State Of The Web #01
Posted by Lauren and Dan, January 23 2012 at 12:29Google ‘Search, Plus Your World’ Update
A presence on Google+ is now something brands should be considering more than ever. The network grew to 62 million users at the end of 2011, rumours spread that they had hit 90 million just last week with predictions that the figure will reach 400 million by the end of this year.
The recent Google updates have brought ‘social search’ to 2012 and it has been causing a bit of a stir. Google has now started to use social signals from your Google+ accounts to incorporate social data into personalised results page. The concerns raised are that Google is clearly biased to its own network over the social behemoths Facebook and Twitter which undoubtedly are a major source of valuable content and real-time data. This is not to say that integration of other social networks will not happen but for the time being it would seem Google+ is the place to be and brands should be prepared for this. Read more about the Search, plus Your World update here.
Facebook launches 60 new timeline apps
On Wednesday 18th Facebook unveiled its plans to give users more ways of sharing what they are doing with friends with the launch of its new timeline apps. Many big time brands have already jumped on-board with 60 new apps announced from the likes of TicketMaster, Pinterest, TripAdvisor, Spotify and Foursquare. As Facebook describe it in their latest post “you can now enhance your timeline with apps that help you tell your story, whether you love to cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies.” Using Facebook’s Open Graph platform any brand can create an app that will sit in the users’ timeline.
This a great opportunity for brands to increase touchpoints with new audiences since the app gives updates that will appear in their friends’ tickers and news feeds – success will boil down to creating an app that users feel compelled to use every day and more crucially something they want to share with their friends and network.
What 2012 holds for Social Video
According to e-consultancy social video campaigns generated 820m views in 2009, 2.7bn views in 2010, and over 8bn views in 2011. They predict this figure will double again in 2012. What’s driving growth to social video? Device proliferation, the increasing number of people watching social video on phone and tablet mobile devices; the normalisation of cross-platform consumption and social gaming are cited. Brands are also getting smarter around the advertising possibilities of branded content – the days of the pre-roll ad look numbered as pioneering brands get more creative. Think the Old Spice ‘The man your man could smell like’ series of viral hits, and Volkswagon’s ‘The Force’ ad which became the most shared ad of all time jumping from 100,000 to 1m views in just a few hours. Read on for social video predictions for 2012.
The darkest of days
#Daywithoutwikipedia became a trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday 18th sparked by their decision to blackout to the English version of the site for 24hours to protest against two pieces of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. They weren’t alone – Reddit, WordPress, MoveOn.org, Mozilla joined them in the protest which spread to more than 10,000 websites. Many sites blacked out completely, others covered their logos in black including Google who posting this message next to the search bar “Tell Congress- please don’t censor the web”
To do justice to the implications of such legislation we’ll cover it more in another post (coming soon) but for now have cherry-picked quotes that give a flavour of what happened on Wednesday.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, on Twitter “This is going to be wow, I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!”
Wikipedia: “Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people’s access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.”
The “We the People” petition, authored by several White House staffers under the Obama administration: “While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response.”
And what was Twitter’s position on the blackout? CEO Dick Costolo wrote “that’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish” Though did later concede that Twitter is among those opposing SOPA and PIPA (in case you were wondering 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets were sent between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Wednesday 18th Twitter announced.)

RSS Feed