We are pleased to share new research published this week in collaboration with the IAB and Facebook. It studies the behaviour and attitudes of YouTube and Facebook users, with the aim of understanding the role of each in users’ online lives. Specifically, it delves into the motivations for visiting these sites; the ‘social’ activities conducted on each; attitudes towards brand presence and different types of advertising on the sites; and behaviours around viewing and sharing brand content.



Key highlights from the study:

• While it’s commonly assumed that everyone uses YouTube and Facebook, the overlap is smaller than one would expect.

• Visits to YouTube tend to be for a specific motivation while visits to Facebook are to pass time.

• Social networking is greater than any single site. YouTube and Facebook play different but integral roles in a user’s online social experience.

• Brands that advertise on each site benefit from the perceived attributes of each site.

• Loyalty and familiarity are not the driving force behind recommendations. Whether people share or like a brand depends greatly on whether its content is interesting.

To learn more, please download the full study here.


Posted by Selina Rennie, Agency Team

The Grammy’s have created an interactive site that recognises the collective power of online music fans and their individual expression through social media. We’re all Fans constantly updates portraits of Grammy nominated artists such as Beyonce using real time images and footage from fan-generated YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook postings. The constantly evolving portraits represent the social media presence of these artists and act as a barometer of what fans are saying. With direct fan/artist interaction social media has become a very real part of today’s music industry, making fans the ‘True Voice of Music’.

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Our ‘Google on the Street’ team have been out and about again, this time asking people about the role of online in the automotive industry. We have focused on topics that are of interest to advertisers wanting to reach and engage with consumers online. Please watch or download the video below to hear people’s opinions on the following topics:

• How do consumers use online to help build their consideration list?
• How do people search online?
• Do consumers buy cars online or do they need to visit a dealership too?
• Do people buy parts and book services online?
• What is their perception of branded websites?
• What do brands get wrong/right on their websites?
• What is the role of social media in the decision making process?
• Do people find online video useful and what do they want to see?
• Real time research: How do on and offline world’s fit together?

We hope you find this short video insightful. Watch this space for more updates from our ‘Google on the Street’ team.

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Goollery is a collection of great Google related projects from people around the world. Here I want to share with you just some creative uses of Google Maps.

Real Time Twitter Trendmaps: Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. Users can visualize and follow conversations on a local and global level. Users can click on a trend and follow the conversation in real-time.

Stweet: Mashup geo-coded mobile tweets with StreetView or Maps so that you can see where other people are twittering from.

Uniqlo Fashion Map: Interactive website acts as a fashion map of Tokyo. The site allows users to visit the various districts of the city and “meet” it’s inhabitants- even being able to buy what they are wearing. The Parka Campaign features 1,000 men and women, all adding their own unique touches to the ubiquitous parka - culminating in a video montage of the jacket being passed from one part of the city to the other. By Uniqlo and Graffiti Magazine’s ‘Tokyo Graffiti’ publication, Tokyo.

Make History: September 11th: Make History captures September 11th through Google streetview to show photos and how those areas look today. Built with Google app engine. By the National September 11th Memorial & Museum in partnership with design firm Local Projects. Users can Create a virtual memorial to 9/11 using Street View imagery and layers of digital storytelling.

MONOPOLY City Streets – A live global game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. Own any street across the world and play to become the richest property magnate ever. The inspiration from MONOPOLY City Streets was taken from their latest game board, MONOPOLY City. MONOPOLY wanted to bring the updated game play to life in a unique way and a new game was born.


There are lots of creative uses of Google product on Goollery. Take a look and see if it sparks some creative ideas for your campaigns.

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Google Reader can be used as a powerful aggregator of multiple sources of information which mention your product or brand. Google Reader is a free tool from Google which allows you to stay up-to-date with the content from any site which publishes to the web using a feed or RSS*. It can be tough monitoring and tracking mentions of your product, brand or service in multiple locations, so to help we've put together a list of examples of how you can let Google Reader do the work for you. With a little setting up, we've found Google Reader not only saves time and effort but makes reading and sharing stuff on the web fun too.

Here are some examples of ways you can keep tabs on mentions of your product or brand on the Internet with Google Reader:

• Set up a Google Alert for your product and subscribe to it in Google Reader to see a range of updates from the web.
• Subscribe to the latest posts from your competitors' blogs to make sure you don't inadvertently miss something important! Just look for the RSS logo on their site.
• Subscribe to Google Blog Search and Google News Search results for your brand or product in Google Reader to see what top publishers and bloggers are saying. In Blog Search you'll find the feed to the left of the search results; in Google News, you'll see the feed at the bottom of the page.
• Create a Twitter Search for your product and subscribe in Google Reader to see what consumers are saying on the popular micro-blogging service. You'll see a 'Feed for this Query' button on the right hand side of the search results.

With all these feeds, the easiest way to add them to Google Reader is to copy the URL of the feed, go to Google Reader and paste it in the 'Add a Subscription' box. (More help here). And voila! Now mentions of your product or brand will be collected for you in one place. Got some more suggestions for updates to subscribe to using Google Reader? Let us know.

Posted by Dom Elliott, UK B2B Marketing Team

*What's an RSS feed? Feeds let websites distribute their content much more widely by inviting users to subscribe to regular updates delivered via their method of choice e.g. web portal, news reader or email. Google Reader is one such news reader designed to let you easily collect and read your RSS subscriptions. Learn more.

Did you know 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? That 84% of the UK population owns a mobile phone? Or that on average 30% of our leisure time is now spent online?* We always hear interesting stats on the Internet marketplace and we thought it would be great to share these in one easily accessible location so we've just launched an Internet Stats microsite. This site aims to provide searchable and browsable stats on the Internet and the advertising industry from reputable and carefully selected sources. The stats are split into five sections:

• Technology
• Macro Economic Trends
• Media Landscape
• Media Consumption
• Consumer Trends

We'll be keeping the stats fresh and adding new ones as we find them but if you have a stat that you find useful and want to share then there is a ‘Submit a Stat’ form for you to send us one. Whether you are an advertiser or work in the media industry and want to uncover key industry stats or just someone interested in the trends of the web, we hope you'll find the tool useful. As always we welcome feedback on how we can improve this.

*Sources:

YouTube, May 2009
Deloitte, April 2009
TNS (PDF), December 2008

Posted by Dom Elliott, UK B2B Marketing Team

Social media’s influence towards an information-driven society is becoming increasingly apparent. A recent online information surge relates to the tragic death of a pop icon, Michael Jackson. Everything that relates to Michael Jackson seems to be playing out on the Web. As web activity is trackable, it is working as an archive for our experience of him. We would like to share a short presentation on this here.

Facebook reported a tripling of the number of status updates in the aftermath of Jackson’s death. Indeed according to CNN Michael Jackson is now the most popular person on facebook, overtaking U.S President Obama. He has over 9M fans on Facebook. Before his death Michael Jackson had around 80,000 Facebook fans.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times that there were nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon. Sysomos documented that as the story broke 25% of all Tweets mentioned his name. Jackson’s Wikipedia page logged 1.8 million visitors, compared to its daily average of just 20,000. A Google blog search between 25th June and 1st July shows 6.7M blog results. This goes some way to demonstrate the volume of people wanting to share their experience and opinion on the internet.

Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics tracks popular conversions on the web. In their most recent ‘State of the UK Market’ study they found that prior to his sudden death conversations about Michael Jackson were not high on the BuzzMetrics monitor. But now, these conversations dominate the web sending Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics even higher than the Obama inauguration, the swine flu scare, the iPhone, and the Iranian election.

The Internet gives access to a variety of content (video, audio, text) and it is this variety that makes it the first place people go to gather information. This is demonstrated on Insights for Search which shows that soon after the news broke search volumes for ‘Michael Jackson’s death’ peaked at +100% relative to the entertainment category. Search acts as a navigational tool.

Video is another medium that fans use to pay tribute and interact with peers across the web. Michael Jackson dominates viral video charts of the past month as documented by unrulymedia. The ‘Thriller video’ on YouTube has over 55M views, over 210K ratings and around 238K comments, with more being added by the minute. Already today fans have uploaded to YouTube over 6,800 videos relating to Michael Jackson.

And of course, people are remembering him by his music. LastFM shared this chart showing how people have been listening to his music in high volumes after the news broke.

Download the presentation (PDF).

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team

Social media started as a simple and quick way to stay in touch with friends and family. For some it is still just that but for others it has become a powerful tool that gives political voice to ordinary citizens and has given rise to mass collaboration that has the ability to change history. We cover this in more detail in a presentation here.

Looking at the Election in Iran we only have to search Google New Timeline to see that journalists and photographers are documenting the situation. However they are not alone, the Iranian people are also using networks such as Facebook and Twitter to document their stories and opinion in real time. Suddenly social networks are providing us with a new way of seeing world change, via the citizens’ voice. Twitter is one of the best places to follow what is happening in real time, it is also a source of unique documentation, such as the Tweet from Mousavi saying that he had been placed under house arrest. Blogs allow more detailed coverage from both inside and outside Iran. A search on Google Blogger Search shows that there are over 2.7M blog results for Iran Election in the UK in the past month. YouTube is a good source of video content from inside Iran, and users of Flickr are building a library of images documenting the aftermath of the election.

There is a depth to the information found on the web, allowing us to draw a unique picture from both mainstream media and the citizen journalists. As a result, people proactively search the web for information and are now more in control of the media they consume. Google Insights for Search shows that when the story first broke search volumes for Iran Election rose by nearly 2000% relative to the News and Current Events category. Sysomos (A company that developed a tool to track Twitter usage) found that Iran had a total of 19,235 Twitter users in June, compared with 8,654 in mid-May, up 122%. They also looked to see when Twitter accounts were created, the most active months were March and June when 9.81% and 9.93% of all Twitter accounts were created.

Another country where citizens are empowered to document change is Kenya. Crowdsourcing to document civil unrest was implemented during the post election troubles, by a group of concerned bloggers who set up Ushahidi. Ushahidi mobilizes Kenyan citizens to report and map conflict or peace efforts in real time. The information is then documented in a Google Maps Mashup. Crisis information can be submitted by mobile phone, email or web form. Reports are then generated to promote peace efforts, increases awareness of violence and provide a permanent log of events.

Social media and collaborative applications will not replace the great work of journalists but they do give those searching an added depth and variety of information.


Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team