Office Archives for Latest Trends
Facebook IPO trading opens at $42
The time has come. Facebook IPO trading began this week, and despite all of the crazy predictions, it was shockingly uneventful. Priced at $38 a share, Facebook is on course to raise $16 billion, aka the largest tech IPO ever. After a bit of a rocky week, with GM pulling their advertising and questions being raised regarding Zuckerberg’s lax attitude, it was all smiles on Friday when Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell.
So now what? What changes will we see now that Facebook is public? The biggest one will hands down be advertising. With the issue being front and center this week, we can only expect to see more ad controversy when it comes to our favorite social giant. Now with public pressure to be making revenue, Facebook will have to utilize their advertising more and more as it’s main source of moneymaking.
As a team of creative thinkers, we are always looking to create fresh, innovative and original content for our web and mobile experiences but, more often than not, we spend our time repurposing existing material. (We do so quite awesomely, of course, but that’s beside the point.)
Now, I understand that this reflects the reality of big business today. Budgets are tight, timelines even tighter. New graphics, video, interactive modules — heck, even copy — can be costly and time consuming to produce. And it is really tempting to think, “Hey, we have a bunch of usable content from other internal sources that we can just tweak and get out there quickly and easily.”
But this kind of thinking can lead us down a dark, consumer-repelling path when you’re trying to build extraordinary digital experiences. Here’s why:
Originally published at iStrategy
Anyone who’s a student of marketing has learned about the four P’s for defining the right marketing mix. Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (as in distribution) were drilled in our heads as the way to think about assembling the right mix of tactics to drive marketing success. It’s been about sixty years since those elements were formulated by Professor McCarthy at Michigan State University and captured in the definitive Marketing textbook – Marketing: A ManageriaL Approach.
Given the changing consumer dynamics, increasing mix of technology in driving preference and decisions, and the role of social and societal influence, it’s time we reformulate (and expand) these elements in planning the right marketing mix for 21st century success.
One of the first books a new content strategist must read is Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web. Among other things, for me, it reinforced the value of quality over quantity in terms of content.
Text is messy as hell. As anyone who’s ever dealt with web content knows, text is a moving target with multiple owners and stakeholders. It’s the most important kind of content to produce, and it’s the easiest to lose control of.
-Kristina Halvorson, Content Strategy for the Web
The web and your business website is a living organism that operates in an ecosystem. That ecosystem, while appearing stable, is influenced by ever-changing external factors. New tech trends delegate new modes of communication. Medical breakthroughs offer new treatments. New technologies replace old. Content changes, it evolves, it grows old and unhelpful.
Content needs to be updated often and the quality of that content matters much more than the quantity. Traditionally, rhetoric is essentially about finding the “best available means of persuasion,” so following the same logic, finding good and engaging content should far outweigh trying to reach critical mass.
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Facebook Adds Organ Donor Status to Profiles, Number of Donors Rises
This week, Facebook began a partnership with Donate Life America to encourage Facebook users to add their organ donor status onto their Timelines. Now, rather than keeping the information private on the back of your drivers license, you can make it a public and social act, and gain a better chance of saving a life.
Since the launch of the initiative early this week, donations have risen and so has awareness. Over 114,000 people in the US are waiting for organs, so socializing the willingness to donate is essential. While this is not the first time that Facebook has been a communication tool for crises and social awareness (think Japan tsunami in 2011), this is one of the first official steps that they have taken to harness their social powers for good, rather than waiting for the support to appear organically.
A couple weeks ago, marketers, agency folks, start-ups and industry types converged in New York for the 6th Annual Ad Age Digital Conference. On the roster was a solid mix of established brands like GAP, Puma, Budweiser and AT&T and next-generation disruptors including Spotify, Tumblr, Hulu, Buzzfeed and Loyal3.
This year’s theme: how tech-driven change is transforming our industry and what we as marketers must do to cope with, adapt to and fundamentally alter our approach to consumer engagement. It’s not often you leave these conferences with tangible takeaways for such sweeping challenges. Yet, ironically in this instance, several clear takeaways did emerge.
