Ban on booze ads ‘will cost SABC R400m’

Acting CEO says an outright ban on alcohol advertising on television and radio is one of the biggest risks to SABC’s revenue

THE cash-strapped SABC stands to lose R250m-R400m if a total ban on alcohol advertising is imposed by the government, the broadcaster’s acting CEO Robin Nicholson said yesterday.

"An outright ban on alcohol advertising on television and radio is one of the biggest risks to SABC’s revenue," said Mr Nicholson. "It’s a significant part of our advertising revenue."

The SABC has warned the parliamentary portfolio committee on communications that such a ban would see the SABC lose about 8,5% of its advertising income. The SABC is the only public broadcaster in the world that has to rely almost exclusively on commercial revenue to fund its operations, with 80% of its revenue derived from advertising and 17% from licence fees.

A discussion document being circulated among the departments of health, social development and trade and industry, contains various proposals aimed at reducing alcohol consumption. These include limiting trading, a ban on sponsorships, higher taxes and a ban on advertising.

The SABC’s financial problems have occupied headlines , with the broadcaster indicating recently it did not intend to borrow more than the R1bn it received through a government guarantee, after a R1bn loss in the 2008-09 financial year. The broadcaster will still have to shed 699 out of 3699 jobs in order to streamline the organisation and cut costs, according to reports.

Mr Nicholson was recently asked by Parliament to name the top 20 risks to SABC revenue. "Obviously there were the normal ones like risk to market share, the decline of advertising and threats like mobile advertising, but loss of alcohol advertising revenue was at the top of the list," he said.

Marketing analyst Chris Moerdyk has warned that a ban would have implications for all media.

He said of the R17bn spent on advertising last year, about 10% could probably be directly attributed to alcohol advertising in the mass media.

"Removing that from the advertising and media industries would achieve nothing but considerable job losses.

"So much so that one could easily argue that an increase in alcohol abuse created by unemployment as a result of an advertising ban would exceed any benefits resulting from the ban," he said.

Mr Moerdyk said legislation banning smoking in public, and changes in the acceptability of smoking, helped to reduce smoking — not a ban on advertising. US research indicated that advertising bans led to a 5%-8% drop.

Some have argued that the ban would have more effect on marketing and advertising companies than on alcohol producers, as ads are aimed more at switching brands than encouraging drinking. It is also not clear how much money would be lost to soccer, cricket and rugby, which receive millions in sponsorship deals.

Health ministry spokesman Fidel Hadebe said yesterday the debate was at an early stage. "The ministerial committee , chaired by Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, drew up the initial documents. Everyone will be consulted, including the alcohol industry before it is submitted to Cabinet. Look, alcohol abuse is a serious problem," he said.

Last month Ms Dlamini said a survey had shown that alcohol and substance abuse was destroying families.

Vodacom, Cell C spat takes nasty turn

Vodacom’s advertising agency, Draftfcb, has accused its former executive creative director, Grant Jacobsen, of unethical behaviour over Cell C’s new advertising campaign and has warned it may sue him for damages.
The development comes as Vodacom and Cell C prepare to do battle at the Advertising Standards Authority this week over the latter’s latest campaign, which disparages the former’s brand makeover.

Now the tussle is getting ugly, with Draftfcb CEO John Dixon suggesting Jacobsen used confidential Vodacom information in Cell C’s advertising war with its bigger rival. Jacobsen has rejected the accusations, saying they have no basis in fact.
Jacobsen had been involved with Vodacom’s rebranding campaign — the operator changed its brand and colours on 1 April to bring it in line with parent Vodafone — while still at Draftfcb. Jacobsen left the agency at the end of December to join rival DDB SA as executive creative director.

DDB recently signed Cell C as a client. Its campaign for Cell C, launched last week, includes a television ad that disparages Vodacom’s decision to rebrand to red and took flight just five days after the latter unveiled its new brand identity to the public.
Dixon suggests Jacobsen used information he gleaned while working on the Vodacom account at Draftfcb to develop Cell C’s new advertising campaign and says the television ad had to have been produced before Vodacom took the wraps off its new brand campaign.

“Producing a TV ad has a long lead time,” Dixon says. “There is no way that ad could have been produced in response to what they saw in the public domain. The timeline makes us suspect that confidential information has been shared with Cell C.”
He says the timing is “of concern” to Draftfcb. “Grant developed all of the Vodacom ‘red’ stuff that is in the market at the moment. He didn’t produce it — that happened after he left — but he had intimate knowledge of all the scripts and the use of the meerkat and all of the Vodacom characters in the campaign,” Dixon says.
“He knew how simple and central the initial rebranding was — namely, that ‘Vodacom is red’. He understood that and, by implication, could make it appear that [the red rebranding] is insubstantial and that is what he has done.”

But Jacobsen says Cell C’s campaign was produced at very short notice, with three television ads featuring Cell C “chief experience officer”, comedian Trevor Noah, being shot on the same evening Vodacom officially took the wraps off its new brand.
He says Cell C first became aware of Vodacom’s new brand image days before the official launch through marketing material that was already available in community newspapers. Vodacom was also painting its banner at the top of the Ponte tower in Johannesburg red. And websites, including TechCentral, published details of the redesigned brand several days beforehand.

“We shot the ads on Friday, 1 April,” Jacobsen says. “It was one of the most rushed shoots I have done in my career. I was writing scripts on the set.”
Radio ads that form part of the campaign were recorded several days later. “If I was using preexisting knowledge, why didn’t I write and shoot this campaign in February?” Jacobsen asks, adding that he’s prepared to share corroborating evidence showing schedules and bookings for the shoot and edit.
“If I was going to use my knowledge to get one up on Vodacom and Draftfcb, the last thing I’d be doing is shooting in the middle of the night in Cape Town, on Friday, 1 April, and editing on Sunday, 3 April, and post-producing frantically through the night on Monday.”

Jacobsen says he can state “categorically” that he shared no confidential Vodacom information with Cell C executives. He says he continues to “love and respect” the Vodacom brand, which he helped nurture for five years.
“The last thing I want is for a real conversation about network and technological leadership to turn into an in-house fight between a couple of ad agencies,” he says. “That has no benefit for consumers at the end of the day.”
But this is a fight that seems far from over. Draftfcb and Vodacom have written a letter, by way of their lawyers, to DDB asking for answers, Dixon says. He says the agency may sue Jacobsen for damages.

Jacobsen says neither Dixon nor Vodacom has approached him for his side of the story.
Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Authority is considering a complaint lodged by Draftfcb on behalf of Vodacom against Cell C’s latest campaign. Vodacom has objected to Cell C’s television ad, featuring Noah, in which the operator claims to have SA’s “number one network”. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral

Steve Jobs Official Biography Arrives in Early 2012

It’s official: the first official biography of Steve Jobs will be making its debut sometime in early 2012.

The book, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, is being penned by Walter Isaacson, famed biographer and the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time. While very little is known about the contents of the book, Isaacson did manage to obtain unprecedented access to Apple, Steve Jobs and even Jobs’ family. Simon & Schuster will publish and distribute the book.

This will be Isaacson’s fourth biography, following Kissinger: A Biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world’s greatest innovators. Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius,” Simon & Schuster Publisher Jonathan Karp said in a statement.

Apple’s CEO is famously secretive about his personal life. Some of the details of his past have been unraveled in unauthorized biographies such as iCon: Steve Jobs and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, but none of them paint a complete picture. Isaacson’s book should hopefully provide some concrete answers to unresolved questions about Jobs’s life, along with some new insights into how Jobs runs the world’s most valuable technology company.

Will you read the book? What do you hope his authorized biography reveals? Let us know in the comments.

HOW TO: Optimize Your Content for Social Discovery

David Sasson is the chief operating officer of Outbrain, a content recommendation platform that is based in New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @davidsasson.

Since the rise of search over the past decade, few obsessions have run deeper in the world of online publishing than search engine optimization (SEO). In an attempt to grow their audience and gain exposure for their content, publishers have increasingly focused on keeping Google’s crawlers well fed with tasty morsels of meta data, keyword repetitions, internal linking and more. But designing websites for crawlers often has a downside; namely, it can lead to a poor experience for flesh-and-blood users. How often have you actually used a keyword tag like the one below to navigate a site and discover new content?


Probably never. It’s wasted space cluttering the page, used only to help Google instead of actual readers.

Luckily, this mentality is beginning to change as the sources of traffic into publisher content diversify. While search may have constituted the majority of referrals to a publisher five years ago, we now see it giving up ground in favor of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and through the recommendation of other content creators and curators who link out more frequently than ever before.

This development is great for publishers. Not only does it mean they can return to their emphasis on structuring content for humans instead of crawlers, but the audience engagement levels from these sources is much higher. For instance, across the hundreds of major publisher sites where my company operates, we see that bounce rates (meaning people who consume only one page on a site before surfing elsewhere) from search traffic is generally 14% higher than from other sources. Similarly, time spent on site from search traffic is lower by about 16%.

These changes aren’t totally surprising. After all, someone accessing content from search is usually looking for an answer to a question. If Google does its job perfectly, then the person should never need to go deep into a publisher’s site to get what they came for. Meanwhile, how do people find great, original content using a search engine if they don’t even know it exists? They can’t. Search provides wonderful answers to directed inquiries, but it is not the natural starting point for discovering new, interesting content.

This changing landscape, however, means that publishers need to refocus on the larger question of content discovery: How do you create content that will find its way to people who are in browse mode? And equally important, once people come to your site, how do you help them discover great additional stories so they stick around longer? Fortunately, a lot of the tactics required to improve discoverability are a return to common sense principles.

1. Write Better Headlines

Your headlines need to be interesting and feed people’s curiosity, not simply focused on keyword density and repetitions. Good titling boosts clicks, especially from social networks like Twitter where users won’t see a blurb or image.

For example, print publishers like Cosmo have known for years that people love lists. This translates to digital, too: “The 9 Reasons We Love Fatty Foods” will pull in audiences, even if you’re boxed out on Google for the keyword “foods.” (Interesting tidbit: Research on the publishers in my company’s network indicate that odd-numbered lists will net you a 20% increase in headline click-through rates vs. even numbers.)

2. Make It Visual

Add an engaging thumbnail image representing your story. Just as photos draw people into content in newspapers and magazines, a great image goes a long way online. Now that sites like Facebook automatically pull in your thumbnail when people share your story, it’s more important than ever to designate engaging images in your page structure in order to capture audience attention from outside and within your site. At my company, we find that when we add thumbnail images as part of an article headline, we see a 27% increase in click engagement and content discovery.

3. Hold On to the Readers You Have

Use your page’s real estate wisely. We tend to focus on tactics for drawing new audiences into our content, but it’s equally important to think about how to ensure those people quickly find additional great reading material once they arrive. This means analyzing the real value you’re getting from each navigational device on the page. Are people using them and clicking deeper into your site? Or are you simply cluttering the page with links that have diminishing returns? Avoid the notion that you can spray paint your way to a work of art. If you’re not getting at least 1% engagement on a navigational module, junk it and keep the page clean.

4. Create the Best Possible Content in the First Place

Write great, original pieces. Easier said than done, of course. But now that content discovery is moving more and more into the hands of real people who are sharing it, recommending it and reading more of it once they come to your site, there’s a limit to how far you can get through repurposed or aggregated content.

The tactics used to optimize for overall content discovery continue to evolve. While making sure your content is well represented in search will always play a role, SEO should be seen as just one piece in a much larger puzzle. It’s now more important than ever to design your content for humans, not just crawlers.

7 Million Fans Like Leo Messi’s Facebook Page in 7 Hours

Seven hours after Argentine soccer player Leo Messi started a Facebook Page, he has almost 7 million Likes as of Wednesday afternoon.

To put that number into perspective, it’s nearly 40% as many Likes as U.S. President Barack Obama has on his Facebook Page and about 30% as many as Justin Bieber fans have contributed to the pop star’s Facebook Page — but Messi’s Likes were gathered in hours, not years.

Messi, who plays for FC Barcelona and is considered by many to be the best soccer player in the world, wrote in a translated welcome message on the page, “Hola! Welcome to everyone. Thank you very much for the great number of messages that I have received. I am so excited! From now on we will be more closely connected … through Facebook.”

Lady Gaga beat Obama to 10 million Likes last summer, but we can’t remember another celebrity nearing the milestone so quickly. We’ve reached out to Facebook about whether Messi has set a Facebook record.

Update: Some commenters have suggested that Messi may have automatically transferred fans from his unofficial pages to his official page. While Facebook allows businesses to merge place pages with fan pages and to turn personal profile pages into fan pages, there’s not a public option to merge multiple fan pages. We’ve reached out to Facebook about whether Messi’s page administrator negotiated a merge with a Facebook representative.

How To Convert Facebook Profiles Into Business Pages

If there is one question I get asked every single day of the week it is how to change Facebook profiles in to business pages. I get phone calls, I have people email me and friends ask me if I can ask somebody in Facebook. It’s a very common problem that many people have especially people who joined the site early and thought the right thing to do was promote their business via their own personal profiles. Many people have as many as 5000 friends (the maximum limit according to Facebook) that they can’t move over to business pages. Complicating the matter further is the fact that Facebook strictly forbids anybody from doing any marketing from personal profiles and has even been known to shut down personal accounts acting as businesses in recent months. Well today it is as if Christmas has come early for all those people because Facebook have just launched a new tool which you can find here that allows you to convert your personal profile in to a business page.

The Problems
There are some very serious downsides to doing this though namely that if you have set this up as your own personal profile and use Facebook on a daily basis you are going to lose all your information like likes and personal info. The friends that you have on the personal profile will however be converted in to likes and you’ll have a brand new legal business Facebook page. If you have any other problems or are not sure about making this move the help page on Facebook should help you with this.

Perfect Solution
This really is the perfect solution because it means that people who have had no solution for the last couple of years can now finally migrate their friends over in to likes. The only solution up until now was posting a link or message to all friends and hoping they would head over an like a new Facebook page. For most this is not going to be a huge deal but for many this tool is a life saver!!

Twitter Reverts to Old Interface Amidst Technical Woes

Hours after rolling out a new version of its homepage, Twitter suddenly took a trip back to its past.

The microblogging service disabled the so-called “New Twitter” (though it’s not really all that new at this point) and reverted to a simpler time when users had to check their @replies from a text link on the right-hand navigation menu.

In a post on its status blog, Twitter writes, “We’ve temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and will update you shortly.”

Update: New Twitter has returned for many users, several hours after the outage.

During the outage, a number of users noted that they appeared to be seeing entirely different Twitter feeds from the ones they’d signed up for — many in different languages.

Ironically, it was just last week that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote that “the dark days of imminent technical meltdown are over” in a blog post about his transition to a smaller role at the company.

Foursquare Makes Discovering Brands Easier

Foursquare has launched a new web page to showcase top brands on its network in an effort to make it easier for users to find and follow them.

You may not know it, but there are hundreds of brands using Foursquare (1,323 brands to be exact), but most people don’t follow them, mostly because they aren’t easy to discover. Foursquare is trying to address that issue with Pages Gallery.

Pages Gallery, as the name suggests, is a gallery filled with the different company Pages on Foursquare. Through it, you can follow everyone from MTV to Zagat (or even Mashable) to get tips and other content.

The feature also includes a simple tool for searching through pages and browsing by popularity, whether they’re trending or whether they’re new. Pages Gallery also suggests pages that are popular with your friends.

Lots of brands are hopping onto Foursquare in a big way, but the additional exposure should help boost brands’ follower counts, which could be vital to Foursquare as it tries to monetize its millions of users. While it still desperately needs a way to discover brands within its mobile applications, Pages Gallery is a good start.

How Women Really Feel About Their Facebook Friends [SURVEY]

When it comes to Facebook, we have friends, and we have “friends.” A recent survey found that for many women on Facebook, their true feelings about many of their Facebook friends might be less than friendly.

Daily deals site Eversave talked to 400 women about their Facebook relationships. The company originally conducted the survey as market research on the social network’s influence on the daily deals ecosystem, but Eversave was surprised to uncover the love/hate relationship between women and their online friends.

For example, the majority of female respondents said they had at least one friend who was a “drama queen” on Facebook. A majority also said they had at least one obnoxiously “proud mother” as a Facebook friend.

Most women — 83% of respondents in this survey — are annoyed at one time or another by the posts from their Facebook connections. For these respondents, the most off-putting post was some kind of whine; a full 63% said complaining from Facebook friends was their number one pet peeve, with political chatter and bragging coming in a distant second and third.

The respondents also said at least one of their Facebook friends tended to:

Share too many mundane updates too often (65%)
“Like” too many posts (46%)
Inappropriately or too frequently use Facebook to promote causes (40%)
Project false information or images of a perfect life (40%)

These kinds of Facebook archetypes have become part of the cultural lexicon. We recently covered an amusing music video about Facebook “types.” But it’s fascinating to see these characteristics quantified by the women who get teed off by them.

Here are a couple infographics with more details from the survey:

Google’s Answer to the Facebook “Like” Button: The “+1”

Google is making a big new push into social with a feature called “+1” that is similar in purpose to the Facebook “Like” button, but integrated directly into the world’s biggest search engine.

Starting Wednesday, users who opt into the +1 button experiment (and soon everyone else) in Google Labs will start seeing a +1 icon next to each link in Google search results.

Google defines this action as a “public stamp of approval,” and it is exactly that. When you +1 something, your name becomes associated with that link “in search, on ads, and across the web,” according to the company. It also shows up in a feed on your Google Profile, which is required to use the product.


The move builds on a number of social features that Google introduced in search earlier this year, such as the ability to see which friends have tweeted a given link in search results. Today’s move, however, is clearly something much bigger.

Beyond showing up in search results, Google plans to offer to publishers a +1 button that lets readers +1 something without leaving the publisher’s site. Facebook has a big head start here with its Like button — some 2 million sites and counting have it installed — but Google’s button will instantly have a lot of appeal, given the company says +1 data will directly influence its market share dominating search rankings. Similarly, we have to imagine that +1 is more bad news for content farms, whose content is less likely to be shared.

In another twist, users will also be able to +1 ad, which essentially adds a “recommended by friends” component to AdWords and AdSense. as the company explains on the AdWords blog.

The video below explains +1 in more detail

OMG, the Oxford English Dictionary Added New Words! We ‘Heart’ It! LOL!

Before you take to the comments to ream us out about the above headline: “OMG,” “LOL” and the symbol for “heart” have all been added to the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

According to the OED‘s site, the newest edition of the dictionary (which comes out online today) revises more than 1,900 entries and includes a ton of new words — including the neologisms above.

So what do OMG and LOL mean to the OED? In the electronic realm, they’re merely shorthand for surprise and mirth. In the real-world space — according to the OED’s blog post — “The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.”

So, we’re going with irony rather than pre-teen sincerity here, huh, OED? Fair enough.

The OED also reveals that these neologisms aren’t as neo as we might think: The first quotation the dictionary uses for the definition of OMG is from a letter dating back to 1917, and LOL meant “little old lady” back in 1960.

The heart sign, however, is perhaps the most interesting addition. As the post says, “This update may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers.”

All this is fine and good, but I’m holding out for the next edition, which will hopefully include some of those symbols all those witch house bands have been throwing around of late. OMG, I would <3 that! LOL!

Why Facebook’s New Questions Tool Is Good for Brands & Businesses

Brands and businesses are looking for ways to leverage Facebook’s recently unveiled Questions tool in ways that differ from what they’re already doing on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and LocalMind.

The feature, which Facebook rolled out to all users March 24, functions as a recommendation engine. It also presents a major opportunity for businesses to conduct market research and crowdsource in a far more elegant way than was previously possible, according to Ben Grossman, communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications.

“We know from Nielsen that recommendations from friends and family and the opinions of online strangers are the top two most trusted forms of advertising,” Grossman told Mashable. “Facebook Questions offers the perfect opportunity for brands to tap into exactly that.”

Businesses, groups and organizations can use Questions in several ways. For example, Grossman said:

Ice cream parlors can find out what the flavor of the week should be.
A gym can find out what time is best for its new hip-hop yoga class.
Radio stations can determine the hottest concerts for the summer.
Manufacturers can do a pulse check on fans’ holiday shopping plans.
“The best part about this is that it’s in a trusting, social and real-time setting,” he said. “The opportunity to gain instant feedback from a brand’s biggest fans is amazing.”

Fittingly, we had some more questions about Questions. Below, Grossman weighs in on the feature to help brands better understand the tool.

Mashable: How is Facebook Questions different than the Q&A tools already online?

Grossman: Though Questions certainly falls into a similar category as Yahoo Answers and Quora, there is are two very major differences:

Answers to questions are not free-form; users are limited to multiple-choice responses.
Questions (and their answers) are not catalogued by search engines at this time. Public Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora will still remain important for public-facing customer support and inquiries.
Mashable: How will Facebook Questions change the way users of Facebook Pages interact with their fans? Why is this important?

Grossman: Though third-party Facebook application development companies such as Involver and Wildfire have developed turn-key “poll” applications, many users were likely to get hung up on that pesky “Applications Permissions” box that demands access to users personal information.

Questions changes that. No permissions are required, and the Questions platform lets you answer and talk about questions with all your friends no matter if they’ve engaged with a third-party application before or not.

The other great thing about Questions is it comes with a setting that allows users to add more answers to the multiple-choice answers. This bit of flexibility will really and truly allow businesses to learn from their consumers — they just have to know the right questions to ask.

Questions also demands a higher level of fidelity to opinion statistics for brands. If brands bind themselves to the Questions platform to pose questions and they relate to the brand’s business, it’s going to be a lot clearer to all the fans what public opinion is. If the brand doesn’t follow through by acting on that opinion, Questions has a nice comment area that gives fans the perfect place to call a brand out on it.

Mashable: How have you or Oxford used Facebook Questions so far? How do you plan to use the feature in the future?


Within 15 hours, we had engaged 13% of our fanbase and had not only gained votes on answers we had given to the question; we also had fans suggesting (and voting for) new answers, including local couponing sites, LiveTVChat and more. For us, it was an opportunity to enjoy a high level of engagement with our followers, emerge as a thought leader and learn a little all at the same time.

The next frontier, after some additional testing, will be to activate Questions on behalf of our clients. Next month, we are planning on extending Legends Outlets Kansas City’s “Charity Check-In” program through use of Facebook Questions. On Legends Outlets Facbeook Page, Legends Outlets is currently encouraging its consumers to check-in with Facebook Places in order to trigger the brand to donate $1 to a pre-determined, local Kansas City charity.

Next month, the brand will be doing the same, but we will also be employing Facebook Questions to ask the fans what charities they would like to see appear as part of the ongoing Charity Check-In program. We’re excited to help Legends Outlets partner with the charities that mean the most to its fans, while raising their friends’ awareness of ways they can give back to the community.

Mashable: What was your initial reaction to the new Facebook Questions tool?

Grossman: Any time Facebook adds a new standard application to all user and business profiles, I get excited. When Facebook adds major new functionality like Questions, it stands to shift the social dynamic of over 500 million people, creating richer, more diverse and increasingly dynamic conversations.

Beyond the impact it will have on users, the widespread release of Facebook Questions is also emblematic of the continuing trend we’ve seen from Facebook: As soon as a new trend in social media begins to rise up, Facebook acts quickly and decisively. For those long-time Facebook users out there, Questions will hearken back to the days when Polls were far more common on Facebook. But this round of Q&A-based functionality released by Facebook is likely more of a direct response to the increasing popularity of up-and-coming sites like Quora and LocalMind.

What I love about Questions is how true it is to Facebook’s zeal for transparency and trust.

'You've got to find what you love' Steve Jobs

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much."

South African Entrepreneurs: Listen Up

Its interesting to look at the motivation and inclination of entrepreneurs in South Africa. Entrepreneurs are those who are passionate and driven about the business plan that they intend to implement. Neither a shortage of business finance, not the opinion of others will stop them from what they know they can achieve. If you compare them with the rest of the population we will quickly find that entrepreneurs are go getters, not blaming anyone for their situation and not waiting for anyone else to improve it. These are people who take responsibility for their actions and futures. A great example of this was one of the finalists of the country's most prestigious empowerment awards program

Unique motivation has powered Design Communications Group CEO Zoë Molapisi into the finals - a burning desire to encourage South Africa's 'no capital, no connections' entrepreneurs.

"I'm honoured to be a finalist," said Zoë Molapisi. "The accolade is for personal achievement, but I won't be at the finals in my personal capacity. I will be there for all the start-up entrepreneurs who began with no capital and no connections and asked for no favours.


CEO of By Design Communications Zoe Molapisi
"It's important a strong message goes out that you don't need patronage and a handout to succeed in business. You can do it by hard work and perseverance; by holding your head up and never holding your hand out.

"It's satisfying to be recognised for that type of success and a great opportunity to give encouragement to self-starters, hard workers and go-getters that have very little else going for them."

Eight years ago, Zoë Molapisi launched her 'one-stop' communication group By Design as a one-woman start-up with no seed capital and no contracted clients. Today annual turnovers are fast approaching the R100 million mark and clients include major brands and institutions such as Coca-Cola, Telkom, Cell C and many blue chip clients across different sectors.

In addition to local communication and promotional projects, By Design organizes conferences and travel incentive programmes in several markets in sub-Saharan Africa and island territories in the Indian Ocean.

Expansion to South America is being explored.

"My message to tomorrow's entrepreneurs is simple," said By Design's founder. "You don't need government incentives. You don't need hand-holding by some official program. You don't need to be well connected.

"You need passion, commitment and the sort of commonsense that tells you to keep overheads low and service standards high. You can make it. I know ... because I did."

This is certainly a very important lesson for many who see their futures relying on others. When speaking to young people about their futures this is a key message I try to get across. Yes of course you need to connect with and work with others to get where you want to be but no one else is responsible for your future success other than yourself

Apple Removes “Gay Cure” iPhone App From the App Store

After more than 146,000 people signed a petition against a “gay cure” app, Apple has removed it from the App Store.

The app’s goal, according to its creator Exodus International, was to “provide support for individuals who want to recover from homosexuality.” The app, which could best be described as a mobile version of the Exodus International’s website, was previously available at this link [iTunes link].

The activist organization Truth Wins Out and Change.org, the platform used to launch the petition, on Wednesday praised Apple for removing the app from the App Store.

“Apple made a wise and responsible decision to dump an offensive app that demonized gay and lesbian people,” said Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out.

In a similar situation last year, Apple removed an anti-gay app after 7,000 people signed a Change.org petition calling for its removal.

What do you think? Did Apple make the right move by shutting down the application? Should Apple have ever approved the app in the first place? Please share your opinions in the comments.

10 Tips for Posting on Your Brand’s Facebook Page

Once your brand is on Facebook, the question becomes: How you engage those fans and sustain a meaningful online dialogue with your customers. Facebook fans will only want to engage with us if we serve up relevant content and truly participate. We also forget about EdgeRank — Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that helps display “relevant” stories. The News Feed only displays a small subset of stories generated by the friends and brands users engage with the most. The more popular your story, the more likely it is to show up in people’s News Feed. News Feed optimization becomes as important as your content strategy.

Let’s explore ways we can create updates that are optimized for the News Feed and engagement. Below are some dos and don’ts to remember each time you tackle that all-important question, “What should we post to our Facebook Page today?”

1. Don’t Automate Your Status Updates

Don’t automatically feed your blog posts or your Twitter updates into your Page. Often, automated content doesn’t make it into users’ News Feeds. Your fans can also distinguish between “auto” posts and customized ones. For a lot of brand pages, auto posts do not engender engagement.

Don’t share the exact same content across all networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) in exactly the same format. We all understand the value of saving time, but respect your customers enough to manually post customized copy. You will get far better engagement and show your fans you care. Some folks who use Facebook don’t really like Twitter and get irritated when they see hashtags or other Twitter-specific content in their Facebook stream.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Show You’re Human

Thank your fans for their replies and for sharing their opinions with you. From time to time, talk about things other than your products. Wish them happy holidays. Ask them fun questions or to share their personal stories.

If you make a mistake — admit it. Everyone knows you are human, and no one expects you to be perfect. You will actually score points for admitting that instead of trying to hide it.

Don’t be afraid of negative comments or people posting on sensitive topics. You’ll find that most of the time your fans will jump in and defend you or address these comments for you. And that carries much more weight than you trying to chime in. And at the end of the day, this is your opportunity to turn haters into loyalists by providing timely responses and great customer service.

3. Do Post More Photos and Videos

Media like videos and photos always perform well on Facebook. Not only do they seem to be a favorite of the News Feed algorithm, but they just grab people’s attention in a feed full of text updates. A lot of web users choose to watch more than they read.

Facebook also offers you a nice little feature that helps bring more fans to your Page. If you post a video and a non-fan of your Page sees it, a little non-intrusive call to action will pop up in the top-left corner that invites them to Like your Page.

4. Do Put Your Fans in Charge Every Now and Then


Not afraid to crowdsource? Your Facebook Page is a perfect place for it. Not only will your fans feel valued and heard, but some of their decisions might help your content strategy in the long run. Let’s face it — sometimes we don’t always make choices that resonate with our customers.

My favorite example of this was Budweiser. They let their fans choose the commercial that would run during the 2010 Super Bowl.

5. Do Target Your Status Updates


If you are a global brand, make good use of targeting. We sometimes forget that not all of our fans want to know about campaigns or contests we are running in a specific region or country. Target your updates by country or language as necessary. In the U.S. you can even target by state and city.

6. Do Ask Questions and Involve Your Fans

Want your fans to express their views on a topic? Ask them. Want your fans to share their favorite content with you? Ask them. Want your fans to share your content? Ask them. You get the point.

If you want your fans to participate more, just ask them every now and then, you will be surprised how many of them respond. Multiple experiments by other brands and yours truly show that the posts where you include a call to action get better than average engagement.

7. Do Watch Your Post Frequency and Timing

Don’t overwhelm your fans with too many posts. I suggest posting once a day to start with and potentially moving to twice a day, especially if you have great news to share. As far as timing goes, many people catch up on their Facebook activity at the end of the day and during weekends. However, this trend varies, and might be different for your target audience. Be patient, watch the response trends on your Page, and identify the frequency and timing that works best for you.

8. Do Have a Unique Voice


It is important to know your voice. Skittles does a good job maintaining a consistent brand voice on their Facebook Page. It’s entertaining, funny and refreshing.

That is not to say that you shouldn’t experiment and step outside your comfort zone to see what else might work for you. Find a voice and tone that is representative of your brand and yourself.

9. Do Diversify Your Content

Change up your content every now and then. Often, people are not sure what to post on a regular basis. You could try adding how-tos, trivia about your company, breaking news, polls, fill-in-the-blanks, relevant third-party content, multimedia, or even experts to speak about your field or business.

10. Do Track the Performance of Your Posts

Do you know your average number of comments and Likes per post? Watch for trends on your Page and feedback from your consumers on topics/programs/discussions and adjust your content strategy appropriately. Don’t become complacent.

Hopefully these tips will help you gain an edge on EdgeRank, and put your brand on top.

Good luck!

Firefox 4 Has Arrived

After months of development, no fewer than 10 beta releases and a release candidate, Firefox 4 is finally here.

An ambitious release for Mozilla, Firefox 4 promises to be not only faster than previous releases — but also more streamlined. We’ve already discussed some of the major changes in the venerable browser and will be putting out our own in-depth review later today.

Firefox 4 enters the browsing market at an important time. Not only is Microsoft back in the browser game with IE 9, but Google’s Chrome browser continues to gain in popularity around the world. Features like tabbed browsing, extensions and add-ons that once set Firefox apart from the crowd are now standard features across all major browsers and platforms.

The results, in our early tests, are a leaner, faster Firefox that holds up well against its increasingly tough competition.

Check out this video that interactive agency JESS3 made to introduce Firefox 4 to the world:

Firefox 4 Introduction Video from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Blackberry Fans . . . The new BlackBerry PlayBook is HERE!!!!!!

BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM’s foray into tablet territory, is now available for pre-order in three different versions, starting from $499.99.

PlayBook has a 7″ 1024×600 WSVGA capacitive LCD touch screen, a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM memory, a 1080p HDMI output, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 5-megapixel camera on the back, as well as a 3-megapixel one on the front for video chats. The aforementioned $499.99 will get you the 16 GB variant, and you’ll have to dish out $599.99 or $699.99 for the 32 GB and the 64 GB model, respectively.

Social Media for your brand

By Amanda Patterson

Facebook reflects your brand. Twitter reflects your personality. LinkedIn shows us what you've accomplished. 23 million South Africans have access to the Internet via cell phones alone. It would be naive to ignore these platforms.
70 out of every 100 people who join Facebook never leave. 30 out of every 100 people who join Twitter continue tweeting. Anyone who is serious about business has a LinkedIn profile. Facebook requires patience, charm and innovative thinking. Twitter requires wit, and an authentic voice. LinkedIn requires an honest up-to-date record of your work history. It also needs regular updating and referrals from satisfied customers.

Secret to social media marketing

Everyone wants to know the secret to social media marketing.

It's simple. It's also hard work. You have to create a personality for your brand. You have to give it a face, and a voice. Literally. You have to choose a real person. This person can be someone in your company, or someone you believe personifies your brand.

However, it would be wise to avoid using the usual suspects.

Musicians, screen and radio personalities do not always translate successfully into social media networks. These artists may have only been famous for the way they look or the way they sing or talk. Social media networking requires more than this.

The usual suspects also rely on their employers, their existing platforms and publicists to bring their audience to them. They are not necessarily innovative and creative. Most radio presenters, actors and musicians work through agents or managers. Mostly they are unaware of how these new media work. In all honesty it would damage their careers if they were let loose without supervision on the Internet. It would also be commercial suicide for their sponsors.

It is interesting to note that Talk Radio 702 has only 3094 members in its Facebook group. Redi Tlhabi has 2 386 members in her group. Other presenters have 100-300 members. The Parlotones have a few hundred members, as do Freshly Ground.

Why these low figures?

Firstly, the dedicated television viewers and radio listeners are growing old. They are not young enough to understand social media. Secondly, these presenters, and performers, have producers who script shows for them. They need direction and are largely reactive. Thirdly, the Internet needs constant 'gardeners' who create and grow their online personalities. These 'celebrities' do not, and in some cases, cannot, do this. An Internet audience can feel the lie when publicists do it on their behalf.

This is worrying for advertisers. Most consumers with a higher LSM (life style means) spend significant amounts of time on the Internet.

Some celebrities like Trevor Noah with 494,300 fans and Gareth Cliff with 276,105 fans have crossed the divide. Why? They are multi-talented. Not just famous for a voice or a look. They often write their own material, think on their feet, and entertain us. They are perfect for social media. They are the constant gardeners.

Choose the correct personality

Social media is networking. It has levelled playing fields. You do not need a huge budget. If you choose the correct personality to represent your product you will succeed. If that personality is able to attract 'fans', post interesting content and inspire them to want more, your customers will follow.

Allow consumers into your world and headspace. Remember that consumers don't just want to buy a product. They want to be courted and tempted into making the decision.

The most successful companies place social media marketing at the heart of their business. They find online social media personalities with an established following to promote their product and woo an audience.

Where will you find your 'constant gardener'?

South African startup: Mobile social network Motribe growing by 10,000 users a day

There’s Silicon Valley on the West Coast, Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Roundabout in London and now, Silicon Cape in South Africa- Yes the comercial technology industry is growing in South Africa too, but startups are largely focusing on mobile because just like in many developing countries mobile is how people connect not just to each other, but to the Internet as well. And for the majority of the population we are not talking about smart phones we are talking about first and second generation Nokias and the West’s hand-downs from the 90s.

I sat down with the co-founders of Motribe -a startup that is providing a platform for people to build their own social networks for mobile. We talked about how the company was set-up and how South Africans are using mobile technology to help go about their daily lives.

Why Social Media Innovation Has Hit a Plateau

Whenever you bring up the idea that the cycle of innovation must, at some point, come to an end, you inevitably evoke the memory of Charles Duell. For the uninitiated, Duell was the commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in 1899 supposedly said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

We can all have a good laugh at Duell’s expense now (even though he may never have actually said that), but perhaps we shouldn’t. After all, isn’t Duell’s sentiment generally true in a lot of cases? For instance, have cars really changed that much since the ’50s? Sure, they’re more fuel efficient and they now have OnStar systems and USB ports, but they’re still basically the same — four tires that you operate with a steering wheel. They still (mostly) run on gas. They’ve been perfected, but are they fundamentally different?

Or take toasters. Is the toaster you could buy in 1971 really all that different from today’s? For all I know, toaster technology may have advanced dramatically since then, but as a consumer, there’s really not much difference. It took a minute or so to make toast 40 years ago, and it still does today.

So why do we expect social media to be any different? Simple. It’s because we have just come off a big spurt of growth and the natural inclination is to assume that’s going to continue forever. That’s just human nature. And that’s why this year’s South by Southwest conference is a bit of a comedown. Back in 2007, SXSW was the launching pad for Twitter. In 2009, it was Foursquare. This year? Nada.

But we’re not just having an off year. We’re at a new, more boring stage in the development cycle.

Such thinking runs counter to the ethos of social media, I realize, but consider that social media has really only been around in its current form since 2005 or so. The real innovation that spurred the social media movement is microblogging. Before Facebook added status updates, fewer people were blogging and responding to blogs. Every innovation since then has basically been a refinement, including:

Twitter: a network devoted exclusively to microblogging
Foursquare: mobile microblogging with information about your location
GetGlue: microblogging about TV programs
Instagram: visual microblogging
If the latter is the big innovation of SXSW this year, I can hypothosize that micro video blogging will rule in 2012, but this is more tweaking than anything brand new. (While 12seconds.tv ultimately failed in its micro video blogging endeavors, perhaps it was ahead of its time.)

Perhaps you object to this on the grounds that tech is somehow immune to the toaster innovation phenomenon. But what about personal computing? The industry took a quantum leap in 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh, but, seriously, how different is your Mac or PC today? Yes, the graphics are a lot better and it’s a hell of a lot faster, but there hasn’t been another innovation quite at the same scale as the graphical user interface. The iPhone was also a big jump for mobile in 2007, but all the smartphones since then have basically run with the idea of a touchscreen and mobile apps. The iPad? It’s nothing new: Tablet PCs have been around for 20 years. Apple just basically introduced a larger version of the iPhone. The iPad is very well designed of course, but, in the end, the device’s success is a feat of marketing.

So where does this leave us? Maybe with a more realistic sense of where social media is going. Yes, it’s going to be even more prevalent in 10 years. Yes, there will no doubt be lots of cool new technologies that bring microblogging to new arenas, but you’re not going to see another Twitter or Facebook. Maybe everything that could be invented hasn’t, but, in social media, all the important things have

Social Media Revolution

We are the leaders

Social Media Champions League: Man United, Justin Bieber, Glee, MTV

If there were one giant global sports tournament, to be decided by how many fans a team has on Facebook, Manchester United (9.9 million fans) would lose a close, tense final match to FC Barcelona (10.3 million fans).

But what if you decided the winner on how many of those Facebook fans are active – that is, the ones liking posts and making comments? Then Man United’s 256,000 active fans would run away with the trophy. Barcelona wouldn’t even get a runners-up medal. Its 142,000 active fans are fewer than Real Madrid’s 155,000. (All numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000.)

Such are the results of a fascinating new monthly ranking of Facebook fandom, cooked up by New York startup FanGager. In a bid to promote its CRM-style dashboard of social media engagement, the startup has started curating a list of the top 100 most active fan pages. “Brand managers are collecting fans,” says CEO Eran Gefen, who started the company in Tel Aviv two years ago, “but we think the conversation should move to engaged fans — just as on the web, counting hits and page views gave way to counting unique users.”

Moving the conversation would be good for Justin Bieber, too. The Canadian pop star’s 20 million fans are outnumbered by Lady Gaga‘s 29 million — but Bieber’s number of engaged fans, 360,000, is the highest on Facebook. Lady Gaga’s 148,000 engaged fans can’t even top those of Kesha or the Black Eyed Peas.

Facebook game company Zynga has the second highest number of active fans, for its Texas Hold ‘Em poker game, while Facebook’s own fan page doesn’t even make the top 10. Glee is by far the most engaging TV show, apparently, followed by Jersey Shore and trailed way behind by How I Met Your Mother and House.

Given that Jersey Shore activity, the top-ranked corporate brand in the listing, MTV, may come as little surprise. The second highest corporate brand, Victoria’s Secret, also requires little explanation. The top packaged goods? Skittles, followed by Oreo cookies. Check out the top 20:


Man United can’t claim quite as many engaged fans as Bieber or Zynga, but it does walk away with the title for highest percentage of active fans in the top 100, at 2.6%. But Gefen says that figure pales into comparison with the U.S. Army, which has relatively few fans but a 10% activity level.

As for Mashable? We’re closing in on half a million Facebook fans — and a very respectable 4.5% activity level. Thanks, everyone

Facebook “Likes” More Profitable Than Tweets [STUDY]

f event registration site Eventbrite’s experience is any indication, social media marketers looking for monetary returns on their efforts might get more value from Facebook than Twitter.

The company announced Wednesday that an average tweet about an event drove 80 cents in ticket sales during the past six months, whereas an average Facebook Like drove $1.34.

The study, which used in-house social analytics tools to track ticket sales on the site, was a continuation of a similar analysis the company released in October after analyzing data from a 12-week period. That study also indicated Facebook drove more sales for Eventbrite than Twitter, although the difference between the two networks’ sales per post was greater at that point than throughout the entire six-month period (the “value” of tweets increased).

In addition to each individual Facebook Like driving more sales than an individual tweet, the study also revealed cumulative activity on Facebook was greater than activity on Twitter for Eventbrite. People shared Eventbrite events on Facebook almost four times as often as they did on Twitter. The company attributes this disparity to Facebook’s wider reach and greater emphasis on real-world ties.

It’s important to note that only a very small percentage of site visitors shared event pages on either network. Just 1% of people who landed on an event page shared it with their friends; 10% of people who had purchased a ticket did the same.

Obviously people are more likely to share events if they are attending. Their friends, according to Eventbrite’s data, are also more likely to buy tickets to an event shared on Facebook by a ticket holder than one shared by an uncommitted friend. But whether these trends, or any of Eventbrite’s findings, are relevant to other types of purchases is still a matter of speculation. But Eventbrite is betting they are.

“We carefully track sharing behavior in an effort to help event organizers tap into a new world of distribution for their event promotion,” wrote Tamara Mendelsohn, Eventbrite’s director of marketing and former senior analyst at Forrester Research, in a blog post about the study. “But the findings apply broadly to all e-commerce businesses, because the foundations of e-commerce are shifting as the social graph becomes a meaningful influence in driving transactions.”

Is Twitter Dividing the Happy From the Unhappy?

Anyone who thought that social media was going to usher in a utopian era of communication without borders is going to have their faith badly shaken by a new study from Cornell University. On Twitter, it seems, there are already at least two walled-off nations: happy people and unhappy people.

And never the twain shall tweet.

The Cornell study, spotted by New Scientist magazine, tracked 102,000 Twitter users and analyzed the 129 million tweets they sent and received over a six-month period. It examined the words they used using what the authors call “standard techniques from psychology” to rate their sense of self-fulfillment — an important measure, in the burgeoning field of happiness studies, known as Subjective Well-Being or SWB. People with a high SWB were significantly less likely to send or receive tweets from someone with a low SWB, and the same was true in reverse.

In other words, the happy people have formed little Happy Twitter clubs. Meanwhile misery loves company in social media — as much as, if not more than, in real life.

“Beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” can be assortative in a social network,” writes the study’s lead author, Johan Bollen. But he admits that even he doesn’t know why that should be the case.

So why is it so? Is it simply human nature, or a function peculiar to short-form virtual communication?

The answer depends on who you ask. Users on the “happy” side of the SWB equation will probably tell you they meant to respond to that depressive tweet from their Debbie Downer friend, but it was such a bummer they couldn’t be bothered. Unhappy tweeters will grumble about the insufferably peppy quality of tweets from those shiny cheerleaders over in the happy corner.

If there are any Twitter API developers looking for a Nobel Prize-worthy challenge, now would be the time to devise an app that could bring the two factions together in a state of semi-contentedness.

Twitter: 460,000 New Accounts Created Daily

Twitter will soon be celebrating the fifth anniversary of the first tweet, and the company Monday released a set of stats showing how huge the service has become.

This week in 2006, designers began creating a prototype of what would become Twitter. Jack Dorsey sent the world’s first tweet on March 21, 2006. On its blog, Twitter took the opportunity to point out some key stats, including:

-It took three years, two months and one day to get to the billionth tweet. Now there are a billion tweets a week.

-A year ago, people sent 50 million tweets a day. On March 11, 2011, the tally was 177 million.

-There were 456 tweets per second after Michael Jackson died in 2009. That record was broken on New Year’s Day this year with 6,939 tweets after midnight in Japan on New Year’s morning there.

-There were 572,000 new accounts created on March 12, 2011; there were 460,000 new accounts created daily, on average, in the past month.

-Mobile users increased 182% in the past year.

Twitter has 400 employees today, compared to eight in January 2008.

80% of Children Under Age 5 Use the Internet [STATS]

Nearly 80% of children between the ages of 0 and 5 use the Internet on at least a weekly basis in the United States, according to a report released Monday from education non-profit organizations Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop.

The report, which was assembled using data from seven recent studies, indicates that young children are increasingly consuming all types of digital media, in many cases consuming more than one type at once.

Television use dwarfs internet use in both the number of children who surf the web and the amount of time they spend on it. The analysis found that during the week, most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, and that television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years. Of the time that children spend on all types of media, television accounts for a whopping 47%.

Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older (the report suggests this is because school-age children have less time at home), but even 8- to 18-year-old children reported in another study that they consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods.

Internet and television use among children has become entwined in other ways as well. A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children between the ages of 2 and 11 use both mediums simultaneously. Altogether, children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media — eight hours if you count the additional media consumed while multitasking.

The report doesn’t attempt to solve the more-than-decade-old debate of whether all of this screen time is good for children. Instead, it preaches balance: “My mother used to say that too much of anything isn’t good for you, whether it be eating only protein, shooting hoops all day or ‘always being connected’ to the digital world,” said Dr. Lewis Bernstein, executive president at Sesame Workshop, in a press release.

It does, however, point out that time spent in front of books remains constant even as screen time increases.

About 90% of 5- to 9-year-olds who participated in a 2008 Sesame Workshop study reported spending at least an hour every day reading old-fashioned, physical texts.

Facebook Adds Ability to Easily Tag Others In Comments

Facebook has expanded its @ Mentions feature, now letting you tag friends, pages, events or groups within comments, turning their names into clickable links by using a simple drop-down menu.

Try it. Start a comment in Facebook, type the “@” symbol, and when you type the first letter of a friend or group’s name, a drop-down menu appears and creates an easily navigated link to that friend or group’s page. When you mention and link to somebody like this, it notifies that person that you’ve done so.

There’s more coolness: According to Inside Facebook, “Admins can ‘use Facebook as a Page’ and publish comments that mention themselves on the posts of other Pages in order to attract people to their Page.”

In other words, this is a way to get around Facebook’s spam filter that often won’t let you include URLs in comments (hey, that’s just like Mashable), letting you slip in a link to your page that might actually stick.

How about it, commenters? Will this enhance engagement, or will it encourage spamming within comment reels?