Ms. Adverthinker

Back in January, we outlined predictions for the 2011 technology year that included an increase in mobile photo sharing. Half-way through the year, and we are seeing that prediction come true.

Instagram is now up to five million users and is adding about a million users a month.  According to a New York Times article this weekend, “Those who study the way people socialize online say cellphone photos are becoming an integral part of sharing and communicating.”

“Professor Sundar said people once tended to take photos on special occasions, like birthdays and vacations, then post a big batch on services like Picasa and Flickr and share a link with friends. But with the introduction of smartphones with improved cameras, coupled with the rise of services like Facebook and Twitter, people are more accustomed to constantly documenting moments and sharing throughout the day.”

And brands are starting to experiment and use the tools available to engage their customers with photography.

“Brands like Oscar de la Renta, Brisk Iced Tea, Kate Spade, Starbucks and Red Bull are also on the service. Cecilia Liu, digital marketing manager at Kate Spade, said the company added Instagram to its social media lineup this year. She said it was appealing because the company could mix in a little more personality and behind-the-scenes glimpses than it would on Facebook and Twitter.”

Starbucks was one of the first brands to sign on to Instagram.  Now, when you search the Starbucks tag on Instagram, over 10,000 photo hits come up.

“We’ve been using Instagram for a couple of months and think it’s a fun, different way to share photos of what’s going on behind the scenes,” says Product Manager Brad Nelson. “We’ve also found a lot of people already sharing Starbucks photos, so it’s been a joy to look through those.”

As people are using mobile photography and sharing to these sites to document their lives, what are they taking the most photos of? Food, of course.

And, to find all of this great photography online, last week, Twitter introduced a new version of its search that incorporates photos and videos.

Brands that are figuring out how to incorporate photography sharing into their engagement strategies are connecting with their consumers on a more intimate level.

Below is a Prezi I put together for a couple of agency presentations I was scheduled to give post-SXSW. It sums up my key takeaways from SXSW 2011.

Thank you to Roby Brock at Talk Business for the discussion about 2011 tech trends.  Check out the video here:

Because I had some work to catch up on last night, I chose to stay home and watch the Golden Globes alone.  But I didn’t feel alone at all.  With my computer in my lap, the Twitter app running and Facebook in my browser window, it felt like I was at a watch party among friends.  I laughed at some posts, rolled my eyes at others and commented on many.  Is the fact that technology can replace the feeling of camaraderie that comes with personal, face-to-face interactions good for our society or bad?  Probably neither and both.

This topic is explored in a new book, Alone Together.  I haven’t read the book yet, but have put it on my list to read soon.  The book was recently reviewed over at The Daily Beast:

“The advantage to all that gadgetry, of course, is connectedness: email lets us respond on the go, and we are in touch with more people during more hours of the day than at any other time in history. But is it possible we’re more lonely than ever, too? That’s what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book, Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology. The result of nearly 15 years of study (and interviews with hundreds of subjects), Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our perceptions of intimacy and solitude—and warns of the perils of embracing such pseudo-techno relationships in place of lasting emotional connections.”

The “alone” versus “together” situation works in reverse as well: when we are face-to-face among a group of people, many of us isolate ourselves by bowing our heads to the mobile devices actively lighting up in our hands.  If you don’t believe me, next time you go out to dinner, do a quick scan around the restaurant and check out what people are doing at each table.

The impact of technology on social mores is not a new topic of conversation, but as technology and social channels continue to improve and become even more integrated into our lives, the conversation will grow.  But will anything change?  Will we pull back on the use of technology and social media now that it is ingrained in our behaviors?

Check out the novel Super Sad True Love Story for a satirical look at the possibility of completely transparent sharing through technology and utter dependency on technology.  It is funny and sad and scary.  Set in a future where people are obsessed with appearances, their smart phones and credit scores, this book tells the story of two mismatched lovers through their journal entries and online communications.

It is that time of year when predictions for 2011 abound across the web. It’s always tough to make predictions about technology due to the speed of innovation, but that hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from throwing opinions against the wall. Outlined below is a summary of some the most talked about and interesting predictions for 2011.

• Online video viewing continues to grow and results ensue.
• Photo sharing gains in popularity.
• Social shopping gaining momentum.
• Location sharing is (still) not going away.
• Consumer influence continues to grow online.

Online Video Viewing Continues To Grow and Results Ensue

Prediction: More Companies/Brands Using Video to Sell. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. In four years, more than 90% of internet content will be video.

Online video viewing is now more than just cute kittens. The kittens might get the most views, but consumers are actually just as interested in interacting with brands via videos as they are in laughing at pet tricks. Brands that engage consumers through video demonstrations are seeing the results on their bottom lines. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. Based on that success, by the end of next year, Zappos will have ten full working video studios, with the goal of producing around 50,000 product videos by 2010, up from the 8,000 videos they have on the site today.

Toyota is another example: its “The Swagger Wagon” music video garnered over seven million views, only three percent of which were driven by advertising.

And, Travelocity was the first brand to jump on the Chatroulette fad early in 2010 when they placed their signature gnome character in front of the webcam holding signs with clever travel messages. Over 40 days and nights, the Roaming Gnome generated 350,000 impressions on the site, engaged in 40 conversations, and generated over 19 million media impressions for the brand.

In the next year, we will see more brands using video to sell their products and services.

Sources: Mashable, Streaming Media

Prediction: More Mobile Video Sharing. Smartphones with video recording abilities are not new to consumers, and even the ability to record HD video is not new. Up until this point, however, we have not seen mobile video capturing and sharing take off. This is most likely a result of the difficulty in uploading and sharing video instantly due to bandwidth limitations. In the next year, we will see wireless providers improve bandwidth, allowing friendlier video uploads and we will devices improve video compression without sacrificing quality that will assist with immediate sharing.

With this in mind, businesses might consider encouraging consumer use of videos to share their brand and product experiences.  Providing customers with  back-drop and props, allowing access to a wireless connection to assist in upload speed, and giving them a place to share their videos with other customers are all ways to promote brand-specific videos.

Source: Mashable

Photo Sharing Gains in Popularity

Prediction: More Mobile Photo Sharing. Mobile sharing services will hit critical mass as smartphone users install apps in order to keep up with their friends. The iPhone photography app Instagr.am, which launched less that three months ago, claimed this week to have surpassed 1 million downloads. Services like Instagr.am have become so popular because they emphasize simplicity and make it easy to share your photos on social networks; Instagr.am, in particular, is liked for the filters it offers, the community they find there and the ease of cross-posting Instagrammed photos out to other networks like Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare.

With tools like these, average users can look more like professional photographers and they want to show off their work. And, although people already post photos to Facebook, we will probably see an improvement in their photo sharing features that include integration into their Places app that launched in 2010 so that users can share their work with a broader audience of people who also visit that “place.”

Expect to see photo sharing increase in the next year.  Businesses can capitalize on this trend by launching promotions that reward customer participation by photographs or gives customers a forum for sharing their amateur photography with others.

Sources: ReadWriteWeb, CNN, Mashable

Group Shopping Gaining Momentum

Prediction: More Ability to Share Purchases Through Social Channels Allowing Customers to Become the Advertisers. When you add in a reward component, like with Groupon, there are many more people willing to share their individual purchases (or purchase intent) through their existing social platforms. Groupon was introduced to the central Arkansas area in 2010. It is a daily coupon for a local business that only becomes active if enough people purchase it that day. “This creates the incentive to share the deal with friends and family, until ‘the deal is on.’ It’s great for local businesses because they can set the parameters for the offer and they know a minimum for how many offers they will have sold in advance.” Businesses establish the offer and people who have signed up for Groupon receive the notification. If the user decides to buy the offer, they have the option of telling their friends about it – through Facebook or Twitter, thereby spreading the word to their networks, too. Groupon gets its offers in front of buyers via the word of mouth of its 13 million subscribers.

Groupon’s effectiveness is evident in its claim that it now has 35,000 companies clamoring to be a part of the service offerings and only one in eight applicants is accepted. The companies that register with Groupon must already be getting good reviews at online review sites like Yelp, CitySearch and TripAdvisor, and the deals must offer a substantial discount from normal prices and not be similar to other promotions regularly offered by the vendor.

In the next year, consumers will become increasingly comfortable sharing their purchases and getting their friends on board to make the same purchases.  Businesses should make this easy for their customers to do.  With tools like Facebook Connect and linking to Twitter accounts on their websites, companies can encourage customers to share their purchases through their existing social media tools.

Sources: Social Media Explore, TechCrunch, Forbes

Location Sharing Is (Still) Not Going Way.

Prediction: Location Services Will Continue to Grow in Popularity. People will get more comfortable checking in to a business when they realize they can get deals and coupons for doing so. Additionally, with options like privacy blocking, enhanced security will ease the transition.

“Relevance will distinguish [location] services from each other as the two biggest players, Facebook and Google, have the most powerful social graph data to customize deals for consumers. Don’t count Groupon out, though. It more than makes up for its comparative lack of technology with brand equity and scale, as its massive sales force will remain dominant in 2011 by further monetizing local commerce beyond the recently launched self-service platform.”

If you are a business owner, it is “time to acquaint yourself with sites and applications such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla. These sites will help you better target prospects’ likes and interests, pique interest and influence purchase decisions by offering discounts, promotions or giveaways when they ‘check in’ to your business.”

Sources: Mashable, Entrepreneur

Consumer Influence Continues To Grow Online

Prediction: Consumers Get More Selective With The Brands They Allow In Their Social Streams. In the coming year people are going to be much more diligent about curating their own content into a more manageable form. While following a brand on Twitter or Facebook is getting consumers good coupons and deals, it is also turning their streams into undesired and overwhelming advertising channels that drown out the social sharing from their friends. “Therefore, what’s happening in Facebook is that consumers are turning off brands posting to their walls, using friends lists to pay close attention only to their ‘real’ friends, and commenting on or sharing only when something is really juicy. In Twitter, a company called Cadmus aims to change the way we view our streams by determining what content is most relevant to you based on your Twitter usage patterns. Other tools, such as Paper.li and Flipboard (for iPad), also curate Twitter, primarily based on content popularity, and make that content much more reader-friendly.”

It is no longer enough for companies to be in these channels generating regular content. The content that brands and companies post is going to have be worthy of consumer curation into their social streams. “If your content is truly compelling and share-worthy, it’ll get noticed and Liked, it will generate Comments and Retweets, and you’ll be okay because it will have legitimately earned its way into people’s streams. If not – you’ll have to have a combination of search optimization savvy [and] fans in high places (influencers).” In the next year, as consumers get more selective in their follow habits, brands will get more creative in their ploys to make into the social streams.

Source: Social Media Explorer

Prediction: Online Influencers Are Celebrities. Consumers want to be heard, and more importantly they want answers. Consumers are already scouring the social web and polling their friends and followers to decide where to eat, shop and stay. Websites dedicated to customer reviews will dominate the social media landscape. Sites such as Groubal.com, consolidating common user-submitted complaints and presenting those petitions to businesses, demanding answers for their wrongdoings.

As consumers are doing all of this, brands are desperately trying to insert themselves into those relevant streams by analyzing Twitter, blog posts and reviews to understand not only who has the largest audience, but how much influence individuals have. These influencers become well-known locally, regionally and nationally as their content is commented on, retweeted and linked to, driving them higher in search results. The past year also saw some brands go full throttle on Foursquare’s game-like geo-location platform, attempting to reward mayors and creating custom badges for the network’s power users. To measure the relevant influence of these online “celebrities,” tools like YouTube’s Partner Program is being joined by new services such as Klout to create an official layer of social credibility.

We will see brands doing more research on their social consumers in the next year as they figure out ways to influence the influencers.

Source: Mashable, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review

Is our increasingly technological media world giving us so much information that we are distracted from pursuing independent and in-depth knowledge? It appears that our country’s president believes that. In May, President Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at Hampton University in which he, the very same president that leveraged online information channels to win his current post, said:

“‘You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter,’ he told the students. ‘And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.’”

President Obama seems to be criticizing the media, technology, video games and the internet in one fell swoop, lumping it all into an “information” category. When did having access to more information become a bad thing? Is not good to hear many sides of a story so we can form our own opinions? And if the information comes to us in an entertaining way, doesn’t that just make us engage with it more?

The discussion that sprung on the internet following this speech was surprising: while many were quick to defend the technology, most agreed with President Obama and felt they were constantly attempting to manage information overload, with no time for processing and understanding. This brought to mind the two-year-old The Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (which has developed into a book just released this month entitled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (see the Ms. Adverthinker review of this book here) Some highlights from the article supporting President Obama’s opinion:

“…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

“A new e-mail message…may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

“Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today.”

And, an excerpt that provides an argument for the other side:

“In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”

One commenter had an interesting perspective in favor of the information abundance we are experiencing:

“…it may not be that the internet is making us stupid but making us more demanding. Before the internet we were given a limited number of topics that we could review from a newspaper, television, magazine etc. Since they were limited in scope they needed a greater amount of depth and description. However now that we can delve a wider range of topics there is no need for such depth. In fact if a person was to spend as much time on any given topic today as was 50 years ago or more it would be hard to stay up to date on the numerous happenings that are going on. No longer are people simply expected to know what is going on in their home town on a day to day basis, but all the important events of the modern world….So it is really a question of balance and of need. Is it truly necessary for us to wrap our minds around each topic that we stumble upon on the net, or is it more important to simply grasp the main points of each topic? In today’s world it is no longer necessary to be intimately familiar with each topic, I can say that I have often found it better to skim information so that I am aware of it’s existence, then when I find myself in need of it I can pull it up more quickly.”

The debate is an interesting one that has spawned books, articles and comments galore. The access to information is empowering. The knowledge we gain is the power. The question then becomes, are we turning that information into knowledge? Perhaps we are in the midst of an evolutional shift: those that can learn to navigate the information streams and turn them into applicable knowledge are the ones that survive.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains is a book by Nicolas Carr that provides a history of how our brains process and absorb information delivered in evolving channels from oral storytelling, to the written word, from broadcast media to now through the web.  The impetus for the book was a 2008 article in The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” So, the premise of the book is the possibility that our continued digital media consumption in bits and bites could be diminishing our capacity to understand and process complex issues the require in-depth information analysis.  The conclusion, however, is not that our intelligence is waning, but instead that our faculties are changing, even evolving.

The Brain Changes as It Needs to Change

Through the first few chapters of the book, we learn that our brains are amazingly adept at adapting to these changes.  The brain actually re-wires itself to deal with the new experiences: “Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind–over and over again.”  Experts quoted in the book support this fact:

“Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created.  ’The brain,’ observes Olds, ‘has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.’”

“‘If we stop exercising our mental skills,’ writes Doidge, ‘we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.’”

Are We More or Less Creative as a Result?

Our brains become more accustomed to cursory scanning of data for relevant bits of information; in turn, it becomes more difficult for the brain to focus on long-form, single-source reading.  This is not a bad thing, as we are able to gather the same amount of information, but now diversify the sources from which that information comes.  However, a question was posed about the stifling of creativity as a result of reduced focused on reading as a meditative act.  Many of those quoted in the book felt the opposite was true:

“Friedman told me…that he’s ‘never been more creative’ than he has been recently, and he attributes that ‘to my blog and the ability to review/scan “tons” of information on the web.’”

“Karp has come to believe that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand his mind than reading ’250-page books’…”

“Muses Davis, ‘The Internet may have made me a less patient reader, but I think that in many ways, it has made me smarter.  More connections to documents, artifacts, and people means more external influences on my thinking and thus on my writing.’”

Conclusion

History has shown that our brains adapt to the way information is processed: we did it when converting from oral storytelling to the written word and we are doing it as we convert from the written word to the digital word.

Recommendation

Read The Shallows.  It is a quick, interesting and relevant read right now.

Thank you to Roby Brock at Talk Business for inviting me to talk about the importance of having websites optimized for mobile viewing.  See the interview here:

And, here is the link to the article on Talk Business.

Here are my full thoughts on the subject:

With the news that Apple sold over 1.7 million of the new iPhone 4 in just three days (making it the most successful launch in Apple’s history), it is past time to notice that more people have the ability to access websites through their mobile devices than ever before. In fact, “nearly 73 million mobile users accessed their browser in April, an increase of 31 percent from the previous year.” With people on the move and the right technology in their hands, it is safe to assume that the first experience a consumer has with a website may very well be on a mobile device rather than a desktop computer. Many websites that look great on a computer screen fall apart on the screen of a mobile device. Since a website is often a customer’s first introduction to a brand, it should make a great impression no matter how it’s viewed.

When thinking about a website on a mobile device, many businesses are trying to decide whether to invest in a custom mobile application or simply create a mobile version of the website. Research tell us that “although growth in application usage on smartphones continues to grab the spotlight in the mobile market, the audience using their mobile browser remains larger and is growing just as quickly.” And, while “smartphone penetration in the U.S. has grown from 11 percent of mobile subscribers in April 2009 to more than 20 percent in April 2010 — nearly double in just one year,” it is predicted that by 2011, over 85 percent of all new handsets will be able to access the mobile web. Mobile web activity is not just limited to smartphones anymore. But due to the popularity of smartphones and buzz about applications, there is an inclination to create a mobile application for businesses that duplicate website functions, though this is not always necessary.Creating a mobile version of a website can address the needs of mobile consumers across many different devices without as much expense and as many device limitations as custom application development.

The most important things to think about when optimizing a website for mobile consumption are:

• Appearance
• Content organization
• Content functionality
• Mobile enablement of content

Appearance

Not all devices are created equal and the way a website renders on one phone may not be how it looks elsewhere. While looks aren’t everything, when it comes to first impressions, appearances can make an immediate difference. Given the small size of the screen, consider incorporating more white space and think about load time over the cellular networks and reduce the images necessary for download. Some of the most important systems to test against include BlackBerry devices, Android devices, Palm Pre, iPhones and iPads.

Content Organization

Because visitors will be viewing the content on a smaller screen, content organization and prioritization become even more important. Think about the content that is most crucial to visitors, especially those that would need to access the site when mobile and on-the-go, then place that content in easy to locate and navigate areas of the screen. Even if this is not the content that would be considered most important for general users of the site it, placing it in a more accessible organization can make the mobile user’s experience more efficient and effective, leaving a good impression of the brand.

Content Functionality

Flash – the predominant browser plug-in for creating dynamic web content – does not yet work on most mobile devices, and it may never function on some platforms. Websites that are all-Flash or which include a Flash-based navigation or intro-animation that blocks access to the home page can be completely lost on the majority of mobile users. Most animation and video on the web is currently handled through the Flash Player. That doesn’t mean video is off-limits for mobile – quite the contrary – but it does mean that certain steps must be taken to enable video play on both desktop browsers and on mobile devices.

Mobile Enablement of Content

Mobile users are frequently consumers who are outside their home or office and making an immediate decision about whether to purchase a product, go to a restaurant, use a service, etc. An important step for mobile-enabling your website is ensuring that this most critical information is available to your users in ways they need to use it from a mobile device. This includes active links to contact information, maps to the business location and the ability to buy straight from the mobile device. Consider optimizing this (and all) content for touch-screen navigation.

The bottom line: websites are being viewed on mobile devices now and this mobile consumption will continue to increase as technology becomes more available. The web experience is vastly different on a mobile device as compared to on a computer, it only makes sense to tailor websites for the best experience by device.Developing mobile ready versions of your websites is an efficient and effective way of delivering the right content to consumers on the go, without investing the time and expense of custom application development.

Over the past two days, I have been reacting like one of Pavlov’s dogs to a bell every time @oldspice tweets a new video.  The Old Spice “Smell Like an Old Spice Man” commercials are viral hits online.  As a result, fans have shared, commented, and clicked play many times over the last several months.  For the last two days, Old Spice has capitalized on that popularity by creating (so far) almost 200 response videos, in real time, to its fans.  The videos are often less than 30-seconds, but in each one, the Old Spice Guy personally addresses a commenter (from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Reddit) and provides a clever quip, thereby endearing the brand to that commenter (as well as all their friends).  The videos are coming so frequently and are so funny, it is quite easy to find myself clicking through to each one as it is posted.  (And so are many, many others: YouTube’s servers are having trouble keeping up today.)

This idea is brilliant because it exploits the basic premise of social media: two-way communication and sharing.  And it leverages the benefit of digital media: immediate communication and sharing.

As brilliant as the idea is, I am most impressed with the production coordination that must be going on behind the scenes to keep up the posting pace of these videos.  I wonder how many people are monitoring the web for comments, then mining those comments for potential humorous responses?  And, how many copywriters are standing by to write these hundreds of 30-second scripts on the spot?  And, the clients must be on the set to approve on-site.  Then there is the actual video production crew, shooting and transferring the video straight to the web.  And there must be a person/people posting the videos and tweeting them out.  This must be one large and fun team, but I bet they are getting tired.  The production turnaround is impressive: I would love to see a behind the scenes/”making of” video after this stunt is complete.

This has been a successful scheme for the Old Spice brand: everyone is talking about it.  Quite a brilliant idea, indeed.

Here are some of the responses I have enjoyed most:

I have never liked having my picture taken.  But a weird thing started happening a little over a year ago: I started taking pictures of myself with my iPhone and posting them to my various sites.  They were, of course, titled: Self portrait, followed by a description of what I was doing when taking the photograph.  I have no idea why I was doing this.  Perhaps it was boredom, maybe it was because I thought it was funny, but most likely I was doing it because I could.  I could take a picture and post it right away.  And I could review it before I posted it.  The whole process was in my control – which is not usually the case when someone else is taking my photo.  Scrolling through the photo library on my iPhone now shows many self portraits, sprinkled with photos of my dogs and then various other activities, usually plates of food or various beverages.  And all of these have been with the previous versions of the iPhone.  The latest iPhone edition has a front facing camera, sure to enable better self-portrait shots.

As it turns out, this self portrait phenomenon and observation is not unique to me.  According to the New York Times:

“With the debut last week of Apple’s newest iPhone, the latest show of vanity has kicked into high gear. With a second camera lens that faces the viewer (instead of the view), the iPhone has simplified something people have been struggling with — some covertly, some flagrantly — ever since they signed up for AOL more than a decade ago: taking a good picture of themselves. Finally, the iGeneration has a good head shot.”

…

“As a result, the self-snap is fast becoming as vital a facet of how we present ourselves as our clothes, figures or voices. Photographing oneself easily and well is a talent that, like being able to download music via mind control or reduce whole paragraphs to acronyms at warp speed, is now a given for young people.”

…

“‘This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device,’said Geoffrey Batchen, formerly of the City University of New York and now a professor of art history at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, who has written extensively on historical and contemporary photography. ‘The camera was used to record something that happened so it could be remembered. Now it’s used immediately. It’s uploaded to Facebook to say, “Here I am in Istanbul” or whatever, so it also goes back and forth between personal and promotional use. It really represents the refashioning of the self for a semipublic view.’”

I am a fan of the self-portrait: there is something intimate, incorruptible, interesting and immediate about the taking and online posting of these photographs.  While, I am relieved to know that I am not alone in this ridiculously narcissistic behavior, I am curious to see how the trend further develops as self portraits become easier to take and people are less inhibited when taking them.  I really like the thought of photography serving as a “communication device.”  After all, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and with our decreasing attention spans as a result of technologically delivered snippets of information (more on this later), pictures could be how we ultimately receive most of our information.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Self portrait, while writing a blog post.

C-SPAN recently announced a partnership with Foursquare, the geo-location social media tool that really took off at SXSW this year.  From BrandChannel:

“Far from stodgy public access programming, C-SPAN has been embracing social media (and taking its shows on the road) as it pushes for greater public access through media coverage of the House and Senate and the Supreme Court.

“Now, Foursquare users who friend C-SPAN can, via Foursquare.com/cspan, access an abundance of C-SPAN content about U.S. public policy, politics, and government – a virtual tour guide to the inner workings of American democracy.

“If a user searches Foursquare for the U.S. Capitol, up comes a C-SPAN video with information about the Federal budget. Search for the White House, and view a C-SPAN interview with President Obama that was taped in the White House library.”

A partnership with C-SPAN solidifies the legitimacy of Foursquare and its potential in our increasingly digital and social world.  By linking relevant (and educational) content to locations, the act of checking-in becomes more valuable to the consumer.  And, C-SPAN is now exposing itself to a target viewer that might not otherwise have interacted with the media brand.

Historically, six degrees of separation has referred to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.  However, according to recent data, Twitter has now shortened our “degrees of separation” from each other: “On average, Twitter users have five degrees of separation between each other – meaning nearly everyone within Twitter is only five steps away.”  Therefore, “on average, a Twitter user will encounter 83% of all other Twitter users by visiting everyone’s friends up to a distance of five steps.”  So, in theory, it does not take a great number of “retweets” for a message to reach a large and diverse audience.

This is great news for marketers looking to justify a larger investment in social media as communications tools.  The news is even better for those looking to communicate in local (i.e., smaller) circles: “if a user traces their friends, and their friends and so on, in 3.32 steps on average they will discover a follower of their own. This means there are many small, circular connections on Twitter.” At this point, it almost seems negligent of a brand to not have a presence on Twitter.

When looking to wade (or dive deeper) into the social media pool, take the five-degrees-of-separation fact with a grain of salt and remember these few tips:

• Don’t build it and assume they will come.  Seek out quality followers: those active on Twitter who are predisposed to like the brand.
• Content should be relevant and interesting to warrant any “retweet” activity.
• Monitoring with the resources for rapid response are absolutely necessary.  A negative message will usually be spread faster than a positive one will be shared.

The Today Show announced a partnership with Foursquare today (see video below).  Watch out, world: Foursquare is going mainstream.  Who’s next?  Oprah?

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Several months ago, there was a video released revealing social media stats.  Now there is a new one – see it below.  These stats change so fast, we could have entire different video to watch next month. So, don’t get too attached to the numbers here. They will be greater next month. Social media is definitely not a fad.

This infographic shared on Mashable a couple of days ago has me thinking about innovation in business today.  It wasn’t just the device that drove the iPod into the only MP3 player of note, it was the iTunes store and the simplicity and functionality of the iTunes application for managing music.  All so clean and bundled together.   So smart.  We know this, but it is good to remind ourselves of it every once in a while.

[Source: Online MBA for MashableMashable.com]