In October, we unveiled the findings of our social shopping research. We’ve therefore had a few months to turn the data over and tease out any interesting trends …

“If you’d like to reach more women, you might like to consider incentivisation; but if you’re looking for brand advocates, it might be better to target men.”

Without running the risk of stereo-typing (!), we reviewed our data by gender and uncovered some surprising insights around shopping behaviour online. In the world of social shopping, women are the hunters; and, men are often far more “social” when it comes to sharing purchases or connecting with other consumers or brands.

We’ve created a slideshare to illustrate our findings and provide some next step ideas; and these are some of the key points:

• There’s still a marked differentiation in product categories: women are more heavily involved in clothes and beauty products; men lead in sports and technological products.
• Men gather information from a wide range of sources. Women hunt: their research is based on identifying the best prices or lowest discount.
• The female emphasis on discount is also evident in the value they place on incentives and rewards.
• Whilst women are less likely to refer to named sources of information than men; they are more likely to collaborate with others and actively seek advice out.
• Men are actually far more open to the “social” in social shopping. They lead in online mentions and post purchase actions; and nearly always trust the opinion of another consumer more than an expert or someone who works for the retailer.
• Male consumers are more open to being brand advocates than female consumers; and they are also more interested in connecting with other people who are involved with your brand.

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This week, YouTube reported the acquisition of movie recommendation engine, fflick, a service that streamed film mentions from Twitter to show users their friends’ tweeted reviews, as well as an indication of the sentiment around the film.

Whilst there’s not enough information, at the moment, to see how this acquisition will pan out; it is clear that the trend to integrate consumer sentiment and recommendation is still going strong. We’ll keep you updated with what’s going on.

Whilst details about how fflick will work with YouTube are still unconfirmed, the YouTube blog hints at the potential for using this technology to integrate YouTube videos with the comments posted on other social platforms –

“We’ve always believed that there are great conversations happening all the time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself.”

- a move which could have some pretty big implications for brands.

• Online conversations may no longer be restricted to the platforms on which they take place. This means that someone does not to be Twitter user to be influenced by a Tweet.
  

  Image via CrunchBase

• Negativity or positivity related to video footage is likely to be amplified as the commentary will be amalgamated rather than thinly spread across audiences.
• YouTube would become more social with an increase in dialogue and active conversation. This would make monitoring YouTube conversations increasingly important for brands.

• If content is streamed onto brand-owned YouTube pages, there could be a potential risk under the new CAP code relating to user generated content appearing on branded social.

Whilst there’s not enough information, at the moment, to see how this acquisition will pan out; it is clear that the trend to integrate consumer sentiment and recommendation is still going strong. We’ll keep you updated with what’s going on.

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Get excited, it’s another post by Mark where he’s been on a press trip! (OK, stop rubbing it in [that's what she said!].Ed.) Last weekend, I accompanied our client Sony Europe as they visited the MIDEM 2011 conference in Cannes. If you haven’t heard of MIDEM before, it’s an annual music industry conference where movers and shakers come together to talk about issues being faced, unveil new products and ideas, and showcase forthcoming bands in music.

Sony was there to support its recently unveiled cloud-based music streaming service: Music Unlimited. It’s a new platform which allows you to stream music on a range of Sony networked products, as well as through your PS3 (and any PC). The service went live in the UK in December and is now available to those of you based in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

President of Sony Networked Entertainment, Tim Schaaff, who is the main man behind Music Unlimited, flew over from California to engage in some of the key debates of the digital elements of MIDEM. Following an interesting discussion around the future of music in the cloud (featuring Sony Music’s Thomas Hesse, more from him later), Tim took to the stage to be interviewed about Music Unlimited and the Qriocity platform in general. MIDEM have the full interview on their YouTube channel, and we live-tweeted the conversation on the Sony Europe Twitter stream:

The following day started off with a very special visitor to the Sony booth at MIDEM – the French minister for Culture and Communication, Frédéric Mitterrand. He had expressed an interest in the service and wanted to see how it worked, so he was given a private demonstration of Music Unlimited by one its developers. Let’s hope the network access in the Minister’s office allows him to stream his favourite tracks at work!

Next was a very special Q&A put together by Sony, which brought the major players from the four major record labels into the same room to discuss Music Unlimited and music streaming in general. Alongside Tim Schaaff and Shawn Layden (both from Sony Networked Entertainment or SNE), we had: Mark Pibe, global head of digital music at EMI; Michael Nash, EVP of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music Group; Rob Wells, president of the global digital business at Universal Music Group; Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business at Sony Music Entertainment.

Again, the event was live tweeted by Sony Europe, and the MIDEM blog has a transcript.

Hopefully for those of you into music and thinking about the future of music online, these discussions are interesting and stimulating. I should also add that you can currently enjoy a free 30 day trial of Music Unlimited’s premium service – head over to http://www.qmusic.com to find out more.

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Does UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt believe the Murdoch buy-out of BSkyB is “against the public interest in media plurality”?

Will the competitions commission review do anything more than delay the merger?

This would be more of a cliffhanger if we didn’t already know that Murdoch has been spooning with the Tories since the run-up to the last general election.

On the one hand, Murdoch is feeding billions of much needed capital into the media industry and as a former journalist myself, I have to accept that a monopolised media industry is better than no media industry at all.

Besides, according to the latest Ofcom report on media consumption, the majority of the UK population gets its news from the BBC (37%), a run, but not controlled source of news, which in theory regulates media objectivity.

But I can’t shake the notion that the 22% hold Murdoch will have if the merger goes ahead does go against the public interest. Murdoch is not backwards in coming forwards with political allegiance or agenda; a rose by any other name would be called propaganda.

Many fingers have pointed at the internet for contributing towards the media industry’s downfall, but if you look to The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a reliance on advertising has done more damage to newspapers than the distribution of news online ever did.

If anything, the internet is the one thing that can keep journalism in the public interest.

There will always be critically minded people who trawl the internet for several perspectives on a single news story. As long as those people are socially active and share what they find across micro blogging platforms like Twitter; there will always be a constant stream of media plurality.

The Murdoch merger may be inevitable, but there’s no reason why we can’t put the public interests of journalism into the hands of the public.

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Last week I blogged about the convergence of social media and TV and this week news from SideReel shows the convergence isn’t as great as we first thought! SideReel, the largest independent TV destination on the web, has produced this infographic of the findings of the survey. Interestingly, SideReel found that only 10 percent of users want to broadcast what they are watching or want to watch to their friends. Twitter was the top social network for sharing though, with 29% of users using it. So, with such a high volume of people tweeting about Glee lately, it makes us wonder if any of these were surveyed by SideReel?

What do you think? Are social media and TV becoming more converged or do you agree with SideReel’s findings?

Related articles

• SideReel Survey of Online TV Behavior Finds Unexpected Results: Users Aging, Social Networking Not Important, 5% Own iPad (prweb.com)
• Consumers don’t want to mix television and social: study (econsultancy.com)

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Some of us at IF towers are self-confessed ‘Gleeks’ so we were ecstatic when the new series started last week on E4 and annoyed the haters in the office by talking about it. But it looks like we aren’t the only ones who love a bit of Glee gossiping. The Twitterverse is filled with chatter about Glee. And while us ‘Gleeks’ love talking about it, it does raise an interesting point. TV shows and Twitter are becoming more and more intertwined.

We are ‘connected’ when we watch TV, whether it be through our smart phone, laptop or iPad. We watch TV with these devices by our sides and often update the social media world with our thoughts as we go.

The infographic below shows the volume of tweets in real time during the Golden Globes ceremony in the US last week. And us Gleeks were the most vocal. The biggest spikes in conversation on Twitter were when stars of the show and the show itself won a Globe. When Chris Colfer picked up Best Supporting Actor for his part as Kurt in Glee, there were 3,394 tweets relating to it. 3,323 people tweeted about Jane Lynch winning Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the hilarious Sue Sylvester. And when Glee was announced the Best Television Series, Comedy or Musical over 3,500 people were tweeting about it – the highest number of tweets during the whole ceremony.  The hastag #Glee was also tweeted 2,262 times.

Glee also becomes a trending topic across social media when the shows are broadcast on TV. The stars of the show all have their own Twitter accounts and when it is shown in the US, they login and chat with their followers about the show. Here in the UK, we regularly update Twitter and Facebook about our favourite characters and quote from the show (mainly Sue Sylvester and Brittany S. Pierce).

The show has established a good way of keeping the Twitter conversation going when the show is both on and off air and us Gleek’s can’t get enough of it.

As more people tweet about TV shows while they watch them, it shows a growing convergence between Internet and TV. The TV experience has changed. TV is no longer a passive experience – we are interacting with others and offering our opinions.  It seems when we love something on TV we love talking about it and sharing with our followers and friends in cyberspace.

Related articles

• What Glee Means for Twitter & Television (readwriteweb.com)

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As a fanatical iPhone fanboy I was sceptical when I first heard about the concept video for this young Chinese upstart to the smartphone crown. However, the winner of the gold award at the 2010 Furong Cup ‘Digital Product and Service Design Competition’ might just have something, it is quite simply stunning.

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There are loads of free tools out there designed to provide insight into what is being said about you or the brands and products you work for on the Internet. One such tool that is worth checking out is G’lerts.  Using Google Alerts as the base of the service it provides you with a daily email (example shown on the right) that rounds up what has been happening on your Google search over the past week.  It includes some simple charts as well as the all important links to the stories Google has found for you.

There is also an online dashboard but this is where things start to get a little flaky in my opinion.  One thing to be aware of is that you only have access to the last seven days information (come on it is free).  So do not rely on this to provide you with monthly reporting. The other is that I have only been seeing results for web, no news sites, blogs or Twitter, which I seriously doubt given one of my searches was regarding flu cases this winter.

Yet, if you are using Google Alerts for tracking issues, stories, clients, individuals or anything else, over the recent past, forget the Google Alerts emails and set this up.  Oh, just watch out for that sentiment analysis. We all know sentiment is nigh on impossible for automated systems to get right – no matter what the monitoring tool guys tell you.

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With the new CAP code coming into effect on the 1^st March, the ASA has today launched a new media campaign in order to raise awareness of the code’s extension to cover content (including user generated) on websites and owned social media platforms.

Whilst there are still some grey areas in relation to what constitutes as editorial material in contrast to that deemed to be marketing material, we’d advise brands and businesses to:

• Assess any risks related to this new legislation. Where are other people writing about your brand or product – and what do you need to do to ensure that the content is in line with regulation?

• Communicate the changes to any staff involved in managing websites and social media presences, to ensure that they are ready for March 1^st.

• Sign up to the CAP Services, in order to ensure that you’re receiving the latest information.

Let us know if you think we’ve missed anything!

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We like this visual representation of the size of the internet, wow is it big!

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