In a great article from Advertising Age, Kunur Patel looks at the different social media models emerging in the corporate world:

1. Centralised - social media role functions at a senior level as used by Ford

2. Distributed - everyone in the organisation has a role in social media as seen at Best Buy

3. Combination - incorporates centralised best practices and distributed execution as Kodak does.

You can read the full article from the Advertising Age website here.

I remember when mobile location based services were first being touted in 2000 - in the midst of the dotcom boom and getting our heads around exactly what e-commerce was, it was all so exciting and held so much promise.

It was around the same time when I believed the hype about voice recognition software and that in just a few years I’d have no use for my touchtype training all those years ago on an old typewriter (to the beats of some rather uplifting piano music no less) but instead would be having lovely realistic (an authentic Australian accent was even promised by one vendor) conversations with my laptop.

However, it seems a different story with Foursquare and its competitors. According to a report released this week by Juniper Research revenue from mobile location based services could reach US$12.7 million by 2014. An article in the Washington Post provides a good analysis of the report here.

I’m not surprised having spent the last few weeks evangelising to everyone I know (and nearly everyone I meet) about the potential of Foursquare and other similar services. While it has been around since mid last year, it was limited to select cities so unless you travelled globally, it was hard to get your head around the potential of it, but since the start of the year it can be used anywhere now.

Foursquare is basically a service you can download to your mobile phone that allows you to let everyone know where you are - it’s like Twitter for socialites.

Instead of telling everyone what  you are doing, you let your friends know where you are by ‘checking-in’ to various locations either already in the system or you can add them if you are the first to check-in there.

For those whose ears I haven’t chewed off about this topic as yet, below is a good video from the Wall Street Journal as to what Foursquare all about. And this article also from the Wall Street Journal highlights the benefits  small businesses are gaining from combining social media with their marketing.

There are literally hundreds of mobile location based services around including Gowalla, Yelp (which has had its own problems with iliciting bad reviews which we wrote about recently) and even early forerunners like Brightkite, Loopt and My Town but Foursquare is getting a lot of attention perhaps because of its quick growth - some quote it as having more than 1/2 million users already, but its also been in the news with the recent concerns over privacy and its partnership announcements with high profile brands like Bravo and Zagats.

But if people are going to worry about privacy on Foursquare they’ll be horrified to learn about another service Blibby which goes one step further and allows you to tell your friends where and what you are buying somewhere. A story in the Financial Times this week claims the service already has 10,000 users since its launch in December ‘09.

But back to Foursquare, some including Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider, say that Foursquare’s will be ousted from its ‘mayorship’ in the space if other more established and popular social networking sites like Facebook add location based services. And the introduction of Google Buzz adds another interesting element to the mix.

Nicholas also gives a nice comparison between some of the services in his article:

Yelp

• Advantages: Scale, brand, ardent community, large app install base. More money from investors like Elevation Partners.

• Disadvantages: Not your real friends. It’s a site for writers. No Foursquare-like gaming element.

Gowalla

• Advantages: Closer to mainstream than Foursquare. Has more money than Foursquare, from sexy investors like Greylock. Not based in New York so it’s closer to “real” America.

• Disadvantages: Not based in New York, which is the perfect city for this kind of software.

Facebook

• Advantages: Huge scale. Has tons of engineering talent. Like with Foursquare, Facebook friends are your real friends — the kind of people you want to join you when you go out.

• Disadvantages: Unlike Foursquare, Facebook can afford to fail. Potential rivals also include Twitter and CitySearch

Momentum is certainly growing in all these services and a lot of people are talking about it, but there are those who aren’t convinced just yet.

It seems a pretty safe bet that business will gain real benefit from these services (a lot safer than betting on my talking laptop at least), so the real issue is whose going to lead the way.

Cute influencer campaign for Marmite Extra Strong from We Are Social. Also proves the best ideas are the easiest told, as the deck below illustrates.

And then there’s the wrong way to launch a product extension a la Vegemite which we wrote about a while back.

Three of the top five most engaging brands in the UK (as judged by research agency Hall & Partners) are brands that have defined how we interact on the internet and been at the frontier of the social media revolution so much so none of them actually exist outside the internet.

The top five include Google (No. 1), Amazon (No. 3) and Facebook (No. 5). We’ve written quite a lot (and ahem, yes, some have talked even more) over the years about how you can use social media to engage with your customers, so this was no real surprise.

The other two in the Top 5 include Cadbury and the BBC - both who have embraced social media and seem to be reaping the benefits according to this study that looked at a range of indicators including integrity, the importance of ’sensing’ in shaping shopper preferences, stock market expectations, profits as well as purchase intent.

Read the full article here from Warc.

Below are links to some related posts:

Top 10 most engaging brands

The most engaging brands in the world and how they got there

Econsultancy has put together a snapshot of some of the statistics floating around about social media usage and compared it to six months ago.

Regardless of all the bookmarking tools there are around, I’m always losing track of figures like this when I need them so I thought I’d whack them on here and I’ll always be able to find them - maybe you’ll find them useful too.

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.Okay, so now some new stuff that’s worth considering when looking at social media marketing that I’ve not included in previous posts:
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Something else interesting came out this week from Neilson (reported on Mumbrella) that showed Australians are the most prolific users of social media in the world. Apparently we here down under spend on average nearly 7 hours a month on social networking sites compared to the UK and the US at just over 6 hours.

There’s one more interesting figure I came across today and that is the growth of Facebook users in Oz - according to Facebook’s advertising information, there are nearly 8 million Facebook users in Australia (see full details on Laurel Papworth’s post here).

And if that isn’t enough stats for you for one day, check out this very extensive (and seemingly real-time) overview of Facebook usage worldwide at CheckFacebook.com.

Your handy automatically updated widget (thanks la Google) to the hot search phrases and trends around social media marketing, social media agency and social media consultants.

Here’s my (collectors?!) jar of Vegemite’s iSnack2.0 which I couldn’t help buy when I saw it at Foodland (at a significant discount) yesterday.

And there’s no danger of this jar ever being opened given my family made their own decision on an appropriate name based on their taste test of the original Name Me jar:

But seriously, Kraft has had to respond to claims from right around the world that the Vegemite iSnack2.0 naming debacle was a publicity stunt and publicly deny it, yet the latest twist that the new, new name - Cheesybite - was registered by Pizza Hut in 2006 as outlined in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald makes it even harder to believe.

There are those who believe it was a genuine mistake like Tony Richardson on the Crikey blog and here’s an interesting summary from Sheldon Nesdale as to why he believes it could never have been planned.

I’m more interested what impact this has had on the Vegemite brand and how effectively they’ve managed their brand’s reputation as is Professor Kenneth Miller from University of Technology Sydney’s marketing school in this interview with ABC Online.

“There’s potential to do significant brand damage to Vegemite and Kraft because people are talking about it and they’re not talking about how wonderful Kraft is,” he said.

“They’re not talking about how wonderful the product is - the former iSnack 2.0 - they’re talking about things that will damage the brand.

I almost think this marks a watershed moment in our marketing history when 2.0 comes into the mainstream vernacular - many who’d never heard of Web2.0 certainly do now, but at what cost to our beloved Vegemite?

I am in beautiful Prague today talking at the Eye for Travel (www.EyeforTravel.com) Sales and Marketing Summit.  I am doing a joint  - unrehearsed -  presentation with Allison Wightman from Virgin Atlantic, can’t wait..

Check back here ( or drop us an email - travel@carveconsulting.com ) for the presentation after its released, and for feedback and conversations.
You can follow the event “live” on twitter via  #smeurope

The “mummies on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter” sound familiar?

Research released from Neilsen in the UK shows that women (over 35) are the fastest growing demongraphic on sites like Twitter and MySpace as reported by The Times:

Figures gathered for The Times by Nielsen, the market research firm, show that just over half of all social-networking users in the UK are women. But almost 59 per cent of females “consume the content” of these sites — a jump of almost 10 per cent since last year.

Not surprising really is it? Social networks are merely just another social arena, so it was only time before women caught up with the latest place to have a good chat and gossip.

But what does this mean from a marketing and corporate communication perspective?

Mommy Bloggers have long been on the radar as Darren Rowse (@problogger) wrote some time ago about Five Reasons why Mom Blogs are the Blogs to watch.

Corporates must be careful though: Nestle recently tapped into this influential group of women only to have it backfire on them according to an article in The Age last week.

Only a miniscule 64 PR companies participated in the UK’s PR Week digital survey released yesterday which showed the majority of clients (83%) are now expecting a digital element to PR campaigns, but what was also interesting was the range of budgets for those highlighted as the best campaigns - they ranged from ‘no direct costs’ for the Henry VIII Twitter campaign using @IamHenryVIII to almost $300,000 for Cadbury’s Red Licquorice Allsorts love story using Facebook.

A panel of experts from agency and client side highlighted what they thought were some of the best UK digital campaigns here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how this compares here in Australia? Is digital now expected in a PR campaign or it still distanced from PR efforts?

Everyone in the world has heard about the best job in the world’ by Queensland Tourism but what do you think is the best digital PR campaign in Australia so far?