Ms. Adverthinker

Yesterday, I wrote about Google+ and the reasons for brands to consider using it. And then yesterday afternoon, I discovered a report that said Google+ users were more satisfied with Google+ than Facebook users were with Facebook. How timely! My favorite quote in the article:

“Facebook is the addiction we hate, but just can’t kick.”

It is so true. Facebook has become on our connection to friends, family and even news–world, national, and local. It is the one place we can go to get all the information we have selectively aggregated for our interests and needs. Which means that we are highly dependent on it and addicted to it (even checking while in the bathroom).

But why do we “hate” it and why are satisfaction reports saying that we don’t love it as much as we used to? My speculation is that in addition to just not liking that we need Facebook, we are frustrated with Facebook’s constant changes (it is just as frustrating for individuals as it is for marketers). It is hard to keep up and adapt to the changes, though eventually, everyone gets over it and loves the new things. And we are never sure if our privacy settings remained in tact, or even how to check to make sure that they are set as we want them in the first place. I’ve talked to many people that are on Facebook, but really don’t use it because they are scared that something about their posts won’t remain private.

“The survey attributes Google+’s high marks to the social platform’s ‘superior commitment to privacy,’ lack of traditional ads, and overall better mobile experience. Those surveyed by ACSI expressed distaste for Facebook’s Timeline feature, ads and privacy policies.

Enter Google+, where people are supposedly more satisfied. Google+ has a few features that differentiate it from Facebook. And it is a little more obvious as to how to control who sees your messages. And it is too new to have a lot of changes flying at us constantly. But one of the sole reasons for Google introducing Google+ was to use your Google+ content to customize your search results. So concern for privacy can not be the reason that people are more satisfied with Google+ as compared to Facebook. Google will be making relevant recommendations based on our profiles, habits and location. Google+ is socially annotating our search results with friends’ activities and recommendations and garnering an uptick in click-through rates of 5-10% as a result. This can be a good thing, or a scary thing, depending on your point of view.

I like the idea of Google+, but I am not a committed user quite yet. It is overwhelming to me and I don’t know as many people using it regularly yet to be able to count on it to get all of the information I need and want. Ultimately, I can see myself using Google+ differently than I use Facebook. I am quite addicted to Facebook as a connection and information source. Both networks have their places in our worlds and may not need to be compared to each other if we are going to use them in different ways.

These kind of requests pop up throughout our days on a regular basis. And they are good questions to ask. It shows thinking about new channels and an understanding that jumping in without planning is not usually the best approach. This particular question came up yesterday, so it seems timely to share some considerations towards a decision to include Google+ in communications plans.

Google+ is a social media channel. Before deciding on a channel for communication and engagement, we must first have an understanding of what we are trying to achieve. This is a too common mistake when it comes to social media: brands want to be on a channel and don’t think through whether it is right for them. And we shouldn’t let a channel drive our strategy. We want to think first and foremost about  (1) who the target audience is and (2) what we want to achieve and (3) then figure out if a channel, Google+, is a channel that will help meet those objectives.

Who is on Google+?
A full two-thirds of Google+’s users are men. A sizable number of Google+ users (42%) are single, and the most popular occupation listed is “student.” While it has a long way to go before it catches up to Facebook in popularity and adoption, with over 100 million users, it would appear that Google is off to a decent start. However, everyone who has a gmail account is automatically signed up for Google+, whether they actually use the service or not. This inflates the number of users making the service seem more popular than it is so far.

Why should a brand consider a presence on Google+?
Google+ is influencing the integration of search and social. Searches for brands on Google are showing Google+ pages near the top. And content and pages that have received +1s also show near the top of Google search results. For SEO purposes alone, Google+ is worth the investment in time and effort. For example, someone who is logged into Google (any Google account is a Google+ member, remember), and may have played around with Google+ by adding a few people to circles or uploading some images to Picasa, but is not really active on the network, will still see their connections +1s in their search results, giving those results a great weight in importance. There is definite value in the tie to search results as Google turns on its social search function. This means that a brand’s content that fans share will be more widely seen by their peers in relevant search results.

It is not a bad idea to claim your space before someone else does. Even if you are not sure how you will use it, or if you will, claiming the brand name while you decide will save you trouble later.

Google Hangouts. Hangouts is a feature unique to Google+ that makes it worth using if video conversations would be relevant and effective for the brand.

Engagement with content will mostly be driven by photos and videos. If the brand has highly visual content or can come up with a way to share highly visual content, Google+ may be a viable outlet for sharing and engaging. Take care, however, not to post the same information on Facebook; give fans more than that. Consider posting original content, like archival photos or live video chats with team members. Ask fans what kind of content they want and figure out a way to deliver that.

What should a brand expect from a presence on Google+?
Keep in mind that Google+ doesn’t have the user base yet that Facebook has and the user base they do have is quite different. So, don’t use Facebook as a gage for expectations on Google+ engagement. And as with any other social network, a brand is only going to get results out of Google+ if they put effort into developing and maintaining good content.

As a benchmark, consider Ferarri. On Google+, Ferarri has a 1.2 million circle count, but has more than 8.8 million likes on Facebook. Or consider Adidas, which has a 3,000 circle count, has an equally impressive 8.5 million likes on Facebook.

Sources:
1, 2, 3, 4

“Foursquare is setting itself up as mobile users’ go-to app for socializing around a location.” - TechCrunch

Discovery, serendipity and exploration are all words that Foursquare has been using to describe the promised evolution of their location-based check-in app to a tool that gives you more. Foursquare has delivered on that promise with the introduction of Connected Apps.

Connected Apps are apps that function within Foursquare and are triggered by check-ins. The examples provided by Foursquare:

“For instance, Eat This, Not That can suggest healthy dishes the moment someone checks in at a restaurant. Or The Weather Channel can tell people the forecast when they check in to a new city.”

These kind of apps expand and enhance the user experience, providing them with information, suggestions and revelations they might not otherwise have encountered. The information delivered is customized for that user’s location and delivered exactly when it is relevant to them to make a decision about how to interact in and with that location.

This addition gives users a new reason to check-in and could drive increased use of the app. With these check-ins, Foursquare continues to grow its database of user preferences to further power its recommendations for new business, products and services nearby, making it a more valuable tool for businesses and brands to engage with consistently.

“Foursquare is setting itself up for an interesting niche in the future of the mobile/local/social web. Facebook is the network of people, but Foursquare’s Connected App platform could see itself turning into the network around places. For a service that’s struggling to remain relevant as the lure of gamification wears off and the local offers plan fizzles, becoming the go-to app for the location-based social web is not a bad position to take.” - TechCrunch

It will be interested to see how brands and marketers take advantage of this opportunity to communicate messages within the Foursquare app about new products, services and surrounding opportunities to the location where the user has checked in. I see brands partnering with the third party apps, not Foursquare to create their own apps. For example, restaurants might partner with a travel app to negotiate recommendations for their restaurants in cities where a user checks in. Or gyms might partner with the healthy eating app to push messages about nearby workout facilities. The possibilities are many.

Shazam is so much more than I originally thought that it was, and I like its potential.

I’ve seen the Shazam logo popping up on commercials and television shows the last several month and just couldn’t understand why I would Shazam these things. In commercials, I can never get my phone out and Shazam open quickly enough to capture the sound. In television shows, I just didn’t get it. My use of Shazam has always been for identifying a music selection that I liked and wanted to note and/or buy.  This seemed good enough to me and I liked it for just that purpose.

But then I saw this article about Shazam partnering with the Olympics and I got curious. Though they don’t describe it this way in the article, it seems that Shazam can be used for “scanning” to get more information about what you are hearing, like scanning a QR code gives you more information about what you are seeing. This is actually pretty cool:

“Viewers who tag the broadcast from their Shazam app will be able to see additional information on the athletes, engage in polls, view the competition schedule, check the latest results, keep tabs on the medal count and share on social media.”

The tricky part of this for brands and advertisers is going to be consumer education. If consumers are familiar with Shazam at all, they are going to know it only as a music identification app, like I did. But, like any other new tool and technology, once people figure it out and start using it, it has huge potential for communicated extra and bonus information to its users. I like that.

Pinterest is still the latest tool that brands are eager to jump into and try out with their messages. I thought I would share some things from the tip sheet I put together for planning discussions when the topic of Pinterest is raised.

A Few Random and Interesting Pinterest Facts

(Relevant as you are thinking about the audience that engages with Pinterest)

• Pinterest users are three times more likely than average Internet users to have visited Disney World in the past year.
• Their favorite magazines are Good Housekeeping, followed by Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Woman’s Day and the AARP magazine.
• 80% of pins are re-pins (for comparison, only 1.4% of tweets are re-tweets).
• See more stats here.

Sample Objectives That Using Pinterest Might Help Achieve

• Drive sales through new products boards.
• Create brand affinity (with boards related to topics in which the brand target audience are really interested).
• Build community acquisitions (with pinning of images of things related to the brand offerings).

Some Pinterest Tips

• Claim the username that you want to use and ignore all others. While Pinterest currently offers little, if any, resolution for squatters, if the community continues to grow in popularity it will eventually create a verification program similar to Facebook and Twitter and the squatters will be revealed and exiled. In the meantime, learn from them, take their ideas and make them better for the true brand.
• Image should take center stage. Make sure all images are nicely photographed. If the story can’t be told visually, Pinterest is not the right place for the brand to spend time.
• The information should be presented in a sleek and icon-free presentation.
• Users can attach price tags to pins by typing in a “$” sign followed by one or more numbers in the description box. The price tag appears not only in the description, but also in the upper lefthand corner of the pin thumbnail and image. However, when brands affixed price tags to product pins, users behave differently and are far less likely to repin images with price tags.
• Put the “Pin It” button on all digital presences (websites, microsites, online store, etc.).
• Provide link to “official” Pinterest page on all web properties.
• Create board names and topics that spark interest, going beyond things like expected titles like “products,” “photos,” etc.  Instead, get creative with the names/topics, considering titles that align with brand attributes and brand personality.
• Leverage internal resources (employees) to create Pinterest boards beyond products and focus on interests related to the brand and the target audience.
• Consider arranging products in groups that go together in themes such as gift boxes, outfits, complete decor (you get the idea, but it really depends on what products/services your brand offers). Don’t just post a product that is available for purchase; put it in some context. Pull in products from outside the brand that complement it. Always consider the visual appearance of the posts.
• Avoid pure, blatant promotion. Pin a nice balance between brand-only boards and boards that highlight others.
• You can pin videos. Do it, in the relevant board categories.
• Tell a story of their history through photos.

Tips for Building Followers

• Repinning others
• Following others
• Commenting on and liking others’ posts
• Share pins on the brand Facebook page
• Share pins on the brand Twitter page

Monitor how much traffic is driven to site from Pinterest.

• Which posts are driving the most traffic? Consider why and work to repeat those efforts.
• Which posts are being re-pinned? Consider why and work to repeat those types of posts.
• Which posts are garnering the most likes and comments? Examine the users that are commenting and liking, follow them back and respond when relevant.

A note on requests for a “Pinterest strategy.” Pinterest is a social media channel and we shouldn’t let a channel drive our strategy. Think about who your target audience is and what you want to achieve and then figure out if Pinterest is a channel that will help meet those objectives. Don’t jump into Pinterest just to be there.

You can follow my boards on Pinterest here.

I talked to Alyson Courtney of KATV today about the use of social media by politicians and their elections campaigns. Check out the interview here:

Last month, I attended the sixth annual AdAge Digital Conference. Today, I gave a presentation to our agency recapping some of the key presentations and learnings. Here is that presentation:

Today, I talked to Today’s THV about recent college grads looking for jobs in a tough market when everything you can do to stand out makes a difference.

It is time for college grads to start their job searches and the competition is stiff for the number of jobs compared to the number of candidates. Standing out among the competition is more important than ever. And an online brand can make all the difference in getting the call for an interview.

When it comes to an online brand for these candidates, there is a seeming indifference. They are restricting their professional lives and online representation to LinkedIn, then write and post about anything and everything but their career of choice. The bottom line: your are getting Googled before you get called for an interview. And searched on Facebook and Twitter. And the potential employer is definitely looking you up on LinkedIn. Do you know what they will find when they perform these searches? What do you want them to find? It is time to think about yourself through the lens of an potential employer. This isn’t just about removing embarrassing moments, but also about showing that you are curious and intelligent. Think about who you are and what job you want; this is your personal “brand.”

Here are some tips for getting started:

• Build online profiles in places and with content relevant to your personal brand. Determine where to do this and what to talk about based on the searches you do related to your industry, your specific career interests and your location. Look up the people that you admire in your industry and those that you would likely be interviewing with: what are they doing that you can emulate?
• Google yourself. What do you find? What would you like an employer to find? Google your likely competition for the job. What are they doing that you can learn from?
• Get your LinkedIn profile fully completed. Too many LinkedIn profiles have only a name and the school from which they graduated. Fill in all the fields. Tell your personal, professional and educational story. Think about it like telling a story.
• Create a “professional” blog around your interests in the industry in which you want to work. While a personal blog is great and can help potential employers get to know you, if you are writing about the industry relevant to your degree and the job you are seeking, they can see that you are really interested in the work and know what you are talking about. Use Google Alerts, Twitter searches and blog subscriptions (RSS feeds, Google Reader) to stay on top of your industry, then write about it. Create original content; writing about your own discoveries shows that you’re processing the information you are reading.
• Create a public Twitter profile for sharing industry and professional news. If you have a personal Twitter profile that you don’t want potential employers to see, go ahead and protect that and keep using it as you have before, but make sure you have all the privacy settings adjusted. Respond to thought leaders in your industry via Twitter. Show that you have an opinion and a backbone.
• Adjust your privacy settings in Facebook so that only friends can see your content. Be wary of friending potential employers, employers and co-workers. Consider the content that you post to Facebook and what you want them to see. Facebook has sophisticated privacy options: if you are not comfortable not friending someone, consider categorizing them to only see certain content. If there are pictures that others have posted of you that are not flattering, consider un-tagging yourself (once you have untagged yourself from a picture, you can not be retagged).
• Consider creating a website for your resume where you provide links to all of your online presences, making it very easy for an employer to see all that you are and all that you are doing. How can you be creative in the way you display your resume? Think about using video as a way to personalize the resume.

Keep in mind that the differences between a personal brand and professional brand online are blurring. You can have separate profiles, but it is hard to maintain and mistakes can be made. And Google can find almost anything. It is better to assume that everything you put online will be seen by a potential employer or employer and be mindful of what you put out there.

Good luck!

This Fast Company article reveals that advertising people aren’t normal when it comes to brand and advertising awareness in social networks. I was reading this article while watching “Morning Joe” this morning where they were talking about Facebook being overvalued because no one clicks on the ads (meaning they don’t click on the ads, of course).

I don’t know the future of Facebook, or the future of social networks in general, but both these channels this morning aren’t talking about the other half of the story.

On advertising people being more aware of advertising: duh. It is not because they are the ones running the ads or because they are more susceptible to advertising. It is because they are paying attending and learning. Advertising people know that an audience of 800 million people is not to be ignored or avoided. They are studying how brands are using Facebook, both for content and for advertising to learn what works, what doesn’t and how to improve the communications for the brands they represent. This only means that the advertising and the content shared by these brands is going to get better, and better content and advertising gets clicked, shared and incites interaction.

On no one clicking on Facebook ads: if advertising is not getting clicked, it is because the message is wrong for the audience who is seeing it or the advertising is bad or confusing. If we put the right message, delivered in an engaging way, in front of the relevant audience, it works. Additionally, Facebook is continually changing how brands can deliver content and advertising; ads will be moving out of the sidebar and into the news stream as sponsored content. This is dangerous if advertisers continue to deliver bad and irrelevant content because users may be frustrated and leave. It is the brand’s responsibility to make its messages engaging to the audience it is targeting and to target the right audience.

While the future of Facebook is not guaranteed, it is not fair to say that the advertising is not working and ad people are the only ones aware of the advertising. Facebook is still relatively new, and with the rules constantly changing, we are all just trying to learn and keep up with what is working, what will work and how to not ignore a captive audience of 800 million people.

While doing some research today for a client planning session, I was searching the client’s competitors on Facebook. I noticed something I hadn’t previously noticed on brand pages under the new Timeline structure: friends’ posts that mention that brand are showing up on the brand page when I view it, without the friend having officially “tagged” the brand and without having posted the message directly to that brand’s page. These posts were mostly several months old and all were negative. As a marketer and manager for brand pages, I definitely don’t like this. As a user, I think it is pretty relevant, however.

As a marketer, I don’t like this because the brand managers don’t even know these comments exist. Since the comment wasn’t tagged with the brand or posted on the brand’s page, the brand manager has no way of knowing that the comment exists. So he or she can’t respond to it and he or she can’t control what a user sees on the brand Facebook page. Facebook acknowledges this as user privacy:

“Posts about a Page respect the privacy settings of the people who create them. Page admins won’t see posts about their Page that people haven’t shared publicly even though people visiting the Page might see them if they’re part of the audience the post was shared with. Pages themselves are public spaces, and posts added to a Page’s timeline will be visible publicly and are eligible to appear in the Recent Posts by Others box. “

If the comment is positive, this doesn’t matter to the marketer one way or another (other than it would be nice to have those to report back). But the problem is the negative comments, which were what I saw today on all the brands that I was visiting for my research. Facebook is basically amplifying negative word-of-mouth. As a user, I might not have noticed my friends’ posts several months ago, or paid little attention to it in my stream. But it suddenly becomes relevant as I am on the brand page and it sticks out like a flashing beacon.

As a user, when I land on a brand page and see a friend’s comment immediately, it gives me a new perspective on the brand. If it is one that I was considering engaging with in some way and I saw a negative comment from a friend, I believe this would impact my engagement with that brand or I would reach out to that friend to learn more. I love this as a user because it helps me make decisions, helps me learn more and is extremely relevant.

We’ve been hearing and talking a lot about socially annotated search and banner advertising the last few months. The stats say socially annotated search gets a 5-10% better click-through rate. Having just experienced a version of socially annotated brand commentary, I see why it works so well.

Here is a round-up of things heard at the AdAge Digital Conference that resonated with me in some way, shape or form:

• “Snow White” was the first full length feature animated film. It was also the most financially successful film when it came out. (“Gone With the Wind” beat it next year.)
• Stop thinking about the technology and instead think about the purpose.
• Go back to your startup mentality. What was it that excited you? Don’t think about digital as something you do to stay relevant; think instead about how to communicate your message.
• Every marketer mines data. It is how you use the data that makes the difference.
• People would rather give up their toothbrush than their mobile phone.
• People look at their mobile phones an average of 40 times a day.
• Over 50% of Facebook users are accessing the network via mobile device.
• Social is not a what, it is a where things happen.
• We have to scale platforms for two-way engagement with consumers.
• Consumers now have the power of media and a consciousness of marketing. Consumers talk about how they know what a brand is doing with its marketing. Keep this in mind.
• Don’t reduce the whole world of social networks to two or three social networks.
• Consumers talk about brands as “they” rather than “it.” Brands have to figure out how to behave as people. Brands are positioned as people on social networks, so they should act like people.
• 80% of consumers are using their phones to shop smarter, sometimes on the spot, at the shelf.
• Learn what people are engaging with and build content to match.
• People don’t change their TV very often, only every five to seven years. A tablet probably gets upgraded very 18 months.
• Customers are lazy, stubborn and loyal. Don’t force them todo things they dont want to do.
• 500 million people listen to music online illegally.
• Viral ads are no longer a happy accident. Every campaign today needs to be interesting enough to be passed around and shared on digital networks.
• The definition of content has changed. It used to take money and power to distribute content. Now the cost is practically none. Content distribution is happening in mass scale. It is about empowerment and democratization.
• The challenge is now the curation of content. How do we find what is meaningful to us? We are increasingly using Facebook and other places like it: we turn to friends for what to read, listen to, watch, eat, buy, etc.
• Social technologies change the way the stories are seen and shared.
• Consumers are 50% more likely to remember an ad when they see a friend’s name associated with it (socially annotated ads).
• Technology is enriching and enhancing our experiences.
• Beer is the original social network.

This week, I am at the sixth annual AdAge Digital Conference in New York City. This is my first time to attend this conference, I am here with approximately 650 other ad agency-type folks and day one is complete.

The themes that are being discussed here are the same as the themes I heard at SXSW this year. Because the audience is made up mostly of agency people, the twist is a little different, the stories are a little more relevant and the audience has questions more like the ones that I have, too, as compared to SXSW that had a broader swath of attendees.

By far, the best presentations of the day were given by two major brands: GAP and Gatorade. And though the two stories were different, the lesson was the same:

{Approach digital communications looking through the lens of the brand position.}

While this seems so obvious, it appears that most brands are not doing this. Rather, brands and agencies are reacting to the need to be in digital channels and coming up with reasons to be there that aren’t true to the brand. They are throwing out ideas that might work for the digital space but don’t make sense for the brand. Or that don’t relate to any of the other communications strategies being executed for the brand. Stand alone executions aren’t getting the brands anywhere. The overall communications strategy must work together, be integrated and be true to the brand.

The GAP Story

Seth Farbman, Global CMO of Gap, presented the Gap digital story. Farbman hadn’t been at Gap long before he made the big proclamations that they had to do two things: (1) return to the roots/heritage of the brand and (2) go digital. He said that it turned out, these two were not independent actions.

Farbman’s thesis for his presentation:

{Stop thinking about the technology and instead think about the purpose.}

Farbman told the origin story of the Gap brand. It stood for optimism, democracy and individualism. It was founded during a generation gap and the founders were filling a fundamental need for basic customer satisfaction and delivering a reliable product at a reasonable price.

So, how does the 42-year-old company remain relevant today? They realized that the company values and what people want now are still the same as they were when the company was founded. (I loved the visual example that he gave to help make his point: a Woodstock photo from 1969 taken with Kodak film and one from Coachella last week taken with Instagram were almost identical: the technology is different, but experience is the same.)

The idea of the individual when they started was important. Individuality is about how you express yourself and the GAP brand simply accessorizes you. But, people seek other like-minded people to reinforce their sense of individuality. In another word, they are seeking “communities.” This is how GAP decided to use digital channels: to use the connected web to do more together.

Farbman went so far as to say that today at Gap, digital is dead. If a strategy or execution wouldn’t have met the filters of the founders 42 years ago, then it is just technology for technology’s sake. Everything they do at Gap has to tie back to the brand purpose.

How is Gap doing this in practice? They are finding partner companies like Styld.by and Refinery29, where users can create outfits and share them with them friends. They are giving customers control of their experience, those customers are spending four minutes with the brand, they are sharing their created looks and they are buying the clothes. Gap is creating and allowing for community. They are not pushing the message.

They are also working with Threadless, a tshirt company with a designer community. Gap sends a challenge to the the Threadless community and the designer community submits designs for the community to vote on. The selected shirts are sold on the Threadless site and in Gap stores.

Farbman’s parting advice:

• Go back to your startup mentality. What was it that excited you (or your founders)? Don’t think about digital is something you do to stay relevant. Think instead about how to communicate your message.

The Gatorade Story

Randall Brown, Global Director of Digital Strategy for Gatorade, presented the Gatorade story. Gatorade had made a brand shift from a hydration product to a more holistic approach of partnership with athletes. In 2010, the brand had 500,000 people across its networks, but the posts were not from their core target audience. Instead they were from 30-something’s reliving their heydays, talking about hangover cures. Today, Gatorade has five million people in its networks and those people are their core target audience: athletes.

Brown outlined the Gatorade approach to digital communications:

1. Define social purpose and brand behaviors. With this, you have to go back to the brand essence and core brand behavior before thinking about the social channels. Brown says that once you have this defined, it becomes really easy to show, demonstrate and define those behaviors. Remember: brand purpose = social purpose.
2. Live your ethos daily. This is about planning and executing a systematic approach to engagement. Additionally, you should understand and accept the consumer antes with social: they want you to answer questions and to deal with complaints. Most companies have the infrastructure to deal with these types of customer requests, and just because you are not ready to respond to those through social channels does not mean that you can’t enter the social channels (you can still refer them to the traditional response channels).
3. Purposeful experimentation and measurement. Here, you should use the scientific method. State a hypothesis. Define your variables. Test and experiment often. Then you start seeing key levers you can pull to drive consumer behavior. This should happen at least monthly.

Brown’s parting advice:

{Don’t reduce the whole world of social networks to two or three social networks.}

{Social media is a new place, but people haven’t evolved. Social is a new place for old human needs, wants and behaviors.}

While the approaches by Gap and Gatorade were slightly different, they were each telling us the same thing:

{Approach digital communications looking through the lens of the brand position.}

Everyone is talking about Facebook buying Instagram this week, and not just the tech geeks. Why are people talking about, even those seemingly not of the geek mindset? Because everyone uses these two services. Well, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people: Instagram has 30 million users and Facebook is creeping up on on 900 million users. The real question is: why do people care that Facebook purchased Instagram (for a whopping $1 billion!)?

First, let’s talk about why Facebook (probably) purchased Instagram:

• For the data.

“Photos for Facebook are already a huge driver of both interactions and data. But while users often upload photos to Facebook, they actually take them with Instagram. The amount of data generated from a mobile device’s camera is significant, from location to time of day to any number of data points that can be associated with a smartphone’s sensors…

“Instagram itself was not in a position to capitalize off of its data. It did not have ads and it provided its API for free (with the right to charge the heaviest users if it deemed it appropriate). Implementing ads would be a recipe for disaster for Instagram and its fickle, emotional user base. But what if Facebook can take that data and provide ads against it without actually putting advertising into the app itself?

“Here is the trick: Facebook has the ability to grow Instagram’s user base by tens if not hundreds of millions of users. The more people use the app, the more of that rich metadata Facebook generates. Facebook can then turn around and serve ads against that data on both the Facebook desktop and mobile clients. It is a matter of linking the back-end infrastructures of the two companies without overtly changing the Instagram user interface.”

• To improve the photo-sharing experience on Facebook, because photo-sharing is only going to continue to increase. In fact, half of all pictures ever taken were taken in the past 12 months.

“In a general sense, this acquisition on the heels of the dramatic growth of Pinterest in the last few months is a massive reflection of just how fast the Social-Stream is becoming visual in nature, meaning evolving social engagement driven purely around visual media, not text – and just how valuable that will inevitably be to every major participant in the social media landscape,” Downing said. “This is a huge endorsement of the shift to the visual web and visual conversation in a social media framework.” {source}

And, Instagram really makes our photos better, especially those of us that aren’t great photographers. “In the end it really is the actual image under the electronic processing that counts. Most of the time the filters are covering the shortcomings of the original photograph and the person behind it.”

Then, there is the fact that Facebook really wants to be your main site for photo-sharing. As Instagram continued to grow, Facebook probably saw the writing on the wall for competition. “Facebook is making sure all those images don’t end up on Flickr or in some other storage cloud.”

• Leverage mobile growth. Instagram is a mobile-only app. Facebook’s mobile app has always been less than stellar. Maybe Facebook is hoping to learn from Instagram.

“Instagram was beating Facebook at its own game, and the social network needed to stop it before it was able to do more.

“The photo-sharing app is essentially everything Facebook wants to be on your mobile phone. Facebook wants people using its mobile app to share photos of what they’re doing with friends and to share their location -– something Instagram users have no problem doing.”

“Smartphones are everywhere now, allowing apps like Foursquare and Path to be self-contained social worlds, existing almost entirely on mobile devices. It is a major change from just a few years ago, underscoring how the momentum in the tech world is shifting to mobile from computers.

“Cellphones are also prompting a shift in how people want to share things online, creating a market for apps that make instant sharing easy, said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University.

“In other words, many people want to post a photograph of themselves right from a sun-drenched beach in Bali, rather than waiting until they are back home to upload all 50 pictures onto Facebook.” {source}

Now, let’s talk about why some users are so upset about the purchase:

• Instagram was relatively private; Facebook is known for constantly-changing privacy rules.

“The app was limited to smartphone users, and there was no built-in way to copy or repost pictures — lent it a sense of privacy and intimacy, separate from the rest of our online lives. Its ability to let its users delicately toe the line between public and private gave us a little breathing room from the all-pervasiveness of Facebook, and to see it whisked away feels like a tangible loss.

“The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading.” {source}

“Part of the concern is that it’s Facebook,” says Chris Conley, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “And their history of privacy and respecting user choices is mixed.”

“That mixed history includes Facebook’s repeated changes to the default settings of user accounts to make more user data public over time — a practice that has vexed advocacy groups, drawn charges of being overly confusing, and culminated in a settlement last fall with the Federal Trade Commission. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user count has continued to grow, and now surpasses 845 million.

“Instagram users thought they were signing up for a simple service, of relatively little utility to advertisers or government. Now that data is likely to be combined with an entire social graph. I picture the consumer happily paddling down a data rivulet only to find themselves suddenly on the open waters of the social sea.” {source}

• The potential for limited sharing. Instagram has always encouraged sharing across a range of networks, with Twitter listed first. Users are worried that Facebook would limit that sharing to only Facebook.

“As regular Instagrammers know, one of the first choices you have to make in sharing your photo — after you’ve applied tilt shift and filters — is which social network you’re going to share it with.

“The two big sharing choices? Twitter and Facebook. No prizes for guessing which of those options may disappear, should Facebook get its way.

“Of course, Facebook has gone out of its way to assure users that sort of thing won’t happen. ‘We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks,’ wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his blog post announcing the acquisition.” {source}

• Instragram will be ruined by advertising. (Well, come on now, it was bound to happen!)

Looking at my bookmarked articles from the week, I can tell I have really been focused on creating relevant and engaging content to pull consumers into brands’ messages. I still love Delicious for bookmarking interesting finds across the internet every day.  Looking back across the articles that I flag and tags that I create each week starts to reveal the web of where my thoughts have traveled and the areas I tend to be focusing on that week. The themes I saw in this week’s bookmarked articles were:

• SEO
• Facebook Optimization
• Content Creation

All of which roll up under that umbrella of creating relevant and engaging content to pull consumers into brands’ messages. Here are some details of what I learned this week and links to the articles I found most interesting.

{SEO}

This Google video sums up SEO pitfalls and tricks nicely.

{Facebook Optimization}

I’ve posted here several times over the last couple of weeks that brands should be wary of relying on “likes” as a measure of Facebook success and reach to their fans. This is because most posts by pages are seen by less than 10% of their fans. And, on average, only 1% of total fans actually “engage” with the posts (like, comment, share).  But, one of the articles I stumbled upon this week notes that:

“…friends of fans represent a much larger set of consumers than a brand’s fans – 81 times larger, on average, for the top 1000 brand pages. The link to this extended network occurs when fans engage with your messages, thereby sharing the message with their friends.”

So that 1% engagement doesn’t look so bad anymore. Though it is still not great. And Facebook has done this to brands on purpose in an effort to drive revenue:

“Facebook first degraded brand content over the last year, and has now released advertising products to let companies pay to offset the changes they’ve made.”

“Mid-way through 2011, the company changed its approach to determining what people saw in their newsfeeds, with the result that the number of people seeing posts from brands dropped significantly – by up to 75%, in fact.”

“Enter Facebook’s new advertising products. Distilled down to two points, the latest advertising announcements from Facebook are: putting Page content as a core component of Facebook Ads and allowing you to reach more fans through the “Reach Generator.”

All of this makes it critical that the content posted to Facebook is interesting, useful and stand-out from day one.  If you are trying hard for engagement, consider posting more on Sundays: it turns out, Sunday is the most engaging day on Facebook. And if you really need people to click on your Facebook ads, you should run them in South Dakota, Tennessee and Colorado, where users click through on ads in record rates.

{Content Creation}

This article does a nice job of summing up the basics, step-by-step, to developing a content strategy and then executing it.

You can follow all my bookmarking here.

A conflicting study to the one I mentioned here last week says that brands using the new Facebook timeline actually saw a decrease in fan engagement. A report released today says:

“Ultimately, Facebook users interact with brands on their own newsfeed and rarely, if ever, visit a company’s timeline.”

Given these results, the report supports the learnings from the book The Like Economy:

“Regardless of how Facebook changes the appearance of a page, this should rarely have a significant impact on engagement. This also suggests that brand managers must continue to focus on optimizing engagement within the news feed as usual.”

There is no doubt that implementing Facebook Timeline for a brand and using all the features available within it will present the brand better to those fans that visit the actual brand page. Though the words of caution still stand: it is not a build and they will come tool when using Facebook. Rather the content produced by the brand must be relevant to the users targeted and interesting enough to engage with it for fans to continue seeing it in their news feeds.