What The Tech Works!?

05/25/2012

FB stock? I just think there is more to this story. You can't have a super smart team make mistakes 'like' this, can you?

Now I don't doubt that Morgan Stanley is surely culpable of some mismanagement, I just can't believe this huge engine of social power known as FB is going to go down in smoke..

I bought stock. We'll see!

05/14/2012

Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 today! So Wall Street is throwing a party! This Friday promises to be a historic one when Facebook is set to raise $13.6 billion from its IPO! This will generate a healthy war chest for all manner of things -- buying another Instagram, fending off patent litigation, or building timeline 2.0 (and the next 100 versions).

According to CNET, the numbers are staggering: " The company boasts 526 million users who check into Facebook daily (and 901 million who log on once a month), 3.2 billion "likes" and comments a day, 300 million photos uploaded per day, and 125 billion "friend"ships.

The bummer? Average folks like us are shut out until after Facebook becomes public, after which it is almost always too late to get in on the stock at a reasonable price. Some estimates have it re selling around $100 a share.

For the wonky investors CNET goes on to say: "At $35 a share, Facebook would be valued at 70 times its projected 2012 earnings of 50 cents a share, and 18 times its estimated revenue of $5 billion. By comparison, Google trades at $610 a share, but trades at less than 15 times its 2012 profit estimate and six times its revenue.

Such "multiples" are one of the core ways investors gauge a company's value, since stock prices fluctuate depending on the number of shares outstanding. Even if Facebook's $35 stock price looks like a bargain next to to Google's $610 price, it could still be overvalued relative to its financial potential."

Facebook is all about making money now. And we here at WTTW, were invited to a pilot program running specials within FB and sponsor posts with a budget similar to the ad campaigns that have been available. We are having fun working with FB on these pilots!

Facebook guarantees that a post gets seen by all of its followers (currently, users see only a fraction of posts on their news feed).

05/07/2012

My beautiful friend Regan is an influencer at this company. Congrats on the nod from Tech Crunch Regan!
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/06/7-new-educational-startups-founded-by-minorities-in-tech/

One of today's most challenging yet promising markets is the educational system. If you want to see startups hungry to disrupt an industry, look no further. Founders are trying to solve the problems plaguing our education system: including reconciling student debt, providing students with the skills...

04/22/2012

Facebook Syncs Email Addresses: “With your .com email address, people can email you using any traditional email system (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail), and the emails will be delivered to your Facebook Messages.” Facebook now syncs your email address with your Facebook name.

"Now, the address people use to get to your timeline and send you email on Facebook will be the same."

04/22/2012

On April 26, Facebook will be updating the display size of the profile picture/avatar on all pages. If you have a tightly integrated design, you should be aware of this change. Be ready to update your profile picture on April 26. The new profile picture will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the page.

04/20/2012

Why aren't more brands using Facebook to tap consumers for new ideas? Facebook is usually managed by the marketing team, and should be managed by someone with innovative ideas and time to do a lot of research and real talking to businesses. Strangely, crowdsourcing initiatives, which provide a window into consumers' minds, are typically run by the R&D team, who are mostly left brainers.

Open innovation projects like Procter & Gamble's Connect Develop and Starbucks' My Starbucks Idea have done a great job publicizing how R&D teams can benefit from crowdsourcing consumer insight. Dell has Ideastorm. As a result, most marketers don't realize that the value of crowdsourcing goes beyond the innovative ideas consumers provide.

Starbucks has millions of ideas flowing through the company all categorized and looking at the responses to the posts tell what loyal fans like and defend!

04/09/2012

Apples and Oranges!

Facebook is the apple, all the old stuff? Oranges. Do more of what works!

A digital marketer with a $5 million budget looking to drive traffic to Facebook rather than its own site could feasibly be spending $2 million on content development and community management, with the balance going to media, said Scott Symonds, general manager at AKQA Media. In that scenario, 20% to 50% of the $3 million could be going to Facebook ads.

Mr. Symonds said a paradigm shift is taking place because of social media, with the percentage of a digital campaign's media spend going toward creative increasing from the legacy share of roughly 10% to 20%. Investment in a costly social app such as Spotify can pay off handsomely if it goes viral.

"If you create brilliant content, you don't have to pay so much to get the news out there," Mr. Symonds said.

04/09/2012

I can't say it enough.

SAFE is second rate. Social and Personal is Powerful. We want the story from the eye to eye perspective. We want the 'what does it mean to me' report.

We want even edgy and certainly passionate. We live in an over exposed world. You have to bring enthusiasm, clarity and purpose to your business or service.

The same old business as usual is going to find you without a business in 2 years or less. NOTHING is the same, the same skills that built your business will not SUSTAIN it.

http://mashable.com/2012/04/06/press-release-blog-lessons-alternative/

Check out the four examples of companies reinventing how they use and present the press release.

04/09/2012

http://mashable.com/2012/04/08/top-chocolate-ads-youtube/

The top 10 chocolate ads on YouTube will either melt your heart or tickle your funny bone.

04/03/2012

Lipsman writes: Nelson-Field's focus on engagement also ignores important aspects of how social media delivers brand messages and impacts consumer behavior. Even absent any engagement with a social marketing message, brands have an unparalleled opportunity to communicate with their fans. And when these fans do engage with brand messages, even at a low incidence, they become exponentially more valuable in delivering branded messages to their friends.

The Friends-of-Fans Effect
In comScore's 2011 white paper The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans through Social Media Marketing, we found that friends of fans represent a much larger set of consumers than a brand's fans - 81 times larger, on average, for the top 1000 brand pages. The link to this extended network occurs when fans engage with your messages, thereby sharing the message with their friends.

Procter & Gamble CMO Marc Pritchard recently talked about this friends-of-fans effect, stating, "Social media is not just about the number of fans or friends [your brand has] – it's the number of fans they have to create amplification." This amplification over a series of messages increases the effective reach and frequency of these impressions to – can you take a guess? - lighter buyers.

Our research confirms this effect: we frequently observe that friends of fans represent the majority of the earned reach brands are able to achieve. In the Power of Like, we reported that in May 2011 Starbucks reached 10.6 million friends of fans (4.9% of the U.S. internet population) compared to 6.3 million fans (2.9% of the U.S. internet population).

04/03/2012

Swarm marketing is like this line of folks to the 1000th power!
One click and you reach thousands of people with your brand or product. The trick is posting relevant content, knowing your audience and tracking metrics. Time, date, content, etc. Your brand is too important to trust to the employee with the most friends on Facebook. Get a professional with some life experience and an understanding of the mind of the consumer!

04/03/2012

When Mark Zuckerberg called for a "Space Hackathon" to decorate Facebook's massive new headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, he probably didn't expect employees to take him so literally. A few scurried up to the roof with some tar paint, and now there's a 42-foot wide QR code on the roof that's visible from...