I’ll let others decide whether or not that’s a ridiculous valuation for a company with zero profits to date. I did hear NPR describe it with a word that rhymes with “trouble” and starts with “b”. Just saying.

Setting expectations.
What can we expect from this purchase? It’s hard to say. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom has stated that Facebook intends to grow the service as a separate entity that connects seamlessly to other social networks. That’s great, but Instagram’s 40-million-plus users are just too sweet to ignore.

Facebook’s new advertising platform makes ads from the posts themselves: brands choose which of their posts to sponsor to increase visibility in user feeds. It’s a novel approach, more nuanced than side-banner placements. I would expect to see this platform brought to Instagram at some point in the future.

Not the only party in town.
Instragram isn’t the only platform to explode on the simple strength of sharing images, of course. Facebook itself built its user base initially as a repository for college party pix (I’ll save you some clicks: my account is set to “Friends Only”), and Timeline places a new emphasis on pictures. Tumblr continues to grow based on users sharing pictures and art. We’re all replacing our Amazon wishlists with Pinterest boards.

Sites like Reddit have their own language, consisting of visual memes like “rage faces”, and “advice animals”. Indeed, “Draw Something” has usurped ”Words with Friends” as the mobile social game du jour. Even animated GIFs — the original viral videos — are being revived as an art form. Brands wanting to stay relevant in the conversation are going to show, not just tell.

Brand expressions.
Does this mean that all brands should switch their Facebook and Twitter streams to a series of meme images and GIFs? No, though certain brands have definitely headed down that road and been noticed for their efforts. Random memes and out-there humor won’t work for every brand, although I’d certainly enjoy my job even more than I already do if more brands gave it a try.

All brands can learn from the shift in how people are expressing themselves online. Where a tweet once sufficed, an Instagram snap may now be a better choice. This increased visual focus is not a total rule change: just as brands must nail down a clear tone of voice and story they are trying to tell with their social media presence, so should they consider how to tell stories through these other visual mediums when the time feels right.

Peel back the curtain.
How should brands approach this? Let’s go back to Instagram. It isn’t a single image, but the collection of images over time that really defines you and makes an impact. A single photo from my Instagram feed may only tell you what I’m eating or what concert I’m at, but only by following me for a while or scrolling through my whole stream will you get a good sense of who I am, what I do, and what I’m about.

The same approach can work for brands. Define the story or personality you want your brand to convey, then get creative. Leave the smiling models for the corporate HR page. Instead, share pictures that make an emotional connection, even if they have little to do with your product or service. In this context, the seemingly mundane can become interesting: Share candid shots of products in production, or empower employees to contribute shots of themselves at work. Do not be afraid to peel back the curtain a little bit.

Brands with uniquely popular products may have an easier time making an emotional connection, but if your content is engaging and makes sense for your brand, most followers will stick around. Those who do will grow to know your brand in new and intimate ways.

I always advise against brands jumping onto a hot new social network without a sound strategy, but it’s clear that users are turning to a wide assortment of visual methods to tell their stories and express themselves across social media. As speeds increase and mobile devices become increasingly adept at taking and viewing photos, this trend will only continue. Brands that keep an open mind about how they can contribute to this new conversation of imagery will be better equipped to be heard, seen and remembered.

If I’m reading the press correctly — Nielsen and TubeMogul have introduced a GRP model that normalizes TV and online video GRPs such that they could theoretically be treated as additive, enabling “apples-to-apples comparisons with television.”

Mistaken identity.
Not so fast. To do this, one would have to establish that Audience A (TV/broadcast) and Audience B (online/digital) are the same. The simplest thing to do would be to combine the available online audience with the available TV audience within a fixed period of time and calculate reach and frequency off that.

I’m assuming that Nielsen wouldn’t tamper with the definition of the broadcast GRP, so that means in order to do this normalization, online-only audiences would have to be discarded. This means that the combined video GRP is most likely a measure of people who are exposed only to TV or to both TV and online video in a fixed timeframe. This implies two things:

• That some portion (possibly a very large one) of the digital audience is not represented in this delivery metric.
• That the measured digital audience is only adding frequency to the calculation, not reach.

Smells like disenfranchisement.
Suddenly, I’m really concerned that I’m in the minority opinion on this issue, because this is starting to smell like a conspiracy to disenfranchise digital media agencies.

For years, digital video providers have been pushing to standardize online video metrics against the broadcast standard to appeal to broadcast planners and buyers. The rationale is that the more digital video looks and smells like regular broadcast, the more likely it is that digital video will capture a portion of the billions of broadcast dollars in play.

If things play out this way, then pure digital media budgets are likely to shrink as the funds earmarked for video in a given digital plan are siphoned back into the broadcast budgets. The digital shops will lose the responsibility for planning with properties like Hulu, YuMe, perhaps even YouTube. This also sets the stage for Pandora, Spotify and other digital audio channels to fall back into the broadcast planning fold as well.

It’s time for someone to call BS on this.

Priority one: Tear down the GRP myth.
Since no one has really stepped up, I’ll go first: I say that priority one is to tear down the myth of the GRP.

GRPs are not units of efficacy; that is to say, they are not unto themselves advertising success metrics. The goal of an advertising campaign is usually to change a behavior or perception: to get an audience to buy or think or feel. A GRP doesn’t ladder directly to any of those things and isn’t even a reasonable proxy for them.

A GRP is a unit of weight, an average percentage of available eyeballs that a property within a given channel has or can deliver. It’s the same thing as saying “ounce”. Only in media terms, it’s “ounces of eyeballs.”

Here’s the problem: Are 10 ounces of eyeballs seeing your commercial on 50” flat screens in the comfort of their living rooms the same as 10 ounces of eyeballs seeing it on their mobile phones on a crowded train? The answer is that there isn’t enough information to say one way or the other and the only conclusion is that it’s 20 ounces of eyeballs. If I’m an advertiser, my reaction is, “Well, that doesn’t tell me anything.” Exactly. We need to be talking about outcomes and objectives. Anything else is an endorsement of a lazy and indolent status quo, where volume remains a woefully under-disguised stand-in for efficacy.

Recently, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by our T3 social team about the impact on fan engagement for early adopter brands to the new Facebook Timeline format. The team looked at research by Wildfire Interactive, a maker of online marketing software. The research looked at 43 brands ranging in fan size from 22,000 to 40 million fans for 42 days, 21 before the change and 21 after. In addition, T3 evaluated the brands we work with. What they found was fascinating, surprising and not surprising at all, all at once.

Timeline changes.
Let’s quickly review the changes that came with Facebook’s Timeline.

First, there’s the new cover photo with art restrictions that can be summed up as “Keep your sales pitch out of my Facebook.”

Second, there’s one fixed view and three visible tabs, with your other tabs visible only when you click to open them. No more driving people straight to different tabs. Your fans land on your profile page and that’s that.

Third, fan posts are in a separate container and large-format photos and videos can be used in your brand posts. There’s also direct messaging now.

Lastly, you can use brand milestones to illustrate the history of your brand.

And the survey says…
Wildfire Interactive collected data on the following metrics:
• Daily fan growth rate
• People talking about this
• Comments per brand post
• Likes per brand post

That’s pretty much a wish list for what brands want out of their Facebook pages. So here’s what the research uncovered: Brands with less than a million fans saw nearly a 70% growth in people talking about them. Pair that with 40% more comments and 60% more likes per post and you’ve got a huge winner, right? Well, almost. Fan growth rate didn’t change at all.

For larger brands with 1 to 10 million fans, the numbers were mixed. There was roughly a 30% increase in people talking about the brands and 13% more likes per post. But the comments on posts were down 17%. Once again, fan growth stayed exactly the same.

The super big boy brands with 40 million+ fans got pretty beat up by the transition. Everything was down. Significantly. Except one: Fan growth rate. Didn’t change a lick.

Mixed signals.
So is the new Facebook Timeline better for brands? Depends.

If you are a smaller brand on Facebook, it’s much better. Timeline has significantly increased the engagement behavior of fans. Stay focused on great content to keep that momentum going.

For larger brands, the answer is “by and large.” The new functionality has definitely increased interaction between users. If (and it’s a big if) you can create opportunities to join conversations in an unobtrusive way, you can become part of the increased engagement users have with Facebook.

For mega brands on Facebook, the results are worse. But if you’re one of these brands, don’t worry. You’re kind of like the homecoming queen. People only really like you because everybody likes you. Your drop in numbers is mainly because people are nosey and they are off checking out all the other brands in their life. Post another million-dollar giveaway and they’ll all come running back.

The biggest takeaway.
All three groups saw absolutely no change in their growth rate. Zip, nada, nothing. Which leads us back to the core truth of Facebook: People read, like, comment and share what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.

Technology simply can’t bear the full weight of generating interest in your brand. Only content can do that. Relevant human content that tells the story of your brand in a relatable way. Tell that story on your page and no matter what Facebook does, it’ll be better for your brand.

As we all know, using a mobile device to shop is catching serious tailwinds. In any case, I came across a few interesting learnings going through the process of finding a new TV, so I’d like to walk through my customer experience.

Searching for success.
It’s been a couple years since we last bought a TV. We have a Vizio that we like, and it didn’t break the bank, so I was hoping to duplicate that feat in some fashion.

My quest started where many do, with a mobile search on Google. (Mobile stat to be mindful of: in 2011, nearly 80 percent of smartphone users visited search sites; mobile paid search budgets grew 220+ percent during Q1 2012, accounting for 12.3 percent of total search advertising spend). One of the first results that popped up was a 47-inch LED Smart TV. Nice TV, and since I’ve always associated Wal-Mart with saving money, I clicked the link to check it out.

A frown quickly ensued, as I hit a brick wall and wasn’t able to find the product I was looking for. At this point, I could have done a search on the Wal-Mart mobile site, but this small hurdle had me second guessing the Wal-Mart route, so I moved on.

Going big box.
I typically end up buying all my large electronics from a big box retailer, so I decided to go straight to Best Buy’s mobile site. In the back of my mind was something I’d heard about in-store pick up, so I started salivating over picking up a new TV that night. Surprise, surprise; the site was unavailable on a Sunday afternoon. Go figure.

With that option out of the question, I decided to go straight to Vizio site to see what I could find out. Unfortunately, the site wasn’t optimized for mobile and I lacked the patience to zoom in and out searching for information. It’s about this time that I started thinking the stars were not aligned for me to buy a TV right then and there.

As a last-ditch effort, I decided to go to the source that typically provides the best mobile shopping experience: Amazon. After a quick search, I found the TVs that fit my criteria. I compared a couple that interested me but ultimately made my decision based on customer ratings. Amazon already had all my payment information, so after I logged in, I quickly made the purchase and begin waiting for its arrival. Success!

Unrealized potential.
As a marketer specifically interested in mobile, here’s what I find interesting about my mobile TV-buying experience, which I can only assume was very typical. Wal-Mart and Best Buy had a chance for my business before I went to Amazon. In many ways, I would have preferred to purchase from them so I could pick up the TV that day (Have I mentioned I can be very impatient when it comes to electronics?). However, I hit small mobile shopping snags that nevertheless were big enough to send me searching elsewhere. Fickle? You bet.

It seems to me that this current landscape should motivate retailers rather than frustrate them. It’s important for marketers to understand where mobile fits in the typical customer’s purchase path. There is an immediacy to mobile search. The customer is either following a spur-of-the-moment impulse to know something now, or is actually ready to visit or buy on the spot. Two retailers had that chance with me and missed. The third let me take the next step with one-click simplicity that took me from consideration to purchase in minutes. All from my mobile device.

I think we can all appreciate the growing threat brick-and-mortar retailers are facing from the rise in online and mobile shopping. Competition is tougher than ever. With people price shopping in store via mobile, it presents an unbalanced situation with regard to online retailers who don’t have to carry the same overhead.

If as a retailer you’re committed to providing the best experience so you can capture every precious sale, no matter the channel, success will follow. To ensure that success, retailers should be considering how to line up their mobile experience to support their physical location so both become strong selling points for impatient shoppers like me in this new mobile-oriented world.

Pinterest represents a simple equation: Engaged users + cultural insights + potential purchase intent = anticipatory marketing. Here’s how it breaks down:

Engaged users
Pinterest is a place of diversion that begets visualizing oneself doing, being, or wearing something else. It’s where aspirations lie. Think of it as displaying the glimmering lights of purchase intent. As individuals pin and surf others’ Pinterest boards, they are engaging in material that is visually, mentally, and emotionally stimulating. It’s the perfect place for marketers to feel the individual and cultural beat.

Cultural insights
Unlike Facebook, which thrives on the interconnectivity of friends, Pinterest is a place where individuals explore the realm outside their social connections. The reach, then, of Pinterest is great — networking strangers and their interests across the world. As Fast Company author Nathaniel Perez notes, Pinterest is creating a storybook of folksonomies — a mapping of collaborative and relevant social interests and information. Through these mappings, marketers can assess and discover the next purchase, trend, and influencer.

Behind each influencer is a web of relations, weaving individual likes, hopes, and dreams into a network of associations. This web is where marketers can listen and harvest information that can then be rolled out into other platforms. To marketers, and especially to strategists, storytelling is huge; it breathes life into an idea, it captures the rhythm of the time. It moves. It feels.

At a recent SXSW panel, Edward Boches presented that not only can we, as marketers, listen to our customers, we can also be a part of the storytelling by encouraging creation and generating inspiration through our own stories, pins, and boards.

Purchase intent
While demographic data is important (e.g., 68% of Pinterest users are women), analyzing who the trendsetters, innovators, and influencers are within Pinterest is even more powerful for marketers. Knowing the trend leaders, whether it’s an individual or a large group, allows marketers to create conversations while simultaneously keeping track of potential purchase intentions — a huge opportunity in itself.

The basis of Pinterest is that it allows individuals to dream, plan, and track their wants and needs. Through their pins and boards, individuals are in effect communicating their hopes, their first flickers of purchase intentions. If marketers listen closely, they can be there to support and drive those aspirations.

Anticipatory marketing
Welcome to anticipatory marketing. At the hub of all these stories, connections, and intentions is where we can begin to explore how interests are integrated; forming what is called an interest graph. In a follow-up post, we will discuss this topic and assess the opportunity behind understanding interest graphs. For now, we should be listening to the stories on Pinterest and anticipating next moves.

Enough is enough. I’m not going to stand around while Groupon sullies the very notion of what advertising is.

Here’s what the headline will read come July: “Groupon victimized by own model as people scramble to gobble up the company’s shares at half their IPO value”. But you better redeem those shares fast, because they will continue to shrink in value.

It reminds me of a trip to the Soviet Union I took in the early 90s. Coming back, I struck up a conversation with this guy who was smuggling two half-inch tall stacks of rubles out in his socks. Back then, you had to by law convert your rubles back into your native currency. It was easily more than a thousand dollars in Soviet script.

The conversation went something like this:

“Why didn’t you exchange those out?!”

“It’s an investment,” he said smugly.

“In what?” I nearly screamed. “I’ve only been here for about a month and that currency has lost probably 20% of its value!”

“These will be valuable someday,” he said.

Sure, if you found a couple hundred picture frames for free you could sell these worthless notes for five bucks apiece as relics of the Soviet Union.

But wait, if you could get free picture frames, you could just sell the frames without taking the hit on defunct currency that happens to smell like a pauper’s dirty feet.

Or you could sit on your stock of framed currency for two decades and then issue coupons that allow customers to buy these relics at half of their original price of $5. Two hundred units at $2.50, which is $500 free and clear. Oh, minus Groupon’s cut, so make that $250. Oh, and minus your initial investment in the rubles, so…uh oh.

That’s right, you just took a 75% hit. Great model, Groupon.

No one can claim that title yet. Social is still too new of a proving ground to have any discernable best practices. What’s more, it almost evolves too rapidly to establish any.

So what does this have to do with a 900-year-old, two-foot-something Jedi master with a debatable grasp of English? Everything. Yoda’s mantras share the same common truths as the success brands are looking for from social media.

“Size matters not”
Every time I hear a client set Facebook “Like” goals, I die a little inside. Simply put, if you want a million friends, give away a million dollars. You’ll hit that number in a week. And your engagement needle won’t move.

We’re programmed to think bigger is better. But you have to ask yourself, what’s more powerful, an army of people who could care less about your brand or a crack squad of brand evangelists who will preach your good word to the masses?

“You must unlearn everything that you’ve learned”
As marketers, we’re taught to “craft and control” the brand image. We’re also taught that media is something purchased, like a hunting license on a private preserve stocked with our preferred prey. With social media, you can toss all that out the window.

First off, the second you enter the social realm, you are not in control of your brand. Swallow your pride and move on. In fact — in true democratic fashion — the more you turn control of your brand over to the people, the more successful you will be.

Secondly, you must remember your guest status in the conversation. You have to earn your right to be there. And uninvited guests are only welcomed when they are incredibly charming.

“Impossible to see the future is”
For years, marketers have talked about the “conversation” we’re having with consumers. Before social media, that was largely a lie.

With social media, you’re having a real-time, two-way conversation with consumers. And just like a regular conversation you’d have with a friend, it’s impossible to plan out what you’re going to be saying five minutes from now because it’s impossible to know where the conversation will go.

So as much as you want to plan out every post six months in advance so you can be positioned for a dynamic Q4, don’t bother. If you still want to be talking to people in Q4, follow the conversation closely and always have something interesting to say.

“A Jedi uses the force for knowledge and events, not for attack”
All marketers salivate over the engagement numbers in social media. Converting even a fraction it to sales translates into big-time money with an insane ROI. But here’s the bad news: social media is a listening device, not a direct sales tool.

In fact, social may be the best listening device ever created. If you’re willing to listen, you’ll never again wonder what your customer is thinking. Even better, your brand has the chance to respond to those thoughts with a human voice. That’s how brands become timeless.

“Do or do not, there is no try”
Obvious as it may seem, Yoda’s most memorable line seems to be the one brands most often forget. They seem to think that throwing up a profile is social media’s silver bullet. I blame that on the fact that social media appears free and sometimes effortless. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most successful brands in social media either invest lots of time or pay lots of money for their success. Either way, they go all in.

More importantly, they realize that what drives any conversation is an idea. From Old Spice to Small Business Saturday, a big idea beautifully executed across many platforms was what got people talking, sharing and bonding with the brand. Find yourself an idea true to your brand and bigger than even the grandest post or profile, and “Master social you will.”

Tracking flights
One of the Unity drivers drove us back to the airport. I noticed that every time he stopped to wait on traffic, he glanced at his Blackberry and was looking at something that looked like a map. I asked him what he was looking at. “Oh, I’m checking to see whether the Delta flight from Miami is on final approach yet,” he said.

“How are you doing that,” I asked. “Flight Tracker on my Blackberry,” he replied. He handed me his phone and I could see via a real-time map graphic that the Delta flight was still about 250 miles out. “They’ll be about 15 minutes late so I can run back to the lot and pick up another customer before that flight gets in,” he said.

Here is a man who spends his days meeting airplanes from all over the world. Flight delays, weather and overcrowded airports all create chaos in his life; think about the boring, wasted hours spent sitting at the airport in the absence of real-time arrival information.

Transformed by mobile
Boom, it hit me. This guy’s profession and day-to-day life had been radically changed by the emergence of mobile technology. Suddenly, this guy was making minute-by-minute decisions about how to manage his day based on real-time information coming in from hundreds of flights. His life has been made radically better. In turn, his customer service is radically better because now he is always there at exactly the right time. He knows how long it takes after the plane lands to taxi, disembark passengers and process them through customs. He also knows that some people check bags and some don’t so he has to be there when the first passengers leave the secure area. There are always passengers without checked bags.

The precision of the system he has developed is impressive. He smiled with pride and confidence as he explained it to me. “The JFK flight was four hours late yesterday,” he explained. “But even so, I arrived five minutes before the first passengers exited the secure area, and I got to spend two hours at home with my kids before the flight arrived.”

Plan for impact
Think about the impact of this one man’s story. Multiply that by the millions of smart phones in service today. Then multiply it again by the number that will be out there in two years and you can see a growing phenomenon that is changing lives in even the most unexpected places.

As marketers, we not only have to understand this, but we have to focus on how we can create these valued exchanges between our clients and their customers. Heady stuff for sure.

Got to go, that Delta flight just touched down.

T3 is proud to be jumping straight into the buzz and insanity that defines SXSW. We’ll be hosting events, joining in the all-night App Dev Hackathon fun, holding “office hours” at Star Bar, and participating in the first SXSW Tech Career Expo. Here’s what we’re up to at SXSW:

MARCH 9: App Dev Hackathon @SXSW
We’re throwing T3 developers into the all-night fun and challenge of the always interesting App Dev Hackathon. They’ll learn new skills, build mobile and HTML5 apps, drink lots of coffee, and compete for $4,000 in cash and prizes. All the best to our T3 hackers.

MARCH 9–10: SXSW Tech Career Expo
We’re proud to be participating in this first-ever Tech Career Show at the Austin Music Hall. For SXSW Interactive attendees and non-attendees alike, the Expo showcases the best jobs and career opportunities across the industry. We’re always looking for great talent, so be sure to stop by and see what’s up.

MARCH 10: What’s next for the mobile web?
T3 and Netbiscuits are joining forces to host this invite-only event that focuses on the future of the mobile web and celebrates the launch of Netbiscuits’ Tactile, a new HTML 5 framework for touch-enabled features to mobile web apps. Joining us are sponsors Mindtree, iLoop Mobile and Digiday, plus content partner IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence.

MARCH 12–14: T3 “office hours” at Star Bar
We’re creating an official stop for clients and partners in town for SXSW. We’ll hold “office hours” in the heart of West 6th St. to treat co-conspirators to libations and sustenance in an informal setting. Add us to your SXSW schedule. We’ll be at the Star Bar from 4–7 p.m. on March 12–14.

A colleague sent me this presentation the other day about the notion of transmedia.

The short implication of transmedia planning is that in some instances, overarching strategic constructs may be too rigid to fully exploit new channels of communication and the behaviors and beliefs each channel may represent. It effectively advocates an approach that starts with multiple tactical implementations that, when viewed from a step or two back, should mosaic nicely into a representation of the larger idea: A collection of appropriate parts that will sum into a cohesive and effective whole.

This idea triggered an odd flashback.

Fishing for an upper hand
For years before I worked in advertising, I bounced around as a sort of trout bum. I worked for a fly shop, a rod company, tied custom flies, taught people how to cast and served as a fishing guide. Every now and then you’d come across a client who’d show up at the river with million-dollar equipment but without the slightest inkling of how to use any of it. Back in the day, expensive fly rods were largely an expression of technical prowess; fine-tuned instruments that demanded the user have both a specific use in mind and a honed skillset.

When the movie A River Runs Through It came out, a lot of wealthy men and women who had never fished before reasoned that leapfrogging starter rods in favor of top-of-the-line outfits would represent an advantage. Retailers were happy to oblige, but in most instances this practice actually added time to the learning curve.

Too advanced for our own good?
To get back on course, while the idea of transmedia planning is both intriguing and, I think, sound, it strikes me as an advanced tool that will likely be misused more often than used correctly. I don’t know what it is, but I think we as marketers and advertisers are most comfortable with tactics, and I don’t intend this to be a pejorative use of the word. It’s just that to be a tactician feels like a natural state; tactics are more fun, easier to envision, and our profession tends to celebrate and perpetuate the notions of serendipity and genius versus strategy and hard work.

Here’s a dirty little secret: You actually don’t have to be a very good caster to catch trout on flies. In fact, in many instances you don’t have to know how to cast at all. Fly fishing is one of the purest intersections of art and science that I know of (outside of advertising, of course); it’s the art of casting and fly tying joined with an understanding of what fish eat and where they prefer to live.

Know how you got there
There are people out there who only like the part of fishing where they’re reeling the fish in; what got them to that state is almost immaterial. Who can blame them? I think the actual catching is the best part, too. But I do care how you got there, and I’m concerned that this idea of transmedia planning puts a lustrous and credible veneer on our preferred natural state and issues license to those who would rather catch fish before learning how to cast.