Is Print DEAD? [InfoGraphic]

Is The Printing Industry Being Crushed By The Internet?

Source: www.Sketchee.com

8 Facts About Facebook’s $33 Billion Valuation [InfoGraphic]

Did you know Facebook’s recent valuation is estimated at a whopping $33 Billion? Here’s an interesting Infographic by AllFacebook.com to put things into perspective:

Source: www.AllFacebook.com

Social Media For Insurance Professionals: VIDEO

Am super EXCITED!!!, as after hours of to-ing & fro-ing, writing the video scripts, browsing for the ‘right’ music, giving my video guy a hard time ;-) …etc, finally, the short VIDEO for our Social Media For Insurance Professionals book is ready!!!…must say, I like the end result

We would like to thank Mari Smith, Matthew Sapaula, Rod Drury, Barry Read and Melissa Cibelli for their kind words of appreciation.

And thanks to Erik Qualman for all the cool stats.

Statistics source: www.Socialnomics.com

Social Media Ad Spending [InfoGraphic]

Social Media Ad spending is on the rise and I guess, rightly so! Check out this interesting InfoGraphic by Flowtown:

Source: www.Flowtown.com

FACEBOOK FACTS: You Probably Didn’t Know About

Some interesting stats & facts about Facebook:

Better Facebook: Free Script To Make Your Facebook Experience Better

Better Facebook is a FREE user script that plugs into your browser and adds a lot of great enhancements to your existing Facebook account.

Here’s just some of its 75 features:

• 1) Tabbed News Feeds
• 2) Advanced Feed Filters
• 3) Hide Posts You’ve Already Read
• 4) Highlight New Comments
• 5) Static Header And Left Column
• 6) Quick Links To Your Pages, Events, Groups, Apps, and Friends
• 7) Friend Tracker – Notification Of Un-Friends
• 8) Show Group Activity
• 9) Show Friend Activity
• 10) Expand Similar Posts
• 11) Character Counter In Status Updates
• 12) Enhanced Left-Column Navigation
• 13) Automatically Retrieve Older Posts
• 14) Pin Notifications
• 15) Custom CSS/Skins
• 16) Reclaim Privacy
• 17) Hide Annoying “Update Your Email Address” Notification
• 18) Highlight specific posts

Website: http://betterfacebook.net/

BIG BROTHER: Do You Know Who’s Watching YOU?

These stats are interesting as well as scary in a way:

Source: Wordstream.com

How the INTERNET works – InfoGraphic

Another awesome infographic by Online Schools:

Social Media For Professionals: VIDEO

Am super EXCITED!!!, as after hours of to-ing & fro-ing, writing the video scripts, browsing for the ‘right’ music, giving my video guy a hard time ;-) …etc, finally, the short VIDEO for our Social Media For Professionals book is ready!!!…must say, I like the end result…would lurvve to have your feedback too:

We would like to thank Mari Smith, Matthew Sapaula, Rod Drury, Barry Read and Melissa Cibelli for their kind words of appreciation.

And thanks to Erik Qualman for all the cool stats.

Statistics source: www.Socialnomics.com

FLOCK – The Social Browser

I’d stumbled upon this new “social browser” a while back, but didn’t quite get to installing and using it, but now that I did, must say, am impressed.

FLOCK’s tagline: Built for Facebook & Twitter

Here’s an excerpt from their website:

Flock is faster, simpler, and more friendly. Literally. It’s the only sleek, modern web browser with the built-in ability to keep you up-to-date with your Facebook and Twitter friends.

Share web pages, photos, and video. Update your status and make comments—from anywhere on the web!

Check out their COOL video:

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to give FLOCK a try…you’ll be GLAD :-D

Top 10 lists of interesting trivia information

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Geography

Countries

Vacations

Automobiles

Business & Consumerism

Miscellaneous

Social Media For Professionals: Book Foreword by Mari Smith

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…you’ve been hearing about these online social networking sites on a daily basis and may be wondering:

Social Media is a fundamental shift in how we function on the planet on both a personal and professional basis. As Socialnomics author Erik Qualman states, “Social media touches every facet of business and is more a function of good business ethics.”

The widespread adoption of social media, which began making mainstream traction in 2007, is the largest paradigm shift in how professionals approach their potential clients… and how consumers approach businesses. We’re literally getting to the point where, if your prospects cannot find you on Facebook or Twitter at minimum, you may as well not exist in their eyes.

Yet so many businesses are still stuck using “old media” because they simply don’t fully understand the power of new media, nor how to effectively integrate it into their overall marketing plans.

If we look at old media – traditional marketing – it’s interruptive; we’re constantly interrupted while watching TV, listening to radio or even while driving. In fact, “old style” internet marketing with pop-ups, pop-under’s, forced opting in, and big flashing banner ads is also interruptive and generally not effective any longer.

By contrast, new media marketing involves and encourages participation by both the professionals and their target audience. Old media is flat, one-way; there’s no interaction. The message is typically designed and delivered with zero input from prospects or clients. Whereas social media is two-way – multi-way, even.

Companies like Starbucks and Best Buy are leading the way in engagement through social media marketing. Nike, Vitamin Water and Threadless are great examples of “crowd-sourcing” – having your target market actually help you co-create products!

Together, we are literally reinventing and redefining communication and how we market and sell our products and services.

Social media is the dynamic new marketing phenomenon that has changed the business landscape and it is absolutely here to stay. Successful social media marketing puts the focus directly on your prospects and customers; the emphasis is on building relationships in creative ways.

A few stats of two of the most popular social networking sites:

Facebook:

• Over 480 million active members.
• Predicted to be over 600 million by 2011… or sooner.
• The 2nd most trafficked website in the world – second only to Google. Facebook has, on a few occasions, ousted Google and taken the #1 spot. [Source: Alexa.com]
• The largest photo-sharing platform. Two billion photos are uploaded per month.
• More than 50% of Facebook users in the U.S. are over 35 years old. [Source: ComScore].

Twitter:

• Popular social network, news source and viral marketing tool.
• Grew by over 1900% in 2008 to 2009.
• Over 100 million members.
• Politicians, brands, big companies and celebrities now embracing Twitter.

These numbers and stats are staggering. If you’re not active on the top social networks, you risk being left way behind and you’re may well be losing business on a daily basis. You simply must get active now, at least on social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach social media marketing. If you do it wrong, you could risk your reputation, and potentially do more harm than good. I’ve certainly come across a number of horror stories out there – some by renowned companies too, who just didn’t “get” social media!

I’m delighted to introduce you to my friends Ash and Brad – their book will help walk you through the crazy morass of conflicting information and easily put you on the right path to social media success.

Mari Smith
- www.MariSmith.com
– Social Media Speaker, Trainer and Consultant.
– Author, Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day (Sybex, May 2010)
– Dubbed the “Pied Piper of the Online World” by FastCompany.com.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

CLICK HERE to find out how YOU too, can leverage the power of
Social Media, to build credibility, generate leads for free
and increase revenues in 60 days or less!

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

The Social Network: Movie Trailer

YES, a movie based on the FACEBOOK story:

– Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg;
– Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president; and
– Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money.

UK Prime Minister in discussion with the Facebook Founder

Talk about the ‘impact’ of Facebook, check out this interesting video between David Cameron (UK PM) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) on how to engage/encourage ideas from people to get the country out of debt…is this a good idea? What do you think?

The Modern Day Version of A-B-C

This is quite interesting :o)

Social Media For Insurance Professionals: Book Foreword by Matthew Sapaula

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one MOST RESPONSIVE to change” says the biologist Charles Darwin.

This is probably the only thing I will agree with him on, yet it well-describes the financial services industry undergoing reform and especially, change.

Insurance professionals and financial advisors alike must be able to continually market and brand their services, in a highly ethical and compliant manner, to continue helping clients reach the goal of financial security, freedom and control.

Phonebooks, billboards, newspaper ads, direct mail, seminars, radio and TV advertising are not only extremely expensive but also, have lost their draw and effectiveness. These continue to be the most costly methods to test your message in your target market and it’s doubtful whether they engage in your call-to-action.

Although still important, spending hours upon hours of continuing education and obtaining multiple financial designations does not have the same impact during these times, unless you are constantly communicating your ongoing value proposition or unique competitive difference. Simply having alphabet soup splattered on your business card does not get your phone to ring any faster than the agent of the future who updates his status on Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Financial planners and insurance professionals have been reduced in the perception of many as commodities and people to be avoided…sad, but true!

This is an age where people expect information at the speed of light, on-demand and assume you are ready to deliver. If not, your competitors always are.

Hopefully, Finance and Insurance Professionals can look back upon their education and employ, not only the skills learned in math class, but also their English class as well. Being able to write and effectively communicate years of serving families with wisdom and experiences at a fifth grade level is a skill taking precedence in the Influence and Recommendation Age.

Somewhere along the line, we have zoomed past the Information Age. People are looking for the financial services professional that can organize the masses of news clutter that is out there…and tie current events along with financial solutions to make sense to them, their friends and peer group.

Today’s consumer is internet savvy and utilises social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for not only entertainment but also, for researching answers to their personal problems and help make important buying decisions. Operating your practice in this day and age without establishing a footprint in these mediums is like running a business without a phone, email or address.

Don’t be invisible. What you do on a daily basis changes peoples’ lives for generations upon generations. Since you have this individual capability, you now have a responsibility to market your product, services and message in one of the most powerful ways combining the power of newspapers, radio and TV. And do you know what the cost is for you to use this potent platform?

Nothing…it is free.

The only cost is the time for you to upgrade your marketing skills, train your staff in using these social media platforms and without hesitation, begin a marketing transformation that gives the small guy a shot, and being as influential as the corporate titans.

Facebook, Twitter, blogs and video sharing sites have given us the capability to stay ahead of change and be the change that our communities and bottom line desperately need.

It’s the social media strategies that allowed us to become the #1 ranked Chicago-based independent financial services firm in Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I also have been using these predictable strategies to help coach other financial, mortgage, legal, accounting and real estate professionals become the obvious choice in the eyes of their clients and community.

It took us almost two years of tweaking and testing to figure out what worked. But thanks to Ash and Brad, your business can now change in months.

To your success,

Matthew Sapaula
Chartered Financial Consultant
Financial Strategist, Speaker, Chicago Talk Radio Show Host, TV commentator.
www.MoneySmartRadio.com

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

CLICK HERE to find out how YOU too, can leverage the power of
Social Media, to build credibility, generate leads for free
and increase revenues in 60 days or less!

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days: Case study

An interesting case study article on AllFacebook.com, by Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal.com

When we took over the Facebook Fan page for Weekly World News , they had 3,244 fans. 4 days later, we had 40,310 fans– 10 times larger. We’re going explain exactly how we did it in this exclusive article for AllFacebook.com. In the coming days, we’ll demonstrate how fans translate into trackable revenue, how to perform analytics, integrating social widgets (Open Graph Protocol) with your site, and other aspects of effective Facebook marketing. But today we’re looking only at growing your fan base quickly.

The Background

A few weeks ago, Facebook made some massive changes– more of your personal data as publicly available, you could like something from a website (as opposed to only from Facebook), community pages launched to challenge Wikipedia, and so forth. But the biggest change in our mind was that “become a fan ” was changed to just “like”. The user doesn’t know what they’re liking– the cute saying, the underlying page, the website they’re on, or their friend’s remark.

It used to be that you could tell when clicking on an ad would take you to a fan page or to a website. The fan page would have the “become a fan” button, creating an in-line fan– meaning that they can become a fan without ever having to go to your page. At first we thought this was terrible, since we felt that users wouldn’t want to be yanked outside of Facebook. Therefore, the ads that send users to Facebook pages would have a higher CTR– and this, we reasoned, would be something Facebook would “like” (pun intended), too.

But it’s a funny thing how data often proves you wrong. The highest click-to-fan conversion rate we had achieved prior to the F8 change was 55%– that’s for an in-line fanning of the ad. After the switch to like, we saw conversion rates consistently in the 50-90% range. We tried a range of ads– here are a couple:

RULE #1: Ask users to like you in the ad.

Give them a reason why. In our case, Weekly World News has plenty of entertaining content about aliens, Michael Jackson, Elvis, you name it. We tried capitalizing the word “LIKE”, writing short versus long copy, testing dozens of images, and trying out different interest targets. Don’t make it complex– keep the language casual, as if a friend was telling you about something cool.

When you have a high click-through rate, Facebook rewards you by decreasing your CPC. As you test out hundreds of ad variations, you’ll inevitably find a couple winners. In this example, we got 631 fan for 95 cents. That’s not a typo. We had a CTR of 0.98% to get 770 clicks. Then 631 of those 770 clicks became fans from within the ad itself (what’s defined as an action).

This doesn’t count the fans we got from users who then clicked to our incentivized like page or the viral users that we got when friends of fans came in to participate on our wall, because they saw in their news feed that their friend just became a fan.

Warning: We saw spammers that were impersonating brands, just to drive likes to their page and then monetize via affiliate ads– explained here . Because there is no direct connection between the ad and underlying page, if you’re a spammer, this open the door to all kinds of tomfoolery.

RULE #2: Send users to your Facebook page.

Don’t send them to your website, which removes the ability to get a like from the ad. If you send them to your website, the like action now means they like the ad, not the page. It’s true that when you send traffic to your page that you no longer have control over the ad headline– it becomes the page name. However, the ability to get fans from the ad is well worth the loss of being able to choose a headline, since the choice of image and targeting are far more important in determining ad effectiveness.

So choose your page title carefully, since it will be your headline from now on.

RULE #3: Create an incentivized LIKE page.

Facebook allows you to show one thing to people who are fans and something else to those who aren’t. So you can say “click like to reveal the exclusive video”. This is a scratch off card, essentially– so use your imagination on what you can do here. What are your fans going to get by hitting the like button?

We found that incentivized like pages got 200-300% higher click to fan conversion rates than regular landing pages. Some people argue that Facebook is going to shut down this technique, because of the practice of incentivized invites from 2 years ago in the app world. Remember when you’d get points in a game for inviting friends or where the results of the “quiz” were revealed to you only when you invited 10 friends? Incentivized liking on your landing page is not the same thing– it doesn’t result in spamming other users.

RULE #4: Do NOT send users to your wall.

This is almost as dumb as sending your Google AdWords traffic to your homepage, as opposed to a PPC landing page. The Wall is the last dozen or so random things that you and your fans have said– it’s just not going to convert. Instead, change your default landing tab to be your incentivized like page. Most users will click “like” to see the special content and then head over to the wall anyway to see what others are saying and how many fans you have. For better or worse, Facebook users judge how trustworthy you are by how many fans you have and how many of their friends are also fans. So jack up your fan count.

You can test conversion rates from different areas of your fan page. In the example below, we had a 19% conversion rate from the wall, versus a 35% conversion rate from the custom tab, prior to supercharging the page with an incentivized like page.

RULE #5: Rotate your ads DAILY

For those folks who are PPC professionals, you’re probably used to the “set it and forget it”. We’ve found CTR to often fall by 50% within 24 hours. The smaller your target, the faster your ads burn out. Remember that Facebook doesn’t have frequency capping or the ability to placement target. So the burden is on you to watch your CTR, even if you’re bidding on a CPC. Just because you might be bidding on a CPC basis, don’t think that you can just ignore your CTR.

Do you have that annoying friend in real life who likes to talk only about his or her favorite subject? You know, the one who no matter what the subject of the conversation is– somehow it goes back to that particular topic? If you don’t keep your ads fresh on Facebook, you’re that very person.

Rule #6: Optimize primarily to cost per fan (CPF), not just CTR or CPC

Sometimes the ad with the highest CTR also converts the worst. Maybe you’re getting a bunch of irrelevant users in your targeting– children, singles, who knows– folks that may still click on your ads. Systematically root them out by multiplying ad variations like this:

If you’re trying to do this manually, good luck. We have our own software to do this, as do many other engineering-oriented companies. More important than blind multiplication, which can blindly increase your costs from having more cells to test– is being able to quickly prune the unsuccessful variations.

Rule #7: Separate into test and production campaigns

When you multiply ads into a single campaign, it’s easy for a single bad ad to hog up the entire budget. So when you have a group of ads that are performing, place them in a separate production campaign with a high budget, while you test in a low budget campaign. There are no ad groups in Facebook– just ads and campaigns.

Rule #8: Send updates regularly to fans

Most companies just use the wall to communicate, throwing away the massive power of email. Did you know there’s an option in Facebook to “Send an Update to Fans?” This sends a real email, so don’t abuse it. In fact, group this in with your current email marketing campaigns.

We find that a Facebook fan, incidentally, is worth twice as much as an email list subscriber. Why? Almost half of Facebook users log in every day, while email addresses are going dead from spam. Even Sheryl Sandberg is saying that email is dying. Think of building your fan base as a giant list builder with these social options for free.

You might not be a national brand like Weekly World News, nor might you have the kind of content that lends itself readily to social media. Whether you are a consumer packaged good, non-profit, or small business, many of these technique will work for you. You might not be able to drive 631 fans for under a dollar, but you can certainly do a LOT better with proper Facebook ads than you’re doing with Google alone.

If you’re a local business, you don’t want 40,000 fans. Perhaps just 500 of the RIGHT fans might be more than enough to supercharge your business. In our next article, we’ll cover how using Friends of Fans targeting is the most powerful feature in Facebook advertising and the proper and improper ways to use it.

Article source: AllFacebook.com

Social Media + Email Marketing = More Clicks

Study shows that E-mail messages that include options to share content on social media sites drive significant increases in click-throughs according to a new study released today by GetResponse, an e-mail marketing firm.

Specifically, the study of 500 million e-mails sent using the service found that e-mails that included options like share on Facebook () or Twitter () generated a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without them. Moreover, when e-mails included at least three different sharing options, publishers experienced a 55% higher CTR on average.

Despite these findings, GetResponse reports that only 11.2% of e-mails actually offer three or more sharing options. That’s up a bit from stats published last year on the same subject, but still low considering what are becoming increasingly clear benefits of social media integration.

At the same time, we’re seeing a quick move by e-mail m arketing service providers into the realm of social. In the past couple months, we’ve seen ExactTarget buy CoTweet and Constant Contact acquire NutshellMail. We see the trend of e-mail marketing getting more social continuing, especially with more numbers pointing to the positive return on what’s a pretty simple investment.

Article Source: www.Mashable.com

Social Media Check-in Earns You Hotel Rewards

It’s standard practice for hotels and airlines to offer discounts and other rewards to their own best customers, but a new service aims to pass those benefits on to other consumers as well. Specifically, users of location-based social networking services including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Brightkite, Google Buzz and Google Latitude can now coordinate their check-ins through Topguest for a variety of travel and hospitality rewards.

Topguest is a free, members-only service that automatically gives users real rewards program points for their location-based check-ins. There’s no need to download or install anything new; rather, users simply sign up for Topguest and sync their check-in app account(s) to the service.

Some programs, such as Delta Skymiles, give users points wherever they check in; others, such as Starwood Preferred Guest, will award points only for check-ins at Starwood hotels, Topguest says.

Currently Topguest is in “sneak peek” mode, featuring a partnership with Standard Hotels; rewards include a complimentary week’s stay for any road warrior who checks into four Standard hotels in the course of a single week, and a 25 percent discount for those who check into Standard properties 10 times. Over the summer, however, the New York-based company plans to add additional partners in the travel and hospitality industry, according to a CNET report.

As the mass-mingling crowds increasingly coordinate online and compete for badges and other local rewards, there’s opportunity aplenty for vendors further afield to get in on the action—not to mention companies like Topguest, which stand to benefit by making it all happen. One to get in on early…?

Website: www.topguest.com

Article Source: Springwise.com

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Facebook “Like” Increases Traffic to Blogs by 50%

TypePad users who installed the Facebook “Like” widgets on their blog sidebars have experienced a 50% increase in referral traffic from Facebook collectively, TypePad revealed in a blog post.

Approximately 1,500 TypePad bloggers have installed the “Like” buttons on their blogs since the widget became available on the platform in early May.

Shortly after releasing the sidebar widget, TypePad released a second feature that enables users to attach a Facebook “Like” button to the bottom of each blog post. 2,400 bloggers have added the feature, and have enjoyed a 200% growth in referral traffic from Facebook as a whole, according to TypePad.

Have you installed the LIKE button on your blog yet? If not, you may wish to add one now: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

Article Source: www.Mashable.com

Social Media For Insurance Professionals, Agents & Brokers

Discover How This Lead Getting System Can Help You Attract Your Own, Exclusive, Qualified Leads Without Buying Leads Or Making A Single Cold Call.

Why selling insurance is doomed to fail most of the time

As an insurance agent, you’ll know how difficult it is to sell an insurance policy to a lead. People don’t want to be sold to – when you cold-call they get defensive, the walls go up, and you’ll have a hard time breaking down the barriers once they’ve clocked you as a sales person.

What if hundreds of hot insurance leads came to YOU instead

Consider how easy it is to persuade someone to buy a product when they come to you for advice, as an expert or a friend. Just think – aren’t you more likely to buy a product on the recommendation of a friend who’s tried it already, than you would be from a cold caller?

When people see you as an expert and a friend, they’ll trust your advice one hundred percent, which means infinitely more sales for you, at no extra cost!

So, how do you establish yourself as an expert and a friend, and get hundreds of exclusive, qualified insurance leads flocking to you for FREE?

> Introducing: Social Media for Insurance Professionals

Social Media For Insurance Professionals

TESTIMONIAL: 

“Social Media is the current phenomenon, which I believe all the professionals needs to be part of. ..the only thing is, it can be so overwhelming, especially, if you don’t know how.

But thanks to Ash & Brad, this book proves to be an excellent resource to build your credibility as a professional and generate leads for free. Everything is laid out in a very simple to understand language with diagrams, templates, a 30 day action plan and not to mention the step-by-step video tutorials showing you exactly how to implement your learning’s from the book.

Needless to say, this book is highly recommended to all the professionals looking to effectively integrate social media in their marketing efforts.”

Matthew Sapaula, ChFC
Chartered Financial Consultant, Financial Strategist, Speaker, Chicago Talk Radio Show Host, TV commentator.
www.MoneySmartRadio.com
Chicago, U.S

TESTIMONIAL:

“This book is the perfect handbook to help insurance brokers integrate social networking sites into their marketing plans effectively and avoid the many pitfalls. Well done to Ash and Brad on providing such a practical and valuable tool for our industry on such a cutting edge medium.”

Barry Read
Chairperson
Institute of Financial Advisers
Auckland, NZ

Click Here To Learn More…

Facebook Storefront: Setup your’s in 15 minutes

Facebook Storefront:- PAYVMENT:

Since Payvment launched in November 2009, more than 20,000 businesses and individuals have started to sell goods on Facebook and over 500,000 Facebook users have shopped for products in stores using the Payvment application.

Christian Taylor, Payvment CEO, says: “Facebook users want a buying experience that captures what’s truly unique about the Facebook experience. They want to be able to easily find products and brands, use a shopping cart that travels with them across storefronts, and take advantage of discounts sellers can offer to attract their loyalty. Payvment delivers on the promise of the social network, and helps sellers transform a relationship into a sale.”

Salient Features:

1) Turn Facebook fan pages from marketing platforms into sales platforms. with a built-in, full-featured admin area.

2) Installation takes 15 minutes and the Facebook users can shop and make purchases from that store without needing to leave Facebook

3) Each TRUSTe-certified storefront can be added to an unlimited number of Facebook pages

4) Integrated product search enables discovery of the store’s items from across Facebook, and a universal shopping cart lets customers complete their purchases from any Payvment-powered storefront on the site

5) Payvment currently supports sales in more than 20 currencies with automatic conversion; PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover are all accepted

6) Other features include automated inventory control, email receipts, storefront comment capabilities and instant discounts for Facebook fans.

This service is FREE for participants in its public beta program, so why wait, sign up for your free storefront here now: http://www.payvment.com/

MASS MINGLING: Why the online revolution is fueling an ever increasing range of real world meet-ups.

MASS MINGLING | Thanks to the online revolution, hundreds of millions are now actively searching for, finding, connecting/signaling, and staying in touch with likeminded souls in the virtual world. Constant updates, GPS and mobile online access is now bringing this explosion of dating, networking, socializing and mingling to the real world domain.

Here’s what driving this trend, in more detail:

1)      People LOVE to connect

Think friends and family, colleagues, romantic interests, and those sharing similar hobbies, interests, political preferences, grievances or causes. And all this ‘befriending’ takes place in unprecedented quantities: never before were people able to build and maintain such extensive and relevant personal networks.

Some numbers:

• Twitter: 100 million+ users, with 50 million tweets sent each day.
• Facebook : nearing 500 million users. The average user has 130 friends, spends 55 minutes a day on the site and receives three “event invitations” to real-life gatherings every month (in December 2009, the company stated that 3.5 million events were created every month). Next? According to The New York Times, Facebook will soon incorporate ‘location’ in two ways: its own features for sharing location and APIs to let other sites and apps offer location services to Facebook users. This could well be a MASS MINGLING killer app.
• LinkedIn : over 65 million members. A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second.
• A ‘veteran’ MASS MINGLING engine like Meetup has 6.1 million members, handling 2.2 million RSVPs and 180,000 meet-ups, in 45,000 cities a month.
• Foursquare has one million users, while Gowalla: 150,000 users.
• Nearly three quarters (73%) of online teens and an equal number (72%) of young adults* use social network sites. 73% of adult profile owners use Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% use LinkedIn. (Source: Pew, Feb 2010.)

* Hundreds of millions of personal pages, feeds, status updates, tweets, profiles, blogs—courtesy of the Facebooks, the Twitters, the LinkedIns—are building an eternally up-to-date encyclopedia of individuals. Some thoughts on how this will lead to ‘forever connected’ amongst younger generations, from our fave media guru Jeff Jarvis:

2) People LOVE the ‘real world:

This incredibly powerful tandem of mass urbanization and experiences has resulted in an orgy of real world activities and happenings that are all about mingling; from countless cultural and not so cultural events, concerts, festivals, and seminars, to a burgeoning and truly global bar/dining/party scene, to a Warholian retail renaissance, to tourism & travel now being one of the world’s largest industries, employing approximately 220 million people and generating over 9.4 percent of world GDP. In short, people have always, and will for a long time continue to enjoy interacting with other warm bodies.

3) An info-layer on top of daily life

This layer has created a space in which following, finding, tracking, connecting to, and ultimately (spontaneously) meeting up in the real world with interesting known and unknown people will be easy, automatic, instinctive, convenient, and even natural. And thus, for many, connecting to ’strangers’ is rapidly becoming second nature.

For a glimpse of things to come, dive into location-based ‘meet-up’ services like Foursquare (now doing 700,000 check-ins per day), Gowalla, Google Latitude and Loopt.

Check out the examples, opportunities and more here: http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing

Social Media Books cooking in our labs:

Thanks to all our friends and potential JV partners for helping us finalize the list of 10 books we plan to release this year:

COOKING IN OUR LABS and almost ready to be served:

1. Social Media For Coaches
2. Social Media For Accountants
3. Social Media For Professionals
4. Social Media For Network Marketers
5. Social Media For Insurance Professionals

RECIPE FINALIZED :O)

1. Social Media For Designers
2. Social Media For Tradesmen
3. Social Media For Law Practices
4. Social Media For Mortgage Professionals
5. Social Media For Real Estate Professionals