A Snapchat image sent by a certain relative of mine who will remain anonymous (and yes, it's bad form that I saved it)
Ad Age readers may have caught a double dose of contributions from me last week about Snapchat, one of the most electrifying companies to come along in quite some time. As noted on my blog last week, Snapchat has as many photos shared daily as Facebook does (350 million) - albeit from a much smaller base of users.
As a bit of backstory, the columns were published in reverse order. I submitted the second one that ran a week before it did, and Ad Age had a bit of backlog. Then, Wednesday, as news broke of Snapchat rejecting Facebook's $3 billion offer, I banged out a new post on why ads don't belong there. Ad Age published it right away, and then the second one, a thought experiment, the day after.
We'll see if the post on ads proves to be controversial. It was a fun conversation starter, and regardless of what Snapchat does, it's meant to be a warning for advertisers that Snapchat users are going to be especially wary of anything that reeks of targeting:
The crux of this is that Snapchat users value privacy, while marketers value publicity... Valuing privacy leads to other consequences. Snapchat users don't want to be tracked. They don't want to be analyzed. They don't want to be targeted. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog, but on Snapchat, you'll share with a few of your close friends that you're a dog. When you do that, you won't expect to see any dog food ads from Purina or pet-friendly hotel ads from Travelocity. And you won't want to wind up in any reports showing the age, gender, location, interests, and species of Snapchat users.
The second post is more philosphical, musing on what would happen if marketers treated their content (namely their ads) more like Snapchat content:
What if marketers embraced the fleeting nature of their advertising, and even of the content that they're sharing? What if, when a marketer deploys its 30-second spot of a car going down the highway, it has decided that this ad will never be seen again? What if the frequency is always designed to be one, even as the reach varies? What if this were true not just for the 30-second spot but for the Facebook post, the tweet, even the so-called viral video hosted on YouTube? And what if all of this was taken a step further so that the only way this ad or other promotional content could last longer was if the recipient shared it? Otherwise it would vanish.
Stay tuned at Ad Age's Digital Next. Unlike Snapchat messages, these issues won't disappear anytime soon.
You may be surprised by the answer (below). It's just one of hundreds of fascinating facts Benedict Evans put together in this stellar presentation the global mobile market.
Have you tried the app Refresh? It's iOS only right now, though Android is coming. It is now one of the apps I use most, right up there with Foursquare and TripIt, and more than some like Instagram.
The gist is that you sync up a bunch of accounts (Facebook, Foursquare, Gmail, Meetup, Evernote, AngelList, etc) and your calendar, and then whenever you're meeting someone, you can find out a ton of interesting intel about what they're up to and your mutual connections and interests. I confessed to LinkedIn's head of marketing last week that now when I go to meet someone, I use Refresh instead of LinkedIn's app because Refresh has so much more info.
I'm not an advisor, investor, paid shill, or secret employee - just a raving fan. And I was so open to raving that I did an interview with them for Refresh's blog, something I rarely do for someone's promotional efforts, but it is a great product and one I can endorse it wholeheartedly.
The only glitch I've had is that I can't sync Outlook to it, though that may be an issue with my Outlook rather than Refresh, as I can't sync Outlook to LinkedIn's contact manager either. Beyond that, Refresh is a homerun, and it keeps getting better.
Read the interview for more, or just download the app.
You know what this image is?
It's a Snapchat. Of a Gameboy iPhone case (not a real Gameboy). With Pac-Man drawn on it. By a 10-year-old girl.
I've received a few of these kinds of Snapchats. A lot of others are of this girl eating stuff. She likes dessert. She's a 10-year-old. I like dessert too. And we happen to be related. She's my niece. And adorable. And brilliant. And all that good stuff.
She is ridiculously into social media, but Facebook and Twitter don't play a role.
My latest Ad Age post dives into what it was like learning from my niece and her older sister. Read on, or just go to Ad Age for the original.
Get Schooled in Social Media by a 10-Year-Old Girl
Ignore every guru, ninja, or so-called expert. If you want to understand how people really use social media, spend some time with a pink-wearing, puppy-loving 10-year-old girl.
I had the pleasure of conducting such an informal study recently, with a niece who I'll call Annie (her name is changed to protect her privacy). My long weekend with her in Toronto, along with her 14-year-old sister who I'll call Rebecca, offered a glimpse into an overwhelmingly digital life centered on a mobile device -- in a world where Facebook and Twitter were completely missing. Here is how they use technology:
Facebook. Annie's too young for it and has no interest joining it yet. Rebecca thinks it's creepy.
Vine. Annie and Rebecca love watching Vine videos. They can talk at length about the latest antics of Jerome Jarre, a Vine celebrity. Their mother, sharp as she is, found their conversation hard to follow. I earned some major "cool uncle" points here, especially having researched Vine for other columns.
Snapchat. Annie and Rebecca love Snapchat. This concerned their mother, not because she heard about the dangers of it but because she wasn't familiar with it. The sisters like taking pictures, drawing on them, sharing them with a few close friends and letting them disappear. Kids don't want everything they create to hang on their family fridge forever. Snapchat is more like a passed note or doodle that the friend laughs at and throws out -- not because it's provocative, but because it's meant for certain people in a certain moment, and those moments pass. Annie and Rebecca are selective about friending only people they know, minimizing the likelihood of them seeing anything they shouldn't.
Skype. Annie used to have her own account to communicate with a few friends and family members. Then she stopped, forgot her username and switched e-mail addresses so she couldn't recover the password. I helped her get a new account. At first, we made the mistake of entering her real birthday, and then it blocked her because she was too young. We restarted the process, fudged her age, and she's now ready to Skype again.
Instagram. Annie and Rebecca both have Instagram accounts that are private. Still, some less savory characters will try to follow them. That's a cost of them using social media, and a significant one, though the girls will accept connections only from friends and family, and their mother is actively involved in setting up guardrails.
Mobile apps. I was surprised by the home screen of Annie's iPod Touch, with its spread of all the default apps. Annie didn't bother to customize it. On the second screen, she organized seven folders of other apps. Here are highlights:
Brands are games, media disappear and celebrities star in six-second shorts. It's amazing how much can change so quickly. Annie and Rebecca hardly have cemented their behaviors, but these building blocks can shape what they expect from media in the decades ahead.
Well, I have no idea. But Google has a new series about it:
What is top of mind for mobile evangelists in the agency community? How are agencies helping their clients win with mobile? We caught up with mobile leaders from the agency world and asked what excites them — and challenges them — about mobile today.
There are some great features with Zach Morrison at Elite SEM, Tom Cramer at Razorfish, and my old friend Jeff Heinz at MediaCom. For those more inspired Q&As, you can go to Google's Think Insights site (one of the best resources available for mobile marketing and other marketing trends and topics). While I only have so much patience for watching myself on camera (especially on a day where I was so distracted by the interviewer wearing Google Glass), here's the interview, also hosted on Google's site:
The series also on Google's Mobile Ads, AdWords, and Agency blogs.
Oh, and here's what the interview looked like wearing Glass:
10 Things Facebook Can Do with Face.com
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider; above image via Face.com's iPhone app Klik
One of the fastest-growing Facebook groups this year must be for people whose companies have been acquired by the social network. Following Instagram, Facebook acquired loyalty app Tagtile, proximity network Glancee, photo sharing service Lightbox, social gifting app Karma, and, this week, facial recognition platform Face.com. The last one’s a fascinating company with cutting-edge technology for marketers and publishers, as well as a new consumer-facing iPhone app, Klik, that can learn to recognize friends’ faces based on their Facebook profiles.
What could Facebook do with Face.com? Here are 10 possibilities. Note that these are all what could be done, rather than what should or will happen.
1) Suggest faces to tag in friends’ photos on Facebook, rather than requiring users to manually tag everyone.
2) Target ads to people based on the facial expressions in their Facebook photos. Also allow Facebook page updates to be targeted to fans’ facial expressions. For instance, Virgin Atlantic could target special offers to people whose photos make them look so serious that they need a vacation.
3) Offer an option of logging into Facebook using your face rather than your username and password.
4) Build on the Apple partnership and combine Siri.com with Face.com. When handling your requests, Siri will not just analyze what you say but how you look when you say it. When you wink, Siri will know you are being sarcastic.
5) Improve accessibility for people with speech disabilities. It didn’t take much searching to find a story about Intel working on automated lip reading back in 2003, and Engadget covered an academic approach in 2009. This could benefit Siri as well. Beyond the accessibility enhancements, it could let people mouth commands to their phones when it’s inconvenient to talk aloud.
6) Make “liking” real. Require people to smile to like something. Or just offer it as a bonus option for users to show they really like it.
7) Create an app for event organizers to verify attendees based on recognizing faces of those who registered on Facebook.
8) Offer facial-based age verification when people like and share content from alcohol brands. My wife would love getting facially carded if she tried liking Smirnoff. She’d love it even more if it said she was too young and she should stop lying about her year of birth on Facebook.
9) Team up with Google to create a realistic “Minority Report” theme park. Combining Google’s self-driving cars and intent-based targeting with Facebook’s one billion users and Face.com, little in the movie seems fictitious.
10) Buy book.com. Barnes & Noble owns the site, so Facebook may have to buy Barnes & Noble. That seems doable. Facebook has a market cap of $67 billion, compared to $917 million for the bookseller. Then Facebook can merge Face.com and Book.com and call it… Facebook.
The possibilities are endless? What else should Facebook do? Just look into your webcam, mouth your response, and remember to smile. You want Facebook to know you’re happy, don’t you?
