What you need to know about Facebook 'Places' in Australia

The basics
The way it will work will be similar to other geo-locating social apps such as Foursquare where you can notify your friends of where you are via digitally 'checking in' to physical locations. The difference with Facebook is that you can also tag your friends who are with you, making Facebook Places a more social geo-app than Foursquare.

Limitations
Places requires users to have Smart Phones, with only 5% of Australians accessing Social Networking site on their phones, I think we should proceed with caution in regards to the uptake of this functionality.

Edit:
According to Nielsen Internet and Technology Report 2009, 43% of Australian Internet users owned an Internet capable (“3G/Smartphone”) / which can mean Nokia N95 or iPhone or Blackberry at Dec-2009. Hat tip Sam Granleese

Also as Nic Hodges points out, that number of people accessing Social Networks from phones is closer to 18% (using Nielsen latest stats as a guide). That sounds about right to me.

Businesses and Facebook
You can also integrate a Facebook Page to Places (click here for tutorial), allowing you to further spread company presence and also show how popular your company is in the real world rather than simply online.

Side Effect
One side effect is that it may take away from organic growth for Pages which has recently been going crazy for brands. The early word from the States is that the organic growth will look to decrease by half as they give more priority to Facebook Places in the Facebook Newsfeed.

Word from Facebook Australia
In terms of a launch date in this market, the word from my mate at Facebook Australia is that the US has not given them an exact date for roll out however they are working with a local Retailer to roll out an execution. My hunch is that it will be in the next month.

This post was collaboration between TCO’s Community Manager Michael Goldstein (Mickeyg77) and I. If anyone knows a launch date, please share.

The Justin Bieber Cookie Cutter

I am genuinely surprised at how easy it is to copy this formula of success that Justin Bieber has created, Cody Simpson and Jordan Jansen are two Australians who are following the exact formula of success as Bebs. Launching their careers on Youtube, uploading covers to the site, they have the same look, same style of music (Cody has even taken the next step of collaborating with a popular rap/hip hop artist Flo Rida. Even the style of video is the same.

Cody Simpson


Jordan Jansen


I thought that it would not be as easy to replicate such success, but both artist have over 60,000 subscribers on Youtube and are currently in the Top 10 Most Subbed Australian Youtubers?!?! Wow!

Forgetting the Distribution Strategy.

There has been two great pieces of online Australian created branded content that have caught my eye recently. It has got me really excited that we may be seeing a second coming for branded online content. However I am worried we may be falling into the same trap that we did 2 years ago when the first bubble burst.

Burn


Walking Tours of Melbourne


Marketers have been wary to reinvest in online content with one major problem....scale. Spending $100,000 to get a few thousand views of content is not equitable.

I think this problem is due to the creators of content not having a distribution strategy in place when they create the content. I think for projects to kill it these days they need a solid content distribution strategy that has a mix of seeding and paid media making sure that the content flies online. Aden picked up on this as well with the latest Bacradi project which was amazing content with little to no content distribution strategy.

Cannibal Trolls

According to Wikipedia 'A troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response'.

E.g All the comments that lead to this....


However there is a new species of people called Cannibal Trolls. They are people who lure trolls into their trap and make them waste their time baiting who they think is an innocent victim when really they are thriving off the attention. The best example of this is Angry Ginger kid. He is very measured with his response and knows exactly what he is doing when he is provoking this response.


I think we have seen this recently on Mumbrella with Jothy Hughes with his baiting of all the usual Mumbrella commentors with his 'Guaranteed Model of Publicity'.