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In case you haven’t heard, last night TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million UMVs, becoming the fastest standalone site ever to surpass 10 million monthly uniques.

The #1 driver of consumer purchases is word of mouth recommendations from friends, and Pinterest holds the power to drive authentic “word of eye” recommendations in a way that is changing the landscape of social commerce.

How? The landing page for Pinterest is an endless visual stream of subtle product recommendations from the very people who influence your purchasing decisions - friends and strangers with good taste. This means that there is an endless opportunity for your brand and its products to be seen by Pinterest’s 11.7 million unique monthly users as endorsements from friends in the form of repins.

Currently availably stats show the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. Pinterest is most popular in North Eastern states, among females (estimates range from 58% to 70% female), and with people ages 25-44 (59% of visitors).

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I was certainly not surprised to read that Twitter is calling this the year of the Twitter election; former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had said as much in a PRWeek interview last October that stated: “political campaigns, governments, and businesses face a “unique” environment with a completely new set of rules: no-one is immune to society’s doubts and everyone has to be accountable to their users, who are now the ones in control.”

Moreover, we see the impact of users’ voices on Twitter every day - whether occupying Wall Street or voting for The X Factor winners. As social media professionals, we advocate that one of the regular benefits of social media listening for any organization is the opportunity to take a pulse of the community, but in the upcoming election, that pulse can impact media coverage, debates, and candidates in real time.

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We’re all rightly impressed with social media when it activates communities to engage with a brand — when it does its job. We’re even more pleased when that community uses our social channels to lift that brand to a new level, even boost sales and profits.

I’d suggest that there’s an even greater accomplishment for social media, one that our integrated, cross-regional Ogilvy team recently saw in action. At the Opportunity Nation Summit in New York, a broad coalition of activists spent two days crowdsourcing solutions for our country’s joblessness and faltering education system. Some of the biggest names in business, media, policy and entertainment came together: Arianna Huffington, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, CNN’s Dr. Fareed Zakaria, financial guru Suze Orman, Pastor Rick Warren, hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, tennis star Serena Williams, and several business icons lent their voices at this critical moment for our country, sharing ideas and making solid commitments.

With a combination Atlanta/DC/NY/Chicago Ogilvy team at the controls and global CEO Chris Graves leading the charge, we produced an event livestream from the stage at Columbia University, live celebrity interviews from our Conversation Room, and liveblogging and tweets from Ogilvy content creators, making the conversation a worldwide talking point. And an innovative new Opportunity Index was unveiled. It was social media for a special cause, playing a crucial part in the effort, and it was an honor to be a part of it.

The conversation was built on the foundation of our New York and Washington DC offices’ remarkable work for Opportunity Nation’s new brand identity and website. We spent a month seeding conversations throughout the social web and promoting the stage and livestream events. Then, at Friday’s summit, the conversation really took off. We invite you to take a look at the video interviews, Facebook activity, and follow the continuing conversation (#oppsummit).

"Proceed until apprehended," the rallying principle for social media experimentation & execution shared by Brandon Friedman, Director of Online Communications for the Department of Veterans Affairs captured the pioneering spirit of all of the panelists from the October 6^th Ogilvy Exchange: Can the Department of Defense realize the full power of social media? The experienced panel of practitioners — rounded out by Jack Holt, former Senior Strategist for emerging Media at the Department of Defense, and Lieutenant Commander Chris Servello, Director of Emerging Media for the US Navy’s Chief of Information — shared very practical tales from the trenches for applying social media to some of the government and DoD’s most difficult communications challenges.

Lessons & Links
Social greatness comes from the inside out - Jack Holt shared a number of helpful lessons, but thematically returned multiple times to something often overlooked — it is critical to embrace the principles of better interaction and connection internally before the promise of social media engagement with external constituents can be fully realized.

Even small engagements are important. If you visit the Department of Veterans Affairs remarkable Facebook page, you will see 1×1 questions and customer service being addressed in a very “public” forum. Take a read through the discussions and see if that changes your impressions of the Department.

There is power in speaking directly to your audiences — Last week, LCDR Servello’s group at Navy released a YouTube video of the new F-35 fighter landing on the USS Wasp. This brief video clip has racked up a remarkable 200k+ view on YouTube in a week of release with no traditional media aircover — overwhelming evidence that there is an audience for the stories the Navy has to tell. Social media empowers them to speak directly to their audience in the same venue where they can carry the story forward to their networks. continue reading

Like most in our industry, I tuned in to the live stream of f8 to hear what Mark Zuckerberg and team have been working on and what’s in store for the brands who use the platform to build their business.

Our Ogilvy team will be looking at these changes and their impact on marketers in detail over the coming week.  In the meantime, below are five quick takes as the microphone cools down from more than 75 minute presentation:

1) Facebook Timeline

Sound byte: “It’s how you can tell the whole story of your life on a single page.”

This may be the biggest new feature since the introduction of the news feed in 2006 and the impact for brand pages is just as profound.  In short, Facebook has packaged all the activity that tends to fall off the “news feed cliff” after a few days and assembled a personal museum showcasing the highlights from a person’s Facebook life.

Presumably - though Mark didn’t mention this explicitly - brand pages, too, could have a timeline that fans could use to chart the launch of major product announcements over the course of many years, plot the rise and fall of logos, styles, and product designs, and even see a customised version of a Brand Page timeline a highlighting the history of the brand along with interaction from a specific user.

One could also imagine a timeline in which Brand Page Administrators could upload historic photos and brand history well before their plunge onto Facebook, seamlessly threading a 100-year legacy to the current day on the wall.  Imagine reading the latest news from the Ford page this week and scrolling down on the same page to see the evolution of the vehicles and the history all the way back to Henry Ford himself (disclosure: client).

This seems like a great way to craft an image-rich brand history, though it could haunt some brands with early missteps on the platform as those early posts may be easier to dig up than ever before.

2) “Lightweight” Earned Media & Open Graph

Soundbyte: “”Ticker is a lightweight stream of everything going on around you. Because it’s moving by so quickly, you will never feel annoyed by a friend. When you share a post it goes into the News Feed, but when you add activity through the Open Graph it goes into Ticker”

Research suggests many brand fans stop short of sharing content through their feed for fear of annoying friends tired of seeing your daily Nike+ Running app updates.  “I don’t care how far you ran this morning, get out of my feed!” users likely hear in their heads and opt not to share.  To address this, Facebook created a second, fast moving stream called Ticker.  Built on the back of the Open Graph, ticker is designed to launch a new form of social app relying on a set of verbs “Read”, “Watch”, “Listen” designed foster a spirit of serendipity as these help you “discover new things through your friends,” as Zuckerberg announced.

As new verbs possible come on board (imagine “drove” for an automaker, “ran” for the Nike+ running app) the power of earned media increases in both breadth as more people are likely to share if they can plop this in the Ticker versus the bright lights of the news feed and in depth as brand fans are freed from the one-word Like Lexicon and have greater degree of control in the way the share and describe affinity.

3) Longtail Lifestyle

Sound byte: “Express who you are through all the things that you do — the music you love, the recipes you enjoy, the runs you take, and more.”

Closely related to #2, Zuckerberg made reference to a suite of music and movie apps that had been given early access to the new feature set in the form of a social lifestyle app collection including Spotify, Deezer, Earbits, Mixcloud, Hulu, and Netflix.

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, made a brief cameo to talk about how, in an early roll out of this feature among his Netflix employees, he was more compelled to watch an episode of Breaking Bad by a friend’s ticker post alerting friends that he was “watching” breaking bad, despite months of seeing the AMC television show in his own “recommended for you” list.

4) Potential Friction for “Frictionless”

Sound byte: Mashble editor Jennifer Van Grove wrote on Twitter, “I can see a lot of users getting peeved about the “frictionless experiences” piece. Apps auto-posting to the Timeline sounds like a lot less control for the user.”

Zuckerberg pointed out his frustration with apps interrupting users to share an action in the middle of using an app as major problem.  He gave an example of a mario brothers apps that pauses in mid play to encourage users to share once Mario nabs a mushroom.  Now, those “share / don’t share” days are gone.  Apps will now make these updates “frictionless”, easier for apps to publish to the ticker without the need to prompt users. One can envision a situation in which frictionless publishing will result in a less control of what get published - newsfeed, ticker, or otherwise.

Time will tell how much of a privacy issue this becomes.  History tells us Facebook will ask us to become a bit more open with our data than we’re currently comfortable with, Facebook will hold the line, and we’ll get used to a new level of openness.  Brands will need be wary of a frictionless world for the sake of its consumers, while still using the data that pours out as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

5) Facebook as the Preferred Social Hub for Brands

Sound byte: “For the first time ever in a single day we had half a billion people use Facebook.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Google+ has put up some impressive early figures and many have written about the superior Google+ brand pages and potential take over of Facebook.  Had Facebook remained unchanged, and Google+ scored some major brand cases in Q4 2011, there may have been the case for such an argument.

Now, with a new form of earned media on Facebook beyond “Like”, with the introduction of a lightweight stream designed for users to share everything, and with half a billion users logging in everyday, Facebook and its Brand Pages have gained greater distance from rivals competing for eyeballs.  Brands with years of experiences under their belts and in year 3 or 4 of Facebook will continue to devote more resources to the diverse forms of earned media it generates as the platform races toward the once unbelievable one billion mark.

Stay tuned for a deeper analysis of Facebook’s new features in the coming week as our f8 Live Stream attendees explore the new features and work with our clients to kick the tires on these major changes.

Sunrise over Marathon, Greece.

Even after the jetlag has subsided and you’ve had a few days to reflect, it’s nearly impossible to justly capture the sense of creativity, openness, innovation and playfulness you experience at WPP Digital’s Stream 2011 ‘unconference’.

An avante-garde mix of WPP agencies (think Ogilvy, Mindshare, Hill & Knowlton, Blue State Digital) and clients (think Ford, IBM, Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola), communications thought leaders (think Sir Martin Sorrell, Ze Frank, Rory Sutherland) and technological innovators (think Facebook, Google, Spotify, Yoni Bloch, Innovid), the event was a shorts-and-flip-flop discussion of everything ranging from the malpractice of Dr. Google to the miner (Chilean) Twitter parody.

I had the chance to meet folks from Facebook and Google and was pleased to hear that they’re not only thinking about how to work with marketers, but also how to work with marketers in ways that make sense to their customers. The major social platforms are now putting greater resources into collaborating with agencies who they see as partners in unleashing the full potential of their platforms - not just on the media side, but now on the creative design side.

As Facebook’s Patrick Harris and Sarah Personette expressed it, Facebook is primarily a technology company - not a content company. Thus, they see agencies as the “evangelists, designers and curators” of effective social media marketing and integration.

And as we all anticipate what the Google+ platform will offer brands, Chris DiBona says they’re structuring the platform for smart, sensible, segment-able marketing that makes sense to consumers. (I swear it was just a coincidence he used one of my favorite clients, Ford, as an example.)

And because I’d love to tell you more about Stream 2011, but don’t have the time or space, here are some great recaps:

• Five-part series in the Huffington Post penned by the likes WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, txteagle’s Nathan Eagle, SoundCloud’s Caroline Drucker, Ford’s Alex Hultgren and Y&R’s David Sable.
• TechCrunch video interview with Sir Martin Sorrell on content valuation and the “dreadful mistakes” we’ve made in giving it away for free.
• H&K’s (and die-hard Stream-er) Candace Kuss’ amazing Storify curation of #stream11 tweets.
• WPP Stream’s YouTube channel. Especially check out the Ignite playlist. Everyone should try to do a presentation with 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds for a total of exactly 5 minutes. My favorite: Esther Dyson on paying attention.

Remember the excitement you felt when your website finally went live? All the design, development, revisions, and debugging were finally completed. And with a click of a button, you launched your brand presence.

Getting a brand.com or corporate.com website off the ground can require a massive team effort. It can be so challenging that the mantra becomes, “Let’s just get through Phase 1.” For the moment, that makes sense.

However, content (and keeping it up to date) is as critical to the life of your website as the launch that excited you so much.

But when was the last time you reviewed and updated the content on your website? If you haven’t touched your site since the “let’s get through Phase 1” launch, you’re not alone. And if it has been more than six months, you may want to surf to the dot.com featured in your email signature and check things out.
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Chart by Leon Haland

After launching Wave and Buzz to poor reviews and little pick-up in user base, Google had a low bar to clear with Google+. Now that Google+ has acquired 10 million users in 16 days and is receiving accolades for user interface as well as high responsiveness from the Google+ engineering team on the platform itself, the social media community is asking itself “what does the future hold for Google+?” Moreover, as social network users, we each need to ask ourselves on what platforms we’ll share our information and content - and with whom.

If you are looking for a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Google+, I encourage you to check out the complete guide to the platform compiled by Ben Parr at Mashable. In this post, I’ll give you the very brief overview of key elements of Google+ and how you can get the most out of using them.

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Wedding bells are ringing. They’re no longer just ringing at your ceremony, but all over the internet. Social media has expanded your wedding planning and day-of events to not only guests attending the big event, but to your entire social networks. Social media allows you to communicate with guests prior to the event and keep the memories forever. Since I’m getting married in less than a week, I decided to take a glance at how social media has changed the wedding process.

Wedding Proposals

Wedding proposals are getting more and more creative. Along with being creative, they’re being captured on video and uploaded to YouTube. There are more than 6,000 results when searching “wedding + proposal” on YouTube. Some of those proposals videos became so viral they have millions of views.

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Although it was a few weeks ago, my mind is still buzzing with learnings from the 2011 Digital CMO Summit, which I had the opportunity to attend in New Orleans with John Bell. This unique event was not only filled with hands on learning and compelling content, but brought together some of the most innovative brands for a two day summit. More to come on that in my next post.  While I was at the summit, I had the opportunity to meet some truly inspiring and interesting people - who not only breathe social - but know how to apply it to a entrepreneurial spirit to fuel really smart ideas among the vibrant New Orleans community. Meet Chris Schultz, President of Voodoo Ventures. We briefly sat down with Chris who shared his passion for creativity and the importance of entrepreneurship in New Orleans, especially Post-Katrina.

Chris is a co-founder of Launch Pad, a collaborative workspace in downtown New Orleans that is home to more than 60 startups in the Big Easy.  He created Launch Pad Ignition, the first seed accelerator on the gulf coast, and part of the Techstars Network and the Startup America initiative.  The list goes on: He also co-founded TribeCon, a conference about leveraging online communities to create offline change and mentors young entrepreneurs in the community in addition to building his own companies. You can see part of his interview with us in the video below:

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