Archive for July, 2009
Social Networking in Business – The Results of the Survey
When Britney Spears launched her back-to-school commercial for Candie’s this summer, it wasn’t first seen on TV. It wasn’t first in theaters, either. She launched the commercial on Facebook, Twitter and BritneySpears.com. So, we don’t have to guess where marketing pros think our kids hang out online these days. But what about us — Professionals in their thirties and upward. This is the group of people I mostly interact with on my job. This is also the majority of the readers of “The Point”. I had posted a questionnaire on how we use social networking sites a few months back. Today, I am publishing the results. The survey had a little over one hundred participants. I asked three simple questions to ensure that the survey could be completed in less than a minute.
Question 1: What social networking platform are you using?
This question allowed multiple answers, because most of us join multiple networking sites over time. As expected, Facebook and LinkedIn scored high. MySpace didn’t score high at all among readers of “The Point”. Twitter and Plaxo came in with decent results. Among “Others” particpants named sites such as Skype, Ning, TonyRobbins, GreenPearl and Naymz.
Question 2: How many hours do you spend on one or more of these sites on a weekly basis?
It is worth mentioning that some folks in the last categoy “+20h” spend as much as forty hours on social networking sites per week. On average, the survey participants spend 6.42 h on these sites. The median came in a tad lower with 5 h.
Question 3: How do you navigate to these sites?
The majority is still using their computer to navigate to social networking sites. But our iPhones/Blackberry usage is catching up. Certainly the downloadable apps make the wireless visit to sites such as Facebook and Linkedin easier. Twitter is optimally suited to be used from a cell phone. Anyone following Lance Armstrong’s tweets this season on the Tour de France knows that.
Based on some of the comments I received so far, it appears that social networking is already a serious tool for people in the search industry as well as those in business development or sales roles. This is not a surprise – the benefit is obvious. As social networking becomes increasingly important in our business lives, I am interested in all the use cases that are out there. How do we leverage our membership with the LinkedIn’s of the world conducting business? Please feel free to comment or simply send me an email to my LinkedIn account.
Charities go mobile
On May 13th, 2009 Alicia Keys came to American Idol as the Global Ambassador for “Keep a Child Alive”. She put together a great show featuring the 15-year-old Rwandan rapper Noah, who is receiving care at the KCA-funded Icyuzuzo Clinic in Kigali, Rwanda. Noah hopes to change his personal life, and the future of others living with HIV through his music. On American Idol, Noah performed “The World’s Greatest”. Afterwards, Alicia Keys asked the audience to send the text message “ALIVE” to 90999 in order to contribute $5 to the cause. These one-time donations are added to the mobile phone bill or deducted from a prepaid balance. The results were astounding. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were collected within a short period of time.
The infrastructure that makes collecting donations through text messages possible, is the result of the Non-For-Profit organization “Mobile Giving Foundation“. The Foundation was created in order to combine the capabilities of the U.S. wireless industry with the need of charitable organizations to find a new class of donors and more intuitive methods of facilitating contributions. The Foundation is working with US wireless carriers to create a “Mobile Giving Channel”. This channel would allow wireless subscribers to instantaneously respond to charitable solicitations using text messaging via all US wireless carriers. The foundations forecasts that more than US $1 million per month will be raised through mobile giving campaigns in the U.S. market by the end of 2009. Over 220 well-known charities have joined the “Mobile Giving Foundation” utilizing its infrastructure as the new way of giving through people’s cell phone bill. At http://mobilegiving.org/Charities.aspx you can find active programs to support.
My friend Christian Zimmern works for the foundation as the VP of Partnerships and Programs. He explained that contributing by text messaging constitutes as a tremendous advancement over current means. Contributors don’t need to write a check, fill out forms, or call someone. They just text a reply, and the giving cycle is complete. The time lapse from notification to contribution can be seconds rather than days, weeks or months. By the way, I just sent Noah (90999) another text message “ALIVE”. I got my acknowledgement within seconds and replied with “YES”. If all readers of this blog do the same as they read this sentence, we will have raised another $50,000 in no time. Let’s do it!
