At its much-hyped F8 developer conference Thursday, Facebook introduced a revamped profile page and an updated version of its Open Graph for developers, allowing friends to go beyond just "liking" something to share their experiences as they happen. As part of the emphasis on what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls "real-time serendipity" and "finding patterns in friends' activity," the company, as rumored, has partnered with more than a dozen high-profile media companies to launch a new wave of social applications across music, movies, TV, news and gaming geared to instant sharing among friends. Among the initial group of companies introducing new Facebook apps are Spotify, iHeartRadio, Rdio Netflix, Hulu, The Washington Post and Yahoo. With new features and a bevy of media partners, Facebook clearly wants to outflank growing social media rivals such as Google+ and Twitter, by keeping users even more tightly wedded to the social network used by more than 500 million people each day. Upgrading the profile page is one of the ways Facebook hopes to keep that number growing, along with increasing usage by existing users. The centerpiece of that effort is a new feature called Timeline that organizes all a user's content across photos, updates and apps in a timeline view stretching back to when they joined Facebook. "It's the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up," Zuckerberg says, noting that they've been working on it all year. "Timeline is the story of your life." Designed for both the Web and mobile versions of the site, Timeline will allow people to select a personal photo as an enlarged cover image for the page. They will also be able to add the newly launched media apps to generate specific "reports" about things like meals they have cooked or runs they have taken. Zuckerberg emphasized that Timeline also puts controls at hand to determine what content is shown, how it's displayed, and who sees it. "You have complete control over your Timeline," he said, noting that the new feature will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks. Along with Timeline, Facebook also recently introduced a new Twitter-like feature for the home page called Ticker, geared to showing friends activities in real-time. Zuckerberg described at as "a lightweight stream of everything going on around you" that he projected would increase sharing by an order of magnitude. Ticker will also work in tandem with apps built with the upgraded Open Graph platform. For instance, if someone posts an update that she is listening to a particular song on Spotify, a friend who saw the message could click on the link in the feed to listen to the song together. The same would apply to a TV show someone was watching via Hulu or a game she was playing like Zynga's Words with Friends. In addition to the media- and gaming-oriented apps, Facebook also unveiled a new set of lifestyle apps covering various activities, including cooking, running, fashion, and biking to help expand the range of things users can update friends about instantly. While the new features certainly expand on the now ubiquitous "Like" button Facebook launched last year at its F8 event, they also test the limits of just how much and how often people want to interact with Facebook. The Ticker feed and changes to the news feed rolled out earlier this week have already triggered a backlash among users. That's nothing new for Facebook -- which has had its share of privacy-related stumbles in the past. But as it pushes to increase sharing "by an order of magnitude," in Zuckerberg's words, it risks wider disapproval. "With its new Timeline and app changes that bring real-time discovery of content and activities, Facebook is positioning itself as not just your social graph online, but your life online," noted Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran. He acknowledged that the changes would trump Google+ and could open up new, more targeted advertising opportunities for marketers. But he also said concerns about privacy and how to use these tools effectively "will make it a slow go" for users. He added that Timeline, Ticker and the new apps make the user experience on Facebook even more personal. "So you really have to make sure if you collect any information, that it's very transparent," he said. The Inside Facebook blog points out that previously, users had to both grant an app initial permissions upon install and fill out a sharing prompt every time they wanted to publish something to Facebook. "Now, users will grant a new type of permission that allows an app the ability to instantly publish activity without showing a prompt." New buttons for sharing what people have "Listened," "Watched," or "Read" through Timeline will provide more specific information about a user's activities than simply clicking the Like button. One company that hopes to benefit from more sharing activity on Facebook is Yahoo. The struggling Internet giant added a new service Thursday that lets users see and share what Yahoo News articles their Facebook friends are reading. Through the opt-in feature, people will see images of friends who are also signed up at the top of Yahoo News pages. Automatic updates back on Facebook will also show what friends are reading. Separately, people can also tell others what TV shows they are watching on their Facebook profile page through Yahoo's IntoNow social TV app. The deeper integration between Yahoo and Facebook comes even as the Web portal continues to lose ground in display advertising to the social networking powerhouse. Facebook's global revenue is expected to more than double to $4.27 billion this year, with $3.86 billion of that total coming from advertising, according to a forecast this week from eMarketer.
By the end of 2011, there will be 550 million people worldwide using their mobile phones to engage in social networking, says ABI Research. And by 2016, that number will explode to 1.7 billion as mobile platforms become the predominant way to access these services. But such rapid growth is not all good news for the undisputed leader in social networking, Facebook, ABI analysts contend. "A huge problem for Facebook is that while on the Web, it is a platform -- on mobile, it's just another application," says Senior Analyst Aapo Markkanen. While Facebook has a massive presence on mobile, the company has not had a proven ad strategy for monetizing that activity, he warns. Worse, both Google and Apple appear to be making headway in integrating basic social networking functions into their competing operating systems. Unlike Facebook and its legacy as a Web site, Google+ was designed from the ground up with mobile integration in mind; it hooks more seamlessly into the core functions of the Android operating system. Likewise, ABI expects Apple's partnership with Twitter in the next iteration of the iOS operating system to be especially attractive to developers. The Twitter integration will give developers a verifiable social identity that can be used for new ways of personalizing apps and creating new ad products. With Google and Apple both building social networking functionality into their respective OSes in ways that benefit Facebook rivals, the current leader in the space will need to rethink its approach on mobile. "To strengthen its hand in the short term, we expect Facebook to aggressively take advantage of HTML5, but in the longer term, it should absolutely become a mobile operating system of its own," says Markkanen. A Facebook phone? Well, back in 2006 didn't we chuckle about a Google phone, too?
Social video analytics firm Visible Measures this morning said it closed on a $13 million round of financing led by DAG Ventures, but also including Advance Publications, the owner of consumer magazine publisher Conde Nast, which publishes titles such as Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and related websites as well as Epicurious.com and reddit.com. Other backers in the round included existing investors: General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital. Visible Measures, which has raised more than $45 million in financing to date, said the new round would be used to "accelerate the growth" of its platform for analyzing social video and advertising on it. "Advance Publications, with their incredible breadth of media properties, will be an excellent partner to help us increase the scope of our offerings," stated Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin. "We believe that the application of data and analytics will be the catalyst to shift billions of TV ad dollars online over time," added Andrew Siegel, senior vice president-strategy & corporate development at Advance Publications. "Visible Measures is uniquely positioned to deliver Google-style ROI measurement across the increasingly sought-after segment known as Earned Media." In addition to expanding its platform, Visible Measures said it is increasing its sales force and support infrastructure to service, including its offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and London, in addition to its headquarters in Boston. Among the new hires it has made, are Google's previous head of sales and enterprise for Google Analytics, Paul Botto, who has been named general manager of analytics & senior vice president-business development at Visible Measures.
Former Yahoo executive Ramsey McGrory just found a new home as CEO of social-media software company Clearspring. "Data and social are where incredible innovation is happening," McGrory said Monday in a nod to Clearspring's expertise. At Yahoo, McGrory led the Yahoo US data business and digital advertising exchange Right Media. McGrory replaces Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar, who will continue to drive the company's product and marketing in his new role as executive chairman. Current Chairman Ted Leonsis will remain on the board of directors. "Clearspring is at an inflection point," said Radfar. "Ramsey's operational expertise in scaling data-driven and large-platform businesses operations is just what we need to take our rapidly growing company to the next level." In May, Clearspring secured $20 million in new funding, with which it planned to consider acquisitions opportunities, along with other options to broaden its product portfolio. Founded in 2004, Clearspring has raised a total of $60 million to expand its Web presence, while managing to redefine its core business along the way. Currently, millions of Web sites rely on Clearspring's AddThis platform, where visitors can share articles, videos and other content across their social networks. Having accumulated ample consumer data in the process, Clearspring has built a business connecting major brands with millions of Web Internet users in real-time. With revenue on track to triple this year, according to Clearspring, the company recently said it was hiring a new employee nearly every week, which it expected to result in almost doubling its staff this year. Clearspring recently announced the integration of Audience Platform with major demand-side platforms, including WPP's Media Innovation Group, Invite Media, MediaMath, DataXu, Turn and Yahoo's Right Media Exchange. The platform taps into the company's real-time data processing engine to aggregate influence and intent data from across the AddThis platform, which now reaches 1 billion unique users monthly. AddThis, available on the Web and mobile, offers various marketing insights into consumers through social signals, such as Facebook "likes," interests and purchase intent. Along with Institutional Venture Partners, Clearspring investors including New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, former AOL vice chair and president Ted Leonsis, AOL co-founder Steve Case, Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway.
There appears to be a new digital divide, but this one has nothing to do with socioeconomics. For reasons that are not altogether clear, women now dominate men in their use of social media as a communication tool, according to a new study from Harris Interactive conducted on behalf of mobile VOIP provider Rebtel. Among online adults, 68% of women now communicate via social media, compared to 54% of men in the United States. By Harris Interactive's estimation, that translates to approximately 75 million women who communicate with friends using social networks versus 57 million men. "Our findings show that men tend to lag behind women when it comes to communicating with others through social media, which debunks other recent studies that suggest that men are more savvy networkers between the sexes," said Andreas Bernstrom, CEO of Rebtel. Among those online adults who use social media to communicate, one out of five -- 19% -- expect to use social media more in the near future to communicate with these groups, representative of approximately 27 million American adults. Of this group men -- 23% -- are significantly more likely to indicate this than women -- 16%. That said, related findings show that 11% expect to use social media less in the near future to communicate, while 70% expect to use social media the same amount in the near future to communicate with these groups, with women -- 74% -- being significantly more likely to indicate this than men, at 65%. Specifically, among the 93% of the U.S. online adult population that communicates with family other than in-person, 60% of women communicate with family through social media, compared to just 42% of men. That equals about 67 million women communicating with family via social media versus 44 million men. Evan among the 58% of the U.S. online adult population that communicate with work colleagues other than in-person, 34% of women -- compare to 22% of men -- use this method to stay in touch. According to Harris Interactive, that comes out to 21 million women who communicate with work colleagues compared to 16 million men. When given the option to choose one communication method to stay in touch with friends (other than in-person), 18% of women -- compared to 12% of men -- choose social media. Men are now slightly more likely to use phones to communicate: 75% versus 73% of women.
At its much-hyped F8 developer conference Thursday, Facebook introduced a revamped profile page and an updated version of its Open Graph for developers, allowing friends to go beyond just "liking" something to share their experiences as they happen. As part of the emphasis on what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls "real-time serendipity" and "finding patterns in friends' activity," the company, as rumored, has partnered with more than a dozen high-profile media companies to launch a new wave of social applications across music, movies, TV, news and gaming geared to instant sharing among friends. Among the initial group of companies introducing new Facebook apps are Spotify, iHeartRadio, Rdio Netflix, Hulu, The Washington Post and Yahoo. With new features and a bevy of media partners, Facebook clearly wants to outflank growing social media rivals such as Google+ and Twitter, by keeping users even more tightly wedded to the social network used by more than 500 million people each day. Upgrading the profile page is one of the ways Facebook hopes to keep that number growing, along with increasing usage by existing users. The centerpiece of that effort is a new feature called Timeline that organizes all a user's content across photos, updates and apps in a timeline view stretching back to when they joined Facebook. "It's the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up," Zuckerberg says, noting that they've been working on it all year. "Timeline is the story of your life." Designed for both the Web and mobile versions of the site, Timeline will allow people to select a personal photo as an enlarged cover image for the page. They will also be able to add the newly launched media apps to generate specific "reports" about things like meals they have cooked or runs they have taken. Zuckerberg emphasized that Timeline also puts controls at hand to determine what content is shown, how it's displayed, and who sees it. "You have complete control over your Timeline," he said, noting that the new feature will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks. Along with Timeline, Facebook also recently introduced a new Twitter-like feature for the home page called Ticker, geared to showing friends activities in real-time. Zuckerberg described at as "a lightweight stream of everything going on around you" that he projected would increase sharing by an order of magnitude. Ticker will also work in tandem with apps built with the upgraded Open Graph platform. For instance, if someone posts an update that she is listening to a particular song on Spotify, a friend who saw the message could click on the link in the feed to listen to the song together. The same would apply to a TV show someone was watching via Hulu or a game she was playing like Zynga's Words with Friends. In addition to the media- and gaming-oriented apps, Facebook also unveiled a new set of lifestyle apps covering various activities, including cooking, running, fashion, and biking to help expand the range of things users can update friends about instantly. While the new features certainly expand on the now ubiquitous "Like" button Facebook launched last year at its F8 event, they also test the limits of just how much and how often people want to interact with Facebook. The Ticker feed and changes to the news feed rolled out earlier this week have already triggered a backlash among users. That's nothing new for Facebook -- which has had its share of privacy-related stumbles in the past. But as it pushes to increase sharing "by an order of magnitude," in Zuckerberg's words, it risks wider disapproval. "With its new Timeline and app changes that bring real-time discovery of content and activities, Facebook is positioning itself as not just your social graph online, but your life online," noted Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran. He acknowledged that the changes would trump Google+ and could open up new, more targeted advertising opportunities for marketers. But he also said concerns about privacy and how to use these tools effectively "will make it a slow go" for users. He added that Timeline, Ticker and the new apps make the user experience on Facebook even more personal. "So you really have to make sure if you collect any information, that it's very transparent," he said. The Inside Facebook blog points out that previously, users had to both grant an app initial permissions upon install and fill out a sharing prompt every time they wanted to publish something to Facebook. "Now, users will grant a new type of permission that allows an app the ability to instantly publish activity without showing a prompt." New buttons for sharing what people have "Listened," "Watched," or "Read" through Timeline will provide more specific information about a user's activities than simply clicking the Like button. One company that hopes to benefit from more sharing activity on Facebook is Yahoo. The struggling Internet giant added a new service Thursday that lets users see and share what Yahoo News articles their Facebook friends are reading. Through the opt-in feature, people will see images of friends who are also signed up at the top of Yahoo News pages. Automatic updates back on Facebook will also show what friends are reading. Separately, people can also tell others what TV shows they are watching on their Facebook profile page through Yahoo's IntoNow social TV app. The deeper integration between Yahoo and Facebook comes even as the Web portal continues to lose ground in display advertising to the social networking powerhouse. Facebook's global revenue is expected to more than double to $4.27 billion this year, with $3.86 billion of that total coming from advertising, according to a forecast this week from eMarketer.
One proven way to increase effectiveness and lower your costs is earned media coupled with social optimization. With the social share button being one click away from spreading good content, the connection between "earned" and "paid" is undeniable. Intent is everything, if someone shares, tweets, comments, etc., it all hits the graph and spreads to friends. That's gold! Where brands fall short is the follow through engagement, re-posting the best-trending content means not just your super fans become your evangelists. Without good content the engagement that drives reach will not happen and social has become the best way to integrate "paid," "earned" and "owned" media (PEOM) like never before. Examples from a social perspective: Paid: Buying Facebook ads, Twitter promoted ads and display ads / TV spots Earned: Blog or news about your product, conversation on your social sites Owned: A brand's own social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and websites, all used to drive interaction The fact that consumers are connected and the social graph is melding paid, earned and owned media presents challenges in synthesizing and optimizing these three channels. Since social has truly leveled the playing field it takes work and here is where the "Earned" comes in. The majority of content is not being leveraged to its maximum due to poor tracking and the inability to be responsive. Creating more engagement on what's most relevant not only expands the brand's reach but also maximizes those paid assets. Earned media's biggest payoff is from behavioral shared connections compelled to create reviews, a blog post, a comment or a tweet, people sharing their thoughts on your brand with their social network. Understanding intent and behavior around all that content gives brands a competitive advantage. All content being shared is reduced to a link and with one click hitting one of the major social networks. Word-of-mouth marketing now spreads at the speed of a button click and that's why earned media has become so important to a marketing campaign. Social is a horizontal layer touching every part of your business, from customer service to customer acquisition, to customer retention. There are different performance metrics for each point along the marketing funnel. Now more pressure is on paid and owned media teams to streamline their coordination or lose the opportunity of momentum. As the barriers are being torn down and silos altered, a new form of media collaboration is being created. Chase McMichael, Co-Founder and CEO, InfiniGraph
I've been watching the new Facebook stewing in the crockpot since yesterday morning, and have discovered the recipe for making it: To a base of existing Facebook friends and surfing habits, add three tablespoons of Google+ Circles along the left-hand margin, a pound of Flipboard to the News Feed, and a heavy dollop of Twitter along the right hand side. Then, add a raft of user complaints, simmer for a while, and behold: it's the hotly controversial new Facebook! What a stinky stew! The level of engagement with how awful the new Facebook allegedly tastes has been so high that it almost seems like a scheme to goose Facebook's already stratospheric time-spent statistics, but I digress. As I've been tracking this bumper crop of user complaints -- at least one of which even compared it to Netflix! -- I've been wondering if this is a recipe in search of people who want to consume it. Facebook had a simple enough way to explain the changes it unveiled yesterday, particularly the ones to the News Feed: "Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won't have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven't visited Facebook for a while, the first things you'll see are top photos and statuses posted while you've been away. They're marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner." Users, per usual, don't like it -- even if the change sounds sensible enough -- but that's not the core concern. It isn't the first time that a folksy explanation about changes on the Facebook blog has unleashed outrage that once was reserved for real crimes like bank robbery, or murder. The core concern - or maybe I'll just downgrade it to a sense of wonderment -- should be whether so much change, in such a short time, is even necessary. And I write this even before the earth trembles yet again with the changes to Facebook that will be announced later today at Facebook's F8 developer conference. These changes, which are said to revolve around sharing content, caused Mashable's Ben Parr, who was pre-briefed, to post earlier: "The Facebook you know and (don't) love will be forever transformed. The news that will come out of Facebook during the next few weeks will be the biggest things to come out of the company since the launch of the Facebook Platform."Of course, many of the changes have to do with the fact that Facebook is a little too freaked out by Google+. Yes, Facebook is too freaked out about Google+! But yesterday proved that Facebook seems to be freaked out for all the wrong reasons. Instead of being concerned about users departing for Google+ out of sheer frustration with Facebook's never-ending cascade of new features, it's entirely focused on the antithesis: on building out new features that mimic, or better, what can be found on Google+ -- even if it frustrates users to such an extent that they seek out a rival social network that treats its users a little more delicately. It's favoring product over people. Now, there are smart people who pointed out yesterday that Facebook has to keep innovating. Said Edelman's Steve Rubel in a much commented-upon status update: "They have to keep advancing the product even if that means causing some to complain. If they stay still they won't continue to thrive. That's the lesson of the last 15 years of history and arguably the last 2000 years of commerce." Which is true. But it's a matter of degrees and approach. In less than two weeks Facebook will have launched Lists, a radical change to the News Feed, and a huge change in how content is shared, -- not to mention other changes, like how to alter privacy settings, that have also come in recent months. It's a lot to digest, even for sophisticated users. So what's the problem with Facebook's approach in rolling these changes out? That there is none. Sometimes features are previewed, sometimes they are not. Sometimes the new changes -- such as the News Feed and the ticker -- are the default, sometimes (like Facebook's Lists) they're not. The result is user confusion and frustration. I don't think Google+ will overtake Facebook any time soon, if at all. Still, when a worthy threat comes along, the bigger threat to the hegemony of Facebook is not in how broad its menu of features is, but in whether it leaves users with a taste in their mouths that's bad enough for them to consider making a switch. (Editor's note; Check out the agenda for OMMA Social San Francisco, slated for Oct. 27 at the Marriott Union Square.)
Look closer at social media numbers and TV ratings. Can you draw any conclusions? Exclusions? Fox spent much on marketing and public relations efforts for such new shows as "The X Factor" and "New Girl." Returning shows typically don't need as much. But perhaps "Glee" should have had a bit more. Looking at social media data from Trendrr.TV, a service that surveys shows' social media activity, "Glee" had more than 338,000 individual bits of social activity the day before its season premiere, the highest for any show -- and more than three times that of second-place "Dancing with the Stars." Trendrr.TV also said "Glee" had 72% "positive sentiment" in its social media results. Seems "Glee" could have used a bit more -- at least according to preliminary Nielsen numbers. The show was down a whopping 30% from its season premiere a year ago --to a 4.0 rating/11 share among 18-49ers. Programming and scheduling executives typically plan for viewership slips of some 8% to 10% year to year. But the "Glee" ratings seemed to open more than a few eyes, especially since it ended up not even being the most viewed show of the night! That honor went to the show following on Fox's schedule, "New Girl," with a stellar 4.8 rating/12 share. Did viewers' fickleness cause "Glee's" ratings drop? Or was it the news of departing cast members and storyline changes? Stuff happens in television, most times out of the blue, that you can't explain. Last year around this time Fox took a big hit when its highly touted drama "Lone Star" just didn't "open" -- at all. "Glee" isn't in this category, with a still very strong 4.0 rating among 18-49 viewers and better results among younger viewers. But its lower premiere ratings show that viewers' tastes can be slippery, even with the new-fangled barometer that everyone wants to ogle: social media. "New Girl" grabbed a lot of social media interest -- in third place among all network shows, according to Trendrr.tv . But it had just 65,000 bits of activity, lower than "Glee"'s (although it had 89% positive sentiment). Another big Tuesday show, CBS' "NCIS," came in fourth place with 37,000 bits of interest, 81% positive. It received a more predictable 4.3 rating/12 share, up 5% from a year ago. Still, not all social media data is the same. Banyan Branch, a social media agency, said shows such as "Glee," "The Playboy Club" and "Charlie's Angels" generated almost "no" recent online excitement. Television shows aren't the only medium that can be fleeting. Social media about the shows might be, as well.
By the end of 2011, there will be 550 million people worldwide using their mobile phones to engage in social networking, says ABI Research. And by 2016, that number will explode to 1.7 billion as mobile platforms become the predominant way to access these services. But such rapid growth is not all good news for the undisputed leader in social networking, Facebook, ABI analysts contend. "A huge problem for Facebook is that while on the Web, it is a platform -- on mobile, it's just another application," says Senior Analyst Aapo Markkanen. While Facebook has a massive presence on mobile, the company has not had a proven ad strategy for monetizing that activity, he warns. Worse, both Google and Apple appear to be making headway in integrating basic social networking functions into their competing operating systems. Unlike Facebook and its legacy as a Web site, Google+ was designed from the ground up with mobile integration in mind; it hooks more seamlessly into the core functions of the Android operating system. Likewise, ABI expects Apple's partnership with Twitter in the next iteration of the iOS operating system to be especially attractive to developers. The Twitter integration will give developers a verifiable social identity that can be used for new ways of personalizing apps and creating new ad products. With Google and Apple both building social networking functionality into their respective OSes in ways that benefit Facebook rivals, the current leader in the space will need to rethink its approach on mobile. "To strengthen its hand in the short term, we expect Facebook to aggressively take advantage of HTML5, but in the longer term, it should absolutely become a mobile operating system of its own," says Markkanen. A Facebook phone? Well, back in 2006 didn't we chuckle about a Google phone, too?
Social video analytics firm Visible Measures this morning said it closed on a $13 million round of financing led by DAG Ventures, but also including Advance Publications, the owner of consumer magazine publisher Conde Nast, which publishes titles such as Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and related websites as well as Epicurious.com and reddit.com. Other backers in the round included existing investors: General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital. Visible Measures, which has raised more than $45 million in financing to date, said the new round would be used to "accelerate the growth" of its platform for analyzing social video and advertising on it. "Advance Publications, with their incredible breadth of media properties, will be an excellent partner to help us increase the scope of our offerings," stated Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin. "We believe that the application of data and analytics will be the catalyst to shift billions of TV ad dollars online over time," added Andrew Siegel, senior vice president-strategy & corporate development at Advance Publications. "Visible Measures is uniquely positioned to deliver Google-style ROI measurement across the increasingly sought-after segment known as Earned Media." In addition to expanding its platform, Visible Measures said it is increasing its sales force and support infrastructure to service, including its offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and London, in addition to its headquarters in Boston. Among the new hires it has made, are Google's previous head of sales and enterprise for Google Analytics, Paul Botto, who has been named general manager of analytics & senior vice president-business development at Visible Measures.
Former Yahoo executive Ramsey McGrory just found a new home as CEO of social-media software company Clearspring. "Data and social are where incredible innovation is happening," McGrory said Monday in a nod to Clearspring's expertise. At Yahoo, McGrory led the Yahoo US data business and digital advertising exchange Right Media. McGrory replaces Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar, who will continue to drive the company's product and marketing in his new role as executive chairman. Current Chairman Ted Leonsis will remain on the board of directors. "Clearspring is at an inflection point," said Radfar. "Ramsey's operational expertise in scaling data-driven and large-platform businesses operations is just what we need to take our rapidly growing company to the next level." In May, Clearspring secured $20 million in new funding, with which it planned to consider acquisitions opportunities, along with other options to broaden its product portfolio. Founded in 2004, Clearspring has raised a total of $60 million to expand its Web presence, while managing to redefine its core business along the way. Currently, millions of Web sites rely on Clearspring's AddThis platform, where visitors can share articles, videos and other content across their social networks. Having accumulated ample consumer data in the process, Clearspring has built a business connecting major brands with millions of Web Internet users in real-time. With revenue on track to triple this year, according to Clearspring, the company recently said it was hiring a new employee nearly every week, which it expected to result in almost doubling its staff this year. Clearspring recently announced the integration of Audience Platform with major demand-side platforms, including WPP's Media Innovation Group, Invite Media, MediaMath, DataXu, Turn and Yahoo's Right Media Exchange. The platform taps into the company's real-time data processing engine to aggregate influence and intent data from across the AddThis platform, which now reaches 1 billion unique users monthly. AddThis, available on the Web and mobile, offers various marketing insights into consumers through social signals, such as Facebook "likes," interests and purchase intent. Along with Institutional Venture Partners, Clearspring investors including New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, former AOL vice chair and president Ted Leonsis, AOL co-founder Steve Case, Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway.
There appears to be a new digital divide, but this one has nothing to do with socioeconomics. For reasons that are not altogether clear, women now dominate men in their use of social media as a communication tool, according to a new study from Harris Interactive conducted on behalf of mobile VOIP provider Rebtel. Among online adults, 68% of women now communicate via social media, compared to 54% of men in the United States. By Harris Interactive's estimation, that translates to approximately 75 million women who communicate with friends using social networks versus 57 million men. "Our findings show that men tend to lag behind women when it comes to communicating with others through social media, which debunks other recent studies that suggest that men are more savvy networkers between the sexes," said Andreas Bernstrom, CEO of Rebtel. Among those online adults who use social media to communicate, one out of five -- 19% -- expect to use social media more in the near future to communicate with these groups, representative of approximately 27 million American adults. Of this group men -- 23% -- are significantly more likely to indicate this than women -- 16%. That said, related findings show that 11% expect to use social media less in the near future to communicate, while 70% expect to use social media the same amount in the near future to communicate with these groups, with women -- 74% -- being significantly more likely to indicate this than men, at 65%. Specifically, among the 93% of the U.S. online adult population that communicates with family other than in-person, 60% of women communicate with family through social media, compared to just 42% of men. That equals about 67 million women communicating with family via social media versus 44 million men. Evan among the 58% of the U.S. online adult population that communicate with work colleagues other than in-person, 34% of women -- compare to 22% of men -- use this method to stay in touch. According to Harris Interactive, that comes out to 21 million women who communicate with work colleagues compared to 16 million men. When given the option to choose one communication method to stay in touch with friends (other than in-person), 18% of women -- compared to 12% of men -- choose social media. Men are now slightly more likely to use phones to communicate: 75% versus 73% of women.
Is social media making individual editors obsolete? Well, MTV Networks doesn’t think so, and, according to its EVP of Digital Media Dermot McCormack, MTV is the most social brand online. That’s why they recently brought back Matt Pinfield, host of MTV’s alternative music program 120 Minutes from 1995 to 1999. He curated content then, and -- albeit with more help from social sharing platforms -- Pinfield is curating now. McCormack thinks Pinfield’s reemergence is a great example of a smart media company (again, MTV) repurposing old resources to new ends. Still, what does Pinfield have that a million tweeters and Facebook “likers” don’t? In a word, “authority,” says McCormack. Make no mistake, authority still has a huge role to play in media, McCormack says.