So, what are you planning this Valentine's day? Top this: Instagram founder Mike Krieger's girlfriend, Kaitlyn Trigger, built him an app for Valentine's day. Without knowing how to code! She started last December, learned Python and then built Lovestagram. She noted in the end, as most programmers know, learning how to code was really easy. How to put everything together … that was the hard part. Heart warming!

Numbers flock to the Social Network newcomers

Have you noticed how many people have started following you on Google+ lately? It's no coincidence, and frankly, it's not only you. Google+ is absolutely exploding, to the point where it now has half the unique visitors that Twitter has! One caveat to take note of: Twitter is constantly undervalued in this area, as much of its traffic comes from mobile apps, not counted by web stats. Another relatively new network, Pinterest, is the fastest stand-alone website ever to hit 10 million monthly unique visitors. On top of that, the average pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site! If you're still in the dark about what Pinterest is good for exactly, check out mashable's board of top Superbowl ads. Nice, eh?

Pinterest is not only popular, they're also very sneaky

More cheating: On Pinterest, there is a strong use case for brands to link pictures (or "pins") of products to their online shops. Pinterest enhances this use case by presenting users with a "gifts" tab, where product pictures are sorted by price, with the price displayed prominently on each picture. It simply gets this price from your pin description. This is very nice of them, but it's just surfaced that they're not exactly doing this for free. Through affiliate-links partner Skimlinks, they're earning themselves a bit of money off your purchases by modifying the links to your products. This is all fine, except, they didn't tell anyone about it … and by doing so, they have quite a few users very hot under the collar.

P&G signals shift to digital & social

Top news this week is that Proctor & Gamble has laid off 1,600 employees, shifting budget to digital and social. To quote their CEO, Bob McDonald:

In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient.

Word.

Sky prohibits journos to Retweet, break stories on Twitter

Stonewalling: It's a difficult one for broadcasters. Both Sky and the BBC has tried to reign in and regulate how their journalists share information on Twitter. These social tools raise the profile and shift power to individual journos at the expense of their institutions. But curtailing journos' actions on Twitter will only leave them hamstrung and at a disadvantage to other users. Already there is talk of Twitter users refusing to Retweet Sky accounts.

Retailers and the mobile threat

More Stonewalling: Retailers have reason to be worried about mobile. Why? In increasing amounts, customers check product reviews while in shops, and compare prices on online stores. What to do? Econsultancy has an in depth post outlining some of the options and possibilities, including mobile coupons – well worth a read. In related news, Google announced that it is opening its first physical shop, following Ebay's lead.

Turning action into advertising

Facebook will soon introduce more social advertising formats. This time they will allow advertisers to sponsor user actions. In other words, when a friend listens to Moderat on Spotify, the message telling you of this fact can be sponsored by a record label. Or a similar sounding, less known band.

The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Arguing: Before Paris got its grand boulevards, it had little nooks and crannies where anonymous flâneurs could just leisurely stroll and discover the unexpected. Internet critic Morozov wrote this week in the New York Times how social sites like Facebook has killed the flânerie of the early web. Zeynep Tufeckci was not convinced:

…the social web has greatly increased exactly this quality of the Internet – encountering the unsearched and the unplanned … connectivity through people – the social web – yields more diverse and surprising encounters than mere connectivity through topics or information

Creative of the week – Colin Pinegar

How many of your Facebook friends are 'real friends'? American design student Colin Pinegar used that very fundamental question as the starting point for a striking piece of design/art called 'Best Friends'. Based on a set of simple questions (like "Do I know this person's phone number?") he scored his online friends. That range of scores got plotted on a colour spectrum and then turned into a series of wax sculptures of his own face. It's a simple, but thought-provoking visualisation of a very interesting issue.

In the past we have explained why good content – so called Linkbait – is the best Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. This week we've seen a burst of – er … content – fly by our timelines announcing that content Marketing is now where it's at in more than just SEO.

Like this one by Entrepeneur mag:

When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur.

They explain what content marketing is:

It's the creation and publication of original content — including blog posts, case studies, white papers, videos and photos — for the purpose of generating leads, enhancing a brand's visibility, and putting the company's subject matter expertise on display.

Mashable – a blog that is in itself an example of effective content marketing – carries on in the same vein explaining new more sophisticated forms of content marketing:

Lately we’ve witnessed the intersection of content and commerce, an emerging breed of retail site that features magazine-like editorials, photo spreads and inspiring video, all designed to instruct and, ultimately, sell a product.
 

If content is king, why are newspapers struggling?

Good question. General news (should The Telegraph write about rugby at all if there exists specialist vertical sites like Planet Rugby?), the high costs of print and distribution, the rise of expert amateur content and the erosion of cash cows like classified advertising to sites like Craigslist, have all contributed to the malaise.

The UK Guardian has been at the forefront of attempts to arrest this decline, first by launching an API a year ago (We explained what an API is here). And now USA today are following suit. This is the platform play. Open up so others can build on your content or service.

But yesterday the smarts at King's Cross fired another shot across the bow of the Grim Reaper. Reports Nieman Lab:

But it doesn’t follow that, in 2011, Craigslist has completely cornered the market on classified advertising — or, for that matter, on community messaging overall. Today, a major paper is getting into the community messaging game: The Guardian is launching n0tice, a social news platform that draws a little from Craigslist, a little from Foursquare, a little from Ning.

 

Put the Hacker into the Hack

N0tice is a platform play (the content is user generated) which also neatly encompasses a ready made business model newspapers know – classified advertising. But to conceptualise and build this kind of tool you need a different kind of journalist, the hacker journo. Explains Poynter:

The process of becoming a hacker journalist is different for everyone, but the pattern is common. Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives way to MySQL. And then, almost without knowing it, you’re creating the tools yourself.

And just to show their hacking credits The Guardian also launched a little bot this week that runs on their API. Tweet it a search term and it will scour the Guardian for content based on that term and bring it to you.
 

Content comes in many forms

Apps can be content. Content that can be particularly useful even as a customer support tool. Apple's Stores have just launched a location aware one which most stores could emulate to provide in store updates. Reports TNW:

…it looks like the app knows exactly what store you’ve walked into, what workshops are coming up, lets you ask for help, tells you how many people are in line ahead of you, and gives you the opportunity to set up a Genius appointment for your Apple devices.
 

Crowds with thin skines

Two cautionary tales to note this week. Moleskine thought it a good idea to crowdsource a new logo. But designers baulked at the prospect at spending hours working on a project where they stood little chance of getting rewarded. And a US brand Chapstick committed a basic but grave sin: Deleting critical comments from Fans on their Facebook page. This generated loads of 'content', but of the negative kind.
 

No shortcuts – Content is hard

One of the most clicked-on Tweets we posted on Twitter this week is this study that shows that links one third into a Tweet, gets more clicks. (Notice where our link is.) If only doing content was that easy as following a few rules. Far more important is curating good content. Like we mentioned last week, you'd probably need to change the skills of the people in your business. Hire journalists, bloggers, programmers or other creatives that make or build compelling … you guessed it.
 

Creative of the Week – Matt Reed

Alcohol has inspired many a great conversation. How many great ideas have we all scribbled on beermats? But developer Matt Reed has taken the beer-bull by the horns and developed a Siri-controlled, Twitter-activated beer-pouring system. You say "pour me a beer", the robot does the job. Nuff said; watch the video.

Something to mull over

Is there a difference between content marketing and social media marketing? Or are they flipsides of the same coin?
 

News that Google will hate. On smartphones people use apps almost 6 times as much as they use the browser. This is important since smartphones are fast becoming the dominant way people access digital content.

No wonder Google and Facebook are pushing hard for web technologies to become more app-like.

Journalists told: tweet or die

At BBC Social Media Summit the managing editor of the Washington Post, Raju Narisetti, said that "it is unlikely a news job candidate will get hired if they don't even know how to use social".

And the New York Times will replace their automatic Twitter feed by a human. Poynter has a good analysis why this is a good idea.
 

Finance industry embraces social tools

It's not only journalists who are piling into social media. Morgan Stanley has announced (FT registration) that thousands of its brokers will commence using Twitter and LinkedIn after software has become available that allows them to still comply with the tight financial regulatory environment.
 

Diesel, I Like 

Finally someone's done it. Diesel is running a trial campaign in their Madrid stores that lets people add Facebook Likes to the clothes on display. You scan a QR code, tap Like and boom, another piece of content potentially gets into your friends' Newsfeed.

Still, there's room to make the tech even more social. Why stop at "Tell your friends"; when you can "Ask your friends for advice"?

Integrating Facebook on your own site works

While Facebook Pages have their value, people often underestimate the value of integrating social plug-ins into your own web presence. Facebook has now released some stats that show that using these social plug-ins (like the Like button) increase traffic. A few ones to note:

• The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.
• Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button.
• When a Ticketmaster user posts a specific event they are attending, or may want to attend, to Facebook, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales  
   

Groupon not wasting time in the location game

Facebook Deals better gets a move on. This week Groupon looks to close 2 deals with location-based services. First they announced a partnership with US-only app Loopt that will send users push notifications of nearby Groupon Now deals.

And now there are rumours that the deals service is in similar talks with Foursquare. A bold move from Groupon. And much needed, as the redemption rate of their email lists is apparently surprisingly low.
 

Google Wallet

Last week we spoke about the amazing possibilities of Near Field Communication. As a testimony to the hotness of the topic, Google launched their NFC payment service, Google Wallet, yesterday.

Prove that this is an important development: Google has already been sued by eBay and Paypal for a slice of the NFC pie.

In related news: Jack Dorsey's Square – which lets you accept credit cards through your mobile phone – for the first time processed more than $3 million in one day last Friday.  

Spotify + Facebook = end of iTunes?

This week, Forbes reported of an impending partnership between Facebook and Spotify. Not only will it bring Spotify's music to Facebook users, but it will also let friends listen to music simultaneously.

Apart from some combined Apple-bashing, what does Facebook stand to gain? A very interesting social graph they do not own at the moment: people's music interests. We can literally see Mark Zuckerberg drooling for this data. Whether this is going to be part of the deal (if there ís a deal at all), will be determined by Spotify's bloodlust versus their protectiveness over their data. 
 

Superinjunctions & the fight for control over the open net

A number of celebrities in the UK have sought to keep news about their private lives out of the media through so-called superinjunctions. That is, injunctions that not only protect the applicants secrecy, but also prohibit anybody from mentioning their existence. Social media fundis are well versed in the so-called Streisand effect. When information is kept secret, social media, or rather people using it, tend to do quite the opposite and try and reveal it.

And that is more or less what happened when footballer Ryan Giggs tried a super-injunction. This is particularly contentious, because this is really salacious gossip and not clearly in the public interest. But the English Courts are fighting back. The Chief Justice said the net is out of control and Twitter has announced that it would reveal details of users if they have indeed broken a law.
 

Creative of the Week – Sergio Albiac

Painting, that's what Sergio Albiac does. Sometimes with paint. Sometimes with code. The latter he calls Generative Video and this week we stumbled upon this intriging work called 'Content is Queen'. Just watch and be mesmerized.

Tech Insight of the week – Twitter is ten times the size of your mobile operator

How big is Twitter really? How does it compare to, say, SMS? We made a comparison, and we were quite surprised. In fact, we were very surprised.

Two of the incidents were started in the mainstream press, but another by a lone ranger. This fire starter turned out to be armed and dangerous. Well versed in the language of communications guerrilla tactics you mean?

Well yes, Jonathan Macdonald is a former commercial manager of Ministry of Sound, and founder of this fluid world, a marketing company. Full CV on LinkedIn.

But it turns out he also had a ready-made army following his not-so-narrowcasting. And he had the power of righteous indignation on his side.

Jonathan’s blog entry on the incident.

RAAK wanted to find out why he chose to take action, and how he got the message out.

RAAK: You blog and Tweet? How many Twitter followers do you have? And how many people read your blog?

I have around 1300 followers on twitter and around 100k readers per month on my blog.

RAAK: At what point did you decide to act? Why?

I decided to get my camera out when the guard started shouting in the guys face. I did this because I cannot stand bullying and aggressive behaviour toward other human beings. I like blogging on things that I see.

RAAK: Did you you consciously think that action might be taken by the TFL and the mayor of London, or did you just want to expose this injustice? How premeditated were your actions and what did you want to achieve?

I had no idea what TFL and the Mayor would do – if anything. Its totally separate to anything in my control. All I did was blog and tweet it – the rest was done by the crowd.

RAAK: What information did you want to capture and get to achieve your goal?

The goal was to record what was happening. I am not a reporter searching for a story. Citizen journalism is different to trying to get a ‘scoop’.

RAAK: What camera did you use to record the incident? Did you ever have any camera training?

I have no training. I used a Canon pocket camera but I also use an iPhone 3 to record. The reason I didn’t use my iPhone was that my battery was dead.

RAAK: How long after the incident did you blog about it and upload the video? What else did you do to promote your blog post and video?

I blogged it about 5 hours later. All I then did was tweet it and email a few friends who may have been interested.

RAAK: What blogging platform do you use and why?

I use WordPress. I love it as its easy and free.

RAAK: How did the message spread? What in your view were the key tools and things that made a difference? What did you learn from this?

The key reason it spread was due to the level of injustice. Nothing more. I have blogged thousands of other things that virtually nobody has ever seen or talked about – let alone twitted into the general public eye.

Ruby on Rails, Sys admin, Web developers, Software developers, Platform Engineers – not a scribe in sight. The Times they are a changing.

What to expect from the Times? My guess? A different kind of content. Interactive multi-media, applications, distributed widgets, but also platforms. An ad platform. And perhaps some platforms that allow their users to share news.