Social ‘Petworking’ on the rise

Social ‘Petworking’ on the rise
- Hounds are ‘top dog’ on social media compared to cats -

Andy Murray’s dog Maggie May has posed with his Olympic medal on Twitter and Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette gives fashion advice to her followers. It’s 2012 and pets on the net are bigger, better and fluffier than ever; the nation’s obsession with their pets means we are increasingly likely to give pets their own social media status from sharing photos to tweeting their thoughts.

Research from Petplan, the UK’s largest pet insurer, and host to one of the most engaged Facebook pages in the UK,[1]  reveals a 36% annual increase of pets with their own social media profile, as well as a 25% rise of pet owners sharing photos of their pets online.

Cats have traditionally dominated the World Wide Web but now it’s the socially savvy hounds who are the true social ‘petworkers’ as 7% of pooches have their own Facebook page, compared to only 4% of felines. Boo, nicknamed ‘the world’s cutest dog’ started and still leads the online trend. Currently Facebook’s most popular pet, this adorable Pomeranian has more fans than the Dalai Lama.[2] Along with Boo, four out of the top five most popular pets on Facebook are dogs including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s pooch Beast. Since the explosion in popularity of Britain’s Got Talent winner Pudsey, dogs are now 12 times more talked about on Twitter than cats.[3] Dogs also dominate YouTube with ‘the ultimate dog tease’ being the most popular pet video with over 100 million views.[4]

Despite dogs’ dominance online, cats are still strongly represented. 83% of cat owners who put their pets online also regularly share photos of their felines compared to 69% of dog owners.  Although it seems that pup parents demonstrate a greater sense of humour with 42% posting status updates on behalf of their dog.

Francesca Keefe, Petplan Social Media Executive comments: “We’ve long known that animals are the stars of the internet, but in the last year since we started tracking pets’ presence online there has been an explosion in ‘pet pride.’ Increasingly pet owners are giving their pets a more active role in their life and spreading the joy that having a pet can bring. As well as the fun side of social media, we’re also seeing more and more pet owners take to Twitter as an effective way to look for lost pets.”

Jan Rezab CEO at Social Bakers comments: “As a global social media and digital analytics company we track online engagement levels across Facebook and Twitter and over the last year we have seen a significant rise in the interaction with pets on social media. There are many social media profiles dedicated to pets, but at the top of our Facebook pages, in the animals category, are dogs with cats coming in fifth.”

Case Study

Denver the dog, owned by Morgan Taylor

Someone who has experienced the phenomenon of social petworking first hand is Morgan Taylor, owner of Denver, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. Morgan started taking photos of Denver because he was his first puppy, and he wanted to capture those moments before they disappeared into memories.  He added the photos to his Flickr account under his "Littlest Duder" set.

There was an instant interest in Denver and a picture of him in the park made it to number 11 on Flickr’s Explore page. As page views of Denver went up, new people added him to their contacts, and Denver's fame train was solidly in motion. After that a number of people contacted Morgan asking if they could post his photos on their blogs, requests he always granted. Brekend.nl was one of these blogs, and he regularly sees traffic coming through from that post. Another surge in popularity occurred when a friend posted one of Denver's photos to reddit.com, resulting in 73,000 views to that photo in a single day and 147,000 total views to his Flickr stream.

The most recent surge came from the UK’s Daily Mail posting an article on its website. Following this publication, The Huffington Post ran a similar piece, with further information about Denver; as a result Morgan received 248,000 page views of his Flickr page in a 24 hour period.

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-ENDS-

Notes to editors:

Pick of the best social media pets

http://textfromdog.tumblr.com/

http://maddieonthings.com/

http://dogswaiting.tumblr.com/

http://foodonmydog.com/

Facebook*

Pet	Number of likes	Celebrity comparison	Number of likes
Boo	5,014,674	Dalai Lama	4,179,463
Beast	880,336	Gisele Bundchen	846, 086
Joe	310, 767	Stewie Griffin	306, 483
Mishka the talking husky	286, 450	Richard Branson	249, 964
Professor Meowingtons pHd	101, 870	Al Gore	81, 194

Twitter*

Name	Number of followers
Maggie May	12,505
Choupette Lagerfeld	13,187

YouTube**

Name	Number of views
The Ultimate Dog Tease	109,375,464

Statistics from a survey conducted by Vision Critical July 2012 and the Petplan Pet Census March 2011 both surveying over 1,000 respondents

*Facebook and Twitter statistics taken from August 2012

**YouTube statistics taken from June 2012

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[1] According to Social Bakers http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/708-june-2012-social-media-report-facebook-pages-in-the-united-kingdom/

[2] Social Bakers figures taken August 2012 

[3] Radian6 figures taken between 1^st April – 20^th June 2012

[4] YouTube figures taken June 2012

Snowboarding!

Well after having tried out the wakeboarding in Spain I decided I wanted to give snowboarding a go as I didn’t feel that strapping a plank of wood to your feet was actually that scary!!  Mark snowboards and he has tried to get me to give it a go for ages, I only learnt to ski three years ago and haven’t really done much of that.

A little while afterwards Tamworth snowdome emailed some voucher codes and I managed to book two 3 hour lessons (required to get you up to standard) for £29 each instead of the normal £86 – bargain!!

Lesson one I was very nervous and was in a group of 6, 3 children and two other adults.  The instructor was really good and basically kept hold of us until we were confident in going down the slope heelside and toeside.  Lessons take place from half way up the slope.  Unfortunately one lady hurt her wrist and had to leave the lesson.  The instructor started to teach those of us that were a bit more confident to turn so we attempted that a couple of times.  I came away thinking that the toe and heelside wasn’t too bad however the turns were DIFFICULT!!

Lesson two was about learning to turn and being able to run from the top of the slope without falling over a lot.  This time I did fall over a lot trying to turn, we were in a smaller group which was great (just 4 of us) and the slope really went quiet for the last hour so we got in a lot of practice.  Luke (our instructor) was very patient and would try and explain how to do it differently so something clicked.  For example, I was struggling going toeside to heelside, and on about my 4^th attempt he said lift your toes and it clicked and I got it, before he had said weight on heels but I wasn’t doing it very well, as soon as he said lift your toes I could do it.  Ironically (typical me) he said I was struggling with the turn that most people find easy yet I had mastered the more difficult turn fairly easily!

After that there was no stopping me and we were allowed to go from the top, I had one really bad fall coming from the top which was very painful!!  However other than that I did really well and we’re going to book a recreational session again in a couple of weeks.

I loved it and am keen to go again, it looks so much cooler than skiing and the boards look cooler lol!  Though my ideal board size is 141 and there aren’t many about so I don’t know whether I will get one of my own.  I really could do with my own boots though as the newer boots I had for lesson one fit perfectly but the boots I had in lesson two were the older style and felt a bit big.  You need to be comfortable so I think I might pay a visit to decathlon when the winter stock is in.  Would like some nice white ones!!

Double Chocolate Cake with White Choc Buttercream

This is a lovely cake I made last night. The sponge is lovely and light and moist.

Ingredients
For the cake:
150g unsalted butter, at room temperature
150g light muscovado sugar
40g cocoa, sifted
150g self raising flour
1tsp baking powder
½tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 medium free range eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
142ml soured cream
2tbsp golden syrup

For the buttercream:

200g white chocolate
280g unsalted butter
280g icing sugar
1tsp vanilla extract

METHOD
1. Heat the oven to 180C/mark 4/ Fan 160C. Grease and base-line 2 x 18cm sandwich tins. Beat together the butter and sugar until pale. In a separate bowl sift the cocoa, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt, mix well. Add to the creamed butter and sugar.
2. In a measuring jug whisk together the eggs, vanilla extract, soured cream and syrup. Pour over the dry ingredients and beat altogether.
3. Divide the mixture equally between the tins. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until springy. Leave to cool for a few minutes in the tins, then transfer to cooling racks to cool completely.
4. For the buttercream, melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Leave to cool slightly. In a large bowl, beat the butter and icing sugar together until creamy. Beat in the chocolate and vanilla extract.
5. When you’re ready to serve, transfer one of the cakes to a serving platter, spread ¼ of the buttercream on top, then top with the other cake. Then use the remaining buttercream to ice the top and sides of the cake. Top with the chocolate curls.

Guess the breed?

We have guessed and guessed about what dog breeds are in Dizzy and have always though border collie and German shepherd but I got fed up of guessing so I have sent off for her DNA test. I am so excited, can't wait to see what she really is!!

Tricolour Cupcakes Attempt Two

So I decided that I would be using this method for the day and I didn’t have a practice first!

For the cupcakes:

150g (5oz) butter, softened

150g (5oz) caster sugar

100g (3½oz) self-raising flour

2 level tablespoons cocoa powder

3 medium eggs

2 tablespoons milk

Few drops of vanilla extract

For the frosting:

75g/3ox marg/butter

175g/7oz Icing sugar

good slug of Baileys

Oven - gas mark 5 or 190°C or 170°C fan.  15 – 18mins

I divided the frosting into three bowls and coloured then red and blue and left the other plain.  This method involves four piping bags!  Put each colour into separate piping bags without a tip attached.  Then flatten the icing in the bags so that they all fit in another piping bag with the tip attached.

It was tricky to keep an even pressure and not squeeze too much of the one colour so I just had to continuously push the icing down the bags.  Otherwise I didn't waste any icing like the last lot and I got the result I was looking for.  Am just dissappointed in the cases which have gone a bit floppy - need to stick with foil perhaps.

 

Tricolour Cupcakes

I have volunteered to do some cupcakes for an event at work celebrating the Olympics.  I saw some fantastic cupcakes with three colour icing and though that would look fab. http://thecupcakeblog.com/tag/jubilee-cupcake/

Today I tested one method of three colour icing to see what it looked like.  I used a standard vanilla cupcake and vanilla buttercream recipe.  For the cakes though I split the mix into three bowls and coloured them pink (didn’t have any red), white and baby blue.  They looked fab when cooked.

Onto the icing, the buttercream was split the same way and coloured as the cakes were.  This method I decided to put all three colours into the same piping bag, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be overly satisfied with the result but wanted to give it a go.

However I wasn’t too disappointed in the results, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for which I expected, although it looked quite nice.  I did find I would have wasted a lot of buttercream as you couldn’t get all the colours evenly into the bag, as it was a test I didn’t wait till I had got all three colours piping through and just piped the cakes right away (only for our consumption so it didn’t matter what they looked like).  If I had been doing them properly there would have been a fair bit of wasted icing.

Agility Wins

At the UKA agility show yesterday my lovely Rum had four wins and a second! The naughty sheltie also had a win. I won't bore you with the details, if you want to know more go to discodogs.blogspot.com


I have been working hard on the cross trainer this week to increase my fitness and it's paid off!


Here is a video of all but one of the wins: