The last days of Bebo?

Image by stefania murru

Not too long ago Bebo was the bright and shining star in the Irish social media firmament. They trilled loudly about having a million plus accounts, back when Facebook had considerably less than half that. But the worm hasn't just turned. It's fallen into a vat of toxic chemicals, emerged with super Bebo-munching hunger pangs and has just devoured the kids' favourite. Meanwhile school buses packed with migrating teens have been pulling up outside Facebook High in an endless stream. The glitzy shimmer of your own designer skin is suddenly old-skool, and the nu-skool uniform of anaemic fb blue seems to be all that the kids want. Jesus, is this a Heathers moment or what?

I don't think that the kids have just graduated because of the colour scheme somehow. You'd have to give some credit to Zuckerberg's minions for getting the functionality of Facebook to a level where the yoot would want to go there, despite the fact that it looks like corporate fascist design of the most boring kind. Whatever the motivation, be it functionality, peer pressure or both (or perhaps just a superior product), the roll call has been taken and not too many are still hanging around the Bebo gym. (Ok, I've been waiting for someone to call me out on the piss-thin schoolyard metaphor for two long paragraphs and nobody has, so I'm just going to have to shoot my own damn self. Why oh why did nobody shout Stop?)

Daily unique visitors to Bebo Ireland (source Google)


And to Facebook Ireland (source Google)

Google's impassive adplanner analytics paint the sobering story. Barely 30,000 hits shows a plummet of over 200% since January '09. Last month saw the departure of Philip McCartney, Bebo's head of sales in Ireland. It highlights the fickle nature of the younger target market, and the dangerous dustbowl that social media spaces can quickly become. Not that Facebook will be caring too much right now.

Bearing in mind that Ireland was the Golden Child for the platform, it wouldn't fill me with confidence today to be an AOL shareholder. The American mammoth bought Bebo last year for $850 million and despite a hefty redesign early this year it's been tanking steadily since.

Advertisers take note: when you're hot you're hot. Bebo no longer is.

Websites: yours v Skittles

Fragmentation: it needn't affect the overall taste.
Pic thanks to Dirty Bunny.

Skittles has gone the next step. They've pretty much done away with their 'own' website and just harnessed themselves into a Facebook page.

Kind of.

If you go looking at their pics page, it's hosted on Flickr. Their videos? A link to a Skittles page on - you guessed it - Youtube. Click on the Chatter link and you're straight to their Twitter page. Even the links to product information bring you to Wikipedia.

They've put themselves in a very interesting place: totally visible at the centre of a very public web of communications.

It's awesome, it's obvious and it's a brave step for Mars nonetheless, embracing as it does the underlying ethos of 'social' in the term social media. There are almost 600, 000 fans on the Facebook page alone. Ten more people commented on the Skittles Twitter page in the time it took me to type this paragraph. Ok, I'm not the fastest typist, but you still have to be a bit impressed, right? Right?




Yes you do. Because Skittles are allowing unflattering comment too. Look at the top of the thread above. 'wtf is with the skittles???!!! i HATE skittles!!!!' Even antisocial has a social element in it, something not lost even on the once notoriously reclusive Mars family. So at the risk of repeating myself again for the 400th time this month, watch how brands are using social media to leverage consumer opinions. People said Bring Back Wispa was a once off, and maybe it was. Here's another in Skittles. Who's next? It could be you, or one of your clients' brands. Why not, exactly? Why not?

Announcing the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland.

Corporate/Social applications of Web 2.0 for clients in Irish advertising agencies.

This is the new roadshow we're putting together for Irish agencies that have limited or no involvement with internet conversations for their roster of clients. Snappy title, right? Somehow Corporate Sapps doesn't seem right either. Anyway, this is a heads up for what we'll be doing moving forward. It's also an invitation to demand a free pint from me if I EVER use the phrases heads up or moving forward in this blog again. Utter arse clutter.

So, to redress the balance of technophobia (it ain't technics, baby) and the chasm of understanding between having a Facebook profile and using similar for your clients, the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is being compiled, nay, composed (for it will be a beautiful thing) and will be doing the rounds from March. It'll be swift, enlightening and a lot less painful than trepanning.

This is NOT for those who are already well familiar with the web's social apps and are exploiting them for clients. It's pretty much for those who think that the web begins and ends with rollover banner ads which look awful like the press ad they just did. It's an introductory course to the pros and cons of corporate engagement on platforms such as

• Facebook
• Bebo
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Email marketing
• Virals
• SMS
• YouTube
• Google

Readers of this blog are to varying degrees already in the 2.0 wave. Many of those in the agencies you work with aren't. Spread the word! The Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is a pretty informal beast, but it has great relevance for Account execs, managers, directors, planners, media and creatives. Not so much for the agency cat, but for everyone else it's essential like avoiding David McSavage's 'new' 'show' on RTE is essential. It makes housecalls too, so disruption is minimal.

More to follow.

The importance of the logo to advertising

How many can you recognise? Extra points for knowing what the people behind the button actually do.

While facebook is a relatively new company, much earlier into its career than say, a creaky 23 year old Wayne Rooney, that didn't stop Microsoft from paying $240m for a chunk. Well, more a crumb really. 1.6%. That makes fb worth fifteen effing billion dollars. Not bad for a four year old. As a tradvertiser, if you're not asking why a social bloody network where people 'poke' each other is so bloody expensive, you should possibly stop playing Scrabulous for five minutes and find out.

And then there's YouTube. It's interesting to note that on the day your new €275,000 (excluding terrestrial media buy), 40" spot for your client's SwankyShine Shampoo breaks, two hundred THOUSAND people will upload videos of their own (many featuring themselves, with their bedroom walls in the background, mostly in the US and UK and, increasingly, here) and two fifths of them will be in the music and entertainment categories, stuff that other viewers will actively seek out. You don't have to be Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry either. Any old low res tat will do, as long as it's entertaining or informative.

Good luck with the new SwankyShine spots on terrestrial TV, btw. Thank God it's got added ProPylaxaToriAmos Ten, huh? At least YouTube can never make that sweet shit.

There are one million Irish profiles on this social bee already. About half a million of these seem to be Dublin nightclubs. It's Bebo, of course. Correctly used, this is an incisive way to reach a younger demographic. It could however also be a bit like standing in a lush, green meadow and shouting at the grass to try purple for a change. You need to be punting the right product or you're wasting your time. There is an interesting early test case involving the marketing of Granard's most famous export analysed here. Rarely has thirty grand generated such intense debate.

Here be bloggers. I know the word sounds fluffy and dismissable, but when everybody's TV analysis of the US election is certain sure to have its own blogger, then pay attention. No marketing campaign on earth is more finely tuned to the nuances of its target market, and if they say blogging is necessary, you should believe them. The W is for Wordpress, the B is for Blogger. Two of the main software providers for most bloggers. There are some differences between them (like Wordpress is a commune of freeware-loving hippie geeks and, er, Google owns Blogger), but fundamentals are the same. They give you a voice and a set of ears in a very big world. It's lunchtime as I write: already 88,570 posts have been written on Wordpress blogs alone today. The simplest way to understand the phenomenal attraction of blogging is to just start one.

This is Feedburner's logo. If you publish content on the web, in a blog or a podcast, and you'd like to advertise your stuff, Feedburner can help with that. Anyone who wants it will be given regular, automated updates of your new content by Feedburner. It can also help you analyse who visits your stuff. Owned by Google. The more you blog, the usefuller it is.

If you use StumbleUpon it means you can give the thumbs-up to web content you like. Wikipedia calls it a 'personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.' StumbleUpon themselves say that it 'helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.' Seven million people are out there using it, bigging up what they find cool or useful or relevant. Sounds nerdy? A waste of time? Yeah. That's probably not why eBay parted with seventy five million dollars for it in 2007.

When an engine is developed just to search blogs, it's safe to say that bloggers have arrived as a legitimate and understood voice in the social and commercial media mix. Technorati is the engine. But it's a bit more than that now too, as it also acts as go-between between the blogger and the advertiser. Oh, didn't I mention? If you're a good blogger you can get paid by advertisers who want your space.

Digg is where people share and discover web content. Users vote on popularity, and the best stuff rises to the top. This is, in theory, all done by users. I can, also in theory, give this blog post an extra boost by submitting it to the upcoming stories section on Digg and get some extra readership thataway. In theory.

Delicious (or del icio us) is a social bookmarking site. Instead of just bookmarking a site or page you like, you instead have a Delicious account where you keep all your favourites online. Everybody else can see and share and swop. This exposes you to more of what you like, so if trans-Carpathian slapstick cookery programme outtakes is your big thing, then you'll find like minded souls on Delicious. Or not.

Twitter is a relative newcomer, having started in California (you don't say) in 2006. In essence it's a way to network with your own friends by keeping them up to date with your movements in info bursts of up to 140 characters. This can be fed through to your computer on your Twitter homepage, Facebook, a variety of other apps or, more popularly, on your mobile phone.

You get a 'tweet' SMS or email telling you and your network that Sean has found his lucky sliothar and so won't need to kill you for accidentally giving it to Mrs Quin's Charity Shop. It may sound stalkerishly obsessive, but it's getting ferociously popular, adding on users every month by the million.

Linked in is yet another social networking site, this time for business purposes. It's your CV, portfolio and business card online. Your contacts/network is an extremely valuable part of the site's architecture, as they act as referees and an endorsement of what you're about. 30 million users are registered on Linked in. I'm dismayed to think that anyone would suggest I've added it in here so that I can be readily checked out. Shameless.


Some postscript observations.

I'm guessing that not one of these dorky names went through the focus group hell that a lot of big brand advertising is forced into. Just a small bunch of startup people with a working title and butterflies in their tummies. There are lots more out there: try 10,000 new downloadable applications already for the iPhone alone, and it's an infant.

The single unifying theme for all these new social tools is their interactive nature. They rely on user input, commentary, feedback. They thrive on it, including the critical stuff. Traffic is blood. And that represents the divergence between the old world and the new. Top-down communications the ad agency way is gone, at least for the foreseeable. Not listening is no longer optional. Marketing has undergone a radical shift, and the polarity between the young who have always known social network media and how to integrate them into their lives and interests, and the 30-plus demographic who have a half-hearted interest in a facebook account at best, has never been wider. The important thing from the agency's perspective is to appreciate which one of these is the growing market, and then learn - quickly - how to connect with them.