Facebook reached its 500 million member milestone yesterday and celebrated the event with the launch of Facebook Stories. The monumental moment also played a role in the ABC World News report featuring acandid interview between Diane Sawyer and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

To commemorate the achievement, the team at Facebakers.com put together the comprehensive infographic included below (click to enlarge). The illustration breaks down the demographics of Facebook’s burgeoning population (according to their own data on the service), and explores the international makeup of the site.

Via Mashable

The third installation of Old Spice’s ads featuring the impossibly charismatic Isaiah Mustafa was a little unexpected.  Isaiah and the creative team have been rather busy of late – listening, researching and responding in very personal and meaningful ways to people who have mentioned the first two ads across all types of media.  Currently I count 118 video responses on the YouTube channel – to people ranging from Ellen DeGeneres (33,000 views) to Perez Hilton (61,700) to Kevin Rose (61,600) to dozens of every day people who average 300 views.  Note: these numbers tripled in the 2 hours since I started this post.

This phenomenon is often labeled viral but this is a fundamentally flawed way of understanding it.  By definition, a viral video would have to have an in built replication mechanism – one that forced its way into the attention of all your friends.  Individuals decide whether to pass on content based on how they believe it will effect the relationships with the recipients – most people don’t spam their friends.  As Bud Caddell points out, better word for this is popular – the original ads had broad popular appeal and these new responses have a much narrower appeal but much deeper meaning.

I applaud the agency Wieden + Kennedy for convincing their client to spend more of its marketing budget on genuinely connecting with and rewarding people who want to be involved in the campaign – its fans.

At the end of the day though – will I switch to Old Spice?  Very unlikely but then again, I’m not the target market.  Looking forward to seeing the sales figures – I’m willing to bet they’re pretty good.

Ian Lyons blogs over at www.blog.ianlyons.com or follow him on twitter.

The other day I saw a great quote from Larry King, he said “A year ago, if you had told me I’d be re-tweeting Justin Bieber, I’d have said ‘I’ll be doing what to who?’” The rate of change, the sheer pace of it all seems to be getting ever faster. If you compare the time it took the humble television to reach 50 million people to the time it took Facebook to reach 50 million people (13 years versus 2 in case you’re interested), you can be left with only one conclusion: that things move much, much faster these days than they did before. Which is equal parts right and wrong, depending on your perspective.

The thing missing from the last 50 years to suggest we’re actually operating at a faster pace is evidence of dramatic human evolution to not only keep up with but cope with how different things are since Ed Sullivan became synonymous with entertainment via the TV. We’re largely the same animals we were hundreds of years ago, let alone what constituted “us” a few decades before.

What has gone are the silos, the endless echo chambers and wells that ideas, culture and to a large extent people dwelled within. The web has tunnelled between them allowing a more rapid pace of change in society not by enlarging our brains but by circumventing the natural world’s way of keeping us from mental overload – physical distance from one another. In a world where I can be as aware of the craze of the week among Brooklyn hipsters as I am of the latest fashion trends in Harajuku, what we’ve lost is the ability for an idea to have an artificial longevity via the time it takes to travel from one place to another.

There are two ways to frame this change. One is Seth Godin’s who argues the only important part of having an idea is that it spreads, and that it is no good to you if it doesn’t get taken up by anyone else. With this point of view, there’s no bad in the new way we live and work.

The other way to look at it is unbridled negativity – that the movement of information faster between two points is actually detrimental when it can’t be controlled. This point of view is generally taken up only by those who have a vested interest in the control of information between two points – usually government or big business; the music industry immediately springs to mind.

For the average person on the street however, it is hard to see this as a bad thing. What it does mean is the half-life of an idea has been dramatically shortened. We don’t tire of an idea any faster than we used to, we just get it at the same time as everyone else – and can then get it any time we want after that.

All this is only a problem for businesses built around the control of information. For them, right now is as easy as it is ever going to get.

VISIT DIGITAL STRANGELOVE TO GET INSIDE DAVIDS HEAD

uncluttered white spaces are on the hunt for a creative intern passionate and knowledgeable about building online communities and working in the social media space.

The candidate must have a strong interest in design, social media, collaboration, strategy, marketing and social responsibility. This is a very cool opportunity to get involved with a growing company still in its early stages and to play a significant role in working with and creating this online community in the future.

Specific Skills Required:

+ Social Network Integration (Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc)
+ Experience with wordpress and web design
+ HTML/Basic PHP
+ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
+ Proficiency in InDesign, Illustrator, Keynote and Photoshop

This oportunity will start off as an unpaid, mobile (studio or home) position with plenty of opportunity to gain a wealth of experience and eventuate into a full time position.

We are looking for the candidate to work around 16 hours per week in a flexible set up for the right person. All Interns will be mentored and given as much opportunity to grow in the position. You will be a key member of the uncluttered white spaces and IF talks team collaborating and working with inspiring business leaders/ writers, innovative people and a diverse client list with a readership across 24 countries.

If this is for you, send an email to Ben Rennie detailing why you would be excellent for this internship, providing links to online projects you have worked on and briefly describing your specific role and responsibilities in relation to the skills required above.

Thank you and good luck. Please Tweet and Share this opportunity with your friends on Facebook.

APPLY HERE

From the uncluttered white spaces Archives | Original Post: July 2009.

Louis Gerstner’s riveting memoir, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, tells how he turned IBM from a mainframe manufacturer heading for the knacker’s yard into a world-class services organisation. In corporate terms, it was the greatest comeback since Lazarus, but Gerstner’s title was misleading; the sad truth is that elephants don’t tango.

Evidence of this is provided daily by the attempts of large corporations to engage with social networking. You can see how the process works. Their CEOs see all this activity going on and are disturbed by it. They read reports in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal about Facebook having 250 million users, Twitter growing exponentially or the YouTube search engine becoming the prime source of information for teenagers, and think “hey, we’re missing out on this”. So instructions go out to minions to create a corporate presence in this whirlpool of online activity.

Results to date have been unpromising, not to say embarrassing. Sometimes they can be positively damaging, in the sense that they actually alienate the audiences big corporations are hoping to engage. Thus, turning PR handouts into a sequence of Tweets (increasingly the pattern on Twitter) is not a way to enhance your credibility in a socially networked world. Au contraire

The other day a perceptive blogger, Michael Foley, put his finger on the problem: “There are a lot of big brands dedicating resources to social media lately, because it is the new ‘bright shiny thing’. I’m worried that these big brands may feel the need to shut down these social media business experiments if they don’t see results – meaning big revenue – in time for the next quarterly earnings report.

“It takes time to build relationships and develop trust, especially if you’ve been neglecting your customers for a long time – and most brands have. They’re already suspicious of you because you’re selling something. Real relationships aren’t built on the salesman’s need to move product on deadline. They are built on a mutual exchange of value over time. Don’t think of your social media presence as an experiment, but as an investment so that you can obtain social capital in the long term.”

That seems spot on to me. Patience really is a virtue in this context, but it’s the one thing large corporations don’t seem to have. In part, this is a structural problem: public companies are driven by stockmarket expectations – which effectively means short-term exigencies. But corporate impatience to extract revenue juice from the online world in the short term is also a psychological problem. It’s the product of a mindset that has failed to take on board the scale of the changes now under way.

What’s happening is that one of Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of “creative destruction” is sweeping through our economies, laying waste to lots of established businesses and industries, and enabling the rise of hitherto unprecedented ones. And it’s doing so on a timescale of maybe 25 years, which means that the broad outlines of the new economic system won’t be clearly visible for at least a decade. But everywhere one looks, we find corporate moguls wanting answers Right Now. The most spectacular example is Rupert Murdoch, who is on his third demand for an immediate answer to the online question, but virtually every large organisation in the world is driven by the same panicky impatience.

The writer Steven Johnson has suggested an insightful way of thinking about this. Imagine, he says, the effect of a hurricane on an ancient forest. There’s massive destruction, lots of venerable trees are felled, where there was dense foliage there are now clearings and lots of sunlight. And in those clearings lots of interesting things are sprouting. These are the foundations of the new forest which one day will replace what the hurricane destroyed. But, for the time being, they are immature seedlings.

In those terms, big corporations are like exploitative loggers stomping round the clearings, pulling up seedlings and disgustedly discarding them as pathetic, or at least useless for their purposes.

And so they are – at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that one day seedlings like Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube et al and the blogosphere might not provide the makings of an impressive – and fantastically profitable – new industrial ecosystem. We just need patience – the one thing stockmarkets don’t have. So the future will belong to corporations that don’t have to march to Wall Street’s drum. Step forward Google and Microsoft – and maybe even Gerstner’s IBM.

About the Author: John Naughton

To add to our growing subscription base, we have conceeded and agreed to create a Facebook fan page for uncluttered white spaces.

Whilst we limit the content on white spaces to 3 articles per day on design, strategy, marketing, people and business, we get sent a lot more content than that from blogs and people from all over the globe. We will use our Facebook page as an outlet for that content so whilst the blog will remain the master source of insight, the facebook page will look to feature more of the cool and the same amount of insight.

Like us, join us and become a part of the growing family of innovators and thought leaders.

Once we hit 1000 fans, we will be giving away a free Sigg chosen at random from our new Facebook fan base so get on the list, tell your friends and lets create a cool community.

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The new Facebook Movie  is to be directed by Fight Club director David Fincher and is based upon the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook which profiles the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook empire. The movie will star Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg (from The Squid and The Whale,  Zombieland) as well as Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker.

For more Visit the social network-movie . com/

Hand up if you used email today. Yep, me too. What about the teens of today. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaking at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference yesterday, only 11% of teens email daily–clearly, a huge generational drop. Instead, they are increasingly turning to SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communication.

What most drives the effectiveness of social networks is its authenticity, said Sandberg stating that many join Facebook’s social network because people use their real identities–she also claimed that users join because they entrust the network with personal information (really?).

Regardless, authenticity on the Web certainly means better word-of-mouth communication for brands. Sandberg cited one study which showed that people who receive product recommendations from their friends are 400% more likely to buy that product. On Facebook, this is encapsulated in the site’s “like” feature. The study also revealed that friend-recommended products have 68% better product recognition and 200% greater memory of brand messaging.

With Facebook’s 400 million members and 100 million daily mobile users, the network enables brands to connect with more customers than ever before–or, as Sandberg explains, “On any given day, you can reach twice as many people in the U.S. as watch American Idol–and that only makes up 30% of our global audience.”

Check out Twitter’s new World Cup site, it’s an amazing source of news for the FIFA tournament–and perhaps a glimpse at how we’ll be socializing during events, in a Twitter-dominated future.

The site provides helpful flags for each participating country, a list of upcoming matches, top tweets, and a what’s-happening-now button that takes visitors right to the soccer pitch, focusing in on games in progress, with custom-Twitter feeds for each match. During a match, tweets originating from each team’s home country flow face to face, so that you can get a sense of the trash talk.

Chances are good you have a Facebook profile. Chances are even better that, if you do have an account, you check it at least once a day. You might be a professional Farmviller or the President of 100 Facebook groups, but do you really know Facebook and what you’ve gotten yourself into?

Via Online MBA

Community Participation 3.0

Flowtown have created an infographic addressing the way people are consuming and engaging news and media. Due to the number and type of media outlets accessed, and the regularity of accessing media, individuals now believe that it is easier to stay up to date with today’s changing world than ever before. Individuals, are also increasingly contributing to the conversation, in a way never before experienced. The graphic  illustrates the way people in 2010 access, disseminate and contribute to modern media.

Read more: http://www.flowtown.com/blog/who-is-the-modern-media-consumer#ixzz0otljzg4u