On July 22nd 2010, Facebook officially announced that it had surpassed 500 million users around the world. This significant achievement represents a significant milestone for Zuckerberg and Co. as well as for social networking and more importantly for global societies overall.

To celebrate this achievement, Facebook released Facebook Stories, a new service to spotlight user stories from around the world and the impact Facebook has had on their lives.

Facebook Around the World

Facebook is the leading social network in 111 out of 131 countries as recently analyzed by Vincenzo Cosenza.

If Facebook was a country, it would rank third, just behind the People’s Republic of China and India and roughly 190 million ahead of the United States, over 200 million greater than Indonesia, and 300 million greater than Brazil.

If we examine the breakdown of Facebook’s population, we’re presented with an interesting picture of worldwide adoption (source).

Top 15 Countries by Number of Users

1. United States – 125,881,220
2. United Kingdom – 26,543,600
3. Indonesia – 25,912,960
4. Turkey – 22,552,540
5. France – 18,942,220
6. Italy – 16,647,260
7. Canada – 15,497,900
8. Philippines – 15,284,460
9. Mexico – 12,978,440
10. Spain – 10,612,820
11. India – 10,547,240
12. Argentina – 10,452,040
13. Columbia – 10,226,920
14. Germany – 9,948,700
15. Australia – 9,151,280

To offer a bit of balance, at the end of the population list, Anguilla Facebook ambassadors rank at number 187 with 6,420 users.

When we examine worldwide Facebook activity however, we’re presented with a different picture. According to O’Reilly Research, Asia and Africa represent high growth regions.O’Reilly also reports the age demographics of users in each country. The share of users age 18-25 is higher outside the U.S., but notice the representation of users 35 and older.

The Human Network

Facebook’s mission is to help make the world more open and connected and indeed it is changing how people interact online. The “Facebook” stories shared through this new service highlight very human ways that social networking is changing people’s lives and I believe that is the bigger story here. Over time, I have borrowed Cisco’s tagline, “The Human Network” to demonstrate how digital social networks were contributing to a new era of society that transcends online and offline relationships and how we foster and interact with each.

The discussion as to whether or not Facebook is the largest social network in the world is no longer relevant. Facebook, along with other prominent and emerging networks such as Twitter, Foursquare, and hundreds of other networks, has forever changed the way individuals connect and share with one another, adapting cultures and customs, dissolving borders, and uniting disparate cultures. The world is indeed becoming a much smaller place.

Get the rest of the story from Brain Solis.Com

More recently, it revealed plans to install ‘standing seating’ onto some of its flights, and the irascible airline boss O’Leary attended a press conference wearing a Germany shirt just after England’s World Cup drubbing.

But is this un-customer-friendly approach the most short-sighted piece of brand suicide we’ve ever seen or a stroke of marketing brilliance?

Reputation madness

Google has become every brand’s new homepage. Run a search for Ryanair, what do you see? As you’d expect, its own pages take the top two spots, but then much of the rest of the SERP is negative. ‘I hate Ryanair’ and then a load of negative press stories (including ‘Police feed delayed Ryanair passangers’) particularly stand out.

Negative stories in the search results are more enticing to searchers, meaning they are more likely to be seen. The fact a lone campaigner’s ‘I hate Ryanair’ website is ranking so highly for such a major brand shows just how many online pages are linking to it.

So, the search results for Ryanair are full of negative stories, which people will click on. This will inevitably affect brand perception and must influence many people’s buying decisions.

According to Nielsen research, a huge 70% of people trust online reviews. That means angry rants and negative stories will hurt the brand.

Marketing genius

Of course, an upshot of the aggressive customer services approach is that the search volume for brand queries is much higher than it otherwise would be.

My SMX London presentation highlighted that there are in fact, there are an incredible 20,400,000 global monthly searches for Ryanair. Compare that to Virgin Atlantic’s mere 1,500,000 and you can instantly see that there’s a huge amount of brand awareness being generated.

That brand awareness might partly result from negative publicity being generated by the airline, but it’s got people searching.

It also means that when people think of a low-cost airline, Ryanair is very likely to be the one they mention because it’s the one they’ve seen last.

Read more at Econsultancy ‘Digital Marketers United’

This Place We Call Social Media

Social media is a seemingly cluttered landscape with numerous vendors and customers vying for attention and voicing their opinions in 140 characters or less (in the case of Twitter). The origin of social media, which gained popularity with consumers, remains a space dominated by a collection of many individuals and few businesses. Admittedly, the challenge of reaching B2B customer prospects via social media is definitely more challenging than reaching individuals or consumers. Generating even one qualified business lead against this noisy backdrop may look and feel impossible.

Ironically, the very noise of this environment can play into your favor. Although many companies are using social media, only a handful of them are using it effectively to actually engage in a meaningful dialogue with their audience.

The key is to match a call-to-action with a state of mind, so you can properly engage customers — businesses or individual consumers — and move them through the purchase cycle. For example, a call-to-action on a blog post should match the visitor’s state of mind. Start with the simple assumption that visitors to a blog post are not there to buy the company’s product or sign up for a free account (at least, initially). Rather, they are there to read interesting content or learn more about the space. Therefore, the call-to-action should match that state of mind and prompt the visitor to “learn more” or “download a white paper.” These types of call-to-action align with the visitor’s reasons for visiting your Web site and are more likely to convert a visitor to a lead.

Social Media Takes it Personally

The biggest difference between social media and traditional media is the level of personalization. Social media is highly personal and interactive — it’s a two-way, interactive form of communication in real time. Traditional media is not.

In addition to being a more personalized communication medium, social media leads are more targeted than those generated through other online channels. This is a major bonus for marketers. If a call-to-action is strong, it can do an amazing job of bringing in solid leads.

If the channel and activity align, meaning you are using activities that are appropriate to the channel you are using, leads tend to be more engaged and thus more enthusiastic about a given product or service. As a result, leads involved in social media outreach tend to be more forgiving of problems with your product, as they feel more connected to the product and the company.

At the same time, social media opens up feedback channels and discussion loops that are muted or not present at all in traditional media. For example, if customers are disappointed in a particular product or service, social media provides equal opportunity to spread their own messages in their own words. Some control will be forfeited. This introduces new risks not associated with traditional media, as the reputation of your brand now rests in other people’s hands.. These effects on a brand, both positive and negative, are often said to be hard to track and measure.

Better Business Leads

The bottom line is that social media has the potential to generate more business leads. These leads are more targeted and they know what they want. If your call-to-action is relevant and aligned with your message, leads generated from social media can be highly qualified. On the other hand, as with traditional marketing, some leads from social media will be less qualified and require more lead nurturing. The key, as a marketer, is to establish a set of objective criteria and automated lead scoring that can help sales distinguish a “hot lead” from a cold one once they hit your site.

Get the full story from MediaPost.com

The white paper, Best Practices for Maximizing Your Hotel’s Online Revenue & ROI, written by Kathleen Cullen, provides results from actual hoteliers who shared their experiences and areas of focus as it relates to Internet marketing and help for hoteliers to establish a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy. It takes an in depth look at Website design best practices, effective marketing strategies and the importance of understanding analytics. The white paper also reveals practical ways to avoid common pitfalls often seen in hotel Internet marketing.

“This white paper provides the results from actual hoteliers who shared their experiences, areas of focus as it relates to marketing, key metrics and best practices,” says Inspire Resources Founding Partner Kathleen Cullen. “The goal is to provide an educational resource whereby hotel professionals can review the white paper and use it as a tool to assess current strategies, understand the areas for improvement and create a plan to action.”

The paper is broke down in three categories: Websites, Marketing and Measurement. Each category includes the survey findings related to the respective topic, as well as recommended best practices and implications for each. Some of the most interesting highlights of this study include the following discoveries:

· 70% of properties see their greatest returns in online investments

· 40% of respondents do not have a social media strategy

Get the full article from HotelMarketingStrategies.com

Additional source: Vizergy

In the past, a customer’s bad experience may go as far as several friends. Now, a negative hotel review can be viewed by almost the entire world literally in only a matter of seconds.

Determine when not to respond: Sometimes the best online hotel marketing strategy for dealing with negative reviews is to simply ignore them. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, it may be smarter not to respond to the review at all:

1. Are other users of the website already disagreeing with the initial review?
2. Has the user left many negative reviews on the site – are they a ‘born complainer’?
3. Is this the only negative review out of dozens of positive ones?

If you have answered yes to more than two of these questions, it may be best not to respond to the review. When there is a ‘troll’ on a blog who is posting inflammatory comments, it is sometimes best not to fan the flames and let the fire burn out quickly.

Deciding to respond: You or your online hotel marketing team must assess each case individually and decide whether to respond and what action to take. If you don’t respond, you not only run the risk of the review ‘growing legs’ and spreading across the internet, but you miss an opportunity to retain a customer and to possibly right a genuine wrong.

Good responses outweigh bad experiences: In most cases, you can actually improve your reputation online by handling a negative review well. It isn’t only the customer in question that will notice, either; potential and past customers will often respond better to a hotel that is consistent, mature and proactive in its handling of bad reviews through internet hotel marketing.

Respond in a calm manner: There are two things you need to do before you start typing anything in your response box. First, try to determine the facts of the situation. Secondly, make sure you’ve calmed down and are seeing both sides of the situation before you start your response. Don’t write anything that sounds angry, sarcastic or negative, even if it is ‘veiled’.

Apologise for the way the customer is feeling: If it isn’t appropriate, you don’t need to apologise for the situation that occurred or your staff’s action. However, saying something like “I’m sorry that you felt so unsatisfied with your experience” in no way admits guilt, but does help to start on a conciliatory note and help appease the hotel customer.

Correct the facts if appropriate: If a customer’s bad hotel review is based on incorrect facts, correct them politely. Check with the owner of the review website also – if a review is libellous or false you may be able to have it taken down. Even if the facts are false, don’t threaten either the reviewer or the review site – you’ll only damage your hotel’s reputation.

For full article see Hotel Internet Marketing

1. The future of revenue management will include a rapid evolution of data as a strategic asset that can drive future decision-making.

2. Hoteliers will track, analyze, and maximize social networking platforms as an integral part of revenue management – leveraging the power of tools that help them in managing consumer review sites and other forums. They will take a proactive approach to user-generated hotel reviews, blogs, videos, and images.

3. Revenue directors will reinvent their approach to be even more proactive and creative – conducting more research, focusing on demand generators, developing relationships with the competition, shifting market share, developing the hotel’s reputation, and directing sophisticated channel management.

4. Automated revenue management technology will become the dominant practice, quickly delivering significant increases in revenue and return on investments to those who adopt it.

5. The hospitality industry will focus time and resources on developing strong revenue executives—headlinedby the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) – who can deliver the best revenue strategy, top-line revenue, and bottom-line profitability.

Also serving as a publishing sponsor of the report is Smith Travel Research, the hospitality industry’s leading information and data provider.

“By relying less on spreadsheets and revenue directors with strong Excel skills, and more on central storehouses that compile all enterprise data and help hotels better analyze and process it, hotels will advance the impact of revenue management,” said Kristi White, TravelClick’s Director of Revenue Optimization. “Business Intelligence tools will be critical in this effort, producing objective, actionable information and analysis, and reducing subjective interpretations.”

White underscores the importance of sticking with a strategy, through good times and bad. “During good times, hoteliers are more apt to pay attention to their own needs and price as a benchmark of what the market will bear,” she emphasized. “During downturns, they shift to groupthink and merely follow the herd to the bottom of the bucket. There are always opportunities to maintain or grow rate – even in a down economy.”

For full article see Hotel Marketing

Report available for purchase on HSMAI Site

Facebook accounts for 55% of all UK social networking visits, almost three times as many as the next most popular social network, YouTube. Twitter, one of the fastest growing and most talked about websites of the last two years, is now the third most popular social network in the UK, putting it ahead of former favourites such as Bebo and MySpace.

Get the full article from Hitwise.com

In total, the social networking site displayed 176.3 billion ads during the period, for an average of better than 50 billion ads each month. That total represents 16.2% of the total number of banner ads served across the entire web, and places the site ahead of the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft — the latter by nearly triple.

Of course, Facebook isn’t quite monetizing on the level of those Internet giants just yet, with recent estimates placing the company’s 2010 revenue at around $1 billion (Yahoo is expected to do nearly $5 billion in revenue this year).

Its monetization strategy expands beyond banner ads, though, exemplified by the recent launch of a virtual currency –- Facebook Credits –- that sees the company take a 30% cut from game developers with apps on the social network. Some see this eventually morphing into a PayPal competitor.

Get the full article at Mashable

Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012 (based on a full presentation which is available on my blog). Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.

1. Privacy expectations will (have to) change

There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.

2. Complete decentralization of social networks

The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect.

3. Our interaction with search engines will be different

Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.

4. Rise of the content aggregators

The amount of content online is growing at an exponential rate, and most online users have at least three online profiles from social networks to micro-blogging to social news sites. Our ability to manage this influx is challenging, and content aggregators will be the new demi-gods, bringing method to madness (and make a killing). Filtering and managing content will be big business for those who can get it right and provide easy-to-use services.

5. Social media augmented reality

Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends and associates will appear in GPS-based mapping services as a standard feature, and socially enabled CRM will change the way companies manage business relationships forever.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined

As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of Twitter in Google search results or Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google’s infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere

In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.

See the full article at AdvertisingAge

Additional source: http://takemetoyourleader.com/2010/04/01/social-media-2012-presentation/

This is so important as this is your brand that someone could be messing around with.

One of the examples of what is coming through was a hook trying to get you to click on the link. There was a little rude so I won’t include that as an example. I work with Hootsuite so I have a link previewer which is certainly helpful on occasions where your not to sure about the DM. (Direct Message)

So what do you do if your account has been compromised?

Have you noticed:

• Unexpected Tweets posting from your account.
• Unintended DMs (direct messages) sent from your account.
• You are unable to log in to Twitter (and you know you haven’t changed your password or username).

If so, you please take the following steps according to Twitter.

Reset your password and Revoke Connections

1. Reset your password.

If you can log into your account, change your password immediately from the Passwords Tab in your Account Settings. You can also use the Twitter password reset feature to request an email with instructions for resetting your password. Select a strong password you haven’t used before.

2. Revoke connections.

Once you’ve logged in, visit the Connections tab in Account Settings. Revoke access for any third-party application that you don’t recognize.

3. Update your new password in your third-party applications.

If a trusted external application or widget uses your Twitter password, be sure to update your password in the application. Otherwise, your account may be temporarily locked.

If You Still Can’t Access Your Account see www.status.twitter.com where you’ll also find more information about Safe Tweeting.