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…
June 26th, 2006 at 11:07 am
MySpace is going global. They plan to roll-out localized versions this year. Interview in the Financial Times (UK): MySpace outlines European expansion
It could be hard for them to get users away from their established loyalty to local social network providers like Skyblog especially because of the community effect, but they are the 75 million-user gorilla in the space. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
June 27th, 2006 at 12:59 am
The global expansion of Korea’s Cyworld Korea will also be interesting to watch; they have just launched in the US. Cyworld is interesting to watch because they have reached a population penetration which is far greater than myspace (1/3 of the Korean population!). I wrote a post on this topic:
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/2006/04/08/883.html
Happy you enjoyed my post on the French blogosphere
Eric
August 1st, 2006 at 11:07 am
[…] We’ve mentioned in previous posts that the French blogosphere is substantial with 5 million blogs in the skyblog platform alone. The UK blogosphere is also growing, the article can be seen here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/07/21/blogging.pdf with additional commentary by Shane Richmond. The report was commissioned by MSN Spaces so there might be issues with impartiality of the study, but the numbers are indicative of higher involvement (up to 7 million bloggers in the UK) and a heavy bias for blogging by young people (up to 42% of under 25s blogging.) From our point of view these numbers “feel” a little high but unquestionably the impact of blogging on UK internet behaviour is very significant. […]