Coming to your screen

New to Google's YouTube, a subscription service to as many as 50 channels, enabling new content, such as TV shows and films. 

According to Google Chair Eric Schmidt, the average Brit now spends 20 minutes a day on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Facebook launches video advertising in its newsfeed in July.

The new Joanna Shields

We wish former IPA President Nicola Mendelsohn well as she steps into the VP EMEA role at Facebook!

551 days and $ 1bn better off!

I was only introduced to Instagram one month ago but it's been catching on like wild fire in my family.

So it was interesting to see it's not just us that like it, but another 27 million people too!

Interesting Netimperative discussion on the brand's valuation by Facebook.

Interesting Numbers

About Facebook

- 800 million: users
- 500 million: access every day
- 350 million: access via mobile
- 2000: the number of people who work at Facebook

About Average Friends on Facebook

- 5: your inner circle of trust
- 15: your sympathy group
- 50: people you can keep up to date with
- 150: the physiological limit of our brain's ability to interact with people

About LinkedIn

- 130 million: sign-ups out of a global universe of 600 million professionals
- 2: new sign-ups per second

About Google

- 5 billion: users by end of 2010
- 5 billion: searches a day
- 3 million channels: (the number of channels on YouTube in the next 5 years)
- 250 million: the number of websites Google searches
- 20,000: the number of people who work at Google

About Mobile

- 80%: the percentage of clients who don't have a mobile-adapted website
- 95%: the percentage of mobile apps that fail!
- 835 million: the number of people who currently use smart phones
- 5.6 billion: total mobile phone users and the potential for growth as
smart phones take over

About Yelp

- 20 million: the number of reviewers who drive the quality of their
data

About Twitter

- 800: the number of people who work at Twitter
- 8000: the record for the number of tweets per second (Beyonce
announcing she was pregnant in the MTV movie awards)
- 100 million: active users
- 600,000: new users every day
- 250 million: tweets a day
- 57%: the percentage of active users on mobile

About Zynga

- 3300: the number of people who work at Zynga
- 55 million: players per day
- 13: the number of different languages they play in
- $52 billion: the size of the gaming market

"This journey is 1% finished: the first 750 million users are the easy ones"

So said Andrew Bosworth, chief engineer at Facebook, Palo Alto, at an IPA VIP dinner on Tuesday, in advance of the launch of the UK's first Facebook Studio Live.

Inspiring stuff, and a wake up call for advertisers. Continuous innovation is the name of the game. "Move fast, and break things" is the motto!

Will the face of 2011 be social media?

I suppose we all know that the answer to that question will in some way be 'yes.'

Social media platforms are now more widely used than their railway equivalents - and you don't have to hang around waiting for a dirty, one-way journey, packed in with strangers. Social media offers conversations with friends wherever and whenever you want to hold them.

For many in the west, India is synonymous with the image of packed trains on a largely unreliable service. Interesting, then, that WARC News is reporting this morning on the popularity of social networks in India too. According to WATConsult, the social media agency, total penetration is some 60% which, when you consider the vast population of friends and strangers in that country, is pretty impressive.

In an article in yesterday's Guardian it was reported that almost half of the global online population visited Facebook at some point in 2009. Already the largest UK display advertising publisher, showing 24.4bn ad impressions to about 30 million web users, Facebook is also the world's biggest photo site. An average of 2.7 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every 20 minutes. In an online comment on this article it is suggested that over 750 million photos were uploaded in the first 48 hours of 2011 - or over a million photos every four minutes on average!

So yes, one way or another, social media will be the face of 2011

Social media rules

According to WARC the top search phrase on its site in 2010 was 'social media.' Facebook was also the leading brand being searched for (sought after?) on the WARC site, confirming users' thirst for more content and comment in the social media area. Feels almost omnipresent now doesn't it? 'Press Button B' could almost only have happened in an episode of Dr Who it seems.

On the IPA site, of the top six successful search terms used on the site, 'behavioural economics', 'case studies' and 'databank' were all in the top six. This reflects also the desire of users to understand better the decision-making processes that result in hugely effective advertising and marketing case studies, published for us by WARC. Unsurprisingly the IPA databank of case studies increasingly demonstrates the role played by social media in advertising effectiveness.

Refreshingly, cider was the product category most frequently searched on WARC in 2010. Love pear cider and love seeing brand entries for Copperhead, Strongbow and Magners all being submitted as case studies to the annual IPA Effectiveness Awards competitions: over 1400 case studies are available for download from the IPA databank. Cheers