As frictionless sharing becomes the norm for applications like Spotify and Huffington Post, it feels like we’re at the cusp of an era of increasingly intense oversharing. Facebook’s new sharing mechanism has already contributed to a distinct decrease in manual curating and the rise of automated sharing through software. But the real question is: Will frictionless sharing create a true paradigm shift in the way we interact and share on the web? And what are brands to do about it?
This post originally appeared in our February issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Facebook’s Stories project has, for all intents and purposes, fulfilled its end goal. Now a fully-fledged, first-of-its-kind ad network named Sponsored Stories, not unrelated to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets/Trends/Accounts, it allows brands to affix their name (and corresponding Facebook page) to an organic, consumer-generated activity in the hopes of populating the well-intentioned promoter’s friend network with a more compelling push to purchase. This approach is infinitely more engaging, and invasive, than any brand-spun messaging could hope to be—and that could be what makes it pure (or evil, depending on your perspective) genius. It raises the inevitable question: Is your privacy even more at stake these days? Let’s look behind the stories.
In September, The Huffington Post surpassed the Washington Post in terms of unique visitors. "The Huff Post was up 26% year-over-year to 9.4
million uniques, while uniques at the Washingtonpost.com dropped almost
30% to 9.2 million," reports Jennifer Saba at Editor & Publisher.Look out, media giants. You are never safe.
In a bid for web supremacy, Facebook has snatched up the bulk of your digital life for a healthy 47.5 million bones (U.S.). Your online existence (besides what you already "accomplish" on Facebook) comes their way this summer through the media tracker FriendFeed. Prepare to adjust your regular web routine.
Nancy Hill celebrated her first anniversary as CEO of the 4As (the new name of the recently rebranded American Association of Advertising Agencies) by giving a speech that demonstrates she has trouble making sense of opinion polls and statistics. Not a very good showing for someone who wants to lead the advertising industry into an era when measurement of everything is fundamental.
