Written on March 19, 2008 – 9:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Rebecca Jennings, a Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, talked about Social Computing in Europe: Facts & Figures. She asked how well social computing is being adopted in Europe. Why is the adoption and use of social computing different from country to country?
She started of with some examples to show how important social computing gets. Of course she mentioned Lego, the toys company who really gets how you can use your engaged following. For example, they asked the community what kind of Lego thing they wanted to see. The crowd asked for a bit more challenging object to build. So Lego launched the Lego Imperial Start Destroyer, an expensive Starwars space ship (80 euros). It was sold out in five weeks.
So Forrester figured it might be about time to do some profiling. Here’s what they came up with:
- Creators (10%) - creates content, like blogs and Flickr pictures
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Critics (19%) - commenting and participating
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Collectors (9%) - Following RSS feeds and social bookmarking
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Joiners (13%) - Maintain profiles on social networks
- Spectators (40%) - Watch, listen, read
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Inactives (55%) - guess what: none of the above
The percentages refer to the whole European population. When you look at the numbers per country, the Dutch turn out to be the keenest creators - reason for us to start yelling (sorry about that Rebecca). So why is that? Jennings thinks it’s because Holland was pretty early with affordable broadband. Yet cultural reasons do matter as well. Germans for example, are less into sharing than their Dutch neighbors.
Jennings waving at the yelling Dutchmen
If you look at different age groups, you notice that social media is a way of life for young customers. Companies should jump into this trend. A good example according to Jennings is Spine Breakers from Penguin Publishing. It’s a writing community for writing youngsters. The team of Spine Breakers gives their young users what they want, and it a huge part of the content is generated due to that philosophy.
So profiling should be the foundation of a company’s computing strategy. Companies have to ask themselves: What do we want to achieve? Then strategy evolves next. This is becoming more important everyday. “It’s a long term phenomenon. As you know, since I’m preaching to the converted”. In 5 to 10 years, we’ll see ubiquitous social networks, based on developments like open technology, shared identities, an information flow and advertisers who embrace the social influence of the community. And, as Jennings noted, thanks to internet entrepreneurs like us.
Update: check out the graph Ton Wesseling from Dutch blog Marketingfacts made.
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Written on March 19, 2008 – 9:09 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Boris, Robert and me just arrived at the fancy Hotel Plaza in Brussels for ‘a European perspective on Web 2.0′. If the Wifi connection survives - it looks pretty good right now - we’ll cover this event for you. It’s up to TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher to now open the event - which is called Plugg by the way, while everybody is still having their regular conference breakfast: croissants and coffee.
After that, Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research will address Social Computing in Europe in her keynote. To know what happens then, have a look at the schedule. If you have any requests about covering, or you want us to ask a certain question, give us a shout on Twitter.
Updates:
Butcher opening the conference by walking into the public, asking who people are
More photos by Robert or Ernst-Jan
Written on March 16, 2008 – 12:43 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Stefan Fountain from Dutch start-up Soocial.
By now most will have read about the Zuckerberg revolt (video here, and more), the release of Clickpass, and all the other big news. Yet I noticed something equally remarkable at the SXSW conference in Texas last week.
Building Portable Social Networks Panel - with Jeremy Keith, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, Joseph Smarr, David Recordon
My impression of SXSW has been generally very good, the quality of the panels outstanding, yet the most important part of visiting this conference was - surprise! - meeting people. Walking around and having conversations with the likes of JavaScript heroes John Resig (jQuery), Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us), Sam Stephenson (Prototype), Chris Messina (OAuth evangelist), Simon Willison (OpenID evangelist). At parties I met people from Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! in various stages of intoxication. I even got some quick peeks at Billy Bob Thornton and Moby.
It wasn’t until the last day at the closing party when I was talking to a hard-to-understand German that I realized something. This was the first European I had spoken to. We met the great guys from Brighton-based Clearleft and quite a few other British guys, but where were the main-land Europeans? Perhaps I missed them, yet I’m judging from the panels, parties we went to and after speaking to over a hundred people. The statistics support my theory. My contact at SXSW confirms that 3 percent of the attendees came from the European mainland. Although the statistics on traffics to sxsw.com probably don’t say much, cumulative European visits is around 16 percent.
For what is arguably the most important tech event of the year, is the lack of European involvement a sign of something greater? Is it the current political climate, lack of European startups, overkill of our collective chauvinism or <enter any far-fetched reason here>? I don’t know, but what I do think it’s important to be present either to influence someone’s views, or to be influenced and inspired yourself.
So I would encourage European startups and established companies to head over to SXSW next year as it is well worth the money, jet lag, the occasional loud Americans, fat food and other pre-conceptions largely encountered on this trip. I think it’s time we head over the pond to learn, meet and share our own wealth of knowledge.
Written on January 21, 2008 – 3:47 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
I’m at DLD Conference in Munich. Today is the second day and the first topic is (finally) Social Networking. An impressive panel got up on stage: Reid Hoffmann (founder and former CEO of LinkedIn), Joanna Shields (President of Bebo), Matt Cohler (VP of Strategy and Operations at Facebook), Lars Hinrichs (CEO of Xing), Sean Parker (’forgotten’ founder of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook), Andrew Nabergoj (founder of new east European social network noovo.com). The panel is moderated by Marc Samwer, who recently bought a stake in Facebook (see also TechCrunch article)
A third of the members of Facebook are from Europe and with their translation application coming up it will be interesting to see if Facebook can hurt local social networks. The translations are done by the Facebook community, with some help of professional translation bureaus. German, French and Spanish versions of Facebook are being tested as we speak and many many more languages will follow in the near future. To be successful in a local market more than just a translation is needed, local applications will also play a major role in the uptake are already in use in the UK and according to Matt, the reactions are great.
As you can see in the short film, Matt professionally ignores the question if Facebook is going to acquire European local Social Networks and talks about Facebook’s focus on their internationalization strategy, when the same question is asked again Matt starts smiling stating that it is a possibility but it is still to early to draw conclusions.
Let’s take a wild guess and come up with some potential social networks to be acquired by Facebook.
Bebo (UK)
Why? Bebo is the nr1. social network in the UK, profitable and innovative.
StudiVZ (DE)
Why? Germany is a huge market and might be hard for foreign companies to conquer. StudiVZ has a similar interface
Hyves (NL)
Why? Hyves is by far the number 1 social network in the Netherlands. Other competitors already tried to enter the Dutch market without any success.
Netlog (BE)
Why? Netlog is the biggest European social network with strong presence in several European countries. Big in Belgium, France and Turkey.
I think Facebook will push their local versions hard and only if the results are worse than expected they will look at a possible acquisition. Seems like some fierce competition is coming up in the Social Network space.
communties, conference, lego, plugg2008, profiling, social computing, social networks, spine breakers
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