Kevin Systrom (CEO)

Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products and the latter where he worked on the Corporate Development team. Kevin has always had a passion for social products that enable people to communicate more easily, and combined with his passion for photography Instagram is a natural fit.

Mike Krieger

Mike also graduated from Stanford University where he studied Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction. During his undergrad, he interned at Microsoft’s PowerPoint team as a PM and at Foxmarks (now Xmarks) as a software developer. He wrote his Master’s thesis on how user interfaces can better support collaboration on a large scale. After graduating, he worked at Meebo for a year and a half as a user experience designer and as a front-end engineer before joining the Instagram team doing design & development.

Sprinklr Pioneers Social Media Management

by Gavin O’Malley,Taking email’s place, the belief that social media is the next great communications medium is a common one. Yet, coming from Ragy Thomas — former Interactive Services Group president of email powerhouse Epsilon — the idea carries more weight. Online Media Daily got the opportunity to grill Thomas on social media’s assent, the idea behind his new company Sprinklr, and its mission to pioneer “social media management.” What is “social media management,” and does it finally offer brands standardized social measurement? Social media management refers to an organization’s ability to manage a disparate social media environment. It allows companies to internally collaborate across teams, departments and geographies to externally publish to and manage conversations across multiple accounts and social media channels. Utilizing an integrated social media management platform across business units offers brands the ability to implement standardized social measurement. However, the industry as a whole is not at a point where the measurement is standardized across companies. You contend that 2012 will be the year businesses make a significant investment in social media management. What evidence backs up that claim? Anecdotal evidence that Sprinklr has indicates significant investment in social media management spend in 2012. For example, across the hundred-plus brands we have visibility into, we see the leaders beginning to allocate seven-figure budgets to implement global social media management infrastructure in 2012. Just in the first three weeks of December, Sprinklr signed on 10 global brands as clients. In addition to what we see at Sprinklr, Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter has done significant research on social media spends by large companies. His new report, due in January, will have the specifics. He indicated that the average budgets in 2012 could potentially double from 2011. How will businesses’ social media outlays measure up? The overall percentage spend is still in single digits for many companies. However, Forrester Research has predicted that social media will have the highest cumulative aggregate growth rate across all channels through 2014. Their report expects social media marketing spend to catch up to email marketing spend in 2012. What social insights did you take away from your time as president of email marketing specialist Epsilon Interactive? If you’ve been involved in sending over 100 billion opt-in commercial emails like I have, you tend to learn the limitations of email as a channel. The recipient doesn’t control who to accept messages from. And since emails clog up a private inbox, users have to painfully delete every message as it becomes irrelevant. The biggest insight for me is that social media basically is the next evolutionary version of electronic communications. Essentially, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, etc. are communications frameworks where the recipient controls who he/she receives messages from by explicitly subscribing to (friending or following) someone. And the framework distinguishes public messages from private, allowing users to passively ignore ones that aren’t relevant. In the area of social media management, what are most brands doing right? Most brands are moving cautiously into social. Most brands have started listening to social conversations, which is a great first step. The next step is to tie the listening to engagement by enabling and empowering business owners to respond. Leaders like Dell have established internal social media councils and are taking a global approach to social media management. What are most brands doing wrong? Brands need to start putting some enterprise focus on social media management instead of seeing it just as a community manager’s problem. Unless you establish processes and workflows to harness social conversations and further business goals, you are not tapping into the true power of the channel. Brands have to respond across departmental silos to adapt. What’s your take on the contention that social is only appropriate for a certain type of brand? Social is appropriate for all brands. However, it is true that consumer-focused brands are going to be able to tap into social media much more, as they can have real-time access to the voice of the customer and are relevant to a larger audience. Despite ongoing efforts by Google and others, Facebook seems to be tightening its grip on the social sphere. Is that an accurate assessment, and if so, is it bad for “social” progress? Facebook is definitely the 800-pound gorilla in the social space in terms of scale and sophistication. But as the story of Myspace reminds us, perceived size and scale don’t make companies invincible. The rapid growth of Facebook is not bad for social progress. They’ve upped the ante in terms of speed of innovation, and that has been incredible for the entire industry. Social is synonymous with consumer privacy-concerns. If they’re not careful, what privacy pitfalls could brands fall into in 2012? It is critical that brands respect consumer privacy while engaging in social media conversations. A coherent social media policy for employees is a “must have” for brands. As the much-publicized Chrysler “motor city” tweet from March taught the world, the policy needs to be extended to agencies and other third parties involved with social media. If brands aren’t careful about privacy, they can cause serious damage by inadvertently sharing sensitive corporate information or accessing private consumer information. Marketers need to make sure they understand the policies of social networking platforms and demand to know the source of any third-party social data that they use for business purposes. Whose social strategy would you love to take credit for? Brands like Dell, Samsung, Microsoft, Virgin America, Nike, Cisco, Target, SAP, Newell Rubbermaid etc. are doing incredible things in social. Virgin America is a great example. Their social team has the capability to notify in-flight crew if a passenger tweets on board. Sprinklr provides a SaaS (Software as a Service) Social Relationship Management platform and social media services to these companies, but the credit for social strategy goes to the leaders within these companies. Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/164974/sprinklr-pioneers-social-media-management.html?print#ixzz1iebHlW5N

  2012 will be a tipping point as exploding mobile-connected consumer adoption reshapes all business structure, process and economics. The chasm will deepen between companies integrating anywhere connections into every level of their operations and those that don’t. Defined by author Malcom Gladwell as “the moment of critical mass and threshold,” consumer reliance on and use of mobile connectivity will be collectively potent enough to prompt major change for companies across the spectrum. Attention will shift from platforms, devices and channels of parity to consumer-specific needs and interests as content and marketing blur across all screens.  Individual relevance will be the key to creating and mining new connected mobile value propositions for all parties. Privacy concerns will dissipate when consumers know and “allow” data to be collected about them in exchange for the delivery of targeted products and services. With the domestic social network audience comprising 66% of U.S. Internet users in 2012, according to eMarketer, social media will emerge as the de facto connection platform, providing the glue for revenue-generating transactions through its share, likes, links and clicks. Facebook will lead the march leveraging  members’ personal Timelines, sponsored story news feeds and Open Graph protocol in new mobile applications, and users’ texting affinity. Worldwide social network ad revenues will pass $8 billion in 2012, $5.8 billion of which will be generated by Facebook and its mobile expansion, according to eMarketer. Amazon has set the bar high on a new breed of customer service that is cost-effective, reliable, intuitive and all about the individual customer. While the development of new interactive metrics and measurement continue their slow and steady churn, merchants will begin relying on the ultimate endgame: the transaction. As video becomes seamless across all screens and is the catalyst for next-level digital advertising — tech giants Apple, Google, Sony and Microsoft will wage a major battle for the American living room. The pastime of TV viewing will be folded into a more ubiquitous video experience. With 86% of Web users now using a mobile device while watching TV, according to Nielsen, the integration is clearly underway, reducing the continuing slide in conventional TV viewing and box office attendance to a mere footnote. The intensifying tension between such tech giants and Facebook, as they innovate in a land grab for consumers and companies, will be the most significant story and driving force for change in 2012. The continuing flow of merger consolidation and IPOs, dominated by Facebook going public with a possible $100 billion valuation, will just raise the stakes and create unprecedented value. Consumers favor on-the-go interactivity; companies change or risk obsolescence. A simple but profound example: Sears’ decision to close more than 100 stores due to poor holiday sales and Best Buy’s failure to fulfill all of its online orders by Christmas underscore etailers underestimating the power and expectations of the connected consumer. Such is the Amazon effect that will shape all companies. The pricey premiums the broadcast TV networks paid for mobile rights as part of the recently negotiated $28 billion NFL rights could trigger a major move into a la carte streaming fees to offset those costs, possibly backed by new concepts such  as pay tiers on on the new NBC Sports Channel and the ultraViolate initiative’s digital rights locker. Comcast-owned NBC has, but may not boldly exploit, new content, marketing and commerce business models with its multiscreen coverage of the London Summer Olympics. The issue of interactive universal video screens ultimately will be forced by Google’s YouTube (the top online video destination) and its $100 million investment in original Web-only to fuel its entry into interactive TV. Perhaps the most riveting question for 2012 is how companies will put mobile interactivity to work in new ways to capture the attention and spend of the connected consumer? Some of the other change they must consider: *Location-based content, service and marketing will become more sophisticated as it moves toward the mainstream. Revenue growth will be generated from reaching the right individual consumer with the right content, marketing message and deal at the right time. It won’t just be up to consolidating deal players, such as Groupon and Foursquare. With more than 60% of adults rely on the Internet for information about local business, according to Pew Research, every company will need to beat a new path to connected consumers on the go. *Widespread cloud-based streaming will fuse content and marketing, upending old-line video and advertising delivery and economics. The result could be a viable movement toward a la carte pricing and self-serve targeted advertising that give consumers precisely what they want and when. *Personal relevance becomes the key factor. For consumers, it goes beyond loyalty to convenience and cost efficiency. For companies, it translates into more direct marketing and impulse buying, and bottom line growth. *Strongest holiday sales occurred with merchants that straddle the online and brick and mortar worlds, demonstrating a tireless advance of virtual connections to customers. *Advertising and marketing holdouts — including too many of the leading ad agencies — will finally succumb to these overwhelming trends.  Anyone pointing to a temporary blip in 2012 Olympics and election-related advertising as a reason to feel encouraged about the future of conventional TV advertising, is drinking the Kool-Aid. The companies that target the ultimate sale will win.  However they finally shake out, mobile payments $700 billion by 2015, according to Juniper, will turn retail spending on its head and fortify already impressive online commerce. *The reconciliation of the virtual and physical worlds will become more pronounced. One simple example: Politico will begin distributing free hard copy versions in New York City to promote the online Web site where it was conceived. Little wonder, since its Washington, D.C., free, advertising-based print version is more profitable than its online counterpart. This seemingly backward approach is indicative of the way companies must continue to integrate and reach out to connected consumers across both worlds.

 

Google has long told marketers that though buying AdWords won’t help them in natural search results, creating great, well-linked content will.

But some marketers are preparing for another shift: Google’s incorporation of social signals from Google+ in its rankings. Brands aren’t waiting for the giant to make it official, which is a big reason they’re investing in Google+ pages. Their worry is that early adopters will reap the search benefits, while others will be buried by those who have collected more +1s. Google is already “experimenting” with making a click on +1 buttons one of the more than 200 signals informing its search algorithm, according to a company spokesperson. But it could go much further and factor in the number and size of a “circles” — the pools of Google+ users following a brand — as well as how widely its Google+ content is being shared. That could give brands an incentive to be active on the platform and get fans to engage with content there. “Google’s trump card in social is if they make Google+ an extremely strong signal in their ranking algorithm, and basically they can force every brand to push it because of the impact it would have on Google search results,” said Group M Search CEO Chris Copeland.Google+ brand pages were rolled out last month (http://adage.com/article/digital/google-open-business/230862/), but few organizations are committing major resources to them at this stage. Dell and Macy’sare among the brands to have worked with Hangouts (http://adage.com/article/digital/brands-start-test-hangouts-google-pages/231053/), Google+’s group video chat feature, one of its main differentiators from Facebook and other social networks.   The vast majority are still treating Google+ as an experiment, and Michael Scissons, president of Syncapse, a social-media management firm. Most are reproducing Facebook content on their Google+ pages and not worrying about making their content SEO-friendly — even though it’s a looming consideration.   “I would say everybody at this point is in trial and discovery mode around best practices, and I believe Google will start to give some degree of preference to Google+ pages over Facebook pages, because it’s in their own best interest to do so,” Mr. Scissons said. Ford was among the marketers in Google+’s beta-testing group for brands. The automaker’s head of social media, Scott Monty, said that though his team hasn’t made a big content push yet, he expects more movement when brand pages’ functionality is enhanced next year. Google+ hasn’t affected Ford’s search visibility to date, Mr. Money said, but he sees it coming. In terms of opportunities for a marketer like Ford, Mr. Monty drew a potential scenario in which a YouTube video on Ford’s channel could be shared on Google+. If it were shared widely and got many +1s, it could reach the top rungs of organic search results for “Ford” or “fuel economy,” for example. “The more deliberate we are with the content we create and share on Google+, the more those earned search results are going to come up,” Mr. Monty said. Chad Estes, Vitrue’s VP-client partnerships, said some major brands working with his firm are carving out a Google+ presence defensively, as a hedge against changes to search.   “Chances are they don’t want to wait until Google finally admits that it’s happening to start creating content,” Mr. Estes said.   Mr. Copeland of Group M Search envisions a near future where the best results for a brand are its own site and its Google+ page, followed by its Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter pages to round out the top five. But he thinks the bigger opportunity for early adopters nurturing communities on their Google+ page could be in generic search. A detergent maker’s page, for instance, could surge in results for such keywords as “grass-stain removal” if engagement is high. In that case, he foresees late adopters having to compensate by spending more on paid search than they had intended. “One or two brands [per category] will embrace this to a large degree, and everyone else will have to play catch-up,” Mr. Copeland said. Roger Barnette, IgnitionOne’s president, expects Google to tread lightly in tweaking the algorithm to avoid disrupting the user experience. “You want to see how users are using [Google+] before letting it impact ranking,” he said. It’s also possible that signals from Google+ won’t directly alter search rankings but will instead be used as a results “validator,” according to Kevin Lee, CEO of search-marketing firm Didit. For example, +1 clicks could be used to confirm that a recently launched news site merits a high search ranking if it has been linked to and written about extensively. “They want it to continue to be the best user experience,” said Mr. Lee. Making social signals a big factor in SEO would open the door to marketers’ attempting to game the system and offer incentives to users to engage with their content in the Google ecosystem, he added.

For a content publisher, which of the following user visits is most valuable to you? First, there is the person landing from an auto keyword search onto a car section with a high CPM. He is showing high intent in a lucrative ad category and is generating an impression in your highest-priced ad segment. On the other hand, there is the person who comes in perhaps from an article link into an area that sells at a modest CPM. But unlike the first “high value” user who came in on his way across multiple car reviews at many publishers, this user is intrigued by your content and starts on a longer path across multiple lower CPM pages. In the end, it is that second user, who may not be coming in with high value, lower funnel intent, who proves most valuable to you. Their flight path results in greater monetization. In some sense, recommendation engines help do part of that work by keeping a visitor in a content garden. But an interesting company that is getting traction with publishers like MSNBC.com and Hearst Newspapers argues that content needs to be valued differently in order for this approach to monetization to work. “How do you get audiences to the places that matter most?” is the main challenge, according to JumpTime CEO and co-founder Michele DiLorenzo. Most publishers continue to associate high CPMs with content value, but the premise of JumpTime’s alternative model comes from economic theory, which understands the true worth of an asset as a combination of its current and future value. “If content is an asset in a network, that means every piece of content has two jobs: it delivers information but also exposes the user to other content and gets them to consume more content,” DiLorenzo says. For most sites, recommendation engines perform some of the work of maximizing visitor value by driving the user into more content. But JumpTime explains that the “flow power” of content itself needs to be examined. “Some content doesn’t induce people to go further,” says DiLorenzo. “The true value of content is beyond the first click.” In some scenarios a user may come in to a news article with relatively modest CPM value, but that content drives them to other content of much higher value. With one lifestyle site, the ad sales team was having trouble selling into a user-generated content area, so the site was intending to kill off the area as worthless. But when user flight paths through the site were examined, it turns out that the UGC content succeeded in engaging visitors with the site and passing them on to content that was being monetized. The area with the lowest CPM ultimately had the highest longer term value.  In order to calculate the true value of given content, JumpTime uses a number of inputs, from ad servers, conversion, subscriptions, etc. These values are calculated into a traffic valuation that can be overlaid on the Web page for editors and marketers to see. In the demo JumpTime showed me, a front page shows numeric valuations on every article link so the managers can make decisions on how best to use its screen real estate. “The movement of any person through the site affects the value of everything else on the network, so it has to be updated at all times,” she says. The editors and marketers can see from the dashboard view that an article garnering tons of clickthroughs may not actually be generating substantial total value. Landing page adjustments can be made on the fly to optimize the value of a popular piece, but over time the metrics can inform revisions for site structure and sectional content. These are the kinds of metrics that can also inform a site’s marketing and social media strategies. They can identify and distinguish value among different traffic sources, such as search and social networks. As pages become cluttered with all of those share buttons from multiple vendors, which really is worthwhile? JumpTime’s is an interesting model for understanding monetization at a content site and seeing a publisher’s domain as a complex ecosystem. It takes a longer view of “audience” than some of the demand-side, real-time models that are looking to “put the right ad in front of the right person on any given page.” While JumpTime’s solution is really aimed at optimizing monetization, one has to wonder if this approach also imposes a certain perspective about the nature of a publisher’s audience and the behavior of people with content. It’s curious that we’ve adopted  the “site” metaphor for online publishing. Unlike broadcast or printed products, interactivity makes content navigable in ways similar to a physical location. While the received notions of traditional media tend toward thinking of an online destination as an enhanced newspaper or magazine, the experience is really closer to that of a theme park. Apart from the raw numbers of monetization, one might ask, what holistic experience is this “site” creating for me?