‘World’s Leading Facebook Expert’
I had the opportunity to listen to David Kirkpatrick speak yesterday, and speak he did – very candidly. Kirkpatrick has not only entered farther than any outsider into the innermost operations of Facebook, but has also befriended the widely misunderstood Mark Zuckerberg, formed the Techonomy conference, authored “The Facebook Effect,” and is the self-proclaimed “World’s Leading Facebook Expert”.
Here are some of his insights that I’d like to share:
- Individual empowerment and globalization as themes of the modern world, spurred by rapid technological innovations and social networking enhancements.
- A social infrastructure for web browsing as the next big thing on the web. Internet and web giants are desparately looking for ways to create social networks (i.e. Google)… which implies the forecasted importance of social in the coming years.
- Prediction: A Facebook Phone. We’ll get to that in a post coming soon (Stay tuned). {Sneak peak: Facebook as the platform for everything dealing with communication…and what that means for telecomm providers.}
- (A Nokia, Skype, Facebook, Windows Phone partnership - mobile potential regarding a Facebook phone on an existent mobile OS…? hmmm….)
BTW, if Mr Kirkpatrick ever reads this, I’d like to thank him so much for speaking with us…what an inspiring, intelligent, insightful, and successful man.
Get his thoughts on the Facebook/Skype announcement and Facebook as the next telecommunications giant here.
Instagram is an Instant Boomer
The hype continues to poor in for the mobile newcomer – Instagram. The newest edition to mobile applications, Instagram provides an easy, on-the-go way to share photos socially. The best part, even beginners can look like experienced pros. This feature, along with quick uplaods, social widgets, and comments/likes/follow integration, has boosted Instagram use to 3M+.
Also sweeping the news world by storm, Instram has made its way into Mashable, TechCrunch, and perhaps most impressive: a New York Times feature story. (Click the link for each story.)
So…why is it soo hot right now? Here six reasons provided by Mashable, which I’d like to simplify: Mobile is on the go social networking, camera phones are no longer cheesy, and mobile photography has become user-friendly and actually pretty professional.
Today I downloaded the new app and put it to the test. It was quite cool and a bit addicting at first. As mentioned before, it had a friendly user interface and with its image alteration widgets I was able to take, edit, entitle, and post a photo to Instagram within two minutes – maybe less if I wasn’t browsing the photo/color options.
Overall, it is a great new app that plays well in the emerging mobile market. It’s touch of social networking boosts its potential. But, I question how long it will stay around. With an ever expanding Twitter platform, for one, that just increased its photo sharing integrations, its a tough world to survive out there in social media land.
Blogworld Recap
The BlogWorld Conference in NYC this past May was anything but a conference solely focused on blogs. Sure there were sessions on blog SEO, ROI and perspectives on best ways for PR pros to pitch bloggers, but opinions on next steps in social media were the greatest talking points. After only the first two sessions it was clear that the next big themes in social are Mobile, Location/Check-ins, and Curation.
Check-ins, mobile activity, and location-based applications appeared the next major trend in social media. Three of the world’s top 25 brands – Disney, American Express, and PepsiCo – are now using Foursquare and gowalla as platforms for extending their brand and integrating their large social networks into the mobile sector. Gowalla’s partnership with Walt Disney World specifically garnered attention for their storytelling engagement at Disney theme parks and attractions.
Curation, as another main theme, refers to the gathering of varied information and bringing it together for a client or research objective (…like a library curator). It is used to track social networks, industry news, and compile social conversation about a particular client or company.
I would like to pause and note, however, that the underpinning of each of these three themes was strong content and storytelling applicability, detailed ROI metrics, and connecting social media to business and sales growth.
The subtle surprise of the conference: Game mechanics emerging as a trend, specifically within the next year. Game mechanics not only includes apps and web-based gaming, but also polls, value levels, voting schemes, or character loyalty integration…attempting to make boring information fun. It’s as simple as LinkedIn’s “profile completeness” side bar poll.
