We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #19
Jordan is off skiing down the side of a slope right now, so I’m taking over Mashup duties for today. Hope you’re all in fine fettle.
Conservatives web campaign backfires
Anatomy of a hashtag: #cashgordon by Meg Pickard
The Conservative party scored an own goal today with a website attacking Gordon Brown’s links to the Unite union. Dubbed ‘Cash Gordon’, the site encouraged users to gain action points by reading, donating or Tweeting about the campaign. However the site was built using the same template that’s been used by right-wing U.S. lobbyists for a number of campaigns including; the scuppering of U.S. healthcare reform, the banning of homosexuals in the armed forces and attacks against carbon trading legislation. In addition, the tweets Cash-Gordon.com was encouraging supporters to generate and displaying on the site weren’t moderated and allowed Javascript, leading to much profanity and many hilariously mocking tweets. At the time of writing #cashgordon is the second largest trending topic in the UK and the site’s been taken down.
Facebook ousts Google as the most visited site in the US
Hitwise’s story that Facebook.com surpassed Google.com in visits for a whole week last week was deemed big enough to be picked up by mainstream media. Although Facebook is still a long way off overtaking Google here in the UK, the battle in traffic numbers for these two internet titans reflect what’s already happened down under in Australia with the social media sector overtaking search engines, before swallowing all of planet earth (possibly). Pull is slowly turning to Push. Social media FTW!
Nestlé runs into a spot of bother
Greenpeace launched its latest campaign last week with the aim of shocking the general public (not me, I thought those Orang-utan fingers looked lovely – hmm, yummy) into taking action against Nestlé for using palm oil from non-sustainable sources. They got off to a flying start by rather cleverly turning the Kit Kat logo into something rather different as well as doing their own rather grisly version of a Kit Kat ad. Whoever was running Nestle’s social media channels managed to add an articulated lorry load of fuel to Greenpeace’s little campfire by first demanding YouTube take down the spoof ad from their service for breach of copyright, before responding rather irately to criticism being left on their Facebook fan page. It appears they now realise the error of their ways and are now taking steps to rectify it.
Social fans are more likely to buy
Although Nestlé would probably argue these findings given its experiences in the past week, it appears that consumers that are friends and followers of a brand online are more likely to purchase from that brand. According to an article on eMarketer based on findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate: “60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly eight in 10”. However this dovetails nicely with the fact that the reason those consumers followed the brand in the first place was that they were customers already (49%) and wanted to show support (42%).
STOP PRESS! Majority of Chatroutlette users are MEN! (and big dirty pervs)
TechCrunch recently conducted their own analytics study into Chatroulette and it’s users, here are some of the highlights:
- About half of all Chatroulette spins connects you with someone from the USA. The next most likely country is France at 15%.
- Of the spins showing a single person, 89% were male and 11% were female.
- 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. 1 in 3 females appear as part of such a group. That number is 1 in 12 for males.
- 1 in 8 spins yield something R-rated (or worse)
- You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity
The UK also dominates the pervert rankings with a concentration rate of 22%. This won’t be news to any of you who’ve spent more than 5 minutes looking at Blighty on Chatroulette map.
Facebook to roll out location based service
Staying with TechCrunch, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of rolling out it’s own location-based feature to possibly rival that of FourSquare’s. This feature would be based around the use of QR codes (no, we haven’t given up on those yet) which businesses could print out and display in-store for people to check in manually (an issue which is becoming more and more tiresome for folk). More details are likely to be unveiled at it’s f8 conference in May.
Have a lovely week.