Sam Michel's blog

Facebook: from the bedroom of an Ivy League colleague to a Silicon Valley powerhouse. It's an all-American startup dream, but one that the Brits have taken to heart and then some.

This new infographic from BLiNQ Media, who have recently opened an office in London, shows Facebook penetration in the UK (49%) leads the US (48%). OK, so obsessed might be going a bit far, but safe to say, we're fans despite any privacy concerns.

Whilst luxury brand tops the chart in the UK, it's Starbucks in the US, the other 4 top brands are all confectioners: Skittles, Cadbury Creme Egg, Cadbury Wispa and Maltesers.

If Zuck gets his way, every breathing moment will be automatically captured in a Facebook timeline. OK, so a slight exaggeration but ever more information is aggregated on social networks.

According to a recent survey from Reppler, whose service helps candidates manage their online reputation, 91% of employers are using social media to screen candidates with 67% making a decision based on the info they find, whether it's their personal triumphs to sordid bloopers.

Today is the last chance to grab an early-bird ticket to this week's Facebook Marketing Conference on Thu 6th Oct. We know everyone works late, so the early-bird lasts until midnight.

Early-bird tickets start at just £199+VAT+booking fee with the chinwag discount code, saving £100 off the regular price. And for those interested in the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp workshop on Wednesday, there's just one ticket left.

The full programme is up on the website with a few last-minute additions helping us to take an in-depth look of the impact of the f8 announcements. It's going to be a busy day with 30 speakers from leading brands and agencies, discussing the strategies of getting ROI fro Facebook Marketing.

So, that's my facetious take on the new feature, Facebook Subscribe, launched yesterday in the run-up to the announcement frenzy of the company's f8 conference.

In a nutshell: Facebook Subscribe = Twitter Follow.

Tricky question, huh? Trickier still when it's your job to explain it and set the guidelines for your organisation. Well, I think this video pretty much nails it in just 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

It's award season and time for nominees to gather public votes. Having got your eye in with some thumbs-up, thumbs-down action on the SXSW panel picker, it's time for voting in the Smarta 100 awards and the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition.

And we're chuffed that our friends and Digital Mission alumni ParcelGenie, Teamly and Zkatter have made it through to the Smarta 100, vote for them, or, if you must the other nominees ;-) - here:

IC tomorrow, a Technology Strategy Board (TSB) initiative has launched a brand-spanking new £25,000 competition for the University of Abertay Dundee to build prototypes to push the barriers of the games industry.

The Future of Games contest is designed to enable small firms to develop prototypes which can be developed into commercial models in early 2012. As part of the hook up with IC tomorrow, developers will get access to content from EMI, Tate, IPC Media and National Geographic.

I'm pretty sure it happens earlier each year, but maybe it's age. Policemen are all looking younger, too. The annual 'vote for me' fest that is the SXSW Panelpicker has opened its doors.

This year sees over 80 panels submitted from this side of the Atlantic from organisations big and small including the BBC, Iris Worldwide, FutureGov, TechHub, BBC, PeerIndex, mydeco, Somethin' Else, Madgex, Clearleft, The Economist and heaps more.

Researchers at a K.U.Leuven university in Belgium have identified flaws in AES, the encryption algorithm used by hundreds of millions users worldwide securing everything from ecommerce transactions using SSL to file encyrption tools including the popular BitLocker on PCs and FileVault on Mac OS X.

Researchers Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich and Christian Rechberger came up with a clever new attack that can recover the secret key four times easier then previously thought.

Digesting numbers is a lot easier when they're in pretty picture format, and for a visual download of the latest Twitter stats, this is a handy infographic from the folks at Touch Agency in Lancashire, they've pulled together "over 35 different statistics - it contains everything you need to know about (twitter)"

A new report from analysts Gartner suggest that some audience segments audience are showing signs of fatigue in their social media consumption.

"The trend shows some social media fatigue among early adopters, and the fact that 31 percent of Aspirers [younger, more mobile, brand-conscious consumers] indicated that they were getting bored with their social network is a situation that social media providers should monitor, as they will need to innovate and diversify to keep consumer attention," said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner.

This is a very handy resource for anyone tasked with getting stuck in to a Facebook marketing campaign. Priit Kallas at DreamGrow Social Media has put together a downloadable PDF with dimensions and sizes:

Using Google Trends and the popularity of search terms as a guide to media consumption certainly isn't bulletproof, but reading Matthew Slight's post about the shift in media consumption inspired a spot of digging. And boy, is Facebook having an impact on search terms - just look at the graph above.

I can't work out whether it must be slightly galling for Google search execs to watch one of their main rivals rocket in popularity, or are they rubbing their hands with glee at all the data gathered about user's interaction with Facebook?

Whilst Facebook and Twitter are both ramping up their sales functions in the UK, sheer numbers play a factor, but influence will play a critical factor in grabbing those marketing dollars.

I love me a Wordle. If you're the same and you're interested in some ground-breaking techniques to visualise big data in real-time this video is worth a watch.

Deb Roy's research starts with an experiment to parse 90,000 hours of video to chart his infant son's discovery of language through to analysis of online comments, sentiment and social connections during President Obama's State of the Union address.

Seven hundred million is a very big number. And with Facebook's big number comes big opportunities for branding, marketing, commerce, games, analytics and insight.

Following on from the success of Social Media Week London, Chinwag is launching "Chinwag Insight: Facebook Marketing", a brand new full day conference exploring how to harness the 700m strong userbase to create a positive impact on their business. 

The event scheduled for early Autumn will take place in central London for senior marketers from agencies, brands and media owners and is the first event (we can find) focusing solely on Facebook as a marketing platform.