ChasNote

The JFK Library has enlisted the Martin Agency to create a Twitter account for JFK, as if he was tweeting from the campaign trail in 1960. Follow it here.

Great marketing for the JFK Library and a novel approach to teaching history.

Full collection, including a link to a site that sells them as posters, at Laughing Squid.

Boing Boing suggests the faux vintage ads must be the work of Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. “These are too cheesy to be the work or Don or Peggy. Let’s be honest here.”

I came across some eMarketer data this week that initially struck me as obvious: Social media users are more likely to trust blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates authored by friends than those posted by brands. In the “trust completely” column, friends are considered two to three TIMES more trustworthy.

Makes sense: human friendships are built around trust, and while we sometimes trust brands, brands aren’t friends or humans.

Of course brands aren’t people, but they’ve long understood that humanizing themselves (itselves?) — by hiring likable pitchmen and pitchwomen or creating cute animated characters, for example — makes us more likely to think of them as friends. When they act like humans (or tree elves or fun-loving tigers), we often forget they are corporations trying to sell us stuff. We start considering them pals and trusting them.

In social media, though, brands aren’t doing a good job of acting like our human friends. A recent report by digital agency 360i (see Forbes) shows that consumers use Twitter to converse with their online friends — @Replies, in Twitterspeak — while brands predominantly use social media to talk about themselves.

“When marketers use Twitter, 360i says that 75% of the time they are using it to disseminate news or information about the brand, as opposed to actively engaging Twitter users. Consumers are only engaged by the brand approximately 16% of the time. Putting that in perspective, consumers engaged in conversation with each other 43% of the time.”

And it turns out that behaving like a human in social media — listening and conversing rather than spouting from a soapbox — isn’t just an academic exercise or a contest to rack up follower counts. Charlene Li at the Altimeter Group recently ranked brands into a leaderboard of what she calls the Social Media Mavens, the brands that most actively engage with their followers, and cross-checked her data with financial performance of those companies. It turns out that acting more human in social media is good business.

“These Mavens on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.

“Note that we are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on [customers] than the competition.”

If you’ve got 17 minutes, and you’re interested in why Facebook is “defaulting to social” (despite the PR hoopla) and why Google’s PageRank algorithm is about to face stiff competition from Facebook’s Like signal, watch this video from the start.

If you’re a short-attention-span ad wonk, skip forward 13 minutes and 30 seconds — to where Kevin predicts syndicated Twitter ads that are targeted based on “interest graphs,” and a future where you no longer hate ads.

Twitter and Facebook are growing like weeds, with 60 million and 400 million members each, respectively. Last month Twitter announced that its account-holders are churning out 50 million Tweets per day, to ever-expanding networks of friends and colleagues (and, let’s be honest, robots). According to stats published in DailyFinance:

“Web analyst firm HubSpot estimates that the average Twitter user now has 300 followers — compared to 70 in July — and follows 170, a substantial increase from 45 in the middle of the year. And, users are tweeting more, with the average output growing from 120 in July to 420.”

There’s a danger to looking at averages, though. Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears each have more than 4.5 million followers (see WeFollow).

And while total Twitter membership is up to nearly 60 million accounts, visitors to Twitter.com remained flat in the 2nd half of 2009. Again from DailyFinance:

“According to data from Web analytics company Compete, Twitter attracted approximately 22 million visitors in December 2009, which was pretty much unchanged from June levels. From its best month, August, the visitor metric fell by 770,000.”

Twitter usage on client and mobile apps such as Tweetdeck isn’t counted by website traffic firms like Compete, but it’s not logical to me that the percentage of Twitter users who use downloadable clients, which requires a bit more technical know-how than visiting a website, would grow faster than usage of Twitter.com as its overall audience has expanded to a more mainstream (and less technical) population.

According to BarracudaLabs, only 21 percent of Twitter accounts are active, if you define “active” as an account holder who has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and has Tweeted at least 10 times. (See PC World.)

Facebook has a similar problem. Total membership is bigger than the entire human population in the United States and those members push 5 billion pieces of content into Facebook newsfeeds every week. But the activity rates per person — sharing links, photos or status updates — are falling. From FastCompany:

“While the actual raw count of data shared has skyrocketed, the overall percentage of Facebookers who post status updates daily has actually fallen. Which means that on the whole, Facebook’s users may be much less engaged with the site. And much of the increased content-sharing is coming either from a proportionally smaller group or from the much larger number of pages being published — many of those, however, are promotional vehicles for other companies, particularly local businesses.”

With total audience numbers as big as Facebook’s, I’m not downgrading its odds of achieving world domination. But declining engagement rates aren’t a good thing. What is Facebook if members aren’t participating? Anecdotally, I know many Twitter lurkers who actively use the service as vital news aggregator. The non-contributing Facebookers I know tend to lose interest altogether.

Anyhoo, because I know you need to know, here’s what I’m up to: Awwww, cloudy Saturday morning in SF!! #ihatecloudydays

(Thanks, Larissa Dinh, for pointing me to several of the above articles!)

From NYT’s Dealbook blog:

“While Twitter has nearly equaled Facebook in awareness among Americans — 87 percent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year — it still lags behind in use, Teddy Wayne writes in The New York Times.”

Twitter usage is still way, way behind that of Facebook but it’s enormous awareness will keep Facebook on its toes, especially when you look at this other data point from the Edison Research study:

“[Twitter] users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as other users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands.”

Hey, imitation is the highest form of flattery.

From the Mashable report:

“To us, the system sounds very familiar to Digg Ads. Digg Ads appear in the homepage stream as sponsored Digg submissions. Based on the number of diggs, buries, and clicks an ad receives, that ad will either stay on the homepage for longer and decrease in price, or it will be ‘buried’ and the advertiser is charged more for submitting a bad ad.

“While clearly there are differences between Digg Ads and Promoted Tweets, the same concepts and philosophies underly both: users know the difference between a good ad and a bad one, and thus they should get a say as to which ads appear in their streams. It’s not a bad strategy on Twitter’s part: Digg Ads have been successful thus far.”

I mean, what can I say? Twitter’s approach to advertising sounds GENIUS!

From Pete Cashmore’s latest guest column at CNN:

“In May 2009, YouTube announced that 20 hours of video content was being uploaded every minute. This week, the video sharing giant revised that statistic to 24 hours per minute. Last month, Twitter announced that users are producing 50 million Tweets per day, up from 35 million per day in 2009. Facebook, meanwhile, reports that users are posting 60 million status updates per day — in October 2009, that number stood at 45 million per day.

“With this content tsunami growing faster than our ability to consume it, Digg seems perfectly positioned to solve the content consumption crisis.”

(Disclosures: I work for Digg and Pete Cashmore is founder and EIC at Mashable, a site whose ad inventory is represented by Federated Media, my old employer.)

Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute has put together a concise cheat-sheet for CMOs looking to understand how to leverage social media platforms in support of their brands. Color-coded for easy reading: Green represents opportunity and red equals waste of time.