Updated version of the epic video Erik Qualman put out last year for his book, Socialnomics.

Great work!

Yet another reason Facebook makes me feel a bit queasy...

Facebook will soon use your activity on other web pages to target ads based on your interests, Financial Times reports. That’s potentially a big boon for advertisers, but it won’t sit well with privacy advocates.

Note that Facebook already targets ads using information from your profile, and this new system will not track all of your browsing.

Rather, Facebook will offer sharing buttons to interested websites. Readers will be able to click on them to share the links with their Facebook friends via Facebook Connect — just like the buttons you already see on this Mashable article.

Once the user shares a link with his friends, Facebook will assume that person shared it because he or she liked it, so the company will include content from that web page in the data it uses to target ads based on user interest. The ads will appear whenever the user visits the Facebook website.

Facebook will probably announce this new system at the F8 conference on Wednesday. The company is also expected to officially announce its already-revealed to change the words “Become a Fan” to “Like” for brands’ pages because it has found that users are more likely to click the latter than the former.

For businesses this is genius. The companies users share links from will be the sites that show up in ads.

Taking off my marketing hat for a moment, I must say that it is a bit Orwellian.

Privacy online is a misnomer.

Mitch Joel nails it with this piece called "Unlike advertising, Social Media can't save a bad product or service." He discusses how the brands that do well online are the ones who essentially look good naked- "in the buff". Being buff involves being ready for that transparency.

The Three New Features

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First, we discussed the core philosophy underlying the recent changes at Twitter. As Ryan told me, the company is maturing and asked itself at the beginning of the year, “What are we going to do when we grow up?” The answer is: Grow the platform while enabling developers to do more unique things with it.

The first new feature we discussed is Places, also known as Points of Interest. This new feature, Ryan explained to me, is not like Foursquare () or Gowalla (), where users check in. Instead, developers will be able to attach location-based metadata and use it to enhance their products.

Here’s an example: Say you tweet from a park. Twitter’s new Places feature will recognize your location and then allow you to access relevant metadata, including the ability to see other tweets from that location and who those tweets are coming from. Places is less like a Foursquare competitor and more like a subset of another new feature rolling out later this year, Annotations.

Annotations, which launches next quarter, allows developers to attach little pieces of metadata to tweets. This could be anything from location to tags to notes. Sarver believes that the feature will be huge, but that the company shouldn’t decide what data should be attached or how people use that data. Those decisions, he said, are up to developers.

The final new feature announced today is User Streams, which will make Twitter apps real-time. Instead of waiting for API calls every few minutes to update your TweetDeck () or Seesmic Desktop () applications, updates to your Twitter stream will appear in real-time in your apps. Ryan Sarver says that this feature has really changed how he is using Twitter — in fact, he tweeted about it last night as a teaser for Chirp.

Wow. The groups at Gowalla & Foursquare HQs are crying somewhere.

When Twitter acquired Tweetie and made it their official iPhone app last week, dozens of lives and business plans were thrown into turmoil.

The third-party app developers and investors who had worked together to create startups around the Twitter platform were blindsided. Some lost an entire business model or were forced to rapidly reconsider their plans, all because Twitter wasn’t clear and transparent about its roadmap for developing features and acquiring companies.

Kara Swisher of All Things D moderated an investment panel today at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference. With her were two Twitter board members, Bijan Sabet and Peter Fenton, and investors Mike Hirschland and David Pakman. All were eager to address the issues presented to the VC and startup community by Twitter’s situation in particular and about the risks associated with building apps on another company’s platform in general.

Interesting how Twitter is the least transparent platform around.

Twitter Presence- Twitter has to be present on your blog and you should use any and all of these methods: Option to re-tweet post, visible twitter stream, display your latest tweet… There are many twitter plug-ins and tools to twitterize your blog; your blog must have a twitter presence.

Don’t Sweat The Comments- Since twitter has become so popular the number of comments on most blogs has been drastically reduced.  Don’t let this bother you or think it’s an indication of fewer readers.  There is a good chance that the comments that you used to receive on your blog are now coming in the form of @replies, DM’s and Facebook replies.  Embrace these replies as the new blog comments.  Be sure to interact and always try to respond when questions are asked.  @Replies Are The New Comments.

Twitter has killed blog comment numbers. That is OK, it needs be be OK for new platforms to come and change the way we interact online.

As somebody that develops strategy for large corporate brands, I often work with different types of brand advocates in various social media channels.  A common tactic of many marketers and PR professionals is to try to go after “influencers” to get them to talk about their product.  Sometimes these influencers are individuals, sometimes they are communities, but a common denominator is that they have substantial audience sizes. The typical way of approaching these people or groups is to ship them a sample of your product and include a note that says something like, “Hope you enjoy this, please blog about it”.  I think this is a good shotgun approach to communities, it’s a good step up from a press release and it gets your product information out to a lot of people very quickly.  For individuals, I think we have to look at a more measured and personal approach.

To truly be effective in social media with influencers, I think you need to build a relationship, not ship a press package. You also have to recognize and understand the different groups that exist in social media, so you know how to develop and target brand programs and exposure.  In case you fear that I’m starting to sound a little too professional and polished in this approach, I submit for your approval a hand drawn diagram in the picture to the left.  Fancy, isn’t it?

The "Hope you like this, please blog about it" approach is definitely more personal than a press release, but this article gives a smart overview of the Consumer, Enthusiast, Influencers, Inciters.

a new Forrester reports says that the role will become obsolete.

You see, “the agency of record” will need to be able to handle both traditional and interactive marketing–the lines have blurred. If you’re not the agency of record, you’ll still have a role to play–even if it’s a niche role that your firm specializes in.

Fortunately, you still have some time to prepare for this migration. Apparently, there’s still so little overlap between the “big 5″ agency types–advertising, direct, media buying, interactive, and PR–that companies are not going to be able to put all of their marketing eggs in one basket–at least not yet.

So what should your company look for in a marketing agency? Well, Forrester says we’re approaching the age of Adaptive Marketing. One that requires three core skills from the agency of record: ideas, interaction, and intelligence.

It will be interesting to watch the agencies adapt to the new landscape. Many will focus in on a specific niche while other expand and bring in talent from many areas.

The ability to master both traditional and interactive is key.

3. Entitlement to Free Stuff

The people on the web with knowledge, expertise, and information owe you none of it. Some will put it out there for free because they believe there’s value in contributing to the whole. But they don’t owe you a thing, and they can take it away or change the game anytime they want.

Whether they’ll be successful or not is for their potential customers to decide. But you are not entitled to a bit of it. Pay or don’t pay for what’s valuable to you personally, but quit with the naive notion that social media and money don’t or can’t go together, and that content creators are morally or ethically corrupt because they’re asking for compensation in return for making their knowledge and experience available.

4. Joining the Conversation

This was probably a great phrase at the emergence of all of this, but it’s become so diluted that it means little anymore. Join which conversation? For what purpose? With whom? And what then? Let’s start talking about the INTENT behind the conversation in the first place, and the underlying value of being present and engaged with the right people who give a rip what you have to say, not just anyone with a frontal lobe and an internet connection.

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6. Content is King.

Like hell. Creating content is not what wins you the prize. It’s not enough to write something, or populate a blog, or create a video. Content is worth precisely ZERO until it’s being found, consumed, and then used to do something. It needs to drive people to action – sharing, buying, building, interacting.

And guess what, stargazers? If your content isn’t propelling people to act on something that eventually delivers something of value back to your business (provided you’re talking content marketing and not outright contribution for charitable purpose), it’s a time sink. That makes it decidedly less than king.

Amber nailed it. These are just three of the nine trendy social media topics that should die now. Go read the whole thing and send it to your friends. Or just stumble it, would ya?

Tom Hinkes

There's something desperately wrong with consumer brand marketing. We all know it.

The brand-building talent and expertise that created the CPG manufacturer are gone. Marketers with the ability to identify an unmet consumer need, develop a product to meet it, create a brand, and then lead it to market dominance are missing. Product managers with a fear of ambiguity have replaced the creative, forward-thinking brand builders. Our biggest consumer brands are now managed by nerds.

The crisis has been building for years and is now unavoidable. And because the wounds are self-inflicted, we cannot rely on the patient to heal itself. A quick review of industry news confirms this:

General Mills has identified their recipe for future growth. They're "anticipating a rise in multicultural consumers, particularly Hispanics." Apparently, they've also discovered that baby boomers are aging, and boomer children are more tech-savvy than their parents. Breathtaking, breakthrough stuff.

Kraft Foods is touting their "bold," "top-to-bottom" "marketing makeover." But the enduring images from the article are of Kraft executives wandering Cannes, contented dinosaurs and vanilla creative.

Industry researchers and academics have also recently weighed in with their diagnoses and prescriptions:

In "Adaptive Brand Marketing," Forrester Research first suggests brand "managers" be renamed brand "advocates." Then, the authors also recommend restructuring the brand manager role to better accommodate the "real-time digital world." To better fit less than 10% of a CPG brand's marketing budget, we should revamp the entire brand-management system?

In "Call to Action," authors Carl Johnson and Henry Rak contend that weak brand-building skills have forced the CPG industry to a critical juncture. They offer several very logical prescriptions. But like so much of the brand marketing they're despairing, their solutions are half measures, completely "by the numbers."

We don't need a "call to action," we need an intervention.

More data is not better data
Marketing departments used to be the creative engines powering successful corporations. Now they're overrun by number-crunching nerds. As a direct consequence, despite all the conspicuous focus on "change management," the way brands respond to change in the marketplace has deteriorated. A McKinsey Quarterly article several years ago argued that the key to "better branding" is to build brands "more scientifically." If managers would combine "forward-looking market segmentation" with structural-equation modeling, they could "build a better brand more efficiently." In short: more data, more regressions and more conjoint analysis mean the "brand crisis" is solved.

But fluency with buzz words and expertise with spreadsheets do not guarantee brand-marketing competence.

No one would argue with the objectives and need for consumer research. But brand marketing is not a science. It requires analysis, discipline and detail. Even more, it requires intuition, flair and vision. Great marketers are visionaries, not bean counters. They succeed by defying conventional wisdom. They see over the near horizon, envisioning products and ideas long before the average consumer even senses a need for them. Nothing captures this principle better than the adage, "If Edison had done market research, he would have invented bigger candles."

...

There are really only two successful business models. One is cost leadership: Deliver your product to an existing market with lower prices and/or higher quality (Dell, Walmart, Southwest). The second is creating and satisfying a completely new market (Starbucks, eBay, iPod). Effective brand-building is a critical component of both, but the two models require very different managerial thinking. 

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Pendulum has swung too far
The quantitative "MBA aspects" of brand management are vitally important. Ignoring the numbers and just "going with our gut" can be an even worse sin, and result in ... frankly, almost every one of this year's Super Bowl spots. But the pendulum has clearly swung too far. The result is today's brand manager who (paraphrasing David Ogilvy) uses data, "the way a drunk man uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination.".....

 Engineer-managers want to focus on "what they know and what they can control." Consumer behavior is not a controllable variable. Instead, he wrote, consumers can be, "unpredictable, varied, fickle, stupid, short-sighted, stubborn and generally bothersome."

Great brand marketers are comfortable with ambiguity. They realize marketing is a balancing act -- it's numbers and detail, but it's also flair and vision. It's qualitative and quantitative; analysis and intuition; perspiration and inspiration. Great marketing requires the balance of both sides of the brain. But the balance has been lost.

Be like Luke Skywalker
So how do we wrest control back from the nerds? I offer two terrifyingly intuitive solutions. First, we can break the current self-perpetuating nerd cycle by hiring and promoting different people -- it's a proven fact that managers tend to hire people just like themselves. Second, every once in a while, even when the numbers don't quite line up, we can promise to trust our gut and intuition. Be like Luke Skywalker.....

I want to send this article to everyone I know. Or maybe send the author flowers. Or maybe just highlight it here? Ok, seriously, go read every word. Go!