These big four social networks are the most social, most active, most feature rich communities. Or are they? They certainly are the full featured social networks in the traditional sense. But there are many quiet communities out there that are building very significant numbers.

Should we be giving more thought to these quiet social networks?

Some things to consider

• Pandora is growing their member base faster than LinkedIn
• Farmville has more active monthly users than Twitter
• Gmail will soon be larger than Myspace

Yes, Pandora is just for music and has not built in many social tools. And Farmville is just a game with little interactions outside of clicking on farm images. And Gmail is private and email and not a basis for a true social network.

This is the thing though. These are massive user bases. And they are highly active user bases. A much larger percentage of Farmville and Gmail uses are active daily users than Twitter and LinkedIn.

Gmail is of course the biggest threat to somehow leverage this user base into a traditional social network, as recent rumors have Google entering the social networking sphere with a new product soon.

But anywhere you have these types of numbers in a community, already interacting with media or other people, and there are possibilities for marketers, for investment, and for integration.

What communities are you seeing quietly acquire large audiences?

Occasionally I get the question “How long will there be a need for a company like Social Fresh?”

My answer is usually “I have no idea, but I think we are still just at the beginning of this thing.”

Where Do We Stand?

The community of thought leaders in social media is still very small. There are still only a few hundred community managers out there. And while there are a lot of marketers learning social media very quickly and doing some really cool things, have no fear. The audience for social media education is only growing.

Most companies are at least dipping their toes in the social media waters. Few are diving in head first (See Zappos, Dell, Best Buy, Intel).

Where Are We Going?

The education gap is growing because companies are learning just how much social media can do – how many of their employees they need to train to bring them up to speed.

A company can “be social” with just a community manager talking to a few customers on Twitter, Facebook, and a blog. A single employee. A small commitment.

But once they decide to invest in becoming an holistic social company, the education gap grows. The number of people they need to bring into the know explodes.

• Multiple departments need training on how to integrate social
• Departments must learn how to work together through internal social tools
• Chains with thousands of employees on the ground need training for consistency
• Groups of volunteers need training to support non-profits
• Groups of champions need guidance to support brands
• Sales forces need to learn
• Teachers need to learn
• Call centers need to learn

The potential for how social media can change businesses inside and out is unending. And with each realization of these oppotunities, the education gap grows.

For now, the number of people looking to learn social media, looking to utilize this new tool set for business, is small compared to where it will be.

So I say again, we are still at the beginning of this thing.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

Foursquare is the new hot girl at the party and everyone is looking at her. Everyone is saying hello. Everyone is flirting. AND everyone is wondering if there is really anything more there than just a pretty face.

Are some retail stores seeing a small bump in sales? Yes.

Are some larger brands getting nice PR bumps because of the unique ways they are engaging? Yes.

There is a whole list of Foursquare case studies with companies, large and small, experimenting in the space. But is Foursquare a legitimate marketing tool or just another game? Another niche tool for geeks?

Two big questions.

1. Will Foursquare grow beyond being a subset of Twitter users?

This is crucial. Foursquare’s benefit to businesses is based on data and using that data to make money either through loyalty (old customers) or advertising (new customers). The real money for Foursquare is in both the advertising opportunity and the ability to scale the service large enough for a freemium business dashboard to create revenue. Hopefully both happen.

In order to get to either place and create real revenue, scale is crucial. And scale does not exist if the majority of users are the same early adopters and techies that drive Twitter.

2. Do people really want to open up their location to businesses?

One of the key benefits of Foursquare that may help it gain mainstream adoption is how useful it’s data can be to consumers. Knowing where all your friends are or who has suggested positive things about restaurants near you are powerful motivators for members to share their location.

But, sharing that same info with businesses that might contact them without opting in, or with businesses pushing them ads is a different story. We have seen the Facebook uproar recently. Foursquare has not shared too much of this data with businesses yet. But it is important to consider how a larger user base will react to Foursquare opening up their data. To make money they need these options.

Will Foursquare overcome these challenges to be the next Twitter, the next Facebook? Or is it just another pretty face?

Image Source: ShutterStock.com

Edison Research is launching their “Twitter Usage in America 2010″ report today with a live webinar. The report is part of their full Internet & Multimedia Study and includes some quality data. Here are some of the highlights:

• “The percentage of Americans who are familiar with Twitter has surged from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010.” We can all blame CNN’s Rick Sanchez for this.
• There are really only 17 million Americans using Twitter. The inflated number of accounts represents SPAM accounts and users with multiple accounts.
• “The percentage of Twitter users who are African-Americans in the current U.S. population… stands at roughly 25%.”
• “The majority of Twitter users are “lurkers,” passively following and reading the updates of others without contributing updates of their own.”
• “The percentage of Twitter users who follow brands is more than three times higher than similar behavior expressed by social networking users in general.”
• “A significantly higher proportion of Twitter users update their social networking profiles – and access Twitter – using mobile phones than the average user of other social networking sites and services.”
• “Only 7% of Americans are aware of location based social networks”
• “Twitter users are more likely to have improved their financial situation in the past year compared to the total population (32% to 18%)”

Twitter Users are Unique

There are still, relatively, very few of us living and breathing Twitter on a regular basis (and sharing our breakfast choices).  The users driving the content on Twitter are not reflective of social networking users as a whole. They are very much early adopters and more comfortable interacting with brands. This is great for marketers looking to engage influencers.

“The fact that Twitter users are far more likely to follow brands and engage in brand conversations makes them responsive to marketing, but also considerably different to mainstream Americans,” said Tom Webster, VP Strategy adn Marketing at Edison Research.

Marketers can clearly find in Twitter a healthy community of influencers ready to engage. But as Tom points out, Twitter users are a bit of a different breed. Marketing strategies that work well on Twitter may not hold true within other communities. Many marketers would no doubt agree with this assessment, but it is very interesting to dive into some of the data behind it.

Twitter Has A Strong Black Community

Why are so many African Americans on Twitter (There are Black People on Twitter)? Who knows. Why do so many white people love Frisbee Sports? It does not really matter why, but it’s important as marketers to understand the demographics of the channels we are marketing in. Depending on the brand in question, this may or may not be important to your marketing. Nevertheless, this demonstrated even more that Twitter is an outlier.

And now for a couple surprising numbers…

Twitter Users Make More Money?

If you were on Twitter in the past year, you had a significantly higher chance of improving your financial situation. The question is why? Is it because Twitter users are more likely to be business owners? Entrepreneurs?

“WTF is Twitter?” is so 2009

Oprah, Ashton, The Real Shaq oh my. Thanks to some celebrity and media love affairs with the blue bird in question, Twitter has shockingly infiltrated 87% of American brains. To jump from 5% to 87% in 2 years is quite the leap. So while 17 million Americans are the only ones truly using the service, hundreds of millions know we are here. Twitter can continue to have a large influence (as large as Facebook) on what society talks about with a much smaller core user group.

Thanks to Edison for the great data. Check out the the webinar or download the full report.

But, for a campaign that can get people to the internet pretty easily, their integrated social media, if you can call it that, reminds me more of any empty roll that needs to be replaced.

Yes they have two of their commercial’s characters on Twitter, and a Facebook page, and the poll itself with a nice map of results. But these small efforts are social for social’s sake with very little thought toward tying it all together. They even went out and interviewed folks on the street to add to their actor interviews and put all of it on Youtube, but check out the views on those videos. There is obviously nothing being done to promote them.

It smacks of a brand or agency that thinks social media is suppose to be cheap and easy. I see a multi-million dollar traditional ad campaign and a dollar store social media effort.

There is no effort to engage the consumers, whose attention they are buying with some major TV spots, in a long term way. I am sure the media buys will produce a short bump in sales and if that is all Cottonelle wants, then fine, good show.

But in 2010, pointing people to a micro-site that does not extend the relationship beyond the length of a media buy, is traditional advertising and less effective. The opportunity is to build a community, to engage the consumer in a way that creates a longer term relationship (meaning more money), to ask questions of consumers, to answer questions, to get the people they are pulling in with a clever, simple question, and convert them into spending more time with their brand. Consumers want dialogue.

It is a cute campaign Cottonelle, but perhaps you should consider building consumer relationships with a longer shelf life than say, I don’t know, a roll of toilet paper?

Jason Falls delivers a little Gary Vaynerchuk impersonation at Social Fresh Nashville, a social media conference for marketers.

A good portion of Social Fresh spoke to what social media can really do for business, including Jason’s talk on “Moving the Needle, Social Media for the Bottom Line”.

In the quick video above, taken at the Social Fresh photo opp zone, Jason recaps why the social media purists (dirty hippies and treehuggers) do not get that if social media is not making you money, it is just a hobby.

While I was in Florida preparing for Social Fresh Tampa on Feb 8th, I got the chance to meet and speak with Chris Arnold, Director of Communications for Chipotle Mexican Grill, and we discussed their slow, but deliberate, adoption of social media as a corporate controlled marketing channel.

From taking over a customer created 500,000 fan Facebook page to supporting consumer driven blogging, Chipotle is focused on staying true to their word or mouth and earned media roots while evolving their social media efforts.

Not everyone has the good fortune of a massive and committed fan base, like Chipotle. But for them, their decision to allow their social presence to happen organically is sound. It reminds me of Apple’s no social media policy and Ford’s no blogging decision. When a business generates online communities with their brand loyalty alone, they can definitely skip some steps.

I have been using Foursquare for months now in other cities. When it hit my hometown of Charlotte a couple weeks back, I was surprised how many people jumped on. I had 150 friend requests the day after Charlotte was opened.

UNC Charlotte, my alma mater, only took about a week to see the potential of Foursquare on their campus. Last week they became the first University in the country to offer promotions through Foursquare across their campus.

Foursquare Goes to College

I interviewed Brian Baute, IT Director for Business Services at UNC Charlotte, about what their goals are for using Foursquare campus wide.

According to Foursquare, the only other campuses using their promotions are Columbia, who has one promotion running for their campus movie theater, and Harvard who is developing something campus wide.

College students are an interesting niche for testing Foursquare. While they love their smart phones and Facebook, they are not in tune with much else in the social space.

However, Foursquare is similar to Facebook in the fact that it let’s you see up to the second information about your friends. Foursquare is simple in that respect. I can see college students, who are always looking for the next party, latching on to the “where is everybody at” aspect of Foursquare pretty easily.

Foursquare is a location-based social network. Users “Check-in” at venues via mobile phone, find where friends check-in and are then awarded points and sometimes “badges.”

Dead Simple -  There are no photos, videos, comments, or links. It is for you to find where your friends are and discover new places to check out. Those two activities are in high demand for most people. Foursquare is more like Facebook than Twitter in one major way, it focuses on your existing friends. It helps you see where they are right now. Or helps you let your friends know where you are. No more strangers passing in the night.

The Game is the Hook – Even though it is simple and offers value, some people just will write it off as one more of many location based social networks. The game helps get people over the hump of why to join. The game will not work for everyone and many lose interests in games over time. But it is a little bit of sugar on top that will entice many to try it. The information will keep them there.

Businesses Get to Play Right Away – Yes, there is great data being collected on Foursquare. And Yes, there will ultimately be ads I suspect for businesses to pay to play. But right now, any business can go in and watch the check-ins at their establishment. Offer promotions and discounts to anyone near their part of town. And interact with existing and potential customers in a new way. Some location based networks have been around for a year or two and still do not have these opportunities.

Made for Mobile – Foursquare is built from the ground up for smart phones. You do not have to go to their website. You can sign up incredibly easily and quickly. The user interface is very clean and intuitive. The locations can be created on the fly very easily. You can access phone numbers for locations and friends when needed. The platform works perfectly on the go, something that, ironically, many location based social networks have not perfected.

I absolutely crave face to face time with people. I see offline relationships as the heart of marketing.

This is why I keep going to conferences despite the face that most conferences suck. I am in the heart of this world now since creating my own social media conference series, Social Fresh. Here are just a few of the things that encouraged me to find my own solution.

The Four Horsemen of the Conference Apocalypse

Too much hyperbole there?

1. No Networking – Many conferences just cram as much content in as possible and lose track of encouraging conversations. Provide physical space that encourages connecting. Provide time in the day that allows connecting. Create reason for people to connect.
2. Bad Speakers – Where to begin… Unreadable slides, reading from slides verbatim, simply boring, no examples, no case studies, and please, I do not need your life story as an intro. Cut to the meat.
3. Too Big – Don’t get me wrong, I love SXSW and Blogworld, and Web 2.0 for the shear scale of what they do. And they fill a need. But at some point, finding good content, relevant connections, and just navigating these events successfully takes too much effort.
4. Too Serious – Yes we are there to learn. No, I don’t need an all day happy hour. But, please lighten up a bit. Throw some spice into the recipe. People like getting away from their desks. Make the day a little more than just instruction. Make it an experience.

Complaints that don’t bother me so much

1. No Wifi – I get it, we all want to tweet about an event. It is worth complaining about, but let’s face it, there are plenty of venues and cities that just have crappy cell and wifi capabilities. Wifi does not make an event. And I can attend a great event with no wifi and get just as much out of it.
2. Bad Food – Again, I am not there for the food.
3. Too Expensive – It is business. Charge what you want. I either think it is worth it or I don’t. Conferences can be expensive endeavors. This value equation is completely different for each person.

Over the last year I have shifted from spending most of my professional time on social media consulting to spending most of my time working on Social Fresh. It is much more rewarding. But it is also not for everyone.

Social Fresh is simple. It is specifically for marketers that want to see the full potential of social media. We bring big brands and smart people in the social media space to a city near you. Big event content, small event networking and discussion.