So, lots of talk this week about Snapchat turning down a 3B acquisition offer from Facebook. Was this a shrewd move, or an example of millennial entitlement run amok? Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram for 1B is starting to look like it was a pretty good deal for a company concerned about its waning teen …
Digital strategy, content, and cake
What do you get when you bring together 400 folks interested in digital strategy for content and community in higher education — and add cake? ConfabEDU offered a heady mix of ideas and energy for innovative content approaches in the digital/social/mobile world. Superb keynotes from Kristina Halvorson, Dan Roam, and Karen McGrane were interspersed with terrific sessions …
Friday 5 — 11.08.2013
Benedict Evans says mobile is eating the world, and I am inclined to believe him. Slide 7 (above) highlights remarkable smartphone growth juxtaposed against PC flatline. The news has been all TWTR all the time this week, with a few well-timed research reports and a Storify integration adding to the IPO hype. Yesterday, Twitter users Patrick …
It’s not online banking — it’s banking!
Continuous and miraculous advances in the digital sphere — cloud computing! big data! the internet of things! — lead us to have a high bar for digital experiences. So it’s particularly surprising when there are mainstream services out there, in this case a retail bank, that seem to have missed the memo on the integration …
Friday 5 — 11.01.2013
Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are …
Grokking Google+
It’s hard to grok Google+. On the one hand, since January 2013 Google+ user numbers have made it the undisputed second largest social network. In a similar vein, Mashable just published a breathless Google+ for beginners how-to that calls it “an intriguing network for all users.” On the other hand, web traffic referrals from Google+ …
Friday 5 — 10.25.2013
For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation. In an …
Tale of a social media meme
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a social media account will eventually have a regrettable public post. Certainly, that’s the assumption of 59% of teen social media users who have deleted or edited something they posted in the past. Adults are not immune to social media remorse: 74% of …
Friday 5 — 10.18.2013
Google Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is …
Mastering digital project momentum
What are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone? We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an …