Social Media Predictions For 2012

Posted by Avi Savar on Jan 9, 2012 in Bylines, Forbes, News & Information | 0 comments

My recent Forbes Article discussed social media trends for 2012.  You can read the article here, or at Forbes.com, enjoy!

Companies sometimes gripe that social media is useless as a branding tool.

For marketers, converting messages into transactions is the Holy Grail, but if they don’t quickly materialize through new media outlets, that’s no reason to throw in the towel. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other outlets are constantly evolving and experimentation is necessary to find success.

Once we accept that “social” does not equal “transactional” we’ll all be a lot more adept at using it in 2012.

Three trends and tools to watch in the coming year:

From Checking In To Cashing In: Geo-Gaming

Geo-location has been an important marketing tool for a few years, but in 2012 it will become more personal and more transactional, especially in social-media marketing. This is a game-changer for retailers because it enables them to put potential consumers in the context of time and place and more effectively influence purchase intent.

This type of influence is a reason I see social media as a bridge to commerce because it’s where marketers build a relationship with customers.

The context of the offline world is crucial for marketers so they know what kind of message to deliver and how to interact with a customer at any given time. Is my potential customer in front of a store or on the couch? Is that person with people or alone?

Yes, geo-location has been around a while because the technology exists, but marketers have not yet taken advantage of it.  To date, geo-location has been all about the “check-in.” Nobody really understands the value of the check-in yet, but if you think about it, the check-in is a social transaction, but soon will become a monetary one.

How will that work? Look for marketers to motivate and change behavior through geo-location tools and social gaming.

Starwood was one of the first brands to see the check-in as a bridge. Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) members could connect their SPG accounts directly to Foursquare. Anytime they checked into a Starwood property combined with a confirmed reservation they got points. There’s a reciprocal relationship between the check-in and the reward, which is what game dynamics are about–rewarding behavior through real and virtual currency.

Let’s say Starwood has a million fans, a small sub-set of whom checks in on Foursquare. Now let’s add a layer of social gaming so that whatever those fans do online they do through Facebook. I post to my page saying, “I just came back from Paris, ate at this restaurant, and it’s amazing,” and that is shared with the Starwood community of a million people through a gaming experience. Starwood could reward me for that because I’m selling travel to Paris where Starwood has properties.

I don’t think there’s a place in social marketing to have offers, promotions, coupons and transactional items as a part of the social eco-system and social story telling. Where I do think there is a time and place for coupons, offers, promotions is through mobile and geo-location and how those two talk to each other.

These are ways for brands to say, “Believe in us, be part of our community, and when you engage with us, we notice.” It’s that acknowledgement that creates loyalty, advocacy and drives earned-media value.

Facebook: Gateway To The Web

Would it surprise anyone to think Facebook will become the overlay of the Internet experience? It may not happen in 2012 but it certainly will in our lifetimes. Facebook is what Ma Bell once was, a utility with which few people could conduct their daily lives. It’s almost impossible to not use the web these days, and it’s becoming less possible to use it without Facebook.

As marketers build the bridge to commerce through online communities, it is imperative that they do not cannibalize them for the sake of transactions. Microsoft and Zynga got it wrong with their partnership.

Back in early 2010, Zynga moved beyond making its popular games available on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and began making some titles, especially the wildly popular Farmville, available on Microsoft properties like MSN Games and Windows Media Player. More than 200 million players had interacted with friends and acquaintances through these games every month. But Zynga wanted to expand its reach even further, hence the Microsoft partnership.

It was a great move for MSN’s gaming portal, which was steadily losing traffic, but what did Zynga gain? It already had enviable reach. What it really did was cannibalize Zynga’s passionate and original gaming community by adding all those MSN gamers.

Imagine being at a party with people you know and feel comfortable with, and then suddenly, an outside group of revelers crashes your bash. It’s not the same party anymore. You don’t want to be there. You aren’t going to stick around.

Microsoft spent a tremendous amount of time, dollars and effort cultivating a community, and they threw it out the window with the Zynga deal just to boost its fan base.

Starbucks got it wrong — and then got it very right. The coffee bar behemoth woke up one day and noticed it had completely alienated its consumers. Instead of selling them coffee in an ambient setting, Starbucks installed mega coffee machines to serve people faster. They took the artisanal aspect from the process and then realized they moved away from their core brand attributes. The company was smart and sincere enough to ask its community for help by launching Mystarbucksidea.com, listening to the people who were very attached to their brand. It was like the return of the Prodigal Son.

Starbucks also devised Pastry Thursday, creating a regular event on Facebook where people could register and check-in to get a free pastry. On Election Day, they gave away free coffee.

Starbucks is one of the few advertisers that know it will lose [Facebook] friends if all it does is talk about itself. If I had a friend who, whenever we’re together, tries to sell me something, we wouldn’t be friends for very long. Starbucks knows it has to care about what their customers have to say.

Mystarbucksidea.com was an example of perhaps the first time that a brand had to act like a person. The company recognized that relationships are personal and that for a relationship to thrive, some base-line principles must be observed.

Perpetuating The Personal

Brands in 2012 must create a social world of personalization.

Facebook has built a model for this. Its “pages” function enables brands to engage customers on a virtual island and have a theme party of their choosing. If the guests are into Huggies, the page can be about potty training. Amex’s page/party theme can be about small business.

Then you have Facebook’s “social ads,” through which brands can deliver targeted messages to fans and followers. Any marketer that knows something about its core fan base, derived from the insights gathered on its Facebook page, can create and deliver custom messages to sub-sets of that population.

The third prong is Facebook’s “sponsored stories,” which are about leveraging the friends of fans. If you become a fan of my page, this generates a News Feed story that your friends might see.  Sponsored Stories increase visibility of this story by highlighting it for my friends in the right column.

The brand has delivered a story to someone on Facebook, and that person delivers the story to their Facebook friends.

Let’s say you became a fan of the AMC show “Breaking Bad.” Now your feed reflects that action to your friends, and the next time any of your friends log in, they’re alerted that you just “liked” “Breaking Bad” — and maybe they should check it out. Your friend clicks on that link, which takes them to a “Breaking Bad” page, completing the loop.

The Facebook triad of Pages-Ads-Stories is one example of how to create a loop using paid media dollars to drive earned media.  There are many other ways of delivering earned media across social channels.  Every brand has different needs, but most importantly, every brand has a different personality – it’s crafting and delivering that personality that ultimately drives the kind of earned media that you don’t need write checks for.

The best kind of media is organic earned media. In 2012, social media as a bridge to commerce may seem obvious, but the journey will be much more interesting–and lucrative.

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Why you should care about 4Square.

Posted by Avi Savar on Apr 21, 2011 in Bylines, News & Information | 0 comments

Mark my words, Geo-location will be at the heart of Social Media.

Social Media Is About Me.

I had the good fortune to hear Peter Theil speak a few weeks ago.  He shared a lot of wisdom from behind his podium — one memorable moment for me was his answer to the question “why did Facebook succeed where other social networks (ie. MySpace) stalled out?”

His answer was simple and elegant.  “MySpace was started in LA as a place where people went to become somebody else.  Facebook was started in Boston as a place where people went to be themselves.”

I have always said that Social Media is a channel of “people stories” but Peter’s insight into what made Facebook successful adds further context.  The people stories are real, they represent a collective human experience and every individual user is part of it.

Essentially, Social Networking is about real people and the connections between them.  However, social media is also a highly individual experience — I experience social media through my “social graph” and my experience is different than your experience.  Social media is about me — it’s the place I go to be myself.

Mobile Is My Gateway

Like many folks today, I am constantly on the go.  Like many folks today, my mobile phone has become an appendage.  My mobile phone is what connects me to my digital world no matter where I am.  Mobile is the gateway I use to access information, make connections and “plug in” to my social graph.
The use and adoption of mobile is critical to the thesis of this blog post ( “geo-location is the heart of social).  If the stats are true and by 2014 a person’s first online experience will be via a mobile phone not via a computer, then mobile and social will converge — social media becomes more than just being “about me,” it becomes being about me and… where I am and what I am doing.  Everything that I do is tagged by “where I did it” and the mobile device becomes the conduit to sending and receiving that information — mobile provides context to everything about me.

I “Check In,” Therefore I Am

Content is the fuel that makes social media run.  Whether it’s a 140 character tweet, a video clip or a photo — content is at the center of the social universe.  Moreover, content with context is the holy grail.  Geo-location provides instant context to the content we create and share because remember — social is all about me, what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, etc.

Now let’s think about this a little differently.  Let’s think about this eco-system from the perspective of someone that needs to find information rather than share information… Here is a scenario:

I was recently in Amsterdam for 3 days of client meetings.  I landed a day early to adjust to the time change and get settled in, which gave me a free afternoon to explore and wander.  As I headed out of the hotel I had a few choices:

1. Ask the concierge what I should do or where I should go.
2. Open google maps and search for some points of interest.
3. Or…. You guessed it.  “Check-In” to my hotel on foursquare and access real-time information about my current surroundings.

Here is the hypothesis.  As adoption rates continue to increase across mobile and location-based platforms like Facebook Places and FourSquare, hopefully the quality of real time information improves also.  This means that in the future FourSquare could become the front door to the mobile web just like Google became the front door to the desktop web.  When I’m at my desk, I search to find information in the digital world.  When I’m on the go, I “check in” to access information about the physical world.  Social lives right in between the two.

Social is what connects my physical world to my digital world.  “Checking in” is the digital representation of “showing up” — it’s how your digital self knows where you are.

Think about it.  We have all seen movies like Terminator.  Where a the creature or robot from the future (good or evil) has a built-in computer embedded with some augmented reality view of the world.   What does that computer do?  It provides relevant (and real time) information based on where the creature is and what it is doing.

If FourSquare can unlock delivering users relevant information, connecting them to their social graph and providing context to the content they create — then they could indeed become the future front door to mobile — then we will all care about FourSquare.

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10 Reasons Brands Need a Social Media AOR

Posted by Avi Savar on Apr 20, 2011 in Bylines, iMedia, News & Information | 0 comments

Is 2011 the Year of the Social Media AOR?

There is no doubt social media is here to stay. Anyone who still says that social is a flash in the pan (and yes, there are people are still saying it) must be living on a different planet. So now that social has crossed the chasm, do brands need a dedicated social media agency?

My answer, even if I am slightly biased, is unequivocally yes.

Brands need a social media AOR because today a brand is shaped more by what their consumers say than what the brand tells them. And because social media cannot be treated as an afterthought, it needs to be integrated into an overall marketing plan. We live in a social world. Consumers are looking for human connections with the brands they buy. Consumers want to be co-creators with brands. And consumers are looking closer at the role brands play in society.

Additionally, if you look at the perception gap between what brands think and what consumers think about the role of social media – the disconnect speaks volumes.  This study was conducted by IBM and shows how far apart brands actually are in understanding what consumers are looking for out of a relationship with them.

The bottom line:  This is the first time in history that Advertising is talking back. Which means brands (and their agencies) can’t look at consumers the same way in social media as they do in other media.  Not to mention, the growing importance and complexity of social media requires ongoing stewardship in a medium that is “always on.”

So, here is 10 reasons why Brands Need a Social Media AOR:

• Social media is a specialty. It requires specific expertise and skill traditional agencies don’t have. You would not ask your media buyer to write your press release or your Publicist to write ad copy.
• Traditional marketing is about interruption. Social media is about invitation. It’s about a two-way dialogue. It’s about creating experiences. It takes a different mentality.
• You can’t adapt advertising messaging for social media. Advertising is about selling and telling. Social media is about storytelling, engagement and socialization.
• Social is about creating audiences and which is different than traditional “targeting” of consumers. It’s about thinking like a publisher, not a marketer.
• Developing content platforms are fundamentally different from ad messaging. Social media is like advertising in reverse. It would require traditional marketers to unlearn years of engrained behavior.
• If you build a community, you need to engage with your audience on an on-going basis. It’s a living breathing entity that needs nurturing. Traditional marketers are not trained and skilled understanding the dynamics of engagement.
• Social media content has to be created with distribution of content and syndication strategies in hand.
  
• Social impacts everything: from awareness to advocacy to sales and marketing to customer service.
• A dedicated social media agency has social media as part of their DNA. It’s not taking people who happen to be on Facebook and Twitter and dubbing them the new social media department.
• Social media needs to be scalable. While many agencies can handle social media campaigns, few can handle scalability.

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Just Like That, The iPad Is Almost As Big As The Mac

Posted by Avi Savar on Jan 22, 2011 in News & Information | 0 comments

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40 Educational iPad Apps for Kids

Posted by Avi Savar on Nov 7, 2010 in News & Information | 0 comments

I have to say that being a digital dad has really become part of the natural relationship between my daughter and I.  We can debate the socialization concerns around TV, computers, iPhones and other screens that suck the juice out of our brain another time — for now, I’d like to focus on the glass being half full.

I have come to enjoy the time my daughter and I spend playing together on my iPad.  We have curated a terrific library of apps that bring smiles, songs, new words, letters, shapes and colors into her world.  I am constantly amazed by how quickly she learns the nuances of a particular app and is able to fly solo within minutes of launching a new one.  She’s only two and half years old but can navigate an iPad more effectively than my mother in law!

The long and short of it is — I am convinced that our iPad (and sometimes iPhone) sessions not only provide us with quality time together, but also dramatically contribute to her learning and education.

Below is a list of kid-friendly apps I came across while surfing around which motivated this particular blog post.

Happy Apping!

Language and Vocabulary

Here you’ll find apps for learning the alphabet, using the dictionary, reviewing grammar rules, and more.

1. ABC Animals: Help young children learn the alphabet and phonics with this cute, illustrated app.
2. Word Magic: Kids fill in the missing letter to form words, accompanied by bright pictures.
3. Clifford’s BE BIG with Words: In this game, kids spell out words so that Clifford and his friends can think of things to paint.
4. Dictionary.com – Dictionary and Thesaurus: This easy-to-use app features a search bar, thesaurus, search history and word of the day.
5. Free Spanish Tutor: Introduce or help your kids review Spanish with this app that features native speaker audio, puzzles, written tests, flash cards, and a multiple choice quiz.
6. Textropolis: Kids have to find and piece together words in order to build up their “textropolis” in this game.
7. iWrite Words: Small children learn to write by tracing words with this game.
8. Spell and Listen Cards: Kids rearrange letters to form basic words, improving their vocabulary and sight reading.
9. TypeFast: If your kids don’t have time to take a typing class, they can use this app to learn how to type faster and more accurately.
10. Grammar Up: Help kids learn adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, infinitives, gerunds, conjunctions, and other grammar basics.

History

These American and world history apps involve your kids in making decisions that determine the success or decline of whole civilizations.

1. Manual for the United States of America: Kids can learn about and read the Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, biographies of Supreme Court justices, and a lot more.
2. Oregon Trail: This classic game is now available on the iPad and helps children of various ages practice problem-solving and decision-making skills as they learn about history and try to survive the great trek West.
3. Civilization Revolution: Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution teaches kids about world civilizations, including Japan, Germany, China, Spain, America, and others, as they lead their people to victory.
4. On This Day: Help your students learn more about history with this trivia-like game that lists important events each day.

Math and Science

These apps use flash cards, games and interactive displays to teach your kids about math, astronomy and more.

1. Math Cards: This grade-as-you-go game teaches subtraction, division, multiplication and addition in a touch-screen game.
2. Kids Math Fun – Third Grade: This app is devoted to third grade math skills, including basic arithmetic. Games like Double Dare and Minute Math keep it fun, too.
3. The Math Master: Practice math drills and learn math facts on this app, which features a numeric touchpad.
4. KidsCalc 7-in-1 Math Fun: This app teaches young children number recognition, and older kids arithmetic. It features a birthday party theme, and includes flash cards, puzzle game, running timer, and more.
5. PopMath Basic Math: This level-based math game is supposed to be non-stressful but still effective.
6. Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy: This app displays the night sky just as you’re seeing it, but with more detail and descriptions of constellations and stars.
7. Mathematical Formulas: This app serves as a great reference and review tool that catalogs and explains math formulas for geometry and more.
8. The Chemical Touch: View the periodic table and learn about chemical properties with this app.
9. Brain Tuner Lite: This free app is a great tool for getting your kids to practice math skills each day.
10. Mathemagics – Mental Math Tricks: More advanced students can practice multiplication, square numbers, and more.

Reading

Help your children learn to read and get excited about reading the classics with these apps.

1. Learn Sight Words: Help your children learn the expected high-frequency words they need to know by the end of 1st grade with this cute app.
2. Newspapers: Encourage your children to read about the rest of the world by linking them to newspapers from different cities.
3. Free Books: This app costs $1.99, but you’ll get to read over 23,000 classic books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and plays by Shakespeare.
4. iLibrary+audio: Download whole chapters and then listen to them read aloud with this app. Books include The Call of the Wild, Emma and Treasure Island.

Art and Music

Encourage your children to explore art and music with the help of these apps.

1. Preschool Music: Kids can create their own songs and play a virtual piano as they play along with sheep and birds on this app.
2. Ultimate Guitar Tabs: Kids can read guitar chords and tabs to learn about music.
3. Art: Your kids — ages 12 and up — will learn about important artists like da Vinci, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock and more with this searchable app that features quizzes, a slideshow, newsletter, and more.
4. Instruments in Reach Basic: Learn the fingerings for instruments like the flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, bassoon, oboe and trombone.

General Education and Life Skills

These general education apps help to improve critical thinking skills through games, matching, puzzles, and more.

1. Monster Mix & Match: Kids practice critical thinking and problem solving skills with this game that lets them create monster cartoon characters.
2. Preschool Arcade: Preschoolers can learn numbers, the alphabet, and capital and lower case letters while developing critical thinking and matching skills.
3. Highlights Hidden Pictures: Highlights Magazine designed this game that includes eight puzzles filled with hidden pictures your kids search for while using clues and hints.
4. I SPY Spooky Mansion: This is a great app for helping kids think critically as they solve riddles and puzzles while collecting keys in a spooky old mansion.
5. TeachMe: Kindergarten: Review or help younger children get a head start on kindergarten lessons in reading, math and spelling.
6. 10,500+ Cool Facts: This app provides an easy way to add random tidbits of knowledge to your kids’ brains. Shake your iPad to get a new cool fact.
7. 2010 World Factbook: With this app, your children can learn about different countries, their flags, languages, government, economy, and more.
8. Flashcards Deluxe: Customize your own flashcards with this app, which integrates with Quizlet.com, features audio and text, and can hold over 5,000 flash cards.via onlineclasses.org

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Converse Domaination

Posted by Avi Savar on Oct 10, 2010 in News & Information | 0 comments

I can’t think of a recent campaign that impressed me more than this one. It’s simply brilliant and a wonderful example of powerful engagement planning. The video says it all.

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