[Original article: Here]

Social media monitoring company Keyhole is tracking the most popular tweets from CES and it sent us this gem, the second most popular tweet of the day so far.

URGENT NEED TO CONTACT SOMEONE FROM SONY AT #CES AUTOREVERSE ON MY WALKMAN IS BROKE CONTACT ME ON MYSPACE KTHXBYE

— KimJongNumberUn (@KimJongNumberUn) January 7, 2013

Obviously, the North Korean leader is not prancing around CES in Las Vegas this week, with or without a walkman. But we expect the fake @KimJongNumberUn is probably a funnier dude to fine at the show if you can. Here’s how he describes himself on Twitter: “I used to be an unemployed twentysomething still living at home. Now I have nuclear weapons. It’s all good, yo.”

So, what’s the most popular tweet from CES tracked by Keyhole? Nothing special, but you can check out the full list here.

[Original article: Here]

So, Notre Dame’s star quarterback Manti Te’o had a girlfriend. And she died. Sort of.

It turns out the the girl wasn’t real, so neither was her tragic death. Plus, Te’o claims he didn’t even know that his girlfriend was fake, because it was an online relationship. He says he was the victim of “someone’s sick joke,” and that he’s feeling humiliated.

This is a story made for the witty people on Twitter if ever there was one.

In the first hour after Deadspin broke the news about the fake dead girlfriend there were 160,000 tweets about it, say the folks at Keyhole who monitor this sort of thing.

Here’s a few of the funniest ones:

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great summary for #CMAD, which you can read here:

Wrapup: Community Manager Day 2013, Trended

It also included Keyhole’s tracker for #CMAD, which showed over 17,500 tweets by almost 13,500 different users. Congrats to all the Community Managers who were celebrated, and for those who contributed to building all this awareness! 

Go team!

[Original article: Here]

Philippe Dubost is a web product manager who really wants to work for Amazon.

Dubost turned his domain, phildub.com, into an Amazon product page, complete with advertisements and reviews. He rewrote the text to read like a resume. It’s full of links to email him and to view his LinkedIn profile. Amazon HR can even put him in its cart.

For product dimensions, Dubot put his height. He apparently comes in three languages, speaking English, French and Spanish, and can be “shipped all over the world.” 

Dubost looks good on paper. He runs marathons in three hours and twenty-two minutes, he has a bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Nice, and he formally worked for advertising company, MediaMind.

Below is a screenshot of the site Dubost made. It has been tweeted around by Yahoo Finance, Y Combinator and nearly 300 others.

Dubost has not returned a request for comment so we don’t know how long he spent on the web page, but we can assume it took a while.

[Original article: Here]

[Original article: Here]

BY MICHAEL CARNEY 
ON FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Viddy co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien will no longer be involved in the company’s day to day operations, and the search is underway for a new chief executive with more product and content monetization experience. The decision was made by the board of directors after consultation with management, according Battery Ventures general partner and Viddy board member Brian O’Malley.

The executive shakeup comes amid a period of turmoil at the company stemming from declining popularity among users. Just nine month ago, the social video startup raised $30 million in a frothy April 2012 Series B financing that valued the company at an astounding $370 million. O’Brien will remain on the company’s board of directors, but will be replaced as chairman, and will continue to consult with the company until a replacement CEO is found.

“Brett has been great getting Viddy from an idea to where it is today,” O’Malley says. “The goal now is to look at the next chapter of the business, and look for someone with a deeper background in product and content monetization.”

What’s more, we’ve heard from multiple sources close to Viddy that O’Brien played a major role in the young company’s decision to turn down what these sources have described as a high eight- to low nine-figure acquisition offer by Twitter around the time of the most recent financing. If accurate,holy hell! 

“No we didn’t turn down an offer from Twitter,” O’Malley says. “There are discussions of this nature ongoing all the time, but it never got to the point where we ever had anything that I would consider a concrete offer.” Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz declined to comment on acquisition rumors.

It can be hard to get confirmation in cases of deals never consummated, but, if true, it could explain the vote of no confidence and would mark one of the biggest blunders in recent M&A memory – possibly since Yahoo’s Jerry Yang turned down a mid-decade $40 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft. (Yahoo’s market cap is currently just shy of $23 billion, even after a recent resurgence.) In light of the latest executive shakeup at Viddy, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that the company can grow into its massive early valuation. For the founders, its overly-optimistic backers, and the Los Angeles startup ecosystem as a whole, this would be a tragic, if not predictable, outcome given the bar that was set.

O’Brien and his Viddy co-founders, president JJ Aguhob and head of business development Chris Ovitz – who is the son of CAA founder Michael Ovitz – have learned the hard way that piles of cash and heaps of press attention aren’t enough to build a sustainable business. Look no further than Colorand AirTime for two products that never got off the ground despite plenty of both. Celebrity backers don’t seem to seal the deal either, otherwise BeachMint would still be king of the hill. And user acquisition juice from the Facebook Open Graph can only take you so far as well – especially when the social network ceases funneling traffic your way – as illustrated by Chill and so many other similarly buoyed products that have cooled since launch.

“It’s no secret that traffic has dropped materially since the peak last Spring,” O’Malley says. “We still get 4 to 5 million uniques a month [down from highs of more than 30 million], but things are not perfect. The goal now is to maximize the shareholder value going forward from this point. Version 2.0 is set to launch in a few weeks. It by no means a silver bullet, but it is a reflection of lots of user feedback and is a material step in the right direction.”

Viddy has struggled to find a way to keep growing and engaging users at the pace that initially justified (a word I use loosely) its lofty valuation and has shown no signs of effectively monetizing the audience it does have. The company launched its public API in July, with the hopes that the move would make it the backend for social video sharing on both the desktop and mobile Web. While the strategy makes sense, the early adoption has been lukewarm.

The first big blow to the Viddy valuation was AutoDesk’s July acquisition of competitor SocialCam for $60 million, deflating many hopes for a near-term Instagram like exit from the social video category. The latest blow came in January when Twitter released its own short-form video product, Vine. Like Viddy’s 15 second recording limit, Vine restricts users to creating six second videos – although recording can be paused to stitch various moments and scenes together.

Vines have quickly ascended to the most shared social video content on Twitter, not surprisingly given the relationship between the two companies, such that they represented approximately 50 percent of all social video links on Twitter last week, according to Keyhole data, followed by Socialcam at 25 percent, and, in a distant fifth behind Cinemagr.am and Telly, Viddy at just 1 percent. There are a number of metrics that can be used as proxies for the health of the various social video platforms, with Twitter engagement being just one of them. And with Vine’s homefield advantage, these may not even be the most representative. But even as an approximation, the numbers are telling.

Prior to Viddy, O’Brien co-founded digital asset management, online storage, and file sharing startup Xdrive, which sold to AOL in in 2005 for $30 million – a healthy sum in that era. Shortly after, the serial entrepreneur launched a failed premium music video startup called PluggedIn in 2008 with Viddy’s Aguhob, which raised $2 million in backing from Will Smith’s Overbrook entertainment and shuttered in 2009. O’Brien formed a public relations firm called Murphy O’Brien which continues to operate today.

Viddy is backed by institutional investors NEA, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and Battery Ventures. The heady Series B round also included prominent celebrities like Jay-Z & Jay Brown’s Roc Nation, Will Smith Overbrook Entertainment, Rihanna, Shakira, and Rob Dyrdek, among others, as well as angel investors inclduing Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Omniture founder Josh James, Skull Candy founder Jeff Kearl, and Shoedazzle, Honest.com, Legalzoom co-founder Brian Lee.

As I alluded above, Viddy is one of a few LA startups that have gained the most notoriety over the last year and thus, deservedly or not, its health is often cited as a signal of the health and viability of the market as a whole. From the perspective of an on-the-ground observer, this couldn’t be further from the truth, but the signaling effect of a less than spectacular end to the Viddy saga can’t be overstated.

“Startups are like roller coasters, and they typically look either better or worse than they actually are,” O’Malley says. “The reality is always somewhere in between. Last spring, Viddy was less mature than it seemed given its massive user growth. I think now it’s the opposite. While things might seem to be slowing on the surface, they actually have a better product and an amazing team now. Mobile video is a challenging market with lots of companies trying to figure out the right formula. Nobody, including Viddy, has figured it out yet. That said, I bet early on the Viddy guys and I’m still betting on them today.”

[Original article: Here]

BY LUIS SANZ 
ON FEBRUARY 14, 2013

Anyone with a Twitter account has no doubt seen a surge in the number of videos from Vine, the new video app from Twitter released last month.

Vine is a smartphone and tablet app (although it’s optimized for smartphones) that enables users to compose videos that are up to six seconds long. There’s little doubt why Twitter acquired the company that made the app, which was developed by Vine Labs, Inc. — a three-person startup. After Instagram’s meteoric rise and subsequent acquisition by Facebook, it seems everyone is looking for the next big thing, and mobile video seems a logical choice.

But creating a mobile video service with similar impact to Instagram is easier said than done. That’s because when it comes to mobile, there are issues that make creating and consuming video more difficult than stagnant photos:

• Uploading and downloading videos from mobile make video apps slow compared to apps where you can immediately start consuming content.
• Shooting a good video is more complicated than taking a good photo, especially when it comes to editing and stabilizing the camera.
• Dealing with video requires a strong Internet connection and devices with a powerful processor, long battery life, and enough storage space for all these videos. Not everybody has one.

The first notable mobile video startups – Socialcam and Viddy – showed brisk growth over the span of just a few months, and led to Socialcam being acquired by Autodesk for $60 million and Viddyraising $30 million at a $370 million valuation. Most of their early traction came from exploiting viral loops on other social networks (mostly Facebook, as explained by Socialcam’s founder Michael Siebel). However, the generation of original content in these networks remained stagnant, to the point that Socialcam started reposting popular Youtube videos. Based on a recent report from Keyhole Analytics, these apps haven’t continued that explosive growth and Vine passed them in usage in just a week.

Recently, a second wave of startups has emerged, focused on improving the way content is created and experimenting with different ways to create videos. Vine, for example, has taken the “less is more approach” popularized by its master, Twitter, and enforces strict time limits – roughly analogous to a 140-character tweet. Meanwhile Cinemagram allows you to edit the videos in several ways before publishing them, improving the quality of the end result, and Lightt revolves around easy consumption, letting you shoot 7 seconds of content that it speeds up to play in 1.2 seconds. Meanwhile brands like GE, Nike Football, Urban Outfitters and Liverpool FC are experimenting with these tools (especially Vine).

Twitter clearly missed the bus when it comes to photo-sharing and despite their latest efforts to make pictures a more prominent part of the Twitter experience, Instagram is still the indisputably dominant player in the mobile photo-sharing space.

In launching Vine, Twitter has borrowed from the Instagram playbook:

• The app is built on the premise of making insanely simple to create and easy-to-share videos – the same concept initially followed by Instagram. To achieve that, the social network that Vine has built-in has a lot of similarities with Instagram: once you take a video, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, or only Vine.
• It has launched as an iPhone-only app, focusing on nailing the experience for a single platform before moving to Android.
• It includes similar discovery capabilities (even though one could say that Instagram borrowed those from Twitter), such as #’s and similar ways to import your friends.
• The videos are processed very quickly and uploaded to the Internet very quickly too (despite it seems that they aren’t using the “move bits when no one is watching” approach that Instagram popularized)

Vine is a compelling app, and the initial distribution provided by Twitter almost guarantees that it will be a force to be reckoned with. Moreover, as Twitter refocuses its efforts on becoming a big media company, it should be able to monetize this original content as part of its advertising infrastructure. This is something other startups without deep pockets wouldn’t be able to accomplish until reaching massive scale (let’s not forget it took four years for Google to make Youtube profitable). This would likely scare away potential investors.

But has Twitter won the mobile video race? Not so fast. Before we name Vine the winner and anoint six seconds the new default for advertising, it’s possible another company could sneak in and grab the market.

I’m talking about Google.

Hear me out. One of the major challenges with mobile video is ensuring the image is stable and doesn’t shake, and that is something none of the solutions I described before has achieved. But Google has been working on this a long time. In 2011, it published research on algorithms that stabilize videos removing undesired motions. You can check out the results in the video below:

If you think about how Flickr, the once indisputable leader in the photo-sharing space, missed the mobile opportunity, it isn’t hard to imagine that Youtube is already working on something like this (currently, YouTube apps in iOS and Android only allow content consumption, not creation).

What about the other two challenges detailed above (i.e. initial distribution and monetization)? YouTube is already a profitable business and the third most visited site on the web, and as we have seen with previous products (such as Google+), Google has the capacity and to roll out a new product quickly to millions of users. It could become a serious competitor almost overnight. Additionally, if you had to think of a device that could disrupt the way mobile video works, wouldn’t that be Google Glass?

We’ll likely see a coalescing around a couple of major players – as we’ve seen time and again in other tech-oriented industries (search, portals, social networks, you know the drill).

If Google enters the fray, which I think is likely, it could spell a bitter end for existing mobile video apps – including Twitter’s Vine.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday about Burger King’s Twitter account being hacked. We kept track: 146k users sent over 230k tweets (and counting!) talking about it. The account also gained over 20k new followers. 

[Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/Eq9jo3/BurgerKing]. 

So was it really all bad? Our friend, Elliott Volkman (@TheJournalizer), started doing some calculations on his blog, and we helped with some back-of-the-napkin calculations of our own.

The result? Burger King got $1M of free publicity out of it! (give or take a couple of whoppers)

How did we get to that $1M number? Using rough Promoted Account ($2.00 CPF), Promoted Tweet ($1.50 CPE) and Promoted Trend ($200,000) numbers:

• 230,000 tweets X $1.50 CPE = $345,000
• 216,000* link clicks X $1.50 CPE = $324,000
• 20,000 followers X $2 CPF = $40,000
• Trending Topic = $200,000
• Total: $910,000+

[* Link clicks are included as engagements by Twitter. We calculated 90,000 unique links in those tweets X 24 clicks per link]

So all in all: they went from being mentioned 50x per day to over 200k times, got $1M of free publicity out of it, with minimal impact on bottom line sales.

They should be celebrating!

Note: As we were typing this, @Jeep just got hacked. Result: even more mentions of Burger King in the posts about Jeep.

Burger King Real-time Tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/Eq9jo3/BurgerKing

Jeep Real-time Tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/r9Prmm/Jeep

[Original article: Here]

Many people will tell you that Burger King’s Twitter account being hacked is negative for their brand, but let’s look at the numbers.

Crisis situations are off to a strong start this year, especially when it comes to large brands and social media. On February 18 the fast food giant Burger King had their account hacked (various have claimed it, none officially confirmed), and after about an hour of the hacker joyriding on their feed, the account was suspended. Prior to the suspension, the account was converted into a mirror image of @mcdonalds, and began posting shoutouts to rappers, odd images, and some other random bits. Details are still fuzzy about who did it and why; however, we do know that there were likely more positive results from this situation than negative.

Unlike the other real social media crisis situations, Burger King’s account manager was not outright at fault (unless they just handed the account over, but doubtful), and realistically there are only a few things you can prepare for in these situations. But I’ll leave the punditry to other people, and be optimistic about this because Burger King was not at fault.

The following are some rough estimates and things to take into account, all of which @burgerking was able to gain free of charge.

Cost for a daily trending topic on Twitter: $200,000

Promoted tweets cost-per-click: Between .50 - $1.50. times the amount of retweets and clicks the rouge account received

Promoted Twitter account:  Between .50 - $2.50 per follower gained, with at least 20,000 new followers gained from the situation

Time, human resources, and even probable agency involvement to produce such attention grabbing content: Invaluable. See W+K’s Old Spice campaign and Oreo’s Super Bowl social media case studies.

Press generated from social campaign: Invaluable as it does not happen frequently

Estimated total via data from Keyhole

225k tweets x $1.5 CPE = ~$337,000

+ 216k link clicks x $1.5 CPE = ~$324,000

+ 20k new followers x $2 CPF = $40,000

+ trending topic = $200k

= $900,000+

Though Burger King’s social team or agency may have a need for a few additional beers , after organizing a simple apology they could immediately play the situation off and keep the attention going. The kind of press and attention they will receive as a result of the hack would have required nearly a $1,000,000 campaign investment, so if they play their cards right a negative can be turned into a positive.

With this said, we’ll just have to wait and see what Burger King will do.

Data and Mentions

Thanks to my friends over at Keyhole, there is now some awesome data to support my claim as well.

Ripple Effect

The ripple effect of course will stretch far, but these two tweets say it all.

And they are back in action:

Finally, MTV and BET tried to make it appear like their accounts were hacked as well, but Buzzfeed and @emilcDC quickly noticed that their social media managers provided a warning shot. This of course shifted the initial shock to slight humor, and then on to anger about MTV not actually playing music anymore.

A Larger Issue

With the Burger King situation slowing down, another has appeared. Jeep’s Twitter account was also hacked, and from the signs of the content being shared it was from the same group or individual that took over Burger King’s feed. Keyhole has started to track the information here, but because this is the second day in a row that such a situation has occurred, it will likely be less about Jeep, and more about Twitter not protecting accounts. However, Jeep has already become a trending topic in the US. 

Hey everyone,

We’re thrilled to announce a new program that allows users to earn FREE Tracks— whether you’re a paid subscriber yourself or not!

Here’s how it works: Every time you refer a friend and they subscribe, you both get an additional Track. And you can both keep this free Track for as long as your friend remains a subscriber.

To get started, please visit http://keyhole.co/referrals (remember to login).

We’d love to hear what you think.

[Original video: Here]

Keyhole was featured in a Huffington Post Live video! Watch, as host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin (@ASE) uses Keyhole’s real-time analytics to discuss the Syria crisis.

SXSW is like a certain adult magazine — suuuure you’re going for the “panels” just like you’re reading it for the “articles.”

Hey, we’re not judging, we love parties too!

To add to it, here are some fun real-time trackers for various SXSW-related conversations.

#SXSW (What else did you expect us to start with?)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/FWMDTv/SXSW (tweet this)

#SXSWi (For the Interactive-only crowd)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/VRrZS6/SXSWi (tweet this)

#SXSW Apps (Wondering if there’s a ‘hot’ or ‘breakout’ in the bunch?)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/yw7wt8/SXSWApp (tweet this)

#SXSWrtm (our bestie David Berkowitz is on it, so we had to)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/HVKJEg/SXSWrtm (tweet this)

#SXSWpickuplines (oh, you thought it was parties with no pickup lines?)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/GqCZQ6/SXSWpickuplines (tweet this)

[Spoiler alert! “Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my @Klout score, so call me maybe?” - @mikedmerrill]

… let’s not forget …

Grumpy Cat vs Elon Musk (real-life meme extraordinaire vs real-life Tony Stark extraordinaire) 

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/zxEDFV/grumpycat-elonmusk (tweet this)

… and finally … 

#AllHat5 (What’s an Austin party without a cowboy hat?)

Real-time tracker: http://keyhole.co/realtime/576pjt/allhat5 (tweet this)

What did we miss? If you’d like to see us add to this, please email me at saif -at- keyhole.co

Thanks,
Saif

Hey everyone!

Wanted to share some exciting news with you: we’ve just launched 3 new products that will help you understand your audience even better!

Audience Intelligence

Here’s a surprising fact we found in our research: Less than 9% of any brand’s audience actually talks about that brand. This means that when marketers are monitoring brand mentions, they’re missing more than 91% of their audience’s conversations!

Audience Intelligence helps you find what else your specific audience is talking about in real-time, including how they differ from competitors’ audiences. Have your own ‘Dunk in the Dark’ moment by talking about the same things your audience is talking about.  Your can learn more at http://keyhole.co/audience_intelligence.

Influencer Intelligence

Most marketers would agree that a small set of ‘influencers’ drive most of the conversation. Influencer Intelligence helps you stay on top of what they’re talking about in real-time so that you can lead the conversation, not just find out about them once the story’s already trending and it’s too late. 

If this sounds interesting, please visit http://keyhole.co/influencer_intelligence to learn more.

Content Insights

We know a lot of users have setup Tracks not just to measure volume, but also for content discovery — to find the best topical stories in minutes, not hours — and Content Insights helps make it even easier.

The new Content Insights product (located in a new tab beside each of your existing Tracks) brings out the best content related to your search in a much easier-to-digest format. If you haven’t already checked it out, give it a whirl, we think you’ll like it!

We’re continuing to work on new products, and will be announcing more shortly. As always, would love your feedback, so would love to hear from you at saif@keyhole.co with any suggestions or questions!

Thanks,
Saif

The Social TV Ecosystem in 2013

[Original article: Here]

The government shutdown may have grounded all of NASA’s Twitter accounts, but science and space enthusiasts are keeping the information flowing with an out-of-this-world new hashtag — #ThingsNASAMightTweet.

Congress could not strike a deal on a funding bill by the end of the fiscal year, causing thegovernment shutdown Tuesday. Some 800,000 federal workers were sent home. And on the 55th anniversary of the day the agency became operational, most NASA employees were furloughed, aside from those at Mission Control who are supporting astronauts currently in space.

Space itself, however, was not shut down — the universe is still expanding and the celestial bodies have continued their orbital dance. In addition, many of NASA’s contractors have continued to work, such as Jet Propulsion Lab, which is in charge of the Curiosity Mars rover mission, among others.

To continue keeping people informed about these missions and other space news, a group of NASA fans came to the rescue.

"I thought, ‘Why don’t I start tweeting what NASA can’t?’" Bill Dunford told Mashable. “[I tried] to take a guess at some of the things they would normally tweet — they would normally talk about — and just do it myself.”

Dunford, of Salk Lake City, Utah, works at a software company and also runs a non-profit educational website called Riding With Robots. Tweeting as @ridingrobots, he created the #ThingsNASAMightTweet hashtag.

"It’s a little long, but it’s descriptive," Dunford said.

Here’s his first tweet with the previously unused hashtag:

In solidarity, today I’m tweeting some #ThingsNASAMightTweet if they could. Starting with this. 55 years today. pic.twitter.com/vEyygNC95c

— RidingWithRobots (@ridingrobots)

October 1, 2013

The campaign gained momentum a few days later when Angela Gibson, an educator who lives near Norfolk, Va., wrote a post on Facebook to rally NASA’s tight knit social media community to “stand in the gap” by using social media to share information about space and science during the shutdown.

"A couple days into the shutdown, I was very frustrated," Gibson told Mashable. “I felt very much like I needed to do something.”

Dunford commented on Gibson’s post, informing the group of his hashtag. From there, hundreds of members of the community began to pitch in. Some organized shifts and took on designated topics, while others just posted randomly. The chart below shows the hashtag’s growth.

Veronica McGregor, a media relations manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is normally in charge of several of NASA’s Twitter accounts, including @MarsCuriosity which has nearly 1.5 million followers. McGregor said she has certainly taken notice of her temporary replacements.

"There’s been this amazing way that our supporters have picked up the slack," she toldMashable. 

"They are actually tweeting space updates for us; we just thought that was great."

"They are actually tweeting space updates for us; we just thought that was great."

While its Twitter account is offline for the shutdown, McGregor said the Curiosity rover mission has gone on as planned. NASA contracts Jet Propulsion Lab employees, who technically work for the California Institute of Technology.

Additionally, NASA’s next Mars probe is on schedule despite the shutdown. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or Maven, has a scheduled launch date of Nov. 18. For the benefit of science nerds everywhere, let’s hope the government shutdown ends before then.

Every PR pro needs something just a little different from what their colleagues need. Odds are good that you’ll need a mix of tools. With that in mind, here is a list of tools that can help with your specific measurement requirements…

In case you didn’t see this earlier, here’s a mind-numbing exchange between Verizon and one of its customers on Twitter: 

The exchange can be found on Twitter here.

Verizon clearly uses automated responses for customer on Twitter (screenshot below shows they use Attensity Respond 5), but shocking that there’s no human oversight over this. 

Verizon’s supposed to be one of the ‘grown ups’ in the social marketing space, but rookie mistakes don’t get worse than this. 

Has this ever happened to you when speaking with a brand? How would you respond?

Some excerpts from this great interview with Dan Ariely:

What is one of the most surprising findings from your research?

One of them is something we called “coherent arbitrariness.” … If you get somebody to behave in a certain way one time, you’re not just influencing them that once, but you can actually go on to influence a long sequence of decisions.

What insights would you share with a marketer who’s trying to change a customer’s mind?

One is something called a “default,” and it is the path of least resistance. We’ve shown in many experiments that this is an incredibly appealing decision. It’s actually a decision of not making any decision… All of those decisions are vastly influenced by the path of least resistance.

Another of the things we find is that in terms of motivation, sometimes things that you could buy with a fixed amount of money are more motivating than the money itself. For example, let’s assume you like lattes, and lattes are $3. We find that, if that’s the case, I can get you to do things for me more easily for a latte than I can get you to do it for $3.

Which of your findings do you think is the most important for a marketer to know?

The most important one is a finding on relativity. It’s the idea that people don’t know how much something is valued, and we try to assess the value by comparing it to things that are just in the environment next to it.

For more, read the full interview at https://www.google.com/think/articles/understanding-irrational-customer-dan-ariely.html

Did you know that 10 brands dominate a significant portion of the CPG food industry? 

Convergence Alimentaire, a blog focused on the food industry, put together this interesting infographic above, showing how a small number of companies have a significant hold on the food industry. 

The 10 brands listed here were (in alphabetical order): 

1. Coca-Cola
2. General Mills
3. Johnson & Johnson
4. Kellogg’s
5. Mars
6. Modelez (Kraft)
7. Nestle
8. Pepsico
9. Proctor & Gamble
10. Unilever

The blog also goes on to note that some large brands were left out due to limited space, including: Danone, Smucker and Heinz.

Interesting landscape, as marketers think about reaching consumers and understanding their brand affinities. 

Following last week’s bombshell news that Snapchat turned down a $3B offer from Facebook, Ben Thompson just wrote a brilliant post on his blog about the different social networks out there and how each fits a different purpose for users. Here are 2 excerpts from his post:

In the last two days I have used 10 apps you might characterize as “social”. In no particular order:

• Twitter, for keeping up on news and commenting on tech and stratechery
• Facebook, for posting personal status updates and checking in
• LINE, for text messaging with my wife and friends in Taiwan
• Snapchat, for exchanging photos with my wife
• Skype, for instant messaging with my colleagues
• Facetime, for talking with my wife and kids
• Instagram, for posting cool photos
• Email, for all types of content, both work and personal
• Photostream, for sharing photos with my family
• WordPress, for posting to this blog

…

Look again at my list of apps: each of them has their own place… In fact, there is hardly any overlap at all – and none with Facebook.

Ben then continues to argue that Facebook should stop trying to buy startups like Snapchat, which don’t contribute to their potential “gold mine” of a display business. 

What do you think? As a social marketer, are you finding that your audiences have barely any overlap with Facebook, and is ignoring them the right strategy?