Students over at the Berghs School of Communication asked for some advice on research about social networking behaviours in Europe.

As I gathered my links and sources from my Delicious account I ran into this wonderful presentation below by Tom Smith from Trendstream. The presentation was given by Tom to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. It’s well composed and extremely valuable if you’re into branding, communication, advertising, business development and social media. So I thought I should share it with you too!

Tom lists three big trends that will impact your brand in 2010 based on Social Media involvement across Europe.

1. The passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one
2. We increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network
3. Digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones

I spent far to much of my youth riding my snowboard, so getting me into MIT would probably involve both bribes and plastic surgery. But if I had, the MIT Media Lab is for sure the place to be if you wanna tap into the future for real.

Hidden in room 320 you’ll find Pattie Maes and her Fluid Interfaces Research Group. This is a part of MIT where the goal is to radically rethink the human-machine interactive experience. Pattie and her students has already brought us tons of cool stuff like the wearable computer interface and the Stiftables (that I’ve written about before).

Well, this morning when I browsed through the Shapeways blog I feasted my eyes onto the Fluid Groups latest vision for the future – a 3D food printer called Cornucopia. You heard me right. The 3D food printer.

This little beauty, yet to be seen in real life, will let you print your food. Get it? Cornucopia’s cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia’s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head.

You basically press Lasagna on the printer control panel and bam – there’s your fresh (maybe not fresh in that sense) Lasagna. All you have to do now is eat. But who knows, we might sort that problem out sooner than too.

ps. I love to cook so I’m not all that exited about this machine. But I can definitely think of days when I’d love to print a Bearnaise sauce or some ‘home made’ Tabasco. On the other hand – what do we define as cooking?

A Tweet from Gary Hayes caught my eye this morning. I followed a link and found this wonderful social media counter. Gary has built and coded this app based on data collected from a range of social media sites.

Sit tight and watch the thing start counting. After a couple of seconds you’ll grasp the power of social media. But also note the stats that tells you how many SMS’s that has been sent globally. People pay for that stuff!!!

A couple of days ago ComScore published a Top Social Media Sites 2008 list. The list that I found on Techcrunch is an interesting read since I for one thought that Facebook and MySpace would be on top. But instead we find Blogger as the largest social media site in the world. Blogger and WordPress together actually outnumber Facebook and MySpace which means blogging is the number one social media activity in the world right now.

Blogger however is only a site while WordPress also provides an open source platform to bloggers who want to host their own blog (like me). This probably means that WordPress is up there with Blogger fighting for the number one spot.

It’s notable to see that Facebook is the one with the most positive trend. Blogs are showing a healthy growth too while Windows Live has taken a dive. Next years graph will show us if Windows Live has changed their trend with the new features launched in the end of 2008. I do however miss sites like Twitter, Digg and YouTube in the results. They’re just as much social media sites as Flickr, Scribd and Facebook.
Personal publishing remains strong and we can expect more people than ever getting involved with social media in one way or another in 2009.
 

Your advertising has to change

Reaching out to consumers however will require a more complex and advanced execution of communication than ever as people distribute their online behavior on more sites than ever. 

• Creative advertising that entertains your target group becomes more important than ever if you wanna stay ahead of your competition.
• Ideas that don’t include a social spread are only half way there.
• Understanding of technology is key.
• Brands that focus on distributing their communication rather than trying to pull traffic to their own campaign sites will be the winners.
• Making sure your content is relevant and close to brand and product is more important than ever.
• One idea - visible everywhere in every way. (i.e. don’t place video in one place, place it everywhere.)
• Make sure measurement and statistics is in place to show where to feed more money and where to cut the investments.
• Change campaign set up on a daily basis in the beginning of the campaign.
• Don’t forget the technical back end of the social sites – provide applications, widgets and code that supports your overall idea.

If you end up producing valuable content to the masses that have no relation to your products you’ll end up playing clown without getting paid.

I was reading a great post on the 7 ingredients of good corporate design when I found an interesting fact: “research by the Institute for Color Research reveals all human beings make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or item within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.”

That’s something to consider when choosing, changing or adding color to a brand. One of my favorite resources for Color is Colorlovers. Playing around with Kuler is another hobby of mine.

On stage was a man called Mattias Östmar, founder of PRfekt. I’ve never heard about the guy before but what came out of his mouth as he did his presentation was extremely interesting and especially innovative. I’m a big fan of people who have been thinking about something for a long time and decide to put everything they’ve got into the mission of telling other people about it.

This was almost a year ago at Daytona Sessions where I also gave a presentation. The thing is, until today it’s been kind of hard to tell people about Mattias vision since it’s quite complex and I even think that Mattias has needed some time in order to find out how to communicate his ideas.

Now, thanks to Björn Falkevik, social video producer among other things, Mattias thoughts has been caught on film. You should definitely have a look at this.