Famecount - keeping tabs on social media efforts

As we enter the end of the group stage of the World Cup finals in South Afirca. It's not just teams like England. Germany and Portugal who nervously await their fate, the lack of progress into the knockout stages will have serious financial and status implications. The financial gold-mine that is the World Cup is also a vital time for many of the world's biggest brands. Will there huge investments to become FIFA partners pay off? Brands such as McDonald's and Hyundai have spent 100s of millions of US$ to be part of the world's biggest sporting event over the last 10-12 years.

Another brand looking nervously at its investment is Adidas. As official sportswear partner of the World Cup finals, Adidas gets a huge boost at every finals - from player and team endorsement through to pitch-side perimeter boards and sponsored TV coverage in certain territories. However there is a dark spectre making Adidas very nervous, and that is its old rival Nike. Nike have continued their policy of become official partner of the FIFA event, but they stick to their 'ambush marketing' strategy plus massive sums paid to individual players and football federations to supply kits.

Nike have already claimed to be the winner in this mammoth head to head of the sports giants. This seems a little premature but Nike feel they are winning the battle of the buzz. According to Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Nike have achieved a 30.2% of the brand buzz around South Africa 2010, while Adidas trail with 14%. Time will tell but it does throw up interesting questions about how brands track and quantify their social media efforts.

One interesting tool that came to are attention a little while ago is Famecount http://http//www.famecount.com/all-platforms/Worldwide/all/Brand a free service which creates a % Famecount or index for brands by aggregating their performance across Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. Topping the Famecount brand charts right now is Starbucks, mostly due to its 8 million Facebook friends and near 1 million Twitter followers. Starbucks embraced social media some time ago, so they have been adding friends and followers in a gradual organic manner, hence their Famecount of 68.8%. In second place sits uber-brand Coca-Cola with 52% and Pepsi nowhere to be seen. Coke's closest category rival in the social space appears to be Red Bull, thanks in part to more You Tube channel subscribers. Clearly a reflection of the original content Red Bull as a brand prides itself on and which indeed its brand DNA is built on.

What is interesting is that few of the top 20 brands in the survey are doing particularly well with their You Tube strategy. While Famecount assigns the lowest value to You Tube (25% vs 45% for Facebook and 30% for Twitter), a well executed You Tube channel can be incredibly powerful for brands. Hence the virtually unknown outside of social media, Blendtec, achieving a position of 39th, just behind Pizza Hut and ahead of Blackberry. All on a spend in the region of a few $100,000 versus $100,000,000. The Blendtec channel, "Will it Blend" is a cult success, with brand owner Tom Dickson blending everything from golf balls to an I Pad. As of mid June 2010, the brand has received over 117 million views on You Tube.

Famecount certainly does illustrate how smaller brands can and are outwitting their bigger spending rivals with smart social media strategies. Both Jet Blue and South West Airlines are 2 smaller US airlines with Famecounts in the top 20. In part this is due to their long-held customer service principles but also their novel use of the this newer media space. Southwest have games imbedded into their Fan-page that encourage the user to share with their Facebook friends. Easy, simple tactics that more brands should try to emulate.

And so back to Adidas and Nike. Well according to this slice of social media life, it is Adidas who are trumping their Amercian rival. Adidas Orginals has a score of 37.8% driven by its 3 million Facebook friends. As a follower of this myself, I know its good rich and engaging content, not just ads. This week for instance, we had the chance for a live chat with Adidas-star Snopp Dogg. I'm sure he'd love to know his famecount before he re-negotiates his next contract, well now he can use this great tool to find out.

Social Network monopoly - the death of Bebo

It appears that the 'winner takes all' predictions about the social networking market are becoming truer by the day.


Yesterday the news that AOL would sell or close the social site, Bebo, effectively signaled the end of another once-successful social network which simply cannot compete with Facebook.


A couple of years ago Bebo was the only website that mattered in the playgrounds of the UK and Ireland when it hit the peak of coolness in 2007. Among 13- to 16-year-olds, Bebo was the place to be seen online, where members could blog, email each other, upload videos and design quizzes – while many adults just didn't quite get it.


AOL saw the potential in the site launched from a San Francisco living room by a husband and wife team and gobbled it up for an eye-watering $850m. Which even then analysts saw as a triumph of ego over due-dilgence.


It was the sites positioning and content that orginally set it apart from other sites and drove traffic to a peak of 40 million unique users in early 2008. An example of such content was the online drama serial Kate Modern.



However, it looks like AOL uninvested and misunderstood the brand Bebo. Compared to Facebooks 2,000 engineers; Bebo employed 40 - leading to technical issues which todays social networker has little patience for.

AOL aim to broaden appeal failed also. Moving away from a small but loyal audience was clearly an error. Figures from comScore show the dramatic shift – Bebo's monthly users in the UK fell by 60% from February 2009 to February 2010 to 3.8 million, while Facebook's grew 24% over the same period to 28.1 million.

So the still privately owned Facebook can count the passing of another social rival backed by big-spending corporates. ITV recently sold Friends Reunited for a mere $42m (just 14% of the purchase price). NewsCorps' My Space, a $580mill Murdoch punt, is struggling to re-position and losing share. And now Bebo goes.

Which all goes to show, people want to hang out where there friends are. So is there any hope for a non-monopolistic market in social networking?

The Cola Wars - this time it's social

They will be a massive break with tradition this coming Super Bowl Sunday. Yes as usual Americans will be glued to their screens (mostly TV screens) for 4 hours or so. There'll be 2 teams trying to outwit and out-muscle each other on the pitch and yes there'll still be a Mamouth spectacular half-time shows, led by the Who.


But there will be a difference during the now legendary half-time TV commercial breaks. For the 1st time in a quarter of a century one of the 2 soft-drink giants will not be there to compete. PepsiCo - home of Pepsi, Gatorade, Mountain Dew and various salty snacks - this year will not be paying in the region of $ 3 million for a 30 second spot. This year, PepsiCo is putting everything into a $ 20mill social media led campaign called The Pepsi Refesh Project.



As part of this CSR scheme, the Purchase-based firm will give donations, ranging in value from $5,000 (€3,592; £3,140) to $250,000, to good causes in the US, with a budget of $20 million in all. Web users will be able to vote for the individuals, groups and organisations which they consider worthy of receiving this funding, with up to 32 grants being awarded every month.



AOL, MTV, NBCU Universal and Yahoo are among the media partners for this communications drive, while Pepsi will also sponsor a reality series, If I Can Dream, on Hulu, the video-on-demand platform.Facebook and Twitter will be among the other services Pepsi will employ in spreading its message.

What is interesting here are two things.

Firstly that Coke is also using social media to promote a huge CSR programme this year. But it is buying into the Superbowl airtime in order to promote its own scheme. Visitors to a dedicated page on Facebook will be able to view a sneak preview of one of these ads if they send a branded "virtual gift" is one of their friends on the service before the Super Bowl. Each time such a "gift" is delivered over duration of the month-long scheme, the beverage maker will award $ 1 to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, with a total budget of $ 500,000.



So these two behemoths of FMCG marketing are attempting to play the same game but with different tools. Will Pepsi's purely social punt (delberate pun) see them victorious by creating a larger 'reward' pot and letting the power of the idea generate the traffic required. Or will Coke's 'shock and awe' tactic of using the immense Superbowl audience (ranging from 80-130 million individuals), who tend to deliberately view the half time ads (and indeed PVR them to play again and again), see Coke generate big numbers to this site.



Either way, heres the second interesting point. Both companies are now talking about a new post-digital age where 'experimentation is over'. A recognition of the value to them of digital media that allows and encourages a two-way dialogue.


Clearly it will be interesting to track the evolution of these 2 similar campaigns, sowing the seeds of interest in different ways. It will also be interesitng to see how may of the Superbowl ads (generally always especially created for the event) will have a social media elememt or at the very least a Facebook URL. And look out for more of the same at the next global event of this scale - FIFA 2010 in South Africa.

2010 media predictions

So I'm a little late getting to the predictions party. Blame the endless new year revelry, blame the long trip back to Poland - but better later than never. It also gives me the benefit of 4 days in 2010 to see how things are panning out. In the topsy-turvy economy we live in now - things can change pretty quickly.

Making predictions is a great way of starting the year for sure - especially when one of your resolutions is to blog more. Its also a great way to end up with egg on your face when none of your carefully crafted predictions comes true.

Clearly much depends on how well the global economy recovers (or continues to recover depending where you are). Sir Martin Sorrell has used most of the alphabet to describe the shapes of recovery. In the BRICS its a 'V' shape, while in the UK we're looking at the 'L'. Lets just hope its not the dreaded double dip 'W'.

Ok to the predictions:

1) Lets start with an easy one. Facebook will surpass 1/2 billion users well before the end of 2010. There is some science to this one - FB was growing at 500,000 new members a day at certain points in late 2009. Might be hard to keep that number but I don't see it slowing down, especially when you consider the potential for growth in large yet relatively untapped markets like Poland.

As a result, more later adopters will be touched by more social media. Potentially making social media a channel to market as well as marketing channel.

2) The UK election (one thing I can confidently predict before June 2010) will attempt to ape the 2008 US election in many ways. Presidential style debates have already been signed up to by the 3 major parties and with an election date looming, the Tories and Labour will employ every social media technique known to man - and hopefully a few we haven't really experienced yet.


3) The FIFA World Cup in South Africa in June/July will truly see the establishment of internet TV as a mainstream channel. Given the number of afternoon kick offs and South Africa's timezone compared to Europe - WC2010 will see millions of football fans viewing matches from their work desktops, their laptops and increasingly from their i-phones. Commercial broadcasters, all under pressure need to ensure they monetise this channel to make decent returns on the huge rights purchase that a FIFA world cup represents.


4) 2010 will be the year that Rupert Murdoch's much discussed 'online newspaper pay-walls' will get properly road tested. Murdoch's boffins have been stratching their collective heads for some time but apparently they are ready to go in 2010. Whether it be micro-charging or subscriptions - time will tell where the public are willing to pay or whether 'free' is what we now expect. And its not just the News Int titles that are desperate to realise cash based on their editorial investments. The Guardian, whilst being one of the best read online newspapers globally, is losing money hand over fist in the UK and simply must get its model right.


5) Perhaps as I'm not a massive user - I still feel that Twitter has much more to do to go from media phenomana to media powerhouse (in Facebook terms). Twitter appaears to be a long way from realising serious revenues (from advertising) and some of its audience may be under threat if the benefit it has felt from big celebrity names tweet less and less (Stephen Fry's self-imposed exile from all things 'social' and Asthon Kucher's threat to move off Twitter in the USA). Some media rules are true no matter what the medium - celebrities interest people, they sell magazines/newspapers, raise TV ratings and bolster Twitter numbers.

6)In the UK we see 'legalised' commercial TV product placement from the summer. Will the 'new' format realise the 140 million pound boost to broadcasters fortunes that the Culture Secreatry Ben Bradshaw has predicted? While the debate continues as to whether product placement should indeed come in (ISBA have just released a suprise U turn and are now against the idea) it will take the belief of advertisers, patience of consumers and willingness of producers for even a small proportion of this ambitious target to be reached.

7) Apple will release another piece of technology that will become quickly adopted and will have the marketing community pondering how best to use the new 'tablet' for communication purposes. It looks like late Jan might be the date Steve Jobs takes the stage and reveals all. Suffice to say, it will look great and we'll all want one.

So that's it - I know 7 is an odd number but 5 seemed lightweight and frankly I couldn't think of 10.

Maybe I'll come back in December and see how these got on.