Microsoft unveiled mobile phones about two weeks ago on Facebook. The handsets, the Kin One and the Kin Two, aim at a younger crowd who live in social networks. Rather than wait for the product launch, Microsoft reversed the order and unveiled the campaign first. Verizon Wireless holds the exclusive deal in the United States for the phones made by Sharp. Both become available mid-May. And although they have yet to launch, the Facebook page supports more than 100,000 Fans. All that love prompted Microsoft briefly to put the brakes on the campaign. Facebook Fans are important -- but Mich Mathews, chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told attendees at the exclusive 40-exec invitation-only PTTOW event in Dana Point, Calif. that when brands play in social, it's just as important to follow the writing on the wall, whether it's positive or negative. Marketing experts who gathered for the two-day event agree that it has become a continual learning process to integrate social media into campaigns. And it's even tougher when the audience becomes consumers ranging in age between 14 and 34. This age group tends to discuss likes and dislikes online more freely. They talk about brands whether or not those brands have official sites and pages on Facebook or YouTube. For brands, the real question becomes how to participate and become more social with consumers. But some have begun to wonder whether the name reflects the real essence of the campaign. Mike Murphy, Facebook's vice president of global sales, prefers that folks do not call Facebook "a pure social media site," but agrees that's the name that will stick until the industry can collectively create a better definition for the success it has seen. "We have a long way to go to figure out the best model," he says. Brands are slowly figuring it out. Facebook Fan pages have become "a sustainable asset even after the campaign ends." And while it gives brands a "social" platform to continue the conversation, it also means that marketers must tend to the upkeep and keep consumers engaged. Carol Kruse, vice president of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola Co., likens social media campaigns to puppies. Everyone wants a puppy. The problem is that puppies grow into dogs that need walking, feeding and lots of love and care. "Social media is like a puppy -- everyone wants to start a community," she says. "What they forget is the 24/7 365 reality TV show. You have to provide the content, engage the community and focus on what's important rather than just let it fall." Brands that start a community must keep it alive. Coca-Cola has millions of members -- about the most of any company on Facebook, and those members run the community. It keeps the Fan authentic and the community members brand advocates. Fans tend to educate those who comment on negative stuff. "We have a well-fed, well-walked dog," Kruse says. "It's a couple of years old and thriving." Whether or not brands have an official presence, they are being discussed online. Allowing the community to talk among themselves becomes one way to keep costs in check and content fresh, says Hunter Walk, who heads product development at YouTube. "We get 24 hours of new content uploaded every minute," Walk says. "It's the best thing about my project, but also one of the most challenging, because we need to help the user find what they're looking for without a struggle." Aside from social media, the brands on the panel have begun to dabble in mobile campaigns. Kruse says in South Korea and Japan about 70% of the digital views for Coca-Cola come from mobile phones. Everything leads with digital in Africa. Creating an iPhone application continues as the biggest disservice that ad agencies can do to clients when introducing a mobile strategy. And it happens more often in the United States. Kruse wants to see more text-based campaigns reach all the people who text. Not only does Coca-Cola add mobile, but three different kinds. More of the marketer budget has moved over to not only target teens and young adults, but everyone. Microsoft has begun to experiment with location and mobile. The company has been working on a platform that allows the handset owner to view a street in Bing Maps as the merchant serves up a coupon for the store, Mathews says.
Amid a flurry of interest in social buying startups, LivingSocial on Thursday announced the completion of a Series C financing round worth $14 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with participation from U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures, and Steve Case's Revolution, LLC. Engaged in an industry-wide land-grab, LivingSocial plans to use the capital to expand into additional markets, bringing its LivingSocial Deals platform to more domestic cities this year. "We're constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO of LivingSocial. As such, LivingSocial on Thursday announced the launch of its Deals program in four new markets -- Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia -- bringing the total to 18 cities. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the startup raised $25 million in a Series B round just last month. Since then, social buying leader GroupOn secured $135 million from Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, along with Battery Ventures. (Rumor has it that the round valued GroupOn at about $1.3 billion.) Like GroupOn and its many copycats, LivingSocial offers deep discounts on local deals on everything from spas and sky diving lessons to hotels and restaurants. Discounts range from 50% to 70% of the normal prices. If enough people buy into the offers, everyone gets the deal. LivingSocial collects payment and passes it on, minus its fee, to the business. Like GroupOn, what makes the service so compelling is that people have an incentive to get their friends involved to make sure the minimum is hit. The company is launching "hyperlocal" deals for the Seattle area, which will be designed to provide merchants with ever greater reach. Founded in 2007, LivingSocial now claims an online community of 85 million people.
With so much business, money and ego surging into social media, there's an inherent race to become the biggest -- and fast. That's true whether you're with a social network, a business, or even if you're a single user. Indeed, there are benefits to popularity. We live in a world where more is presumed better than less, so implicit judgment usually favors size of membership, number of followers, connections and subscribers. Scale can bring influence, power and the ability to monetize. To be sure, many social media networks work better with scale, and some only work with scale. Being fat has its place, but being fat is not the only way. Skinny is important, too. My friend Jeff Sass and I came to that conclusion a few weeks ago. While most people focus on scale, we participate in a micro-community that delivers transformative value -- value that simply can't be compared to any large social network. It all started when five dads, including Jeff and me, were brought together last year through Sony's DigiDad blogger project. After the program ended, we discovered that we really liked each other and our different perspectives on parenting. So we decided to channel our long-distance friendships and social-media prowess into a new podcast called "Cast Of Dads, The Mother Of All Daddy Podcasts." We'd never even met in person until very recently, because we all live in different cities across North America. While we created an online talk show that's building a listener community of thousands, it had the unintended consequence of creating a completely separate and private online community comprised of just us five dads. Our social network goes beyond simply organizing ourselves for a talk show. Its purpose has evolved to become a hub to share important and not-so-important things going on in our lives, typically related to being a dad. We sometimes have several interactions a day, and these culminate in a live call every Sunday, when we record our show. Our public podcast aside, this group has become one of my favorite online social networks. The Cast of Dads offers a little more fun and camaraderie each day, and makes each Sunday especially enjoyable. The big deal here is that the most important online social networks don't have to be big. In fact, getting big often has the unintended consequence of becoming less focused, less relevant and less intimate. Big is the final step before "has-been." Importantly, online social networks don't even need sophisticated technology -- ours resides on Google groups, email and sometimes the phone! The only thing that matters is that your social network have passion, purpose and proponents. These three attributes alone can achieve transformative impact. Which micro communities are most important in your life?
Microsoft unveiled mobile phones about two weeks ago on Facebook. The handsets, the Kin One and the Kin Two, aim at a younger crowd who live in social networks. Rather than wait for the product launch, Microsoft reversed the order and unveiled the campaign first. Verizon Wireless holds the exclusive deal in the United States for the phones made by Sharp. Both become available mid-May. And although they have yet to launch, the Facebook page supports more than 100,000 Fans. All that love prompted Microsoft briefly to put the brakes on the campaign. Facebook Fans are important -- but Mich Mathews, chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told attendees at the exclusive 40-exec invitation-only PTTOW event in Dana Point, Calif. that when brands play in social, it's just as important to follow the writing on the wall, whether it's positive or negative. Marketing experts who gathered for the two-day event agree that it has become a continual learning process to integrate social media into campaigns. And it's even tougher when the audience becomes consumers ranging in age between 14 and 34. This age group tends to discuss likes and dislikes online more freely. They talk about brands whether or not those brands have official sites and pages on Facebook or YouTube. For brands, the real question becomes how to participate and become more social with consumers. But some have begun to wonder whether the name reflects the real essence of the campaign. Mike Murphy, Facebook's vice president of global sales, prefers that folks do not call Facebook "a pure social media site," but agrees that's the name that will stick until the industry can collectively create a better definition for the success it has seen. "We have a long way to go to figure out the best model," he says. Brands are slowly figuring it out. Facebook Fan pages have become "a sustainable asset even after the campaign ends." And while it gives brands a "social" platform to continue the conversation, it also means that marketers must tend to the upkeep and keep consumers engaged. Carol Kruse, vice president of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola Co., likens social media campaigns to puppies. Everyone wants a puppy. The problem is that puppies grow into dogs that need walking, feeding and lots of love and care. "Social media is like a puppy -- everyone wants to start a community," she says. "What they forget is the 24/7 365 reality TV show. You have to provide the content, engage the community and focus on what's important rather than just let it fall." Brands that start a community must keep it alive. Coca-Cola has millions of members -- about the most of any company on Facebook, and those members run the community. It keeps the Fan authentic and the community members brand advocates. Fans tend to educate those who comment on negative stuff. "We have a well-fed, well-walked dog," Kruse says. "It's a couple of years old and thriving." Whether or not brands have an official presence, they are being discussed online. Allowing the community to talk among themselves becomes one way to keep costs in check and content fresh, says Hunter Walk, who heads product development at YouTube. "We get 24 hours of new content uploaded every minute," Walk says. "It's the best thing about my project, but also one of the most challenging, because we need to help the user find what they're looking for without a struggle." Aside from social media, the brands on the panel have begun to dabble in mobile campaigns. Kruse says in South Korea and Japan about 70% of the digital views for Coca-Cola come from mobile phones. Everything leads with digital in Africa. Creating an iPhone application continues as the biggest disservice that ad agencies can do to clients when introducing a mobile strategy. And it happens more often in the United States. Kruse wants to see more text-based campaigns reach all the people who text. Not only does Coca-Cola add mobile, but three different kinds. More of the marketer budget has moved over to not only target teens and young adults, but everyone. Microsoft has begun to experiment with location and mobile. The company has been working on a platform that allows the handset owner to view a street in Bing Maps as the merchant serves up a coupon for the store, Mathews says.
Amid a flurry of interest in social buying startups, LivingSocial on Thursday announced the completion of a Series C financing round worth $14 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with participation from U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures, and Steve Case's Revolution, LLC. Engaged in an industry-wide land-grab, LivingSocial plans to use the capital to expand into additional markets, bringing its LivingSocial Deals platform to more domestic cities this year. "We're constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO of LivingSocial. As such, LivingSocial on Thursday announced the launch of its Deals program in four new markets -- Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia -- bringing the total to 18 cities. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the startup raised $25 million in a Series B round just last month. Since then, social buying leader GroupOn secured $135 million from Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, along with Battery Ventures. (Rumor has it that the round valued GroupOn at about $1.3 billion.) Like GroupOn and its many copycats, LivingSocial offers deep discounts on local deals on everything from spas and sky diving lessons to hotels and restaurants. Discounts range from 50% to 70% of the normal prices. If enough people buy into the offers, everyone gets the deal. LivingSocial collects payment and passes it on, minus its fee, to the business. Like GroupOn, what makes the service so compelling is that people have an incentive to get their friends involved to make sure the minimum is hit. The company is launching "hyperlocal" deals for the Seattle area, which will be designed to provide merchants with ever greater reach. Founded in 2007, LivingSocial now claims an online community of 85 million people.