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Snapchat is at the mercy of competitors like Facebook and Google that can simply copy its products.Advertisers say Snapchat's unique selling point is that it is cool, new, and has created its own advertising "currency."But ad-buyers also need Snapchat to do more to prove its ads actually drive sales if they are going to commit meaningful budgets to the platform.

the barrier to entry for new entrants is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old.

Users under 25, it says, visit Snapchat more than 20 times and spend more than 30 minutes on the app each day. It may have fewer users than its rivals, but, for now at least, they are highly-engaged

In a market economy, the focus is on transactions. In a gift economy, the focus is on relationships.

In a market economy, people use money as a medium of exchange — a financial currency. In a gift economy, people use social currencies.

Social media are fundamentally gift economies. People are there to cultivate relationships, not conduct transactions. They exchange social currencies, not financial currencies. And status is earned not bought.

Scrumban was designed for more mature agile teams, those working in an unpredictable environment where plans and requirements constantly shift, and/or teams who are supporting existing products rather than creating new ones.

In a nutshell, Scrumban is driven by events and demand rather than a pre-established schedule. It focuses on minimal planning, providing just enough of a backlog to give the team enough important work to do next.

Scrumban also ignores the focus on egalitarian, cross-functional teams that Scrum emphasizes. Instead, it embraces specialized roles within the team (a more realistic way to handle marketing skill sets).

Fully 65 percent of organizations pile social media on top of other responsibilities, while only 27 percent focus exclusively on the emerging platforms. Sixty-nine percent are dissatisfied or only "somewhat satisfied" with how they measure their social media effort. Only 31 percent are "satisfied" or "very satisfied."

Just 13 percent of communicators agreed that their organization was "an advanced, well-run machine," while 64 percent said they use social media regularly, but have more to learn and accomplish. Another 23 percent outed themselves as "newbies."

while lots of marketers spend lots of money on Facebook today, relatively few find success. In August, Forrester surveyed 395 marketers and eBusiness executives at large companies across the US, Canada and the UK — and these executives told us that Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.

ompany focuses too little on the thing marketers want most: driving genuine engagement between companies and their customers. Your sales materials tease marketers with the promise that you’ll help them create such connections. But in reality, you rarely do. Everyone who clicks the like button on a brand’s Facebook page volunteers to receive that brand’s messages — but on average, you only show each brand’s posts to 16% of its fans.

company isn’t good enough at the pure advertising business onto which you’ve shifted your focus. We estimate your site now delivers tens of billions of display ads every day. But fewer than 15% of those ads leverage your ever-growing cache of social data to target relevant audiences. And your site’s static-image ad units offer marketers less impact per impression than they could achieve with the ad units other sites offer.

.Designate staff and agency roles: “Make sure everyone essential is there and that each person has a clear set of responsibilities”,

5.Streamline necessary approvals: Obtain pre-approvals where needed from legal. Capital One even had a lawyer on call to ensure their ability to react fast.

6.Rehearse the process: The command center team needs to practice “to see who makes the final calls and pushes the buttons”, said McLean. MasterCard does “mock examples first so we’re ready for prime time”, Cohen reported.

While women make up about 70% of the PR workforce, they only hold about 30% of the top positions in the industry.

This raises the question, are big agencies losing talented women — some of whom start firms that ultimately become competition because of rigid policies?

A recent study by Bain & Company found that 43% of women aspire to top management within the first two years of their position, compared with 34% of men. “Both genders are equally confident about their ability to reach a top management position at that stage,” reads a blog post on the research. “This suggests that women are entering the workforce with the wind in their sails, feeling highly qualified after success at the university level.”

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.

Twitter has now introduced consumer video uploading, purchased video analytics provider/influencer broker Niche, launched live streaming app Periscope and rolled out auto-play video.

Twitter’s mobile focus means that more than 90% of video views on the network come from mobile devices. For another, he said, Twitter is a superior place for the interaction between creators and their fans.

Niche is another Twitter-owned avenue that can help creators make money. Niche acts as an intermediary between video producers and brands, and Singh said Niche has doubled the amount it’s paying creators since Twitter acquired the company in February. (A Twitter spokesperson clarified that the average deal is now double the previous total.)

study reinforces the importance of context that advertisers need to consider when deciding what content to promote and where via native advertising.

Over 8o percent of respondents said brand mattered, which poses a challenge for advertisers aiming to use native ad units to drive awareness.

Visitors to online news sites said they are more open to advertising on those sites that focus on a story rather than pitching a product.

Native advertising has come under fire for being deceptive. It is, claim critics, an attempt to fool readers into thinking they’re consuming content produced by the publication itself when in fact they’re consuming an ad. It’s this criticism that led Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai to ban ads masquerading as articles.

Outbrain banned native advertising from the inventory of content it promotes on websites.

In an AdAge post, Rafat Ali suggests the following ways to improve branded content: Approach a native advertising assignment from the customer’s perspective, answering their questions and solving their problems. Go deep, with a narrow focus and uniquely valuable content that appeals to a defined audience subset. Offer data not easily found elsewhere that provides genuine insight, including new ways to understand the business. Approach native advertising like an editor, not a marketer.

86 percent of marketers say they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. To accomplish this, the report found that marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects.

Marketing complexity is growing: More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technological change, mobile lifestyles, and an explosion of potential marketing channels via the Internet of Things (IoT) will change the field the most by 2020. This is driven by the billions of possible interactions these channels will create between a company and its customers.

The top marketing channels are those that can be personalized: The top channels to the customer in 2020 will be social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), mobile apps (47%), and mobile web (46%).

The primary reason we’ve seen our best open rate climb ever upwards has been an ever-increasing focus on list hygiene.

It’s natural that curiosity-based subject lines would become more powerful as the inbox gets more crowded.

Scarcity, on the other hand, is a powerful tool but is best used conservatively as its impact diminishes the more it’s put into play. And while scarcity is a great driver of sales, it is often less effective at driving your overall open rate up.

When Should You Use Facebook Canvas Ads? There are lots of applications for Canvas ads. Whether you want to implement a conversion campaign, grow brand awareness, or generate more clicks to your site, these are a great idea. If you want to elicit a direct response, consider using a format that displays your products with a CTA button. If brand awareness is your goal, focus your efforts on creating engaging visuals and copy to attract as many views as possible. In this case, also consider paying based on CPM (impressions) rather than CPC (clicks). This will help you optimize your views.

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips.

LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds.

advertiser interest in Snapchat is flat to dwindling, as many opt to move toward Instagram

Issues with Snap include continued issues over measurement, difficulty in finding content, influencers moving to other platforms and lack of outreach to agencies and brands from Snap

Some brands "think Snapchat is dying, and they want their brand associated with a platform that is growing,"

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”