Here are several key points summarized from the full report.

1) Social networking has emerged globally as the activity which Internet users spend the most time on.

Social networking sites are reaching 82 percent of the global Internet population, or 1.2 billion users. The activity now accounts for 19 percent of time spent online, making it the most popular activity on the Internet. That’s a huge jump from a mere six percent in 2007. Social networking is followed closely behind by search/navigation, retail, and communication.

2) East Asian countries spend the least amount of time on social networks.

While social networking is almost universally a popular activity, cultural differences do matter. While Asia Pacific are seeing high penetration rates for social media, its Internet users are spending only 11 percent of time online on social networks, or slightly under three hours a month.

In contrast, Latin Americans are the marathon runners of social networking, clocking in at 28 percent and over 7.6 hours of monthly usage. Israelis have emerged as the most prolific social media users, at 11.1 hours. In Asia, Philippines is the only outlier occupying the global top ten.

While usage patterns differ across continents, what is similar is that women consistently use social media more than men, or 1.5 hours more per month to be exact.

3) Older people no longer form the minority of social media users (with the exception of Asia).

It used to be true that social networking is a young person’s game. But older people have caught on in the past 18 to 24 months. In fact, the aged 55+ segment is the fastest growing among all age groups.

However, this trend is far more noticeable in North America, Latin America and Europe than in Asia Pacific, where old people still lag behind. Penetration rate among those above 55 in the Asia Pacific is only 59.8 percent against a global average of 79.9 percent.

Internet users aged 15 to 24 are the most prolific at utilizing social media, while those above 55 are the least regular.

4) Facebook continues to be the most dominant social network.

Facebook reaches 55 percent of Internet users worldwide, accounts for three-quarters of the time spent on social networks and one in seven minutes of total time spent online. Facebook is the leader in 30 out of 43 individual countries tracked by comScore in the beginning of 2010, and has since gone on to capture pole position in six more countries.

Today, there only seven markets where Facebook is not the largest player ?– China, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Brazil, Poland, and Russia.

5) Microblogging tools like Twitter, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo are gaining traction.

Today, Twitter reaches one in ten Internet users globally, hitting a growth rate of 59 percent over the past year. It has emerged as an important tool for ordinary citizens to report on important events like the Japanese Tsunami and the death of Steve Jobs as well as organize political movements like the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Sina Weibo, the tenth largest social network worldwide, is the leading microblogging tool in China with an impressive 181 percent growth rate in the past year. Tumblr, in 12th position, grew by 172 percent over the same period of time. These two tools have registered the strongest growth among the top 20.

With microblogging tools registering the strongest growth, it’s likely they’ll become an even more dominant force in the social media world for years to come.

6) Among the top 20, US-based social networks are attracting vast non-US audiences.

The top four social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Profile, and LinkedIn — all have the majority of their users coming from outside the US.

7) Google+ surged to 25 million users faster than any social network in history, but future success remains uncertain.

Google+, which is Google’s own social network, was off to a fast start. It reached 25 million global unique visitors in under a month, and now currently has 65 million users, or five percent of the total social networking audience. To put things in perspective, Facebook took 36 months while Twitter needed 33 months to reach the milestone. However, while sign-ups have certainly increased, Google+ weekly visits have actually dropped to 1.16 million in August from a peak of 1.8 million in July.

8) In the US, social networks lead in online display ad delivered, but lag in terms of spending.

More online display ads are now being displayed on social networking sites than anywhere else, capturing one quarter of US ad impressions. This mirrors the rise in social networking as the predominant activity for Internet users. However, advertisers are still not paying a lot for display ads in social networks, accounting for only 14.8 percent of total US online display ad spend.

This is according to an international study done by Experian Hitwise, a global information services company, which surveyed a grand total of eight countries. Besides Facebook data, the study also surveyed social media usage in general.

Coming in second is New Zealand, which averaged around half an hour, while Australians are third, hitting 26 minutes and 27 seconds. The next best Asian country is India, at around 20 minutes, or seventh place.

None of the other Asian countries with high Internet penetration rates, like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were studied.

The finding that Singaporeans are world-beating marathoners in social media should come as no surprise. A joint study by Google and Ipsos showed that Singaporeans are the most prolific mobile social networkers among 30 countries.

On a per-capita basis, Singaporeans are very adept at using Twitter, beaten only by the Americans.

They are not a lone island when it comes to social media usage, of course. In general, countries in the Asia Pacific region have been found to connect with others online quite extensively.

Here’s some context for non-Singaporean readers: The Singapore President is very unlike the American President. He has very little executive authority (that belongs to the Prime Minister), which makes him a rather stripped down head-of-state.

There are four presidential candidates — Dr Tony Tan, Tan Kin Lian, Dr Tan Cheng Bock, and Tan Jee Say. In case you’re wondering, they all share the same surname, but the similarities don’t end there. All of them are making serious attempts at reaching out to voters through Facebook, Twitter, and their websites. We’ll run through each candidate in turn to see what they doing right or wrong. There are lessons for entrepreneurs and marketers here, so keep your eyes peeled.

Dr Tony Tan

Dr Tony Tan has a QR Code on his poster

Tony Tan (see Q&A with him) is arguably the most well-resourced of the bunch. He has after all an extensive political career and was backed by Lee Kuan Yew as the next Prime Minister of Singapore, although he turned down the post. This means he has the most political cache to surround himself with an effective online media team.

He has implemented two things that are unique to him: QR Codes and Google AdWords. If you look closely at Tony Tan’s election poster, you will see a QR Code which will bring you to his election website after being scanned. But I’m not sure if his team has implemented it well. It takes too much effort to start up the QR scanner only for it to bring you to his website — might as well just print the URL on the poster. Furthermore, there’s no copy to entice passerbys to use it, so why would they bother?

A better use for it might have been to link a set of QR codes to videos, infographics, or even his campaign trail schedule. All the different QR Codes could be consolidated into a pamphlet that could be distributed to residents. See QR Code Film Festival for example. Or how about a QR Code that links to a hidden contest with a chance to meet Tony Tan himself?

Putting the QR Code in his campaign poster is not a good idea for another reason: Sometimes, the posters are out-of-reach, like by the busy roadside or high up on a lamppost, which makes scanning it next to impossible.

His website does well for its clean and simple look. But there isn’t a Facebook widget in the sidebar either, so readers can’t easily ‘like’ him on the social network. What I do like about the website is that he includes short video endorsements from ordinary citizens, which certainly gives the impression that he is highly favored by the masses. All his campaign related videos are consolidated in one location on YouTube and Vimeo, another good move.

Interestingly, Tony Tan has put up advertisements on Google Adwords, which I don’t see other candidates doing. This adds a new dimension to his online campaign, going beyond the social into the contextual. He’s definitely going to reach voters who are reading about the election as we speak. The problem? Again, having the ad link to his website seems like the lazy thing to do. I’d like to see him offer a compelling reason, a pithy argument, why people should vote for him. The ad can then link to an article in his website, which I think is money better spent.

Dr Tan Cheng Bock

One thing stands out for Dr Tan — his app for iPhone and Android. Like Tony Tan, having such nifty features makes you seem hip and up-to-date, but I wonder about implementation. Personally, I find his app short on features: It simply consolidates content and videos that can easily be found on his website and YouTube page, which probably appeals to only his most hardcore fans. One Android user called it a “sorry excuse for an app regardless of the purpose.”

Dr Tan’s website seems to be covering the basics when it comes to social media. He has both a Twitter and Facebook widget. The only problem: The website looks too cluttered. While appealing to different races and languages is important, Dr Tan has crammed different languages of the same content on the front page. That is a really bad idea — why not have different versions of the same site instead, in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil? That is what Tony Tan has done.

Tan Kin Lian

Kin Lian is probably the candidate that is most familiar with social media. He runs a rather well-read blog which has been around since 2007, the year he retired as the CEO of NTUC Income (see interview). He’s a popular speaker on money management given his investment background, and he has used his online presence well to boost his profile.

But his online campaigning lacks discipline, and he has a problem maintaining a Presidential image. Take for instance the next two videos I’m going to show you. In one of them, he is peddling a rechargeable torchlight like a salesman. In another, he demonstrates an optical illusion trick like a Criss Angel wannabe.

Granted, these videos were made before he ran for President, but surely he has control over them because they are all hosted on his YouTube account? A wise thing for him to do would have been to suspend all inappropriate content he has put up online in the past. This is actually not the first same a political candidate was hurt by either an unbecoming YouTube video(see the infamous Tin Pei Ling example), so I’m surprised Kin Lian hasn’t learnt from her. It shows that he hasn’t thought out his campaign well.

Image may not be everything in this election, but it matters a great deal, since the President is a representative of the country to foreign dignitaries.

Another quibble I have with him: His blog appears even more updated than his campaign website. While all the other candidates put up fresh content on the front page of their website, Kin Lian chose to put a personal message. This gives his website a static appearance, discouraging voters from coming back.

And did I mention Tan Kin Lian has an Android app too? But don’t bother, it doesn’t appear to do much.

Tan Jee Say

Jee Say, in my view, has the best website among the four. The design is pleasant on the eyes, with a ‘Take Action Now’ button to encourage voters to get involved. All the social media elements are present too, and readers can easily find him on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. His Facebook Page is also well thought out, with ‘take action’ buttons on the left sidebar, similar to the website.

While he lacks the bells and whistles of Tony Tan’s campaign, he does have the most street cred, receiving an endorsement from media darling Nicole Seah, a political candidate in the May General Elections who has over 100,000 fans on her Facebook Page.

Tony Tan, on the other hand, has been the subject of much derision online, in the form of parody videos mocking him and articles that criticized his stance on issues. Unfortunately for him, these parodies tend to go viral.

Jee Say’s credibility in online media is clear if one counts raw figures. He has the most Twitter followers and Facebook fans, and user engagement is certainly present. What he lacks vis-a-vis Tony Tan is the absence of multi-language support on his website.

While he can assume that people who come to his website are all young, English speaking folks, that surely isn’t the case since the older generation are also starting to pick up computer skills?

Verdict

While Dr Tony Tan and Dr Tan Cheng Bock tries hard to be innovative, I’m not sure if all the newfangled tools like QR Code, Google AdWords, and smartphone apps are money well-spent — they’ve been implemented rather poorly. Tan Jee Say, on the other hand, runs a tight ship with no fancy tricks, but he gets the basics right.

All the media chatter about him seems more positive than negative, but this can’t be helped because the online media scene in Singapore has always leaned towards opposition figures, which Jee Say is. So, overall, I think Jee Say is the winner, followed closely by Tony Tan.

This election also shows that entrepreneurs don’t need the resources that MNCs have to run an effective online/social media campaign. A look at our Top 30 Singapore business brands on Facebook clearly demonstrates that small companies have a fighting chance to compete against the big boys because implementing social media strategies is cost-effective.

I must point out a couple of caveats here: Just like how social media presence does not necessarily translate into votes for the candidates, the number of Facebook ‘likes’ you have does not always lead to increased sales. What’s most important is that you have a good product that people believe in. After all, no amount of Twitter messages can convince a voter to pick a candidate he or she hates.

Bell Pottinger has a very interesting (more quantitative) analysis of the social media efforts of the four candidates. They declared Tan Cheng Bock the winner.

To register, you can send an email to rsvp@readingroom.com.

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Boredom, as it has been said, can be a great catalyst for action and this couldn’t have been truer for Shashank Nigam, founder and CEO of airline marketing blog-turned-consultancy SimpliFlying. Shashank, who cheerfully admits to having a long-standing love affair with planes, says it was all thanks to the winter he spent in Boston while working for tech start-up Endeca that he hit upon the idea of starting the blog in 2008.

“It gets really cold and dark at around 4pm with nothing to do in the winter,” he recalls. “I’ve always liked planes and airlines, so I decided to do some research to see if I could find an intersection of my two interests – airlines and branding – but I couldn’t find anything on the Internet. There was information on everything from startups to Coke. There were airline consulting companies that focused on the technical side of things – operations, network planning, flight operations and scheduling – but none on branding. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just start a website and write articles analyzing airlines and brands?’”

Shashank Nigam

Finding his groove

Nevertheless, he soon realized that there was something quite unique about airlines and airports that set them apart from other industries. “After four or five months, I noticed that airline branding is really unique to the industry and you can’t apply generic principles of branding to it. Generally, with a can of Coke, your brand engagement is two minutes. With Starbucks, it’s anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. With an airline, it can be anywhere from two to twenty-four hours depending on how long your flight is.”

Based on this observation, Nigam wrote Six Steps to Building a Swashbuckling Airline Brand (PDF), a white paper that examines the six unique factors that contribute to an airline company’s brand. However what he wasn’t prepared for was the response to the paper. “It got published by Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com as the featured white paper of Summer 2008. I was really surprised because they generally publish papers written by PhDs or retired industry veterans. It was just as well that I didn’t state my age because I might not have gotten published!”

Taking the plunge

Buoyed by the response to the paper, Nigam started looking at his blog in a new light. “At the time I was still working full-time in Boston and doing this on the side. I decided that maybe I should take myself more seriously and sent the white paper to a few airline folks I knew, like Mike Barclay (CEO of Sentosa and former CEO of SilkAir) and asked them for their feedback. It was generally “Hey, very good ideas. I’ve been thinking about these theories for years and you’re making a lot of sense. But it’s professor speak – you can’t really do anything with it. Bring out the tactical side of it.”

His lack of experience in the industry was also another factor that convinced him to come up with a tactical strategy that would show how social media could drive airline branding and customer engagement. However it wasn’t an easy task. “Back in 2008, social media was just emerging and people were really skeptical about it. MySpace was dying and Friendster was at its peak. They didn’t know if social media was another fad that would come and go. I had an uphill task convincing airline companies about using these new technologies to engage their customers.”

Entering start-up mode

Nigam quit his job in Boston in Dec 2008 returned to Singapore to incorporate and work on Simplifying full-time. “I had $20,000 in savings from my one and a half years working at Endeca. I told myself I had to break even before the money ran out or I’d have to return to the job pool.”

Luckily for him, the company broke even in nine months and even better, it did so using less than $10,000. Although Nigam was running the company all by himself, he made sure to assemble a board of advisors to guide him. Among them was Donald Schenk, President and CEO of Airline Capital Associates in New York.

“Don has been my angel investor and mentor since Day 1,” says Shashank. “He was one of the people I sent my white paper to and I actually took the bus down from Boston to see him on the day it reached his office. I saw that he had highlighted half my paper and made notes, and he told me that he had been thinking about those ideas for a couple of years. His company dealt with the network and operational side of things, not branding. So I helped them with their existing plans and headed up their brand strategy division, and they in turn helped me with my startup.”

Getting a break

But the real breakthrough was to come when he attended his first conference in the February of 2009. “Luckily, I managed to get a press pass because I couldn’t have afforded the $4,000 fee otherwise,” he says with a laugh. It turned out also to be his baptism of fire as one of the keynote speakers backed out at the last minute, leaving the conference organizers scrambling for a replacement. “I had a presentation ready and told them all I needed was to plug it in and I could go up there and present on airlines and social media.”

Not only did it end up being the highest-rated presentation in the conference, it also doubled up as his calling card. “That was what got the conference organizers to call me again and again. Not only that, there were CEOs and senior-level executives in the audience as well, and I managed to get admission into meetings when I didn’t even have an offering.”

Given that he was just blogging at the time, this opportunity eventually enabled him to branch out into offering consulting services to airline companies.

Today the company, which counts Turkish Airlines and Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) among its clients, offers brand strategy, customer engagement and social media consulting and training services. SimpliFlying.com was ranked among the Top 2 aviation blogs in 2009-2010 and its Twitter site is among the Top 5 most influential for airlines. Headquartered in Singapore, SimpliFlying has offices in New York and Toronto. The latter, which opened in June 2010, focuses exclusively on airport branding and airport customer engagement, a new service offered by SimpliFlying.

The road ahead

“One of our biggest challenges right now is staying ahead of the game,” admits Nigam, who jokes that his current address is “Seat 1A or 2A because that’s where you’ll find me most of the time.” The company is currently working on beefing up its product offerings and is planning to launch four products this year, with one of them being customer engagement tools for airlines. “Consulting is about giving companies what they want. But what we’ve found out is that a lot of the times, many of them don’t know what they want. So we want to offer companies something like Microsoft Windows where they just plug in the product to get it up and running. With our customer engagement tools, airlines just need to pay a subscription fee and they can start using them.”

Advice for local start-ups

For those planning on launching their own start-ups, Shashank has just one piece of advice: just do it.

“SimpliFlying is my third start-up. I had two earlier ones which failed so I can speak from that perspective. I think that local start-ups tend to focus a lot on plans, paperwork and strategies. I’d say just do it. If you make a mistake, get up quickly and learn from it,” he says, adding that companies shouldn’t agonize over coming up with too detailed a social media plan. “This doesn’t work because social media is agile and you’ve got to keep moving. The other thing with social media is that if you plan too much, it would have changed by the time you execute it.”

Shashank will be leading a live webinar on location-based marketing for airline loyalty programs on January 28. You can also follow SimpliFlying on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Image credit: gringer

GetIT Comms, in partnership with SiTF and Tata Communications, brings you a Social Media Marketing workshop on Nov 9, 2010 in Singapore.

The workshop will help you realise the true potential of social media for your business by learning about the questions and steps that you must address before jumping in, the relevance of great content to sustain your audience, and the importance of measurement and monitoring tools.

Led by Anol Bhattacharya and Benjamin Koe, the workshop will cover:

- A Quickstart Guide to Social Media for Business – Helping you to ask the right questions and tackle the right points at the start.
- Doing your Homework – The steps that you should do before you jump into the mix.
- Establishing your Path – Choosing which path to take (and what tools to use) would be the key difference between success and failure.
- Sticking to it – The importance of great content and why it pays to be committed to your social media campaign.
-Metrics and Monitoring – The key to proving Social Media ROI.

When: Tuesday 9th November 2010
Time: 430pm-6pm
Where: Infocomm Asia Holdings Pte Ltd, 35 Tai Seng Street, Tata Communications Exchange, #01-01, Singapore 534103
Fees: FOC for chapter members (a no-show fee of $20.00 would be levied for registered applicant); $20.00 for non-chapter member; $50.00 for non member

Register here.

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Lady Gaga, with her army of over 5 million Twitter followers and more than 13.1 million Facebook fans, can move products and now brands are courting her to do just that.

How did Lady Gaga become such as huge pop culture phenonmenon within such a short span? The answer lies in her innate understand of social media which is evident in the way she communicates with her fans.

Here are 5 lesssons which from the brand which has got people going Gaga Ooh La La!

1. Take Full Control Of Your Brand

Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager, described their dynamic as “95-5.” “The only thing I do is manage the vision,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of the time I won’t comment on creative, and 95% of the time she lets me run the business. The other 5% is where we debate about things like, ‘Do you really want to bleed to death on stage at the [MTV] VMAs?’ She wins even when we do have those debates 5% of the time.”

2. Understand How Social Media Changes The Power Equation

3. Engage With Your Fans

Gaga realizes that an artiste’s staying power lies in the support of her fans. She also knows that she will not be able to control what the papparazzis report about her. As such, the singer has taken it upon herself to establish rapport with her fans thereby purchasing their loyalty which will be useful in defending herself against bad press.

4. Treat Your Fans Like Rock Stars

More than that, Gaga manages to simultaneously leverage the social media platform and create a sense of exclusivity by prohibiting professional photographers at the Las Vegas leg of her Monster Ball tour and apparently endorsing the viral dissemination of her concert images and videos via her fans.

Her exclusivity was also evident in a calculated ploy to enable fans to access her music through her own channels before releasing them to other media outlets. The November 2009 premiere of her video for “Bad Romance,” for example, debuted on LadyGaga.com before MTV or any other outlet could play it.

This resulted in a Universal Music server crash, a Twitter trending topic that lasted all week and a cumulative 110 million (and counting) views on YouTube to date, more than any viral music video has ever claimed.

5. Design Your Marketing Campaigns Specifically For The Medium

Similarly, Troy Carter has explained that Lady Gaga makes music videos specifically for YouTube audience, knowing that it would have been impossible to stop leakage of her material to the platform anyway.

Lady Gaga’s videos are mini epics in themselves with catchy dance moves and extravagent costumes and settings fast becoming her hallmark. Of course, the Lady’s penchant for shock (her apparent nun rape and heavy S&M imagery in the ‘Alejandro’) and her willingness to experiment by mashing up what she finds in the cultural image bank are also strong contributing factors which make her videos compelling enough that people want to watch them.

This strategy seems to be paying off as two of Gaga’s hits – Bad Romance and Just Dance featuring Colby O’Donis take on the Number 2 and 9 spot respectively on the list of Top 10 Most Watched YouTube Videos of All Time.

Well, you know what? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Conclusion

Of course, no relationship is perfect and you might have to eat your humble pie sometimes. But the upside to it? When the need arises, you can also be assured that your community like the Little Monsters will be out in full force supporting you.

If you liked this piece, you might also like 3 Lessons In Brand Management From Michael Jackson

Image Credit: Lady Gaga Fan Page