April 20th, 2009

Culture, measurement and managed expectations critical for social business success

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:15 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Measurement

Tags: Social Media, IT Pro, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is at RSA Conference

Guest editorial by Peter Kim

Leading up to SXSW and Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, I thought a lot about the latest thinking in social media to prepare for panels at both events. We discussed the issues that most companies are asking about lately - and concluded that it’s still early for most businesses.

Most of today’s thinking on social media comes from either a marketing or IT viewpoint. And both of those perspectives suffer from bias that narrows focus and diverts attention from the larger opportunity at hand. IT pros are intrigued by “enterprise 2.0″ and how it may be able to rescue the expensive acronym graveyard (e.g. KM, CRM, ERP) in their data center. Marketers obsess with “social media marketing” and how to improve campaign reach and frequency at lower costs. Both approaches are limited and fail to embrace the full potential of social technologies.

What’s limiting success today? A few key factors; let’s start with culture. It’s an issue that comes up quite a bit in conversation, but rarely addressed with solutions. To paraphrase Charlton Heston, “social media is people!” At SXSW and Web 2.0 Expo, I sat through multiple sessions led by enterprise gurus that acknowledged the “people problem” in opening, only to focus the entire discussion on technology. Making social media work requires user adoption, not just capital expenditure and policy mandate. Unfortunately, no simple solution exists for solving the people problem - it takes top down, bottom up, and middle management efforts. We’ve seen a handful of companies address this from the top: Cisco, Intuit, Zappos. Others activate people in the middle to catalyze change: Dell, Ford, Pepsi. And some have started educating from the bottom up: Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble. But even these cultures recognize that they have a long way to go.

Measurement also puts a crowbar to the kneecaps of the prophesied social media revolution. To paraphrase Lord Kelvin: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Models calculating return on investment are laden with assumptions and estimates that muddle accurate pictures of performance. Businesses must expand their approach to account for fuzzy units of conversations, signals, and connections and at the end of the day, these must be tied back to seeing-is-believing results. Remember: just because it appears in a spreadsheet doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

Perhaps the most difficult, if not impossible, current barrier to adoption is the expectation established by public social media sites. With a $15 billion valuation (2007) and a user base of 200 million (2009), Facebook looks a harbinger of 21st century blue chip businesses. Twitter seems to help individuals derail institutions daily, helping people get out of jail, jostling Fortune 50 brands, and breaking news faster than established media outlets. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, “everything in moderation.” Let’s look back at the rise of e-commerce as an analogue here: lots of overhyped business models that failed, some that succeeded, and lots of lessons to learn in between that took years to emerge.

Businesses - not just IT, marketing, HR, or product departments - can make social media work by taking a holistic approach to emerging technologies. With social business design, a company can plan culture and process change, measurement to establish baselines and change, and technology architecture that supports these efforts at today’s early stage and scales to support broad adoption.

Peter Kim is building an enterprise social technology startup that will change the world of work, with fellow principals Jeffrey Dachis, Kate Niederhoffer, and David Armano. The company is funded by Austin Ventures and operating in stealth mode.He was previously an analyst with Forrester Research in Boston, focusing on the intersection of social technology and marketing strategy.

April 1st, 2009

Web 2.0 Expo: Why social media marketing fails

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:21 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Measurement, Web 2.0 Expo

Tags: Web, Marketing, Web 2.0, Social Media, Charlene Li, Campaigns, Jennifer Leggio

Today at Web 2.0 Expo, a “Forrester reunion” panel made up of Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim and Charlene Li told a packed room  at Moscone West how they believe social media marketing is failing. Don’t fear, however, because they also discussed how they believe it can be fixed.

On culture:
“The biggest challenge is the bottom-up bubbling of social media versus the top down approach,” Owyang said. “Requires a lot of cultural change and most companies are not ready for that.”

How do you get a culture to change? “This is not something that’s done overnight. Start small so people can begin experimenting,” said Li. “If you want cultural change you have to get ‘big guns’ involved. These are people at the executive level.”

Owyang cautioned that social media is not often led by executives — it is led by the lower level and mid-level workers. However, Kim said that, “One of the great fallacies of social media is that it is a young person’s game.”

Owyang sees corporations people engaging in social media in three different ways, which he has named:

1. “Tire” When social media comes from the edges of the company; it’s very authentic. However one side may not know what the other side is doing.
2. “Tower” Imagine corporate communications wants to centralize social media. Downside is it begins to look like rehashed press releases.
3. “Hub and Spoke” Cross-functional group right in the middle of the hub, perhaps pairing up executives with younger digital media advocates.

On campaigns:
One of the biggest failures comes from people thinking of social media as “campaigns,” said Li. Campaigns are short-term. She said the bigger question people should be asking is, “What kind of relationships do I have today and what kind of relationship do I want in the picture?” Social media should be part of a long-term business strategy, she said.

That led to likely the most important question for marketers, posed by Kim: “Do we need to get rid of the marketing department?”

Li believes that marketing is safe, as other aspects of marketing beyond advertising and PR (i.e. promotions, brand management, etc.) become more elevated in the face of social media.

“Marketers will evolve,” Owyang he said.

On measurement:
“Many marketers are measuring social media wrong,” Owyang said. “You can’t use page views or clickthroughs to measure social media. It can’t measure conversations or tone with such older marketing measurement approaches.

Li says you also need to consider why you are measuring. Is it for effectiveness? For budgeting? To see if sales leads are coming in? If you don’t know what you are measuring, she said, then what are you doing?

“This is one of the areas of biggest fail among marketers in general, ” Kim said.

“If you’re not associating your social media efforts with a larger business goal, your program is going to get cut,” Li said.

On failure:

The biggest question about social media is around failure itself, Li said.

“If you are engaged in social media you have to expect to fail… if you don’t fail you are not doing it right. So this goes back to the question, ‘Can my culture really adopt this’? Things are not written in stone.”

“Social media doesn’t matter, the way it’s being executed today,” Kim said. “Will it matter? Yes. We are social beings and always will be social beings but we’re learning to adopt and adapt to new technologies.”

March 24th, 2009

Burton Group study reveals enterprise social networking priorities

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:37 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Networks, Tech Companies

Tags: Burton Group, Network, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Burton Group principal analyst Mike Gotta recently published the first of six parts of his Enterprise Social Networks Field Research Study. The study aims to determine whether or not social networking has reached critical mass within the enterprise or if the concept is merely buzz.

The first report in the series, Social Networking within the Enterprise, revealed that many organizations have yet to make a decision on social networking tools and those organizations who have embarked on researching social networking tools are in very early stages of deployment.

According to Gotta the enterprises with which he and his research team spoke were most interested in enterprise social networking metrics and uses cases. And, no matter how enthusiastic the decision-maker was about a social networking deployment, there was always a nagging doubt about effectiveness and results.

The study was conducted from August to November 2008 and Gotta and his team spoke with 21organizations and 65 individuals which, according to Gotta, resulted in more than 1,700 data points. The interviews covered topics such as making the business case, metrics, compliance, talent,generational shifts, community building, technology concerns, and cultural factors.The data showed that there were four general buckets with which people associate social networking:

• Productivity
• Collaboration
• Knowledge Sharing
• Talent Management

The last bullet — talent management — seemed to be pretty high on the minds of those interviewed. According to the report:

Reoccurring business justifications for social networking initiatives were recruiting and retaining a younger workforce with social tools they expect to perform their role, and engaging employees, to help them leverage relationships across the organization to share information and collaborate. As one participant stated, “30% of our workforce is Gen Y now; and by the end of 2010 it will be 50%.”

“In down-times, focusing on operational efficiencies is always the first reaction. However, a crisis that can be weathered can also be made much worse internally because of budget slashing tactics and critical breakdowns in employee communications,” said Gotta. “Social networking is not about technology and it’s not about Facebook — it’s about relationships — it’s about helping your organization be more resilient and more adaptive to changing business and societal conditions.”

The full report can be downloaded from the Burton Group site. You can view Gotta’s presentation on his findings via BrightTALK.

February 11th, 2009

A tale of two faux pas: When transparency meets bad behavior

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:07 pm

Categories: Career Development, Marketing, Microblogging, Personal Branding, Public Relations, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter, April Dunford, David George-Cosh, Public Relations, Blogging, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Earlier today yet another Twitter brouhaha erupted when a Canadian marketing professional named April Dunford was allegedly verbally attacked by David George-Cosh, a National Post tech reporter, after she apparently wouldn’t take his phone call. Ian Capstick does a nice job of rehashing the battle on his MediaStyle blog so I won’t go into it other than to say… Dunford is no victim (hence my “allegedly” statement). Both parties behaved quite badly.

My quick summary based on Capstick’s post: George-Cosh reached out to Dunford regarding a story he was working on and she took a day or so to get back to him. He was, according to Dunford’s Twitter stream, rude to her during the eventual call back, so she expressed frustration in a tweet. It was clear to George-Cosh, it seems, that she was talking about him since they’d just hung up the phone. Her defense was, and I paraphrase, “Dude, I didn’t say your name.” George-Cosh swore. A lot. She put on a show of trying to calm him. It ended… poorly.

Some might say this is where everything went wrong. I think it went wrong from the beginning. Dunford’s excuse of “I was busy and didn’t have time to call the reporter back” shows a lack of urgency on behalf of her client. Sure, sometimes a client doesn’t want to be included or comment on a story, but as a public relations professional she should know better than to avoid the press. She should also know better than to adopt a holier-than-thou stance about calling him back. Other tweets of Dunford’s show passive aggression and condescension that even the most patient people might find akin to nails on a chalkboard.

George-Cosh’s side is a little bit easier to digest. Yes, he F-bombed the heck out of this woman. I think his freak-out and his own alleged holier-than-thou-I-am-the-media comments were unacceptable. He shouldn’t have reacted the way that he did in public and kudos to his publication for apologizing for the behavior. But I can see why he’d be annoyed and as a former PR / current marketing professional I don’t believe Dunford handled this like a pro. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic. I wouldn’t want to be sworn at like that. I would also try really hard not to ignite a situation like that — and after his FIRST tweet I would’ve remained silent and taken it to the phone or some other medium.

What’s bugging me about all of this — as Todd Defren called out tonight on Twitter — “he was incorrigible, she was unprofessional.” And many comments in Capstick’s blog post (other than those made by a very smart Caitlin Fitzsimmons) were sympathetic to Dunford. April Dunford herself commented but didn’t appear as sorry as she claimed to be. It was more of a “I wish this would go away” rather than a show of accountability.

The reason I am even writing about this? The “lesson” that is being passed around the socialsphere tonight is about “watch what you say on Twitter.” I am sort of sick of this lesson, truth be told. We’re grown-ups. We’re professionals. Watch what you say everywhere. What this is highlighting are two things that I have droned on and on about in this blog over the last handful of months:

• Social media is merely shining a huge spotlight on bad PR people / poor PR practices that have always existed
• There are still a large amount of mainstream journalists and bloggers who have no idea how to work with PR people

When it comes down to it I think both behaved despicably. He’s positioned himself to me as a journalist without much credibility and she’s positioned herself to me as a consultant I would never want representing my company. This is not a Twitter lesson. This is a business lesson. Take it to heart.

Update 2/12/08 8:08 a.m. - Dunford clarified in the comments that she is not a PR person. My response was, essentially, that those folks branded as marketing professionals should always consider PR tactics when communicating publicly.

February 10th, 2009

Micro-emailng challenge month No. 1: 'I Talk Too Much'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:05 am

Categories: Microblogging, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Twitter, Hutch, E-mail, Online Communications, Jennifer Leggio

My buddy Hutch Carpenter and I started a little email brevity challenge after the first of the year, in which we’re tracking our sent work emails to see how loquacious we really are. And, more important, to determine if we can leverage the skills we’ve learned by using Twitter to make our communications more focused.

Hutch, obviously the more responsible of us two, posted his results last week. Being the awesome blogger that he is, Hutch also found a way to turn what he learned into an idea around social software for “guaranteed delivery.” I won’t rehash it because, well, you can just read his post. My lesson from January’s micro-emailing measurement? I talk too much. My poor co-workers.

Clearly Hutch is the winner this month. My numbers above even omit forwards and calendar invitations. This represents pure, originally authored emails by yours truly. What’s most telling to me is the following:

• Of these 662 emails more than 60 percent of them were sent to people within a 20-foot radius of my desk
• This says to me that I either feel the need to have a paper trail or am exceptionally lazy and don’t talk to my co-workers face-to-face enough
• Of these 662 emails about 20 percent were “Oh yeah, and also…” emails meaning I am sending emails off too quickly without finishing the thought the first time. Not good.
• My email approach is similar to my Twitter approach — and I have more than 18,500 updates on Twitter.  I think this is telling me that I need to think more before I speak.

As Hutch said, February is a new month. I wish I had gleaned some bigger picture lesson out of this experiment as he did. However, I think because my numbers are so dismal I couldn’t see beyond my own activity into how this impacted the bigger picture. That is a problem in and of itself. Let’s see if I do better this month.

Signed,

Chatty Jen

February 5th, 2009

Fortune 500 series: Cisco's digital everywhere

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Branding, Cisco, Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Tech Companies

Tags: test, Cisco Systems Inc., Cisco Eos, Jennifer Leggio

Cisco is a brand that is known world over. An enterprise-focused company with enough consumer goods to be a household name, the goliath company has an excessively large digital presence. All of Cisco’s combined efforts make it not only digital, but unquestionably social.

I had a high level discussion with Carlos Dominguez, senior vice president in the company’s office of the chairman of the board and CEO, about Cisco embracing social media both internally and externally, its new-ish Eos offering, and it’s potentially aggressive acquisition strategy.

Q. [Jennifer] Cisco is everywhere, but for those who don’t know, where can Cisco be “socially” found?

A. [Carlos] There are numerous ways we communicate digitally at Cisco so let’s look at corporate communications as just an example. Our PR to our analyst relations teams share corporate news and even event alerts using Cisco Twitter and Cisco Facebook.  We have a Facebook “Fan Page” where you can follow company news.  On Second Life’s Cisco Campus, we do product training and hold virtual event such as C-Scape, our analyst meeting in December where we hosted double the number of attendees vs. last year because half attended online (attendance went from 300 to 700).  And of course, we use blogs and video blogs frequently across Cisco to reach both more people and a Web-savvy audience.

We also have an internal Web site to share knowledge we call Ciscopedia. It’s the same concept as Wikipedia but focused on Cisco knowledge and contributions by the employees.  Very powerful posts and links are being contributed daily. The other day I wanted to learn about a particular product and spent two hours going through all the information that was posted.

Finally, we also know that video is an extremely powerful medium.  So we adopted the YouTube concept within Cisco and call it C-Vision. Anyone can post videos to this site, including training videos. I use it all the time both to post and learn.

Q. How does the management of these entities happen? Are they all under the marketing umbrella or farmed out to different business units? I imagine there must be some collaboration.

Each person is responsible for setting up and maintaining their blog presence but the company provides online training and support. One of the key things about leveraging these assets is that you need to set up the rules of usage and train the employees on acceptable use policy.  We have an online Cisco Communications Center of Excellence (CCOE) for our employees that encourages the use of Web 2.0 tools.  It’s a best practices site that contains everything an employee would need to start using the technology. There are now more than 7,000 internal blogs at Cisco.

Internal productivity and lead generation –>

February 4th, 2009

Get me out of this social media echo chamber, please!

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:26 am

Categories: Blogging Best Practices, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing, Public Relations, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

Kyle Flaherty wrote a great thought-provoking post today about balancing the social media noise and keeping the focus on productivity. In it he dug up a question he asked his readers one year ago: “What is your social media tipping point?”

As I asked myself this question I started to mentally hyperventilate. I realized quickly that I’m stuck inside of a giant echo chamber of social media pundits talking to each other — and that I’ve been guilty of doing that, too. After kicking myself repeatedly I decided to work on getting myself out. When embarking on my personal plan, I came up with a short list of things that are especially getting on my nerves.

• Popularity contests
• Social media “consultants”
• The “why you need X” tool discussions
• Did I mention popularity contests?

Blah.

My focus, much like Flaherty’s, is on finding ways for social media make sense for an enterprise technology business. Forget what some of the personal branding and B2C folks tell you — the same fundamentals of social media that work for their efforts don’t always apply to enterprise IT companies. The formula is still in the works and the jury is still out on exactly how it works, despite a bunch of different proposed options.

In order to do this I need to start clearing out some of the noise. I care less about how Bob Smith made himself the most popular person on the Web and how. Just because Bob can promote himself does not mean he understand my company or my space. I need to stop reading blogs — even if I love the bloggers — who talk about how to become an influencer or measure your personal influencer or or or… Bring me more Flaherty. Bring me Peter Kim. Bring me Dennis Howlett. Bring me Oliver Marks. Bring me Dave Fleet. Bring me more people who understand what is bunk and what is not and what the Global 1000 are finding to be successful and what their technology buyers are doing. Bring me case studies. Those are the things I want to read.

Let me inform you — having a blog or being popular on a social network does not an expert make. I am certainly not one. I am an information sponge who likes to share what she’s learned through writing. Also, patting each other on the back for recycling the same ideas should not be allowed. We should expect more out of each other and ourselves. Social media provides new communication vehicles but the basic fundamentals of good business planning still apply. Isn’t it irresponsible to be so self-congratulatory when so many businesses are being sold snake oil or still have no clue what any of this means to them?

Oh, and finally, I’ll say it. Some businesses just don’t need to have an active social media presence.

Do you have ideas for getting other social media folks to step up and take their messages outward? Are you passionate about enterprise technology, too? Will you be at SXSWi? I am open to a discussion. Email me via the form below. And bring your “A game.”

January 22nd, 2009

NHL digital roll-out drumbeats to All Star Game

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:01 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Social Business, Social Business Analysis, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Video

Tags: Team, Fan, League, Video, Site, NHL, Michael DiLorenzo, Hockey Fan, Games, Team Management

Right now, Michael DiLorenzo is en route to Montreal to prep for this weekend’s All Star Game activities. It’s been a busy couple months for the NHL’s director of corporate communications, who is just recovering from the excitement around Winter Classic. With NHL starting to step out of the shadow of its professional sports big brothers NFL and MLB, there’s a lot of activity going on.

However, DiLorenzo’s preparations for this weekend didn’t just start. He and the broad team of content experts at the NHL had been prepping for months, including the seeding of preview video and creating an All Star Game micro site. It’s not just about the fans in Montreal — it’s about creating an experience for all hockey fans.

This is merely an extension of the league’s usual fan-centric approach to content. Over the last year or so, the NHL has been working diligently to roll out a three-phase digital media program to serve its estimated 20 million avid fans in North America — 13 million in the U.S. and 7 million in Canada. The primary objectives were to personalize content for avid fans, make that content more interactive, and create a more social presence on its NHL site and sub-sites.

“We know a few things about our fans that feed our strategy as a media business, but also support our investments in digital media,” DiLorenzo said.  “On average, about 50 percent of fans are displaced — meaning they live in a different geographic area than their favorite teams. Inherently they have an access constraint, whether it be missing the games on TV or not being able to buy their team-branded goods at a local sporting goods store.”

What DiLorenzo realized is that the combination of an access constraint and a technically sophisticated audience creates opportunity — for both the league and for the fans. Recognizing that the NHL has “modest” national television distribution (the league owns all of its TV rights) it has the ability to take video online in a way that other leagues cannot.

With that knowledge, the NHL moved forward.

Phase One: The digital media player –>

January 20th, 2009

Inauguration pass or fail? Social network, streaming video report card

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:57 am

Categories: Election 2008, Facebook, FriendFeed, Life Streaming, Microblogging, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Video, Twitter

Tags: Card, Facebook, Network, Streaming Video, Video, Twitter, CNN, Ustream, Corporate Communications, Social Networking

Countless people took to the Internet today to live stream the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. I wrote yesterday about some skepticism over whether or not the social networks and streaming video sites would hold up during one of their most highly trafficked days.

I, personally, used a combination of Ustream and Twitter — neither of which experienced one single hiccup during my use. The Ustream chat was active and my Twitter network was, as always, engaging and thoughtful. Many wrongfully feared that Twitter would buckle under such tremendous pressure but it held strong. Ironically, it’s partner site Current, which was to live stream the election, was having the issues and reportedly providing poor quality video.

Enough about me and what I think. I took the question to the community at large and asked them to help me grade the streaming sites and social networks they used. I received immediate feedback from 500+ people either via FriendFeed, Twitter or crowdsourcing via HARO. While this is a small percentage of the overall Internet user base today, it’s still quite telling. Happily, more passes than fails:

Pass

• CNN.com — The most live streaming praise came for CNN.com, which also partnered with Facebook to take its stream to a broader audience and spark more interaction. According to Mashable, CNN hit a record 13 million streams.
• Facebook - The social network did so well that it deserves its own call-out. The majority of respondents were using the CNN / Facebook mash-up to watch the inaugural events. According to Facebook, as of 10:15 a.m. PT 600,000 status updates were posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed and there were an average of 4,000 status updates every minute during the broadcast  — there were 8,500 status updates the minute Obama began his speech.
• FriendFeed — The FriendFeed experience this morning was smooth and while the majority of respondents did not mention the lifestream, those on FriendFeed said they shared the experience in the official inauguration room, which saw great traffic and no downtime.
• Twitter — Of the 500 people who responded to my inquiry, more than 400 said they were using Twitter (many of which not even in my Twitter network). Several were live tweeting from mobile phones at coffee shops or from their desks at the office. “I cannot begin to rave enough about how much more connected I have felt to others around the country throughout the election and inauguration because of Twitter,” said Jennifer Kushell, president of YS Interactive Corp.
• Ustream — Both online and via the sites iPhone application, people were successfully streaming Ustream video and participating in its interactive chat. Using Ustream myself, a handful of people had issues with buffering, but admitted it was due to their own wireless connections.

Honorable mentions: MTV.com, Joost/CBS, Citynews.ca, BBC.com

Fail

• Hulu –  Almost everyone who reported that they tried Hulu said it either broke or constantly hiccuped or froze. “Hulu choked under pressure,” said Jason Shultz. More than 150 people claimed the same experience as Shultz, including The Inquistr’s Duncan Riley, who said Hulu was “choppy and out of sync.”
• MSNBC — Most of the people who tried MSNBC.com reported that there was a severe time lag and the service was unreliable, therefore requiring that they switch to CNN. According to user Kristin Miller of SSPR, “Unfortunately MSNBC’s video stream is a major failure.  I can only hear every third word or so and then it freezes up.”

Dishonorable mentions: C-SPAN, Current, MySpace

Of course, many experiences depend on your own Internet connectivity and the local servers from which you’re trying to stream the content. Some had an overall bad experience with all sites and others had no issues with some of the “fails.” Also, there are several other sites that live streamed (as seen in Andrew Nusca’s post), however, these are the ones my network was using.

How was YOUR experience? Let me know here or on Twitter.

January 15th, 2009

Facebook as a country: a visual

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:42 am

Categories: Facebook, Life Streaming, Marketing, Social Business Analysis, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Wiki, Networking, Online Communications, Jennifer Leggio

No, this isn’t “Jen loves Facebook” week on Feeds. This is purely coincidental.  Yesterday my fellow ZDNet buddy Zack Whittaker sent me a little artwork he created in response to Mark Zuckerberg’s post about Facebook’s great start to 2009.

In Zuckerberg’s post he says that more than 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook, including “people in every continent—even Antarctica.” He goes on to say that “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.”

Facebook, however, is not a country (see, I’m very insightful). And, no offense to my dear friend Zack, but I don’t know that either of us are artfully skilled enough to configure a country design and plop it on the globe in a believable manner. However, what Zack did was take Facebook’s existing user numbers and plop them into an already existing map:

What the above represents, according to Zack’s research, is that the entire population of France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Belgium roughly make up every Facebook user in the world.

For all of it’s power, however, Facebook isn’t really a global network, compared to say, Hi5. Facebook experienced tremendous growth in 2008 and is expanding beyond it’s safe and comfortable network of U.S. users. I expect in 2009 Facebook will have to put it’s money where it’s statistics are and try to engage more overseas users if it is truly shooting for world socnet domination.

Original map from Wikipedia