The Chocolate Super Highway: Precursors To Black Social Media

Was in NC last weekend at Duke for the Black Thought 2.0 Conference #BT2Duke. Sat on the panel, "The Chocolate Super Highway: Precursors To Black Social Media." Embedded the video below and would love your thoughts and feedback.

Video streaming by Ustream

For a roundup of coverage, visit Mark Anthony Neal: #BT2Duke In the Mix: Responses to Black Thought 2.0 at Duke

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Facebook Buys Instagram; What's Next for Popular Photo-Sharing App?

Facebook announced Monday that it will buy Instagram, the San-Francisco-based photo-sharing app for mobile devices. The purchase, which is a combination of cash and Facebook shares, is expected to close later this quarter. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the purchase will enhance Facebook users’ abilities to share great photos with friends based on their interests. He also said Facebook is committed to building and growing Instagram independently.

“Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spreadthisapp and brand to even more people,” Zuckerberg said. “We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.”

Lynne d Johnson (that's me), a content and community consultant and former senior social media strategist at R/GA digital ad agency, says it’s particularly important for Facebook to allow Instagram the creative independence, and hopes the popular new photo app company won’t just get absorbed into Facebook and lose its original appeal.

Read more...http://www.genconnect.com/career/facebook-buys-instagram-deal-photo-sharing-what-it-means-for-users/

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Pinterest and Facebook Timeline For Brands

With the growing popularity of Pinterest, and the Facebook Timeline now being the only profile type for brand pages, I decided to take a dive into what both of these platforms mean for brands. Both offer the opportunity for a brand to visually tell its story, but regardless of the presentation, the bottom line remains that content (though it can be visually appealing) must be engaging and relevant.

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Lynne d Johnson on Augmented Reality, Using Social Media Tools, And Building Communities Online

So, I'm not trying to turn this into a self-promotion blog but I've given a few good talks and interviews over the years. I'm not saying they're good just because it's me, I'm saying they're good because of the feedback I've received. So I decided to roll some of the videos that I could find on YouTube into a playlist, and here's what I've come up with: my talks on Augmented Reality as a Marketing Tool, as well as some stuff on building online communities, and on using social listening and analytics tools.

But one of my favorite videos of all time has got to be my off-the-cuff answer to Chris Brogan at SXSW a few years back when he asked me what's next in terms of the future of communities and media. That video isn't on YouTube so it's not in the playlist. But here it goes from Viddler:

What I basically said, and still think is relevant today, even more so as we enter this era of Information Overload (we've been in this era for a while though haven't we?) but with the increased amounts of content that people have exposure to it's even more significant. If you're a brand or a media company, sure, use all the social media channels you want, but be sure you have a homebase a place where all of this activity can land and live. In the era of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, mobile and social apps and the like, more and more we're dealing with shared spaces (the next rev of microsites really).

But what happens when those campaigns end? What happens when those social networks fail? If you can't export your content or create some solution on your own using APIs, what do you have left if all your eggs have gone into this one (waste)basket? I'm really talking about a managed digital presence that guarantees a historical base (timeline if you will). Digital is integrated and not siloed. How do we make what we do on FB or Twitter, come to life on our sites? That's basically what I'm talking about. See what you think.

Another series of videos I really enjoyed, was a program I did while I was working at the Advertising Research Foundation. Every day at one of our annual conferences, I interviewed social media folks about what's happening now and what's happening in the future. There was a lot of focus on social listening and market research communities, but so much more came out of the series that's still relevant today, nearly two years later.

I'll pull out two that I think really hit the nail on the head about what we're experiencing now in marketing and media.

Customer Engagement as the New Marketing

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media, The ARF interviews Samantha Skey — CMO, Passenger about customer engagement as the new marketing @ ReThink 2010: The ARF Annual Convention + Expo.

What is the Next Step in Social Media Research?

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media, The ARF interviews Chris Wilkes — Senior Director, Social Insights, Ripple6, Inc. about what the future of social media research looks like @ ReThink2010: The ARF Annual Convention + Expo.

And I'm pulling one from the vaults.

Lynne d Johnson Interviews Sophia Stuart, Hearst Mobile Case Study, Blogher '08

Fast Company's Lynne D. Johnson interviews Hearst Digital media's director of mobile, Sophia Stuart, about their initiative to take content and community mobile...realizing the promise of mobile ubiquity. Hear how they brainstormed over what content made sense for their mobile platforms from nine magazine properties, and about how they evangelized this new content internally and with surprisingly intimate efforts externally.

So much of what I was able to understand about what Hearst was doing was because of related projects I spearheaded when I was at Vibe and Spin in terms of adding community not only to our sites, but to our mobile apps as well.

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Is Augmented Reality Ready For Consumer Adoption? Layar Thinks So

In all of my talks about Augmented Reality, I've talked about consumer adoption being one of the hurdles to AR really taking off as a major marketing strategy. And while AR proves itself the best application of SoLoMo (Social, Local, Mobile) there's still a learning curve for consumers in terms of ease-of-use.

Layar, one of the first Augmented Reality Browsers is trying to change all of that by rolling out an AR application that's strictly for consumer usage. The app, Stiktu, enables users to combine digital images with real images and share them. Basically it's like sticking things on top of real-world objects. It's like virtual graffiti, allowing you to tag where you've been or what you've seen with your own marks of expression.

Layar produced the following video to show how it works:

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(YouTube) ad:tech inspire Final Session—Lynne d Johnson, Dan Neely, Flash Rosenberg

So the Inspired By Augmented Reality talk I gave at adtech that I wrote about back in November is up on YouTube. Now looking at it, I realize that all of the examples I should have put in the deck should have been SoLoMo examples. But at the same time, I wanted to make a point that Augmented Reality was realizing ROI for many brands. Given that my argument is that AR is the best tool to deliver on SoLoMo though, I need to find more examples that have ROI case studies or start getting with making some of those case studies happen myself.

Anyway, here's the vid:

Lynne d Johnson, Content + Community Consultant
As smartphones proliferate, consumer behavior is radically changing. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to either make purchases or make decisions about purchases. To take advantage of this trend, marketers need to develop strategies that engage consumers with experiences that are social, local and mobile. No other technology makes better use of SoLoMo than Augmented Reality (AR). Join Lynne d Johnson as she explores how AR layers mobile commerce, social networking and location-based advertising in a seamless format for consumers and brands. Discover which brands are already using AR and why yours will too!

Dan Neely, CEO, Networked Insights
My Customer Does What?--Consumer insights have gone real-time thanks to social media. The challenge is no longer getting good consumer data, it's making sense of it all. Consumer data gathered across the social web can let you walk in the footsteps of your target consumer. A marketer's mission is now connecting the dots, finding actionable information and funneling it to all of marketing functions. Because knowing what's important in the lives of your target consumer lets you make better marketing decisions. Join Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely as he discusses how brands are now using real-time data to inform everything from the content they create to the media they buy just by knowing their audience better.

Flash Rosenberg, Artist & Attention Span for Hire, Flash Rosenberg Studio
Drawing at the Speed of Talk, Laughing at the Speed of Light—Flash Rosenberg will discuss her process of "live-drawing" to translate real-time discussions into animated images. She will offer strategies for how you can fluently harness the funny things you see, to be able to express yourself more accurately, as well as humorously. Flash will also explain how digital technology is boisterously redefining the way we look at images...and ourselves.

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Inspired By Augmented Reality (Slides + Video)

Yesterday, I spoke at adtech Inspire (the opening session to this week's adtech in New York at Javits).

The gist:
1. consumers are flipping the purchase funnel (using the web and mobile devices to help them make purchase decisions via search, reviews, and social media)
2. marketers need to have mobile-ready advertising and mobile optimized sites ready to engage them in these new behaviors
3. but instead of thinking of strategies, think of creating experiences
4. why so lo mo is the new marketing and the new consumer behavior coming out of mobile
5. this is where the idea of using augmented reality to enhance social local mobile strategies comes in (there's a lot more about why AR is the perfect tech for this that i didn't get to say such as geolocation services and now NFC)
6. on a spectrum of AR i covered SMS and QR codes (Zoo records), to webcam virtual experiences (dabs/acer and tissot), to local (location-based) mobile experiences (like Quiznos and hotel.de/hotel.info w/Layar and Stella Artois Le Bar Guide and ), to POS (like the Lego's box virtual experience), to real-world applications (like AR-enabled ski goggles, Google Goggles and Word Lens, but also ways in which marketers are addressing the new customer journey via apps like GoldRun and Converse Sampler)
7. and I ended on a note of what's happening now with NFC (mastercard payments and the new jersey transit system payments with Nexus phones, to android beam making the ability to share info between phones much easier--it's like that bump app for iphones) and then what can come in the future when you use NFC with AR (the ability to mark items and spaces with coupons, codes, ads, information, etc. but then how virtual air rights will need to be solved)

Anyway, wanted to give the summary first before embedding the presentation. The presentation lays out the story, but it doesn't go into quite as much detail.

And finally, I didn't get to show how all of the AR apps and experiences, that I mentioned during my 15-minute presentation, actually work. Now it's time to roll the tape and show the video.

Zoo Records "Hidden Sound"

dabs.com augmented reality acer ad

Tissot Augmented Reality Application Demo

Tissot Augmented Reality

Quiznos Mobile AR campaign animation demo

Video - hotel.de App

Stella Artois Le Bar Guide

Lego Digital Box - augmented reality kiosk system

Zeal Optics Transcend Ski Goggles

Google Goggles

Introducing Word Lens

GoldRun

The Sampler

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