Erik Qualman wanted to get help promoting his new book, Socialnomics, so he made this video viral-bait (can I say that?).  It’s been kicked around the Internet so much I’ll be surprised if you haven’t seen it.  But if you are one of the few, this is a pushy, catchy, in your face statement that Social Media Marketing is HERE and NOW.

Facebook is kicking sand in MySpace face.  And walking away with the prizes, too. Twitter has leveled off heading into fall — a lull?  or a ceiling?

Hitwise recent research shows some huge changes in the social media world over the past year. Facebook’s surge seems to be continuing as it climbs toward 400 million subscribers worldwide. First, here’s the numbers as reported in Online Media Daily:

The fall of MySpace must make Rupert Murdock’s teeth ache.  It still has lots of loyalty (a class-leading time on site nearly 30 minutes), but the numbers are hard to look at from an ad network’s point of view.  Nothing here about the demographics on MySpace, but my guess is it stills skews very young which makes it a good target for lots of products aiming at the college kids and younger.

Facebook, though, is catching on with the older crowd.  Fastest growing group on FB is 55+ — all those jokes about Grandma spying on her grandkids by getting on Facebook have been overtaken by the reality that Grandma’s circle of friends is getting into the game as well.  And Facebook is still about personal networks of friends keeping up with each other efficiently and in a convenient way online.

Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed is all the buzz the past couple days, but I’m really more interested in FB’s roll out of a new search capability. This is something that will grow over time — as people learn about it, more content will be added to the network that can be used in search.  But it is clearly another alternative to traditional search, and it is based on peoples’ own preferences and experiences.  That’s the social media advantage!

Now that search bar in the upper right corner of your FB page takes you to a new search page where a great array of results wait for your browsing pleasure.  This is keyword-driven (like all search) so it’s not too useful if you have a really complex query (use Aardvark for those!), but if you’re looking for something more common, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘music’, you’ll get lots of ideas.

The image below is from my own search for ‘music’, filtered by ‘events’.  I found a lot of concerts advertised on Facebook!

Facebook's New Search Interface

On the downside, when I tried to find ‘music san luis obispo’ there were no results. Come on SLO musicians!  Get with it and get on Facebook.

This is another example of Facebook’s huge advantage of having all that profile information from hundreds of millions of users and businesses.  You couldn’t usefully add a search capability to a small network (not enough results possible), but when you have this kind of scale, it becomes valuable.  The network effect means that FB will continue to grow because it has these capabilities.  The big get bigger.

I wonder if there will come a point where the personal connection people feel with their networks gets so diluted that the information in the network overall begins to degrade, in quality and/or in quantity.  In a way, that’s what happened to MySpace.  Thinking of the goose that laid the golden eggs here.

Yeah, Facebook vs. Twitter.  The second time this week I’m looking at a struggle for survival at the highest levels.  And into this mix, I’m throwing Aardvark — see why below.

Techcrunch has the blogosphere roiling with its publication of internal Twitter docs that somehow just showed up in the inbox one day.  This amazing post is LONG with detailed meeting notes about everything from employee retention (yawn) to deals with Google or Microsoft (hmmm) to the threat from Facebook (this one caught my eye).

As the Twitter folks see it, Facebook can begin to mimic the Tweet by making its status updates public (through user option), displayed via the same kinds of tools as Tweetdeck and the like.  Or maybe literally in Tweetdeck types of tools modified to also show Facebook status.  And so forth — Techcrunch comments that Facebook is already moving toward this in recent changes.

Now I want to add Aardvark into the scramble.  Recently out of beta, Aardvark is a real-time search tool based on matching your complex query (the more complex the better, not like a search engine) with another person who can answer it.  This is done through an algorithm that analyzes your query, matches it to the stated expertise or interests of people in the network, and sends the query to the best probable matches through email or IM.

The information Aardvark analyzes to make the matches between question and answer comes from Facebook.  There should be a pause before that ‘Facebook’ with a drumroll.  Aardvark’s service is not warmed over Twitter — it is different.  But it matches the real-time search features of Twitter very well, only better because it finds people who could not possibly be in your personal network, or the networks of your friends, or of their friends… OK, I’m getting carried away but you get the point.  It is one component of the Twitter functionality, and it depends on Facebook.

Twitter search is different — it would help you find a laptop cable at a trade show, whereas Aardvark would not — and with Twitter you learn things you didn’t even know you wanted to know (what the Twitter folks call ‘discovery’) and that’s important.

But Facebook is evolving, and sharing its users’ personal data with Aardvark (by permission only) is one way to move into Twitter space.  This personal data, btw, is a crucial advantage of Facebook.  It’s going to be interesting to watch these models converge, clash and compete.  Again, this is going to be good for us users.

You know it had to happen, but it’s still depressing. We are hearing more and more stories about scams and spamming on Facebook and other social media sites. Unfortunately, you just have to be careful with all that personal data you put on those sites — it can be used against you.  See some security tips below.

Sid Kirchheimer, writing in the AARP Bulletin (yes, I am THAT OLD), profiled a Facebook scam that the victim could only watch as it unfolded.  A thief somehow hacked Bryan Rutberg’s Facebook profile and changed the passwords so Rutberg no longer controlled it.  He then posted a status update telling Rutberg’s friends he was in trouble overseas and needed money.  Some sent it to a fake address in London and into the thief’s hands.  Rutberg tried to warn his friends via his wife’s profile, but the clever thief has ‘defriended’ her, so the messages were not delivered.

Kirchheimer theorizes that Rutberg may have inadvertently downloaded a program that sent his keystrokes to the thief, who could then gain control of his accounts.  This kind of identity theft is only going to increase and it will be global.  Kirchheimer offers some very useful tips for increasing your security online:

• Don’t click on links provided in messages—even from friends—unless you check them with a phone call or off-website e-mail.

• Get program updates by going to the company’s website, not through a provided link.

• Make your Facebook account private so that only friends can see your details.

• Scan your computer regularly with an updated antivirus program

• Be suspicious of anyone—even a “friend”—who asks for money over the Internet.

Sad.  But human nature is not a thoroughly happy thing, is it?

For all other commentators and I raise expectations of great things from Twitter, it has not yet made the big breakthrough to popularity in numbers.  Not that 20 million subscribers is puny!  But research published today by the Center for Media Research (based on a Harris poll) indicates Twitter is still reaching a small proportion of the audience, even among the 18 – 34 year old early adopters.

While 74% of the 18 – 34 group report having a Facebook or MySpace account, only 8% of them subscribe to Twitter and just 4% use it to send messages.  Twitter use to send messages is actually a bit higher among 35 – 44 year olds, at 5%, but the use of it drops to 1% or less for everyone over 45.

I still think Twitter will prove to be a game changer.  I don’t think it’s primarily a communication tool, however, which is what Facebook is.  It is a news source, and a search tool.  And as it grows (OK, if it grows) it will gather enough volume to allow specialized conversations about narrow topics of intense interest to any number of groups.  General news will spread virally among the groups through their interconnections, and search tools will capture information about queries in almost real time.

At some point, nobody will tweet about what they had for breakfast.  But they will report interesting things to people who care about the same things.

Advertising Age posts some data about Facebook and MySpace becoming more evenly populated by the generations.  What was once the outpost of mostly young people (after all, Facebook started as a college-only networking tool), is fast becoming a communication tool for people of all ages.

The largest group now on Facebook is aged 35 – 44, and the fastest growing segment is age 55+.  Don’t have your parents in your network if you don’t want them to hear about that long weekend fling, OK?  Some very interesting inter-generational things going on here.

But is it really ‘uncool’?  Not yet.  The numbers only show that the older generations are catching up.  Facebook is still the #1 Internet destination for college aged people, ahead of Google and Yahoo.  The big numbers are there for ALL generations, so if you target youth, go for it.  If you want to aim at their parents, still go for it, knowing that the proportion you will reach is less than for the young set (but growing).

As always, stay tuned.  This is moving so fast that we could see that sharply UP trajectory for Facebook to turn sharply down overnight as people get tired of keeping up with their online networks.  Or, what might have the same effect, prune them back to what they really wanted in the first place:  a network for real friends only which would be in most cases much smaller, much less ‘viral’.

Yup, it’s up. Latest ComScore data as reported on the ClickZ network shows an overall gain of 13% in unique visitors to social networking sites in 2008 vs. 2007, compared with a gain of 4% in total Internet audience. (Some of us remember when the total audience was growing double digits every year — yikes!  this Internet thing is maturing — digg down for the competition to heat up, folks!)

The details in the horserace are interesting. In the first place, nearly every social networking site they tracked had substantial gains for the year.  The biggest traffic sites continue to be #1 MySpace with a 10% gain and #2 Facebook with a 57% gain — which confirms our earlier post about how Facebook is taking it to MySpace.  Facebook is growing fast from a large base, and that’s impressive.

The only losers in the chart are Yahoo Groups (minus 13%), Webshots (minus 21%), and bringing up the rear, Windows Live Spaces (a whopping minus 57%).  Poor Microsoft.  Another loser.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reported yesterday that Facebook is now twice the size of MySpace worldwide, measured by monthly unique visitors. MySpace is still #1 in the U.S., but extrapolating the traffic data predicts that Facebook will overtake it sometime later this year.  Facebook’s registered users has been growing explosively.

However, MySpace users also used their social network much more intensively.  According to socialmedia blog, MySpace users spent 17.5 billion minutes online compared with 9.3 billion minutes for Facebook, generating 40 billion pageviews compared with Facebook’s 18 billion.

Anyway you look at it, these are staggering numbers.  MySpace claims it is succeeding in monetizing this traffic, while Facebook continues to push for user growth.  For me, the more interesting thing is how these giants will push my world around.  We already know that social media generate the huge buzz we depend on for ‘viral’ marketing with content syndication and links between publishers (see the two above?).  But how is that going to affect the core function of search in the online world?

I don’t think Google is worried.  But search functions can become a lot more specialized.  Think about looking for real time insights into a developing event:  wouldn’t you search Twitter?

A couple nice posts from Techcrunch here, outlining the Microsoft push into social networking (lots of money still sitting around since NOT buying Yahoo).  In this first one, Michael Arrington tells about how MSFT leveraged its user base in Windows Live Messenger (by FAR the biggest IM network) to jump start its social network at home.live.com by importing the profiles of the IM users.  Microsoft is apparently making an energetic attempt to lock in online users with a suite of online apps and web services to encourage more commitment to the brand and to get the viral push of the network.  Arrington followed up a couple days later (today, Nov 14) with a post that points at how MSFT used its connection at Facebook (remember that $240 million investment they made a while back?) to mine user information, including email addresses, to try to get more people enrolling on their new social network.  Is this in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy?  Microsoft wants to be invited to the party but they aren’t; so, they crash it. I will be very curious watching their shiny new social network evolve.