Even in 2013 you find sceptics who don’t appreciate how the internet and the social web is disrupting traditional media consumption. Experian Hitwise has just published research that shows in 2012 the UK spent 37 billion hours online, but as that is far too big a number to comprehend it has helpfully distilled it into how it would look in a single hour:

Social is the biggest single element taking up 13 minutes of our time. News takes up just three minutes, which is depressingly below the time spent on shopping and alarmingly is the same as ‘adult’!

The world map of social networks is updated every six months by Vincenzo Cosenza. The latest shows that Facebook is continuing its relentless growth and dominates much of the globe. The most obvious exceptions are Russia, China and Iran. The other big two remain Twitter and LinkedIn.

In Russia the top networks are Odnoklassniki and V Kontakte, but significantly with Facebook in third place. In China it is Qzone, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. In Iran it is Cloob. Other networks worth noting are Badoo, Orkut, Tuenti, Skyrock, Xing and Mixi.

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• Twitter active users in Arab countries (stuartbruce.biz)
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Interesting new infographic showing the number of active Twitter users in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The most useful stats are the ones that show the percentage of population penetration as the 215,000 figure for Egypt reflects its larger population as despite the hype since the Arab Spring penetration is only 0.26%.

The highest penetration is in the GCC states around the Gulf. Kuwait tops the list with 8.13% penetration, followed by Bahrain 4.28%, Qatar 2.22%, United Arab Emirates (UAE) 2.16% and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) 1.37%. Palestine is also in the top half of the list with a penetration of 0.36% which equates to 15,500 active users with Jordan on 0.57% and Lebanon on 1.06%.

I’m not surprised to see Kuwait at the top of the list as when I’ve been in the Gulf doing online PR and social media training I’ve seen some quite impressive examples of Twitter being used. One that is worth taking a look at is VIVA Telecom where Salman Bin Avdulaziz Al Badran, CEO of Kuwait Telecom Co, who has a verified Twitter account and is very active even personally responding to customers. He mainly tweets in Arabic, so it’s also worth following Sarah Al-Foudari, his senior communications counsel who tweets in both Arabic and English. The @VIVAtelecom Twitter account provides customer service from 9am to 4pm during the normal working week (Sunday to Thursday in the Gulf).

Browse more infographics.

UPDATE: On closer inspection the map appears to be wrong as it is missing Ethiopia and Southern Sudan.

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• Arabic overtakes English as the most popular language on Facebook in the Middle East (thenextweb.com)

Corporate communications heads agree (82%) that discussions in social media and social networks can impact on a company’s overall reputation and licence to operate, but are split on how seriously it should be taken. Forty per cent said that criticism in social media channels was taken too seriously while 46% disagreed.

The report also looks at some of the issues facing corporate communications professionals and highlights the importance of the need for digital experience and and expertise:

However for most Reputation Council members, relevant experience in the
communication sphere is the key criterion. A particular specialism can sometimes be
valuable, but generally a spread of experience, particularly across all things digital, is
required. This reflects the fact that the media landscape is changing rapidly.

You can download the full Ipsos MORI Reputation Council Insight & Ideas report (PDF).

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A new infographic illustrates how Facebook is being used in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf. To take advantage of rapid growth of Facebook in the Middle East Facebook is opening a new office in Dubai to focus on dealing with advertisers from the Gulf. The new Facebook office will initially just have three people and will be in Dubai Internet City, one of the free zone business parks.

New research by Insites Consulting has revealed a wealth of fascinating statistics about social media use around the world:

• 347 million or 73% of European Internet users use social networks
• 50% of social network users are connected to brands
• People become a fan on Facebook because they like the product, not because of the advertising
• 36% posted content about a brand on social networks
• 61% of employed social network users are proud about their employer, but only 19% share stories on social media
• 33% of employees can’t access social network sites at work
• 60% would like to get help from their employer to share relevant content
• 25% have a written policy about social media usage
• 13% receive social media training

There are hundreds of more interesting statistics in Professor Steven van Bellegham’s full presentation on SlideShare:

I haven’t had chance to read it yet, but many of the Econsultancy reports that I have read have been full of interesting and relevant facts and knowledge.

Econsultancy will turn this into a case study and publish the results, so we’ll all be able to understand exactly how well it worked.

Incidentally it’s with reports like this that tablets really come into their own. I find it hard to imagine ever buying an electronic book, it just doesn’t match up the real book reading experience, but for free reports like this it’s ideal. Before my tablet I’d frequently find and save this type of thing, but then never get around to reading it properly. Now I can take a quick look whenever I’ve got a few spare moments.

The full text of Ashley Friedlein’s email about Econsultancy’s content marketing experiment is below:

We’ve just published a 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy briefing which is free to download. It analyses five key current trends: customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.

It’s a bit unusual for us to make something like this free. It’s an experiment in ‘content marketing’ – a hot topic in digital marketing and something we examine in the briefing itself.

Of course we’re interested to see how many visits and downloads we get, the tweets and social mentions, but we’re most interested in getting links to this page (ideally with the link anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy) to see how this impacts our natural search rankings for the phrase ‘internet marketing strategy’.

Currently we’re nowhere near the first page of Google, or other search engines, for this competitive search phrase. But could we be with a bit of ‘content marketing’? And what value might that drive to us?

We plan to publish a mini case study with the results of this experiment which hopefully you’ll find interesting and which might help put more concrete value to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of ‘content marketing’.

You can help with our experiment…

Of course we encourage you to download and read the briefing itself (we think it’s very good) but, ideally, you would send a link to this page (not the file itself – little SEO value there…) to relevant contacts or, even better, you’d link to the page from your blog, via social media etc.

In an ideal world you’d even use the anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy to the link to the page.

I’m sending this email to around 30,000 of Econsultancy’s members globally so, if you do your collective bit, then we should stand a good chance of building some great, and relevant, links…?

Will we shoot up the rankings as a result? Or get punished for the suspiciously quick build-up of links with the same anchor text? Who knows… watch this space.

Obviously we’re not incentivising you to do this in any way because that would be ‘paid links’.

All the best and thanks for any help.

Ashley

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
Econsultancy