katie van domelen *

In fact may even be less. According to the news I've read on InsideFacebook and ZDNet and Facebook itself it sounds like these stories can only be ones that you could have seen anyways. To quote ZDNet's concise explanation:

[In order to see the Featured story from Ben and Jerry's] First, you must have already Liked Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page, or one of your friends must have interacted with Ben & Jerry’s Page. Second, Ben & Jerry must have chosen to have the ad promoted to users who have Liked its Page.

Alternatively, a story you wrote can also be featured as an ad, but it will only be shown to people you originally shared it with. A business may want to do this in order to get more people to Like its Page by showing off someone important Liking their Page, or underlining interesting content someone posted on their Page. Facebook is likely hoping the fact that since the story is being shared between friends, it will be considered more relevant than a traditional ad would be.

Since these ads are just stories, they cannot be stopped completely (although ad blockers may find a way around this). Users do, however, have three options provided by Facebook to limit the ads: click hide to remove individual stories, limit the volume of stories you see from a specific friend to only important posts, or unfriend the person and/or unlike the Page to stop seeing certain kinds of stories altogether.

This new "featured" option is just giving brands a way to (pay to) get around the negetive effect of EdgeRank.  

Per usual - I have a dual reaction to this. As a user, I'm not particularly thrilled. I still think the ads i see on Facebook are marginally more relevant than those I see on any given website (provided it isn't using retargetting) but that's not to say I enjoy them. I just have come to accept them as a necessary evil, right there with death and taxes.

On the other hand, as a marketer, this is fantastic news. 1) I can now pay to get around an EdgeRank block 2) I know that Facebook ads are highly targeted and relevant (see my own comments above) 3) I can use the social context of friends' stories and fans' connection with me to increase that relevance.

What do you think (either as a user or a marketer)?

I've started seeing more and more articles dedicated to exploring Pinterest and I couldn't be happier. I joined Pinterest a little over 9 months ago and I love it. I love it a lot more than other new networks, like G+ for example. (Point in fact, I login to Pinterest regularly and am constantly updating where my G+ is a wasteland.)

After reading a couple different articles that look at the site from different perspectives (popular male bloggers trying to demystify this "female" network, wife of popular blogger and blogger in her own right explaining it's benefits to her craft-oriented crowd) I wanted to throw my two cents in on the potential here.

The reason that Pinterest is interesting is because it's entirely focused on images. Every post is a picture - you can pin any link and choose a picture from that link to represent it. Twitter is text based. Yes you can link to photos and videos but when you login you see a stream of text. Facebook has a ton of stuff going on, yes pictures are involved but there's a lot more to it. Pinterest is just pictures. Think about how easy it is for the eye and mind to scan that. That where it's power is.

So what can you do with that power? Pinterest allows you to create various "pinboards" to collect your types of pins. Uses for this are all over the map:

• Inspiration in any visual category (food, design, imagery/art, architecture, fashion)
• Planning in any visual sense (parties/weddings/events, decorations, outfits, gifts, costumes, website, project, home redesign, new car purchase, moving, new baby on the way, adopting a pet)
• Specific decision making as an individual or in a group (picking a dress, picking a new piece of furniture, buying a new car, picking a new house/apartment, picking a pet)

A couple personal examples: I recently set up a pinboard just for bridesmaid dresses for my sister's wedding - I made all the bridesmaids, and my sister, contributors to that board so we could scour the internet for pictures of dresses we liked. We pin the pictures, tag prices and stores and then we can go back to this visual collection and comment and rank the ones we like. Where else could we have done that so easily? I also store dinner recipes I find on the web here. That way I can visually look for something delicious and then click through to the actual recipe when it's time to cook.

But the really fun part is browsing. The trick is to not get stuck on the screen of people you follow, that's so limiting. Click into "Everything" and pick a category you're interested in in that moment. You can spend hours looking for and finding inspiration in anything. Scanning images is a much more pleasant browsing experience than scanning short text messages. Trust me.

The reason this works so well is that Pinterest is completely open. It's less about sharing personal information and more about storing/sharing found things so there's not as much hesitation about putting it all out there. In fact, Pinterest doesn't have a private option. So there's this wealth of content being currated, beautifully. 

Even brands can get in on the fun. Nordstrom is doing some really cool things there [Disclaimer: They are an ExactTarget/CoTweet client.] I could definitely see it being more fun to follow some brands here than on Facebook or Twitter. Off the top of my head here are a couple ideas:

• Like Nordstrom, boards of various products. Works well when your products are visual and beautiful
• Themed boards: design a room, or provide a party plan, or put together an event using your products (bonus if you mix some others in as well)
• Shared boards: you can allow other contributors to add to your boards - right now this is limited to people you specifically pick (maybe a collaboration across a couple brands to come up with a cool themed board?) but in the future if you could set it to be "open" and say something like "Put together your wishlist from our fall catalogue" that could be a lot of fun.

If you haven't tried it yet, and still feel hesitant, my best advice is to get on there and just start with one pinboard - something like "cool stuff" - add the bookmarklet and just start using it. Head back to the site every now and then to check out what's going on in the Everything category and before you know it you'll be hooked.

Obviously only works with brands that earn customer love, and that customers want to identify with. But I think it's pretty savvy.

(P.S: In case you hadn't heard, this is also the best new show on Television right now. Just sayin.)

Give power to the readers AND the writers.

Think about it. It's not a bad idea to surface all the songs my friends are listening to - that's what Last.FM is all about. But general sentiment was negative when the Spotify frictionless sharing showed up on Facebook. Why?

Or think about Goodreads. I'm a nerd who loves to read and I don't care who knows it. I keep my Goodreads account meticulously up to date with the books I've read and my reviews, but I don't post that content back to Facebook. Why?

The answer is simple. We don't want to push all that content to our friends and force it on them. I bet if there was a way to filter content streams that gave readers control over what they were looking at, we'd all be more open to sharing.

I guess the way I'm envisioning it is that there'd be a main stream where I'd post my normal status updates, photos, etc (my wall, the news feed) that I want to push to all my friends so they can see it. But then there should be a way to update content areas that don't push to a main feed. Like "Music I'm listening to" or "Books I'm reading" or "Movies I'm watching" - all would be perfect examples. Then as a Facebook user, looking for reading inspiration or music suggestions, I would navigate to the "music" feed and see all the music updates my friends have posted, or the [fill-in-the-blank] feed. I could see that easily applying to music, movies, books, check-ins, games, articles read, etc.

Essentially it's a double opt-in - one friend is saying "I'm willing to share this" and the other is saying "I want to read this type of info." It would be up to the writer to decide whether to publish to the main feed/wall or to a content area and then it would be up to the reader/viewer whether to look only at the main feed or at a paricular content area.

This way we can have our cake and eat it too - we can share to our hearts content without worrying that we're oversharing and bugging our friends. And we can hear all about our friends lives, but in a manageable way that fits with what we're interested in. And Facebook gets allllllll those impressions, and shares, and connections.

Win-Win-Win as Michael Scott would say.

This is incredibly important - if you haven't read 1984 since high school, pick it up and tell me this isn't the beginning of that world. It's all well and good to protest the systems that are in place to create such a gulf between the 99 and 1 percent in this country but it's nothing if you don't take action to stop yet another law that increases the barrier to entry for small companies and promotes the interests of the largest conglomerates. They don't need our protection.

Now do something about it.

But now that Klout has decided I'm influential in humor I've pretty much decided it's all knowing and completely correct about everything ;)

Check it out:

https://apps.facebook.com/meetnewwpdemo/?ref=nf