Sarah Biedak: Why We Seek the New: A History and Future of Neophilia – An interesting look at why we all are always trying to discover the next best thing.

Jesse Davis: Social media measurement is difficult. There’s no one tool that does it all, no one strategy for measurement, no one department that owns this space, but this article by Fast Company has some interesting thoughts about how to organize, strategize and analyze social media ROI.

Melissa Lion: I don’t condone crying at your desk, however, if you’re up for a bit of a weep and some very beautiful stories from people all over the world, check out DearPhotograph.com. And hand me a tissue.

Julie Yamamoto: Video: where good ideas come from http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU.

Gary Rubin: How social media is changing college athletics and recruiting. http://espn.go.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/7510010/social-media-makes-mark-recruiting

Stefanie Week: Ever wonder what those tech-savvy youth are doing online and with their mobile phones these days? Ekaterina Walter from Intel compiled an impressive list of the top stats for how Gen Y is using technology.

What did you read this week?

SEM

Search got social in 2011 when Bing and Google laid the groundwork for changing how search results are delivered. High relevancy scores will only go so far—Bing now prioritizes results that your Facebook friends have liked, and Google is doing the same with its +1 service.

What’s coming in 2012: Social will be even more integrated in search. Users will see the value of signing in while searching. Search results move from a list of blue links to a collection of things your friends and those with similar interests have tried and liked. Search becomes personal in the way that shopping on Amazon has become personal. Marketers need to be ready by making sure that their pages are instrumented with social buttons. In 2012, the most important part of your Web page may just be a few pixels wide.

Web
HTML5 became real in 2011. No technology in recent memory has made it through the hype curve, past the trough of disillusionment, and back to practical and useful faster. HTML5 and its collection of related technologies are delivering on the promise of the Web like no other technology before it.

What’s coming in 2012: In 2012, designers and developers late to the game start learning HTML5 and usher in a new era of innovation in the sites we use daily. At the same time, Flash gets branded as old and tired—its traditional supporters start moving away.

On the enterprise front, corporate sites go roguish in 2012. Companies will realize they can’t centralize all content, navigation and style. So instead of policing the Web and forcing all content into a single set of templates and designs, they begin letting business groups do their own thing. A great home page, and some universal structure is needed, but everything below the header becomes fair game.  This will allow more flexibility in how different divisions, brands and product lines talk to their customers.

Mobile
Wow, there are a lot of apps . . . and a lot of them are bad. Mobile is almost ubiquitous. In 2010 and early 2011, everyone needed an app.  As we got deeper into 2011, people started to realize it’s easy to build an app, but it’s difficult to make it useful. As the year evolved, marketers figured out that building an app isn’t enough. You need a good-size promotion plan to drive adoption and a generous number of notifications to keep your audience using it semi-regularly.

What’s coming in 2012: More of the same: mobile usage will grow, and apps and mobile Web will get better. Marketers will often focus mobile strategies around existing social networks and social platforms rather than always building their own app.

You’ll also start to see more companies use HTML5 to create sites that scale for any device. Toward the end of 2012, the line will blur between Web and app.  The OS manufacturers will race to be able to find a way to allow the mobile Web to interact with the device just like apps do. The one who figures it out could shake up the playing field.

Social
“The only thing constant in life is change,” just like in social media.

The first part of the above statement is attributed to François de la Rochefoucauld. The second part can be attributed to marketers everywhere.

Organizations have matured significantly in the last year. Adoption of social CRM and social measurement systems has grown. Companies are determining what they can handle internally day-to-day, but are looking to agencies for planning, strategy, creation of sharable content, social promotions, and building systems and engagement tools.

What’s coming in 2012: 2012 will see a continued maturation of engagement tools and how companies approach social. From a user perspective, mobile will be the primary point of interaction with the leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  Expect to see more functions of the enterprise adopt social media. Corporate leaders will begin to see the value of social beyond marketing and PR.

Online Advertising
2011 was the year that didn’t. Near field communications were expected to enter the mainstream and they didn’t. Mobile advertising was expected to become more local and it didn’t. Contextual advertising was supposed to be everywhere, and it wasn’t. One thing that did happen was continued growth. Many experts predicted social media would steal some of online advertising’s thunder, but spend on online advertising continued to grow.

What’s coming in 2012: Hopefully some of the 2011 expectations will become real, but then again, we’re all still waiting for flying cars. I do think you’ll see an evolution in mobile advertising and in interactive signage. Mobile advertising will just keep getting better and become more integrated into the mobile context. Interactive or digital signage will be more responsive and more informative based on user input.

New page, new possibilities

A few ways Facebook’s changes have improved the brand and user experience:

• Custom tabs with iframes allow brands to streamline content and pass data directly to a hosting or analytics service. This is a big one, I’ll explain later.
• Admins can set and receive alerts based on fan activity and engagement.
• Brand page layouts are now similar to personal pages—five photos on the top and tabs on the left.
• Both fans and administrators have new filters for the wall that help prioritize wall content.
• Admins can now represent their page when interacting with other pages.

Which Facebook changes will have the biggest impact on marketers?

1. iframes, additional analytics and opportunities to serve up highly interactive content make custom tabs even hotter. With iframes, marketers can deliver more target—based on the user’s location and referral source—and more engaging content than ever before. Add Google Analytics to any tab for a deeper understanding of how users are interacting with its content.
2. The ability to comment or like other pages as your brand page leads to a larger potential audience. As part of your Facebook strategy, consider creating a program of interaction, where you post with your page identity to related pages and groups as a member of the community. By contributing positively, you’re likely to draw potential fans back to your page.

Bonus Facebook Tips!

• Not all likes are created equal. Just because someone likes you doesn’t mean they’ll consistently see your updates and posts. Facebook uses a complex algorithm to display posts on news feeds. Ongoing engagement with followers is critical to get value from your likes.
• Facebook ads are easy to manage, and with careful messaging and targeting can be very effective at drawing people to your page or your website.
• Post questions, activities and cool content. Try to put some type of link in your wall posts. The more interaction the fan has with your posts, the better.
• Facebook likes are now crawled by Bing. Your search results are likely to be influenced by what people are saying about you on Facebook. Here’s a peek at CMD on Bing:

How are some of your favorite brands using the new Facebook page design? What innovative ways are you using it? Tell us in comments.

In case you haven’t heard it, here’s the background: two weeks ago, Gap tried to introduce a new logo to replace its decades-old blue box icon. Customers and designers piled online to heap criticism and venom on the new artwork, and ultimately forced the retailer to bring back the old version in a public show of humiliation (and probably at great expense).

I’m not a graphic professional, but I know where to find some experts in the field. So for a little perspective I asked some of CMD’s design pros for their thoughts and what they would have recommended to Gap. Here’s a little taste:

Jenn Brewer, CMD designer, says brands need to look at their logo and brand history while keeping an eye on their audience when they go through a rebranding exercise. Only then can a redesign campaign (slight modifications or a total overhaul) be determined. Does she think Gap should have given in to the criticism?

“No, it should have been confident enough in its new logo that it could rationally and intelligently deflect the criticism,” she said. “Giving in to the criticism tells me that perhaps the company was not in agreement about the new logo in the first place.”

Thom Marchionna, CMD creative director, said that a logo is only the tip of the spear for a brand evaluation, and other companies could learn from this situation by paying attention to core issues first before introducing a refreshed logo.

“Solve any underlying business problem first, such as product quality, customer service or differentiation,” he said. “Only when you can make a promise to your audience that things are positively better and different, can you introduce the symbolism that reinforces that. To do otherwise is like putting a fresh coat of paint on the hull of the Titanic.”

And what should Gap have done differently?

“Pretty much everything,” he continued. “Forget the lousy logo. Those happen all the time. Entrusting a logo redesign to a traditional ad agency may have been the first mistake. A branding firm would have started with more probing questions, the first three of which might be, ‘how much equity exists in the current logo with our most loyal customers and influencers?’ ‘what is the nature of that equity?’ and ‘what do we risk by changing our symbol?’”

Marchionna said the real failure, in his opinion, was a surprising lack of understanding of the power of the social web.

“It is the most immediate and powerful focus group technology in history,” he said. “And it dictates a code of conduct that one would expect a company such as Gap to be attuned to. Its response to the criticism was disingenuous at best and tragically underestimated the audience’s intelligence to see through ill-conceived efforts to save face. All of which violated the implicit social contracts on which all relationships are based: trust, honesty, and authenticity, to name but a few.”

As this situation showed, indeed every brand change is now open to debate and fair game for backlash by the public and the marketing community. The key to success, in my opinion, is to do the research, answer the tough questions that need clarification internally, and have the confidence to stick to what your gut tells you. I had a basketball coach once who said “you can’t lie to yourself,” so if Gap was lying to itself about its overall business shortcomings and thought a new logo would help distract the public, it was asking for criticism.

What do you think?

If case you haven’t heard, you won’t be able to count on Google Wave after year’s end. I’m sure there are a large number of variables that led to this decision, and Google has probably thought very carefully about each and every one of them. So how can I contribute something new to the conversation? Maybe I can’t. But I will share what I was thinking when I was asked that question.

From a UX perspective, none of the items that stand out to me that were probably big contributors to Wave’s demise are more important than what is defined at the beginning of a UX process: the business problem.

The business problem must be well defined, as everything that follows this step depends on it. Then business objectives and goals are defined to address the business problem, and clear success metrics (usually quantitative and qualitative) are established, which determine if the developed solution has addressed the business problem.

If I had to articulate the primary business problem that traditional email was trying to solve decades ago, I would probably state it this way: It takes too long to send documented communication (digital, or otherwise) from one physical location to another.  I’m sure there are secondary problems, such as expense and inconvenience, but the term “snail mail” was created for a reason.

Although traditional email is clunky and has a ton of perceived problems, which Google took the time to address in its videos, Wave’s biggest problem is that it attempts to solve the same primary business problem as email. And in order for it to uproot an entire worldwide system that’s already adopted, since it doesn’t solve any additional business problems, it must offer SIGNIFICANT (as in game-changing) improvement. But Wave is not a significant-enough improvement over email to motivate businesses, countries, (or grandparents) to learn and adopt a new system.

Unfortunately, you can’t just add loads and loads of cool functionality into a new system and expect immediate positive feedback and adoption from such an enormous audience. Google proved it. While Wave did have some great features which I’m sure will creep into other Google products, if the features don’t lead back to the business problem, they don’t do anything other than establish a cool factor. And as we can continue to learn from Google, you are going to need much more than a strong brand presence, overwhelming hype, and a big cool factor in order to get the user adoption needed to supplant a dominant worldwide system.

The best solution always begins with clearly defining the business problem and creating use cases that specifically address it. That’s what email has done. And when you’re not first to market, (especially by decades), you had better bring something to the table that your audience perceives they need over what they already have. Google didn’t do that with Wave.

On May 27, 2009, Lars Rasmussen made a very intriguing statement, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.” And as thought-provoking as Rasmussen’s statement may have been, it didn’t have much impact, because email had been invented long before that day.

What do you think?

Melissa Lion: Will Condé Nast be able to pull up out of print media’s death spiral with a new revenue model? The New York Times article, Condé Nast Is Changing Its Blueprint, explores the possibility.

Sarah Biedak: Facebook has launched Facebook Questions, a Yahoo! Questions-esque service. This could be useful for seeking community feedback and research.

Darcie Meihoff: I have two favorites this week. Have you considered inviting a guest blogger to your blog? Get some helpful tips from HubsSpot’s recent post. I credit @DaveAtNorth for this one: a 14-page article from The New York Times, The Web Means The End of Forgetting, explores how your digital past is never forgotten and can haunt, or help you. Enlightening and a little frightening.

Erik Sebellin-Ross: New Forrester research shows that Foursquare doesn’t have a big enough user base to warrant its use in marketing efforts. Outside of major cities, sure . . .

Stefanie Week: Content is king, but only if it’s free. A new USC survey shows that zero percent of those polled would pay for Twitter. I think I’d have to agree.

Julie Yamamoto: Mashable reveals how to send an audio tweet.

Julie Ma: Having a case of writer’s block? Clarabela Media’s post, Nine Sites Every Freelance Writer Should Bookmark, will get anyone’s creative writing juices flowing.

Think again. There are more things you can do to optimize your content for the social web. One of the more interesting speakers at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this year was Paul Yiu of Bing. He talked about how to rethink SEO strategies to rise above the noise of social search.

Why is optimizing for social search different than the SEO strategies that have been drilled into us thus far? Well, as we all know from swimming in the social web, everything moves faster now. The popularity, and hence the ranking, of your content may depend not only on regular, old-school content updates, but also on how many people Tweet links to your content within the first *few hours* of posting.

Catch that? Hours. Indeed, Bing’s algorithms measure social references to your content as it takes its first feeble breaths on the Web.

Yiu says that in the past, we planned for useful content. That seems so simplistic in today’s environment. Now we need to plan and create share-friendly content. It’s important to seek out links from trustworthy sites, but add to that seeking links from trustworthy individuals who are influential voices in the social stream. Whereas regular updates were a popular SEO strategy in the past, today’s content managers need to be prepared to turn on a dime, especially to respond if a “mob” (positive or negative) arises.

Some food for thought the next time you’re prepping a piece of content. Before you hit the “upload” button, check out Paul Yiu’s Web 2.0 presentation on Slideshare (posted below).

Do you have a social SEO success to share?

It’s a topic that was covered yesterday at the PRSA Portland Metro chapter “What the Blog?” session that I moderated. With a panel representing some great points of view including those of our own Melissa Lion, (CMD earned media talent/blogger extraordinaire), Julian Chadwick of PDXPipeline.com, Kari Aakre of Intel PR, and Katlin Smith, whose blog is Southwest Washington ZEST, the answer was . . . “it depends.”

Clearly, there are many types of blogs, from online diary types representing personal thoughts and opinions and those whose sole purpose is to share information, to still others that operate as an extension of online news sources. Should this massively different and varied form of expression be required to adhere to the codes of professional journalism? From the panelists’ point of view, not necessarily. Even among the panelists, there were clear differences. For example, some bloggers welcome things such as incentives and giveaways for their readers, and others are guided by traditional journalism rules that don’t accept them.

Watch top tips from the “What the Blog?” panelists here:

So how do you know and what’s the guiding force when it comes to working with bloggers? As Stefanie Week pointed out in an excellent earlier post, certainly the FTC guidelines are a must and transparency across the board is the foundation. But the fact is that it’s hard to establish overarching rules for very personal and individual forms of expression, so there’s a need to go above and beyond that. The panelists agreed that successfully working with bloggers means getting to know each blogger’s intention, purpose and motivation for his or her blog—and respecting the operating guidelines that they have established for themselves.

Bottom line, it has to “feel right”—for the blogger, the audience and the story or client you want to cover, so knowing the “rules” will only get you so far—the rest is good old-fashioned common sense and a gut check.

Outside of the FTC guidelines, what other “rules” do you think bloggers ought to follow?

On the other hand, the latest round of Facebook privacy concerns has led to a diaspora among tech-savvy folks. As a social media lover and an admirer and follower of many early adopters, I’m paying attention to where they’re going. What I’ve seen so far—they’re taking it to Twitter and to their own blogs. What? No new social network someone has uncovered from Canada?

So what’s next? I mentioned a diaspora, right? Well, some tech-savvy college students have gotten together and started Diaspora. It’s an open-source social network that has yet to be built, but is already funded to the tune of $173,000 through Kickstarter. (Their goal was $10,000.) I have my five bucks on this—the tech-savvy people love open-source and hey, it’s college students! Just like Facebook!

Until those guys get their Facebook-crusher built and I hear a liftoff from my Twitter feed, I’m waiting for someone to take me up on my offer to bring back Friendster. C’mon. You know you miss getting email in your Hotmail about the birthday of that college friend whose name you can’t remember five years later. Who’s with me? … Hello?

Last week was the Social Media Club of Portland’s annual awards event and CMD took home the big prize for the “People Like Me” category that recognizes social media programs that help build brand awareness and user engagement.

The campaign that caught the eye of the judges was a social media effort to garner the attention of gamers for Intel’s presence at PAX East, one of the industry’s biggest shows, attracting more than 50,000 gamers. The goal was to dominate the show, generate maximum buzz and create/convert fans among an audience that is cynical when it comes to traditional marketing efforts.

So how do you set your social media programs apart from the rest? Consider incorporating these elements that we used for the PAX East promotion:

• Face2Face – You may have thousands of fans and followers online but don’t exclude the ones you meet in person! Amplify your social media conversation by integrating offline activities like events, activities and special guest introductions.
• Build momentum – Consider creating multiple mini-promotions within a larger program. Multiple activities provide different touch points for different portions of your audience, while also building excitement and relationships along the way.
• Be competitive – Think about ways that you can tap into your audience’s good natured competitive spirit to motivate a call to action that’s fun and engaging.

Check out our “red carpet” interview to get the full scoop from the awards event!