For our first installment we asked team members what mobile phone they own, and what they owned previously. What we noticed is a consolidation of device types over the past couple years.  We used to own a wider-range of phones, including a Blackberry(!), but are trending towards iOS. Our graphic designer, Nae (@PHOTOSbyNae) said that she likes to stay current going from an iPhone 4 to the iPhone 5, while our community manager Colleen, (@collroon) said that she was due for an upgrade and did not want to wait for the iPhone 5. She added: #Android4Lyfe! When Colleen was asked if the iPhone 5 had been available at the time of her upgrade would she have gone with it instead, she only sighed. She had a slight fear of missing out on the “buzz,” but listened to her friends who said the Galaxy S3 was better and very similar to the iPhone 5; and she hasn’t looked back. One thing we did see was that change doesn’t come easily for some. As of December there was still a slider phone in our midst, a Samsung Intensity Slide. (They have since moved to Samsung Galaxy S3.)

Pew Internet reports that 87% of American adults own a cell phone, and 45% of those are smart phones. As a social media agency, it’s no surprise that Affinitive is 100% smart phone-based.  Our device ownership is more or less aligned with the trends, with Samsung and Apple controlling over 50% of the market. However, Android is expected to have 63% of the market in the future, but good luck finding that kind of market trend at Affinitive!

What about you?  Is your company Apple or Android – or maybe keeping the faith with Windows?

What’s the value of each of your fans? Sometimes fewer, more active fans have a greater value than achieving that millionth “Like”. New tools allow you to target your desired audience on Facebook and spend your Facebook ad budget more efficiently regardless of whom you have acquired as fans.

It’s time to start thinking differently about your Facebook ad-spend. It’s no longer just about amassing fans. Marketers should be considering Facebook as an awareness channel that enables deep engagement around brand concepts and advertising messages. Facebook is going to help you think in a new away about the goals of your ad spend. The focus will be on driving consumer behavior, not racking up big numbers of unengaged fans responding to a one-time promotional offer.

To help facilitate more sophisticated ad planning, Facebook has been focusing on increasingly nuanced ad products including enhanced Custom and Lookalike Audience targeting, conversion pixels, and partner categories. Partner Categories are especially exciting as they enable targeting to users based on offline data from Acxiom, Epsilon, and Datalogix.

You’ll also soon be seeing an adoption of Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings standard and enhanced measurement tools provided by their recent acquisition of Atlas. This will allow you to confidently prove the ROI of efforts spent on Facebook.

In short, Facebook will be making the most advanced tools of online ad planning, targeting and reporting available to its brand partners, strengthening its position as a leading customer engagement and interaction platform. Or, as we heard in Menlo Park, Facebook is not in the social media business, it’s in the marketing business.

As a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD), Affinitive can help make sense of this whirlwind of new products by leveraging our existing technology offerings and architecting custom solutions to meet your business objectives.

Stay up to date on the latest social media technology news and trends by following @Affinitive on Twitter.

Dark magic time @affinitive.Also, Vine is hard, you guys. vine.co/v/b1eiBBUuzPm

— Patrick Courtney (@PatrickCourtney) February 1, 2013

Just as brewing coffee is one of our morning routines, with any new app or platform, we like to play around to not only discover the value, but also see if the product is likely to form new types of consumer behavior. And what Vine offers is an easily accessible playing field for creative, expressive, and real-time content for individuals and brands.

It functions just like Twitter and embeds right into Twitter’s feed, making it a seamless experience. It is easy to find people and brands to follow on Vine, and editors sift through content to promote their favorites.

Here are some of our favorite uses of the app so far:

Innovation starts at the drawing board. #animation #loop #magic #2013 vine.co/v/b5PUVEEE9tn

— General Electric (@generalelectric) January 25, 2013

Happy National PB&J Day from @peanutbutterco #pbjday #food #tasteamazing #coupons vine.co/v/bIjdL3vTOtm

— Peanut Butter & Co. (@PeanutButterCo) April 2, 2013

@tribecafilmfest How to clear out your garage from a scary ghost. vine.co/v/bphpbiKmKJw#6secfilms #animate

— Jethro Ames (@JethroAmes) April 2, 2013

 

There are a few drawbacks:

• It is currently iPhone only.
• While it launched as a non-age restricted app, it has since moved to a 17-and-over app.
• Without any demographic user data, there is limited regulatory functionality for any brands in regulated industries.
• No analytics.

Three months in, early adopter brands are already on the platform, creating content for their Vine and Twitter audiences. With its close tie to Twitter, Vine is definitely a platform to keep an eye on.

We’re going to work on our tans and enjoy our Summer Fridays policy with these stories in mind:

Facebook To Debut Real-Time Bidding On Advertising Prices

Facebook took a step towards the inevitable distributed ad network by launching Facebook Exchange. According to Bloomberg, the service will allow marketers to target ads to users on Facebook based on sites they have visited around the web. AdAge says the demand-side ad platform signals “a new age of marketing”.

Experience more with expanded Tweets

Twitter is embedding more of the web shared through it’s service into twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com (coming soon to their iPhone and Android apps). This should give users more reason to visit Twitter’s own sites rather than consume their Twitter feeds via 3rd-party apps such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. This, in turn, allows Twitter to display more of their promoted tweet ads and encourage people to see their new editorial content.

Continued Rise Of Pinterest And Visual Social Networks

This week saw Michelle Obama join Pinterest and Project Runway launch a “Make It Work” campaign that runs on Pinterest, Instagram, Piictu and Viddy. These apps have been able to grow quickly thanks to integration with Twitter and Facebook’s login features and open graph. Brands have been jumping on these secondary networks in hopes to stand out compared to the crowded major social outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but we’re already starting to see saturation. On a side note, we just stumbled upon Mashable’s “Everything Pinterest” pinboard. So meta.

Microsoft to Buy Yammer

Speculations have been brewing all week, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft indeed agreed to buy Yammer for $1.2 billion. Assuming the acquisition completes, Microsoft now goes up against Salesforce who’s Chatter enterprise social network is the closest competitor to Yammer.

Social Media Integration Via RFID At Music Festivals

We’ve gotten to witness several friends keep us updated with their whereabouts at Coachella, Bamboozle, and most recently Bonnaroo. Wristband makers ID&C are bringing RFID to the masses this year at many major festivals. The technology makes a ton of sense for a music festival (much like it does for ski resorts) and we love the intersection of offline and online social activity. The Facebook integration at Bonnaroo merely checked you into the festival and put the stage and band you were watching in the message that accompanied the checkin. We think much cooler integrations could be enabled by integrating Facebook’s Open Graph to provide a richer experience including a Timeline aggregation of all the bands you saw, most popular stages, etc.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Did you ever see a cat’s eyes in the dark and wonder what they were? Let us know here and join in on the conversation!

When not buzzing over a contest involving watching a livestream of baby squirrels, looking up summer reading book recommendations, watching the Shiba Inu puppy cam (why are they sleeping?) or mini-pig Hamlet learn how to walk down stairs (the best part is where he dive bombs into oatmeal), or sideeyeing the prospective Facebook smartphone, we’ve been linking each other to these stories.

We’re logging off for the weekend with these in mind:

We’ve been acquired!
The cat’s out of the bag – Affinitive has been acquired by Project:Worldwide! We’re pleased to be joining Project:Worldwide and its extended family. Not to worry, we’re still the same Affinitive you’ve come to love and know, just part of a much larger global network! But instead of waxing sentimental, why not read CEO Bob’s blog post on the acquisition?

Twitter Confirms Facebook Integration
Now more rich media to cross post onto your Facebook feed! While a long expected move, Twitter has confirmed that they have been tweaking the way that usernames, hashtags, and photos appear on user Newsfeed after friends tweet. Twitter users can now post to Facebook pages, and their hashtags will appear as rich links that users can click on to see other tweets. To nudge the change, simply disconnect and re-sync your two accounts.

Facebook to Open to the Under 13 Crowd?
At the moment Facebook’s pages are off-limits to the under-13 crowd (although folks can create profiles for their unborn progeny or their pets). Due to the fierce nature of worried parents and children’s safety groups, Facebook has not confirmed nor denied that they are looking into simply creating more protective layers for kids, instead of completely banning them altogether. While the concerns are legitimate, some parents have aided their children in already setting up their accounts simply by racking up their birth year upon registration.

LinkedIn Passwords Get Hacked
Admittedly, there was a bit of a scrabble to log into our LinkedIn accounts to make sure that our passwords weren’t part of the 6.5 million encrypted passwords stolen and leaked by a Russian hacker. As if the news that LinkedIn’s iOS app violates user privacy by sending very detailed calendar entries to its server wasn’t bad enough. Word on the street is that the same person has also stolen 1.5 million passwords from dating site eHarmony (why he would go after that one is beyond us) as well as Last.fm. (Edit. Note: Yes, I am still trying to make Last.fm happen.) Want to check if your password was compromised? Check out LastPass’ tool.

Starbucks Makes Twitter Boo-Boo
We silently thanked the powers that be that we weren’t the CM that made a Twitter error that struck a historical and political nerve amongst consumers. Starbucks’ Ireland Twitter account accidentally tweeted a promotion that implied Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom, despite a sensitive and tenuous history between the two countries. While the backlash was expected and immediate, props to Starbucks for apologizing and keeping the original tweet up – transparency! Although we wonder if this could have been avoided had the IE and UK accounts not posted almost identical copy within minutes of each other.

Developers Are Still Building for iOS Over Android
While the smartphone usage in Affinitive is split pretty evenly between the iPhone and Android, sometimes a discrepancy can be noticed when it comes to apps. It seems that when waiting for Android-exclusive apps, there’s always a bit of a wait. According to Flurry data, developers are building for Apple’s iOS over Android by 2-to-1.

Facebook Mobile Ads – Now for Everyone
Now in a move for “the masses,” Facebook  is now automating mobile ad buying. While previously ads were only really available to big advertisers buying premium ad packages. Now these mobile-only sponsored-stories are open through Facebook’s self-serve tool Power Editor and third-party Facebook ad sellers, which means a bigger pool of cash money for ad revenue. To read the rest of these implications for Facebook, check the link.

Seriously, enough with the Holograms Already
When Tupac came back as a hologram we were intrigued and pleased. Then TLC announced they intend to resurrect deceased member Left Eye to take with them on tour this summer, and then there were rumors that Selena Gomez was going to a duet with a hologram of Selena Quintanilla. And now, Elvis Presley. Sure, it’s cool to see deceased artists “back” in performance but man, enough is enough. Over it. Showtime is over, Synergy.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Let us know here and join in on the conversation!

Way back in 2002, I cobbled together some code for an online “street team” platform that allowed record labels and movie studios to create buzz by mobilizing their fans and giving them tools to “get the word out”.

We quickly saw the power of “engaging, empowering, and connecting” consumers and how passion extends far beyond entertainment, into every area of peoples’ lives – their pets, the cars they drive, the video games they play, the clothes they wear, and the beverages they drink.

As marketers, we were also learning first-hand how to foster engagement and advocacy among consumers. Be authentic. Don’t just listen to your customers, but have conversations with them. Give them “insider” access and make them feel special. Educate them. Co-create with them. Cultivate a community. This all seems obvious now, but early on, the idea of giving up control of your brand scared the (pardon my French) crap out of most senior marketers we met with.

Fast-forward to today. Over the past decade, while developing and managing hundreds of programs that have engaged millions of people, we’ve witnessed massive change and evolution within the industry and have seen organizations shift their entire approach to marketing.

While the platforms and buzzwords have changed over the years, our core values have not.  And social media is now the fabric that ties everything together – from online and offline consumer experiences to the marketing, loyalty, CRM, and research functions of any organization.

Social is now serious business. But we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

That is why it is with great pleasure and excitement I’m announcing that Affinitive has been acquired by Project: WorldWide, the first independent global agency network built around engagement marketing.

It’s a validation of Affinitive’s original vision and will enable us to deliver fully integrated, best-of-breed social business solutions to our customers on a global scale. It will also allow us to continue to attract and nurture the best and brightest talent in the industry.

Over the past few months I have gotten to know many of the talented folks within Project’s family, and I always come away thinking the same thing – they are such genuinely nice people – from how they treat their employees and clients to their commitment to ethics. It’s greatly reassuring to see that a 1,700-person, global enterprise shares the same fundamental values that we do.

We will be teaming up with a diverse roster of highly collaborative, award-winning agencies including the #1 ranked experience marketing agency in the world, George P. Johnson, The Spinifex Group, Partners + Napier, JUXT Interactive, G7 Entertainment Marketing, and Raumtechnik.

I would like to take a moment to extend big congratulations to everyone on our team for their tremendous work and dedication, and to our awesome clients who have not only believed in us, but have continued to challenge us to innovate.

As for myself, I am not going anywhere! I will remain CEO of Affinitive, and our entire team remains 100% intact. For our clients, things will remain “business as usual”.

While I’m proud of our accomplishments and could spend all day reflecting on the lessons I have learned over the years (I will save that for another time!), I’m even more excited about what the future holds for Affinitive. It’s been an amazing journey, and with the added capabilities and scale of the Project: WorldWide network, the next chapter of our company is going to be an even more amazing one!

- Bob Troia

Project: WorldWide Acquires Social Marketing Firm Affinitive (MarketWatch)

Project Worldwide Acquires New York Social-Media Agency (AdAge) 

We’re logging off for the weekend with these in mind:

Facebook Moves into Mobile
While it seems Facebook is late to the mobile advertising game, they’re  making bold moves to compensate and monetize.  In addition to acquiring Karma, the social gifting app, it looks like Facebook is aiming to acquire Face.com to expand the shift away from desktops.  Combined with rumors that Facebook is looking at Internet browser company Opera as another possible acquisition and even exploring the option of developing its own smartphone one has to wonder, what does Mark Zuckerburg have up his sleeve?

Speaking of $1 Billion dollars…

Instagrammers are the new brand influencers
It’s not surprising to hear that major brands are hiring prolific Instagram users to capture their brands.  So despite the steep price tag—and Facebook’s own mobile photo app—there is still a chance that Instagram was still a great company to invest in.   Naturally, with the mobile photo app space seems to getting crowded, we are asking ourselves what could possibly be next?

Why GM pulled Facebook advertising
While it was widely known that GM pulled it’s $10 million ad account from Facebook days before Facebook’s stock went public,  it was a bit unclear as to why they did so, other than the initial statement that ads don’t have a big impact on customers.  AdAge is now reporting that the actual reason for GM’s departure is due to Facebook’s refusal to allow GM to “brand” Facebook by running bigger, higher-impact ad units than the current offering. Instead of relying on sponsored stories, or smaller units on the right side of the pages, GM wanted an entire page. While Facebook’s been known to be leery of big ads, the platform may want to consider its approach in the long run, especially now that it has shareholders to answer to.

Facebook adds post scheduling for pages
In some news that’s bound to delight Community Managers, Facebook page administrators can now schedule posts in advance! With this nifty new tool, page admins can now schedule posts up to six months in advance, in 15-minute intervals. The move also allows for admins to back-date content, ensuring your timeline is laid out correctly, no matter when you post.

PostRocket Wants to Optimize Your Facebook News Feed
Who doesn’t constantly ponder and brainstorm what to post and when to post it? Since most users and fans interact with brands through their newsfeed, visibility is paramount to success on Facebook. PostRocket has taken on the art of mastering EdgeRank, making it their business to become Content Plan advisers to businesses. Read more about the startup at the above link.

So as you head out for the first glorious weekend of summer, don’t take on any serious questions that have baffled man for ages, like:

• What IS the ROI of social media anyway?!
• When is it okay not to wear a tie?
• How does one quit smoking with social media?
• Do tigers sleep in lily patches? Do rhinos run from thunder?

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Let us know and join in on the conversation here!

We’re logging off for the weekend with these in mind:

Facebook, IPO, and “Muppet Bait”
What a week for Facebook and its investors.  The headache started after an odd debut where Facebook closed at $34.03, down at 11 percent, and a decrease from its initial offering of $38. A delayed opening on Monday (a glitch from Friday’s system) proved to be rather costly and now some unhappy folk are looking to sue Facebook and Nasdaq. We’ve lined up links in chronological order to provide a rough timeline of what happened.

What is Facebook Worth?

Facebook Closes at $34, far below IPO Price

Bombshell: Facebook Bankers Secretly Cut Forecasts for Company in the Middle of IPO Roadshow

The Inside Story of What Happened on the Facebook IPO 

Facebook, Zuckerberg sued over IPO 

Facebook Market Makers’ Losses Total at least $100 Million

Facebook Launches Instagram Clone 
We’ve been wondering what Facebook was going to do once they bought Instagram. Well, we have the answer. Facebook began rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS, an Instagram-style, photo filtering, sharing, and viewing app. Users can pick one or more photos, apply one of 14 filters, tags, write a description and post. This doesn’t necessarily rule out Instagram either, as there are reports that Facebook intends to cultivate Instagram independently. Now the crux of the matter, with Facebook Camera, Facebook now has three mobile apps, not counting Facebook Pages Manager: its primary, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Camera. Something’s gotta give, right?

RIP Rick Roll
The Internet’s favorite prank was temporarily killed, only to be brought back?  In a rather bizarre timeline, Rick Astley’s music video for Never Gonna Give You Up - inspiration behind the “Rickroll” – was yanked off Youtube through a copyright takedown request by AVG Technologies – but for only 24 hours before being silently brought back. No word from Youtube yet.

Brands Can Turn Timeline into a Movie
Brands can now take all their photos, status updates, and wall posts and churn them together into a chronological, one-minute Timeline “movie” with Timeline Moviemaker! In order to create this flick, the brand’s Timeline must have at least 50 public photos. While the tool now supports nine languages other than English, there’s no plans to make videos embeddable – at the moment they can only be shared via Facebook. For instructions, click here.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Let us know and join in on the conversation here!

We’re logging off for the weekend with these in mind:

President Obama Supports Gay Marriage, Twitter Explodes
By now you should have already seen it taking off on your feeds – and if not, who are you? The POTUS formally came out to the public with his support for same sex marriages. And of course, social media exploded. Mashable rounded up “top 10 Tweets” from rather official Twitter accounts from news outlets and other politicians, which you can check out here, but we want to know, why was RuPaul’s snappy Tweet not included? Incidentally, this should lead to an interesting song selection on the POTUS’ “Campaign Song” Spotify playlist, which they’re soliciting user requests for.

Pinterest Continues Expansion to WordPress
Pinterest continues its acquisition of share buttons all over the world Internet, and it seems that Word Press is no exception to this. WP Pinner launched beta on Wednesday, allowing WP users to carry over their witticisms and musings onto Pinterest; installing WP Pinner mounts a dash on the blog admin’s area, which displays the board name, dates, clicks, likes, and repins. WP Pinners can also schedule pins and automatically follow users who interact with them on Pinterest. Nifty! You can read up on the marvels of WP Pinner here.

The Best and Worst Posting Times 
Posting times on platforms usually have a sort of blind  science to them; obviously everyone’s going to post according to their user demographics – but is there an actual hard proof to when is best? Mashable says there is, and while its article provides interesting details on best times, traffic patterns on Twitter and Facebook, and the longevity of bit.ly links, it doesn’t really offer anything for CMs who work with communities that span across state lines and countries even.

Facebook’s New App Center and Beta Program 
Facebook has opened a beta program that will allow developers to charge users a flat fee to use their apps, which will also cover HTML5 apps and canvas apps. This all ties in with Facebook’s larger announcement regarding its new App Center (for Web, iOS, Android, HTML5, Pre-Paid). For peeks at the what the App Center looks like and for developer guidelines on eligibility, read this link. For a roundup post of “what this all really means,” read this post.

YouTube Takes the Next Step with Vloggers 
YouTube is focusing on vloggers with its next class of creators to go through its  Next Program, which initially launched six weeks ago.  The platform picked 16 vloggers who will undergo mentoring and receive cash and advice on how to expand their already sizable kingdoms. While YouTube isn’t shy about investing millions in professionally produced content, it’s also looking to nurture the next level of creators by helping amateur and semi-professionals who’re looking to improve.  For the final list of 16 vloggers, check the link above.

Drinking the Kool Aid with Google on Reddit’s AMA 
Sharing network Reddit got a hold of an anonymous Google employee for their AMA (Ask Almost Anything) threads; an employee from Google’s Kirkland office agreed to answer all questions candidly and honestly on the condition that he didn’t violate his NDA and users were aware that he was speaking as himself, not as a representative. Disclaimers aside, the conversation was interesting to follow, especially since folks were curious about the Kool Aid and mystery of Google, the point of Google +, and the ongoing “creativity war” on the tech scene. You can read through the unfiltered and raw Reddit thread here, but if you’re just interested in specific tech and social media questions, read Mashable’s “highlights” post.

Highlight Your Facebook Posts
About 12% of your friends see the average Facebook post on their newsfeed, and it’s become known that most users don’t bother clicking away from their home feed. So Facebook has decided to counter it by testing an optional “highlights” program where users pay a little money to have their post be visible longer and to more friends and subscribers. This leads us to wonder how this will work with a user’s privacy settings if they’ve hidden you from their feed, among other things. In other news, Tumblr too has a “highlights” feature.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Let us know and join in on the conversation here!