Useful infographic and great for decks.

Watch this.

Some of you may have heard of Danah Boyd before, she’s a fairly well known researcher in all this new media malarky. When I was doing my dissertation a few years back now on social networking and it’s value to business, I got in touch and asked her a few questions. This was before that thing called Twitter, which everyone talks about now. My research focussed partly on how people and brands were using Facebook and considering it was for an academic piece of research for University, it was something I actually quite enjoyed doing.

Now, I’m living and breathing it all daily and Danah is part of the research team in New England at Microsoft and has written a hugely scientific yet interesting and informative paper on the conversational aspects of retweeting. It’s currently in draft form with the finished copy to be published in January 2010, yet still already spans 11 pages. The other researchers involved are Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan.

The report is based on analysis of over over 700,000 tweets (440,000 or so users), taken in samples of five minute chunks between January and June 2006. This, I feel is a problem when undertaking such research. Because of the enormity of the numbers, it is expected that this kinda thing isn’t conducted and written over night. However, samples taken in 2006 will have only been focussing on the VERY early adopters. Usage patterns will have changed since then. Although I signed up on Twitter in April 2007, it wasn’t until mid to late 2008 that I really started using and understanding the service. My uses, habits and processes for using Twitter have changed since then. It’s impossible to be able to follow everyone back now for starters and I now use services like Twitterfeed which pushes new posts out that I publish here on to Twitter. It’s a lot deeper than a simple Facebook status update (which is what most compare it to who haven’t tried it out).

If ever you wondered why people retweet and what they do it for, wonder no longer!

Highly recommend checking out the rest of it here and also follow Danah on Twitter here. Scott is @redlog and Gilad is @gilgul.

A few quick facts from the research via Antony Mayfield:

• 36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’
• 5% of tweets contain a hashtag (#)
• 22% of tweets include a URL (’http’)
• 3% of tweets are likely to be retweets in that they contain ‘RT’, ‘retweet’ and/or ‘via’
• 9% of retweets include the users own handle – dubbed “ego retweets” (though as Antony notes, the paper acknowledges sometimes this can be “a way of giving credit” or saying thank you.)
• ‘RT’ is very much the predominant form, with 88% of the retweets using this (Tweetie please take note and change your app’s retweet function).

According to recent research by analyst house CCS Insight, the BBC’s iPlayer came out on top in a poll of what the most desired mobile service is with users saying that they want to get access to the TV and radio programmes on their phone.

There are a handful of handsets out there which currently have the ability to play programmes from the iPlayer through 3G and Wifi, for example, a whole host of Nokia’s like the N85, N96 and N97 phone, Samsung’s, Sony-Ericsson’s and the iPhone. The iPhone can however, only stream over Wifi. Considering the amount of storage available on the iPhone, I’d love to to be able to download a programme in an evening and watch it while travelling in to work in the morning. I’d like to think over time, it will be possible!

Consumers’ mobile internet usage is on the increase due to phones like the iPhone coming with ‘all you can eat’ data packages. I use my phone more for web browsing and emailing than I do for actual phone calls. That’s something the telco’s will have noticed as a growing trend and it represents an opportunity for mobile operators to revitalise their ARPU (average revenue per user) and create new data-oriented business models as voice revenues continue to decline.

In the poll as mentioned above, navigation/maps and unlimited music are the next most desired mobile services after iPlayer, according to the analyst’s report, with around 20% of the votes on each. Maps have been ever present on the more top end of phones for the last few years, I was using an N95 and it’s ‘Maps’ programme about 2 years ago now but it’s becoming more commonplace and a standard feature.

Multiplayer games and other mobile TV were desired by four per cent of the vote apiece, with video calling being requested by just three per cent. Video calling was once a key feature for some top end phones on Vodafone a few years back in 2005. It was expensive, you were prohibited by others needing a front facing camera and well, it never did catch on did it. Picture to the left is Vodafone’s Christmas 2005 handsets which were heavily pushing the 3G technology, increased download speeds and mobile TV.

Interestingly, the respondents of the survey showed that gender informs hardware choice, with Samsung mobiles being twice as popular with women than men – but the reverse being true for the iPhone and BlackBerry. 90% of the users questioned had visited Facebook on their mobile with only 14% having visited Twitter. This for me would be a clear indication of the age of the large majority of users polled, where it was said that 18-35 year olds were polled. I’d think they were mostly of the younger age bracket as it’s well known that Twitter is more widely used by 35+.

It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Great video full of interesting facts and well worth sharing.

A few tidbits:

• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users while Facebook achieved the same number within 9 months
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old women
• Gen Y consider email passe. In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to new starters
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
• 78% of internet users trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements
• 1 in 4 Americans in the past month have watched a short video… on their phone
• More than 1.5m pieces of content are shared on Facebook, daily
• Listen first, sell second

The most amusing I thought was: “What happens in Vegas now stays in Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Orkut, Digg, MySpace and YouTube”

The presentation below was given by all round friendly chap and serial tweeter Dirk ‘The Cow’ Singer at the Social Network World Forum in London on 9th March 2009. They are now incidentally advertising for the 2010 event which isn’t until March 15th 2010 but that’s forward planning for you! The presentation deck is all about Justifying Social Media spend in a recession to ‘internal clients’. Well recommended to anyone working in any way shape or form in that thing we know and love called Social Media.