Social Landscape Review: Q3 2012

What an exhilarating summer on the web in 2012! The space is rapidly maturing, mobile has arrived, and two major events that happen only once every four years took center stage across social channels in the third quarter. For the Olympics in London, NBC streamed the games through their YouTube channel and Facebook created a page to track the sports and athletes. During the run up to the 2012 Presidential Election, Twitter unveiled the Political Index, Facebook and CNN launched Real-Time Election Insights, and YouTube streamed the RNC and DNC through their US Election Hub. Read on for more news from Q3 2012.

July

• Twitter Releases First ‘Transparency Report’ (7/2): Nearly any effort to promote transparency on the web is welcomed in social, and, in July, Twitter began issuing Transparency Reports which detail government requests for user information, government requests to withhold user information, and DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders. Anything to keep people more accountable is a plus in my book.
• Google Migrates All Google Video Content to YouTube (7/3): A big shift of data in this update, but nothing that should have a major impact for most. Google Video stopped taking video uploads in May of 2009, so this shift seems to be a very long time coming. When you’re designing the future of human–computer interaction, I suppose things like video migration may fall to the wayside for a while.
• Foursquare Launches Local Updates and Sponsored Updates (7/19): In addition to redesigning the Merchant Dashboard, Foursquare launched something called Local Updates in July. Essentially, this is a bit of catch up for the network, as most players already do rich updates to subscribers (Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, etc.). And with a natural step toward monetization, Sponsored Updates are the equivalent to Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets, and will give businesses more prominence in users’ Foursquare feeds.
• YouTube, NBC, and the Olympics (7/27): For the first time, HD coverage of the Olympic games would be streamed through YouTube on the NBC Olympics channel. While coverage delays were much the talk around the social media watering holes, it is truly thrilling to see NBC embrace social technologies as they create a global hub for absorbing the games. Throughout the Olympics, they racked up 50,000 subscribers and over 83 million video views on the way to an exciting Olympics closing ceremony. Expect to see this YouTube integration for many Olympic Games to come.
• Facebook Updates Photos (7/30): Facebook loves to optimize user experience, and it also loves taking pages out of other popular social networks’ books. With the new Photos experience, we’re seeing a combination of elements, in addition to some very intuitive functional design. Two thumbs way up from the Stuzo design team. In addition to updating the look and functionality of Photos, Facebook also continues to iterate on Messenger; more to come in Q4 there, for sure.
• Google Acquires Wildfire (7/31): In a high-profile acquisition that would finalize in August, Google absorbs social app vendor Wildfire, which allows brands to manage their social presence, measure, track, and also spin up off-the-shelf social applications. This social vendor/partner landscape is changing rapidly in 2012 – more to come below in September – and we’re looking forward to seeing how the dust may settle over the next 6 to 12 months.

August

• Facebook and the Olympics (8/1): Facebook created a custom page to celebrate the games and monitor users’ favorite athletes and events. By the end of the games, the page had registered nearly 4 million likes from fans who had been exposed to imagery and video from the games, and countless other users had become fans of individual Olympic sports that they are passionate about.
• Twitter Launches Political Index (8/1): At the outset of the election season, Twitter launched the Political Index to track mentions of each candidate throughout the race, powered by Topsy. Based on some fancy formulas, the candidates’ scores are normalized and measured over time, which creates an interesting pulse for the election going forward.
• Google Hangouts and the NFL Fantasy Draft (8/1): Leading up to the 92nd season, Google and the NFL partnered this fantasy season to enable any NFL.com/fantasyfootball page to spin up a Google+ Hangout with a single click and begin their live draft. In the 50 years that we’ve had fantasy football, it was never so easy to rub your friend’s face in a bad draft pick from the other side of the globe than it was this season.
• Facebook Rolls Out ‘Stories’ (8/2): In August, Facebook created a site that is essentially a collection of human interest stories on the Facebook Platform. The first few ‘stories’ have been inspiring – from a man with memory loss reliving his experiences with friends and family, to the amazing efficiencies created in science, to the story of how one high school used the Platform to stand up for one of their own – and we’re looking forward to seeing more of these beautiful videos.
• YouTube Rolls Out the US Election Hub (8/22): Dubbed the ‘one-stop channel for key political movements’, YouTube released their US Election Hub in August as we rolled into election season. As we’ll see, all major platforms will unveil their election hub pages and channels in an effort to be the one-stop resource for consumers during the Presidential Election, and to enable candidates to hyper-target spend. Hopefully the undecided voters out there know how to find these pages.
• Facebook Announces Real-Time ‘Election Insights’ (8/27): Facebook’s Real-Time Election Insights is a partnership with CNN and is meant to measure buzz and trending topics across the Facebook platform through race to November 6th. While I definitely think it is valuable for these networks to show us the number of users talking about each candidate, the absence of sentiment is a major shortcoming.
• Linkedin Expands Ads to 17 New Languages (8/28): Linkedin rolled out adds to 17 other major languages around the world, and in doing so, opened their revenues up to a much wider market. There has been a lot made of Linkedin v. Facebook since their respective IPOs, and Linkedin actually has 20x the revenue per user when compared to Facebook, based on more revenue streams, among other differences.
• The RNC and DNC on YouTube (8/28): In addition to the launch of Election Hub, YouTube also had great coverage of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions at the end of August and beginning of September. Streaming of major events – like the Olympics and US elections – are going to be a mainstay going forward, so it’s very interesting to see the platforms’ first go-round, so to speak.
• Twitter at the RNC and Twitter and the DNC (8/30): Twitter released some usage numbers during the two conventions that are great to look at. During the RNC, the highest spike in TPS was during Romney’s closing remarks, followed by – probably to Romney’s dismay – Clint’s rambling chair conversation. @InvisibleObama was set up during the speech and rapidly gained over 20,000 followers.

September

• Instagram Rolled Into Facebook (9/6): Took a few months, but this acquisition closed rather quickly, and Facebook rolled the Instagram crew into its organization. We will be monitoring this one over the next several months to see if there are any personnel shifts or transitions in functionality.
• Google Updates Drive for Mobile (9/10): Mobile has hit the tipping point this year, and many networks of the social ‘old guard’ are scrambling to shift their whole value proposition to have a mobile focus. Google made a great move and updated its Drive storage product for mobile in September. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise adopts these social, cloud storage technologies. One of these companies will nail mobile management of social cloud storage – both for consumers and for the enterprise – and others will follow suite.
• The New Twitter for iPad (9/18): In mid-September, Twitter updated their iPad application with changes to navigation, layout, and a new profile. Users can now add a header – much like the Facebook cover photo – to their profiles, offering a new way to personalize the experience. Twitter actually rolled out this update earlier than it made the update to the desktop site, indicating the direction that mobile is heading; design for mobile first, then desktop, because that’s where the majority of users are now.
• Salesforce Acquires Buddy Media and Announces Marketing Cloud (9/19): Earlier this year, Salesforce acquired Buddy Media for $689 million, and in September at Dream Force, the master plan was revealed: the marketing cloud. This service is a package of the Salesforce Social CRM, the Buddy Media social publishing platform, and the Radian6 listening and monitoring technologies, and it is set to make a big impact in the market. Competitors to the Marketing Cloud are those who have made similar moves this year. Adobe acquired Efficient Frontier and rolled out their Adobe Social offering, Oracle purchased Vitrue and announced their Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform at OpenWorld in October, Google has said that its acquisition of Wildfire will lead the social aspect of their DoubleClick Digital Marketing Platform, and the Dachis Group suite of the Campaign Performance Monitor, Employee Insight, Advocate Insight, and the Social Performance Monitor are all set to have a major impact on the enterprise social marketing space in 2013.
• Facebook (Re-)Introduces Gifts (9/27): Facebook has seemingly been turning every possible area of the site into a revenue channel, but has been doing so without taking away from the user experience. Gifts on Facebook had been around in the virtual form since 2007 and ended two years ago, but have now been re-introduced as real-world gifts that can be purchased and sent directly through Facebook – true f-commerce. This is still in the very early stages, but word of the Facebook Want and Collect buttons surfacing in October just in time for holiday shopping promises an exciting Q4 Landscape Review.

Did we miss any updates that you thought were notable from the third quarter of 2012? Let us know about them in the comments! More to come over the next few months – stay tuned for the Q4 landscape review, and check out the Q2 Social Landscape Review and the Q1 Social Landscape Review, if you missed them.