Facebook continues to grow and this addition of our Facebook Demographics and Statistics report shows growth across all ages:

Key insights:

1. So far this year, Facebook’s US user base has grown by 21.8 % (22,474,900 users)
2. The strongest growth remains in the 55+ segement at 35.3% (3,443,460 users)
3. This time Chicago is seeing a growth spurt – almost doubling in 5 months
4. Facebook’s Privacy issues are not causing account cancellations en-mass

Refer to “Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report 2010 – 145% Growth in 1 Year” for a full look at 2009.

Analysis of sexual preferences for Facebook users in the United States

Key insights:

• Number of US gay males on Facebook: 457,960 or .4% of all US Facebook users
• Number of US lesbians on Facebook: 1,768,780 or 1.6% of all US Facebook users
• Highest number of gay males of any age is 27,640 at 19 years of age
• Highest number of lesbians of any age is 102,800 at 19 years of age
• The highest percentage of gay male US Facebook users is 1.72% at age 21
• The highest percentage of lesbian US Facebook users is 2.34% at age 22
• Total sample size is 111,281,280 users with 65.6 not reporting a sexual preference

Analysis of sexual preferences for Facebook users in US cities and foreign countries

Key insights:

• New York City has the highest gay male user count at 20,960, representing .94% of New York Facebook users
• New York City has the highest lesbian user count at 55,500*, representing 1.66% of New York Facebook users
• Washington DC has the highest percentage of gay men using Facebook at 1.20%
• Second only to New York City, Los Angles has the largest homosexual population on Facebook

*Washington DC’s lesbian Facebook user count is so high (128,280) it is questionable

• The UK has the greatest number of gay men on Facebook at 131,800 users outside of the US – .6% of the UK user base (compared to 457,960 or .4% of all US Facebook users)
• Pakistan has the highest percentage of gay male users at 2.0%, 5 times that of the US
• The Philippines has the largest lesbian user count at 842,540, a full 6.66% of users in that country

About the data:

All data was collected using Facebook’s Social Ads platform – this data is elective, meaning users volunteer this information and are not required to provide it. A full excel spreadsheet of this information can be downloaded at Scribd:Facebook Gay Statistics 2010

Disclaimer: iStrategyLabs does not represent the views and opinions of the US Army. The views and opinions contained in this post are to be taken solely as those of Peter Corbett, CEO, iStrategyLabs.

Ever since we launched Apps for Democracy for DC’s Office of the CTO back in September 2008 the world has been a-buzz with “Apps for” contests. We recently released a guide for how to create your own in order to make this kind of innovation method more accessible to people around the world. There are now about a dozen of these innovation contests being run by cities, national governments and various non-profits.

Today I’m happy to announce a new Apps initiative – one which iStrategyLabs has been contracted to create with the Army’s CIO/G6. A special thank you goes out to Tim O’Reilly – who envisioned this program and served as an advisor/connector to make it happen. Below you’ll find full details from the Army’s official media advisory (download as .DOC), and a summary is as follows:

1. A media and bloggers’ roundtable will take place March 3 at 1:30 pm in the Pentagon, Room  1E462.  Lieutenant General Jeffery Sorenson (Army CIO) will discuss Apps for the Army and take questions. To attend the roundtable in person, or if you plan to call in, please contact: Ms. Ashley McCall-Washington at 703-614-1649 or ashley.mccall1@us.army.mil
2. The competition runs from March 1st to May 15st 2010
3. There are 40 employee cash awards totaling $30,000 for mobile and web apps
4. Only 100 initial teams can participate
5. Awards will be announced in June, with public demonstrations at LandWarNet
6. Registration forms and other details can be found on AKO: http://www.army.mil/ciog6/armyapps
7. Forge.mil will serve as a collaborative software repository
8. RACE – a cloud based development sandbox will be provided. Participants can access a Windows server, Linux server and mobile app emulation software for Android and Blackberry. iPhone apps will need to be developed outside of RACE.
9. MilBook’s Apps for the Army group will serve as the core collaboration space for all participants
10. If you’re on twitter, use the hashtag #apps4army to follow the conversation

Video Overview of Apps for the Army:

Apps for the Army Logo & Banner:

Full text of the media release:

Army Launches Software Application Development Challenge “Apps for the Army”

The Pentagon, Arlington, VA (March 1^st, 2010) – Today the Army announced its first internal applications development challenge, dubbed Apps for the Army or A4A.  Open to all Soldiers and Department of the Army civilians, A4A offers Army personnel the opportunity to demonstrate their software development skills and creativity.  In return, the Army hopes to improve its current capabilities or to add new ones – all through the ingenuity of its people.

“We’re building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs,” said Army Chief Information Officer/G-6 Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson.

“Soldiers and Army civilians will be creating new mobile and web applications of value for their peers—tools that enhance warfighting effectiveness and business productivity today,” Sorenson said.  “And, we’re rewarding their innovation with recognition and cash.”

Participation in A4A is limited to the first 100 Army personnel (active duty, Army Reserve and Army National Guard on active duty, and civilians) who enroll.  Teamwork is encouraged but not required.  The Army will recognize the top submissions at the LandWarNet Conference in August 2010.  Winners will receive monetary awards; the total cash pool is $30,000.

A4A applications may tackle any aspect of Army IT – distributed training, battle command, career management, continuing education, or news and information distribution, for example.  A4A will further deviate from traditional development practices by utilizing the latest in collaborative development media.

“Apps for the Army features an innovative cloud computing service for participants to use during software creation,” Sorenson noted.  “This is key because it eliminates the constraints of hardware provisioning prior to prototype evaluation.”

The service, provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency and known as the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), offers access to on-demand virtual Windows and Linux development environments.  Participants will be able to pursue Web application development using all available programming languages supported by Windows Server and the Linux, Apache, MYSQL and PHP (LAMP) frameworks.  They also will be able to build emulated Blackberry, iPhone and Android applications.

Forge.mil will serve as the collaborative software repository for competing teams.  The tools inherent in milBook and AKO will facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, problems and solutions relevant to the Apps for the Army initiative.

The registration form, rules and instructions are located at the Apps for the Army Web site on the AKO portal: http://www.army.mil/ciog6/armyapps.  Rolling registration begins March 1, 2010.  Apps must be submitted by May 15, 2010.  Questions can be addressed to CIO/G6ArmyApps@conus.army.mil.

A media and bloggers’ roundtable will take place March 3 at 1:30 pm in the Pentagon, Room  1E462.  To attend the roundtable in person, or if you plan to call in, please contact: Ms. Ashley McCall-Washington at 703-614-1649 or ashley.mccall1@us.army.mil

For general media inquiries, please contact: Margaret McBride, 703-693-3067, margaret.mcbride@us.army.mil.

##

Photos:

Photo Set 1 (Courtesy Barry & Heidi Page)

Photo Set 2 (Courtesy Jen Consalvo)

Photo Set 3 (Courtesy Jen Consalvo)

Photo Set 4 (Courtesy Kathleen Smith)

Photo Set 5 (Courtesy Nick Witmoyer)

Posts:

http://cjnblog.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/4/big-ideas-big-action.html

http://ericaamerica.com/2010/02/03/big-ideas-big-action-capital-ideation/ [Video]

http://blog.mydailylesson.com/?p=107

Presentations and Videos:

BIBA Presentation: Any Carvin, Sr. Social Media Strategist, NPR

BIBA Presentation: Philippa Hughes

BIBA Presentation: Peter Corbett – “Ideation and Concepting Techniques to Help You Conquer the World”

BIBA Presentation: Mark Drapeau, Director of Innovative Social Engagement, Microsoft

BIBA Presentation: Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial

BIBA Presentation: Steve Moore, CEO, WDCEP

10 Tools in 10 Minutes to Help You CRUSH-IT at Marketing

In keeping with the iStrategyLabs tradition of doing things differently, we decided to create a conference to help people generate new ideas, and bring them to life with others who can help. This is the kind of thing we do for our clients/ourselves everyday – and we want to teach you how to do it too.

A deeper explanation follows, but if you’re running short  on time, here are the short cuts:

• Download the Overview PDF
• Visit the BIBA website (hand crafted by @zbgoodwin and @skeevis)
• 

So…the details:

What is BIBA?

BIBA (Big Ideas Big Action) is a conference – soft of. Sure, technically BIBA is a conference. But it’s way more than that. BIBA is a place for big brains to explore big ideas and plan for big action. It’s one day you won’t want to miss.

Who is behind BIBA?

BIBA was created by iStrategyLabs for the sole purpose of helping people understand how to create new and important ideas and bring them to life. BIBA is co-hosted by FedScoop – a full-service government media and marketing company, specializing in government IT.

Who are the sponsors?

BIBA has been made possible by the generosity of our platinum sponsors Intel, Microsoft, and Citrix. Other sponsorship tiers are available. Please contact dj@istrategylabs.com for more details.

What else should I know?

The participants at BIBA will help you build something new, or refresh something old. You can attend, but you must share ideas and plan for doing something that matters.
You will leave excited, invigorated, and connected to a group of people that will support your .com, .gov, and/or .org initiative. This is an event that will help train you to think creatively, generate new ideas for your business/organization, and bring those ideas to life.

How do I register and what is the cost?
You can register to attend at http://biba.eventbrite.com. Government employees can attend for free (valid .gov or .mil email address required upon registration). 50 tickets will be available for $100. The remaining tickets will be $250. There are 265 tickets available.

What’s the format?

The Morning

The morning of BIBA is meant to teach and inspire you. You’ll hear about some “Big Ideas in the Wild” – these are stories of real doers who’ve brought something new to life and changed the world. You’ll also learn how Ideation (the act of creating ideas) works, and how to take raw ideas and shape them into robust concepts. The idea-focused sessions will be followed by “Big Action Planning” sessions meant to help provide insight into project planning, budgeting, and management approaches for digital and physical projects.

Lastly, participants from Intel and Microsoft will share with us their own internal innovation methods that help their companies remain at the forefront of the tech industry. By lunch time, you’ll be jumping out of your seat, ready to start sketching your ideas, concepts, and action plans with fellow BIBA participants.

The Afternoon

This is where the rubber meets the road. We’re going to split the massive and elegant Woolly Mammoth Theatre space into distinct sectors where participants focused on .com, .org/.edu, or .gov initiatives can collaborate together. You’ll also use a sticker to indicate if you’re generally an ‘idea generator’ or ‘idea needer’ – this method will let people find one another to help them think through specific issues and build new ideas, concepts, and action plans.

Mid-afternoon, you’ll check back in with the group in the main theatre – presenting initial concepts and connecting with new collaborators who will help you during the rest of the conference, and beyond. By 5pm, we’ll be a bit exhausted, but those ready for a second wind will venture out into Chinatown for happy hour and/or to grab a bite to eat.

What’s the schedule and roster of speakers?

ReThink Fundraising from iStrategyLabs on Vimeo.

1) AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

2) Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

3) Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

We have been having a lot of conversations recently with people who are looking to take their online fundraising to the next level with some fresh tools & tech.  So- we thought it would be fun to host a webinar showcasing some easy ways to build a cohesive strategy.  Each presentation will be a maximum of 10 minutes, with time for Q & A at the end.

1)  Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

2)  Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

3)  AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

Call it fundraising 2.0, or call it a good way to spend an hour this Friday – either way we hope you can join us!

First a quote and then I’ll let the trailer speak for itself:

“The experiment descended into an orgiastic party. And just as quickly into hell, as the volunteers began to experience emotional meltdown. ‘All the most hard-core artists were in there, they thought they could beat the system, they’d been through crazier stuff,’ ” -Ondi Timoner

Not only have I not seen the movie yet, but Zach and Zvi have been toiling away on the aforementioned widget, so there’s been a lot of talk around the lab about WLIP…I hear my curiosity will be satisfied shortly since Ondi hooked us up with a screener that’s floating around the lab now.

If you find yourself in need of a shiny new widget for your blog, social profile, or Vista/OSX desktop, just click the share link on the widget and you’re good to go:

“We bring communities together online and off, adding value to them in order to stimulate word of mouth in an authentic and relevant way.” So how does that actually play out?

With the example of NASDAQ, we painstakingly integrated streaming financial data into the StockTwits community (something these traders thrive on) and presented them with the opportunity of a lifetime – to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ MarketSite in Time Square through a Twitter based contest.

Here’s the video recap:

We’ll be following this up with another terrific opportunity for traders to get together with NASDAQ at the MarketSite. Stay tuned and follow the @DataJunkies if you want to learn more.

There’s a striking difference between the average % of students on Facebook from a State/Private Universities verse Community Colleges.

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com

Top 10 Campuses with the Highest Facebook Adoption: State/Private vs Community College

Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com
Contact: DJ@istrategylabs.com

Key Insights:

1)  There is a massive gap between Facebook adoption at State/Private Universities and at Community Colleges, even with similar enrollment numbers.
2)  There are only 19 schools with over 50% of their students using Facebook
3)  Even the school with the highest Facebook adoption (what’s up JMU!) ..is still coming in below 70%

Of course, there are reasons for these figures to be lower than expected.  You don’t need a .edu email address to register a Facebook account anymore, so we could be missing a chunk of students. Additionally, Facebook is no longer requiring students to join a school network.

If Facebook’s Social Ads system is not correcting for this through IP targeting or some other method, marketers are not able to accurately target the college population. As an agency that focuses on youth marketing every day, it’s concerning that our industry/clients assume Facebook captures this entire population – it’ just not the case.

At best, we’re able to reach 2/3 of a college population on a campus like JMU. On average, as we’ve shown, you can only reach about 1/3!

]]> http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/08/2009-facebook-adoption-report-36-5-for-universities-vs-5-5-for-community-colleges/feed/ 1 http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/08/facebook-demographics-and-statistics-august-2009-55-grows-25-in-one-month/ http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/08/facebook-demographics-and-statistics-august-2009-55-grows-25-in-one-month/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:04:50 +0000 Peter Corbett http://www.istrategylabs.com/?p=1203 In last month’s report, we showed that in the 6 month period ending July 4th, 2009 that Facebook saw 513% Growth in 55+ Year Old Users. Fast forward a month later, and we can see how Facebook user demographics are changing this summer. The following statistics have been source directly from Facebook Social Ads system and a you can download the excel spreadsheet here.

Key take-aways:

1) The 55+ demographic is still growing fastest at 24.9%

2) Facebook user growth was 8% over the past month in the US

3) A full 40.2% of Facebook users are 35+

4) Washington, DC saw the strongest growth among major metros at a 30.5% – Hola Federales!

The last report highlighted drops in college and high school user enrollment numbers – but upon digging deeper, those figures are misleading. Users counts of those age groups haven’t declined. They’re still increasing. The drop we saw and continue to see in this report are the result of users removing their school affiliations over the summer, and Facebook’s de-emphasis on joining particular networks.

If you know anything about the work we do at iStrategyLabs, you know we’re suckers for a good unconference. Over the past two years, we’ve created, hosted, sponsored and/or co-organized so many terrific open format events – from WidgetDevCamp, to BarCampDC2, Apps for Democracy code jams, Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp, Participation Camp, Privacy Camp and more.

You could say we’ve become pretty good at getting people together for a common purpose – to share a vision, explore possibilities and get down to the creation new things. You could also say that we’re very passionate about citizen engagement as we see the future of innovation being driven by citizens empowered by their government and other institutions to do great things. That’s what our experiment Apps for Democracy is about.

Which brings me to PublicMediaCamp. When NPR and PBS began thinking about how to strengthen the relationship between public broadcasters and their communities, they turned to iStrategyLabs to collaborate on a framework that could serve as a guide for local market public broadcasters across the country to use for engaging their talented citizens to not only foster dialogue, but even better, build something together. Though most bricks will be made of 1′s and 0′s, either in the form of new civic apps or media projects, the most durable bricks these PublicMediaCamps will cement together will be human relationships. These relationship will build enduring bridges between public media and citizens with the end result being a strong mediascape and cityscape.

PublicMediaCamp will begin as a nationally focused unconference, taking place on the weekend of October 17th at American University’s campus in Washington DC. It is co-hosted by NPR, PBS and AU’s Center for Social Media, in conjunction with iStrategyLabs. But PublicMediaCamp won’t stop there – it will roll out across the country organically as other local public broadcasters pickup the torch and create their own camps in their own cities and towns. We’ll support them with a step-by-step guide for creating these kinds of innovation events, and provide a flexible technology framework for content publishing, event planning and virtual collaboration.

If I’m not mistaken, everything we do will be released under a creative commons license for everyone to use, remix and fuel their own community development efforts. We’ll release the guide and further information as soon as we can. See you at #PubCamp!

Further Reading: @acarvin has a post up on NPR.org

Today, iStrategyLabs and NASDAQ OMX introduced NASDAQ Data Junkies, a social media promotion that leverages NASDAQ’s real-time data products in order to deliver streaming stock quotes using the social media community Twitter. The Data Junkies campaign will allow Twitter users to send direct messages to @DataJunkies to receive quotes, as well as to see real-time stock prices in segmented streams on Stocktwits.com.

The NASDAQ Data Junkies campaign is a compelling example of how real-time financial data can be integrated into a streaming social media community such as Stocktwits. NASDAQ’s @DataJunkie Twitter account provides real-time NASDAQ stock prices directly into relevant StockTwits streams, and users can send “$GOOG $AAPL”-style direct messages to @DataJunkies if they wish to receive real-time stock quotes without leaving Twitter.

In the coming weeks, NASDAQ is planning to offer Data Junkies access to another premier data product – previously not available to the public – and will host StockTwits virtual lunches to provide traders with the inside tips to best utilize these tools.

Later this fall, StockTwits will host StockCamp at the NASDAQ MarketSite.  This is a physical gathering of NASDAQ Data Junkies that will allow traders to collaborate and network around trading strategies, tools, resources, and other stock-related topics.

To demonstrate Twitter’s community building capabilities, Data Junkies will also be able to send a tweet  for the opportunity to ring the NASDAQ Closing Bell at NASDAQ MarketSite in New York. StockTwits.com tweets will be streamed to the NASDAQ MarketSite tower in Times Square and will be broadcast around the world on CNBC and other networks during the Data Junkie market close.

“We’re excited to see NASDAQ OMX execute such a unique and compelling social media marketing campaign. This team really understands how important it is to add value to communities on the web to build brand evangelists and buzz. As a digital word-of-mouth agency, we felt that this was the best way to spread the word about NASDAQ’s data products while still delivering value to the Stocktwits, and broad financial community,” – Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs.

I thought it might be interesting to use Google Insights for Search to try to uncover some empirical evidence to backup my reasoning. The following slides are surprising to a certain extent – and I welcome any recommendations on better methods for trying to figure out which cities are the most tech-savvy.

You can download the full PDF here.

Tech-savvy City Rankings July 2009

NOTE: July and August data has been extrapolated and are our own projections. We used Facebook’s three month rolling average growth rate of 8% per month, and Google’s 1% per month for our analysis. You can download the data set here.

At the current projected growth rates, Facebook will have more unique visitors than Google by the end of August.  It’s interesting to see data like this and then map it back to what we’re seeing in our own client work. In sum, the past few paid search campaigns we’ve run haven’t actually been in Google Adwords as one might expect. They’ve been Facebook Social Ads campaigns.

We’re finding that demand for the hyper-targeted ads that only Facebook can provide are increasingly of interest to brand marketers. We’ve been honing our campaigns to target users by zeroing in on their companies, geographies, interests and Page fan status. For example, we can serve ads ONLY to users who are 25-30 years old who live in New York City and work for Goldman Sachs. There are 880 people that fit that bill who are users of Facebook.

We’ve seen our average click through rate at 3x to 4x what ‘typical’ keyword targeting might yeild, and at an effect CPM of much less than Google has delivered in the past. While we might be benefiting from being early adopters – the cost per click in Facebook will certainly go up as more marketers use the their platform – it’s amazing to see Google finally challenged by a rival ad product.

Bing aside – Facebook Social Ads should be Google’s greatest fear.

.Additional top insights:

• 70.8% increase in total US users over the last six months (71,901,400 total)
• 54.6% of users are female
• 142.4% increase in the number of users from Atlanta – the fastest growing metro

The most troubling statitics we’ve seen are that there are 16.5% less high school users, and 21.7% less college users. There have been rumors that these younger user groups are being aliented by their parents joining the service, and this data seems to prove it.

This nifty little graphic was provided to me by fellow DC Tech Titan and uber-community manager Justin Thorp of Clearspring/Add This. It simply shows what social networks or social book marking sites news about Michael Jackson death was “Shared” to. The “Share” button is powered by Add This is served over 20 billion times per month! Click to see a bigger image:

While Add This wouldn’t provide the scale of the y-axis, my guess is that each line is a million Shares. The x-axis counts 10 second incriments, so this is a 40 minute snapshot of the buzz associated with Michael Jackson’s death as it became known publicly.

If each line is a million shares, then news of Michael Jackon’s death was shared to Facebook almost 7 million times in a 10 second period while it was shared to Twitter at about 1.3 million times in that 10 second period.

The purpose of this post isn’t to analyse Michael Jackon’s death virality, but to look at the comparative virality of these platforms purely from a users perspective. It’s pretty clear that when given a choice, when someone sees an AddThis button on a hot news item, they are roughly 5x more likely to share it to Facebook then they are to send it to twitter or even Myspace.

I’m a big fan of both Twitter and Facebook kicking off, and running buzz marketing campaigns – but if we had one property to choose from it would certainly be Facebook.

However, the following two graphics are general enough that they’ll give you a quick, visual explanation of how Facebook Social Ads can kick off a viral loop; the second graphic gets a bit deeper and shows how experiential marketing tactics (stunts and/or guerrilla marketing executions) can kick off a viral loop to grow a Facebook Page fan base. Let me know if you want to know more.

I LOVE buzz monitoring tools – though you probably already know that if you’ve read my posts on:

1. Social Media Share of Voice – Converse, Adidas, New Balance, Nike and Under Armour
2. Buzz Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis for Disney
3. Sentiment Analysis of Obama’s First 100 Days – 52% Positive
4. SXSW Recap Post: Positive Vs. Negative Sentiment
5. Buzz Monitoring: Google vs. Microsoft Sentiment Analysis

Going beyond buzz monitoring is really important. Sentiment analysis is certainly one of the ways to take social media monitoring a setup further, but influencer identification is really what marketers are aiming for when they put tools like ScoutLabs and Radia6 to the test.

One tool that is not well know in the US (because it’s a French technology with a limited private beta) is Linkfluence and I think it’s a really unique technology for use in social media marketing campaigns. If you want to take it for a test drive, leave a comment on this post and i’ll see what I can do. Here’s a video walk through of the tool: