RAAK

Facebook updates

Apart from playing cheeky games, Facebook made a few updates this week. Main one being the news that Facebook are allowing people to tag Brand Pages in photos. Once people have tagged a celeb or -more relevant for the RAAKonteur audience- your product, that will appear in their friends' Newsfeeds.

The social network also tightened up the rules about running contests on its platform, a warning sign they probably will become more strict in policing it. You can no longer use Liking a Page or checking in to a Place to let someone automatically enter a competition. At the same time, they released some more 'philosophical' guidelines for Marketing on Facebook (warning: PDF-alert).

And while we thought the Facebook Send button would mean that Facebook was going to phase out the Share button, it seems they're making them the same. Which means the 'new' Share button will also allow you to target the people you're sharing the story with rather than simply send that story to your Wall.
 

Let's get Physical

Here's a nice example of how your Social Media activity can influence real life. It's a Social Media connected bottle-opener that invites your friends when you've opened a beer and creates a Facebook Event for your party. Seems like a spec or a student project, so let's hope that Mr Heineken is paying attention.

On that note, our Tech Insight of the week, about the rise of NFC technology, is a must-read.

 

Your place or mine?

So Google has finally released its Places API to the public. With Instagram choosing Foursquare's API to provide their place data, the question is why use Google's?

For one, sysadmins will love the fact that it's very fast and reliable. User experience designers will dig the autocomplete service. No need to type and search for a venue like you do on Foursquare, just type in the first few letters and Google will suggest as you type. For a full rundown of the pros and cons see this Quora post.

In related location news, Comscore has released some check-in data from the US. It found that 60% of check-ins are done by the 18-34 year old group – it's the Instagram Foursquare generation:

The study found that 16.7 million U.S. mobile subscribers used location-based “check-in” services on their phones in March 2011, representing 7.1 percent of the entire mobile population. 12.7 million check-in users did so on a smartphone, representing 17.6 percent of the smartphone population.
 

The Sunday Times Social List thinks my bot is a guru

At the end of last week the Sunday Times launched their version of a social influence engine, called the Sunday Times Social List. Since we're in the habit of stress testing all barometers of social influence (like we did with Klout and Peerindex), we ran our tests against the Sunday Times' engine as well. It didn't fare very well.

 

Track the buzz, Make a buck

So one week we present you with a dazzling Twitter case study, only to temper all the buzz with research that says Twitter is not that big, or that it does not drive traffic like other services do. This week the buzz is back. Derwent Capital Markets has just launched a new £25 million hedge fund that tracks Twitter. New Scientist explains that:

The idea is not as outlandish as it might seem. Last year, Johan Bollen, a computer scientist at Indiana University Bloomington, showed that the emotion expressed in tweets correlates with stock market movements. When Twitter users display high levels of anxiety, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tends to fall a few days later.

Twitter revealed some incredible stats this week too. There are 600,000 developers working on apps that use the Twitter API, and Twitter is processing a jaw dropping 13 billion API requests per day. And yes, there are 900,000 applications that use the Twitter API.
 

The Social Beast that is China

We all know it: China is the force to be reckoned with. This presentation by BBH Asia planner Simon Kemp has some jawdropping stats about what's going on behind that Great Firewall in Digital, Social & Mobile.

Three that made our eyes water:

• Chinese between 18 & 27 spend almost 5 hours per day on email & web.
• There are 303 million mobile internet users.
• 40% of Chinese netizens are 'content creators' (almost twice the rate seen in the USA).

 

Promoted Tweets: Top or Flop?

Conflicting messages on Promoted Tweets this week. An article on Investors.com claimed that click-through rates were paltry.

But then an article in AdAge pointed to some success stories. While Twitter carefully puts the average 'engagement' rate (RT, reply, favourite or click) at 3-5%, the article says that some tweets from Volkswagen have received engagement rates of a dazzling 52%. Which means that an incredible amount of people didn't just see it, but interacted with it.
 

Twitter adds API permissions – for better or for worse

In a blog post and on the twitter-dev mailing list, Twitter yesterday announced a new API permission level, which separates DM access from timeline access. This means, an application has to explicitly ask you for your permission before it can read your DM's or send DM's on your behalf. Which is a good thing.

Except, they also announced, almost as an afterthought, that many non-web applications will have to make major changes to the way they let users sign in, if they want to continue letting users see and send DM's. This caused a huge storm on the twitter-dev mailing list, and sparked interesting blog posts like this one.

The feedback from Twitter has been to move the deadline for switching over back by two weeks, but it seems they're going to stick to making life more difficult for developers.
 

Creative of the Week – Koblin & Milk

Yes, we know, them again. But the creative collaboration between the film maker Chris Milk and the Google creative technologist Aaron Koblin has spawned another highly ambitious 'music video' project.

 

Tech Insight of the week – The sci-fi future of Near Field Communication

While everyone is still getting used to the possibilities opened up for marketing and user interaction by QR codes, the dawn of Near Field Communication is exceedingly overshadowing all the excitement. What is NFC, and what will it enable us to do? Read More »
 

MAS Museum – A world's first

And a quick bit of RAAK news to finish off. We're helping the people from the newly opened MAS Museum in Antwerp promote their rather cool virtual live video tool. Go check it out; it's a world's first.