Who Gets Facebook's Timeline First?....New Zealand!

Summary: Facebook has started rolling out the new Timeline profile, starting with New Zealand. Unfortunately, the social networking giant still hasn’t offered a launch date for the rest of the world.

Facebook has started to roll out its new Timeline feature, which was unveiled three months ago at the company’s 2011 f8 developer conference. The company Facebook has started making Timeline available in New Zealand, with the goals of gathering further feedback and to measure the new feature’s speed and other types of performance.

So, why New Zealand? “As a global company, we need to gain perspective and insights from outside the US,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “New Zealand is a good place to start because it’s English speaking, so we can read the feedback and make improvements quickly.”

Timeline was supposed to launch within weeks of f8 but Facebook made a point not to rush anything. The company isn’t sharing when it will push Timeline to its 800 million monthly active users; it is simply saying it will roll out more broadly “in the near future.” In short, a launch date still hasn’t been given and likely never will be.

Until now, only developers building apps on the Facebook Platform have had access to Timeline (and anyone else who exploited this method). Since September, over 1 million people have signed up for the developer beta to access Timeline. It’s not known how many of those said they were developers just to get Timeline on their account.

Facebook calls Timeline “the evolution of your profile.” While the current Facebook profile is completely based on showing all the latest updates, Timeline is meant to highlight all the important updates of your life. Currently, the only way to find these updates is to click on the Older Posts link at the bottom of someone’s profile. Timeline is supposed to change that by letting you pick what’s important.

Timeline is wider than your old profile. It’s also a lot more visual: not only does it have a giant cover photo at the top, but also lets you star your favorite photos to double their size. At the same time, you can hide things altogether to make other stories stand out more. The most interesting part is that you can add stories for a specific time period in the past, to fill in the blanks.

The change to Timeline also means Facebook will finally let you check out your private Activity Log, which shows you everything you shared since you joined Facebook. You can click on any post to feature it on your Timeline so your friends can see it too.

When you get access to Timeline, you’re able to choose to publish it immediately or take a few days to review what’s there and add anything that’s missing. Whether you’re in New Zealand or elsewhere, I’ll keep you updated on when you can start using the new profile. In the meantime, check out theScreenshots: the Facebook Timeline and the Open Graph to see what you’ll be getting as soon as it’s deemed ready.

*Update - Facebook timeline is reportedly due for nationwide, global release on December 15th 2011. 

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5 Brands That Rock At Social Business (Infographic)

Five companies are rocking social media, according to Voltier Digital, which has produced an infographic featuring that very social quintet. For one, there’s PC brand Dell, which gets into the top five courtesy of its Dell Social Media Command Center, which is used to identify customer service issues as well as brand evangelists.

Plus there’s… Morton’s. The steak house has been doing a pretty good PR job on Twitter, apparently, and is busy cooking up business on Facebook. Unisys, on the other hand, has built MySite, a social knowledge-sharing destination popular among its employees.

Dutch airline KLM also makes the grade with its Living Alphabet video featuring Twitter, Facebook and Hyves. While, also in flying mode, TV network ABC has been busy deploying promotional strategies across Twitter, Facebook and Pandora for the TV series PanAm.

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Symantec says spam levels fall to lowest in three years

Global spam fell to the lowest level in three years in a sign that spammers may be getting a better rate of return by hitting social-media websites instead, according to the latest figures on Tuesday from Symantec.

Spam volumes dipped in March after Microsoft, law enforcement and other companies joined forces to take down Rustock, a large botnet responsible for sending up to 30 billion spam messages per day.About 70.5 percent of all email was spam, a still-high figure but one that is much lower than a few years ago, when it was well over 90 percent. 

Symantec calculated the percentage by analyzing some 8 billion messages it processed a day last month, according to the company's latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

"Ever since then, nothing really filled the void," said Andy Watson, a senior software engineer at Symantec.

Botnets increasingly have come under law enforcement scrutiny. Other botnets including Coreflood and Kelihos were taken down this year, and two major ones, Waledac and Bredolab, were dismantled in 2010. A large affiliate spamming network called Spamit also shut down last year.

Watson said spammers may be putting more effort into social media sites because there is a better return. Spam links on services such as Twitter and Facebook can spread through users clicking on the links, Watson said.

Social-media spammers are continuing to set up their own URL shortening services, often with open-source software. By using a URL shortener, a user is less likely to see that the link may lead to a questionable website.

Watson said the current largest spamming botnet is "Grum," which is sending about 25 percent of the world's spam. Grum has been on the scene for a while now and Symantec ranked it as the second-most active botnet last year, comprising up to 470,000 infected computers.

The U.S. is the biggest source of spam, sending 28 percent of the total number of messages, followed by India at 9 percent; Russia, 5.7 percent; Brazil, 4.3 percent and China at 4 percent, Symantec said. The most popular topics for spam messages are hawking pharmaceuticals, watches and jewelry, unsolicited newsletters and adult-related content.

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Sony music chief: Spotify can still fail

Spotify is on a roll of late: last month, it revealed it had surpassed 2.5 million paying customers, and announced its new plan for apps within the Spotify desktop client. It wants to be the de facto online music platform, but Sony’s entertainment boss Tim Schaaff tells Electricpig today that the battle is far from over, going so far as to compare Spotify to failed social network Myspace.

At briefing today in London, president of Sony Entertainment Network Tim Schaaff told journalists that he doesn’t see Spotify coming to dominate subscription music services in the same way that Apple’s iTunes has for music downloads.

“It’s certainly not in the label’s interest to have one company dominate everything,” he said. That’s not likely to happen, that doesn’t happen in general.”

“Spotify has been one of the first companies to be able to really make a statement about subscription services that has made sense to consumer, but it’s early days and we used to think that Myspace was going to dominate everything in social networking and they’re gone. They’re gone.”

Schaaff didn’t highlight any particularly flaws in Spotify’s freemium business model, but pointed out that digital music is far from mature, and tastes change.

“Things change very fast in this environment and fashion changes quickly in this environment, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. We really are at the early stages here, and the question is how will the companies hold up over the long run.” It’s not a one horse race, in other words.

Of course, you’d expect Schaaff, who oversees Sony’s Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services, available on PlayStation 3, Sony tablets and other Android devices, to say that. But Schaaff’s expertise goes way back: he first made a name for himself at Apple leading the company’s QuickTime video team in the 90s, and was one of the few vice-presidents to survive the cull when Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997.

He’s also frank enough to admit that Sony can’t simply emulate Apple’s iPod+iTunes vertical model when it comes to hardware and software.

“If I own a Sony Playstation device but I don’t have a Sony handset, does that mean I can’t use the music service when I leave my home? The reality is I’ve got to enable a kind of connected experience that spans where customers really move in their life. it’s probably not reasonable at this point in time to target a segment of customers who are all pure Sony from start to finish.”

“This is going to be a long struggle, it’s going to be a very messy competitive landscape,” he told Electricpig. “Sony’s in this for the long run and we’ve got the kind of financial stability to survive through the ups and downs that industry is experiencing as we find the right formula for this experience.”

Above, you can see Schaaff talking about the plans for SEN at a recent conference. What do you think? Has Spotify sewn up the market or is there space for Sony, Napster, Deezer et al? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Xbox 360 mashes up games, live TV, social media, and more in a major update

Summary: New Xbox 360 dashboard software update further blurs the line between games, television, and social networking

Starting this week, Xbox 360 owners will get a new version of the game console’s dashboard software pushed to them, and this fairly radical update further blurs the line between games, television, and social networking. I’ve been checking out the beta version of the update for several days, and there are some interesting gamification developments in there.

It’s odd to think of the video game company or device having to ‘gamify’ part of itself, but this is the latest step on a long road for the Xbox 360 (and indeed the entire current generation of living room consoles). Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are already part of Xbox Live, and there’s no better example of competitive badge-earning than the points and awards that come from the console’s ‘achievement’ system.

It just so happens that one currently earns these achievement badges on the Xbox for playing games, but it could just as easily be for downloading music videos, buying virtual goods, or exercising with the Xbox’s Kinect camera via a personal trainer program.

This new update, besides radically overhauling the visual look of the Xbox dashboard (and actually going back to a horizontal orientation after a couple of years of a vertical menu bars), adds new TV and video services, and a Bing-branded search engine to connect them all.

The most interesting part, from my point of view, is the upcoming implementation of a new UFC app (that’s the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, if you’re not familiar). Essentially a combination of live streaming events and on-demand video content, there are also some potentially very interesting interactive features for anyone curious about how to gamify the TV-watching experience.

Through an “Interactive Fight Card,” you’ll be able to check out upcoming matchups and pick who you think the winners will be. These choices will be up loaded to leaderboards so you can compare with friends and the global audience. Especially for sports fans, this seems like a great way to engage viewers in a game-like experience, and it could be a great foothold for the Xbox 360, or other game consoles, to fulfill their long-time dream of replacing your cable box.

It’s also much more viewer-friendly than those TV news or sports polls Time Warner and other cable companies trot out occasionally using colored “vote” buttons on your remote control (In NYC, the local news station NY1 does this almost daily).

Check back for a hands-on take of the UFC interactive content and some of the other Xbox 360 dashboard updates.

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Dachis Group Debuts ‘Social Business Index’ – Think Of It As Klout For Companies

The recent launch of the Social Business Index, a project from social business services company Dachis Group. In essence, the information service aims to provide some insights into how ‘social’ companies are, and how they stack up against similar corporations in their respective industries and their competitors, and provide some ‘social business’ benchmarks by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand.

If Klout and PeerIndex are about trying to measure the ‘socialness’ and influence of people and rank them, Dachis Group basically wants to do the same for corporations, in real time.

The company says the Social Business Index is but a lightweight glimpse onto its big data analytics platform. Currently, Dachis Group tracks over 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies and over 100,000,000 social media accounts worldwide (plus “hundreds of millions” of other sources).

Over 300 large companies have signed on as beta participants, including giants like Samsung, Dell, Coca-Cola, Target, Levi’s and IBM.

The data used to put together the Index is made up of company, employee, partner, vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and derived from APIs and data obtained through purchases, partnerships, scraping, crowdsourcing and otherwise by its internal data team.

Says Jeffrey Dachis, founder and CEO of Dachis Group:

“Unlike the typical ‘top 100′ lists that litter software vendor and social media consultant blogs, the Social Business Index is based on deep big data analysis of a company’s engagement globally and can give insight to companies on optimizing their social spend.”

The top 5 today: Facebook, Google, News Corp, Coinstar and Wal-Mart, in that order.

The Social Business Index is free, with advanced features available to companies and registered users for a fee.

Dachis Group says it will start selling an advanced set of SaaS applications with deeper views and approaches to understanding the data with a SaaS model, as well as premium pricing schemes, before the end of this year.

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Walmart, Target, Macy's and other retailers battle it out on social media

By Justine GriffinDecember 6, 2011 12:00 PM

Retailers are fighting for shoppers' attention this holiday season by offering deals and promotions through social media.

Stores like Macy’s, Best Buy, Walmart, Target and Toys R Us have turned to Facebook and Twitter to offer holiday promotions, exclusive news and helpful guides. All shoppers have to do is “like” a Facebook page, or follow the retailer on Twitter for a to score bargains during the promotions.

Walmart is the king on Facebook, more than 10.5 million fans who liked its page to gain access to promotions. Target comes in with has more than 6 million and Toys R Us has more than 2 million fans.

This year, Simply Measured, a New York-based social media research company, is tracking the “annual retailer showdown.” The company will be posting a series of articles covering the holiday shopping strategies and trends used by major U.S. retailers on social media. The battle kicked off this year just before Black Friday on Nov. 26.

Target saw a 9 percent growth and added more than 600,000 new likes during the week of Black Friday. Macy’s also almost a 9 percent growth in fans during the week of Black Friday.

Target required shoppers to “like” them in order to win prizes and get special deals. This growth declared Target and Macy's the winners of the phase one showdown.

Comscore reported that 2011 Black Friday sales were up an estimated 26 percent from 2010. Mashable reported that Cyber Monday sales were up at least 15 percent from 2010. According to Simply Measures, Black Friday won the Black Friday versus Cyber Monday showdown.

These questions remain: Does the brand with the most social media fans have the most engagement? Are they able to retain the fans they gain over the course of the holiday season?

The Simply Measured team will declare a winner based on data points at the end of the month.

Graph provided by Simply Measured.

Three ways to keep up with the latest deals: "Like" our Sentinel Deals page onFacebook; follow Justine Griffin on Twitter@SunBizGriffin and sign up for Deals text alerts.

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One in Four Starbucks Card Transactions Now Done Via Mobile

Starbucks customers apparently are finding buying via mobile as addictive as the company’s coffee.

Less than a year after Starbucks launched an app that allows mobile payments, it has hosted 26 million such transactions on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, according to the chain. One in four Starbucks card transactions is now executed via mobile.

The mobile-payments initiative has built momentum recently: In the nine weeks after it was released, there were 3 million transactions. But in the past nine weeks, there have been 6 million, says Adam Brotman, SVP and general manager of Starbucks. He adds that New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and San Jose, Calif., are the top cities by volume for mobile purchases.

Brotman declined to say exactly how many people had downloaded the app, except that it’s in the “millions.”

Starbucks presented the stats to emphasize its contention that 2011 was the “year of mobile” for the company. Among other recent highlights was the company’s Cup Magic augmented reality app, which has spurred 450,000 “engagement points” since its November release. An engagement point refers to a use of the app. According to Brotman, 91% of people who downloaded the app used it.

Finally, $110 million has been reloaded to customers’ Starbucks cards via mobile, Brotman says. For comparison’s sake, $2.4 billion was loaded onto Starbucks cards overall in 2011.

When asked why mobile payments seem to have caught on at Starbucks, Brotman said he thought convenience was a major factor. “It’s a faster, easier way to pay,” he said. “We not only developed the feature, but we also rolled out scanners in our locations.”

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Business social networking to become £4 billion market

Enterprise social collaboration software, which offer Facebook and Twitter-like capabilities adapted for workplaces, will grow strongly in the coming years, eclipsing demand for more traditional communications and collaboration products, according to a new study from Forrester Research.

Organisations will increase their spending on enterprise social collaboration software at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which the market for these products will reach $6.4 billion (£4 billion), compared with $600 million last year.

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Simultaneously, demand for unified communications and collaboration products that offer IM, audio calls, online meetings and video conferencing, will start to drop overall in 2014 because, unlike enterprise social software, they don't help employees discover peers outside of their work groups with expertise they need to tap, according to Forrester's report "Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration," published this week.

"By creating a social layer between information workers and the applications and communications infrastructure, social enterprise apps will overcome the adoption malaise that has affected UC&C," wrote Forrester analyst Henry Dewing.

Over the years, companies have invested in a variety of tools for increasing employee productivity, like email, IM, VoIP, UC&C, videoconferencing and collaboration software platforms but these tools have not meet those expectations, according to the report.

"Forrester believes that a new generation of social enterprise apps will finally deliver the productivity businesses desire by systematically grouping and rating people, information, and processes required to answer business needs," Dewing wrote.

Currently, there are vendors that focus solely on providing enterprise social software, like Jive Software, NewsGator, SocialText, Yammer and Telligent, while others are adding these capabilities to broader stacks, as Microsoft and IBM are doing in their collaboration platforms, and SAP and Salesforce.com in their enterprise business applications, and Cisco in its communications products, according to Forrester.

Although enterprise social collaboration products have been around for about five years, only 12 percent of information workers have access to enterprise social collaboration software, and only 8 percent of them use it at least once a week, according to the report
.

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32% of Businesses Cite ‘Lack of Time’ as Biggest Social Media Challenge

A lack of time has been found to be the biggest challenge facing marketing professionals, says a survey by Red Rocket Media. In view of the findings, Red Rocket Media has published a social media white paper which addresses the 5 biggest challenges faced by businesses and provides an all-encompassing solution.

Portsmouth (PRWEB) December 05, 2011

Red Rocket Media, a specialist content marketing agency, surveyed marketing professionals across a wide range of sectors and found that 32% of businesses cited ‘lack the time’ as their biggest social media challenge, closely followed by 28% who cited ‘creating original content’. Others included: deciding what to say (17%), measuring ROI (13%) and engaging with customers (10%).

“The results from this survey very much echo the message we are hearing from our own customers" says Matthew Hopkins, Managing Director of Red Rocket Media. “As businesses embrace social media marketing they are very quickly realising that to get results, you need to invest a serious amount of time in creating original content which will engage your readers: time, the majority of them just do not have.”

When asked about their main social media objective, 35% cited ‘increase brand awareness’, followed by ‘form deeper relationships’ (30%) and ‘generate leads’ (15%). 10% stated ‘increase website traffic’ as their main objective with the remainder being split between ‘enhance search engine rankings’ and ‘create buzz’.

Hopkins added: “More and more companies are cottoning on to the power of social media when it comes to increasing brand awareness. Valuable content such as topic-related news articles connects people and spreads like wild fire as people re-tweet it, share it and comment on it. As long as you publish high quality, original content, there are simply no limits to the reach your brand can achieve on social media.”

Whilst the biggest challenge faced by businesses is a lack of time, it is, however, encouraging that so many are still committed to social media as a long term investment. Over 50% of those surveyed are now spending 1-3 hours a week on social media activities, 17% are spending 4-6 hours and a surprising 15% are spending over 10 hours.

As far as social media budget is concerned, 41% will be allocating more budget to it in 2012, compared to 49% who plan to spend the same. The rest intend to reduce their spend which is likely to be attributed to the fact that those businesses who do not have the time to properly execute their social media plans naturally aren’t seeing results.

One of the main objectives of the survey was to gain a better understanding of the challenges businesses face when it comes to their social media activities. The findings have formed the basis for awhite paper, written by Red Rocket Media, which addresses the five biggest challenges in turn and showcases how content marketing can provide an all-encompassing solution.

Download the FREE social media white paper

ABOUT RED ROCKET MEDIA

Red Rocket Media specialises in helping companies build loyal audiences of prospects through highly effective content marketing. Their Social Media Content Marketing service provides companies with high quality, original content for them to publish through their social media channels. For more information, visit http://www.redrocketmedia.co.uk.

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The Six Cultural Attitudes Towards Social Media. Where do you stand?

And attitude matters, a lot. Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how organizations, from senior executives to managers to line employees, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.

Organizational culture is critical to social media success. It is among a company’s most fundamental social media asset — or liability. Here are the six basic attitudes toward social media:

Folly
Organizations with this predominant attitude consider social media a source of entertainment with little or no business value, and they typically ignore it. Where a folly attitude prevails, the approach to a social media strategy must emphasize direct business value tightly tied to well-known and recognized organizational goals or challenges — and it must avoid flabby value statements around improved collaboration and stronger relationships.

Fearful
Fearful organizations see social media as a threat to productivity, intellectual capital, privacy,management authority, regulatory compliance and a host of other things, and often discourage and even prohibit its use. This attitude can reduce the potential risk, but it also stifles any possible business value. To counteract fear, the strategic approach should focus on relatively low-risk initiatives, even if other, higher-risk opportunities might offer greater business value.

Flippant
Leaders and managers may not ignore or fear social media, but they don’t take it seriously, either. This typically leads to a technology-centric approach where the company simply provides access to social media and hopes that business value will spontaneously emerge. This rarely bears fruit. Important in countering this attitude is convincing leadership that purpose matters, and that they should progress beyond the technology and identify good purposes for social media — causes that are strong enough to catalyze and mobilize communities of people to act in a way that delivers value to the community and the organization.

Formulating
Formulating organizations recognize both the potential value of social media as well as the need to be more organized and strategic in its use. The right approach here should build on this positive foundation, emphasizing the broader strategic value of social media and mass collaboration, with a succinctly expressed set of business opportunities that (1) demonstrates social media’s potential impact across many areas of the business, and (2) is strong enough to capture the attention of the most senior leaders.

Forging
In companies with a forging attitude, the whole organization is starting to develop competence in using social media to assemble, nurture and gain business value from communities. To keep progressing, leaders should recognize previous successes, capitalize on growing momentum, advocate continued evolution and increase investments. They should also promote additional grassroots social media efforts as critical in becoming a highly collaborative social organization.

Fusing 
This is the most advanced attitude, and still rare. Fusing organizations treat community collaboration as an integral part of the organization’s work, ingrained in how people think and behave. This is a description of a social organization, and in such organizations the need for an explicit vision and strategy subsides — all business strategy and execution already include community collaboration where it’s appropriate.

How do most organizations shape up? Right now, our analysis indicates that leaders of most organizations have yet to progress to the Formulating stage, which accounts for the high social media failure rate. We know treating social media as strategic can lead to tangible business value and competitive advantage, so the goal is for business leaders to move quickly past the Folly, Fearful, and Flippant stages and get right to Formulating. Ignoring social media, or throwing it over the fence to Marketing or IT could create serious business risk.

Where does your organization stand?

Take Gartner’s free Social Readiness Assessment and find out. The assessment is 4 questions and takes about 5 minutes. It provides a mapping of where you fit on the 6F model, comparison to where others fit, and a report that provides guidance on how to move forward from where you map.  You will need to register (free).

This post is adapted from a version we originally ran on Harvard Business Review blogs on Monday October 17, 2011.

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