So that's what my friends taste like

Facebook flavoured vitamin water.

Yes. It's true.

In cahoots with Coca Cola, the brain trust at Facebook has come up with the pinnacle of branding. They've created a flavour to associate with their brand. Apparently Facebook tastes like Black Cherry and Lime. Good. We needed that. It's another indication of how social media is advancing.

Sign number 451 of the impending apocalypse.

Users, users everywhere

but not a click to be had.

Facebook now boasts a user base of 350,000,000 people. More than many countries. That's a pretty large market.

Now the problem is how to monetize them. Sure there's advertising on Facebook but how many people actually click through those tiny little things?

Not too many.

Your facebook profile is the real you.

New research from The University of Texas at Austin about people's Facebook profiles...

Facebook profiles capture true personality, according to new psychology research

Online social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate real personality, instead of an idealized virtual identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin.

"I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," says Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles. "In fact, our findings suggest that online social networking profiles convey rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren't trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.

"These findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing positive spin for the profile owners," he adds, "but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions, much like the telephone."

Gosling and a team of researchers collected 236 profiles of college-aged people from the United States (Facebook) and Germany (StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ). The researchers used questionnaires to assess the profile owners' actual personality characteristics as well as their ideal-personality traits (how they wished to be). The personality traits included: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.

In the study, observers rated the profiles of people they did not know. These ratings were then compared to the profile owners' actual personality and their ideal-personality. Personality impressions based on online social network profiles were accurate and were not affected by profile owners' self-idealization.

Accuracy was strongest for extraversion — paralleling results of face-to-face encounters — and lowest for neuroticism. Those findings were consistent with previous research showing that neuroticism is difficult to detect without being in person.

"I think that being able to express personality accurately contributes to the popularity of online social networks in two ways," says Gosling. "First, it allows profile owners to let others know who they are and, in doing so, satisfies a basic need to be known by others. Second, it means that profile viewers feel they can trust the information they glean from online social network profiles, building their confidence in the system as a whole."

Gosling recently co-authored a study on how first impressions do matter when it comes to communicating personality through appearance. For his latest personality research, he focuses his attention to personality in relation to online social networks.

Findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers include: Gosling and Sam Gaddis (The University of Texas at Austin), Mitja Back, Juliane Stopfer and Boris Egloff (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany), Simine Vazire (Washington University in St. Louis), and Stefan Schmukle (Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany).

You're not as popular as you think

So you've gone and set up a Facebook page for your client. Good for you. Everyone else is, so you should get on that right away. But at the end of the day. How many people have you brought over to the brand? How many of them are going to be influenced by it?

Well, if you're part of the 77%, less than a thousand.

Sure you've got fans but how many and how often do they see you?

Online ad spending. There's money to be made.

And if AT&T is reading this, we are very open to negotiations, and our prices are so low you'll think we're crazy.

Different sites get different traffic, and different traffic attracts different advertisers. Here's a delightful little infographic that outlines who is spending what and where they're spending it. Online-adwise that is.

Seems to me like Facebook could become bigger than the GDP of many countries by sometime in November.

The internet - now in print!

Social media is online right? Not so fast there champ. It turns out that social media is offline too. Way offline.

It would appear that obituary for print was a tad premature.

Web 2.0 and who's using it.

Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Flickr, LastFM - what do they have in common? Well, for many creative folks the sharing of personal 'space' on the web, isn't happening.

Sure there's professional/business content using all the tools available, but very little content that's more personal. It's a reflection of the ongoing corporatization and commodification of social networking and Web 2.0.

Once upon a time it was a new and novel way for people to connect. Now, it's another channel for communication to the consumer.

Shame really.

An interesting look behind the scenes in social media

Here's a look at what goes on at Facebook - the 'porn cops' who make sure our eyes aren't offended by bum cracks and nipples. This is done so advertisers will feel better about the sanctity of their ads - no one wants to have their ad pop up next to a picture of some lout mooning the camera.

What a job, looking at blurry, hazy pictures of people showing things they shouldn't. But I guess someone has to do it.

It is something to consider though. There's a myraid group of people out there who have access to your Facebook profile, your gmail folder and who knows what else. And they're watching...

Social Media and Marketing legalities

Marketing in social media is a very new frontier for everyone - the rules are still fluid about rights, content and use. But what happens when someone takes the content that was provided under one guise and repurposes it to do something else?

Here's some food for thought:

"Former dating columnist Julia Allison, an Internet microcelebrity now famous for not being particularly famous, has finally gone too far in her attempt to acquire Facebook fans. She may even have broken the law.

The ruckus has been stirred up by a sudden rise in the number of people who list themselves as fans of "Julia Allison" on Facebook. Allison has confessed to what happened: After Allison had a meeting with Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is now actively promoting the site's celebrity pages, Facebook listed Allison's page on a list of suggested pages for new users.

That accounted for most of the jump. But Allison also admitted that she had Facebook "convert" 2,500 people who had requested her friendship on Facebook into fans. That's where she got herself in trouble.

Allison declared herself a "brilliant businesswoman" after her egoblogging startup, NonSociety, cleared five figures last year. She hopes to make more by accumulating a fan base and then shamelessly marketing products to them. In theory, she ought to be familiar with the strict laws around endorsements.

New York, California, and a number of other states have strict laws regulating what's called "commercial appropriation" — simply put, the right to control whether one's name and likeness is used in an advertisement to give the appearance of an endorsement.

Legal pundits have long been alarmed by the way Facebook skirts these rules. When users sign up to be fans of a product or celebrity on the site, the privacy argument goes, they didn't necessarily consent to broadcast that fact to all their friends in a way that's similar to an advertisement. Daniel Solove, a law professor has called this feature of Facebook a "privacy debacle" and argued that simply expressing appreciation for a product or person wasn't the same as signing up to appear in ads. But at least this involves users who willingly signed up to be fans. What of people who found themselves yoked into fandom without giving any kind of consent at all?

That's what happened to 2,500 users who aimed to be friends with Allison, but instead ended up in ads for her described as "fans." Facebook can't fall back on its old defense that they volunteered for the endorsement. They could well file a class-action lawsuit against Allison and Facebook. Nothing in Facebook's terms of service seems to cover such a conversion, which Allison now admits Facebook did as a favor for her.

There may be no separation in Allison's mind between friendship and a commercial relationship, no line between the self and the product. But there is a distinction in the law.

The lesson here: Sometimes first judgments are right. And sometimes guilt can be a dangerous thing."