Facebook Acquires Storytelling Site Storylane in Talent Grab

Facebook is buying Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Storylane in what is a talent-oriented acquisition. Storylane wanted to become a new kind of story-telling platform much like Evan Williams’s Medium and Rebel Mouse. “We’re trying to build this library of human experience,” said founder Jonathan Gheller in an interview with my colleague Eliza Kern, when the service launched in October 2012.

It caught the eye of Internet giants and entered acquisitions talks with the likes of Yahoo and Facebook. Facebook clearly values the team and founder Gheller who is known for his ability to correlate data, identity and growth. The company had raised $2.8 million dollars from the likes of Balderton Capital, Sigma Partners, Ariel Poler, Mark Goines and bunch of other angel investors.

On his Storylane page, founder Gheller shared this note:

After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook. 

This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about. 

The beautiful stories you have decided to share with us are yours to keep and share in however way you want. We are building tools that will help you migrate the content to other services if you so desire. I will be in touch with you about those specific tools later, but I can confirm that Facebook is not acquiring any of your data; and we’re working to make sure you can migrate your content in a manageable way. 

I want to thank our users. Your passion, sincerity and willingness to share, has made Storylane the incredible experience that exists today. We have learned so much from you. Your ideas and creativity will stay with us and inspire us on the next stage of our journey.

Now a Social App that can manage Your Entire Home From a Phone.

A new app aims to reassure absent homeowners by letting them manage and monitor household items, straight from their phone or tablet.

Prizm is a 5-inch touchscreen controller that uses Z-Wave, a wireless system designed to help users communicate with home appliances. Combined with the Prizm Manager mobile app, they can turn light switches on and off, lock and unlock doors, raise and lower shades, and adjust the thermostat. Users are also notified when a door or window is opened, or when someone leaves or enters the house.

The product's creators say they have developed a cloud platform that makes it possible for users to "stay connected to your home from anywhere in the world."

So far, Prizm has raised a little over $6,000 of its $200,000 goal on Kickstarter. Would you use it? Tell us in the comments, below.

Pepsi India Reveals New Brand Ambassador Through Social Media

Creating a buzz about new brand ambassadors on social media is another trend that is catching up from 2012. The latest to follow the trend is Pepsi India for its ongoing campaign “Oh Yes Abhi”. According to Best Media Info, Pepsi has brought on board the U-19 cricket captain, Unmukt Chand, as its new brand ambassador to its “Oh Yes Abhi” campaign. The latest TVC which has been created by JWT India introduces Unmukt along with the captain of the Indian cricket team, MS Dhoni, Virat and Suresh Raina. The entertaining TVC that focuses on the impertinence of the young star to join the Indian team went on air from 1st of March.

The video in a weeks time, has already got more than 175K views. One of the reasons for the growing views could be attributed to the pre-launch buzz created on social media. The Facebook page that caters to more than 3.6M fans, created some thrill for them before revealing the video. The page moderators shared some interesting visual content that not only revealed that there is someone coming pretty soon but it also got the people talking. For example the below screen grab gives the kind of the content shared to create the initial excitement. The numbers depict the excitement too – 178 Shares and more than 1K comments.

Along with Facebook, the brand that has an amazing presence on Twitter with more than 6K followers, was not left out. The tweets focused on the new member joining and sharing the video. In addition to this, the brand created a hashtag #SeniorVsJunior and tried creating a conversation around it.

Pepsi India has launched the commercial a month before the IPL which is not surprising. Unmukt Chand, who truly reflects Pepsi’s ‘Oh Yes Abhi!’ attitude in the TVC, has been used smartly on social media too. Not that it is the first time since last year we saw FashionAndYou and Myntra launch full fledged campaigns on social media for the launch of their brand ambassadors. A trend which is going to be explored in the near future by more brands.

Prasant Naidu

About Author 
Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. Loves to experiment in social media and believes social media is a game changer for SME's. A diehard Royal Enfield fan,a voracious reader. I believe that knowledge should be shared so I often do it via training and speaking assignments on social media...

Rebecca Marino Quits Tennis Following Attacks on Social Media

Canadian tennis professional Rebecca Marino announced she is quitting the sport, following a bout with depression that has been exacerbated by cyberbullying on social media sites.

Marino — the 22-year-old who was once in the top 40 players in the world — told reporters on a conference call she had received hateful messages such as "go die" and "burn in hell," according to Canadian publication The Star. Others berated her for costing them money while betting on her tennis performance.

Although Marino said she has "thick skin," the "really hurtful" words were compounded by the fact she has suffered from depression for the past six years.

“My depression had come way before the so-called cyberbullying,” said Marino. “Social media has also taken its toll on me.”

Following her announcement, she deleted her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

“Social media is actually a really important part of our society and there can be a lot of good that comes out of it,” said Marino, before adding it became too distracting. It's unknown if she will return to those sites in the future.

Last year, Marino took seven months off from tennis, but had recently resumed competing. Social media and depression aren't the only reasons she is leaving the sport, she said.

“I don’t think that I’m willing to sacrifice my happiness and other parts of my life for tennis,” she said. "There’s more to life than just tennis."

Three ideas that can revolutionize your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social marketing can be hugely powerful: it drives new and repeat business, builds loyalty and engagement, and even inspires the holy grail of word-of-mouth marketing: spontaneous brand advocacy.

But, like any powerful tool, social requires knowledge and skills to effectively harness its might.

Before you rush out to Post and Tweet with reckless abandon, it’s crucial to have the right foundation in place to inform what you’ll say (strategy), how you’ll say it (execution), and how you’ll measure the results (ROI). Here are three fundamentals to set you up for success in social marketing all through 2013:

Get Over IMC

IMC, or integrated marketing communications, has long been the de facto mantra of the modern marketing world. Its main premise is that you should keep brand messaging uniform across all mediums.

For many big brands and old-school agencies, IMC is simply how things are done. But IMC was created with a different world in mind.

When the term was coined back in the 1970s, there weren’t nearly as many mediums in play — and they were all one-way, “broadcast” mediums. TV, radio and print ads were usually the vehicles of choice, backed up with package design and store placement. It was easy to use the same taglines, imagery and branding in a uniform way across all of these marketing efforts.

Today? Not so much. With all of the dynamic new mediums created by the internet revolution, we can’t just shoehorn the same message into all channels, digital and analog alike. For one, most marketing channels today are a two-way street.

Brands can broadcast their messages, but consumers and fans also have the opportunity to respond, remix, retweet and generally change your message. Two-way marketing channels throw a wrench in good, old-fashioned IMC.

Instead of trying to keep the message 100% uniform across all channels, we recommend focusing on the unique “personality” of each brand and on providing consistently great interactions, everywhere from your website to your social media channels to customer service and everything in between.

Think of a brand more like a person, with different facets to its character. It’s still a single, cohesive entity, but it’s a heck of a lot more complex than a label on a shampoo bottle.

Bottom line: IMC had a good run, but the end is near. That doesn’t mean you should give up on integrating your brand’s messaging. It just means you need to think about it more holistically.

Start Using Full-Spectrum Attribution

As budgets continue to rise for social media marketing, executives have increasingly (and rightfully) demanded that marketers prove their efforts are “ringing registers” and delivering return on investment. But some marketers claim social metrics are too “squishy” to align with real business objectives. Others still haven’t summoned the discipline to establish a rigorous measurement framework.

But for those marketers who have fully embraced social media marketing and invested in a rigorous measurement framework, it’s easy to demonstrate the benefits. Success stories like Samsung and Nutella are now outnumbering naysayers like GM, because marketers are using data to prove that they can leverage social to solve complex business challenges and deliver significant returns using social. 

This is only possible through an analytical process called Full-Spectrum Attribution.  In order to attribute positive results (engagement, enhanced loyalty, new sales) to specific efforts (paid advertising, applications, publishing, customer care), marketers need a highly analytical, full-spectrum view of their social media activities. 

Tools can enable this approach (more on that in a moment), but first it requires a commitment to identifying metrics and benchmarks that are specific to social and that recognize the unique qualities that distinguish it from broadcast mediums.

Find the Right Tools For You

In order to begin treating your brand’s messaging more holistically and implementing Full-Spectrum Attribution, you’ll need to find the right tools.

The right tools for you will depend on the size of your company and the nature of your brand(s). Most importantly, you should make sure that the people who are producing social content are directly and constantly connected to the people who are amplifying that content, and that they’re using the same tools.

One way to do that is to create a social media “war room.” Oreo employed this tactic with great success during the Super Bowl, pushing out fun and timely content with speed that made plenty of consumers and brand marketers take notice. How did they do it so fast? In a word, integration.

Everyone who needed to be present to make a decision (and put the creative together) was in the same room at the same time — the right time. Agile social marketing is best enacted in real time, in one room, with one group of people who can easily communicate with each other and who use the same tools to achieve common goals.

Why is this war room so important? Both content producers (for example, the people writing your Facebook posts) and content promoters (the people pushing your ads) have valuable insight into what works. If they’re both measuring correctly, they will start to see patterns.

Perhaps a clever Facebook post is getting tons of likes and shares. Or maybe a certain retargeting strategy is suddenly paying off and needs more media spend immediately. In a war room, real or virtual, these patterns can be quickly identified and used to adjust your strategy and combine owned, earned and paid media effectively without missing a beat.

To make this even easier, we recommend using automated software tools that can aggregate and make sense of data faster than humans can. When a powerful software system is combined with a “war room” full of well-trained people who can put this data to use, what results is a highly scalable approach to maximizing the return on your social marketing efforts.

So there you have it. Three important ways to think about putting social to work for you in the new year.

How will you be approaching social marketing differently in 2013?

About the Author

Jamie Tedford is CEO and founder of Brand Networks, one of twelve companies that comprise Facebook's Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer program, and a leading provider of integrated social software solutions and marketing services for some of the world’s most “Liked” brands.