pounds in his pocket. There, he worked as a sparkling wines manager for Kaiser Stuhl Co-operative. Initially, he had wanted to go to Venezuela because of what he referred to with a wink as more "Cha, cha, cha," but there was a civil war on, so he shifted plans and wound up in Australia. I suspect that things may have been very different in the wine industry had Blass made it to his original destination. After 10 or so years as a technical advisor to many different wineries, he decided to make his own wine, and in 1973 created Wolf Blass Wines International. Wolf said the atmosphere for drinking and understanding wine in Australia was rather rudimentary-after all, this was beer country; thus, wine would have to be positioned and marketed very differently.

First, Blass identified a target group whom he could most easily persuade to drink wine. Wolf recognized that Australian women were typically not included in social drinking, and decided that "bubbly" would convince them otherwise. He then looked around at what was popular at the time, and as he put it, "Australians are mad gamblers and they love their racing and football." He noticed these popular sports featured a bold colour aesthetic on jerseys worn by the athletes. One very popular football team had a bright yellow jersey he particularly favoured, and believed yellow was a colour that the target audience would relate to. So, his now world-famous first line of wines was named Yellow Label and as he stated, "It just took off, and from then on it was going to be colours and not varietals." Inspired by Johnny Walker whiskey and its coloured label approach, Blass' colour choice for the second label in his line was adapted to green for the product's launch in Ireland. Blass' colour-coded system was easy for people to remember, as they could ask for it by Yellow Label first, and varietal second. The system has been so successful, in fact, it is now being used by the French for Cognacs and Bordeaux wines. Hell, the Scottish are even using it for the selling of fine whiskey!

When Blass started, there was very little money for advertising and he needed to think about how to maximize his limited funds. Back then, the football fields were not ringed with end-to-end billboards as they are today. When football matches were being televised, there was only one camera filming the games. Wolf would hand-paint advertisements on bed sheets, and hang them over the fence at the far end of the field. He worked out a side deal with the camera man to exchange a bottle of wine for each frame-up on the branded sheet. Quite often as the action was happening at the other end of the field, the camera would be fixed on Blass' banner, to the puzzlement of viewers. Those were the early days of guerilla marketing; Guy Kawasaki would be proud.

Wolf stated his belief that opportunities start with a conversation, and that is why his conversation is now personally taking him on a worldwide speaking tour to talk with brand loyalists and fans of Wolf Blass Wines. His discussion of the role of technology in the way people and brands are now connecting made me think of the new wine conversationalist from Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk, Although Gary doesn't make wine, he talks about it passionately and has similarly broken down barriers to entry. Through social media and modern guerilla marketing techniques, he is marketing wine in ways that resonate with real people. It's interesting to see what is old become new again.

From clear and easy to remember packaging systems, to low-fi guerilla tactics involving homemade bed sheets and cases of wine for cameramen, Wolf Blass has made a huge impact on how the world thinks about wine. Not only did he become a master vintner, but unlike so many artists, he knew how to sell it to people that didn't even know they wanted it.

In a recent Adage article, using data from the research firm Hitwise, t was reported that Facebook now accounts for more referral traffic to some sites than Google. Facebook now has a confirmed number of registered users in the range of 200 million. Social networking has grown a whopping 93 percent since 2006; the amount of time people spend communicating online has increased from 18 to 32 percent of their total online time.[1] The actions performed in Facebook are shifting as well; users spend a good portion of their time on the newly redesigned newsfeed page, where they can quickly scan for status updates and user-recommended videos, products, and  articles. Similar streams in Twitter and FriendFeed are also becoming powerful recommendation engines. Further, the low click-through rate of banners on social media sites is even further below the already shockingly low industry average of .01%-.02%. These low results are primarily due to the highly focused activity performed by users on social media sites, and also explain why media placement companies have bluntly told me, "Social media does not work for online advertising."

The numbers:

• Last fall, it was reported that 40 hours a month are spent online by the average internet user in North America.[2]

• Of those online, 75% are spending time in the social networking and social media space.[3]

• The the industry attributes a .1%-.2% click though rate on most web banners and that number drops further on social networking activity.

• Social networking has grown 93% since 2006.[1]

Now, let's look at some of my anecdotal social media link click-through activity. According to mrtweet.com, a Twitter user recommendation site, I post an average of 42 tweets a day. 28 percent of my posts contain links; that's about 12 links per day. I use Hootsuite to post links, as it enables me to measure the stats of those who actually click on the Hootsuite to post links, as it enables me to measure the stats of those who actually click on the links I post. Last week, I had a total of 1250 clicks[pretty graphs], either directly or through re-tweets[4], on 84 links. That gives me an average click-through rate of 7%. I have approximately 1200 followers, and there are hundreds of thousands of Twitter users with substantially more followers than me. With the growing number of Twitter users alone, recent rumours of the company's acquisition by Google make sense. I post about half the number of links on Facebook as I do on Twitter, but can't measure the click-throughs as Facebook currently lacks the requisite analytical tools. The total number of online social media users across the various platforms-Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us., etc.-provide a clear indication of where consumers spend their time, and why it's important for companies and agencies to create content and campaigns that are viral-worthy.

So where does that leave the web banner? Should we abandon the staple that has given hope to so many web start-ups and sustained others? The answer is no; the web banner has its place in delivering brand presence and campaign messaging online. Perhaps if the web advertising industry had not hung its collective hat on CTR, this issue may not have seen so much back-peddling as there is today. The industry was so keen on proving its relevance in the web's early days that it differentiated itself from other mediums through the highly measurable CTR. Unfortunately, what wasn't considered were the lack of novelty and typically bad experiences users often associated with the click.

However, banners are still important in that we can track their impacts by measuring all customer impressions through comprehensive analytic tools. I believe it is all part of the mix, but the final destination of any campaign must be relevant and engaging enough to hold the attention of users, and contain content that will compel them to share it with others. Creative agencies play an important role in orchestrating compelling ad campaigns that customers can relate to, but ultimately, the method of directing viewers to those destinations is shifting from the once almighty banner ad, to the terrain of "the people's media."

[1] This, according to a survey conducted by Netpop, based on the 105 million U.S. broadband users.

[2] Comscore

[3]  PEW Internet research, March 2009

[4]  A re-tweet is when a Twitter user likes your post so much and recommends the link to their followers through the method of  what is called re-tweeting.