Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

You would think that it would be a terrible idea for a company accused of helping teenagers send each other sexually explicit images to feature bikini-clad young girls in their marketing. Most would avoid such direct associations, for good reason – it’s immature, and edgy when it doesn’t need to be.

But not the makers of the enormously popular app, Snapchat, which allows people to send images and videos that “self-destruct” after a few seconds.

The company claims messages are deleted once they are opened, but there have been a series of recent scandals showing that this may not be completely accurate.  Their product is far from perfect, and there are several ways to compromise the protection they offer.  It is never a good idea to send something over the internet that would damage you or your reputation if it became public.  While this may be common sense, it has little to do with how we actually act online.

The makers of Snapchat are right to reject the “sexting app” label — it’s not clear that this is what it is even being used for, and everyone deserves the option to communicate privately when they want, without automatically being branded as a pervert.

Within a few months of launching, the company has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet, and we should all be grateful.

They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication.  Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder.

And Snapchat isn’t even the best product out there — there’s a whole slew of communication tools that are more secure and functional making their way into the public eye.

One of those is Wickr, created by RSA veteran Nico Sell, a more serious security-focused app that uses “military-grade” encryption to send text, video, voice, and document files that can self-destruct after a given period of time.  Hospitals and law enforcement have expressed interest in a similarly functioning Android app, Gryphn.  Although it’s not “self-destructing,” keep an eye on the exciting and powerful suite of communication apps developed by encryption legend Phil Zimmermann’s Silent Circle company – they are not for “average” users, but they could provide enterprise and more serious clients a massive improvement in security.

What apps like these do is allow us a little bit more freedom to be ourselves, for better or worse.

In the copycat world of Silicon Valley startups and funding, expect to see a lot more “Snapchat for _____” type companies.  Finally, the lack of app creativity may work in the favor of consumers.  We have accepted the notion that what you do on the internet is permanent – a statement that is partially a truthful observation, and partially a threatening promise from the companies and entrepreneurs who are making it a reality – but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything.

Perhaps the greatest impact of this rising industry will be when the giants try to co-opt them, as Facebook attempted with Poke.  The issue of trust in these companies aside, it would be a winning situation for everyone for ephemeral features to be built into the services we already use.

We need more human-behavior-friendly default settings.

Privacy is complicated, and nothing is ever completely secure.  Nobody is immune from this, as Nicholas Weaver wrote in Wired, “even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI.”  But in the billions of messages already sent through Snapchat are a few people who didn’t have their lives ruined because of something they shouldn’t have shared.

The media can continue to ridicule the “sexting app” that so many young people are using, but they are entirely missing the point.  The same generation being blamed for the supposed “death of privacy” has become wiser than those who are criticizing them.

In a candid admission at the Milken Conference this year, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recalling his college days playing in a band, told the audience, “thank God social media didn’t exist then, because if it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.  The next generations are going to be the ones who pay the true cost of the design decisions we make today.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Image credit: Shutterstock/Shocked man

Nevahold is a platform where people rally together to get the attention of large companies. Users compose a “shout” and share it with the community to rally support for their cause. Other members of the community can join in the action by sharing on their social media accounts. The ultimate goal is that enough people participate to elicit a response.

“In today’s culture of huge, faceless companies, chances are high that you’ve hit the hair-pulling, mind-numbing, high-pitched-screeching frustration of overpaying for services, buying cheap quality products, being hit with hidden fees, dealing with the worst of customer service skills, or not even getting through to customer service and staying on an endless elevator-music hold cycle,” said cofounder Kena Amoah to VentureBeat. “Nevahold allows consumers to crowd source their social media accounts to harness their power and increase their influence when reaching out to a company.”

Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a means to express their gripes, grievances, and appreciation for products and services. On the other end, businesses across the board are using social media to connect with consumers and for customer service support. Nevahold’s goal is to give consumers as much efficacy as possible when reaching out to these companies and is based on the principle of “strength in numbers.”

On Nevahold, people send their shout to a company’s social media contact and wait 30 minutes for a response. A shout can include photos, videos, or be a simple comment. If the company is radio silent, then advocates start to retweet an share the shout until the company responds. If the company still doesn’t respond, the question is shared one all of Nevahold’s 12 social media channels.

Nevahold gives each company a customer service score based on their response rates and time. The compare tool helps consumer see how different companies fare side-by-side. There is also a campaign feature that consumers can use to petition for a change in the company’s policy or service.

Amoah said that during beta testing, Nevahold has helped resolve 23,990 questions and complaints in the airline, wireless, and consumer electronics industry and had a 91.5 percent response rate. It recently helped students traveling to a conference stand up against American Airlines and against Barclays U.K.

The three founders met at the Meltwater School of Technology in Ghana. Meltwater Foundation has invested $90,000. Competitors include Gripevine, Gri.pe and Publikdemand.

“SimulTV puts the social in TV – literally – by merging the second screen with the first,” the company says.

The second screen is the biggest phenomena in traditional media, supposedly. Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV. It’s such a big phenomenon that TV Guide rolled out an app to see what’s playing, watch whatever’s on, and also tweet, post, and blog about it. And that Apple is rumored to be releasing a mini-TV tablet to enable an iOS-style second-screen experience.

Of course, when I go to watch TV, I go to chill, or to immerse myself in a story … not to tweet about it or share. But I am, admittedly, not 20 anymore.

For those who want to stay socially connected while watching the big game or the last episode of can’t-miss-TV, SimulTV’s solution is to combine both screens, right on the web. So your football game, Twitter conversations, Facebook messages, online search, and text and voice chat with others on SimulTV who are watching the same thing as you.

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

I tried the service myself, and besides the fact that it’s Flash-based — at least the code that asks for control of your microphone and webcam in order to participate in on-site chat — and fairly processor-intensive, it seems useful and a better solution than a standard two-device second-screen setup.

Currently, there are only a few channels, but by this summer, SimulTV promises to have more than 100 channels, including ”top channels” from Latin America, China, Japan and Europe, plus 5,000 video-on-demand titles. The service is HD-quality, with picture-in-picture for the truly ADHD social TV aficionados, and according to the company, takes only half the bandwidth of typically required.

Most importantly, however, SimulTV is a service that — depending on the channels the company actually brings on this summer — allows you to cut the cord and simply use your computer or tablet to watch TV.

The service will be free initially, and eventually will cost between $5 and $20.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

So social media and search engine optimization in China is a whole different ballgame. But an important one to play for any American company that wants a presence in the Middle Kingdom, according to Bin Lee and Iris Huang of Glogou.

“Asians are all social media users,” says Lee. “Social media users in China are way more active than Facebookers and Twitter users — social media is their key outlet.”

Glogou has been helping U.S companies sell into China — a “reverse Alibaba,” the company calls itself — for about five years. In a natural progression, last year the company started to explore helping Western corporations build their online profiles in China in addition to selling their products.

The reasons Western companies could need such a service have to do with the difficulties Western companies can face in China, such as what happened to Apple over the past few months — negative press in government-owned media outlets and coordinated astroturf social media attacks. And of course, reasons such as those behind Google’s exit from the Chinese market. Basically, if the Chinese government doesn’t approve of what you’re doing, you’re not going to be successful in China.

Early detection and response — Apple CEO Tim Cook eventually apologized, probably settling the issues — is critical.

But not all the challenges of doing business in China can be chalked up to political problems. In the Chinese government’s efforts to accomplish its goals — whatever they are — there’s a lot of collateral damage.

Source: John Koetsier

China’s Baidu search engine is very Google, circa 2005

“Many US sites are not accessible from China,” says Huang. “It’s amazing how many … often that’s not because of political reasons, often simply due to technical reasons.”

So Glogou provides site monitoring services based in China, confirming that your site is accessible from mainland China and building you a small Chinese site if it is not. And the company provides social media monitoring: checking Weibo for mentions of your company and brand, and monitoring sentiment. That’s a big deal, because Weibo has more users than Twitter and almost as many users as Facebook.

That is due to the fact that social media is Chinese citizens’ key political outlet, Lee says. While the government does censor certain keywords, posts, and sometimes entire topics — such as the pigs floating in the river in Shanghai, which had two million search results before disappearing entirely — it has to grant a certain level of freedom, he told me. Which makes social media a key outlet for political as well as personal sentiment.

“The official newspapers never criticize the government, so people need to release some negative feelings” Lee says. “They criticize the government via social media.”

But it’s not just about social media — search engine optimization is also key, and SEO is an entirely different matter in China than in the U.S.

“We also help U.S. businesses to make sure they are included on Baidu,” Huang told me. “Because if you’re not on Baidu, you’re basically invisible in China.”

In addition to SEO services, the company has built an English interface for Baidu’s Chinese-language ad platform. Baidu has advertising products roughly analogous to Google’s AdWords and AdSense products, which until now have been almost entirely off-limits to English-speaking users.

China’s an important and growing market for U.S. businesses, a fact that social media management big boy HootSuite recently acknowledged by adding Weibo support to its tools.

Which means knowing what the Chinese think of you and your product is probably a good thing if you’re trying to sell into their country.

photo credit: jonrussell via photopin cc

Christopher Craft is a speaker and the author of O.P.E.N. Routine: Four Components to Personal Branding Excellence.

With Google+, Google is forming productive partnerships and building relationships with content/media makers from a variety of verticals. Their biggest push is in sports and entertainment.

Why are they doing this?

I was fortunate to have a recent conversation with Google’s Iska Hain about their big “why” concerning Google+’s work with sports influencers and she explained:

“In order to effectively build a community, you need to have the voices from many different perspectives ­ the passionate fan, the informed expert, or the newly converted. We believe sports users want to connect in a deeper, more meaningful way ­ connected by way of their common interests.”

I have direct experience with the work the Google+ teams are doing with media entities and content creators. In late January of this year, my agency received an email from a Google+ team member who was interested in working with our client Bomani Jones on special content for the NFL Combine. It’s not everyday that you receive an email from Google. They’re not the spamming type so I knew that it was something official. We eventually partnered with them to produce a well­-received Hangout On Air discussing post­-combine topics. My eyes were opened to the amount of attention that Google is giving to building authority for its influential users.

Building community is their transparent goal, but it’s no secret of the impact all of this will have on personalized search and distributed media content. The possibilities are enormous.

My conversation with Hain went beyond Google’s goals, motives, and mission behind Google+’s influencer engagement activities. Here are some observations and items from my experience, research, and our discussion:

Google’s Advantage

Google+ has a clear advantage over other social networks: They “own” search.

This is why they don’t seem to be terribly concerned about growing their membership at a certain pace (though they’re doing fine in that department ranking 2nd of all social networks in monthly active users). They know what they’re doing by positioning themselves to be the center of online authority. Their motives were clear with Google Authorship being one of the early features of Google+.

Their other clear advantage is access to talent. For example, they can handpick YouTube stars for easy collaborations.

Partnerships galore

Google+ has partnered with top global leagues like the NBA, NFL, and MLB, premier professional teams, and global athletes like David Beckham and Virender Sehwag. They’ve also done more one­off partnerships recently with personalities, athletes, and media entities of all kinds.

Not only does this allow these brands to attract their fans to the platform but it also gives Google+ the opportunity to bring brands, media, and fans together for compelling mashups.

Just hanging out (on air)

Google+ is constantly deploying new features that allows influencers to use Hangouts as platforms for real show­like production and interaction. Check out the Hangout they conducted with 2013 NBA All­Star and 2012­2013 scoring champion, Carmelo Anthony.

They will be making announcements of new Hangout features at their upcoming Google I/O 2013 event.

Strategic locations

Google offices have been springing up in different cities for a while now. The interesting part is how they’re strategically positioning Google+ teams to have access to specific verticals.

This reach gives them access to a wide variety of sports influencers. Their teams move around quite a bit, especially for major events; but their influencer relation crews in certain cities have focuses that stick (i.e. Atlanta:Football and Austin:Music).

The company currently has stateside teams in Boston, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Denver, and San Francisco and international teams in Europe, South America, and Asia.

Communities

When Google+ unveiled Communities, they gave influencers a means to engage with their stakeholders in a more interactive way. Conversation can now flow both directions. This is crucial for the rapid fire nature of sports. Hain summarized this in our conversation:

“Google+ communities are an online place to explore and engage in the topics that matter most to you. From SEC Football to Knitting, communities afford users a place for users to connect with others who share their interests, using Google+ Hangouts, Photos or YouTube videos, for example.”

What does this mean for you?

Google established Google+ for the people.

My interactions with their team for various projects has featured overflowing support and concern for the development and distribution of good content. This Google-­supported content was well received by the fans of our clients. These experiences excited me and inspired me to write this article.

Your voice is valuable and has the opportunity to reach the people who value your platform.

Christopher Craft is a speaker and the author of O.P.E.N. Routine: Four Components to Personal Branding Excellence. He’s also the Chief Visionary at Nao Media and Consulting, a digital agency for the sports and entertainment industries. You can follow Chris on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, and circle him on Google+.

photo credit: Scott Ableman via photopin cc

Tencent Weibo has over 540 million registered accounts; VK.com has over 200 million registered accounts.

“Adding Tencent Weibo and VK.com to our lineup lets our users expand their reach around the world,” Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said in a statement. “Social has no boundaries. In fact, HootSuite has users in nearly every country worldwide, and is available in 15 languages and counting.”

HootSuite, which recently unveiled swanky new digs in Vancouver, Canada, is already integrated with other regional social networks such as Sina Weibo and Renren in China, Orkut, which maintains a foothold in Brazil, Viadeo, and Xing. And today, the company announced a new language: Russian.

Major brands that use Tencent Weibo include the NBA, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Red Bull, and HootSuite says 79 of the Fortune 100 are its clients. The company grew sales to enterprise clients under $10 billion 272 percent and enterprises over $10 billion 900 percent in the first quarter of 2013, as new VP of marketing, Dee Anna McPherson — formerly of Yammer, helps accelerate its deployment into and within corporations.

The company’s Tencent Weibo integration includes such new features as posting and scheduling updates, viewing and leaving comments on posts, searching and filtering content, and using multiple profiles. For VK.com, HootSuite supports posting status updates, viewing and posting comments, liking updates, and monitoring news and updates.

“With our newest app integrations, you can use HootSuite to connect with hundreds of millions of users on the biggest social networks in China and Russia,” Holmes said.

HootSuite recently surpassed the six million user mark.

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a North African affiliate of Al Qaeda, held an open question-and-answer session on Twitter for journalists earlier this month.

“We are an inalienable part of this world, we live our time and benefit from every mean that serves our goals and clarifies the equity of course cause to the international public opinion who is unaware of a lot of facts,” AQIM said.

“This is our only mean to communicate with the international public opinion, since we are terrorists according to the dictionary of America and its agents in the region and the neutral and free journalists who search for the truth can only communicate with us through it, as for the direct contact it is a crime punishable under the laws of America, France, and governments of the regions, and leads the pro journalists directly to Guantanamo or Serkadji.”

The Q&A was led by Sheikh Ahmed Abu Abdulelah, the organizations’ media spokesman. He prompted journalists and members of the public to send questions in a two-hour window for him to answer. Only questions in English and Arabic were accepted, and all questions sent out of that time window would be ignored.

“With the grace of Allah receiving the questions which we conducted succeeded by the participation of international media and the interested figures and the news of declaring receiving the questions had a big impact in the media […] Alhamdulillah we got a lot of questions we omitted the repeated and kept the others, and we ask Allah guidance and success.”

Questions included “What is the kind of training, support, arms, and fighting force that you offered to Ansar Allah in Nigeria” and “What is the stance of AQIM from the other JIhadi groups like Jabhat Al-Nusra and Ahrar Al-Sham Bridages in Syria in relation to global jihad.” However, the talk mainly focused on the situation with France, which currently has ground troops in Mali.

When asked if AQIM had any relation to threats to blow up the Eiffel Tower, Ahmed Abu Abdulelah said, “We didn’t adopt that threat but we support and call all the Muslims to target France and its interests and subjects inside and outside France until it withdraws the lasts older from the land of the Muslims and lift its support or rulers of the region who oppress their people and its support to the Zionist enemy who occupies Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa one of the greatest sanctities of Islam.”

In response to follow-up questions about France, the spokesman said that the “fate of the hostages is in the hands of the French President” and that the French people “should bear full responsibility for the actions of their politician towards Muslims causes in general and the Mali cause in particular.” Furthermore, it is AQIM’s duty to support “our brothers and people in Mali.”

The Twitter account is under the name Al-Andalus Media and will be used to present “the facts,” as seen by AQIM, so “the sieve of the French media cannot block the sun of the truth all the time.” The account currently has 5,432 followers.

Sukhraj Beasla works for social media marketing firm Viralheat.

This week’s tragic events of the Boston Marathon explosions have given me a lot of think about. While I’m still deeply saddened, I couldn’t help but notice the viral impact of social media during times like these. While it’s awesome we can get news almost instantaneously, there’s also much at stake if we’re not careful with what we say and how we respond during these times or any other time.

While scanning Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates, I was shocked by all the inappropriate comments and jokes at the expense of the runners and their families, brands who still hadn’t learned how to respond properly, and “social media experts” weighing in on their opinions for page views.

Before committing another social media faux pas, perhaps it’s time we learned proper social media etiquette.

While Twitter and Facebook are great resources for information, unfortunately they’re not always accurate. Before re-tweeting or expressing an opinion, it’s always best to check in with a trusted news source and see what they’re reporting. Since I’m a news junkie and like to stay on top of current events, I’ve created a Twitter list that includes news sources like CNN, BBC, AP, and Reuters (just to name a few). I check the list whenever I have a chance to see what’s breaking, what’s new, and what I can automatically retweet since I know it’ll be accurate.

Having the basic facts is the first step in forming a response, being prepared, and knowing how to respond.

1. Determine if the cause is relevant to your brand
   Is it in your area? Did it affect your business? Did it impact your brand in any way? Or do you just want to be sympathetic and say a few words? Most often brands just want to be the first to respond without any thought given to what the tragedy is and how their words might be viewed by their community. Instead of trying to be the first, think about the impact those words will have. Even if you retract your statement, someone somewhere will capture it and that will haunt you forever so think first, social media it later.
2. Inform your company and your community
   Your employees are just as concerned as the community you’re trying to reach. Think about the messaging you also want to provide to your employees so that everyone is in sync, feels safe, and knows that the company has a plan in place in case something were to happen nearby. Construct an email that will be similar to what you’ll be announcing on your social media platforms.
3. Be a resource
   As a community manager, it is your number one priority to make sure you are reporting accurate information about your company.  If you’re going to include a link with your message, be sure it’s something that is thoroughly vetted and accurate or just keep your message plain, simple, and heartfelt.
4. Be compassionate
   Your crisis message is important. Don’t make it a canned message that everyone else is using and throw it up there. Be truly sincere. Perhaps, offer a link with your message that others can use to find help, nearby resources, and/or shelter. Is your company offering up a donation? These are important things to consider.
5. Create a social media crisis plan
   Just like an editorial calendar, create a plan for any potential disasters or your own internal faux pas, determine who will do the research, what will be said, and how to respond.
6. Halt other marketing and promotions
   Remember if you do respond, that should be your closing thought for the day out of respect for the tragedy. Do not follow it up with another post promoting your brand or an auto tweet. If you truly are trying to express your condolences and then follow up with another message, your audience will turn on you in a heartbeat.

What are your thoughts about the social media response from yesterday or during any other national/international crisis? Does your brand have a plan? Does your company use a social media management tool to keep your accounts in order?

photo credit: Jason A. Howie via photopin cc

What’s a social news Android addict to do?

Try SOHO Social Launcher, which offers not just Facebook but also Twitter feeds directly to your Android homescreen and — critically — does so without hijacking your phone. Which means, as INQ Mobile, the company behind the app says, “leaving the convenient parts of Facebook Home and ditching the invasive parts.”

INQ Mobile started life as a mobile phone handset company — the Facebook phone company — before pivoting to a Flipboard-style social reading experience, so social has always been near and dear to the company’s heart.

“Social experience was at the heart of our handsets,” INQ Mobile’s Marcel Rutte told me from company headquarters in London. “The product in its current incarnation is new, but that’s always been what we’ve been about.”

INQ started working on a social launcher for Android months ago, before the company had heard of Facebook Home, Rutte told me. And, of course, it’s a broader experience than just Facebook, as he hastens to add.

Setting up is simple — install the app, hook up Twitter and Facebook, and you’re good to go. Instantly, you’ve got Facebook or Twitter on your homescreen, but you still have access to your familiar Android controls and familiar Android home screen. Swipe left or right to get back to your apps, or scroll all the way up to see your most common Android apps, super-imposed on your Facebook stream: phone, messaging, camera, and so on.

SOHO switches from Facebook and Twitter feeds simply by starting to scroll up, which reveals a header showing which network you’re on. Tap it, and you switch.

At first I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to have both networks showing at once, but a few seconds’ thought revealed the problem: my Twitter river would overwhelm my Facebook stream, blocking me from seeing the content posted by my closest friends and family.

Building the app as a launcher made sense to INQ for probably the same reasons it did to Facebook: far more capability. But INQ has done it in a different, less obtrusive way.

“Building as a launcher gives us much more flexibility … we’re not limited in what we can do” Rutte says. “The moment you unlock your handset it’s right there. But we haven’t broken anything in Android, whether you’re customizing your home screen or widgets.”

Perhaps it’s still an app-centric view of mobile computing versus the people-centric shift that Facebook is trying to make, but the challenge is that people-centric for Facebook seems to mean Facebook-centric. And that installing Facebook Home takes that most personal of devices, your phone, and makes it — while certainly more social — just as certainly less personal. Less created-and-customized-by-me, in a sense.

SOHO only has 105 reviews, but a third of them are 5 stars, and 90 percent are 3 stars or higher. Facebook Home, on the other hand, has 9,378 reviews, and a shocking 4,825 are 1 star.

Which, if you want a more social experience on your phone, and you want more than one social network, makes it a no-brainer to try.

photo credit: Kalexanderson via photopin cc

If you’re a user of the location-based social network Foursquare, that is.

Apparently, I eat a lot, spend a lot of time outdoors in parks and recreation facilities, visit quite a few offices, and — more than anything else — shop. How depressing. Fortunately, there’s a little bit of travel thrown in there as well to add spice to an otherwise mundane life.

Foursquare has released a special badge for 4sqDay 2013 — see it to the right — and has special shwag for those holding Foursquare day parties, as well as suggestions for businesses that are holding 4sqDay promos.

I’m nowhere near that passionate, but it is interesting to see your year in review and see what you’ve done and where you’ve been. Getting that information does, of course, require that you check in at every location you visit, but Foursquare has made that a lot easier in its latest iOS app update.

Foursquare users have checked in well over three billion times, and left tens of millions of tips, all of which is helping Foursquare build a local search and recommendation engine which is helping it transition from the once-I’m-there app to the where-to-go-now app.

To get the 4sqDay 2013 badge, simply check in anywhere, today.

Image credit: John Koetsier

That’s faster than “Gangnam Style,” which took 60 days to hit 350 million views. And with 22 million views in just 16 hours, it beat out Justin Bieber for the most YouTube views in a single day. Plus, its ridiculously catchy jingle almost ensures that this new video will continue to be successful.

But this case has one big difference: A lot more people, proportionally, dislike this video.

“Gangnam Style,” which currently has over 1.5 billion views, with 7,391,498 likes and 731,346 dislikes, for an almost 10:1 like to dislike ratio. “Gentleman,” however, which is a video about not being a gentleman, has 791,926 likes and 138,742 downvotes, for a much lower likeability factor: under 6:1.

That’s probably due to the fact that “Gentleman” is — frankly — kind of nasty.

The video is full of gags that PSY pulls on barely dressed beautiful women: pulling out chairs and causing them to fall, unleashing bikini tops, tripping, “stink-palming,” and more. Plus, of course, there’s PSY kicking a soccer ball away from playing kids.

All of which makes the main lyric very, very appropriate: “I’m a mother f***** gentleman.”

I suppose it’s all in good fun, and PSY does get some comeuppance late in the video when a female companion pulls his chair away as well. But something tells me even if this video goes as hugely big as “Gangnam Style,” it won’t ever be as big a cultural phenomenon.

It’s just too nasty.

Image credit: YouTube

Prollie is a social search platform that tracks how “well” people use social media platforms and makes connections with others who share the same interests and passions. The technology does not evaluate users on metrics like the number of followers or retweets. Rather, it focuses on the “Interest Graph” to qualify people based on their social output.

“Right now, social analytics sites measure ‘influence,’ not the quality and ability of people online, and social search is based around the content itself (tweets, updates, posts) not around the people making it,” founders (and brothers) Mike and Red Fabbri said in an email. “The new trend for consumers and marketers is moving towards the Interest Graph, linking people by what they love, not by who they know (i.e. Facebook Social Graph Search), and we stand to be the only analytics tool and search site to really tap into this trend. We evaluate people based on quality and let you search for them based on your passions.”

The Fabbri brothers founded Prollie to address their own pain points. They both had careers where they made heavy use of social media. Mike worked as a social media strategist for luxury brands like Ray-Ban, and Red headed up social media strategy at NBC Universal. They said they wanted to make a tool that helped them find people based around topics, rather than the “friend of a friend” model, and they left their jobs to build a better social search. Unlike startups like Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex which measure ‘influence,’ the Fabbris  put Prollie in the realm of Google, Bing, and Ark, because it centers on interest-based search.

“Social media shouldn’t just be about the number of people who follow you, or the quantity of reblogs you get,” they said. “It’s about you, no matter who you are. It’s about your personal mastery of the medium, the emotion you put into it, and the passions that you want to trumpet to the world.

Prollie is still in beta mode, but the brothers took me through how the technology works. Once users connect their social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, LinkedIn, and Foursquare) to Prollie, the algorithm analyzes all the activity to determine what topics they are talking about and interacting with while online. Each person is assigned a letter grade per network to show to what extent they know and take advantage of the tools provided by each network. Then they are shown their four top “passions” and an example from their social output for each. The data is also used by their search, which has modifiers and qualifiers for factors like passion, location, network, and grades, to generate a suggested list of users to friend and follow.

I will be the first to admit that I could be more active on social media. I only post things on Facebook that I am really excited about (as opposed to sharing my minute-by-minute feelings) and only signed up for Twitter once I started working at VentureBeat and realized that tweeting was part of the job. Accordingly, my Facebook grade is an A- while my Twitter grade is a C. Ouch. Prollie also pegged my interests pretty well. It has me down for interest in technology, startups, health & wellness, and food and drink.

Prollie is based in New York City and has raised $500,000 from angel investors, including Jetblue and Kohl’s chairman Frank Sica and Allen and Elizabeth Cutler, founders of SoulCycle.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to compose my next awesome tweet.

Photo Credit: Prollie

Self-described digital anthropologist Brian Solis has a habit of being in the right place at the right time.

During the late 1990s, Solis attended all the right events, voraciously blogged, and snapped thousands of photos of Silicon Valley’s newly-minted technology elite. He quickly became one of the original “super connectors,” acting as a bridge between tech and digital media influencers around the world.

But it’s far more than good fortune and a strong network — Solis is a futurist of sorts, and has a knack for recognizing trends. He was among the earliest proponents of the social media craze, and founded creative agencies to help businesses utilize Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest.

All this spiralled into an events career (a keynote speaker at SWSX, Solis recently interviewed Shaquille O’Neale, who has become a firm friend), a high-powered analyst gig at Altimeter Group, and a series of bestselling novels on the business of social media.

I caught up with Solis in the weeks after the release of his new book, “What’s the Future of Business, Changing the way businesses create experiences.” As he explains, the book offers honest insights into how businesses can reach “Generation C” (the C stands for connected), and the most common mistakes to avoid.

VentureBeat: So what’s the new book about?

Brian Solis: This isn’t a traditional business book. The subtitle is, “Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences” and to change experiences takes something special. See, at the heart of new technology is people, the connections they make and the experiences they share in public. These shared experiences represent the future of branding, shifting marketing from a position of impressions to focus on expressions. While it might sound a bit abstract, it is these shared experiences that are starting to match and even surpass traditional branding and media.

“Generation-C” doesn’t necessarily take to Google first to research or make decisions wherever they are in the customer lifecycle. They rely on the shared experiences in the form of Q&A, reviews, and shared content to inform or validate decisions.

VentureBeat: So how can businesses reach this “Gen-C”?

Solis: Websites aren’t the most efficient or effective means of deliver to Gen-C, especially when most of them use smart phones or tablets while they’re on the go. They want information quickly and they want it personalized. Call it the lazy web if you will, but if companies are investing in SEO and SEM to feed information to people who are captive in search mode, then they will also have to invest in the experiences they want people to have and share so that in the real world. And right now, those shared experiences are largely reactive and undefined by businesses.

VentureBeat:  Almost as interesting as the book itself is your efforts to promote it. Tweets from Donald Trump and Oprah! WTF?

Shaq is an avid supporter of the new book.

Solis: While I have had the opportunity to work with many celebrities in the past, the post in which you’re referencing was more of an event to call attention to a controversial online app, LetMeTweetThatforYou. I used the service to demonstrate the potential liability of faking Tweets and how we each need to re-think fact checking before we retweet or share.

VentureBeat: Would you consider a Kickstarter campaign for your next book?

Can you believe that this is my fifth book and my third with Wiley? In 2012, business author Seth Godin took to Kickstarter to raise money for The Icarus Deception. I believe he was seeking somewhere in the neighborhood $40,000 and ended up pulling in $287,000. While Kickstarter is an interesting option, it does introduce production, distribution and marketing responsibilities that require careful consideration.

The Wiley team allowed me to assume creative control where I acted as author and art director. I brought in the team from Mekanism (the creative agency behind the Pepsi and Beyonce commercial at this year’s Super Bowl) and none other that @gapingvoid and his team at Social Object Factory to help me turn a book into an analog app.

VentureBeat: How did you first make a name for yourself in the Valley? You were a blogger / photographer/ chronicler of sorts? 

Solis: It goes back to the mid-90’s when I was an experimental marketer in the world of new media. I grew up as an aspiring programmer in Los Angeles. But like many, I recognized the importance Silicon Valley and moved to Northern California in 1996 to pursue my passion of learning how technology was impacting culture. I was infatuated with message boards and forums and connected societies that could make and move markets.

I tested theories with large brands and startups with fascinating results. I decided to launch a lab in 1999 called FutureWorks that helped prove and test new ideas for technology and consumer electronics clients and over the 12 years I ran that company, we helped thousands find success online in addition to or completely outside of traditional media programs.

VentureBeat: How did you build the “Brian Solis” brand?

One of many images of Facebook’s CEO by Brian Solis

Some time in the mid 2000s as Web 2.0 was finding its footing, I started to practice what I was preaching. I started blogging at briansolis.com to share the experiments and lessons learned in new media. I also launched bub.blicio.us to spotlight the changing world as I saw it. I thought that pictures, video and words were equally important. I also launched a video series called TechSoup, and spent time mastering the art of photography. A little known fact is that many of my pictures of notable entrepreneurs, investors and celebrities are often used in media of all sorts. To this day, more than 3 million people have viewed these pictures on Flickr.

All of this contributed to who I am today. The blogging led to books. The pictures led to exposure in some of the world’s largest media outlets. The videos became the entryway to launch Revolution a popular online series that I host, which has featured incredible guests such Katie Couric, Billy Corgan, Shaq, Adrian Grenier, among others.

VentureBeat: What are the biggest social media faux-pas you see businesses make when they try to market to “Gen C”? 

Solis: As an analyst, this question seems to be the focus of my work over the last several years.  This comes back to the inspiration behind my last book. The problem is that most of us are merely reacting to technology and not harnessing it to take us where we want to go. We understand its importance but we don’t truly understand why it’s important to our business.

While everyone thinks they already know that technology is changing behavior, the reality is that assumptions and blind faith are still playing a role in how businesses are approaching these changes. Many experts believe that mobile and social networks are the new channels for engagement. They place their bets on the number of people each network boasts, as well as by the amount of attention press and bloggers pay to what’s hot.

However, experts cannot tell you the role certain networks play in the customer’s decision- making cycle. Nor can they pinpoint the economic impact of activity or conversations on the business before, during, and after the transaction. That is why the answer to the question of what the return on investment (ROI) of these initiatives is elusive. Instead they come up with new jargon to support their blind faith.

VentureBeat: So technology isn’t the be all, end all? 

Solis: Technology is not the answer, it’s part of the answer. This is one of the reasons that I am an aspiring digital anthropologist. Without an understanding of behavior and the role technology plays in our personal and professional lives we will consistently find ourselves responding to it instead of putting it to work for us.

And in a connected society, one where people believe their experiences are paramount, what people share and say about you becomes as or more pervasive than what you say about you.

Top image credit: affiliatesummit via photopin cc // Brian Solis from Altimeter credit: alexdecarvalho via photopin cc

Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

photo credit: gordonr via photopin cc

That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

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The popular social media management tool that just passed six million users is growing fast, CEO Ryan Holmes told me today, and needed more space for future expansion.

“We just moved in … the dust is still settling,” Holmes says. “In 2012 we went from 100 to 250 employees, and this year at a minimum we’ll close out at 350.”

HootSuite bought an old police station in Vancouver’s eastside and gave it a $1 million facelift, adding a private yoga studio, gym, and yes, the obligatory startup office nap room. Oh, and don’t forget: free beer on Fridays, on tap in the kitchen.

Here’s the new HootSuite digs, in pictures:

Note the the social media icons pillows in the lobby? HootSuite partners YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are clearly visible, plus a few others.

Image credit: HootSuite

While it seems fairly obvious that corporations would use social media to communicate to the public, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has formally decided it’s OK, according to a new filing today that involves Netflix’s charismatic chief executive, Reed Hastings.

Back in December, SEC staff recommended that Hastings and Netflix be formally charged with failing to use proper disclosure procedure when he shared news on Facebook in June. Hastings was sharing news that Netflix’s subscribers had reached 1 billion hours of video watched on the streaming service for the month, which coincided with a boost to the company’s stock.

The SEC’s new decision allows CEOs to tweet, update Facebook, and other social networks, just so long as the information follows other disclosure policy. That means Hastings isn’t going to get in trouble for the Facebook incident he invoked last year. (Now, all other CEO of major companies need to do is just find the time to update their accounts more often.)

Here’s the SEC’s official statement about its decision on social media:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued a report that makes clear that companies can use social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to announce key information in compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD) so long as investors have been alerted about which social media will be used to disseminate such information.

The SEC’s report of investigation confirms that Regulation FD applies to social media and other emerging means of communication used by public companies the same way it applies to company websites.  The SEC issued guidance in 2008 clarifying that websites can serve as an effective means for disseminating information to investors if they’ve been made aware that’s where to look for it.  Today’s report clarifies that company communications made through social media channels could constitute selective disclosures and, therefore, require careful Regulation FD analysis.

“One set of shareholders should not be able to get a jump on other shareholders just because the company is selectively disclosing important information,” said George Canellos, Acting Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.  “Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors, but not if the access is restricted or if investors don’t know that’s where they need to turn to get the latest news.”

Source: WSJ; Photo via blucier/Flickr

Collective Bias has raised $10.5 million for its approach to consumer engagement. This “social shopper media company” connects brands with consumers through its Social Fabric community of 1,400 influencers. These influencers tell “real-life” stories about their shopping experiences and product usage and share them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The company claims to have an aggregate, multichannel reach of more than 50 million people.

“Collective Bias was founded to create a solution to the challenges posed to shopper marketers by social media,” said founder and CEO John Andrews in an email. “Specifically, we create an alternative to traditional ways brands and retailers have reached shoppers along the path to purchase.  Our goal was to create a predictable social shopper media format that has measurable scale and performance that is superior to existing mediums.”

This marketing method seeks to harness the power of social media and integrate into people’s everyday life, so brand promotion seems more authentic (and hopefully persuasive) than display ads. Clients include Walgreens, Sears, Disney, Nestle, Tyson, and Starbucks. These companies set their parameters for a campaign, and Collective Bias taps the appropriate influencers to generate content about a specific product.

With this first round of funding led by Updata Partners, Collective Bias will work on developing new products to streamline influencer identification, content delivery, and campaign management. It will also grow the Social Fabric community member training and technological support and continue to expand regional offices into NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as push into Canada and the UK.

Collective Bias is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/Collective Bias

The new site includes a short Twitter 101 overview for those to whom “tweet” and “hashtag” are still Greek. And an overview of what Twitter’s 200 million active users actually do while posting 400 million tweets a day. There’s also an overview on how to write good tweets: They should be conversational, funny, shareable, and exceptional.

There’s been a definite acceleration in Twitter monetization efforts. The company released new self-service ad tools just two weeks ago that allow small business advertisers to finely target their campaigns by geography, gender, device, and interests. And Twitter’s new Ads API for larger clients and agencies has been live for just over a month.

One interesting thing about Twitter’s new business user intro video is how the social network now sees itself as a “global dialogue where people talk about their deepest interests … including your business.”

Whether your company is one of people’s deepest interests may be of some debate. But the new Pope was announced via Twitter, so why not your business?

Here’s Twitter’s new intro video for business:

Image credit: Twitter

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Rado Kotorov is the chief innovation officer for BI and analytics provider Information Builders.

VP Marketing: “Siri, should I open this email?”

Siri: “Don’t. Your boss sounds very angry. And, by the way, the tone of the email that you are writing to the product management team is very negative. Please change it.”

Many people delegate more and more to Siri (the electronic genie ‘in’ the iPhone) – from dialing phone numbers and finding directions, to taking dictation for SMS and emails. What if Siri could help us modulate the emotional tone of our messages? Would it make the world a better place with less conflict and argument, or would it leave piles of unread messages?

Perhaps, but to be able to help in this aspect Siri will have to learn to do sentiment analysis: read text and determine its emotional charge.

Today, there is a lot of hype and buzz about sentiment analysis even without Siri’s involvement. Like any new technology it has its advocates and its skeptics. And since the technology is in the early stages of evolution the skeptics can find plenty of failures and the proponents plenty of hope.

Let us start with the skeptics.

Emotions are perceived as uniquely human and difficult to read even by human beings. The Spanish philosopher Unamuno believed that emotions distinguished humans from the animal world —  he had never seen a cat crying! So how can a machine accurately predict the emotions in messages?

The problem is further exacerbated by the subtleties of language and expressions, by unwritten but implied insinuations in short messages, by the symbols and abbreviations that constantly change and evolve in social media posts, and by the fact that messages can express more than one emotion. All of these are perfectly valid concerns and problems that do not have definite solutions today.

The ‘mad’ scientists argue that these are minor issues raised by those uninitiated in the arts of semantic analysis. And they have stacks of papers, journals, books, examples, programs, and so on to show you how machines are as smart as people in understanding and assessing written and spoken language. But is it so? Didn’t HP just write off $8 billion from the acquisition of Autonomy — the company that pioneered semantic search and was promising to be able to read and understand text better than lawyers do?

Isn’t this an admission that we are not quite there yet?

I think that both sides are wrong and a more pragmatic approach that recognizes both the needs and the limitations is more beneficial. The driver for sentiment analysis is early detection of warning signs and opportunities. Detecting that a customer is getting very frustrated with customer service can be used to prevent customer churn, and detecting early that negative posts have the potential of going viral can trigger a counter action to prevent severe reputational damage.

The reason why we are seeking the help of machines is because the volume of online communications is so large that organizations cannot put enough employees to sift through all of them.  Naturally when there is a need, people will be looking for solutions … and hype and skepticism are corollaries to every search for a solution.

So what do I think is the practical solution given these limitations?

Industry-wide, we know that sentiment scores can be assigned to about 40% to 50% of messages. Essentially, sentiment analysis allows us to classify accurately messages at both ends of the bell curve, the extremely positive and the extremely negative. Given the human condition, very angry messages have simply a very angry tone. And the focus of the messages is directed entirely to the expression of the strong frustration. The same is true for the very happy messages. So we can safely claim that the technology will help us to filter the messages at both tails of the bell curve, and this is not a small gain.

Now let us figure how to further augment it, so that we can gain more insight. What if we pair sentiment analysis with search technologies? In other words, we assign sentiment to a message, but also index all the messages in a search index. Then, once we find an angry message, search can show us related messages. It is true that those messages will be related by content, but even an inexperienced user can quickly sift through similar messages and pick up the ones that are of interest.

Let us take it one step further.

Search already comes packed with sophisticated analyzers that can extract words from text. Those words and their frequencies can be displayed in various visualizations — tag clouds, lexical diversity graphs, streaming graphs. With this enhancement a user can filter the messages on sentiment (detecting the most angry ones), see the related messages (using search), analyze the aggregate word distributions in the related messages (using text graphs) and drill down on the graphs to further filter the messages. At the end they can read the few remaining messages and know exactly both the sentiment and the content.

The combination of the three technologies allows analysis in fractions of a second to detect cases that need attention. And this is operationally invaluable without being outrageously esoteric.

Siri, can you save me some time?

photo credit: IntelFreePress via photopin cc

By now, you’ve probably realized why you’re Facebook news feed has filled up with pink and red profile pictures.

This week, Facebook users were urged to substitute their profile picture for a simple graphic designed by the Human Rights Campaign. The goal is to demonstrate widespread support for marriage equality with two high-profile cases getting underway in the Supreme Court.

Facebook released data today showing that millions of people changed their profile pictures on Tuesday March 26 in the hours after the campaign was launched. Roughly 2.7 million people updated their profile photo — 120 percent more than usual. Facebook’s data science team also discovered:

• Roughly 3.5 percent of 30-year-old Facebook users updated their profiles in response to the events surrounding the HRC campaign.
• A total of about four million users out of an estimated 160 to 180 million users in the U.S. changed their profile pictures last Tuesday.
• On average, 2.3 percent more self-reported female users updated their profile photo, compared to 2.1 percent more self-reported males.
• Washtenaw County — home of Ann Arbor, Michigan and the University of Michigan — topped the list for the county where most people changed their profile picture. (In general, college neighborhoods showed the biggest spike in profile changes).
• Tech towns ranked high: San Francisco and San Mateo County also saw a jump in profile changes.

The bigger question is whether social media-led campaigns like these actually work. Will it make a real difference in D.C?

“We’re seeing a ripple effect take shape — not only in local communities but across the country,” said Kate Maeder, a new media and political consultant with Storefront Political Media. Influencers like Martha Stewart gave a nod to the movement by posting a picture of a red velvet cake, prompting online communities to debate the issue.

However, Meader said the Supreme Court won’t be swayed by a frenzied social media campaign. “They aren’t tied to the election cycle and are there to uphold the constitution, so the rules are different,” Maeder explained. 

Facebook’s data science researcher Eytan Bakshy is optimistic about the campaign’s efficacy. In a blog post, he wrote:

For a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren’t all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today, we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before. That’s data well worth finding.

With all the data that Facebook has gathered on grassroots support for marriage equality, advocacy groups have an opportunity to drum up new membership. But it remains to be seen whether the HRC will takes advantage of this outpouring of social media activity.

Will the HRC’s social media campaign make a real difference? Let us know what you think in the comments section below…

Enough, apparently, to win a Facebook-sponsored competition. And to know that it is a fleeting, vulnerable, and fragile event.

“About half of your engagement is in the first 60 minutes,” Optimal’s CEO Rob Leathern told me. “And about three quarters is within the first 180 minutes. That pattern is quite consistent.”

Optimal just recently won a Facebook-sponsored competition among the social network’s preferred marketing developers to create an innovative new marketing product. What Leathern and his crew came up with was the Optimal News Feed Promoter, a tool to spot early virality and enhance it. That helps marketers utilize the organic results of earned media to optimize their spend on paid media — specifically, promoted posts.

It’s a unique social take on automated marketing systems that doesn’t try to help you create viral content. It simply spots when you might have already done so — and then helps you capitalize on it.

“Our system basically takes whatever organic posts are getting traction and sets up rules to amplify and create ad campaigns in real time,” Leathern says. “You don’t want to waste money on things that don’t have potential, so instead of spending your money across everything … you can just let the data show you which posts you should focus on.”

Source: Optimal Social

Facebook post virality over time.

The rules are customizable: Posts can be set to transition to paid campaigns via relative measures such as a percentage of virality or absolute measures such as number of shares or comments. To make the system even more powerful, marketers can stack and layer triggers to build complex logic for automated social media campaigns.

Adding paid exposure to already viral content has a variety of benefits, Leathern says. It ensures that your media dollars are well spent, because the precise audience that you’re marketing to is the one that already indicated an appreciation for the content. In other words, it takes the guesswork out. In addition, adding paid media via promoted posts extends the life of those posts and even has a positive spillover effect on your other earned media.

“Paid media certainly does improve what you do organically,” Leathern says. “Even if it’s just because you’re getting more data, you’re building a virtuous cycle … learning something via organic, using it in paid, and vice versa.”

Optimal works with digital agencies and brands, including Fanscape, which says that Optimal’s news feed promoter product lets their teams “immediately amplify the most viral social interactions with paid media.”

Which just might help you enhance your chances of going viral in a major way.

photo credit: Will Lion via photopin cc

Clearly, however, not anymore.

“Seventy-one percent of consumers say they post hashtags from their mobile devices,” RadiumOne VP Kamal Kaur told me yesterday. “I’ve even caught myself hashtagging in my emails.”

Hashtags help communicate ideas and feelings, the 500-person study says, help Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest users redirect their friends and followers to related content and help unrelated people participate in a larger social conversation. The hashtag was born in strictly geeky circumstances on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a form of group messaging that arose in 1988) and made its way to Twitter in 2007 with now-Google employee Chris Messina’s tweet:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But with almost three quarters of this study’s respondents — 70 percent of whom were women, and 44 percent of whom were middle-aged — using hashtags, they’re definitely not something that’s confined to young, geeky, and, shall we say it, male culture.

Interestingly, social media users seem to use hashtags much more preferentially on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, something that may be due to the built-in capabilities for doing so in many social media apps, Kaur said. Of respondents who say they use hashtags, 70.5 percent used them mainly on mobile, and 29.5 percent used them mainly on their desktop device.

Perhaps the reason for the high use is, simply, that they work.

“Fifty percent of respondents said they would explore new content through hashtags,” Kaur said. “People even use hashtags in Facebook, even though you can’t search by them yet there.”

People who see a hashtag tend to click on it, explore it, use it in their own posts, or even check out the person or brand that tweeted it. That’s something that people who want to share their content more widely, including online marketers, should keep in mind.

photo credit: mikecogh via photopin cc

In fact, gamification boosts commenting 13 percent, social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and networks 22 percent, and content discovery by a massive 68 percent.

“Sharing and comment are good for business, obviously,” Gigya marketing manager Victor White told me last week. “So having gamification tied in to to sharing and commenting is really valuable.”

Gigya offers social infrastructure services that gamifies sites as well as providing services like social login. According to the company, it touches 1.5 billion users monthly, and half of the ComScore 100 use its services.

Adding gamification to a site, of course, means giving users points, badges, status, and rewards for engaging in desired actions. Done thoughtlessly, it can seem random or manipulative. Embedded intelligently into the core of a site’s purpose, however, it can enhance the user experience and significantly boost both engagement and user growth.

But you have to be careful, White says.

“We have limits in place so users can’t ‘game’ the system and so they don’t spam all their networks in order to level up,” he said.

“Leveling up” is a term from gamer culture, where in order to achieve higher status, gamers must defeat multiple levels or engage in sometimes repetitive tasks. Apparently, some people do this on gamified websites for status, to get some kind of physical reward, or simply to hit the leaderboard.

Commenting and sharing are pretty obvious and simple. But the activity feed is something that many sites have not yet incorporated. It provides a form of social proof, White says, that a site and its content are worthwhile.

“It allows users to see what other socially connected users are doing on the site,” he said. “For example, ‘Victor just shared this article to FB.’ That’s a method of really increasing content engagement, and if you’ve integrated gamification into that, the user has more incentive yet to check it out.”

It also helps brands to identify and target their biggest fans, as they now can tie demographics to actual behaviors. For example, not only does a particular user live in a California and likes the Golden State Warriors, she’s also your top social sharer and has a ton of influence in her online network.

That’s why Pepsi used the solution for Pepsi Soundoff for X Factor and Super Bowl social media promotions, White says. And the social part is critical.

“Gamification needs to be tied to social,” White says. “It’s often thought to be social inherently, but it’s not – there’s a difference between getting a badge, and getting a badge and sharing it. One is social, and one is not.”

photo credit: compscigrad via photopin cc

Nielsen, the TV-tracking firm, confirmed today that Twitter chatter isn’t all hot air. In a study, Twitter buzz showed a strong relationship to actual TV ratings.

“While our study doesn’t prove causality, the correlation we uncovered is significant, and we will continue our research to deepen the industry’s understanding of this relationship,” said Nielsen media anaytics VP Mike Hess in an announcement on the news.

In addition to giving Twitter the official nod on ratings correlation, Nielsen also identified Twitter as one of the top three indicators of how a show will rate, along with ratings from the previous year and advertising spend.

In a nutshell, the study showed that a swell in Twitter chatter about a show correlated to a smaller swell in TV ratings. The bump was more noticeable in younger audiences (ages 18 to 34) and less pronounced for more mature TV viewers (ages 35 to 49).

For the younger group, an 8.5 percent rise in Twitter chatter about season premiers meant a one percent increase in ratings. For the older group, a 14 percent increase on Twitter meant a one percent ratings bump.

The highest positive correlation, however, was for the younger group and mid-season episodes, where a 4.2 percent bump on Twitter lined up with a one percent ratings increase.

Nielsen did this study with a third-party social analytics firm, but the TV ratings giant also has a standing partnership with Twitter itself. Called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, the new metric established in the partnership was designed to show how socially engaging a given program is based on Twitter users’ conversations and updates.

Facebook has just issued a big dossier (embedded below) for nonprofits, a guide to using the social network to increase their profiles and invigorate their activities.

The nutshells of Facebook’s recommendations are pretty much what you’d expect: Create great content, make it interactive and engaging, talk with your Internet people a lot, and measure, measure, measure.

It also includes advice on how to create an authentic, personal voice for your posts and how to spark and sustain conversations with supporters.

These best practices cover Facebook Pages as well as Instagram and Facebook advertising products.

The notes on Instagram are particularly interesting since the photo-sharing service is still fairly new territory for some social media marketers and PR/community folks.

Facebook says that even in these early days, nonprofits can derive a lot of benefit from experimenting with various factors, calibrating after feedback, and using their Instagram web presence wisely.

Often job-seekers are told that it’s their acquaintances who will help them get a new job. A new study by Facebook data scientists, however, suggests exactly the opposite: job hunters with a strong, deep, and rich social network online are five times more likely to land that new gig.

Facebook engineer and data scientist Moira Burke studied 3,000 Facebook users over three months with Carnegie Mellon prof Robert Kraut. The focus was major life events — like job loss — and during the course of the study itself, 169 people actually lost their jobs.

Books like the 1973 Strength of Weak Ties suggest that you’re more likely to get jobs via people you know tangentially. Their social circles are not yours, goes the theory, and they know or hear about things that you don’t.

Facebook’s data, however, suggests the opposite:

For the users in the study, Burke and Kraut found that users with strong ties who shared private messages, commented on each others’ posts, or posted directly on each others’ walls,  found new jobs at a rate of 33.2 percent over the three months. Those with weak ties found jobs a fifth as often, at only a 6.5 percent rate.

In addition, Burke writes, there are other benefits to strong ties:

Facebook users who talked more with their strong ties reported increases in social support. Not only did they report more support overall, their perceived support increased month-to-month, the more they talked with strong ties. They also experienced reductions in stress when interacting with strong ties. Neither of these effects is associated with talking with weak ties.

One caveat: talking to strong-tie friends immediately after losing a job appears to increase your stress levels, possibly because friends sometimes tend to offer unhelpful help (“I’m sure you’ll find a new job right away”), or because they are cautious about upsetting someone who has just lost a job, which could be interpreted as being distant and uncaring.

The full study is available here.

photo credit: bgottsab via photopin cc

This is a guest post by author and media strategist Brian Solis

In business, social media is becoming a lot like email: every company has it. But, unlike email, organizations haven’t mastered how to effectively communicate through the likes of Facebook or the tweets of Twitter.

Over the last several years, businesses have increased the pace of adopting social media strategies for use in marketing, service, and other related capacities.

What’s becoming very clear however is that adopting social media and understanding its impact on customer and employee relationships — and, also the bottom line — are not always linked. This disconnect between social media strategies and business value is forcing many executives to rethink their overall approach, and the infrastructure they built to support it. The result of this reflective process is motivating organizations to transform everyday social media initiatives into deeper social business strategies.

Altimeter Group cofounder Charlene Li and I spent the better of the last year studying how organizations approach social media and how planning, processes, and outcomes mature over time. Our findings are included in our newly released report, “The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Media Transformation.”

In the report, readers will find common guiding success factors for organizations achieving success in each social business maturity stage, as well as prescriptive recommendations and checklists to grow to the next level of maturity.

Social media vs. social business strategy

The results of our work were surprising, to say the least. We uncovered a notable gap between organizations that execute social media programs and campaigns and those that specifically invest in social business strategies. Altimeter defines the evolution to a Social Business as the deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.

On one side of the chasm, there are businesses (or departments) that are actively investing in social media without intentions or outcomes being tied to business goals. On the other side are organizations that are deeply integrating social media and social methodologies throughout the company to drive tangible business impact.

In a survey of nearly 700 executives and social strategists in late 2012, we found that only 34 percent of businesses felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes and just 28 percent felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12 percent were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year.

And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But, there’s hope. We learned that the two most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are:

• Alignment with strategic business goals of an organization;
• Organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

What separates the two are six distinct stages that we believe most organizations have or will traverse as they mature. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):

Stage 1: Planning – “Listen to Learn”

The goal of this first stage is to ensure that there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution.

Stage 2: Presence – “Stake Our Claim”

Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media.

Stage 3: Engagement – “Dialog Deepens Relationships”

When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer a “nice to “have” but instead, is seen as a critical element in relationship building.

Stage 4: Formalized – “Organize for Scale”

The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4, where a formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor; creating a hub, a.k.a. a Center of Excellence (CoE); and establishing organization-wide governance. Organizations should plan for a potential CoE pitfall, however, as creating one may lead to scaling problems in the long-term.

Stage 5: Strategic – “Becoming a Social Business”

As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential of social.

Stage 6: Converged – “Business is Social”

As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.

We hope this research will help you. In the end, wherever you are in the six stages will be defined by your vision, courage, and tenacity. This really comes down to business transformation and it takes a change agent to guide development in a way that delivers value to stakeholders (customers, employees, and so on) as well as shareholders.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

This is huge, because brands like Sephora say that their Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than their Facebook fans.

The new analytics package tells you what people are repinning from your website, how many people are seeing those pins, and — a key measure for your social marketing ROI — how many visits to your websites those pins generated. It will also show you visual selection of your most pinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so that “you have a better idea of what’s popular.”

“For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more,” Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer wrote on the announcement blog post.

Much as Facebook’s Insights for Facebook page owners, the new analytics are basic measures of the most important engagement numbers. Before today, to get good information on Pinterest campaigns, brands needed a third-party analytics tool such as Pinfluencer or Curalate.

While you’ll still be able to get more insight and data and particular marketing tools from third parties, this announcement from Pinterest covers the needs of most casual Pinterest marketers.

“This is a good basic analytics product to serve as a foundation for Pinterest. It has great features around impressions and reach that large brands and agencies care about,” said Pinfluencer CEO Sharad Verma, noting that Pinfluencer also has Google and Omniture integration, as well as many other marketing and e-commerce features. “No third-party analytics can accurately report on impressions and reach.”

And the new tool is — perhaps — a shot across the bow of Pinterest third-party apps that have been “filling holes” in Pinterest’s now-growing suite of business tools. Pinterest has been fairly partner-friendly to this point, so we’ll have to wait and see if it’s now moving towards a Twitter-like practice of warning developers away from areas where it plans to make money itself.

To get access to the new analytics, you’ll need a verified Pinterest website, and you’ll need access to Pinterest’s new look.

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