Pinterest Is Gaining Ground on Facebook and Twitter for News

When it comes to sharing news online, Facebook and Twitter get most of the attention. Pinterest, a platform more traditionally known for retail, food and travel-related postings, is gaining ground in the news category as well.

A new study from Gigya, a social login provider for many media companies, including ABC, NBC, and FOX, found that 20% of all "media/publishing"-related content shared to social networks in Q3 was shared on Pinterest. Facebook (40%) and Twitter (30%) maintained leads in the category, but Pinterest gained some ground after accounting for 18% of media and publishing shares in Q2.

Pinterest also claimed a higher percentage of social media shares in other categories, including 44% of ecommerce-related shares, higher than any other social network. The chart below shows the media/publishing social shares for the third quarter of 2013.
A social share means that a user utilized a page's share plugin or clicked on the "share" button, which is often located near the top of the page. Thus, Gigya's data does not include instances where users share by copy and paste. The company has more than 700 clients, including Gannett and Hearst, so the data incorporates a significant sample size.

Many now get their news on social networks. A Pew Research study released in October found that 30% of U.S. adults find their news on Facebook. Gigya's data was released just a few days after Facebook announced changes to its News Feed algorithm in an attempt to surface more "high quality" content for users.

Pinterest also made changes in September to encourage users to upload article pins. Articles posted to the site now include more details like the title, author and short description of the article.

Article curated from Mashable

To learn more about how Pinterest marketing can help your business, click here.

5 Top Social Media Trends For 2014

What's next in the realm of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and social business? See if you agree with our experts. 

From social media faux pas to a prominent IPO, 2013 was full of social media highs and lows. According to Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, this year marked social media's move into the mainstream.

"It's no longer passed over as a fad or something that's going away any time soon," he said. "Social media is now part of our fabric of society, like mobile phones and computers -- it's a staple of our everyday life."

In 2014, expect a shift in priorities: a bigger focus on social media monetization, user-generated content, a great acceptance of sharing information, and more. Here's a look at the big trends for next year.

1. Businesses will learn how to better monetize social
"The big question everyone wants answers to is how does social media make money?" Solis said. "Everyone thinks that if these platforms don't make money at the outset, it's not a viable platform, and that's not true."

Neither Twitter nor Facebook made money in the beginning, but Facebook has found a way -- quarter after quarter -- to beat revenue expectations. Expect social platforms to generate new revenue streams and try new things as the sector sets a precedent for the best new ways to make money.

2. Social media users will be comfortable sharing more
As people start to live a digital lifestyle, they open up and become less concerned about privacy. "We don't lose the desire to have privacy. We change the value proposition of what it is. The more we share online and the more people react to it, the safer you think it is to continue sharing."

This is good news for Facebook, which has started pushing users to share more often. The social network recently allowed teens to share posts publicly and removed a privacy setting that prevents people from finding you.

3. User-generated content becomes more important
"Next year will be the year that retailers go bananas over user-generated content," said Apu Gupta, CEO of the social analytics company Curalate.

Expect to see more initiatives like the one from Urban Outfitters. The retailer encourages customers to take photos of themselves in its clothing and to post them to Instagram with a hashtag. The company moderates the content and picks some photos to include in a gallery that links to the pages where you can then buy those looks.

"Not only is user-generated content free, but they're interested in it because every business wants to measure the ROI of social," he said. "This is a really easy and effective way to do that."

4. Google+ gains momentum
It's becoming harder and harder to ignore Google+, the search giant's social network, Gupta said. Take its most recent news: Google redesigned YouTube's comment section and now requires users to have a Google+ account or a YouTube channel to comment. And last month, it announced new details about its user base, confirming that it now has more than 300 million monthly active users.

One reason Gupta says Google+ will gain more momentum in 2014 is because of its visual appeal. "Brands love Google+ because it's so visual, and it seems like there's this undercurrent of people gravitating toward platforms in which content can be expressed in much more visual forms."

5. Facebook gains respect
After Facebook's IPO flop last year, investors remained skeptical of the social network. In 2014, that will change, Solis said.

"Facebook will finally be regarded as the powerful digital platform that it is. It's incredibly undervalued because investors haven't known what to make of it, and many of them probably don't even use Facebook," he said. "The same will probably happen to Twitter. It has tremendous room to grow into its own and will probably follow the same path as Facebook. The market will be a little wary and leery of it until it starts making money."

What do you think 2014 will bring to the social media realm?

Article curated from Information Week

Top 5 Digital Trends For 2014

I am starting to think marketers and astrologers have more in common than meets the eye. We are both asked to stargaze and look into the future on a regular basis. Every year around this time, I see similar emails from clients and reporters alike, all wanting to know what 2014 holds in store. Luckily, I don’t need the stars to predict what comes next because technology always leaves telltale signs. Here are the Top 5 Digital Trends you can look forward to for 2014.

1. An Identity Based Eco-System. As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, I did my thesis on Twitter. (No, it wasn’t in 140 characters.) One of the pivotal questions of my thesis was this: Why do people use social networking sites at all? My incorrect hypothesis was that people wanted to connect to each other. My research revealed that this was only the secondary reason. The primary reason was to showcase their own identity. I’ll pause while you give a moment’s thought to the narcissism of society. Then, I’ll urge you to think deeper. We, as humans, have always had an innate need to express ourselves. By that very expression, we further our identity. Smart companies, such as Facebook (with their timeline feature) and Amazon (with their personalized recommendations) are already taking advantage of what I refer to as an Identity Based Eco-System. The digital world of tomorrow, be it consumer or business, will revolve around the individual identity. The companies who want to take advantage of this trend will proactively create ways to harness the idea that showcasing our identity is the most human and primary of desires.

2. Content Curation and Aggregation. Remember the movie You’ve Got Mail, with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks? It was a blockbuster hit and romantic comedy at its best. But, they can never create a remake of that movie. Why? Because no one is that excited to receive email anymore! We have gone from an information hungry to an information overloaded society. However, we still require information on a daily basis – now more than ever. Hence, we see the rise of websites such as Pinterest, Quora, and List.ly. Pinterest is technically nothing more than an organization system for images which already exist, but because we desperately need that system for aggregation, it is a success.

3. Video = Device Agnostic. When was the last time you uttered the phrase “I am watching video on television.” Chances are you may watch a video on TV, but you may just as easily be watching it on your tablet or smart phone. Video continues to become device agnostic. (Much to my chagrin, my husband takes advantage of this fact by pausing the episode on TV only to continue it on his tablet at the restaurant. I’ll save the net etiquette for spouses article for later.) From a business standpoint, online video will continue to play a bigger role in the digital space.

4. The 4 Screen Revolution. The last Super Bowl showcased this trend better than any other event. While people watched the game on TV, they were checking their work email on the computer for the next day, tweeting about the game on their tablet, and texting their friends at the same time. The number of screens we are used to will only increase with time. When I say screen, I don’t necessarily mean a solid box. Google glass would also qualify as a screen. Any surface (tangible or not) which you interact with can be considered a screen. Look for advertising to innovate as the available surfaces, on which to interact, increase.

5. Social Literacy Skills Required. Social media literacy will be required by companies for most jobs, but especially for the C-Suite. It expands beyond understanding social platforms to making the digital landscape an inherent part of your professional repertoire. As a skill set, social media literacy will be divided into two areas – personal and organizational. On the personal level, professionals will have to know how to create content, curate relevant information, and connect people and resources. On an organizational level, agility (in thought and strategy), the ability to aggregate multiple points of data for decision making, and authenticity (the real deal, not the perception) will be required.

As I gaze into my digital crystal ball, one thing is certain. 2014 is sure to be an exciting year on the digital front.

Article curated from Forbes Magazine

How Bad Online Reviews Can be Good for Your Business

Not only do bad online reviews scare customers away; they also strike fear (and understandably so) in the hearts of business owners conscious of their reputation.

That’s why, according to media-research firm BIA/Kelsey, as much as $700 million have been spent this year by US businesses on cleaning up their image and managing their online reputation.

Sometimes, though, negative reviews and low ratings on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google can actually be a good thing. Here’s how:

Bad reviews lend authenticity to your online presence. Think of it this way: in the era of astroturfing, you don’t want to appear too good to be true. If your business' page on Yelp and TripAdvisor consist exclusively of glowing reviews and five-star ratings, you actually run the risk of looking fake in the eyes of potential customers.

Bad reviews identify key areas for improvement. Even the most highly-rated businesses have weak points, areas to improve in and issues to address. But without valuable customer feedback, these may not always be readily obvious, especially in the daily craziness of running a business full-time. It may take a painful but truthful review to realize that, say, your receptionist needs more training, or your blackhead extraction services need gentler hands.

Bad reviews allow you to stay competitive. Business owners with a competitive streak will find that online reviews offer an opportunity to gain that crucial edge over their rivals. Moreover, being called out online can also serve as an effective motivator that will enable you and your employees to deliver a better customer experience next time. If, say, your ratings were merely average last year, you can set specific new goals this year to achieve higher ratings and stamps of approval like Best of Yelp, TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice, and OpenTable’s Diners’ Choice.

Bad reviews give you a chance to prove critics wrong. Many businesses adopt a helpless attitude when it comes to negative online reviews; they feel like the content, because it’s consumer-generated, is out of their control. But reviews can serve as a platform for changing the conversation about your business, and they provide qualitative data that may otherwise be difficult to observe. If you only look on the bright side, you’ll quickly be able to leverage the information in order to turn unhappy customers’ frowns into smiles.

Article curated from NBC Chicago

The Top 7 Social Trends That Will Emerge In 2014

Social Business has few advocates of change more vocal than one of its leading protagonists, Michael Krigsman of ZDNet. “With few exceptions, every company will face new challenges, competitors, and opportunities, as our society grows more connected,” he said in a recent article, and called on executives to, “step up your own skills and lead the charge!” Indeed, business is changing rapidly, but some argue that ‘social business’ is too broad or too vague.

So given Krigsman’s call to action and the need for more clarity, I asked IBM’s Scott Hebner, VP of Social Business to think about the trends in social business that he’s seeing and to provide his predictions as to what we can expect to see in 2014.

1. Social business is not just about collaboration, it’s about unlocking the engines of collective knowledge, differentiated expertise and rapid learning

Social is no longer just about collaboration. Social today is enabling businesses to break down organizational and hierarchical silos and barriers. It’s providing employees an opportunity to share knowledge and locate expertise. In 2014, we’ll see social transform into an organization’s enablement and learning platform, social learning, that is able to offer the ability to share knowledge and expertise through real-time videos and interactive social capabilities.

Social’s new role will be helping to build a smarter enterprise. For example, doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital are already moving in this direction with social; doctor’s across the globe are sharing peer-reviewed training videos and on-demand curricula to demonstrate the latest life-saving techniques in child care, building an ecosystem of well-trained healthcare professionals.

2. Social Businesses will begin to tap behavioral data to help drive decision making

In the past, business has relied on instrumented data — machine generated data — to help drive decision making. With the emergence of social and all the activity taking place over social networks, both internal and external, we now have access to behavioral data that is allowing organizations to analyze sentiment, listen and learn from customer experiences and behaviors and tap into the social pulse of their employees and customers.

With this information we can understand how, why, who, and what of our employees and consumers. This is a unique and groundbreaking capability, tapping into social behavioral analytics to build resilient and secure social business fabrics that collectively deliver value for both consumers and employees alike. In 2014, social behavioral data will be king.

3. The rise of the individual & “marketing as a service”

For most organizations social networking has been a marketing machine, providing the ability to build armies of advocates for your brand. As we enter into the next phase of social, it will be less about how many likes you can get, and more focused on the quality of those likes and who is doing the liking. Social, driven by the new behavioral data, will allow organizations to capitalize on this trend and individualize consumers.

Looking at customers as individuals instead of segments, marketers will now be able to deliver personalized experiences customized to individual or community needs. Social will transform marketing from a function to a service and consumers will reap the benefits.

4. Social takes on talent management

Similar to how marketers will personalize consumers’ experiences, human resource departments will also begin to capitalize on the power of social by integrating it into their Human Capital Management systems in order to deepen loyalty and engagement with employees. In a world where employees move from job to job at a rapid pace, when it comes to human capital, loyalty trumps everything. Organizations are searching for a means to not only recruit the right candidates, but more importantly retain and nuture that talent to become passionate, engaged and loyal.

In 2014, we’ll begin to see organizations tapping social and behavioral data to better understand what is important to employees, what motivates them, why they stay with an organization and much more. Say good-bye to the traditional HR survey and embrace a new set of social behavioral assets to build your elite workforce.

5. The customer activated social enterprise will drive innovations that really matter

For the past several years, social has been laser focused on internal collaboration or pushing out messages to clients and partners. In 2014, enterprises of all types will open up to customer influence, pioneering social and digital innovation and building engaging customer experiences. We’ll see workplaces and marketplaces fusing together like never before; enterprises will be thinking and acting differently in the context of social.

IBM's recent C-Suite study reveals that 70 percent of C-suite recognize the importance of shifting to new models of social and digital interaction to reach customers and new markets. In 2014, we’ll see that the highest performing businesses are those that recognize that digital and social technologies have spawned a new kind of consumer behavior and new ways to work that are highly intertwined.

6. The true convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud

This coming year will bring the true convergence of social business, big data, the mobile workforce, and cloud computing as ‘business as usual.’ An organization’s social business platform will become the universal foundation for how the enterprise works and engages in the marketplace.

The platform must securely connect, empower and energize the workforce without anyone noticing the technology (i.e., performance, it’s bullet proof and it’s secure). The platform should enable self-service, it should process integrity; it should be intelligent and accessible anywhere, anytime.  Equally important is the ability to harvest data of all types and origins, as that is what fuels the personalized experiences that are so critical.  Bringing all these enterprise technologies together in a highly dynamic, ever-changing environment like a social business requires a well architected solution. Thus, organizations consider which platforms to build their social businesses upon, they will want a highly integrated, holistic platform that is based on SMAC – social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

7. Brand journalism will begin to gain traction 

This 7^th prediction doesn’t come from Hebner, but based on my observations of IBM. They have a reported 40,000+ content producers and brand journalists within IBM, some of which are writing for their industry’s most well-known publications. IBM is becoming a powerful media house and does not rely on the media to tell their story.

But volume is only part of the story, as more and more content is being produced, quality and social distribution matter – and that is usually derived from professionals with large social followings. Brands are starting to realize that hiring journalists or professional bloggers with large followings to create content for them will not only give them high profile attention, but provide myriad revenue opportunities as well.

Yahoo provides an example of how companies are starting to capitalize on the trend. They recently persuaded New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to lead their consumer tech reporting. Another example is Jesse Noyes, who was a business reporter for the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald and now Oracle’s (Eloqua‘s) managing editor.

So for me, not only are Hebner’s predictions something to closely watch, but also watch what IBM is doing closely. Take one of their latest hires, Andrew Grill (former CEO of social scoring site Kred). They hired him to be their Global Social Business Partner lead, but I suspect there’s something bigger going on beyond the scenes. I’ve recently interviewed Grill and will expand more in the next few weeks.

Article curated from Forbes

Facebook to roll out video advertising in test

Facebook has confirmed it is testing video advertising, following media reports that it will roll out video commercials later this week.

The social networking website said on Tuesday that it would be promoting a series of videos for the upcoming film "Divergent" this week -- but stressed it was only a test run. 

It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that video ads would begin appearing in Facebook users' feeds on Thursday. 

"As this is a test, we don't have additional details to share at this time, but rest assured we'll continue to refine this new way for brands to tell stories on Facebook," a company spokesperson told CNBC in an email. 

The videos will run automatically in Facebook users' news feeds without sound; users will be able click on the video to hear the audio.

If the test is judged to be successful, Facebook will be in a good position to capture a share of the lucrative U.S. television ad space -- which is expected to hit $81.6 billion in 2017, according to PwC. 

Earlier this year speculation that Facebook would introduce 15-second video ads surfaced, but it is unclear how long the "Divergent" commercials will be. 

Facebook is looking to further increase its advertising revenue which saw a 66 percent rise in the third quarter of 2013 compared with the same quarter last year, with mobile advertising representing almost half of that figure. 

But earlier this year, it struck a cautious note about advertising amid fears that an increased number of commercials would push users away.

The social networking giant must balance its drive for revenue with the user experience, according to Ian Maude, an online media analyst at Enders Analysis. 

"So far there hasn't been a negative reaction from Facebook users and video advertising will really reinvigorated Facebook's business. The tricky part is getting balance between maximizing revenue and not annoying users to the point they leave Facebook," Maude told CNBC. 

Article curate from NBC News

Twitter Tests A New Nearby Location Based Local Timeline

Twitter is testing out a new service called “Nearby”. The idea is that, if you let them know your location, you will be able to see tweets from those in the same geographic location as yourself, even if you’re not following them. Perhaps, in the example the WSJ gives on this, you’ll be able to find out why those three fire engines just raced past lit up? I have to admit that this idea rather interests me because it’s leading to the exact and total opposite of what I’ve always taken the social aspect of the internet (and of social media) to be. That being to free us from the geographic based interest groups that we find ourselves in and allows us to find people based on a commonality of interests rather than just location.

The upper half of the “Nearby” screen is a map where a blue dot pulses over the user’s current location. The bottom half shows a timeline of recent nearby tweets, with icons on the map noting their locations. Clicking on an icon pulls the corresponding tweet to the front of the screen.

As you move around the map, more picture-linked tweets pop up in a manner similar to the way shopping carts spring up when searching for grocery stores on Google Maps.

One obvious possibility here is that Twitter would like more people to let them know their location (this is an option on this service) as that will enable them to offer location based ads to advertisers.

So far so good, an interesting addition to the service perhaps. But the thing that got me musing is that for me, as for so many other people, all of this internet, web, social media stuff has been exactly to free us from the tyranny of being stuck socially in our geography. I’m old enough to recall the days before mobile phones (no, really, I am) and who you met up with, who you could talk to, depended very much on who happened to be around. Subjects of conversation, activities, were near randomly determined by who actually was around. In many cases if was a matter of who happened to be propping up the bar at the pub on that particular evening.

What all of this electronic connectivity has done is freed us from those geographic limitations. Perhaps the first major example was on Usenet, where the strange people who like to talk about economics, or sci fi, of matters environmental, could all go and do those things. No longer did you have to pour your theories about Ricardian Equivalence into the ear of the poor lad trying to have a pint and read the footie scores. It was possible to find people, perhaps a continent away, who were perfectly happy to discuss such matters. That is, each minority interest group was freed from their geographic reality.

Very much the same is true of Twitter, Facebook and all the rest these days: we’re able to follow our interests without regard (other than, perhaps, timezones) to geography. All of which is why it amuses me rather to find that we’re trying to come full circle on this and turn these social media tools back into local ones, based on geographic not interest concerns.