RAAK

A more social web

Wondering what to buy your friends for Xmas? Wonder no more. Simply zip over to this Etsy page and see what they recommend you buy for your friends, based on their Facebook profiles. Besides being way cool, why is this significant? This week a study showed that more than 50% of web surfers arrive at websites, signed in to Facebook, but very few use the wealth of information that comes with this kind of web visitor like Etsy does. In related news Spotify's paid customers base are up by 500,000 since September, partly due to closer Facebook integration.

Oink is pigging out on users

Three weeks ago, Kevin Rose, the father of Digg, launched an app that allows people to tag objects that they like by location. This works well for products in stores, and especially took off in a big way for dishes in restaurants. In the three weeks since, the Oink iPhone app has amassed more than 100,000 downloads, and more than 100,000 objects have been tagged! So many services and apps launch every week, but few make it. Might this one be one of the few successes, like Instagram?

Google+ is starting to add up?

Much has been said about Google+ lately, a lot of it quite negative, especially after they launched brand pages. Things are starting to take shape, however. Apparently 61% of the world's top brands already have Google+ pages. This week, Klout announced their Google+ support. So, does this mean all the negative criticism is unfounded? That still remains to be seen, but maybe the ReadWriteWeb is right when they claim that Google+ was never meant to be a Facebook competitor? They do however succeed in capturing the social graph data they need.

Facebook introducing ads to the News Ticker

Love it or hate it (which probably depends on whether you're a brand or an individual), Facebook has confirmed that they are planning to push ads in the News Ticker soon. Can they manage to do that in an unobtrusive way like Twitter has done with Promoted Tweets?

Crossing the freaky line – when sharing is too easy

Is Facebook's new frictionless sharing ruining sharing? As is often the case, Robert Scoble this week managed to articulate both the potential and problems with Facebook's new feature, which turns things like listening to a Spotify song into a feed of content into your friends' news feeds. Some already say this will impact what songs we listen to and the argument is made that curation is best done explicitly. This post is good food for thought for the weekend.

Earn your keep

We don't like to navel gaze but the identity crisis in marketing is now impossible to ignore. Now that content marketing is all the rage, apparently every agency needs an earned media director says Ad Age. At media agencies, EMDs help clients better understand which social platforms will produce the most sharing for which campaigns, and how to strategically use paid media to increase the reach of earned media campaigns. At creative agencies, EMDs help direct the full creative process from concept to execution, ensuring that campaigns incorporate the right social triggers and content to generate maximum earned media.

Putting the public relations back into PR?

Talking about identity crisis: in the US the PR industries main body is looking to solicit opinion on "a modern definition for a new era in public relations", and they aim to do this via crowdsourcing. Cynics say PR stands for Press Release but attempts at a new definition in 2003 and 2007 only managed to come up with "Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." The New York Times points out the quest was precipitated by a series of mishaps by the industry and the rise of new terms, like earned media, word of mouth marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and more.

Creative of the Week – Fol Chen

If you're a band, why bring out a static album if you can release the source and get it remixed by your fans? Actually, why get it remixed, if you can build a machine that lets your fans manipulate your music in real time? That's exactly what Fol Chen, an art pop band from LA, did. Together with weird instrument designers Metronome, they developed a wooden, pyramid-style sound toy called Tetrafol, which lets fans mess with some Fol Chen pieces through motion and speed. Hand-made, open-source and limited edition. What more does one want for Christmas?