Social media provides brands with another channel for content sharing. But as this becomes the norm, content marketers are looking to the next step in the process: measuring the effectiveness of this content. Based on an April 2014 study conducted by Ipsos OTX for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the overwhelming majority of brands are now doing so.
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According to the research, 80% of US client-side marketers measured the effectiveness of their social content, with social media metrics such as “likes” the most common. Usage statistics—daily or monthly active users, for example—fell in the middle of the list. Meanwhile, metrics that could identify business ramifications were not used nearly as much, with financially based measurements such as return on investment and sales landing near the bottom.
While most marketers were measuring social content effectiveness in some way, ANA noted that they were still using soft metrics vs. solid metrics, indicating further room for growth.
May 2014 polling by Contently found that these soft social metrics weren’t just common for measuring content on such platforms—they were also among the most popular ways marketers were measuring content marketing success overall. Nearly two-thirds of US content marketers said they used social shares and “likes” to determine success, the second most popular metric. Conversions and sales fell at the low end again, cited by 42.1%.
- See more at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Finally-Most-Brands-Measuring-Social-Content-Effectiveness/1010961/3#sthash.oMy7Efoq.dpuf
Top Takeaways From Cannes Lions 2014
By:Jami Oetting Date posted: June 27, 2014
canes-takeawaysThe industry loves to debate over creative awards and what they really mean. But people still show up and aren’t shy if they return home with a few more statues for the office lobby. So is Cannes still worth it? And what did agency execs learn at this year’s festival?
The Best Ideas Don’t Fit Into Categories
At Cannes, we’re seeing an explosion of categories, but an increasing difficulty fitting the best ideas into them. It’s a reflection of how people experience our work: disparate, non-linear, and honestly, rejected the moment they stop being fun, touching, or useful. The best ideas usually don’t fit into tidy platform boxes — they spill out, get mixed up, passed around, and at their best, fit nowhere and everywhere. It’s time to stop defining categories by platform and start defining them by things like budget or business sector. The best ideas win across current categories, so let’s create some new ones.
- John Patroulis | Chief Creative Officer, BBH New York
Brands Need a POV on Culture
While networking and parties are a huge portion of Cannes, the winning work remains at the center of the experience. This year, there’s lots of buzz about work that’s focused on the betterment of humanity. We’re seeing less overt persuasion and selling and more work that’s putting out a point of view on culture. The brands and the work that have the strongest view on culture are the most effective and most buzzed about on the ground. The only way to break through (and win at Cannes) is to have a strong POV on culture and humanity as a whole.
- Ed Brojerdi | President and Co-Chief Creative Officer, KBS
Connect in a Personal Way
I have been to Cannes before, but in this first year of Lions Health, dedicated to life-changing creativity in health and wellness marketing, my perspective grew bigger. As president of the inaugural Health & Wellness Jury, I saw firsthand in the body of work how marketers are driving positive change around the world. My message to clients is: sometimes you have to start small to create big change. Our industry typically focuses on creating world-changing ideas that do good for the masses, but the most effective advertising can impact large change by starting with one human being and connecting with him or her in a personal way.
Try Different Things
Make more and do it faster. Brands today are competing with YouTube stars, startups, and social publishing platforms, and every great and weird thing the web has to offer. Expectations are sky high, and attention is scarce. Brands need to stop being precious and be more prolific. The marketing competition has never been so fierce. Get out there and try a lot of things. See what works and then iterate on it.
- Winston Binch | Partner, Chief Digital Officer, Deutsch LA
Put the Work In
I think the value of Cannes is equal to the amount of work you put in. There is great access to a wider spectrum of brands and creatives and also the possibility to see the work that they have done that they consider noteworthy. But you have to make the effort to go to see the work and to track down the people you would like to meet. Some of the seminars were great. The rest may have been, I just didn’t have enough time to fit them all in. What was clear from talking to CMOs is that they are all looking for new solutions – which is great news for a company like ours.
- Jon Collins | President of Integrated Advertising, Worldwide, Framestore
Meet the Talent
It’s interesting to see how talent continues to move further up the agenda and is becoming an increasingly important part of the week. More and more communications agencies and now digital platforms are using the week to get to know the best-in-class talent across the communications space and to close out ongoing conversations with the full leadership teams. Grace Blue often works with clients well ahead of time to make sure their time is used to best effect and to ensure our clients get a fair advantage when it comes to procuring the talent that will ultimately define their success.
- Jay Haines | CEO North America, Grace Blue
- See more at: http://www.agencypost.com/top-takeaways-cannes-lions-2014/?utm_campaign=Blog+-+RSS+Emails&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=13321449&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8YGwJl5A9MrDe81IicoltttLb0qG6D8IsZcj9W7VrojexKWTmWQ8q8uMeEJ-PHRcAJuA0qQW4w3eiZFZosGJ6zjind2w&_hsmi=13321449#sthash.S0dnkMus.dpuf
The process of making good advertising is a complex one that requires equal parts business acumen, applied creativity, risk-taking, and trust. Of the client-agency relationship, all involved believe that trust is the strongest of these ties that bind. In fact, 98% of both clients and agencies believe that a trust-based union leads to better work.
Yet, when it comes to the inner workings of the relationship, there’s a serious disconnect between what one side believes and the other’s perception. Where 88% of clients claim to speak their mind freely, only 36% of agency partners agree. Where 90% of agencies say they truly understand their clients’ business, only 65% of other-halves agree. It’s a classic he-said, she-said situation that reveals the client-agency relationship is a pretty dysfunctional one.
These findings are the result of a study into the relationship between brands and their creative partners from agency RPA and USA Today. Dubbed The Naked Truth, the study involving about 150 senior-level agency and brand marketing leaders was initiated by RPA as a way to stimulate dialogue on the topic, and was presented recently at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Tim Leake, SVP growth and innovation at RPA, says he first noticed the significance of the issue while outside of the client-agency dynamic. “Metaphorically, the first time I saw a client naked was when I pivoted from being a creative to working with Hyper Island, a consulting agency. Clients said things to me they never said when I was working agency side. Over lunch, a client once said to me, ‘Honestly, I simply don’t trust any of my agencies to actually solve my marketing problems.’ That got me wondering, what else aren’t they saying out loud.”
Tasked with applying creativity to ensure the future success of his agency, Leake decided to focus on improving relationships because, as he says, “the better the relationships, the better the work.”
Through surveying agency and marketing leaders, Leake came up with four truths affecting trust and a four-point plan for increasing trust.
“What does creativity mean? Two-thirds of agencies and clients agree we don’t have a shared definition of creativity. In the ad world, what we really mean by creativity is making ads but it has to be bigger--we have to figure out how we work for the future. We need to figure out what creativity looks like in each relationship because each situation is judged by different standards.”
“We had lots of agency people talk about risk. 76% of agency execs say clients don’t take enough risk. But when we present something we have to remember we, as agencies, don’t share the risk level as much as they do,” Leake says. “But we have to determine what’s ‘different’ and ‘risky’--those are two distinct things. Any risks that are taken have to be aligned with client goals.”
“Creatives are trained in the craft. They come from portfolio schools. We clearly think we’re better at this than our clients perceive us to be, but at the same time clients don’t understand how passionate agencies are at helping build and transform business,” says Leake. “Too often it feels like we’re trying to sell ideas and clients agreed that agencies seem more interested in selling their work. Our incentives are not aligned and this will be a problem until we fix it. We need a business case for craft. We know from experience and in our gut it matters, but we need to develop the business case stronger, not based on what we feel.
To help rectify the situation, Leake suggest four courses of action: focus on interpersonal communication; work with clients to better understand and define creativity; recognize the distinction between “different” and “risky;” and practice the art of business as much as the art of advertising.
For more insights on this study, and many candid quotes from both sides of the relationship, check this infographic below, orwww.getnakedatcannes.com.
An App Can Make or Break ABC's New Gamble 'Rising Star
ABC has high hopes for the new singing competition "Rising Star" premiering on Sunday night. But the alphabet network's take on the genre is a risky one -- as it relies heavily on the success of an app.
"Rising Star," which is adopted from an Israeli show with the same format, brings at-home voting on TV shows into real time. Contestants start out by performing live behind a screen. Viewers use the "Rising Star" app for Apple and Android devices to vote as they sing, with results and pictures of the voters popping up on the TV. If more than 70% of people who are signed into the app vote "yes," the screen lifts and contestants advance to the next round.
ABC gave an educational primer to viewers during this week's episode of "The Bachelorette," with a live commercial from "Rising Star" host Josh Groban and judges Brad Paisley and Kesha. (The third judge, Ludacris, was delayed by a late flight.) They encouraged viewers to download the app and try it out right then by voting to get a sneak peak of another new ABC series, "Bachelor in Paradise." Viewers then sat and watched a bar rise slowly until the judges also casted their votes -- each judge's vote counts for 7%.
On June 9, when the live commercial aired, the "Rising Star" app jumped to the No. 9 spot among free apps in the iTunes store. As of Friday, it was No. 38. In the entertainment category, it ranks No. 2.
Aside from voting, the app will also direct users to digital music stores to purchase songs performed on the show. It can also serve up ads.
ABC declined to say how many times the app has been downloaded thus far or name initial sponsors of the show.
(If "Rising Star" does take off, it will be interesting to see how brands might jump on the social aspect of the show, by perhaps getting involved in voting themselves and landing their own icons and pictures on the show.)
This is the second big swing from a broadcaster banking on an app to make a TV show work. NBC tried the strategy last year with its live, 24-7 game show, "Million Second Quiz," which let viewers play at home for a chance to join the show.
The results were lackluster. The night of the premiere was plagued with glitches including an outright crash by the app, which prevented viewers from playing along at home. Those bugs were ultimately fixed, and during the 10-day run, NBC said 1.5 million people engaged in 28 million games, with more than 400,000 people earning enough points to qualify to play on TV.
Still, if the hope was to drive players back to the live TV show, "Million Second Quiz" was a disappointment, with just 5.4 million people tuning in to the finale.
Like NBC -- which aggressively promoted the Ryan Seacrest-hosted game show ahead of its premiere -- ABC has been pulling all the stop for "Rising Star," airing frequent promos during the NBA Finals, "The Bachelor" and other programming.
"Rising Star" comes at a critical time for the network, which ended the season once again in fourth place among the all-important 18-to-49 demo. Its total audience also declined 3% from last year. So "Rising Star" is not only a bid for a millennial generation tied to its smartphones and tablets, but an attempt to use apps to attach more viewers to live TV viewing. If ABC pulls it off, "Rising Star" could help recreate a singing genre that's in desperate need of a makeover.
NBC was been able to reverse its longtime ratings woes partly on the strength of "The Voice," a result ABC would very much like to emulate, but even "The Voice" was down among 18-to-49-year olds this past season. Fox's stalwart "American Idol," of course, hit new ratings lows and will likely be reformatted next season. Fox also canceled Simon Cowell's "The X-Factor," its attempt to develop an eventual successor to "Idol," after just three seasons.
On ABC, its top series, "Dancing With the Stars," was reduced to just one night per week this season, and also slipped to ratings lows.
"Rising Star" is ABC's chance to break new ground -- that is, if viewers are willing to play along.
Because grammar can be tricky and we don’t have time to Google everything.
Grammar
is one of those funny things that sparks a wide range of reactions from
different people. While one person couldn’t care less about colons vs.
semicolons, another person will have a visceral reaction to a misplaced
apostrophe or a “there” where a “their” is needed (if you fall into the
latter category, hello and welcome).
I
think we can still all agree on one thing: poor grammar and spelling
takes away from your message and credibility. In the worst case, a blog
post rife with errors will cause you to think twice about how
knowledgeable the person who wrote it really is. In lesser cases, a
“then” where a “than” should be is just distracting and reflects poorly
on your editing skills. Which is a bummer.
I
like to think that my grammar is pretty good for the average bear, but
when I’m writing or editing things I’ll often turn to Google to make
sure my instincts are right (especially when it comes to proper
punctuation and its weird little tricks), or realize they’re not and
quietly sob at my desk before composing myself and moving on.
Which is why I created this list (originally for readers of the Uberflip blog)
— to have on hand for when you’re not quite sure, find the answer and
get back to that article you were working on. It’s a work in progress
that I dream of one day being the ultimate cheat sheet that addresses
everyone’s biggest grammar pet peeves. If I’m missing something you
think should be added, let me know!
Repeat Offenders
You probably already know these, but a grammar cheat sheet just wouldn’t be complete without them.
Their/There/They’re
Their is possessive, meaning it owns something. There refers to a place or an idea. They’re is a contraction for “they are.”
Example:
Their grammar was impeccable. There were no mistakes to be found in the
article. They’re probably going to be promoted soon.
Then/Than
Then refers to timing — you did one thing, then you did another. Than is comparative.
Example:
I ate McDonald’s for dinner, then followed it up with a bowl of Haagen
Dasz. Still, my eating habits are better now than when I was in college.
Its/It’s
Its is possessive, like their. It’s is a contraction for “it is.”
Example: It’s a shame we missed the baby ocelot exhibit but its lineup was way too long, even for an ocelot show.
Your/You’re (because I can’t resist)
Like its and their, your is possessive, meaning you own something. You’re is a contraction of “you are.”
Example: Your car is being towed because you’re the type of person who doesn’t read signs.
Other Commonly Misused/Misspelled Words
Definitely
There is no “A” in definitely.
Example: “Definately” is definitely not a word.
Affect/Effect
Affect is a verb, as in something is affecting something else. Effect is the result of something being affected.
Example: The effects of construction in Toronto greatly affect how rage-inducing my commute is.
A lot
A lot is two words.
Example: People write “alot” a lot, but it’s a whole lot of wrong.
Loose/Lose
Loose refers to the tightness of something. Lose is used when something is lost.
Example:
If your doorknob comes loose and falls off, you lose the ability to
leave your apartment. Please send help and/or non-perishable food items.
Weather/Whether
Weather is all that temperature and precipitation stuff. Whether expresses a condition.
Example: I’m determined to wear shorts today, whether or not the weather complies.
May/Might
Both
of these are used to imply that something could happen or could have
happened. May is used when there is a greater likelihood of something
happening, while might is used to indicate there is little chance.
Example: I may have time to catch up on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills tonight, but I might use that time to go for a jog instead.
Continual/Continuous
Continual
indicates something that continues over a long period of time, with
intervals of interruption. Continuous indicates duration without
interruption.
Example:
Joey played Angry Birds continuously during class. His teacher would
continually ask him to stop, before deeming him a lost cause and giving
up.
Lay/Lie
Lay requires a direct object. Lie doesn’t require an object. The past tense of lay is laid, while the past tense of lie is lay.
Example: I lay my head down on the pillow/I laid my head down on the pillow.
Example: The rocks lie near the stream/The rocks lay near the stream.
That/Who
Use that when you’re writing about something, and who when you’re writing about someone or a group of people.
Example:
The apartment above me is the one that all of the noise is coming from.
Jillian, the woman who lives there, owns several parrots.
That/Which
That
is used to introduce a restrictive clause which, if removed, will make
the sentence nonsensical. Which is used with a nonrestrictive clause.
Think of it as adding more information.
Example: My dog that is small has a total Napoleon complex.
Example: My car, which I’ve had for 10 years, still runs as well as the day I stole it.
Compliment/Complement
A
compliment is what you pay to someone or something. Complement refers
to something going well with or enhancing something else.
Example:
Emily has been getting a lot of compliments on her sweater today.
People say the color complements the green in her eyes.
Nor/Or
Nor is negative. Use nor with neither, and or with either.
Example:
Neither Debbie nor Alison will be coming to the baby shower. Either
they have food poisoning or we should expect an invite to their own
showers about 8 months from now.
Comprise/Compose
Comprise
refers to what something contains, while compose refers to what
something is made up of. You’ll know which one to use depending on how
it is speaking about the subject of the sentence.
Example: One day in world wide web comprises more tweets, blog posts and emails than you can imagine.
Example: The United States is composed of 50 states.
Who/Whom
Who
is used when referring to the subject, or the person doing something.
Whom is used for the object, or the person having something done to
them. Tip: Who can often be applied when the answer is he/she/they,
while whom works with her/him/them.
Example: Who forgot to close the back door and let the ‘possums in again?
Example: To whom is this suspiciously unmarked package being delivered?
I/Me
Using
I or me in a sentence when you’re referring to you and another
person/people also depends on whether you’re the subject or the object.
If you’re the subject, use I (or we). If you’re the object, use me (or
us).
Example: If Heather and I get to the cottage first, we’re claiming the best bedrooms.
Example: They told Alex and me to go outside and get some fresh air.
Everyday/Every day
Everyday is an adjective used to describe something that occurs daily or is commonplace. Every day means “each day.”
Example: Drinking coffee is an everyday habit for me.
Example: I drink coffee every day.
Punctuation
Colon
Colons
are used after an independent clause that precedes a list, or to
separate an explanation or example of the preceding clause.
Example:
The Uberflip blog is a great resource for everything content marketing:
social media, inbound marketing, copywriting, SEO and more.*
*Shameless plug 1 of 2.
Semicolon
You
can use semicolons to join independent clauses where connectors (and,
or, but) and commas aren’t used, or to separate long or complicated
items in a series.
Example:
Everyone hopes this summer will be a good one; after the soul-crushing
winter we’ve had, some serious sunshine is in order.
Hyphen
Place a hyphen between a two-word description that refers to the thing it’s preceding.
Example: Place a hyphen between a two-word description that refers to the thing it’s preceding.
Dash
A
dash is like a comma in that it introduces a related element. A dash,
however, is more dramatic as it interrupts the flow of the sentence.
This dash, an em dash, is different from an en dash, which is shorter
and usually only used to indicate a range of numbers.
Example:
An Uberflip Hub is the best gift you can give your content — it’s much
better than having everything live in sad, lonely silos.
Example: I’ll be out of the office from July 18 — July 21, so don’t bother emailing.
Quotations
Semicolons,
colons and dashes always go outside the quotation mark, while periods
and commas always go inside. Question marks and exclamation points are
placed either inside or outside, depending on whether they apply to the
quotation or the sentence itself.
Example: Did you mean the movie or the country when you asked if I want to come to “Madagascar”?
Example: When I asked my nephew who his favorite person is, he replied “Aunt Hayley!”*
*A chocolate bribe may have been involved.
Apostrophes
If
a single thing or person owns something, use an apostrophe before the
“s”. If the thing or group you’re referring to is plural, put the
apostrophe after the “s”.
Example: The Uberflip office’s ping pong table is in high demand at lunch time.
Example: A second table may be needed to accommodate all of the team members’ thirst for ping pong.
Comma Splices
Comma
splices most often occur when a comma is used without a conjunction
(like and, but, or as) or in place of a period or semicolon that divides
or joins two thoughts that could be complete sentences on their own.
Example (wrong): Stacey was the nicest girl in class, she always shared the rainbow frosting from her Dunkaroos.
Example (right): Stacey was the nicest girl in class, because she always shared the rainbow frosting from her Dunkaroos.
Example 2 (right): Stacey was the nicest girl in class. She always shared the rainbow frosting from her Dunkaroos.
The Oxford Comma
The Oxford comma is the name given to the final comma in a series. It’s completely optional, but personally, I’m on team OC.
Example:
That’s all for now! Here’s hoping it saves you one less Google search (or potential grammar fail).
Mark Zuckerberg streams through the crowd at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco like a politician working a pancake breakfast.
As the Facebook CEO makes the rounds at f8, the company's daylong developer conference, it is clear that he is among his people. Fifteen hundred hackers have amassed, the first time Zuck has called this flock together in two and a half years. They're here to attend engineering sessions about how to build, grow, and monetize their apps; to munch on plastic-wrapped sandwiches trucked up from Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters; and to try to catch a glimpse of Zuck casually hanging out by the Oculus Rift demo, a sight even more surreal for them than the virtual-reality experience itself. Despite the stuffy heat--the 125,000-square-foot space doesn't have air-conditioning, so Facebook had to import its own ventilation ducts, which hum along the wooden ceilings--Zuck looks cool and relaxed in his T-shirt and jeans. He walks tall, chest out firmly, and with each quick hello he leaves a trail of starstruck smiles and excited whispers in his wake, as if Harry Styles were strolling through a suburban shopping mall. As one beaming attendee says after shaking hands with the CEO, "He seems pretty fucking confident!"
Zuck, now 30 years old, has reason to be confident. His company is crushing it. Monthly active users: up to almost 1.3 billion worldwide. Engagement: up, with more than 50% of users now visiting the service six days a week and, according to a report by the app-analytics firm Flurry, spending 17% of their time on their phones in Facebook's app, far and away the most popular service on iOS and Android devices. Speaking of mobile, Facebook, which spent all of 2012 and into 2013 dogged by concerns that it would not be able to make money on people's phones, now generates 59% of its ad revenue from mobile. One particular ad unit--the one that suggests apps a Facebook user might want to download--is the envy of the entire industry and is being widely copied. Revenue for the first quarter of 2014 was $2.5 billion. The company earned profits of $642 million, almost triple its haul a year earlier.
These feats are even more impressive when you consider that Zuck is delivering these results with a core product that has been criticized for being as stagnant as it is ubiquitous, a place where parents and grandparents share photos of kids who may be less likely to embrace the service when they grow up. In a world churning out startups with one innovation after another--Snapchat, Tinder, Whisper--Facebook can seem like yesterday's news. Yet how many businesses see revenue and engagement surge just as passion for their products stalls?
Zuck went on a shopping spree last February and March that seemed, on first blush, downright desperate. On February 19, Facebook announced its acquisition of global-messaging phenomenon WhatsApp for almost $19 billion--the largest sum ever paid for a venture-backed startup. Five weeks later, Zuck shelled out $2 billion for the promising virtual-reality headset company Oculus VR. Two days after that, he spent $20 million on a drone company. Yes, drones.
Although Zuck has outlined his three-, five-, and 10-year goals for employees, he has never crisply explained publicly how all of these recent moves fit together, and that has gotten tech watchers buzzing about whether he and the company have lost their way. But after dozens of interviews with current and former employees, rivals, advertisers, developers, and users, it becomes clear that Zuckerberg has launched Facebook on an aggressive and potentially brilliant strategy--one that has very little to do with the company you think you know based on your desktop use of its social network. [Facebook granted Fast Company access to several company executives, but not to Zuckerberg or COO Sheryl Sandberg.] To make Facebook more relevant than ever, the company has targeted the very core of the app economy to fulfill its vision for the next half-decade. As the six lessons that follow illuminate, the great social network of the early 21st century is laying the groundwork for a platform that could make Facebook a part of just about every social interaction that takes place around the world.
To understand where Facebook is going, you need to start by understanding where it's been. Remember Poke? How about Gifts, or Beacon? Graph Search? Camera? Facebook email? Places? Deals? If none of these ring a bell, don't worry. They're all Facebook products introduced in the past seven years--and they were all failures. Together these missteps have become symbols of a culture where innovation has seemingly evaporated. It's even infected Facebook's subsidiary Instagram, whose two big releases since being acquired--video sharing and Direct Message--flopped, according to a source familiar with the company's metrics. (Facebook rejects this characterization.)
The most prominent failure of all, perhaps, was Home. Introduced on April 4, 2013, at a splashy event replete with overwrought Jobsian flair and blockbuster expectations, Home was a novel software experience created to give users a distinctive Facebook-first way of using Android phones. "A lot of people came over from Apple to work on this stuff," says a product manager on the project. But Home bombed, receiving a tepid reception from critics and an even worse one from consumers. Just a month after launch, HTC, Facebook's hardware partner, slashed the price of its phone that came preinstalled with Home to 99 cents, and weeks later discontinued it altogether. "Everybody was disappointed," says the manager.
But it has hit roadblocks along the way. For one thing, as the company has grown to include almost 7,000 employees, Facebook remained overly dependent on Zuckerberg, whose blessing has been required for projects to gain steam beyond their origins in Red Bull–fueled hackathons. "You face the reality of large organizations, where it's hard to convince anyone to give you resources [for an idea]," says one product manager who recently left to build his own app. "There's that lure of saying, 'You know what? I'm too worn out to fight [for this idea inside Facebook]; I'll just leave and try doing it on my own.' "
Projects that did fight their way through the system faced other burdens rooted in the company's history. The "truth" of data is so paramount at Facebook that products were given little time to improve after launch. "A startup would try again or change it," that recently departed manager says of Facebook's graveyard of failed products. "But that kind of culture doesn't exist at Facebook. If something doesn't work off the bat, it's like, 'Okay, the metrics aren't working, let's put the engineers over here.' " One nasty by-product of this approach: demoralized employees.
Bret Taylor, Facebook's former CTO and now the founder of a document-creation app called Quip, traces the situation back to Facebook's earliest success: the integration of photo sharing into the News Feed. Almost by accident, Facebook became the world's largest photo-sharing site, "creating a dynamic," says Taylor, "where, when you were thinking of a new product, it was always integrating with News Feed--just like the photos product did, because that's what drove all of its usage and traffic. The conventional wisdom was that if you don't do that, there's no way you're going to grow as fast." The problem with this is obvious when you compare the litany of Facebook failures (Beacon, Places, Poke, and so on) with successful social apps that have become popular over the same time. Consider Snapchat. Predicting the success of ephemeral photos would have been impossible. And that's just one of an endless stream of startups experimenting with new ways for people to communicate with one another. A social media startup can be bootstrapped very cheaply. WhatsApp, after all, grew to almost half Facebook's size with just 55 employees; Snapchat (which Facebook tried to purchase more than once) became a perceived threat with even fewer people. Which means that Facebook faces an eternal game of Whack-a-Mole as it tries to predict what's a fad and what's the future. Throw in the impediments of data and bureaucracy, and the chances of creating a breakthrough app within Facebook become slim indeed.
Zuck seemed to acknowledge this challenge when he announced a division last February called Creative Labs, which functions as a separate space outside of Facebook's traditional product teams, for "things that are nascent." At the same time, Facebook revealed what it said was the first Creative Labs product: Paper, an elegantly designed mobile app for reading and responding to your News Feed. "Creative Labs allows teams to go off with very loose time constraints and think about problems," says Scott Goodson, a leader on the Paper team and a former senior software engineer at Apple. "A lot of the core people came here because they saw that level of freedom--they wanted its small-team feel."
If you start asking questions about Creative Labs, though, it becomes less clear just what Zuck and company have learned from their product misadventures. "There's no Creative Labs building; there's no, like, Creative Labs organization," admits Cathcart, who serves as the engineering lead for several (but not all) projects that Facebook has anointed with the Creative Labs moniker. Cathcart describes Creative Labs as more of a framework. It's one with a striking familiarity. "Honestly, a lot of it is Mark," he says, meaning that the way an idea gets green-lighted as a Creative Labs project is exactly as it's always been.
One thing that does seem to be different: Facebook seems willing to be more patient and iterate on ideas rather than just scrap them. Paper, which was in development before Facebook devised Creative Labs, has grown slowly, at least in Facebook terms, and it is being downloaded less and less. But during Facebook's first-quarter earnings call, Zuck said that products like it will be given room to grow and come into their own, indicating that the company won't even worry about trying to make money from any app until it reaches more than 100 million monthly active users. Facebook has even decided to try to develop another Snapchat-like service after its first knockoff attempt, Poke, disappeared almost instantly. All this signals that Facebook can't simply follow its long-standing hacker playbook. It still wants to try to create great products, but it is also willing to buy the hottest next-wave services when it can't. And as we'll see, it's become crucial to tap into a much wider network of apps to fuel its success.
This isn't an analogy you'll hear from anyone at Facebook, in part because it sounds crazy, and in part because Zuckerberg just doesn't seem to be making his strategy clear these days. But one way to think of Facebook is as the Coca-Cola of social media.
Warren Buffett is addicted to Coca-Cola. He's never sold a share in Coke because it has always offered a flavor to please his taste buds: cherry and orange and lemon-lime sodas, energy drinks, flavored waters, organic juices, and teas. Coke serves 1.9 billion drinks per day because the 122-year-old conglomerate recognized long ago that customers will forever thirst for something new. Whenever and wherever you are thirsty, Coca-Cola will be there for you.
Zuck wants Facebook to be just like that.
At f8, Facebook wowed developers with VR stations, visualizations of their app data, and more
When you think about it, social media at first seemed to be a kind of basic cola designed for all tastes. But, of course, it has proved to be much more than that. Especially after online interactions migrated to mobile devices, users began craving more specialized flavors, encompassing everything including communication via photos, instant messaging, group and video chats, and more. Zuck wants Facebook to be involved, in some way, in each of these exchanges. Frankly, he has no choice but to try if he's going to achieve his goal of adding 5 billion more active users--Coca-Cola–like ubiquity--and creating a business that makes today's Facebook seem tiny.
The Coca-Cola of social media won't look like today's Facebook because it will become less and less reliant on the basic cola--the desktop experience that was rather clunkily transported to that big blue app on your phone or tablet. "There was a lot of debate internally as to whether all these experiences should live in the core Facebook app or whether they should live in separate applications," says Josh Williams, the Gowalla cofounder who spent a year and a half at Facebook after it acquired (and shut down) his startup. "Should there be a Facebook Local app? A Facebook location app? A lot of people, including myself, thought that should be the case instead of shoving them in the more drawer on the core app." (The more drawer he's referring to is the button on the bottom right of the Facebook app, under which it has slotted things like Groups and Nearby Places.)
"I'm a little surprised it took so long," says one former Facebook product manager who helped build its mobile platform. "We actually had studies three years ago that clearly demonstrated this was the strategy that we needed. People didn't want one big blue app." The company considered creating a series of Facebook-branded apps (a strategy it flirted with when it launched Poke and Camera in 2012), but research made it clear that users were growing totally comfortable with--indeed, were beginning to prefer--apps that served a single function and that had no connection to a centralized behemoth. "All of them had four to five different social apps on their phones," says the source of the still-confidential studies. "The more we dug into why, the answer that came back pretty much universally across the board was, 'This is how I keep my friend groups separated.' "
Thinking of itself as a conglomerate of apps, rather than as a single one, is a mind shift for Facebook. The user numbers behind each of those smaller apps can pale compared to the almost 1.3 billion people who employ the big blue app. But it's not just Coca-Cola that has made this kind of leap. Television networks are one example of companies that have captured a wide swath of consumers and then diversified into new turf. Fox has FX, FXX, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Sports, Speed, Fox News, and Fox Business. Earlier tech giants did so as well. Yahoo grew from being a directory to providing email, news, and sports products; Google, more notably, went from search to Gmail and Android. Facebook is following an analogous path. "They have this kind of suite developing where they have Instagram and WhatsApp, and it's easier to position it like a grouping of experiences," says Williams, who left Facebook before it decided on this approach. "I have to respect Mark a lot for his aggressive execution on his strategy. Home base is covered, and we've dug a moat around our castle now, and we can be a little bit more aggressive on these fronts because the likelihood of this core toppling over is low."
Transforming Facebook into a multifaceted operation won't be easy. But a little-noticed change that Zuck made two years ago paved the way.
For a long time at Facebook, the advertising team was responsible for the ad products, and the product teams were charged with creating and refining the user experience. They were separated, the way that business and editorial at a newspaper are, because Zuck believed that the product team should focus only on the consumer's experience, without being distracted by financial concerns. The ad team was rewarded for increasing revenue, while the product teams were assessed based on user-engagement metrics.
A number of key players within the company began to argue that if Zuck rewarded all teams for contributing to revenue, the enterprise would get a whole lot more ideas, and they would be better, more creative, more diverse. According to a former senior employee with knowledge of the conversations, Zuck was reluctant to make the change but eventually agreed. Under a revised management structure, the News Feed product team, for instance, would now be accountable for how much money came through News Feed advertising, and the mobile product team would be charged with developing ideas to make money through mobile. "It was a very awkward thing," says the former employee.
But the impact proved to be profound. "As we went through our mobile transition, we had to figure out something different in how ads integrated with content," says Mike Vernal, Facebook's VP of engineering. "That precipitated rethinking how we think about making ads feel like a really well-integrated experience."
"The News Feed team all of a sudden was coming back with suggestions about what to do with the ads product that the ads team had proposed six months ago but were shot down because they were too consumer-aggressive," says the former employee. "But now the Feed team wanted to do those things. It was like, 'Oh? Well, twist our arm! Sure! We'll help you do that! Sounds like a good idea! Why didn't we think of that?' "
This single decision may have been the main catalyst behind Facebook's rebound after the company saw its market capitalization more than halved during the months after its May 2012 IPO. At first, investors didn't believe Facebook had a good plan for generating more revenue from its customers, especially those using Facebook on their phones. Facebook's move to integrate the teams led to it running ads within their apps' News Feed, and that led to its first breakthrough mobile-advertising product.
App Ads are units that only appear on phones and tablets in Facebook's mobile app. As the name suggests, they promote other apps, ones that Facebook thinks you might like based on your usage history. Better yet, each features a prominent install now button, allowing Facebookers to download the promoted app with a tap. "App stores are effectively popularity contests," says Vernal. "If you make the top 10, you'll get a bunch of people using your app. But if you're No. 11, you basically fall off a cliff." In return for using its massive popularity to drive users to interesting apps, Facebook, according to developers, is charging its advertisers as much as $3 to $4 for each new customer. "It's solving that problem of discovery," explains Facebook product-management director and App Ads creator Deb Liu.
The ad unit debuted in November 2012, and the results thus far have been nothing short of phenomenal. In 18 months, this one advertising product has resulted in 350 million app installations. Facebook does not break out revenue by ad product, but by our estimate that would translate to roughly $1 billion. "By the third day of testing Facebook [App Ads], it was already dominating every mobile-ad source out there," says John Earner, CEO of mobile-game startup Space Ape, one of the first developers to use the ad unit. "By April of 2013, App Ads was the worst-kept secret in the gaming industry." Space Ape's Samurai Siege game pulls in $70,000 a day by spending up to 75% of its marketing budget on App Ads. More broadly, Facebook reports that 60% of the top-grossing apps on Apple's App Store and Google Play use App Ads.
The resurgence of Facebook's stock has enhanced the company's ability to acquire innovation that's taking place elsewhere. Zuckerberg is aggressively using company stock to buy startups--because he knows that at least one other competitor is trying to beat him to the punch. "The biggest existential threat is not Snapchat," says one employee who has heard Zuck speak about his strategy. "Their biggest concern is Google."
As social messaging took off around the world, "Facebook was obsessed with WhatsApp," says a former Facebook product manager. In the months before the acquisition last February, one where Facebook reportedly outmaneuvered Google to close the deal, "most meetings you would go to regarding growth and competition, you'd hear about WhatsApp. Mark is a very paranoid person in the way he thinks about Facebook. He cannot stand that there are other people out there doing something better than Facebook. And WhatsApp was clearly doing that: It was faster, more reliable [messaging]." WhatsApp filled a need, at a hefty cost.
Virtual-reality firm Oculus, on the other hand, is a long-term bet at a tenth of the price. It's a roll of the dice. Why would Facebook want to be a significant player in how people interact in 3-D virtual worlds? Because if 3-D is another version of social media, then the company doesn't want to leave that territory open for someone else to develop. The same is true for the $20 million Zuck spent on a drone company, a technology that fits in with Zuckerberg's utopian vision of a world in which everyone, no matter how poor, has ready access to the Internet.
"The glass-empty view," according to one former top Facebooker who has worked closely with Zuck, "is that Facebook can't innovate internally, so it has to buy all these companies. And the glass-half-full view: Facebook is a very innovative company and, as a result, is looking for other like-minded, blue-sky thinkers to join its world." The fact that Zuckerberg can more often than not persuade startup founders to join the company and work with him is a vote for the glass-half-full perspective. "What I found compelling was Mark's commitment to spending a lot of time with us," says Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, adding that he's talked to Zuck nearly every day since the $2 billion buyout. "He spends a lot of time with Kevin [Systrom] and Instagram, and has made the same commitment with Jan [Koum] and WhatsApp. If you look at a company like Google, from what I've heard, Sergey [Brin] and Larry [Page] are too busy to work on any one project, so you don't get much of their time."
Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who now runs Asana, a fast-growing enterprise-software company, notes that while Zuck's personal style differs from that of Google's cofounders, both companies are pursuing a similar strategy. "Rather than just refine the existing product and nail it down to harden against potential competitors," he says, "Facebook, very similar to Google, is saying, 'Okay, we've got all these resources; what bold new things can we do?' " As one employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity puts it, "I always assumed these big moves were out of desperation," he says. "But I actually think it's more like, 'Fuck it, we're going to get Google.' "
Largely unnoticed among Zuckerberg's recent acquisitions was his April 2013 purchase of Parse, a well-regarded mobile-infrastructure startup. Facebook bought it for a reported $85 million. While the dollar value of the deal was modest, this acquisition may say more about where Facebook is going than all the others.
At the time of the Facebook acquisition, Parse made it easy to build apps faster by offering ready-to-use web-based services for otherwise tedious tasks such as creating notifications. Some 60,000 apps relied on Parse, including buzzworthy offerings from brands like Armani and the Food Network. Facebook execs had been talking with Parse's founders since 2011, when the company had just six employees, and Zuck reportedly won the deal over Dropbox (Google was also apparently interested). "Facebook wants to connect the world, and this is part of it," says Vernal, Facebook's engineering VP. "Parse is all about simple and delightful tools for a wide swath of international devices so developers can create great apps."
Yes, but that's only the beginning. It is easy to understand how Facebook can make money from Instagram (luxury brand advertising and shopping) and even WhatsApp (competitors such as Line are vibrant commerce platforms, and only last week, Zuck even poached PayPal president David Marcus to run the company's in-house Messenger product). Facebook now owns all the ad impressions on those services--and on News Feed, and on Paper, etc. Parse promises something else: a way to get a piece of all the other apps that make up the universe of mobile social media. As noted earlier, Facebook is already the most dominant single app in mobile, commanding 17% of users' time. Now Zuckerberg wants a slice of that other 83%, and Parse can be an essential tool in pursuing that goal.
The fundamental challenge to creating a unified mobile platform is that apps are inherently siloed experiences. You can't surf through apps like you surf the web, where you might start at the Weather Channel and follow a long trail of links--traceable links, by the way--that ends with you seriously contemplating the purchase of a model train on Amazon. "That's what made the web what it is," says Simon Khalaf, CEO of the app-analytics company Flurry. "Mobile applications are like TV channels. You make the conscious decision to go from one to another."
The world of apps is further complicated by the fact that companies like Facebook can't plant a cookie on iOS or Android to follow you around, as they do in your desktop browser. Benefits aside, we're less likely to discover new content, new apps--and new ads.
At f8, Zuckerberg began to reveal the ways in which Parse could lead Facebook deeper into the app economy. Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar introduced the first building block with a new protocol called App Links. App Links empowers developers to "deep link" one app to another. As a result, users regain the web-surfing experience within apps, and for Facebook, it creates bridges between its unbundled apps.
Deep linking presents a lot of interesting possibilities. If you were using Dropbox's email app, Mailbox, for example, and a friend shared a song she was listening to with Spotify, you could click the link and open Spotify directly to that song or artist's page. This creates a lucrative feature Facebook can offer advertisers: Uber, for example, might like to put a mobile ad into Facebook's News Feed that lets a user request a car without even opening the Uber app. "This is one of those products like motherhood and apple pie," says Vernal. "How could you be opposed to it?"
At f8, developers gushed over App Links, saying that it could make Facebook the fabric of the mobile world. If deployed widely, App Links would create a knitwork that would connect users to every delicious service and chunk of knowledge they desire without going through a mobile web browser. The payoff for Facebook would go well beyond whatever it charges for a more-attractive News Feed ad offering.
The rest of Facebook's announcements at f8 all tied into this same idea of knitting this mobile fabric. It debuted a mobile like button, which means that app creators can make it easier for users to share app content back to their Facebook pages. Zuck revealed a new login product, which lets users sign up for apps anonymously (of course, Facebook knows who the user is). And App Ads creator Deb Liu announced the Facebook Audience Network, which helps developers make money by embedding ads into their apps from Facebook's pool of 1 million advertisers. Ads are both targeted and designed to resemble their app's look and feel.
In contrast to his grand stage at f8, Zuckerberg revealed a wonky new motto: "Move fast with stable infra."
Picture how this can work for Facebook: A developer chooses to build her app using Parse. To get users to discover it, she'll buy Facebook's App Ads. When she hits a certain threshold, she'll start to pay $100 a month for Parse's services--and more as the app continues to grow. ("You don't have to pay us until your app gets huge," Parse's Sukhar told the f8 crowd.) At this point, to generate revenue, the developer joins the Audience Network, where Facebook will get an unspecified cut of the ad revenue from the spots that run within her app. And finally, in an effort to get users to use her app more often, she takes advantage of deep linking or other tools Facebook might offer down the road. That's at least four ways that Facebook could get paid off the same developer--and Facebook would garner the additional benefit of knowing which apps mobile users were excited about.
As one employee who requested anonymity puts it, "Mark does not fuck around. Parse doesn't have any direct benefit to Facebook.com and the Facebook app. But Parse makes it so much easier to build apps quickly. If you support entrepreneurs to build apps more quickly, you have a lot of data around which apps are doing well, and which aren't. Small things like that show that Mark is many steps ahead."
To understand how valuable this could be, remember that the Google ad business, which places contextual ads alongside your desktop search results and across your web surfing, brings in $50 billion annually--six times more than Facebook's sales.
There are now more than 260,000 apps built with Parse products, but Facebook doesn't have anywhere near Google's heft yet. There is a cadre of users wary of Facebook's growing appetite for personal data, and a lot of developers who built on Facebook's web platform were burned when the company kept changing its rules. A project like App Links, in particular, will require considerable work before developers fully embrace it. Although it launched with an impressive list of more than 20 partners, including Pinterest and Hulu in addition to Dropbox and Spotify, developers say that it will only become truly effective when many more apps sign up.
This challenge reveals a fascinating strategic shift for the social network: The greatest obstacle standing between Facebook and its ambitions has nothing to do with persuading any of us to log in to Facebook tomorrow or to spend more time using its features. It's entirely dependent on outside app developers' adopting these tools. Facebook has become the world's first social-media enterprise company. "The new Facebook is different from the old Facebook," says one company insider who spoke on condition of anonymity. To those who remain fixated on what the social network used to be, this source says, "They're just going to have to learn. We're in a different world."
If Zuckerberg succeeds in makingFacebook, in essence, the most important mobile platform on the planet, he will create all kinds of other opportunities for the company. Expanding globally will become even easier, as the social network learns more and more about the habits of international users. New lines of business, like enabling peer-to-peer payments, are likely to open up; no other company knows as much about the many people it connects. Indeed, the more it becomes an enterprise company, the more the Facebook of five years from now will have erased all traces of the dorm-room quirkiness on which it was founded.
That may seem sad to those who once loved the service, or it might seem to be further evidence that Facebook will never again be cool. But you get the sense that Zuck couldn't care less. There was one other thing he debuted at f8: a motto to replace "Move fast and break things." The new one? "Move fast with stable infra."
That's it. Really. Perhaps never in the long history of Silicon Valley has a company rallied under a clunkier cry. But if Facebook actually executes on the phrase, it will come to have a charm all its own.
