This is quite a thought: recent data released by NPD has shown that Android controls 61% of the US smartphone market. ComScore had it as 51%. These numbers, according to MG Siegler (aka parislemon), is just plain wrong. They don't correlate with sales numbers recorded by the networks at all. Without going into the numerical detail (it's all in his post), Apple is shown to control just about 50% of the US market. That means, the other 50% is split up between Android, Nokia and RIM. To add insult to injury, that is with iPhone only being available on the three biggest carriers (which, together, account for 80% of the market). Which brings us to a previous point he made in 2010: Apple is letting Android win. Riveting stuff!

The gaping Machine Curation gap

Über-blogger Om Malik this week wrote about a sore issue for Twitter – how to figure out users' interests. "Why do they need to do that, users do that for themselves on Twitter, don't they?", you might argue. Exactly, but for every user that figures out how to do this, Twitter loses numbers of other potential users, who never make it far beyond registering. The next logical step for Twitter is to figure out how to show new users exactly what they want, and even how to push more serendipitous content to seasoned users. Which is why they bought Summify, and which is why they've launched a new discover tab, to help users discover new content. Meanwhile, with Summify gone, several other players, like News.me (by the New York Times) and Percolate, are also scrambling to fill the auto-curation gap as quickly as possible. May the best player win!

Facebook

While Twitter seems to be struggling with auto-curation, it's been at the heart of the Facebook experience all along. Few people understand the Facebook Edgerank algorithm, and Econsultancy has a very thorough piece on what marketers need to know about it. Facebook needs to stimulate this kind of understanding – the lack of it might just blow up in its face, as this piece by Wall Street Journal warns. Big advertisers are apparently starting to feel that they're paying too much for Facebook ads, because of the lack of proper ROI analysis. However, Facebook has just released another trick from its sleeve: Mobile Discovery. Allowing a link in Facebook to open an app, Mobile Discovery has sent 160 million users to mobile apps last month, up from 60 million just the month before. It is bound to be even higher this month, since Facebook has only just rolled out mobile discovery for Android. This might have the big advertisers paying even more for their sponsored stories. On the social good front, Facebook has called on their users to flag their Organ Donor status on their public profiles. And to top all that, it seems UK bouncers are starting to use Facebook on their mobile phones for age verification. Thát's how ubiquitous Facebook's become!

US Court Rules that FB like is not speech, therefore not free

What?! Exactly. In a case where a US Sheriff fired people who "liked" his opposition on Facebook during the foregoing election, the US district court of Eastern Virginia had the following to say:

"It is the court's conclusion that merely "liking" a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection. In cases where courts have found that constitutional speech protections extended to Facebook posts, actual statements existed within the record."

This is a very dangerous statement, and mark our words – this will soon be used against someone in a bad way. Does this judge still read his paper, or did the past one and a half years just completely pass him by?

There's a Revolution in Education

In the latest print version of Wired magazine, they had an article on how Stanford University opened up the course material to one of their computer science courses online. With video lectures, assignments, and auto-gradings on those assignments. The only difference: the online students don't get official credit. One of the lecturers expected an optimistic 1000 online students. The other, a laughable 10000. The outcome: a staggering 160000 online students enrolled! Now, in the wake of that bombshell, two groups of universities are scrambling to capitalise on this potential. On the one hand, we have MIT and Harvard, who have just announced their plans to open up classes and course materials online in collaboration, and on the other hand, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, et al, who already have a very impressive list of courses available. This must be the biggest disruption of education since Plato's time.

Reddit does it – again

Reddit never ceases to amaze. This week, a thread popped up, enticing fellow Redditors to spill their guts about their "one big secret". It became a comment fest to start at least thirty PhD's in sociology. This is the Reddit we know, and love, providing social insight that millions of surveys can never do.

Creative of the Week – Iris van Herpen

We like the fashion industry here at RAAK: it's a fast-moving creative beast. So when fashion and technology come together we take special notice. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has taken bespoke design a step further and used a 3D-printer to produce her new collection. The results are special. As she says in this Wired interview: "It freed me from all physical limitations. Suddenly, every complex structure was possible."

So, this week, Google launched Google Drive. Finally. It gives you 5GB of cloud storage, which already contains your Google Docs and stays automatically synced with a local folder on one or more of your computers or devices (not iOS yet, but they're working on it). Despite a torrent of unfounded dismay over its Terms of Service, which is actually very straightforward and logical, the singular thing that stands out is how much it is an identical clone of Dropbox. So, what is different? The ecosystem. A future version of Chrome OS will use Google Drive as its system drive, and Google Drive launched with an SDK providing Chrome applications to be built on top of Google Drive. Like this online fax and email signing app, which launched its Google Drive functionality on the same day as Google Drive itself. For the time being though, it's just some extra Dropbox space.

Twitter destroys Facebook on sharing

A new study claims that links shared on Twitter are clicked much more than on Facebook. Since Twitter is a weak tie network, it makes sense. However, it does not follow that Twitter is a better bet for brands than Facebook. Fashion brands for example would be crazy not to use Facebook.

The future of Online Video

Youtube is great, and Vimeo is beautiful, but we have yet to see a "Twitter for video". Color wanted to be it, but failed. A Norwegian newspaper is currently doing something very interesting with online video. Dagbladet, a liberal tabloid, has launched the Dagblated Nyhetsstudio ("News Studio"), which puts the viewer in control of 7 video feeds (most of them realtime). Only one video is maximised at a time, but if you hover over any of the other thumbnails, you hear its audio, allowing you to "preview" it. Their field reporters walk around with backpacks full of video streaming gear, collecting the footage in real time. If this is not the future of online video, it is dangerously close.

Display ads are dead?

An interesting article in AdAge makes the case that display ads' days are numbered because everybody's attention is switching to platforms like Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest. We don't agree – more nuanced and correct is this article which argues that because of the blurring between ad units and shared content on these platforms, it will require a shift in skills towards 'content'. Buyers would have to have a nose for a story and a finger on the pulse of what's going down on social platforms.

All this connectivity and no conversation

Like Evgeny Morozov, celebrated MIT professor Sherry Turkle is one of the people pining for the early days of the internet. Analysing a considerable body of research, the author of 'Alone Together' this week again claimed that our relationships are suffering because of social networks and mobile phones. As per usual it was Zeynep Tufeckci who pointed out that social media is 'a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives'. Tufkekci takes the debate a step further, pointing out that a small group of increasingly disconnected people do indeed struggle to use new technologies (for various reasons). And they could increasingly find themselves at a social disatvantage.

The power of Guest Blogging, the Buffer way

It is no secret that we love Buffer, and the way they do things. This week, another one of those things intercepted our radars: 70% of Buffer's initial traffic was created by guest blogging. How did they do this? Mostly by guest blogging about Buffer! If you have an amazing application, why not? If you don't, why are you still working on it? This is one of those things that just seems so obvious, once you've heard it.

Creatives of the Week – Matt Richardson & PicturelessPinterest

Who needs images when you've got words? That's the core thought about both of these projects. PicturelessPinterest is a cheeky Twitter account that narrates the best of Pinterest, but without the pictures. Simple but funny. Matt Richardson makes it a bit more complicated: he's developed a camera that doesn't produce an image but a text description of what you're trying to capture. Wait a minute – how does that work? He uses Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service that uses real humans behind to do things for machines that machines can't easily do. Very cool!

This week Sergey Brin, Google founder, launched a broadside against government censorship of the Internet (and added some concerns about Facebook and Apple to boot). This of course echoes the thoughts of Sir Tim Berners Lee, who has exhorted all of us to ask Facebook et al to give us access to our data. But perhaps the most comprehensive call to arms was made by science fiction writer and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow in January, but since it will define our Internet futures it is still worth a read.

Speaking about War …

… the war between Apple and Amazon started in 2007 after Apple made a deal with major book publishers, that smells distinctly of price fixing, is reaching a new apex as the Department of Justice has filed antitrust cases against Apple and its band of book publishers. Apple has decided to go to trial. Which is fair, because this is by no means a one sided argument. This post by Charlie Stross points out the predatory nature of Amazon's way of doing business, by trying to create a Monopoly and a Monopsony (one buyer, many sellers) at the same time. Very interesting.

The not so great firewall of China

The current political upheaval in China is a great test to see whether the Chinese government can keep a lid on their great unwashed. It seems that, despite being one of the most comprehensive filtering regimes yet, the Chinese government has not been successful in keeping a lid on information. In fact, some now argue that the only way for them to do so, would be to switch off the Net completely, which would have large economic and social consequences. The central government could rather use social media as an important tool to fight corruption – it is networked authoritarianism.

Facebook becoming dearer

As demand for Facebook advertising rises, prices are going up. In fact, CPM's (or cost per thousand ads served) have risen by 41% over a one year period. The same report recommends brands use sponsored stories, "the type of ad that offers the strongest return on investment of all promotions on the social network." Sponsored stories are not unlike promoted Tweets, pieces of content which can be seeded by media buying. A past report by TBG found that sponsored stories yield a 46 percent higher clickthrough rate than all other ad types.

Thinking about the next big thing

Speaking of Facebook – Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic provides brilliant insight into the future we envisaged in the late 90's. It is here. It's been done, with Facebook right at the epicenter of it all. To quote:

"The platforms that have seemed hot in the last couple of years — Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest — add a bit of design or mobile intelligence to the established ways of thinking."

And he stomps on hardware too. Yes, even Apple:

"The most exciting thing to come along in the consumer space between then and now is the iPad. But despite its glorious screen and extended battery life, it really is a scaled up iPhone that offers developers more space and speed to do roughly the same things they were doing before."

Without trying to point out what it should be, he urges the great minds of today to put their mind to new things, and especially new business models. Something other than thinking about how to make people click ads. Food for thought?

Path gets a new capital injection

Speaking of the next big thing, Path is not quite it, according to Om Malik. It has, however, secured another $30 million in funding, thus we can be sure to see renewed effort coming from them in the next few months. Despite being designed absolutely exquisitely, Path still needs to define a singular addictive behaviour, and as a result it lacks the draw and engagement of something like Instagram. It can also not harness the viral power of celebrities, because of its 150 friend limit. It surely has a tough job ahead – let's see what happens.

What's in a tweet?

Back to the status quo: the beauty of Twitter is the fact that users are forced to keep their messages down to 140 characters. Despite this fact, as we noted in a blog post last year, each tweet holds twice the amount of data than a standard mobile text message (which can be 160 characters long). What is the rest used for? The economist has published a very handy graphic, detailing all the data contained in a tweet. This is why a single tweet can mean so much.

Creatives of the Week: Agency Republic

Here at RAAK we're completely in love with the mini-computing revolution, stimulated by platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. That's why this project by Agency Republic plunged straight into our radar with a splash. It is a poster, which … wait for it … when you throw something at it, skips to the next track on the office's Spotify. Nice!

According to Econsultancy, that date can't be too far in the future anymore. Semantic search will see Google doing their best to provide direct answers to users' search queries, instead of supplying them with a list of links. This means you'll have to provide answers to questions in your field of expertise in your content's markup, to keep scoring high in Google's eyes. This will see a complete revolution in SEO, where SEO will mean turning your content into perfectly 'minable' data. And this, at last, might finally sign in the dawn of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's big idea for the web: the ability for machines to 'understand' content.

Does Klout measure your social capital, or something else?

Brian Solis has just published a paper on Influence. He rightly points out that we'd be silly not to take services like Klout and PeerIndex seriously, despite their flaws. Solis also points out that they don't really measure Influence, but rather "social capital". We think he is right and wrong.

A public Chatroulette

The Internet is interactive, but broadcasting tends to be one-directional. So whither internet TV? Brand new startup OnTheAir has a novel approach. They will enable conversations to be broadcasted: Ideal for celebrities, bloggers and the like, looking to include their audience members in their broadcasts.

Kickstarter's funding dollars have a lasting effect

Kickstarter has an amazing case study on their blog. In short, before the 3.3 million dollar breakaway success of the game Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter, the Video Games category averaged 629 pledges per week. After Double Fine, the category boasts an average of 9755 pledges per week. This behaviour was mirrored in the Web Comics category. This means, instead of having an exhaustive effect on the available pledges, a surge in pledges seems to attract even more.

The problems of popularity beset Pinterest

A few weeks after Tumblr banned content that promotes self-harm, like bulimia and anorexia, Pinterest has done the same. However, the so-called Thinspiration content is still freely available. In other news, pointing to how tough life can be at the top, Pinterest has been infiltrated by spammers who are making as much as $1000 per day from their spam bots. They claim Pinterest is by far the easiest network to spam these days.

Does Tumblr have an SEO problem?

It would seem so. In a detailed blog post Dan Zambonini details why he moved his websites from Tumblr to WordPress. He reckons that if the simplicity of Tumblr is not key, WordPress's SEO makes it the 'must have' choice.

Creatives of the week – Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg

Take one designer, one mathematician, a desire to invent new ways for people to think about data and you get Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. The pair have been working on data visualisations since 2003 and currently lead Google's Big Picture environmental initiative. But in their spare time they make nice things too, like this gorgeous map of wind patterns in the US.

Last night the US Senate approved legislation that will make it possible to give ownership in return for small amateur investments – equity for crowdfunding. Up to now that is the one thing platforms like Kickstarter could not offer. In the UK equity for amateur funding has had no such issues. And there's two kids quick out the blocks: Crowdcube and Seedr (who won the recent LWS start-up competition). This news, coupled with the just announced tax breaks for start-up investment (SEIS) means it's a great time to be looking for funding.

In unrelated news, we’re very excited by the Digital Bolex, a high sexy quality digital camera – funded by Kickstarter.

Only 9% of people get their news from social networks

…very often. While 36% go to news organisations very often for their news. That bit of news from US based Pew was much repeated this week. Excluding folks that don't get their news from digital sources, 52% of people got 'some' of their news from Facebook or Twitter. And although almost twice as many got news from Facebook than Twitter, those that did said they would probably have gotten the news they got from Facebook elsewhere anyway.

Twitter users thought their news experience was more unique and irreplaceable. Twitter users also said they were less inclided to get their news on Twitter from friends, but still more so than from journos. And what we find striking, they were more often unsure of the source. This chimes with what sociologists would say. Twitter is a weak tie network, and information travels better in weak tie networks.

Social media gets serious

Brian Solis has been one of the first marketers to call for a more social scientific approach to marketing. No wonder then that Solis, who joined the star studded Altimeter recently, would publish a report on the Rise of Influencers and uses sociology to try and see the wood from the trees. The report pours cold water on the claims of Peerindex and Klout that they measure influence, but adds – they do measure 'social capital' – the potential to influence. Now we have one or two bones to pick with how he uses that term (watch our blog for more soon). But broadly what he says is bang on: everybody can now be media, but some us are more media than others.

Is Pinterest the new Facebook?

Insurrectionary talk is in the air, as new figures show that Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than any other site bar Facebook. The answer however is no. Pinterest's strength is that its a weak tie network. Facebook's strength and size lies in the fact that it’s for your close friends (strong ties). And everybody has friends. That's not to say that Pinterest won’t be big. But it’s more likely that they will co-exist as they have quite different rolls. On a side note – Peugeot's Pinterest competition is worth checking out.

A match made in heaven

Champagne glasses pinged from Williamsburg to London Fields, as Hipstamatic – the advanced photo app – became the first service to deeply integrate with Instagram – everybody’s favourite photosharing network. It's never been a better time to be a Hipster.

Google Analytics goes social

For some time now, data geeks have been worried as an increasing number of traffic to websites returned no source – often because they were social shares. With a new update Google Analytics hopes to solve that problem. It includes reporting from niche sites such as Slideshare. For a good run-down as to what's incuded and what not, see this blog post. But as an Adobe report out this week makes clear, even then, the impact of social is bound to be under reported because of the problem of last click attribution.

Promoted Tweets go mobile

Yip, in the week that Twitter turned 6, Twitter now not only allows you to advertise to users on mobile, it even includes new targeting metrics. So now you can target users with an iPhone only.

Report-tastic

We do like reports, three others that caught our eye this week: Google now rakes in more money in the US than all the US newspapers combined. Ad spend on mobile jumped by 157% in the UK in 2011. And the person destined to spend the most on tech inside companies in the future will be the CMO, not the CTO or CIO.

The Empire strikes back – for us

Hardly had reports appreared that companies are asking job seekers for their Facebook username and passwords, and Facebook threatened to fight our corner. Facebook will take action to "protect the privacy and security of its users". Ironic, but very welcome news.

Is the internet of things upon us?

First it was Raspberry Pi, and now Twine (a product funded by Kickstarter) that enables you to make your toilet tweet and your tumble-drier err… tumble. And all that power "without a nerd degree". The little box has Wifi, sensors, and there's no programming required.

No! An internet of…

Drones! There's been a few posts doing the round this week that illegal file sharers like Pirate Bay will load their servers onto drones and fly them around – to escape detection. We don't believe that will be very cost effective…

Creative of the week – Stamen

The San Francisco-based design studio Stamen have combined their love for maps and their technological know-how into a lovely Watercolor Map Project. They used vector map data from OpenStreetMap and layered them with scanned watercolor textures that render automatically. Truly beautiful.

Lets start with what they have managed to get right.

Altimeter, and specifically Brian Solis should be congratulated for being a marketer that has advocated the use of social science, when trying to make sense of social media.

When messages are dependent on their spread via social networks rather than through traditional means, social science indeed provides a more correct theoretical framework compared to what media buffs use now.

Altimeter is also right to point out that services like Klout and PeerIndex, although imperfect, will become increasingly important to understand how information flows through media.

Altimeter is correct about one other thing: They point out that Influence is a complicated terrain, and that services like Klout measure potential – rather than actual Influence – although Solis does not do the best job of unpacking why this is the case.

Klout scores show social capital & status?

“At a minimum, these scores indicate the stature someone possesses within social networks… This stature is referred to as social capital…” – Solis for Altimeter

Altimeter says that a person’s reach, relevance and resonance (see below) comes together and contributes to your “social capital”, which is the likelihood that you will influence behaviour. This is really what your Klout “score” is alluding to, they claim. As you can see, almost in the same breath, Altimeter says these scores indicate ‘stature’, but without elaborating much. Which is unfortunate, because status or stature might be closer to what PeerIndex et al shows us, rather than these scores being a proxy for ‘social capital’.

Now social capital is quite an old and much debated concept in social science, and there is not one accepted definition of it, but none of them is quite like the one implied by Altimeter. All the definitions generally refer to a concept where a social network has a value as a whole for those in it, although individuals can indeed access this value. But to over-simplify, it speaks of trust, cooperation, all things that make life inside the network easier for its members.

For sociologists and economists, a network where there’s trust and cooperation has major advantages over groups where such a network is absent. A case in point: It’s generally accepted that the existence of sufficient social capital is one of the prerequisites for democracies to function.

Like many other social-scientific concepts, it is thought to be quite useful, precisely because it looks at groups or networks of people and their relations with each other, but at scale. Social scientists tend to think that individuals are a bit like sub atomic particles are for natural scientists. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics state that we can’t accurately measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. We can however predict that if we heat water to a certain temperature, it’s particles as a ‘group’ will vaporise.

Similarly, with a few exit polls we can predict the outcome of an election very accurately. At the same time we struggle to predict how individuals behave.

So you can predict people’s behaviour in groups quite accurately, but you can’t predict individual behaviour that neatly – which is kind of reassuring. And although Solis tips his hat to Heisenberg, he still insists on equating Klout scores – which are very individual, to social capital AND status.

Now, to illustrate why this might be problematic consider this – networks with high amounts of social capital often are quite flat or not very hierarchical (within the network). Large differentiators of status inside groups (hierarchies or inequality), often destroys social capital in that network.

Altimeter’s three pillars of influence

Altimeter claims that Influence rests on three pillars:

Your Reach – which is in turned comprised of three things. Popularity: Britney is very popular and has high reach; Goodwill: Do people think you are a good egg? It stands to reason that if you are liked people will be more receptive to your messages; Proximity: Do you have close ties with others that are influential?

Then there’s Relevance: Clay Shirkey might not have a massive following like Britney Spears, BUT he is followed by many academics and smart people in media and tech. He has subject and topical relevance. Relevance also has three components, says Altimeter, namely Authority: Are you an expert in your field?; Trust: Logical really, and I’d argue you can’t have authority without it; and lastly Affinity: A natural liking or sympathy for someone or something. This last element is not necessarily wrong (in fact I will argue that it’s often crucial) – but it’s not obvious that this is the place to put it.

And then there’s Resonance: Which is how frequent the subject make updates on social media and how this activity travels, and how long it stays around for. This sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Resonance is really what impact we can measure a person is having in social media – after the fact. It fluctuates wildly from day to day (more on this in an upcoming blog post).

The three pillars point toward status

Now I think status is more accurate a description for what’s actually being measured here.

When an already famous person signs up to Twitter, their scores quickly jumps, as their followers (and reach) increase.

But what about the difference between a person famous for being famous (Britney), and a genuine authority on a topic (The so-called Relevance pillar)? Well, in social science there’s a differentiation between ascribed status (status you inherit) and achieved status (status that you earn), which can be used to make a differentiation here as well.

So while the first two pillars – reach & relevance – of Altimeter actually measures status, the third – resonance – is a case by case proxy for actual influence on social media, but after the fact.

In a next blog post we will discuss if and why this case specific after-the-fact influence – is such a poor predictor of future performance.

Pretty much. The Kony 30 minute doc has racked up well over 100 million views. Was it simply a finely crafted and expertly messaged piece of content that did it? Yes, but it needed to bust through the initial ceiling of obscurity to build a critical mass. An excellent post by Socialflow's Gilad Lotan explains how Invisible Children increased the video's chances of success by building networks of supporters that acted as a launchpad when mobilised. Furthermore, they designed mechanisms through which they could address celebrities – vast audiences with audiences. Another informative post gives further pointers as to what they did right, including: focusing on a single issue; ignoring policy wonks; and speaking the language of their intended audience.

This cat fight has served as a proxy for a wider debate on the efficacy of social media – two critiques often emerge:

Too powerful: But what if the over-simplication does more harm than good?

Many criticisms of over-simplication have been aimed at the Kony video. Arguably one of the best is by Mamood Mamdani, eminent Ugandan academic. Mamdani rejoined Twitter to join the debate. Meanwhile searches for the word "Uganda" is still double what they were before the Kony video. Our take? Awareness is better than obscurity as it allows for exactly that: an exchange of information.

Too weak: This is just slacktivism

Zeynep Tufekci argues (and warms many a social media marketer's heart) that liking, retweeting and sharing can lead to action:

"We are a highly-symbolic, group-oriented species and signaling our preferences to others is a key dimension of human action. 'Public' is a meta-concept; it's not just about what you know internally, but what you express and what others know that you believe and that you know that others know. Hence, the public sphere is formed not just through people's silently held beliefs, but through overt signaling of ideology and narratives – and this signalling increasingly takes place online… Further, all human societies operate in a world of socially-constructed norms and ideals. And the changes to those ideals are immensely important. If norms move, than often action also moves."
 

Changing of the Guard

The Encyclopaedia Britannica this week announced the end of their print version. Forbes – in a not entirely unrelated article – highlighted the meteorotic rise of powerful new mobile devices: it took 15 years for laptops to reach 50 million units sold yearly. It took smartphones 7 years. Tablets? Just two years.

Facebook Insights goes real-time

In a week where a study conluded that 82% of Business Facebook pages post a paltry 5 times a month, Facebook announced a big update to their analytics. The low activity by companies should perhaps not be so surprising, argues Econsultancy. Even when brands have thousands of Likes they struggle to get much engagement on their pages. However, reports now show that the new timeline feature for brands increases engagement, and the new real-time analytics will enable brands to highlight or remove content soon after they have published it, based on immediate feedback.

Insta-Food porn?

If RAAK was one person, we'd be a nerd. Proof? Two other studies this week (nearly) satiated our curiosity. Why do people use Instagram? An ethnographic study reveals a few interesting points: people want to find other people with whom they have common interests; people want to document the world around them and provide "visual status updates" to their friends. Another study confirmed the findings of a British one about the kinds of Tweets people like and dislike. Informational, funny and yes – self promotion – all score positively.

This summer in a park or party near you

Check out this Kickstarter project: set Instaprint to look out for specific locations or hashtags, and any Instagram picture tagged appropriately will automatically be printed out on inkless paper. Lovely.

Creative of the Week – Yvo Schaap

Here at RAAK HQ we like Reddit. A lot. So, naturally our interest is piqued to the max when someone does something interesting with Reddit data. Which is just what Yvo Schaap did, in the form of an exquisite Reddit Post Activity Visualisation. It shows, in realtime, upvotes, downvotes and comments on top posts as a waterfall of icons, filling up the bargraphs below. It's a thing of beauty – you just have to see it live …

The Kony 2012 campaign might have been slammed by the chattering classes, but it undoubtedly succeeded if you look at it through the marketeer's prism of awareness creation. Millions who never knew who Joseph Kony was before, now do – thanks to #stopkony trending for more than a day on Twitter. Incredibly, a 30 minute (you heard that right) documentary was the catalyst of it all. Content marketing on steroids! It is as Ethan Zuckerman notes, a finely crafted "story of self", tugging at the right emotional heart strings. However, it was also a massive over simplification of the situation in central Africa. Zuckerman asks:

"As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good?"

The power of the new networked Feminism

An interesting counterpoint to Kony was the grassroots, seemingly leaderless but massive media attack on US shock jock, Rush Limbaugh, leaving him minus 12 advertisers and two radio stations. This was authentic, spontaneous, and the second such example after Komen earlier this year. Prominent feminist organizers told Forbes that the mob justice was led once again by Twitter- and Facebook-savvy women, and it dealt Limbaugh the worst humiliation of his controversial career.

How to bribe your AmEx customers to Tweet

Twitter is launching its second initiative with AmEx. You'll remember that AmEx merchants are the first customers able to use Twitter's self service advertising. Now AmEx is letting its members link a merchant coupon to their cards by tweeting out a hashtag from a retailer. In other words, retailers can offer their customers discounts if their customers are their advertisers. In other news, Twitter is rumoured to be on the cusp of ramping up their brand pages dramatically. Twitter plans to add experiences (a page based app platform), including e-commerce, contests and sweepstakes.

Brands punch through the noise on Pinterest

We've seen Pinterest grow from strength to strength over the past few weeks, and inevitably brands are picking up on the fact. This week two exciting pinterest-based campaigns saw the light. The first, by fashion brand Calypso, sees the brand flying a Pinterest superuser, Christine Martinez, to the Carribean Island of St. Barth, to "live pin" a photo shoot for their 2012 summer look. In the second, Airline BMI has created the world's first "Pinterest lottery". People are challenged to repin up to 6 of 45 images of BMI destinations. Whoever gets the secret combination and order right, wins a pair of return flights to any BMI destination. Simple, but effective. And fresh, because it's Pinterest.

Tweet every Tweet as if it's your last

When über-journalist Andrew Breitbart upped and died in the middle of a very public Twitter Spat last week, everyone was left in awe of what the effect could be of a random tweet suddenly turning into your "Famous last Tweet". Then we discovered this gem of different people's last tweets:

"Elizabeth Taylor's last tweet was almost "Every breath you take today should be with someone else in mind. I love you." But then she tweeted, "My interview in Bazaar with Kim Kardashian came out!!!" before dying."

So – do think of this every time you tweet, and you should be fine!

Social media is rather compelling

According to a Cisco report, 40 percent of college students and 45 percent of young professionals said they would accept lower paying jobs in exchange for the ability to use social media, mobile devices, and the Internet more freely in the workplace. 'Nuff said.

"Ludicrous Speed"

As we fast approach a time where nearly half the world's population has a powerful computer in their pockets (500 million smartphones were shipped last year), it's worth taking a look at these maps that show the spread of the moveable type printing press in Europe. Note: it took 30 years for the printing press to find its way from Germany to England!

Creative of the Week – Nathalie Miebach

We like a bit of data visualisation here at RAAK HQ, but Nathalie Miebach takes things a step further. Try and follow this: first she collects weather and climate data and turns that into a musical score. That in itself is pretty impressive. But then she uses that data and visualises it into 3D-sculptures or, as she calls it herself, "devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place". Highly conceptual, but some of the results are stunning. BrainPickings has more info.

Facebook has announced a slew of new ad formats that will sit inside the newsfeed, and especially the mobile feed. Already some are proclaiming that this makes Facebook the world's biggest mobile marketing platform. Until now brands posting status updates via their pages had their work cut out for their posts to be visible to fans. Figures suggested that as little as 5% to 16% of these posts were shown, depending on how good a brand was at getting people to interact with it. But another new tool for advertisers, called Reach Generator, "allows brands to focus on users more aggressively. If a brand meets the Facebook criteria of having a minimum number of fans (the company didn't reveal the number) and posts more than a few times a week, the company will guarantee they reach 75 percent of their fans with ads each month, "a privilege they will have to pay for". This of course changes Facebook from an earned media to a paid media platform. The old adage, advertising is a tax on the unremarkable, is back.

Facebook's brand pages get rid of tabs, make stats public & more

Mashable has a good list of the things you need to pay attention to on the new Facebook pages. Thankfully the annoying landing pages is a thing of the past. Check-in Deals have been scrapped while Offers makes its debut. And more of the Insight Analytics are visible to anybody that cares to visit a page.

Social media is not killing the advertising star

It's being funded by it. Besides Facebook (who gets the majority of its money via advertising), Twitter is introducing its own ads (Promoted Tweets) into the iPhone and Android clients. Global ad spend is set to increase by 4.9% in 2012 to over $465bn – mostly driven by online. Global agency giant WPP's annual pre-tax profits have grown 18.5% to a record £1.01bn while revenues climbed 7.4% to a record £10.02bn.

A golden age for people powered funding

In a week where it was announced that Kickstarter will channel more funds to the arts than the US Federal Endowment for the Arts, everybody has been very excited at the prospect of new US legislation. The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act will enable platforms like Kickstarter to offer shares in projects for the first time. Up to now you had to be an accredited investor to buy shares (while you were free to blow the same amount of money at Las Vegas). This week, £275 000 was raised for billboards protesting the NHS reforms in mere hours, completely independent of any service like Kickstarter. The demand is clear. Also read this blog post about this kind of open access to funding in other countries.

Tweets like Candyfloss no more

Ever since we saw Nick Halstead – CEO of Datasift – demonstrate the power of his powerful platform (Datasift) for sifting Tweets, we have been super excited. However, there's always been a problem with Twitter, even with the help of DataSift. If you did not anticipate Mubarak's resignation or any other event for that matter, you miss the content you were looking for before you started. With their new service, that is now no longer a problem. Datasift is surely one of the most exciting startups to come out of the UK in quite some time.

Should you do content marketing and social media marketing?

The most wanted digital talent for 2012 is "Blogging, Editing, Copywriting". To underline the importance of content marketing, General Motor's beautiful animated Gif's were widely shared accross the web this week. So exactly what is content marketing and does it necessitate a different approach to social marketing? Oh yes.

The highly successful launch of the Raspberry Pi

This week's news was dominated by the highly successful launch of the Raspberry Pi mini-platform, which instantaneously crashed their website, and has their main supplier scrambling to meet demands. In a nutshell, Raspberry Pi is a computer motherboard the size of a credit card. The technology is not exactly new (remember pico-ITX?), but the price is … well … $25. That is very impressive. This brings the cost of a fully fledged computer platform within component range, which means we are likely to see many creative uses of these platforms included into all kinds of mainstream electronics. Think wireless speakers, a kettle that tweets … you get the idea.

It's cobwebs and tumbleweeds over on Google+

Google+ had everything going for it. When it launched, it already had almost 200 million Gmail users, who didn't need to sign up, but only enable. It had access to a rough social graph on these users, based on their contact lists. It reached the 10 million user mark in two weeks. Now, 90 million users strong, it has surfaced that the average user spends 3 minutes on Google+ each month. Which is, well … way below average. Is Google+ trying to be too much like Facebook? Is Google too confused, readjusting its core services in a brave new world? We think that, for the masses, Google+ gives too little, and asks too much. It is too creator friendly and consumer unfriendly.

Creative of the week – Sean Hill

Forget Tolstoy-esque long novels, forget short stories even: we now have a new literary genre called Very Short Stories. Sean Hill is a writer who's gotten himself almost 100,000 followers on Twitter by writing stories that fit into 1 Tweet. There are quite a few writers who experiment with Twitter; but what makes Hill's approach particularly interesting is that he also asks people to send him words – nouns more specifically – to inspire him, a trick he learned while he was doing improvisation comedy.

They are in fact flip sides of the same coin – the ever democratisation of media. Both speaks of media, that can be produced by everyone, and is distributed by everyone. These two terms can however also capture a distinction in approach to democratised media. How so?

Let me explain. Please note that for the sake of clarity, I am going to generalise. The distinction between different forms of media has never been absolutely clear cut. (Some forms of social media are over a century old.) And the distinctions are even less so now. But here goes my little polemic.

But they differ in important respects:

How to make sense of all this?

Here at RAAK we like to think before we do. If you are a regular reader of our newsletter you’d have noticed that we are rather skeptical of some of the central tenets of the social media dogma. Like the ridiculous one that was so big until quite recently amongst the likes of gurus like Chris Brogan: Following somebody back when they follow you as a matter of course.

Don’t get me wrong. We do think its pretty obvious that the continuous drop in the cost of publishing – the democratisation of media, is revolutionary. But we don’t think that the basic rules of media or how people behave have changed. It’s just that the rules now apply to everybody – because we all can be media.

That means, for example, that attention remains finite. And it is silly to pretend you can meaningfully follow 20,000 people. That means Stephen Frye might be a person, but he is also a broadcaster.

So what does all this mean for organisations in practise?

In most instances, what companies and organisations should do when using media for getting their message out (note – a very specific part of marketing), is ‘content’ and not ‘social’. It fits their goals much better. Most companies want to achieve some kind of scale – an audience and not a community.

You often hear social media consultants say to companies, just join this or that service – it’s not rocket science. Yeah, that might be fine for Joe Blogs who has 130 friends and no need to communicate at scale.

Companies and organisations tend to want to excel and stand out. Create a brand. The only way to do this (besides the obvious one of having a great product) is to produce quality content that’s remarkable. And that is freaking hard. It requires a combination of talent and graft. You often need to throw money at the problem – At companies like RAAK They need to hire journalists, creative programmers, film makers – not marketeers or community managers.

Unfortunately doing things at scale cause more noise (See Gina’s post above). Many blogs have started to switch off their comnents. (I’m not necessarily suggesting you do that). But look at hyper successful Burberry and what they do on their Facebook page. They never reply to customers. They are broadcasting.

Click to enlarge – the most important digital skills 2012 – Econsultancy.

To reiterate – I am not saying that relationships and two way interaction with your audience is of no import when getting your message out. It has always been. Just look at how much radio has made use of the phone-ins over the years. And now this interaction is even easier.

So depending of the company, the brand they are trying to project (aloof, part of the crowd), and their size, the answer to how one-to-one a company should be, will vary.

And social media still has a direct roll in other sphere’s of the company operations. For market research social media is gold dust. It has a massive roll to play in informing product development. Creating forums where customers can help themselves is yet another example where social is king.

It’s earned media, that’s earned through blood sweat and tears

AND it’s hard to do content marketing itself well, without listening what’s going on at the coal face of social media – because that’s where it will be distributed. AND even when creating content, you can harness the power of the crowd. (See our logo and logo crowd sourcing experiment). So this is not an argument against social media per se. But it is an argument for a shift in emphasis to take it far more seriously. A few Tweets, and a few replies won’t cut it.

Bottom-line: There are many more media channels today (we all are), and they vary tremendously in size. And so the scope of these media channels for behaving as broadcasters (Stephen Frye) or conversationalists (The Hackney Gazette) vary greatly too.

But really, if your serious about communicating far and wide, you know which one you want to be.