It is official – Facebook is the number one ranking, surpassing Google’s Orkut as the leading social networking site for the first time in July 2010 with 20.9 million visitors while Orkut had only 19.9 million. This was followed by BharatStudent and then Twitter.

If you were wondering to yourself, what is the big deal? I always hear about Facebook but seldom hear of Orkut.

Well, here’s the BIG deal: Since Orkut’s launch in 2004, it has been the prevalent social networking site in India and in Brazil, despite not taking off as well in other countries.

Facebook usage has increased by a whopping 179% in a year in between period of July 2009 to July 2010, as survey from comScore reveals.

Social networking usage is definitely not slowing down, but is in fact growing rapidly in Russia, Germany, India and South Korea.

The use of microblogging site Twitter is growing at an alarming rate. In India alone, it registered growth of 239% to 3.3 million visitors over the past 12 months. comScore also shared that overall in the Asia-Pacific region, Facebook only has 17% market penetration – therefore we can expect much more potential areas for growth.

The project got covered in the news on The Straits Times 28 August, 2010 (Saturday) Home/Causes section. What a great way to end the module for us.

If you are not sure what happened, here’s what my group did for a fundraising project in July.

This article was first published on Penn Olson on 17.08.2010

The first thing you get online, what is the thing you would do? Is it signing in to Facebook or Twitter to check for new notifications, get to your game to collect rewards, or clear your mailbox?

It is not surprising what activities make up the top three: social networking, online games and e-mail. Compared to last year, the usage of such platforms have increased significantly.

Statistics from Nielson revealed that social media network usage has increased by 43 percent – from 15.8% in 2009 to 22.7% in 2010.

Some other findings include:

• Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks.
• Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent.
• June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

From this, we can tell social media is not dying down – not anytime soon, at least. It is changing the way people communicate; companies could learn from this information to better craft communication messages and it could be an invaluable asset as time passes.

This article was first published on Penn Olson on 16.08.2010

Globally, women make up nearly 46 percent of the web population – despite being the minority, it is interesting to note that they are dominating many aspects of the digital media landscape.

Trends are showing that women have caught up in the usage of internet ranging from activities like purchasing online, social networking, instant messaging (IM) and it appears that the online experience of women sway towards communicating and building relationships with others.

Comscore released a whitepaper compiling a study about digital behaviors of women across the globe against men in 40 countries.

Topping the charts, we have

Social media
Instant messaging
E-mail
Globally in April 2010, women spent an average of 16.3% of their online time on social networks, compared to only 11.7% for the men. The numbers were highest among women in North America, with 9 out of 10 female Internet users visiting a social network site in that month.

The below chart shows how the most popular activities skew comparably toward women in terms of reach and usage.

And what are they searching for? The results are not surprising.
Fragrances/Cosmetics, e-cards, Flowers, Gifts and Greetings and Pets are topics most frequented by women.

Other takeaways include:

Men are far more likely to post their own tweets than women. Meanwhile, a larger percentage of female Twitter users say they use the site to find deals/promotions and use the service as a conversation medium and to follow celebrities.
Contrary to common beliefs, women spent 2.7% gaming compared to men at 2.2%; the games are more casual (e.g. Solitaire, Sudoku and Scrabble) than action, adventure, and sports games, which are typically favored by young males.
Overall video usage is the heaviest in Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and Canada.
On average, men conduct more searches per searcher than women (71.6 searches per searcher for men vs. 64.0 for women).
The gender differences in mobile Internet behavior roughly mirror PC Internet behavior. Older women are more likely to play games and check email, and men more likely to access News/Info sites using their mobile phone. However, mobile Internet services (browsing, apps, and email) still skew 65-70 percent male.
Women surpass men in every age group in both reach and time spent on photo sites. They were also much faster to adopt photo sharing when it first became available.
There is no significant gender gap in Internet usage as more and more women across the world are increasing their Internet usage everyday. This brings about so many opportunities to market products to women of different ages and cultures through social networking channels.

This article was first published on Penn Olson on 09.08.2010.
What if one day you are thirsty and find a vending machine, thinking it would quench your thirst but only to find that there is only dirty water?

Thought-provoking, of course.

Very often, we tend to take clean water for granted. So much so we do not remember that there are people in other parts of the world who die of water-related diseases daily.

Spearheaded by UNICEF, the non-profit organization creatively educates the public via its Dirty Water campaign.

Dirty water by UNICEF
The campaign places several vending machines in Manhattan, offering eight different choices of water that represent common diseases that affect the disadvantaged – malaria, cholera, typhoid, dengue, hepatitis, dysentery, salmonella, and yellow fever.

Unicef’s guerrilla marketing tactic has attracted the attention of several giant news network. The result is great. People donated and more are aware of what’s going on with the people who have to drink unclean drinking water. Thought provoking, really.

The video says it best.

This article was first published on Penn Olson on 06.08.2010.

Through user-generated content like tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, conservations with friends and product reviews, consumers determine a large part of a brand’s image too.

Zooming in to Twitter, we’re glad that ExactTarget released their studies on how the micro-blogging site is changing marketing activities of companies. Findings show that…

• Twitter users are the most influential online consumers – 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.

• Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.

• 23 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates at least monthly. 11 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates, but do not have a Twitter account themselves.
• 20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company – more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.
• Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).

What does this mean for marketers?
Twitter provides countless opportunities for businesses to interact with customers first hand, and even tap on influential users who can create an even bigger impact for their brand.

Is mass media still the best medium these days? Well, it still plays a huge role in PR and advertising but with the rise of digital communication platforms, its power has slowly shifted. There isn’t a best. It depends how we use each platform to its fullest potential.

And this quote sums it up pretty well: “Today, everybody is media.”

1. Meet up with 21 friends important in my life & I care about – make sure they know they are special to me!

2. Donate my birthday to charity:waterhttp://mycharitywater.org/ameliachen21

3. Own a unit trust/stock! This genuinely marks adulthood for me.

4. Dedicate a day to pampering myself – manicure, facial, etc.

5. Prepare some edible dinner for my family

6. Donate blood, and succeed…

(I tried to do this before, but my temperature rose to 38 upon the thought! LOL!)

7. Go disconnected for a day. No mobile, no TV, no PC,…. no lights? :S

8. Attend a show/play/concert – perhaps Voyage de la Vie, good or no good?

9. Fly a kite + picnic, visit the Bird Park!

10. Watch the sun set & rise on the same day!

11. Take 21 photos

12. Write a letter to myself

13. Paint a self portrait

14. Get my article published on…

15. Spend a night out

16. Launch my site http://ameliachen.com/

17. Declutter my room

18. Do something not done before!

19. Spend one weekend volunteering.

20. Set 21 goals to be achieved before the next birthday!

21. Archive all these activities – printed in a photo book as keepsake.

I never believed that birthdays are about parties and presents. I’m hitting my 21st year old milestone and instead of asking for gifts, I’m asking for $21 or more from everyone I know. (despite recently being involved in ANOTHER fundraising!) 100% of the donations will directly be used to build freshwater wells for people in developing nations.

My birthday wish this year is not for more gifts I don’t need; it’s to give clean and safe drinking water to some of the billion living without it. I want to make my big 21st birthday matter this year.

I’m sincerely inspired by the video below and I hereby wish that you choose to make a difference with me!

Join my birthday celebration on charity:water.

Last year, Google launched Google Wave in an attempt to re-invent e-mail.

On 4th August 2010, the team at Google have made a decision to drop the development of Google Wave as a standalone product and the site will be maintained through the end of the year.

Some pundits were taken by surprise, but there is a lesson to be learnt from this decision: Keep calm and move on.

Even though Google Wave did not receive the adoption as intended, it was a breakthrough in technology. In my opinion it was the most innovative collaborative tool; my favourite features being live type, the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, and playback of revisions —all taking place within a browser real time.

To discontinue Wave was definitely a tough decision to make; but I trust Google has made a right one.
There are times even when a big company launches a product and then find out there is no market for it.

“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” Hölzle concluded.

Kudos for sharing the development codes, making them available as open source.

What is important is learning to move on and taking on opportunities to bring the company to greater heights. On the same day, Slide, the top Facebook apps maker, was acquired for $228 million and it looks like we can expect Slide to be a big part of Google Game when it is launched later in the year.

Source: Google’s blog, BusinessInsider