Digital Talent Agency

Planning for Social Memes... Case Study: Susan Boyle, the internet singing sensation.

"ITV, YouTube and Simon Cowell have missed sharing a million-pound windfall because they have failed to reach a deal to sell advertising against clips of Susan Boyle, the internet singing sensation.

The Scotswoman’s performance on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent has been watched more than 75 million times on YouTube in a fortnight, but the television network is insisting that no advertisements be shown against the clips while it negotiates with the Google-owned video site"

We advise that media companies introducing new individuals to mass media and the public take the time to develop the appropriate social profiles and media channels BEFORE that personal or brand is presented to the public.  First movers typically develop and control the audience, and if something takes off, control the revenue.

Here's the complete article.

Susan Boyle competitor Shaheen Jafargholi is looking to become another social meme.

Friendster: Big In Southeast Asia

Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region, reported today by TechCrunch.

_{Malaysian pop star Karen Kong is one of the most popular people on Friendster, with over 150,000 friends}

It's become Southeast Asia's top social networking site. Asia is home to three-quarters of Friendster's 58 million users, compared to 17% in the U.S., and it's the source of 89% of the site's traffic, compared to just 8% from North America. While its bigger rivals MySpace and Facebook are just discovering the land across the Pacific, Friendster is already the most-visited web site in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the second most-visited site in Malaysia and Singapore, according to rankings from web tracker Alexa.

Friendster's international reach has become a competitive advantage, for the company as well as for users. Five months after releasing her first album, Malaysian pop singer Karen Kong uploaded a video of a recent concert performance onto her Friendster page last summer, attracting two million viewers, mostly from Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Indonesia. Her manager, Fred Chong, says that even though the record label created an expensive web site for the artist, Kong's Friendster profile is "way more powerful than any official page," attracting up to 800,000 page views per month. With more than 150,000 friends linked to her page, Kong has the biggest following of any Friendster user. "Her profile just exploded," says Chong. "For us, it's been a miracle." Friendster's trying to pull off another miracle. It's reaching out to the 210 million Internet users in China, where the company's user base is already "in the hundreds of thousands," Lindstrom says. Last September, the company began rolling out foreign language capabilities: traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese communities around the world, followed by simplified Chinese for mainland China, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Unlike MySpace, which has launched separate, localized sites for different countries, Friendster is keeping all of its worldwide users on one multilingual site.

taken from this article by Ling WooLiu and this post by Michael Arrington.

Latin Social Networks - Regional Players Vs. Facebook

Latin in America.

According to the most recent Census Bureau projections, about 60 percent of total U.S. growth will come from the Latino population — that's almost 100 million additional people. One in four Americans will be Latino.  Hispanics have accounted for more than half (50.5%) of the overall population growth in the United States in this decade, a significant new demographic milestone for the nation's largest minority group.  Latin Americans also voted 2:1 in favor of Obama, a major driver in the success of the campaign.

Latin American Social Networks.

Latin America is a growing online market, with monthly unique visitors in the region growing from 53.6 million users in June 2007 to 61.6 million users in April 2008.

More internet users means more opportunity for social networks. For example, a new social network, Sonico, claims to have gained 17 million registered users since it launched last July.

But Hi5 is the largest social network in the Spanish-speaking countries (except for Google’s Orkut, which dominates Brazil). San Francisco-based hi5 gained its position by doing things like introducing a Spanish version of its site a couple of years go, while market leaders Facebook and MySpace focused on US growth. This past April, hi5 had 12.8 million unique visitors, about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world. That’s a 20 percent increase from two months ago, when the site had 10.7 million unique visitors in Latin America, according to Comscore. This is part of hi5’s worldwide growth trend: Hi5 has grown from 31.5 million last December, according to comScore.

But Facebook has shown the most shocking growth around the world over the past half year, and is also booming in Latin America, likely spurred by the introduction of its Spanish-language version last year.

So what’s driving some networks’ growth, besides shear numbers of new Latin American users? Maybe, for Facebook, the fact that it is largely comprised of real people providing factual information about themselves — not fake profiles like what you see on other social networks — makes the difference? It’s not clear what’s happening driving Sonico’s growth, and anyway, it doesn’t register as a top site with comscore. Hi5, meanwhile, has continued with its market-specific customizations. It has recently introduced two new versions for Argentinians and Castilians, with more dialect translations to come. It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against Orkut. It has also introduced a Spanish-language help page. Maybe this will allow it to keep growing, and maintain its regional market leadership.

Facebook: The Global Mothership

 

MySpace reached only 121 unique visitors in November and grew a slow 16 percent over the previous year. Hi5 did pretty well, coming in at 58 million uniques with a 89 percent growth rate. Orkut also did pretty well, too, coming in at 46 million with 86 percent annual growth. Things were quieter for Friendster and Bebo: 31 million with a 10 percent growth rate and 24 million with a 20 percent growth rate, respectively.

Why is Facebook growing?

The site has differentiated itself as a place where you share real information with real friends in a secure setting — in spite of launching years after some of its rivals. It started on college campuses in early 2004, and only let you connect with people you knew on campus. It opened up over the years to new “networks” — high schools, companies, and eventually cities and countries — but it always retained this concept of privacy. While rivals like MySpace made your user profile public, Facebook even today only lets other see excerpts of your profile unless they’re friends with you or in the same network as you. The result is that Facebook has near-universally convinced its users to provide real information about themselves; on MySpace, for example, people often create and use fictional profiles.

Facebook has also introduced a tool for users to translate its site into 35 languages so far, with 60 more in development. More than 70 percent of of users are now outside of the U.S.

parts taken from an article by Eric Eldon for VentureBeat and this post by Paul Glazowski for Mashable.