Disney Acquires Social Network for Children

From Mashable:

Togetherville, a social network for children under the age of 10, has confirmed that it was purchased by Disney.

The site’s terms of service now read, “Welcome to the Internet sites of the Walt Disney Internet Group.”

Togetherville launched in May and set itself apart from other social networks for children by facilitating parent-child interactions. In addition to viewing their children’s social network activity on the sites, parents also can post messages to their walls, allocate “virtual allowances” and send virtual gifts.

The social network will join Disney’s powerful portfolio of sites aimed at children, which includes its 2007 $700 million acquisition of the game world Club Penguin and Funschool.com. Disney didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail regarding its intentions for its new acquisition.

Safe social networks for children who are not legally entitled to a Facebook account (at least according to the U.S. COPPA law) is a need that a bevy of new websites are vying to fill. Togetherville competitor Everloop announced last week that it was launching in 56,000 schools through a partnership with Internet safety education program i-Safe, and tween network What’s What? launched last week. Whether the magic of Disney will turn Togetherville, instead of another site, into a synonym for Facebook in the vocabulary of children remains to be seen.

Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY]

From Mashable:

A new report from eMarketer finds that most adult Americans with Internet access use Facebook at least once a month, and a full 42.3% of the entire American population was using the site as of this month.

By contrast, Twitter‘s penetration rate was much lower, sitting at around 7% of the total population and 9% of the Internet-using population, according to the report.

Late last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company saw around 250 million daily users of its 500 million-strong user base. The young exec made the point that Facebook’s products — including Photos, Places, Groups and Messages — are features that people use more frequently than they use other, more established services with similar features because Facebook’s products are inherently social.

Twitter, on the other hand, is driven largely by so-called power users, and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. Another interesting and related Twitter usage stat: 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.

One important stat to note, however, is Twitter’s year-over-year growth. Last year around this time, Twitter’s penetration rate was around 7%, and by the end of this year it’s expected to be at 11% for American Internet users, or 16.5% of the population that also uses other social networks. In terms of the overall U.S. population, the numbers are still small, but the growth is steady.

An analyst for the firm said, “eMarketer’s new Twitter usage estimates are lower than our April 2010 forecast. Since then, Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected.”

The microblogging service celebrated 100 million new accounts created in 2010, and a lot of that growth was due to the company’s investment in official and device-integrated mobile apps.

Is Developing a Mobile App Worth the Cost?From MAshable:

From Mashable:

Aaron Maxwell is founder of mobile web design agency Mobile Web Up. You can find him on the agency’s mobile business blog, where he writes about mobile and social media.

Almost every business is gearing up their mobile strategy. No secret why: Mobile is really taking off. There are already more people on the planet who communicate with text messages than with e-mail and more people who own phones than have credit cards, according to the latest statistics.

The difficulty is that there are many facets of mobile technology. Apps, websites and SMS form the broad foundation. But mobile payments and advertising are rich topics on their own. Where do you focus first?

For many companies, the answer has been “an iPhone app” (notice I said iPhone app, not mobile app. More on that later). But people have also been looking into mobile-optimized websites. That has led to a kind of debate in some circles about which is more important. If you’re going to only do one, is it better to make a mobile app or a mobile website?

Apps have one clear advantage. In general, a well-made app can provide a far better user experience than even the best mobile websites are capable of right now. I don’t think this is controversial.

Really, though, what I often see missing from such discussions is cost. It’s often not that hard to make a web app that will work well on most smartphones (depending on the nature of the app — things like graphics-intensive games being an exception, etc.).

But making just a native iPhone app is usually harder than making an equivalent cross-platform web app. And if you want Android and BlackBerry users to be able to have a native app, too, you often have to build each platform from scratch.

Types of Apps

Let’s make an important distinction here. Apps can be divided into:

• Those that are meant to directly generate income, and
• Those that are built for purposes of marketing, branding, or customer service.

The first type is the topic of all those heartwarming stories about some enterprising developer creating an iPhone app in his spare time, from which he is making more than enough to quit his job coding TPS report generators at BoringBigCo. There are also real companies that do create and sell apps, quite successfully. The income comes from charging for the app directly, in-app purchases, and subscriptions, or less directly, through advertising (think Angry Birds on Android).

If you’re charging for your mobile product, a native app is the way to go. A mobile website can’t integrate with iTunes billing, which — in addition to providing a ready market of 125 million mobile users — makes payment a snap. Charging for access to your mobile website will require rolling your own payment solution… a tall order on mobile right now.

While interesting and exciting, this category of mobile app is not really what we’re talking about in this article. What’s relevant is when companies produce apps in the second category, for the purposes of marketing, branding or customer service. Good examples are the Starbucks or Target Stores apps.

These are normally free, since the whole point is to get them distributed as widely as possible. And that changes the discussion completely. If we make an app, how many prospects and customers will it reach? That puts a ceiling on the potential success of the app as a marketing channel.

The Reach Of Different Mobile Channels

From a pure “how many prospects can I reach” perspective, the best mobile marketing tool is text messaging. About 68% percent of American cell phone subscribers sent a text message in late 2010, according to comScore’s mobile market share report.

Of course, you can do things with apps and websites that you can’t do with SMS. So how many people can you reach with an app? And how many with a mobile website?

For mobile websites, it’s easy. The best indicator is how many people actually browse the web on their mobile phones. As of late 2010, it’s currently over 36% of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers. So, about one half as many people as you can reach with a text message.

There is more to the story for apps. I was at the San Francisco de Young museum a couple of weeks ago. They threw a little shindig to celebrate the release of their official mobile app.

The only hitch: You could only install it if you had an iPhone. Those of us with Androids and BlackBerrys couldn’t play. That reflects a current reality with apps. An iPhone app only works on, well, iPhones. Your app has to be made separately for each platform.

In North America, the most important smartphone platforms right now are iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. How many mobile users are on each? Here are the ratios in the U.S., as a percentage of all mobile phone users, for the last quarter of 2010:

• iPhone: 6.75%
• Android: 7.75%
• BlackBerry: 8.53%
• TOTAL: 23.0%

In other words, if you decide to only make an iPhone app, fewer than 7% of all mobile phone users will be able to use it. If the app’s primary purpose is marketing, you’ll need to decide whether this reach is big enough to be worth it.

And if you develop three different apps to cover these three most common platforms, you’re going to potentially triple your cost. All so you can reach only a fraction of the number of people you can get with a mobile website.

To make things worse, I’m ignoring Windows Phone 7. A year from now it may have a very significant market share, thanks to Microsoft’s joint venture with Nokia. Most mobile websites will work fine on the new Nokia/WP7 phones the day they are released. But creating and pushing out a Silverlight mobile app is no small task.

Apps Aren’t Free

The costs for this can add up. There’s no such thing as a “typical” app, so it’s hard to give a meaningful average cost. But as a general working figure, we can say it costs at least $30,000 to design, implement and deploy a brand-quality iPhone app. I haven’t found published studies for the equivalent costs for Android and BlackBerry, but since the device fragmentation is greater, it would makes sense that the costs are at least similar.

All the above means that, at the end of the day, creating a set of mobile native apps that reach, say, 80% of smartphone users is going to be far more expensive than creating a mobile web app that reaches 90% of smartphone users. I don’t even mean twice the cost; I mean more like five, maybe even ten times the cost.

In many situations, that’s acceptable. As noted, sometimes you want to do things that just aren’t possible with a mobile website, at least with good quality. Or maybe it is possible, but you know you can create something of better quality with a native app, so that the result is more engaging. For enterprise-scale organizations like consumer banks and nationwide retail stores, they have the capital, and the ROI justifies it. But if your budget for mobile is under $100,000, it may not be a good approach.

How does a mobile website compare in cost? I haven’t found any published study of the typical cost for mobile web design and development. But from my experience running a company that does just that, I can tell you that it’s almost always less than the $30,000 for an “average” iPhone app.

What’s the ROI?

Given all this, how many prospects will a venture reach per dollar? At a conservative estimate of 234 million U.S. adults with mobile phones, here’s the breakdown:

In other words, you can reach nearly five times as many people per dollar invested with a mobile website rather than a native mobile app. And that’s conservative, assuming it costs just the same to create the BlackBerry app as it does to create the iPhone app (it doesn’t), or that a mobile website will cost the same as an equivalent iPhone app (generally, not even close).

Does this mean you shouldn’t do an app? Of course not. There are many other factors involved. If an app user converts 10 times more frequently, for example, the difference is more than justified. But that’s a big hurdle to clear. And if you want to reach users across more than one mobile platform, you have to consider the extra capital investment as well.

Whether you go with a mobile website, a native mobile app, or both, you’ll probably benefit. The continued mobile explosion will make sure of that. Just take care that you get the most bang for your buck by doing what’s best for your business.

HOW TO: Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand

From Mashable:

Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs, and internal education and engagement. You can follow her on Twitter, her blog, and via Yammer’s Twitter account and company blog.

Brands try to inspire excitement among their communities so that their fans and supporters will do the selling for them. That’s called advocacy, and it’s much more powerful than self-promotion. There are of course many ways to cultivate that fan base and get your advocates motivated

On the flip side, however, are “badvocates” –- the folks who spread negative comments about you with their networks. For example, Kevin Smith’s experience with Southwest Airlines.

It’s important for any business learn how to handle this badvocacy. To do so, you must first understand its causes.

Causes of Badvocacy

In most cases, badvocacy is a result of negative experiences with your brand. These can come from:

• Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints. With social media, you can touch the customer at any point in the purchase cycle: Pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase. Each of those interactions has to add value and be consistent with the rest of the experience.

  Let’s take support as an example. When you provide multi-channel support, you need to be careful about creating a consistent experience across all channels. Twitter support tends to lead other channels in its ability to provide individual solutions to customers. Other channels tend to lag behind. How many times have you called a support line only to have them route you to another 800 number because information you are looking for is in a different database? An inconsistent user experience can breed bad experiences.

• Inconsistency with expectations. Several times, I’ve gotten excited about a product based on the advertised promise, only to discover that that expectation was wrong. This type of disconnect certainly breeds negative feelings because time, effort and possibly money were wasted.
• A negative relationship with people who represent the company. Social media can humanize your brand, if used correctly. It’s important, however, that everyone adheres to the highest codes of conduct and is on the same page about company’s policies, news, product and feature releases, etc. A negative interaction with any person, whether in social or traditional channels, will mar the user’s view of the brand.

Chronic Complainers

In a few cases, though, badvocacy isn’t actually about the experience, but rather about the personality of the complainer. Most people are reasonable, online or offline, and will not trash your brand without just cause. However, there are a few people who just like to pick fights and complain. Some look for attention, some are just chronic complainers, and some enjoy trolling the web under the cloak of anonymity. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn make it harder to troll under a fake identity, but forums and blog comments can more easily bring out this type of behavior.

When dealing with these users, there isn’t a lot that you can do. You need to realize that some battles aren’t worth fighting, and just move on to someone with a legitimate problem. As they say, “Don’t feed the trolls.”

If someone has a legitimate issue, do everything you can to work through it, offer an individualized solution, apologize and give them space to like you again. A reasonable person will work with you, and although they may never be your advocate or use your product again, they will recognize that you tried to help.

Finding Badvocates

Now that you know the causes of badvocacy, it’s important to take action. First, however, you need to understand who your badvocates are, what they are saying and where they are saying it. The process is about listening, much like finding anything using social media.

Listen across relevant channels for the following words in conjunction with your brand name: “hate,” “sucks,” “bad,” “not working,” etc. You should also be tracking who is linking to your site and reading their blog posts and articles. When you find these distressed people, take the following steps:

• Figure out the issue. Read the content carefully, whether it’s a tweet or a long blog post, and understand the motivation behind the post. Is it a cry for help? Is it a distressed customer? What did they have a problem with? Why was their user experience subpar? How can you help them?
• Reach out. Reach out and acknowledge their pain. Most problems get resolved quickly because the person just wanted someone to talk to.
• Respect privacy. Know when to take the conversation private. Upon initial contact, it’s appropriate to acknowledge the problem in a public channel. After the initial public tweet, you should reach out in a private channel to really dig in and see if you can make a difference. Under no circumstances should you ever exchange confidential account information in an unsecured or public channel.
• Offer an individualized solution. In customer service, there’s no “one size fits all,” because each case is different. Offer an individualized solution, which may require you to work with the right people within your own company. Don’t tell this poor person to call the 800 number — go to bat for him.
• Don’t let it stew. Address sources of conflict quickly. Because most people just want to be heard, cared for and helped, the faster you can reach out, the more likely you will prevent the situation from festering.
• Never make it personal. If and when conflict escalates, never make it personal. Never attack the person, even if he or she attacks you personally. Keep the conversation focused on the issues.
• Take action, close the loop. Even though it’s self-explanatory, after you take action, you need to close the loop. Communicate back to the customer what has been done, or how soon to expect something to be done.
• Never lose your cool. Just like you shouldn’t make things personal, you should never lose your cool. Remember, even if you feel justified in “going berserk” in a certain situation, whatever you say in social media will stay part of your digital record forever. Choose your words wisely.
• Watch advocates come to your rescue. If you have done your job cultivating advocacy, in an online conflict, your advocates will come to your rescue.
• What’s influence got to do with it? Make sure you don’t just help badvocates with high influence scores. Every distressed customer is a potential badvocate, so make sure you help them before they become a “last resort” distressed customer.

How Do You Prevent Badvocacy?

You can prevent bad experiences by carefully cultivating advocacy among your audience through:

• Excellent experience. Just as badvocacy is caused by bad user experience, advocacy is caused by excellent experience. Recall that an excellent experience has to be consistent across all channels, regardless of location in the purchase cycle. The experience also must also be consistent with the promise and solve a big enough pain point to inspire advocacy.
• Create dialogue. Advocates are created when there is a two-way dialogue around their need, and users have a direct input into the future of the product. Just check out My Starbucks Idea for a great example.
• Humanize the brand. Kira Wampler, who handled the Intuit Small Business community, told me that engaging and displaying human avatars changed sentiment from 65% negative towards QuickBooks to only 35% negative. “My avatar was always a picture of one of my children and me during that time. I regularly told folks that it was easy to say ‘f**k you’ to Intuit the brand, but really hard to swear at the mommy and the baby. Especially when the mommy was helping,” says Kira.

Conclusion

You can’t empower your advocates without an empowered internal culture. Since anyone in the organization is a potential touchpoint for a customer (online or offline), each employee must be properly trained and motivated to provide an individualized solution for the client. When hiring, you must look for service orientation and the ability to solve problems. When training your new hires, make sure they have the resources to do the right thing for each and every customer.

5 Ways Mobile Will Transform Commerce

From Mashable:

David Sims covers the payment and data sectors for O’Reilly Radar and is the author of “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity.”

Given everything your smartphone does for you now, from mapping the skies to tracking your rides and delivering your website analytics, isn’t it a bit surprising how difficult it is to buy stuff with it? Mobile commerce — like flying cars or domestic robots — is one of those promises that has long seemed just around the corner; a logical next step, but one that has receded into the future before us, like a financial mirage.

At the risk of getting fooled again, I think that’s about to change. Twitter lights up every time Apple hires an engineer with expertise in near field communication (NFC), the wireless technology that will most likely power wave-and-pay mobile systems, and Eric Schmidt showed off tap-and-pay capability in an Android phone at the Web 2.0 Summit last fall. The fastest growing smartphone platform seems determined to roll out payment capability soon, and BlackBerry and WebOS are not far behind.

So what? How will that change your life if, instead of reaching into your wallet or purse to whip out a credit card, you instead wave or tap your mobile? Here are a few thoughts on how this shift will change the way you shop.

1. It Will Make You a More Fascinating Customer

By mashing together geolocation, check-in services, mobile payments and social media, merchants and payment companies will no longer see you as an inert — if well-funded — lump of credit risk sitting at a desk, but as a story of errands, outings, activities, friends, restaurants and bars. The same device with which you check in at Chili’s and upload your party pics now becomes something like your wallet, only more fun — and with a few skeletons in the closet. Credit card companies have long pieced together bits of your charge trail, just to get to know you better and figure out what odds they should place on getting their money back. They know, for example that if you charge frequently at a home improvement center, you’re more likely to pay on time than if, for example, you suddenly start charging at bars and casinos.

Now the story gets more interesting. Let’s say your current weakness is Mexican food, and you’ve become a lunchtime regular at a burrito shop near the office. Come Saturday, if you find yourself driving past a new taco joint on Main Street, you might get a mobile notification inviting you to lunch with a half-off coupon.

If any of this sounds creepy, it might just mean you’re a few years older than the target demographic. In order to avoid alienating customers, all the companies involved in the system — from the telco, through the payment company, and on to the merchant — will want to make sure you’ve opted in to the system. In exchange for that, we can assume you’ll be getting, at the least, discounts on food and merchandise. But don’t count on it: think how many people check in on Foursquare and Gowalla with no hope or expectation of getting anything more than a colorful, 100 pixel badge.

2. Shopping Will Become Even More Social

Social shopping is big; get ready to watch it get bigger as it gets mobile. Groupon’s mobile chief Mihir Shah said in late January that 5 million Groupon iPhone and Android apps had been downloaded in the nine months they had been available. But receiving mobile coupons is only the start of something big. Now imagine if a critical mass of shoppers within a certain range of a store could trigger a bargain.

This comes on the heels of a few experiments already underway, like Foursquare-powered loyalty programs and rewards for first-time or frequent visitors. But there are new benefits, especially for merchants. Imagine if a coffee shop could offer a mobile coupon to someone who checked into its competitor just down the street. That’s a new type of marketing warfare.

This transition will stretch the bounds of what we believe is acceptable for third parties to know about us. As with any economic transaction, it comes down to what you get in return. Where people once complained that it was creepy if an Internet service knew too much about you, we may be about to crash right through that barrier to the other side where users will begin to complain if the service doesn’t know enough about them.

3. It Makes Brick-and-Mortar Digital (and Vice Versa)

When you’re in Best Buy wondering if that’s the best price you’re going to find on an Xbox Kinect, and you scan the barcode with your smartphone, it pulls up a list of online sites offering the same product for a little less and a little more. At that moment, are you shopping in the real world or shopping online? Both, of course. Retail stores know they’ve lost an advantage against online retailers when you no longer have to phone home to comparison shop against Amazon’s best offer.

Things become even more interesting when retailers begin to use the phone to bring you to their physical space. Some of the best examples are roving gourmet catering trucks that tweet not only their menu specials but their location to customers every day, so diners know where to find them and what to expect when they arrive. Geolocation ads are following close behind, inviting likely prospects to retail doorsteps just because they’re in the neighborhood. I may not have a relationship with Trione Vineyards, but ever since I met their marketing person at a party a few months ago and became Foursquare friends, I get an offer to drop by their tasting room any time I check in at a restaurant near their location. Social, just barely, but there it is.

Offers and invitations are only one way that merchants can leverage mobile traffic to make things happen. Analysis of Twitter and checkin stats increasingly provide valuable customer service data that businesses can use to plan and promote.

And of course, the mobile device as a payment tool works both ways. Intuit, Square and other companies offer simple payment hardware and software that lets sellers big and small collect payment over the mobile phone. Square and Intuit’s target audience includes very small vendors — farmers markets, house cleaners, the Etsy crowd — who may not want to fork out for full fledged credit card processing systems. And once merchants get used to collecting payments over the phone, who’s to say that mobile won’t free them from the register the same way it frees office drones from the cube? Remember the first time the Apple sales person checked you out with their iPhone, right where you stood? Beyond the cool factor of not having to line up to pay, there’s no doubt that having more floor space for merchandise rather than registers is a plus.

4. Attackers and Incumbents Will Tussle

Disruptive technologies often serve as a wedge used by attackers to work their way into markets, and not incidentally to edge incumbents out of the action. One of the most striking examples in the mobile industry been the recent dethroning of Nokia as the world’s most popular mobile platform. Nokia, which rose to the top of the market by creating sleek phones with great reception and long battery life, blinked for a moment and found that the game had suddenly changed. The playing field had shifted from practical functionality to phones with apps that can do fun things, like help you find cool places to go, shop, and share stuff with your friends. Now, Nokia must leap from a burning platform (in the words of its new CEO Stephen Elop) into icy waters if it wants to thrive again.

We’ll also see disruption among the players who handle financial transactions. Apple, Google, and Paypal — hardly lightweights as is — will begin to take more and more of the transaction pie from current transaction leaders Visa, MasterCard, and the banks. They have a ways to go on this. PayPal’s transaction volume is far behind that of Visa and MasterCard, and PayPal may never offer lines of credit. Still, the convenience of mobile payment systems baked directly into phone platforms will ultimately entice many users to put down the plastic in favor of using debit or credit systems processed through their mobile phones. The growth curve of phones running Google’s Android operating system is inspiring, and no one is dismissing Apple’s 160 million iTunes customers or Amazon’s 130 million (give or take a few million). And let’s not forget that telecoms like Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica and T-mobile will all want their cut of mobile commerce pie, too.

The incumbents aren’t laying down, but the momentum could be with the attackers, and given the hurdle that any mobile payment will need to cross to convince users to shift from the wallet to the phone, it seems likely that the companies already most experienced at getting us to love our devices could be more successful in getting us to use them this way.

5. Your Mobile Phone Will Become Your Identity

Since the day you unfolded your first Nokia brick phone or raised the antenna on your Motorola, mobile phone use has been a courtship. Your phone is your diary of sentimental text messages, photo albums, e-mails, your music library, fitness tracker and Angry Birds scorecard. In a very short time, it is likely to be your wallet as well, enabling purchases not only online but in the physical world. It will provide a record (no doubt filtered, processed, and synched with Quicken or Mint) of these transactions.

With all this personal data and financial transaction history, it becomes pointless to argue that your mobile number isn’t as much a proxy for your identity as, say your social security number or driver’s license is. Those government issued cards may be more official, but your mobile-financial identity is certain to be more representative of who you really are – it’s used more frequently and more closely tied with the things, places, and people you love. It’s also tied more closely with your social graph and the map of your connections and haunts, thus bridging the gap between your mobile and other online identities.

Given how important the paying mobile phone will become, we’ll want to ramp up the security on it. Passcodes to unlock, methods to find, and systems to “blow up” the data in mobile devices are already in place. Deeper levels of security are not far behind, including biometric recognition (thumbprint or retina) and methods that employ multiple levels of scrutiny – for example, your password, location, and some private bit of data. And if that’s not enough, work is underway into voice recognition and “gait analysis,” the ability to acquaint your phone with the way you walk so that if someone else tries to walk away with it, the device locks up.

How to Find Your Most Important Fans

From ReadWriteWeb:

Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, but how do you work out which customers are most important in spreading your message? Services like PeerIndex or Klout help you find experts and influencers in particular communities, but can't measure what people have actually done for your business. The new Vipli.st service from Awe.sm aims to fill this gap by uncovering the fans who drive the most sharing. Launched at the Strata Startup Showcase last week, the site visualizes how Plancast events are shared across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It draws a tree showing the first person to create a plan, with links below to everyone who added themselves as attendees after clicking on that link, downwards through the entire history of the conversation around the event. Here's what it looks like for a SXSW Lean Startup plan:

The number next to each name shows how many attendees each person helped to sign up. Eric Ries is responsible for bringing in 10 attendees, which is no surprise since he's the best-known evangelist for the Lean Startup movement. How about Melissa Grody of 500Startups though? Despite having a pretty low-key Twitter account with just over a hundred followers, she's indirectly responsible for four signups, thanks to Patrick Vlaskovits picking up her tweet. Broad influence measuring services would never flag her role, but Vipli.st makes it possible to spot and recognize fans like her who are key to spreading the word.

The service was created by the Awe.sm team, and uses the same API that's available to third-party developers to gather the data it needs. To create the family tree of which attendees were driven by which fans, Plancast uses Awe.sm to create a new URL for each attendee that signs up, including a unique parameter that marks which user is sending out the plan. That parameter is also stored in Plancast's database, so when another user clicks on that special URL, it's possible to tell which person sent them to the site.

Awe.sm's co-founder Jonathan Strauss thinks that this sort of performance-based measurement is going to be a crucial tool for anyone marketing using social tools:

If all you want to do is reach people, direct marketing through email is a great channel. What's different about social tools like Twitter and Facebook are the retweet and like buttons, since users are far more likely to click them than they are to forward an email. The real value of social networks is in the sharing.

Plancast's Mark Hendrickson explained why this was so important to their business.

The whole idea behind our site is to help people hear about events through their friends. Vipli.st is the first time we've been able to visualize how that's happening in any kind of detail.

To explain how this could be useful to other businesses, Strauss pointed to one of Awe.sm's customers, the music store creator TopSpin (which markets online for artists like Eminem, Brian Eno and the Beastie Boys). Bands would love to uncover their most important fans, the ones who do the most to spread the word about their albums and concerts. Right now they can spot the big individual spenders, but not the penniless student who can't afford the deluxe $250 box set, but who persuades all her friends to buy the new album. She's the one they should really be inviting to their velvet-rope launch events, since she's doing far more to make them a success.

Strauss thinks broader measures of influence are still useful for brand-building, but that laser-focused performance metrics will become increasingly important to social marketers. "To understand how your social campaign is working, you need to understand how your message is being passed on down the chain". He and his team built the Vipli.st service to prove how easy it was to gather the data with Awe.sm and turn it into an actionable story. It's based completely on its public API, and Strauss is keen to work with any external developers who would like to do something similar with their own site.

Mobile Phones Will Serve as Central Hub to "Internet of Things"

From ReadWriteWeb:

At a keynote event during this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs talked about how mobile technology could be used to connect non-phone, non-tablet devices and objects to the Internet. This concept is generally referred to as the "Internet of Things," or, as Dr. Jacobs says, "the Internet of Everything."

In this future where everything is Web-connected, mobile phones will serve as the hub, or the remote control, for all the things around you. It will operate as your 6th sense for the machine-to-machine network of devices.

Mobile Phone is Hub of Internet of Things

Dr. Jacobs began his talk by looking back on the history of mobile. "Ten years ago, voice was killer app," he said. Now voice is less and less important, while data is increasingly so. People expect data everyone - more than phones, tablets, and e-readers - "going forward, everything is going to be connected."

And in this new network, where inanimate objects are Internet-enabled, your mobile phone will sit in the center of this Web of things. It will help you orchestrate the interactions of the things around you and provide real-time access to all sorts of info, including the people you meet, the places you go and the content that's available there.

The phone is the key to authenticating with these connected devices and taking their content with you, wherever you go.

Developments Needed

But in order to support this emerging machine-to-machine environment (M2M), there are several things that will be needed. First, there needs to be peer-to-peer support between devices. You should be able to discover the objects in a room with devices that are operating at a very low power level. This technology should even be down to the physical layer of device, he said, and the interactions it enables shouldn't need to hop on the cellular data network to occur - they should bypass it.

That means that modern devices will need to support multiple radios in addition to the cellular radio. They should also have a local radio, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, satellite, NFC (near field communication), etc. End users won't care how it works - they just expect the phone to connect to the fastest connection available to them at the present time.

In this multi-radio environment, radios will become embedded into all sorts of devices, consumer electronics and otherwise. This will lead to an explosion of data on the network. For operators, that means they'll need to figure out how to make their networks run more efficiently to accommodate the data traffic.

By 2014, said Dr. Jacobs, 70% of all consumer electronics devices will be connected to the Internet.

Another facet of the development of this Web of things will be the creation of devices with increased capabilities. Devices will have multi-core processors, multi-mode radios, 3D capture and play abilities and other sensors. Augmented reality will come into play, too - that is, looking through your phone's camera, you can "see" a data layer over top the "real" world.

Mobile Sensors & Health

One of the major areas of development in this Internet of Things is in wireless health . By 2014, there will be greater than 400 million wearable wireless sensors shipped. Just like the Internet helps you feel more connected with other people, these wearable devices will help you feel more connected to your healthcare professional. You will have a sense that you're being looked after. There's an economic incentive here too - the management of chromic disease accounts for three quarters of health care costs, Dr. Jacobs said. Your phone will act as the hub for the wireless sensors around you, connecting you to this information about your health.

Initially, emerging markets may see developments in wireless health first, simply because of need, but these developments will come to more developed markets as well.

At the end of the speech, Dr. Jacobs said that it's an exciting time in the mobile industry - it's as exciting as the beginning of the mobile Internet itself. We can't help but agree.

SMW 2011: Why is Pandora Pimping Out Moms?

From Social Times:

Everyone knows mom bloggers are hot right now, between time spent online and purchasing power, different markets around mom bloggers are estimated to be in the trillions. Trillions. A few months ago Adweek published a summary that projected mommy bloggers to grow from 3.7 million to 3.9 million this year but from the looks of it these numbers are deeply conservative. Blissdom, a mom blogging conference held each January had its fifth successful meetup this year and if you take one look at #blissdom on Twitter you can even see conversations year round. eMarketer predicts the number of mommy bloggers in the U.S. will reach 4.4 million in 2014. The mom factor is a powerful one behind commerce and corporations are jumping on the bandwagon, but our moms the new endorsement?

This week in NYC for Social Media Week, Pandora and RedBull hosted a panel of mom bloggers with the theme of music and how it applies to family life, but after a short time and soft agenda it became interesting to see the shift of consumer focus. Why is Pandora partnering with mom bloggers and what corporations are next to do so? Nichelle Pace, founder of StyleMom, talked about her experience having two kids: a younger and older one and how picking good products that moms like crucial for any business. Tomorrow there is “Building Brand Advocacy Among Women” though the bigger revelation will be which corporations are following this thread and what it means for the future of buying trends.

5 New Avenues That Facebook Pages Open Up For Businesses

From SimplyZesty:

Yesterday brought a whole new set of Facebook page changes which we covered in some depth but there is another angle that I have been thinking about that didn’t occur to me at first and that is business networking. The biggest change of all for me was the fact that you could log in as a business and take the profile of the business around Facebook rather than using your own personal profile and although this seems like a minor change I think it will have far reaching consequences. There is no doubt that Facebook have put a lot of thought in to how people will use the new Facebook business pages and as we always see people will start finding their own uses for their business as time goes on…

Business Networking?

The fact that you can log in as a business rather than a personal profile is a huge step forward and one that opens a whole host of new networking opportunities. Up until now you had to work within the confines of your own page but now you take you business identity all over Facebook and the web in general. You can like things, comment on other pages and engage in entirely new ways. This change should not be underestimated because the networking potential of commenting on other pages and actively engaging with users away from your own business page is huge. The important thing to remember here is that every time you engage somewhere it will leave a link back to your own page so very much like commenting is a good strategy for growing blog traffic the same now applies to Facebook.

* You obviously wouldn’t do it like I have in this example but it shows that you can talk business to business now

Lead Generation?

You never really knew up until now who was running Facebook pages. It could have been somebody from an agency, the brand manager or just an intern. There was no simple way to contact business owners and the page was pretty much a broadcast tool unless you wanted to leave a public comment on the wall. With the new settings it will be far easier to get in touch with business owners or people who run the pages so this could become a great lead generation tool as many businesses now have a Facebook presence of some sort.

Improved Customer Service

Plenty of brands have been using Facebook as a customer service tool already but they’ve been doing so in a very constricted way because of the structure of the old pages. Page owners couldn’t even get notifications about new comments or engagement but that has all changed now that you can log in as your business. Twitter has been a far better customer service tool to date but these changes make Facebook more “real time” for page admins. Add in the fact that you can see who is in charge of the page now and Facebook just became a far better customer service tool than it was yesterday.

Products And Services

Facebook is rigid in the way that it is built and what you can do design wise but the new photo lay out is tailor made for products, services and innovative ways of displaying. Much the same way as images were hacked on personal profiles to do cool stuff the same will be happening on business pages as we speak. A great place to show off your latest campaigns or do something innovative with photoshop me thinks!

Commenting on 3rd Party Sites

The new commenting system that Facebook are rumored to be rolling out in the next couple of weeks could make things even more interesting again. Imagine taking your business identity all over the web and leaving comments that all lead back to your business page. At the moment Facebook doesn’t allow you to do this as you can see from the screen grab below but I’d be stunned if this didn’t arrive in the future. This could be for people who either want to promote their pages or build themselves in to the experts in their field the ability to leave comments around the web. The other angle is integrating Facebook comments in to your own site when they launch and being able to use your Facebook profile to answer everything and have a seamless experience.

Augmented Reality: Making Life Easier

From Digital Buzz Blog:

Here is a taste of what we’ll be seeing at this year`s Mobile World Congress (MWC). This video demos the world`s first integrated markerless 3D object tracking on a smartphone. Or, to you and me, it shows us where Augmented Reality is heading: robust, smooth and useful everyday experiences.

This technology is one of the hottest topics for this year`s MWC. In order to see broad adoption of Augmented Vision, improvements will need to be made on performance, experience and usability capabilities. Market forecasts are predicting that the “AR market” could be a $732 million market (Juniper Research) in the next five years and that the worldwide smartphone sales will exceed 1.1 billion by 2013 (Parks Associates). We’re still a fair way off of this technology becoming part of everyday life but it’s great to see how advanced technology, such as AR will be used in the future.

HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Budget

From Mashable:

As marketers focus on optimizing their social media programs this year, return on investment is going to be a huge consideration. As a result, marketers will — and should — take a more calculated approach towards budgeting for social marketing initiatives. Prioritizing spending on particular social activities, though, is a task that hasn’t quite been mastered by most companies.

Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Founder Charlene Li of digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group, released a report on Thursday about “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets.” In short, the report concludes that budgets should be based on the maturity level of a corporation’s social business programs.

Altimeter interviewed 140 corporate social strategists to create a standard for categorizing programs into novice, intermediate and advanced maturity levels.

When asked about their programs, about half of respondents identified their programs as intermediate, while the rest were almost equally split between novice and advanced. The below graph is an overview of the priorities that each type of program should focus on. Read on for a more in-depth look at these goals.

This overview is just a taste of how businesses should begin budgeting for corporate social media programs. View Altimeter Group’s full report below for a deep dive into best practices at each social program maturity level:

Assessing Your Social Program’s Maturity Level

The report includes an assessment guide for figuring out where your corporation stands in the social world. The assessment covers topics such as leadership and organization models, processes and policies, education programs, measurement techniques and technology adoption to rank where your business ranks in maturity. Check it out on page seven of the full embedded report below.

Novice Programs

The average budget for novice social programs is $66,000, and an average team includes about 3.1 people in a centralized format, according to the report.

Programs in the novice stage are often just testing out or experimenting with social media. Altimeter’s report suggests that programs in this stage focus on organizational models, staffing and education programs. Here are some top tips:

• Organize for collaboration: Organize a team dedicated towards leading the company’s social initiatives. This centralized, core team should be tasked with creating social media policies, deploying education programs and implementing collaboration tools, with the overarching goal of helping team members share best practices and communicate effectively internally.
• Iron out response processes: Before launching elaborate social initiatives, like Facebook Pages and corporate blogs, take time to develop a triage system, which details who responds to customers in certain situations, and what they should and should not say.
• Invest in social monitoring: The beauty of social media is that it breaks down barriers between people. Now, more than ever, brands can easily see what consumers are saying about them online. That’s where listening comes in. Businesses in novice stage should invest in brand monitoring tools and act accordingly. Check out Alterian, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymfony, Radian6, Scout Labs and Visible Technologies, for starters, the report suggests, and Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, SAS Social Media Analytics and Sysomos for a deeper dive into customer insights.

Intermediate Programs

Intermediate level social programs enjoy a budget of slightly more than $1 million and a team size of about 8.2 employees. As programs move into this stage, the focus should shift to scaling, getting community members more involved in social programs and increasing efficiency through social media management tools.

• Focus on scaling: As buy-in increases across a company, the core social team should aim to morph into a “hub and spoke model,” in which one central team (the “hub”) provides guidance to multiple, cross-functional “spokes,” who implement programs related to their own business units. This allows social programs to permeate throughout a business’s culture and become a part of each business unit’s programming.
• Invest in community programs: Inevitably, a brand’s community is larger than it’s social media team. In the intermediate stage, social programs should focus on empowering customers to “do the work for you.” Altimeter suggests identifying key influencers in your community through these activities and formalizing an advocacy program. Centering around word of mouth is generally a much more effective strategy than tasking a handful of social strategists to tweet away from headquarters.
• Adopt social media management systems: To manage content production and deployment, intermediate programs should scope out and adopt social media management systems. This will allow for more efficient dialogue with customers and among staffers. With these tools, creating highly engaged communities across the social web will be much more manageable.

Advanced Programs

While advanced programs often entail having many more teammates (20.8 on average), their budgets aren’t much higher than those of intermediate programs, at around $1.3 million, according to the report. Larger corporations have the ability to support cross-functional teams, instead of fostering smaller groups of direct reports, which explains the huge leap in team members, but lack of proportional budgeting.

Once a social program becomes more advanced, the core goal should be increasing social media integration throughout the entire business. Here’s how to do that:

• Prepare for total permeation: Whether a social program spreads to just key members in all business units, or to everyone in an entire organization, social media leaders should be prepared for social business to become a part of how every area of the business operates. Education will be key — businesses need to empower employees to get involved, while also clearly communicating guidelines and policies. Social education, then, cannot be an after-though — it needs to be part of standard employee on-boarding.
• Employ boutique social agencies: Instead of relying on traditional agencies for social media guidance and deployment, advanced social programs should begin scoping out the landscape of niche agencies that focus specifically on social business. These agencies can help with social management, campaign building and even change management.
• Integrate social into technology deployments: As an ongoing effort, advanced social programs must integrate social into each digital touchpoint across their businesses, including social customer relationship management (SCRM), social sign-on on corporate websites and social aggregation and curation.

This overview is just a taste of how businesses should begin budgeting for corporate social media programs. View Altimeter Group’s full report below for a deep dive into best practices at each social program maturity level:

How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets

Video Marketing: DYI or Take it to a Pro?

From Social Times:

One of my top rules of successful marketing is, “Just because you can do it yourself does not mean you should do it yourself.” Creating and posting online videos seems rather straightforward and doesn’t necessarily require heavy lifting.

So why not do it yourself? Because a badly executed streamed video can hurt your brand as much as any other badly executed marketing. And time poorly spent is unrecoverable.

Let’s take at look at five clusters of decisions you need to make to successfully use video as a social media marketing tool.

Audience

A ridiculous percentage of web and social media marketing responds better to the needs of the brand than the needs of its prospective customers. Always remember that you are not your friends/followers/connections. Put yourself in their heads to determine why they are visiting your media platform and what will motivate them to share.

Know where your audience spends time on social media. If possible, make your content available directly on those platforms; if not, eliminate as much friction as possible from the process of getting to your content.

Promote your video content across your other marketing efforts. Writing, “Visit our channel on YouTube” in your email signature is not promotion.

Content

Speaking to an audience “though” a camera is not the same as presenting face-to-face. Having your messages crafted for the medium by a skilled writer can make all the difference between a hit and a fail.

An experienced presenter can also differentiate your video. On the other hand, personality-based presentations may be recommended if focusing on one or more of your brand’s key staff is part of your overall marketing strategy. (Or if you want to include a user endorsement.) Unless these people are telegenic, assist them by providing a coach or director.

Quality

Dolly Parton once quipped that it cost her lots of money to look cheap. Quality is as much a matter of attention to details as it is expense.

Social media marketing is most successful when brands are authentic. Using a more homemade (and less costly) approach for many of its presentations has made Cisco — a behemoth brand — more accessible. Conversely, startup brands can differentiate themselves from the pack by cranking up the quality of their productions, even a little bit. As long as the brand is not falsely represented to the viewers.

In terms of production, post production and posting services, buy the highest values you can afford. Today’s YouTube clip may be next Thursday’s investor briefing. Here’s where professional advice on where to shoot (in front of a green screen to drop-in backgrounds in production?), what gear to use (a Flip or a rented pro camera with a pro cameraman?) and other factors will prevent later regrets.

Quantification

How important is it to you to know who’s watching your video marketing, how they got to the content and whether they’re watching it to the end? Knowing these things may make it worthwhile for you to use services that offer these metrics. This is especially true if you’re creating videos intended to have a long shelf-life, such as a series for training.

Control

For the most part, social media asks brands to relinquish control of their messages. Some brands are concerned that loss of control of their video content can compromise quality and effectiveness. Carefully consider your content hosting channel if you want your videos to be “wrapped” in your branding, seek comment moderation and/or hope to limit redistribution.

A final consideration — appropriate to all of your marketing efforts — is time. Unless you are a YouTube brand, should you be spending time producing videos (or any number of other marketing activities) when you’ve got a brand to build? Even if you’re the guy who lost the coin toss and is responsible for marketing, can you afford the time away from higher-order activities?

The dangers of a cost per fan on Facebook

From Simply Zesty:

There is an increasing trend amongst marketers, brands and agencies to look for a magic number in the ‘cost per fan’ for Facebook pages. It’s easy to see why both sides want to pursue this. For the company, they get to turn social media into a more neat, understandable advertising concept – a stream of fans you can buy and control by simply turning on or off. And for marketers, it makes it that much easier to sell to the brand in question ; you put people in the room at ease by putting things in plain monetary terms. A direct return on the investment that will be made through Facebook. There is a danger in this model however, that can seriously impact how you structure a campaign and the true benefit if can hold.

A fan is not a thing

To understand the near absurdity of the idea of a cost per fan, you need look no further than the term itself. A tried and tested advertising model like the cost per click or cost per thousand impressions has been apparently seamlessly translated into a cost per fan. Call it what it really is and it’s a cost per person. People, or fans, are not equal to clicks. A click is an action that’s taken on a link whereas a person is not a commodity that cannot be bought, and even if they could be, determining that the person is now actually a fan is wholly misleading. The science behind the concept may seem simple – you just look at the amount of people that ‘Liked’ your page from your ad. But to think of fans in terms of a commodity, even if it’s a case of semantics, should be avoided. This is the unfortunate side effect of Facebook making public the number of Likes on pages. You are inevitably on a race to acquire more fans, at whatever the cost.

The other danger in a cost per fan model, is in assuming that the benefit to the advertiser or brand ends at the point that they click on your ad or join your Facebook page. It is in seeing Facebook simply as a marketplace to trade in the commodity of fans instead of thinking how you can get these real people to invest in your brand beyond the click and possibly drive even more revenue for you. You may be able to boast about a cheap cost per fan, but what is the interaction like on your page? What’s the true value of these fans that you’ve acquired? If you’re not able to answer this, or would rather not as it’s not all that positive, then you’re in danger.

Is the cost of a fan $1.07 ?

A recent study by Webtrends found that the average cost of a fan through advertising on Facebook’s ad platform is $1.07. This might sound like a nice number and indeed it’s easy to see how you can calculate this. Analyse the advertising spend, the attributed ‘Likes’ to those ads and you have a cost per fan. But this is only a cost per fan based on your direct advertising spend. It doesn’t take into account the fact that the community on your page is social, that your fans will be growing as they’re drawn to the page by their friends that join or comment, actively finding your page by searching, or being referred by another campaign promotion you might be running. And the danger in putting a number on how much your fans cost is that you begin to base it on other, unrelated media. The brand begins to make calculations such as how many people they can reach through the equivalent in ad spend, editorial etc..

Now I do recognise the temptation to work on a cost per fan model, but I honestly think that this is a dangerous trap for both brands and marketers to fall into. I’m not impervious to measuring the business value of Facebook pages, but a better way to spend your time in analysing your Facebook page or campaign is to find out the value this it is really driving for your brand. Find out what your fans mean to you first, and then focus on all the avenues that you can use to increase those loyal fans or simply focus on strengthening the community around you. This is what Facebook is for after all. The brands that do this will likely find that their advertising spend can decrease while the value from the fans increase.

An interesting point that was uncovered by Web Trends was that the cost of ads on Facebook is increasing. What started out as a very cheap cost per click is slowly getting more expensive. As the article states, the average CPM was around 17 cents in 2009 compared to 25 cents in 2010. This should be another warning sign for brands. If the cost of your ads is going up then this would mean that your cost per fan is rising as well. But this is at odds with the massively growing Facebook pages that we see today. People aren’t less interested in joining pages, but you do need to work harder for them. The strategy of buying a load of fans in will become harder, as users become less likely to click on ads, combined with an increase from competitor bids. The smart brands will realise this and quickly switch strategy to keep up.

Facebook Ads done well

Facebook’s ad platform is still an incredibly useful tool for brands – I am a big advocate of Facebook advertising providing it’s done well. First of all remember that it is an ad platform and should be treated with the same time and consideration as the likes of Google Adwords. Lots of people make the mistake of blanket targeting their ads and not really making use of the targeting options that Facebook make available. And you should continually optimise and test new strategies just as you would within Adwords. But unlike Google Adwords, remember that this is social advertising and if you want it to, it can work for you in completely new ways. Facebook ads are done best when they are part of a complete social strategy – a first step in a wider customer journey or campaign that you have considered. And if you’re really into making your ad spend work hard for you, then make your advertising a way to push a clever campaign you’re running, as opposed to just buying fans for the sake of it.

I really hope that the cost per fan advertising model doesn’t become an accepted marketing practice as it’s pretty bad news for everyone involved and turns social media into a race for the highest number, or the cheapest fans. Find a way to communicate the value of what you’re doing, but don’t focus on the cost of your fans as an indicator of success.

Content Is Everywhere - The Changing Tide Of The Internet

From 6 Pixels of Separation:

It's no longer about sending people to your website. It's about being at the center of where your consumer is.

There have been a couple of major indicators that the world of publishing and content is shifting away from the traditionally held value that you have to drive traffic to one, specific destination. That world has not only changed, but it's gone.

Need some proof?

• The smart producers of content link out to the best content. The New York Times has not mastered this, but they started experimenting with this technique a few years back, and many considered this revolutionary when it first occurred for a newspaper website.
• Prior to major newspaper websites letting visitors leave their destination for other sites, Buzzmachine and best-selling author of What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis, hailed this concept as "cover what you do best and link to the rest" (February 2007).
• Facebook begins distribution of their "like" button, so that consumers can "like" anything on any site (not just within the walls of Facebook). You can read more about this here: Facebook Isn't (Just) A Destination.
• Even though the iPad has a near-seamless Web experience, publishers still create native apps for the device.
• It was just announced that AOL has acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million (more on that here: Reuters - AOL to buy The Huffington Post for $315 million) and that Arianna Huffington will now become "president editor-in-chief of all of AOL's content," according to the Mashable news item, AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315 Million.

Don't focus on The Huffington Post part of the equation... put your focus and attention on AOL.

The minute Tim Armstrong left his very comfortable position leading sales and advertising at Google to become the CEO of AOL in March 2009, I knew things were about to change online (and I knew it would take some time). Too many people counted AOL (and him) out. I've had the pleasure of meeting Armstrong on many occasions and knew that when he took on the helm at AOL, things would change. This acquisition of Huffington Post isn't the entire picture, but just another spot on a leopard that continues to change its spots.

Ditch the destination.

If you own media and if you publish content, you need to understand that pushing people where you want them to go in a world where anyone and everyone can publish content in text, images, audio and video is an impossible task. The most strategic move you can make is to now be everywhere you consumers are. Here's what Arianna Huffington had to say about the acquisition of her company to AOL:

"AOL's Patch.com covers 800 towns across America, providing an incredible infrastructure for citizen journalism in time for the 2012 election, and a focus on community and local solutions that have been an integral part of HuffPost's DNA. Check. Original video? AOL's just finished building a pair of state-of-the-art video studios in New York and LA, and video views on AOL have gone up 400 percent over the last year. Check. More sections? AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Black Voices, etc, etc, etc. fill gaps in HuffPost's coverage. Add all that to what HuffPost is doing with social, community, mobile, as well as our commitment to innovative original reporting and beyond-left-and-right commentary, and the blending will have a multiplier effect. Or, as Tim and I have been saying over the last couple of weeks: 1 + 1 = 11."

The new publisher.

You can see by AOL's performance and some of the media punditry that this is a company in transition. It's no longer just about the ISP, the portal destination (aka "the walled garden") and building AOL as the primary brand (regardless of what the current revenue model looks like). AOL is quickly becoming the new publisher. The publisher of the future. AOL owns properties like Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone and many, many more. In fact, many laughed when Tim Armstrong first arrived at AOL and said it would take a few months to better understand all of the properties that AOL owned, and where they fit in the grand scheme of things.

What AOL knows... that others are missing.

There is a sense of both innovation happening at AOL when it comes to publishing and no fear of killing their sacred cows. While many of us have all but ignored AOL, the past few years have been spent shedding the old/non-performing sites and turning the Internet into a world of AOL content sites through acquisition and creation. It's something that companies like News Corp, The New York Times and even Google and Facebook could learn from. Is the model perfect? No. Is the model providing astounding revenues? No... not yet. Like everything else, we need to give this transition time.

This isn't about AOL. It's about the new way content flows in a digital world.

Many people will comment (below and elsewhere) about whether or not this is a good deal for The Huffington Post and/or AOL. I don't see that as relevant to the story as much as what this continues to mean for the dramatic changes in content and marketing:

• It's no longer about a destination. The content is everywhere. You don't just have to read this Blog post and comment here. You can read it on Facebook, on a Blog aggregator and you can comment anywhere you wish (on Twitter, YouTube... you name it).
• If you're a publisher, you can acquire the content sites that you are missing and leave them be to perform as they are. You don't have to assimilate them into a global brand (traditional magazine publishers do this quite well).
• If the content doesn't exist, the platform does exist for you to create it in an original and compelling way. Arianna Huffington and team didn't wait for The Los Angeles Times to have a vision for the newspaper of the future. They created it - using cheap, easy and existing tools.
• Local and niche content continues to become more and more relevant in the digital space. Read between the lines about this acquisition and it becomes obvious that the content masters of the near-future will be those who grasp deep niches and hyper-local spaces.
• It's about the platforms too. This isn't a Web-based world, a mobile world and a tablet world. It's about how connected the consumer now is through their one-line of connectivity.

In the end, whether AOL becomes the next big thing (again) is less relevant to me than the business model that they are creating for Publishers and Advertisers. As it acquires more and more properties across all of the technological platforms, AOL makes itself very attractive to these advertisers by helping them to become more findable (and shareable) in every nook and cranny of the consumer's appetite for content.

Foursquare’s Super Bowl Campaign to Test Badge Redemption Codes

From Mashable:

This year, startups and brands are hungrier than ever to capitalize on the Super Bowl and the anticipated volume of conversations that will spill over on social sites by association. In doing just that, Foursquare will be testing out two new ideas: A global promoted venue and redemption codes attached to badges.

The location-based mobile game is trading in the local appeal of its service for a day and working with the NFL on something more global in nature. On Sunday, all Foursquare users will see the same promoted trending venue — “Super Bowl Sunday” — for the duration of the game.

Foursquare will be doling out team-themed Super Bowl badges to Steelers and Packers fans who check in to the promoted venue and include the name of a team in their shouts. Foursquare users at the game can unlock a special Super Bowl XLV badge if they check in to the stadium.

More importantly, every unlocked badge comes with a unique redemption code that badge holders can use for a 20% discount on select merchandise at NFLShop.com.

Foursquare fans will appreciate the badges and the merchandise discount, but there’s much more to this promotion than ephemeral trophies and sporting memorabilia.

The “Super Bowl Sunday” manually promoted venue is a notable tangent from the startup’s everyday fare of venues promoted by popularity. For starters, Foursquare will likely see its most venue checkins to date. Then, of course, is the potential for the startup to open up promoted venues to paid advertisers.

Badge holder redemption codes are also something we’d anticipate the startup will proffer to future partners to better tie Foursquare activity to actual sales.

A Foursquare representative stressed that this particular promotion is merely an experiment and that no money is changing hands. But, in testing badge redemption codes and Foursquare-promoted venues, the startup seems to be laying the foundation for products with advertiser appeal.

Disney Lays Out Its Plan for Android [VIDEO]

From Mashable:

Disney has finally made its debut on Android. Why did it take the company so long to launch apps for the smartphone and tablet platform, and what is Disney’s plan to make a splash on Google’s platform?

At Google’s Android Honeycomb event Wednesday, Bart Decrem, the SVP and general manager of Disney Mobile (and former CEO of Tapulous before it was acquired by Disney), took the stage to announce the entertainment company’s first three Android apps. The first is an app for Disney Radio. The second and third bring two of the most popular iOS game franchises to Android: Jelly Car and Tap Tap Revenge.

I had a chance to catch up with Disney’s Decrem after the announcement to ask him about his company’s mobile efforts. I asked him why Disney waited until now to launch on Android, what Tap Tap Revenge on Android means for the franchise, and what the company intends to launch next.

Check out the video to get his answers. And in case you’re wondering, that is a demo of Tap Tap Revenge 4 for Android being played in the background.

Top 5 Social Media Game Plans for Super Bowl Advertisers

From Mashable:

Imagine you’re an advertiser contemplating spending $3 million or so on a Super Bowl ad. Maybe you’ve never done this before or maybe you do it every year, but at some point, you have to justify to someone — your CEO or maybe a procurement expert at the company — why this is a good idea.

Now imagine there was a cheap way to get a better return on investment on that $3 million. All you had to do was create some kind of buzz before the ad ran on TV. You could do this by running the ad or maybe video related to the ad on YouTube, writing about it on your company blog, premiering the ad on Facebook, or maybe talking it up on Twitter. Or perhaps you could release an app related to the ad around the time of the big game. You could also get fans to actually create a video for you and then have them talk about it via social media channels for months before the game. Or you could run a game of some sort. Or you could do all that stuff at once.

As you can see, there is a confounding array of social media options, and because social media is still so new, few tried-and-true methods. That said, although the social media palate keeps expanding, there seem to be just four basic approaches to social media Super Bowl hyping.

1. Establish a Real-Time Narrative

These days, Frito-Lay starts its Super Bowl push in September. On September 15, the company announced the 2011 version of its Crash the Super Bowl contest, which offers a total of $5 million in prizes. Since 2006, the PepsiCo unit, which markets Doritos, Fritos and other snacks, has been running a contest asking consumers to try to make ads for the company for possible inclusion into the Super Bowl.

At the time, the craze for user-generated content, driven by books like James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, was at its apex. In the 2007 Super Bowl, the NFL and Chevrolet also ran user-generated TV spots. Four years later, Frito-Lay has made user-generated Super Bowl content a big part of its brand essence. But, while few advertisers have followed Frito-Lay’s lead on UGC, the idea of creating a social media narrative leading up to the Super Bowl has found more currency.

Frito-Lay’s plan, which requires would-be commercial creators to upload their videos onto a dedicated website and asks consumers to vote on the ads, provides more or less constant social media chatter leading up to the big game. After the initial announcement, there was a period from September 27 to November 15 in which consumers could upload videos. The company announced 10 potential ads (for a total of six slots, though fans only choose four — execs from Frito-Lay and Pepsi pick the other two) in early January and then holds off on announcing the winners until the game.

Another advertiser using the real-time narrative approach is Mercedes, which this year is running what it’s calling “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race.” The campaign, run via the brand’s Facebook page, sought four two-person teams to race from February 2 through February 4. The teams, chosen for their Twitter followings, win the race based on how much Twitter activity or “Twitter fuel” they can generate.

2. Turn It Into a Game

Until social media came along, pretty much every ad that ran during the game was a complete surprise. Keeping ads a secret, though, is tougher these days. Witness Lipton Brisk, which had been hyping an unnamed big-name rapper as an endorser in the weeks leading up to the game, but lost all social currency when The New York Post broke the story that, in fact, Eminem was the mystery endorser. Still, there are other ways to get people to tune in for your ad. Some marketers are using their Facebook page and/or Twitter feeds to hype secret messages in ads or to get consumers to guess what the ads will look like.

Anheuser-Busch took the latter approach. The brewer, usually the dominant advertiser during the game, has posted a single still from each of its three spots and asking Facebook fans to guess the plot. The campaign, reminiscent of The New Yorker’s caption contest, will reward users who guess correctly with a fourth, Internet-only spot.

Likewise, Kia this year is running a campaign called “One Epic Contest” around one of its Super Bowl spots. In the week and a half leading up to the game, the car maker invited consumers to “embark on their own adventure” through an online grid-based hieroglyphic game set in an ancient temple that poses four questions. Meanwhile, clues for the game were dispersed into 15-second TV spots, print ads and social media postings. A fifth question will be revealed and answered during the ad. The prize: one of five 2011 Optimas.

3. Release a Tie-In App

Another way to give a Super Bowl ad a life in social media is to create an app based on the ad. This, however, is a little-used approach. In fact, until recently, only one advertiser, CareerBuilder, did this. In 2006, the job search site released Monk-E-Mail, an e-mail program that used monkeys from the company’s ads to convey messages. Though the program was successful and resulted in more than 100 million downloads since inception, CareerBuilder monkeyed with its advertising approach, trying a Survivor theme in 2007 and opting for a user-generated ad last year. This year, the monkeys are back and so is Monk-E-Mail.

But just as CareerBuilder is bringing Monk-E-mail back, the app has a rival. E*Trade has come out with BabyMail, a similar concept that features talking babies from the company’s commercials delivering the messages.

4. Advertise the Ad

The final approach to Super Bowl hyping via social media is to treat the ad almost like a movie opening, by teasing out the content. This can be done a variety of ways. For instance, E*Trade plans to run outtakes of its talking babies ad on its YouTube channel before the game as a sop to fans who can’t wait for the next commercial. Motorola even took the unusual step of getting PR agency Weber Shandwick to create a video on YouTube hyping the company’s upcoming Super Bowl spot for its Xoom tablet PC. GoDaddy also released at least one of its Super Bowl ads on its company website before the game, but the ad, featuring Jillian Michaels and Danica Patrick, is designed to hype another GoDaddy Super Bowl spot.

If an ad for an ad sounds a bit insular to you, consider that all the social media outreach techniques outlined above basically perform the same function.

5. Just Throw It on YouTube

This is the first year that advertisers en masse put their complete Super Bowl ads online well before the game. For Volkswagen, this was a smart tactic. The company’s “The Force” ad featuring a pint-sized Darth Vader got 1.5 million views on YouTube in the first 48 hours or so of posting and was a trending topic on Twitter. Two days before the Super Bowl spots are set to air, Hyundai, Coca-Cola, Cars.com and HomeAway had done the same.

Whether this is a smart tactic for everyone remains to be seen, but in a world saturated with advertising, $3 million seems like a relatively small price to pay to get people to talk about your ad.