A recent article in the Financial Times “Word of mouth is now the talk of the town”, (Monday June 19th)quotes a study by an analytics firm showing that 76% of people talk about at least one brand a day in the conversations in blogs that they tracked. The article mentions that myspace and other social networks are driving the growth in social media. The article also says that marketers are looking for more insights and feedback from these conversations.
In a blog posting by Eric Kintz, who is VP of Global Marketing and Strategy for HP, he mentions the growth of the French blogosphere, now estimated to be over 7 million blogs. The growth in blogs is mainly driven by youngsters and platforms like skyblog are heavily represented by younger demographics. “Skyblog now hosts close to 5 million blogs, mostly by teen listeners. It includes close to 245 million posts and 415 million comments.”
Simple conclusions to draw, the social media is expanding rapidly and in Europe the examples are becoming more obvious, with platforms like myspace, skyblog (youth focussed) taking big pieces of the market. Secondly people write about brands in blogs and insights for marketers are there to understand the impact of word-of-mouth (buzz) in a new fast growing, youth laden media…