There is nothing like a nine-month break from work to give you a fresh perspective on your discipline. In the world of digital media, where new hot sites and fads come and go quickly, I was afraid that I would be caught off guard when the question came up “what’s hot right now for digital?”. Yet, as I catch up with my colleagues and industry experts, the same web 2.0 suspects are talked about as nine months ago: Facebook, Twitter, mobile communications, etc …

What this reveals for me is that the key to digital media is not to know what the latest website is, or which social network or virtual world to enter, but instead to understand that their growth is due to some fundamental underlying societal trends. These trends – transparency, individuality, connection and knowledge – are the ones that every company should keep in mind when developing a communication program, offline and online.

The need for Transparency was already engrained in the demand for corporate social responsibility that emerged in the 90’s. Then, consumers required companies to be transparent about their impact on the environment and society. Now, consumers expect them to communicate in a clear and frank manner with them about everything, financial results, products, management… The same demand is also made of politicians, institutions, charities…

This is why consumers and citizens now put their trust in Individuals above all. Reviews on travel websites, opinions by a well-liked blogger, a quick text from a friend about a great product, will carry more weight as they appear free of any corporate involvement.

This is multiplied by the power of Connection. One piece of advice from an individual is interesting, but the same repeated by a community of trusted individuals definitely clinches the deal. Communities are the new social space where people build relationships. As people live in a dispersed world, both geographically and in terms of time zones, they re-create a social place online where they can meet regardless of the physical location they occupy and the time they can connect with each other.

This contributes to a new way of creating and consuming information. People build their Knowledge base via a mix of personal opinion that they gather on the net or via friends with what they get from traditional media in print and TV. Their knowledge is also more immediate. No longer do they want to wait for the six o’clock news (in the UK) or the “20h” (in France), they seek it via Twitter (see the recent explosion in the USA or the China earthquake rumoured to have first be told via the microblogging site) or their mobile phone.

So here you go: do you have what makes your consumers TICK? Be aware, they are already Ticking about you and your products. Have a look here: and input your company or brand’s name…

Sonico, think Facebook for Latin America - you may recall in a previous post, recently announced that they have passed the 15 million mark in registered users (content in Spanish) - keep in mind they have only been around for 9 months. In the beginning of 2008, the network had about 7.3 million registered users. These numbers are supported by a March 2008 ComScore report.

So it seems like they have surpassed Hi5, Orkut, and Facebook (LATAM registered users) and thus becoming reigning leaders in Latin America…

Mashable first reported on this and as a result were contacted by Hi5 to clarify - to which immediately a follow-up post was written. According to a more recent comScore report (April 2008) - Hi5 is clearly still the leader in overall traffic.

This does not take away from Sonico’s strong growth (or any other of the social networks in the region)…what I gather from all this is that Latin America is poised for a huge boom of online communities, conversations, opportunities, and yes, even challenges. And as internet penetration increases more and more, expect this phenomenon to out pace even Sonico’s growth.

Offline the Latin culture is very warm and social – this seems to be translating online. According to Comscore and Analytics 2.0 the number of people creating profiles on social networks has increased by 103% from Jan 07 – Jan 08. The study included Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

Some interesting figures:
• Orkut - 12.9 million (up 27% from 10.1 million in ‘07)
• Sonico - 7.3 million (Sonico launched during the second half of ‘07)
• hi5 - 4.2 million (up 72% from 2.2 million in Jan. ‘07)
• MySpace - around 3 million (13 million users in all markets analyzed)
• Facebook - 2.2 million (up 4,152% from the Jan. ‘07 count of 52,000)

Says Ramiro Prudencio, Managing Director at Burson-Marsteller:

“The growth of social networks in Latin America is extremely important for those of us who manage brands and issues. People are engaged, sharing information and shaping public opinion – especially younger internet users – through these networks. If practitioners and clients think they will drive successful and effective communications programs through traditional media alone, they will be missing a tremendous opportunity. Moreover, there is an opportunity to quickly apply what we’ve learned from working in the US and Europe over the past couple of years as social networks have taken off, and offer clients unique insight as to how things are likely to trend in Latin America.”

This morning, our Worldwide President and CEO, Mark Penn, announced the launch of a new Facebook application around his bestselling book, Microtrends. For the 70+ million users on Facebook, the Microtrends application presents an awesome opportunity to engage, interact and learn from your friends’ various niche interests. As Mark put it, “If you’ve read the book or heard me talk about Microtrends, you know that 1% of society can make or break a business, win an election or launch a social movement. But let’s get down to what’s really important: Which 1% are you?”

The application is in the form of a short quiz which allows you to discover which “Microtrend” you align with. Are you a Caffeine Crazy? High School Mogul? Numbers Junkie? 30-Winker? (I am!) What about your friends? Do they fall into similar or different groups? Take the quiz and find out.

As Erin has previously posted about the era of open and personal communication, Microtrends enables relevant microtargeting - the chance to offer different stakeholders messages and products that emotionally moves them. For Public Relations practitioners or Marketing professionals, the age of mass media and mass messaging is dead. Microtrends, and more specifically, this application represents a new and exciting way for us to listen to our clients, friends and family.

A special “Thank You” goes out to everyone who worked on the first iteration of the application: Zach Ambrose, David Brooks, Ryan Coogan, Matt Hersh, Dan Lazar, Stacey Lazar, Robyn Pearlstein and Kinney Zalesne (co-author of Microtrends). I’m really excited to see how the application plays out, particularly within the dynamic social ecosystem of Facebook.

If I told you that Google and its intuitive search engine would change the Internet landscape years ago, would you believe me? Today, we take for granted the uphill battle that the now-dominant Google faced before Yahoo! and engines like AltaVista or AOL. Looking back, search helped to create a revolution where the consumer was in control. Once again, consumers are beginning to experience a revolution of sorts within social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Bebo, etc) and various platforms (Facebook Platform, MySpace Developer Platform, OpenSocial, etc).

As Charlene Li of Forrester Research pointed out during day one at Graphing Social Patterns, social networks, just like search, will soon act like “air”. The future of these technologies, whether existing on a purebred site like Facebook or integrated social networking tools within a search engine like Yahoo!, are certain to become ubiquitous. However, more interesting is the possibility that social network and application consolidation (exactly like what Erin wrote about earlier) is feasible for the general public ONLY with the help of major Internet players: Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo! To put this into context, think of having customized personal, friend-backed recommendations when it came to search results or financial portfolio tracking. (The idea of the “social graph” or in other words, the visual connection of users within a virtual or physical environment, even furthers this prediction when taking into account that “walled garden” approach of welcoming users in but not out, deteriorates.) For Charlene’s presentation from yesterday morning, see here.

So why does this matter to the communications and advertising professional?

What search did to the Internet in 2003, social networks and later, social applicability across the Web, will transform our understanding of “old” technologies to that of a new, highly targeted and niche frontier. The movement to access your personal profile no matter where you browse, search or shop from one central point is currently under our nose. (Yesterday, Google announced that their contact data API is now live for developers to implement across sites, meaning we are even closer to one, universal identity.) For the public relations practitioner and interactive marketer, valuing social networks as an integrated part of a digital campaign among search engines, blogging and corporate websites is of critical importance to a sustained strategy.

I’ve seen Facebook and other worldwide social networks explode in user engagement and growth in less than a few years between various regions. The question is, are you ready to explore the opportunity for yourself and your clients?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report yesterday, “A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters: Why People First Went Online and Why They Stayed.” The report confirms a lot that we already know - people originally went online for personal reasons, social networking in some form has always been an important component of the Internet experience, and the Internet is the first source when people need information to help them solve problems. Two other elements of the report jumped out at me though.

They talk about social networking as nothing new, which I completely agree with, but they talk about it in the context of early Internet technologies such as bulletin board systems or Usenet. I think it is important to remember that social networks have always existed, and continue exist both online and off. Participating in my quilt guild or local kayaking club are both social networks that exist primarily offline, just as my twitter or facebook communities are online social networks. It is because social networks have always been an integral part of society that online social networks are so dominant now - they allow you to participate in more targeted and relevant communities and expand your reach like never before. This isn’t new, but rather an enhancement.

The second point that jumped out at me was around the personal connection that early adopters of the Internet feel as compared to early adopters of other technology revolutions. As opposed to other technology innovations, (TV, automobiles, and telephone are used in the report), Internet adopters see themselves more as co-creators instead of simply users. I tried to think of another technology revolution that could say the same, users as co-creators, and couldn’t come up with one. Interesting stuff…

Interesting post on TechCrunch about the Spanish language social site Sonico. Brief recap if you do not want to read full story:

- Social networked focused on LATAM
- Over 8 million users
- Ranks 167 on Alexa
- Recently launched Portuguese version
- Tremendous growth in last six months

You may recall our recent Facebook post (about its Spanish version) - see the comments posted by Juan Pablo.

A direct translation of Facebook in Spanish.

The social network launched its Español pages today. There are over 2.8 million Spanish speaking people on Facebook from Spain and Latin America making it the second most popular language. Facebook took a different approach from MySpace, who developed international sites and opened offices throughout various regions; Facebookers were asked to translate the content - over 1,500 FBers were recruited.

The Spanish pages will be populated if your IP address is “Latin” or you can choose the option in “My Account”, “Language” to change your primary language.

I wonder if Marcos Azucarcolina (Mark Zuckerberg) chose the right strategy in localizing or globalizing for that matter…I also hope the pages were not direct translations - as I did in this post

David A - what are your thoughts on this?

Behind the fanfare that was the Microsoft and Yahoo acquisition news yesterday morning as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked financial results for 2007, Google quietly swept in with the announcement of a Social Graph API (Application Program Interface) for the web.

Brad Fitzpatrick, who was a driving force behind the promise and success of LiveJournal, recently jumped ship to Google to spearhead a project that details the web’s many social inter-connections. For Fitzpatrick, it was turning the web from a medium of information sharing and gathering, to one of communal value. Here’s his problem statement from August 17, 2007 before he joined Google:

There are an increasing number of new “social applications” as well as traditional application which either require the “social graph” or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by “social graph” is a the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn’t exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that’s comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

This is exactly the reason why Google swooped up Fitzpatrick after leaving SixApart. He’s right, people are getting frustrated using numerous usernames and passwords to sign-up for various social networks, blogs and wikis. But isn’t the “walled garden” approach the bread and butter for Facebook? Read more:

Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I’m not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It’s a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn’t own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

With this in mind, Fitzpatrick and Google have created, in theory, the most efficient and disruptive mechanism for social sites and applications we have seen. However, as Nick O’Neill points out, the numbers game don’t favor Google’s initiative: with over 70 million users on Facebook, the Social Graph API is limited to public spaces such as Twitter, SixApart and Flickr.

Until the day where social spaces on the web become open, this API will stay dormant. However, if this does change, Google and Fitzpatrick are certainly the ones to do it. What do you think?