@Publish

the goal was to introduce "conversational search." To have a conversation, you need a conversational partner.

what did Google announce today? A new way to get your company logo within the Google Knowledge Graph box, if Google decides to show one for your company.

Google’s post today says that Schema.org organization markup can be used now as a way for publishers to tell Google what preferred logo they’d like to appear there. Google’s post didn’t make it clear that this was happening only for the Knowledge Graph box, causing us to originally write that this was going to put logos next to search listings. However, Google has since clarified that logos do not show next to search results as with authorship, but rather, in the Knowledge Graph box that sometimes shows for companies. Just using the markup doesn’t guarantee that your logo will be used. It only helps suggest this to Google, which makes the ultimate decision.

for most companies, doing Google+ is going to be a far more effective way to gain logo visibility than using organizational markup. But the option is there, for those who just don’t want to be on Google+.

Each video will last a maximum of 15 seconds, suggesting Facebook has taken note of Vine’s offering – which is limited to a 6 second video format. A small number of big brands will be part of the initial trials, including Unilever, Nestlé, Ford, Diageo, American Express and Coca Cola. To create more impact (at least at the beginning) users will only see video content from one of these advertiser’s in any one day. The ads will be bought on a cost per thousand basis with rates predicted to be in the low $20s, a cost per engagement model is not currently being considered.

rapidly expanding online video advertising market - 41% growth Y.O.Y, US 2012.

Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.

Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.

Of the 10,600+ brands we examine on a daily basis (see optimalsocial.com/portfolios for more on these across 100 sectors), we see about 2,400 (just less than 25%) have a tumblr presence.

25% of these are mostly empty and many appear to be brands squatting on their own names and planning to get to it later when they have time, perhaps. About 588 of these brand pages have fewer than 10 items of lifetime activity. Some brands like Pepsi are quite active, though the activity levels ebb and flow quite a bit, but others are far less so. The mean number of total engagements per brand on tumblr is 224 but the median is just two. Tumblr hasn’t yet figured out how to get users to engage with brands, yet, and it doesn’t seem that users are falling over themselves to engage with brands.

Tumblr’s content distribution model still needs to be sorted out, in order for brands to truly achieve viral distribution and authentic connections with consumers

median teen Facebook user has 300 friends. Girls and older teenagers tend have substantially larger friend networks than boys and younger teens.

while 70 percent of teens surveyed are Facebook friends with their parents, focus groups conducted by Pew show that this kind of interaction is the main problem for the age group. Teens felt like with mom and dad electronically close by, they couldn’t truly express themselves, opting for sites such as Twitter and Instagram: In focus groups, many teens expressed waning enthusiasm for Facebook. They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they described as happening frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the site is still where a large amount of socializing takes place, and teens feel they need to stay on Facebook in order to not miss out.

Unlike many of their adult counterparts, teens feel they’re pretty good at managing their Facebook privacy settings. 60 percent of teens aged 12 through 17 in the study say they have their Facebook profile private, so only their friends can see it.

the company's ad units are so new. But Tumblr faces other obstacles as well including an ambivalence towards advertising, a lack of metrics and a platform that lets you do lots of marketing outreach for free.

Tumblr's huge reach — the platform claims 18 billion pageviews a month — the ads only brought in $13 million or possibly even less last year.

In a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, 55% of marketers globally are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year, with 39% of them planning on reallocating existing budgets toward digital channels.

This is a permanent shift, not a passing trend. Products and services must deliver value while telling engaging stories through a multitude of digital devices and within a network of multiple brands, services, and platforms.

Marketing and product teams need to work more closely. Copywriting and story teams must collaborate with user experience teams.

Cards live at the halfway point between minimalism and skeuomorphism

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

Though Facebook is still the most popular social network among teens, their enthusiasm for Mark Zuckerberg's network is decreasing, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center. Pew reports that 77% of online teens (ages 12-17) surveyed use Facebook. But while Pew's findings show that teens view Facebook participation as important for socializing, they have "waning enthusiasm for Facebook," as explained in the video above. The report cites teens' dislike for over-sharing and stressful "drama" on the social network. Teens also don't like the fact that more and more adults are joining Facebook, although Pew found that 7 in 10 teens are Facebook friends with their parents.

Pew found 24% of online teens use Twitter, an increase from 16% in 2011

Outside of Twitter and Facebook, teens don't have as much of an online presence. In 2012, 11% of teen social media users used Instagram, while Tumblr (5%), Google+ (3%) and Pinterest (1%) drew in even fewer teens.

Twitter unveiled the Lead Generation Card today, a new expandable tweet format which allows users to show their interest in a particular discount or offer that’s being promoted by their favorite brand. When a user expands the tweet, they’ll see a description of the offer, as well a small button underneath that will allow them to instantly send their basic contact information – name, Twitter handle and email address – to the brand or business in question. All of the information is pre-filled within the Twitter Card based on the users’ existing account settings, thereby avoiding the often tedious process of filling out an online form. As soon as the button is clicked, the information is sent securely to the account that sent out the offer.