TikTok Is the Last Social Media Platform

I know… let’s go back to blogging on our own domains (no, seriously)!

Clout world:

I don’t want to end this on a bummer note, but I do think it’s probably time to accept that we have reached the limitations of the social web as it’s currently constructed. It’s likely that TikTok was the last “social” platform and even more likely that all the behaviors that we can do on these platforms have been mapped out already. We can rearrange them and try them out in different orders and react to slight algorithm tweaks, but this is it. This is how people will behave as long the company’s that own and operate the web continue to do so. And it’s probably time to start imagining something else — no, not AI — before we forget how to do it.

Marketing Is Evolving; Don’t Get Stuck

Fantastic post from SumAll today:

The Switch to Continuous Marketing – SumAll – Blog: “Social media platforms and analytics provide an immediate, continuous feedback loop that puts marketing into an entirely new cycle. It’s now possible to get a faster, deeper sense of your potential customer and to tailor marketing materials to a highly specific demographic.”

This is a concept that we embrace and focus heavily on at Harrelson Agency.

In the past, marketing campaigns were structured differently and might have done pretty well for the time. However, we’ve seen a gradual shift and trend towards online marketing in the past decade or so as the web has grown and social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerged. While paid search still dominates over social media traffic this year, that’s likely to change in 2014. Marketing via social media is bound to become the larger of the two traffic drivers and that’s due in large to the in-depth analytics and insights tools that services like Facebook and Twitter offer to advertisers. Old-school marketing (create, launch, sit back, evaluate) doesn’t work as well anymore because marketing on the web is a continuous process that requires lots of creative thinking, sweating the details, and monitoring (in real time, not when the campaign ends) exactly what works and what doesn’t. And if something doesn’t work, you can always change it and see where you went wrong.

Tools like SumAll and Chartbeat are fantastic for tracking how your campaigns are doing and what kind of traffic you’re getting, but even the out-of-the-box solutions that Facebook, Twitter, et al offer are pretty good.

Debunking Facebook’s Graph Search

TechHive has a good post up today on what Facebook’s Graph Search (beta) does and what it means to us as users:

How to use Facebook’s Graph Search (and why you would even want to) | TechHive: “Once Graph Search is on, Facebook prompts you to ‘search for people, places, and things.’ Start typing. Graph Search is supposed to recognize natural language and try to guess what you’re looking for, though that feature is hit or miss at the moment. You’ll quickly learn the phrases that will help you get to some sort of result: ‘Friends who listen to Daft Punk and live in San Francisco’ or ‘Friends of my friends who work at TechHive.’ It’s not exactly a conversational way to search.”

I’ve been playing with the service a little and while I’m impressed, I’m also a little spooked by the privacy factor of it. Graph Search indexes just about everything you’ve ever done on Facebook, which might put a lot of people at a disadvantage if they don’t regularly clean up their Likes, etc. I’m guessing a lot of folks will be doing some spring cleaning of their Timelines to hide some things they don’t want to show up in Graph Search when full functionality rolls out to all users.

Nonetheless, the service is looking very intuitive and could be very useful for businesses in the future. I tried a few search terms and the results are pretty solid. For example, if I do a search for “my male friends who live in Spartanburg, South Carolina” (it’s not rocket science but it’s the first thing I could think of), that’s a pretty big demographic (>100 friends) since I’ve lived there for the past 3 years and know people from there:

You can also narrow it down to some other stuff like “my friends who have been to Washington, DC,” that narrows it down to fewer than 100 (makes sense).

Creepy but nifty.

Facebook also has a pretty good video outlining what Graph Search is and what it does:

https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10200156550214780

Strange days indeed.