On Digital

According to Comscore, over 25 million users accessed Facebook via a mobile phone in Jan 2010, a 112% year-over-year increase.

With its initial US-based rollout of Places location functionality on the 30+ million iPhone installed base, Facebook joins Twitter and others in embracing the growing use of smartphones for social networking.

Importantly, this change allows Facebook to expand users’ social graphs beyond such items as friends, product/service affinities and demographics to now include location.

Here are three thoughts on implications for marketers, agencies and social location startups:

According to the most recent numbers from Inside Network’s Appdata, there are currently over 82 million people - or about twice the entire population of California - playing Zynga’s social game Farmville.

Aside from the growing magnitude of the player base for social games like Farmville, a recently released Information Solutions Group / Popcap study also suggests that these games are reaching a broader and more diverse segment of the population than one might expect.

Here are some of the US-specific findings about social game players from the study*:

- average age is 48

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently on how to best leverage channels like Twitter to communicate. This post talks about a bit about the co-creation of new social experiences that drive conversation and engagement in innovative ways, with the potential to then communicate the co-creation activity across multiple channels - including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.

More than ever before, people have tools to help them co-create products and services in social environments. It’s an exciting trend that’s still very much in its infancy. Many of us are familiar with Cafepress, Zazzle and Nike’s custom shoes NIKEiD program. These were early - and still successful - examples of firms that help people remix and create everything from shoes to skateboards.

We’re now seeing signs of continued evolution of this general trend, in areas as diverse as fashion, fabrication and finance. The ideas these companies are introducing will change the way a range of industries introduce, sell and market products. For marketers, these companies all demonstrate useful and innovative approaches to genuine engagement of audiences around co-creation.

Instructables (DIY)
Part of the rapidly growing online “fab” and DIY trend, this site provides one of the best communities centered around creating almost anything - including an Electric Umbrella, Pulled Chicken, a Cardboard Frisbee and even Homer Simpson’s 3D Doughnut Trophy. The site reaches over 4 million monthly unique visitors globally.

A new experimental site, Photocracy.org, is a crowdsourcing initiative to explore whether images are useful in providing brand identity information. The people behind the site, Princeton University student Josh Weinstein and Sociology Professor Matthew Salganik, are currently collecting information on perceptions of 3 countries - the United States, China and Japan - using votes on images of those countries.  Visitors from each country are asked to choose which of 2 pictures is more representative of the country.  Since the site’s launch a few weeks ago, over 100,000 votes have been cast for comparisons like this one:

Photocracy.org US comparison images - cowboy on horse vs. Obama

Why is this useful?  To find out, I asked the people behind the project some questions.