The Facebook Social Life PLACE4INFO

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by Shane Snow.

Facebook Introduces Embeddable Posts

BY TODD WASSERMAN

In an effort to inject Facebook into more public conversations, the company on Wednesday introduced embeddable posts that will let blogs and news organizations include status updates, videos and photos in stories.

The posts work in the same way as embeds from Twitter and YouTube. Once your account is enabled, you will have the option to "Embed post." That will produce a code you can cut and paste into a blog entry or HTML file.

For a post to be embeddable, it must be set to public. In its announcement, Facebook used a status update from the British Monarchy about the recent royal birth as an example:

Mashable is one of a handful of media organizations to get early access to the embeds. Others include CNN, The Huffington Post, Bleacher Report and People magazine.

Though an estimated 72% of Facebook users set their posts to private, the company has lately been looking to tap its public posts for added commentary and color on topical issues.

With this in mind, Facebook introduced hashtags in June so users and journalists could track conversations on Facebook about various issues. The new embeds can also include hashtags, which readers can click on to see those discussions.

The intent of such efforts is to provide more inventory to advertisers looking to reach people during live events, like the Super Bowl or the Oscars. Until now, Twitter has offered the lion's share of such ad opportunities, but with 1.1 billion users, 28% of Facebook audience offers a viable alternative.

Image: Getty, Justin Sullivan

The Social Media Bubble Is Quietly Deflating

The Social Media Bubble Is Quietly Deflating

By Joshua Brustein

Two years ago, when the craze for social media startups was in full swing, a former Facebook (FB) engineer summed up the situation with a memorable lament: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” the engineer, Jeff Hammerbacher, told Bloomberg Businessweek at the time. “That sucks,” he added.

It might be over.

Social networking companies drew a meager 2 percent of Internet venture capital last quarter
Social media companies drew only 2 percent of the venture capital headed to Internet-based enterprises last quarter, according to data published on Tuesday by CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture-capital investment. In the two-year stretch that ended in the middle of 2012, social media companies took in at least 6 percent of overall venture capital invested in Internet companies each quarter. But for three of the last four quarters, those social startups have brought in 2 percent or less (with the outlier quarter largely the result of a huge investment in Pinterest earlier this year). The peak came in the third quarter of 2011, when social companies led by Twitter took in 21 percent of the total $3.8 billion in Internet deals by venture capital firms.

Here’s how Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vanceexplained it at the height of the social media money boom:

Once again, 11 years after the dot-com-era peak of the Nasdaq, Silicon Valley is reaching the saturation point with business plans that hinge on crossed fingers as much as anything else. “We are certainly in another bubble,” says Matthew Cowan, co-founder of the tech investment firm Bridgescale Partners. “And it’s being driven by social media and consumer-oriented applications.”

If Cowan was right, the air seems to have been released fairly gently—at least in comparison to the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, which shook the U.S. economy. Sure, Zynga (ZNGA) crashed and Groupon (GRPN)burned, but overall tech investment continues at a reliable pace. The total amount of venture investment in Internet companies last quarter was $3.625 billion, close to what it was in the third quarter of 2011—and much higher than it was before then.

New buzzwords have arrived: Big data and cloud companies are grabbing the imaginations of venture capitalists, says Anand Sanwal, founder of CB Insights. Boring companies that make tech products to sell to businesses seem to be in ascendance. But it’s just not the same.

“Social was so unique in that it had taken up a lot of mind-share,” Sanwal says. “Folks were singularly focused on social, and that was unlike anything we’ve seen to date. It was probably most analogous to e-commerce in the last dot-com boom.”

Brustein is a writer for Businessweek.com in New York.

Audience and Marketer Insights on Digital Advertising

AUGUST 3, 2013 |  BY WES MAXWELL  |  BUSINESS, ECOMMERCE, INTERNET, MARKETING, TECH

Looking for marketing advice to add some leverage to your online advertising campaigns? Check out the IDG Knowledge Hub’s infographic displaying the benefits of utilizing more “native” style ads in your advertising campaigns instead of traditional, banner style advertising.

Internet advertising is a constantly changing business, and in order to remain successful within a progressive business, those pursuing internet advertising careers should open their eyes up to the substantial benefits of utilizing “native” ads instead of standard, banner-style ads.

Banner ads are your standard, stereotypical ads that show up at the top and bottom of webpages, almost completely out of context with whatever webpage you are visiting, that blandly attempt to draw viewers to whatever it is they are advertising. Although banner ads have proven to be successful in the past, we live in a very progressive, changing culture, with a very strong, youthful presence, who gets fed up with traditional, banner style ads.

With that being said, native ads offer webpage viewers a fresh alternative to advertising. Native ads are embedded within a webpage’s content, and are somewhat related to a webpage’s content. Additionally, native ads are more straightforward about their purpose as ads, unlike banner ads, that force their way onto a webpage just because their company “paid” to have their ad on a website.

In conclusion, native ads are the closest thing advertising can get to honesty, which in our modern-day culture is hard to come by, and greatly appreciated.

[Via]

Best Practices in Internet Presence Management

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