SEO Werkt!

It’s already Sunday?! Man, the weekends fly by so quickly in the summer. And at the speed this summer is passing, I’d say it’s time to hightail it to somewhere warm and sandy for a week and just relax ’til next weekend. Summer doesn’t fly by when you’re on a beach, right? If you need some reading material for the plane/train/bus/car, scroll on and check out the best inbound marketing stories we found this week across the web.

How Top Brands Are Using Instagram, From Simply Measured

This story comes to us from the Simply Measured analytics blog. Instagram recently made headlines with the news that it had surpassed the 80 million user mark (up from just 15 million in January 2012!). It shouldn’t come as a big surprise, then, that among those 80 million users are 40% of the world’s top brands, as classified by the Interbrand Top 100 list. B2C brands like MTV and Starbucks dominate on Instagram, and 25% of the brands that are leveraging Instagram post at least once per week. It seems like Instagram is going to keep growing, and the 60% of top brands who are missing out have created a unique opening for smaller brands to make a name for themselves on the photo-sharing social network. Check out the full story here.

Facebook Launches New Ad Creation Tool to Help Marketers Align Campaigns With Goals, From HubSpot

This week in Facebook updates, we covered the news of a new ad creation tool that will take some of the anxiety out of Facebook advertising. With Facebook elaborating upon an earlier-released feature allowing advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns based on their stated objectives, this updated ad creation interface will make it easier for Facebook advertisers to create ads and Sponsored Stories that are more closely aligned with those stated goals, such as generating more business page likes or promoting page posts. These changes will aim to give advertisers more guidance as they’re building their Facebook ad campaigns and help them achieve the right balance of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve their particular goals. Facebook has also added a preview option to the process, allowing marketers to view what their ad will look like in actual news feeds. The changes will be especially beneficial to marketers trying out Facebook ads for the first time. Check out the full story here.

Brands Missing Out On Mobile Ad Opportunities, From MarketingProfs

MarketingProfs highlights the takeaways of a HipCricket study on mobile advertisement opportunities — namely, that many brands are leaving those opportunities on the table, and then walking away. Yikes. According to the study, 46% of mobile users have viewed a mobile ad, and 64% have completed a mobile purchase as a result of viewing a mobile ad. But an astonishing 74% of mobile users claim that their favorite brands have never advertised to them on a mobile platform. That’s a lot of brands missing the chance to convert some mobile purchases! Additional details in the study revealed demographic differences in those who take advantage of mobile ads: 55% of those who clicked have an annual income of greater than $75,000, and 29% who clicked have an annual income of greater than $100,000. Check out the full story here.

YouTube’s Built-In Video Editor Gets Better, From Mashable

Our last story this week is from the folks at Mashable. For about a year now, YouTube has been offering a built-in video editing tool as a feature that all users can take advantage of in their video publishing endeavors. But as of Thursday, video editing in YouTube has gotten even easier. YouTube shipped some new features, including quick views of every filter and a real-time, interactive preview of the changes you’ve made, consistently available throughout the editing process. The editor is gradually rolling out to all YouTube users. We’ve still noticed a few flaws with the editor, so we’re eager to see what changes YouTube has in store for the future. Check out the full story here.

Repurposing Content With a Purpose, From Smart Insights

The Smart Insights blog brings us this excellent guide to repurposing content — with a purpose! Aimed at making your content strategy more efficient, the post highlights the advantages of repurposing content, as well as eight ideas for efficient and effective repurposing. Some of the ideas we like best? Repurposing the audio track from video content as a downloadable podcast, creating textual transcripts from your video content, curating your best content into ebooks, and publishing the recordings of live webinars. We’d also venture to add that the reverse is also true; ebook and webinar content can be repurposed as blog content, too. Check out the full story here.

Did you come across any other excellent inbound marketing stories in the past week? Share them in the comments!

Image credit: kansasphoto

Editor’s note: Adam Rifkin is co-founder and CEO of PandaWhale, an online network of interesting things and people. He has never owned Facebook or Zynga shares. . You can follow him @ifindkarma.

Facebook and Zynga have experienced similar roller coaster-like devaluation from their peak stock valuations, and they’ve been partners for years, which is why MarkZ and MarkP often get lumped together in the same sentence by fearful investors whose stock is underwater: “Facebook and Zynga (insert analysis here).”

Such bundling masks a deeper structural truth. The reasons that the two companies have tanked in the market could not be more divergent, and more indicative of the character and strategic vision of the startups’ respective founders. Forget any analysis that lumps the two companies together, and instead find lessons in Aesop’s fable that are important to every startup founder.

Zynga is the Grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, playing and trying to get others to play. The fundamentals of Zynga’s business – even when it was working perfectly – are to ensure a steady stream of new games (often via M&A), to grease the user acquisition machine via advertising on other venues (largely Facebook), and to incent users to rope in their friends (via in-game promotions). This strategy depends on playing with copious amounts of capital to buy companies, ads, and promotions, and yet Zynga’s IPO and secondary seemed less concerned with raising capital for Zynga’s corporate coffers. After all its financings, BusinessInsider estimates that Zynga has about $1 billion in pro-forma cash on hand.

Grasshoppers just want to have fun. In March, Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus enriched himself and a few other large shareholders with giddy abandon; the goal of their secondary offering was to provide liquid exits to several existing shareholders. A longer-term thinker would NOT have cashed out a lot of his stock, but Pincus did. In fact, Pincus sold 15% of his ZNGA stock.

A lawsuit against Zynga contends that Zynga executives were selling even though they knew the quarterly numbers were weak. Long-term-focused management does not sell its stock in blocks of 15%; it sells cautiously in tiny amounts scheduled regularly over many years. Examples include Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Pierre Omidyar, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

Facebook is the Ant, stashing resources for the winter with grim determination, regardless of which interest groups might be hurt in the short term (among them: investment bankers who were squeezed down to 1% commissions and retail investors who bought high). Mark Zuckerberg’s goal for Facebook’s record-breaking $16 billion IPO was to put as much as possible into Facebook’s corporate coffers, not his own; through financings to date, Facebook now has over $10 billion in liquid assets.

In retrospect, it’s extraordinary to think about Mark Pincus selling $200 million of Zynga stock and $38 million of Facebook stock to enrich himself, while Mark Zuckerberg only cashed out barely enough to pay his tax bill. Let that fact sink in for a few moments, and then compare how Zynga employees feel with how Facebook employees feel about their respective stock prices going down.

Ants work hard, driven by a higher cause. Mark Zuckerberg truly believes that Facebook’s mission – to make the world more open and connected – is the biggest and most important in Silicon Valley. I’ve heard stories that even his relationships with close friends have suffered if those friends chose to sell Facebook stock on the secondary markets or otherwise showed a lack of faith in the long-term mission of the enterprise. His motivations are far closer to messianic zeal than most investors (and David Fincher’s Social Network movie!) recognize… and simple pattern-matching shows us that the greatest companies in technology are started and sustained by founders like him, who live for the mission.

Mark Pincus, by contrast, seems obsessed with his wealth. With some of his early stock gains, Pincus bought a posh 11,500 sq ft, $16 million mansion on the Gold Coast. He has been living large for years, with multiple homes. Zynga evidently spends $1.37 million a year for Pincus’s personal security – in the top 3 of all public companies behind Lockheed Martin and Oracle. Pincus’s stock obsession was first demonstrated by his attempt to claw back stock grants (extra classy touch to do it during the “quiet period”!) from loyal long-term employees — a move so audaciously selfish that I heard entrepreneurs muttering about the long-term damage to the entire startup ecosphere if early employees started thinking their stock could be taken away within weeks of an IPO.

Compare that with Mark Zuckerberg, who lives more like Larry Page than Larry Ellison. He has a single Palo Alto abode that is biking distance from Facebook HQ. His wedding was a backyard affair for fewer than 100 guests with “catering” that appeared to consist largely of tacos, followed by a honeymoon that was newsworthy largely for the money he DIDN’T spend (no tip on a $40 dinner! lunch at McDonald’s!). He lives a life that allows him to focus his energy on Facebook.

Zuck’s goal is to deploy Facebook’s giant war chest and tremendous talent to build a “social utility” that will outlast his lifetime, like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs before him. Pincus, on the other hand, is so out of ideas that Electronic Arts is suing Zynga for copying them too much. Perhaps he’ll get lucky and online gambling will become legal in America soon. But even the gambling-will-be-legalized wager is a demonstration that he’s willing to bet the company on something that MIGHT happen, and lose. Zynga may still have $1 billion in its coffers, but the actions of Pincus do not demonstrate that he knows how to prudently employ that capital. If Zynga fails, whatever, at least he got rich in the process. If a Game-of-Thrones-like Winter is coming, it will be game over for Zynga as they burn their remaining cash and run out of resources.

If Mark Pincus wants to demonstrate that he’s in Zynga for the long run, he will deploy the $200+ million from his March payout, to buy ZNGA shares on the public market the way Netflix CEO Reed Hastings just did with FB stock. A great poker player demonstrates commitment by going “All In”.

The values of startup founders are baked deeply into the DNA of their startups, from inception on. A founder’s character, attitude, and strategy contribute significantly to the corporate culture, so it’s interesting to compare the “culture of play” with the “culture of making the world more open and connected.” To understand the two Marks is to appreciate how they’re making choices now that affect their companies’ future prospects profoundly. Zynga is having fun, like the solo Grasshopper, because times are good. And Facebook, like an army of Ants marching, works tenaciously and tirelessly towards its vision of a better future every single day.

This guest post is by Alexis Grant blogs of The Traveling Writer.

Now that you’re convinced of the benefits of guest posting and know how to create content editors want, it’s time to ask yourself: am I really getting as much as possible out of my guest posting efforts?

Most of us guest post as an after-thought, making time to pitch a post here or there when we can scrounge up a few free minutes in our schedule.

But you wouldn’t approach your blog without a plan, would you? And you wouldn’t approach your job without a plan either! Since most of us are aiming to make money from blogging, why be lackadaisical about your guest posting strategy?

When I first began guest posting, I was in that same boat, brainstorming guest posts whenever I could squeeze an extra few minutes out of my day. But once I realized just how much guest posting was helping me sell my eguides and gain new subscribers, I decided to take it more seriously. I decided to actively take my guest posting to the next level.

Rather than submitting guest posts in a once-I-finish-all-my-other-work fashion, I created a plan that would help me keep better track of my ideas, pitch more editors and bring more eyes to my site.

The master doc

How’d I go about creating this strategy? With the king of all planning tools, Google Docs.

Using a spreadsheet, I created a column for each one of these phrases:

• Publication
• Editor at publication
• Contact info for editor
• Topic of post
• Date I pitched the editor
• Editor’s response (whether the pitch was accepted)
• When I submitted the post
• When the post was published
• Outcomes (like traffic peak, new subscribers, sales of products).

Not only will organizing your guest posting efforts in this way help you keep track of where you’ve pitched, the response you’ve gotten from each editor, and which pieces you need to write, it will also help you zero in on what’s working.

By tracking outcomes from these posts—even if they’re somewhat anecdotal or vague (example: you gained ten subscribers when a certain post went live, even if you’re not certain all those subscribers came from that post)—you’ll be able to recognize which blogs are helping you reach your goals.

This is important because you might expect the blog with the most readers to give you the most results, and then find out that a different blog—one that focuses on your niche, for example—is actually better at helping you bring in sales.

It will also help you see weaknesses you didn’t know you had. Once I set up this doc, for example, I realized I needed to better track where sales of my eguides were coming from. That prompted me to finally learn how to add tracking codes to my links, which is helping me become even more effective in my blogging efforts.

And here’s one more plus: know all those random ideas for topics and target blogs that hit you while you’re driving or in the shower? Now you can add them to your strategy doc, so those brilliant ideas don’t disappear.

One more way to optimize

Now that you’re on board with taking a strategic approach to guest posting, here’s one more idea for getting the most out of your guest posting strategy.

Once I decided to make this a priority—because growing traffic to my blog and increasing sales is my ultimate goal—I assigned one of my part-time business team members to the project. “Hold me accountable!” I told her.

Having an employee (or intern, or writing buddy, or someone you found on oDesk) oversee this process could help you keep on track, so you’re sure to hit your goal of submitting however many guest posts you’ve decided to write each month.

But even if you don’t have someone to hold you accountable, this strategy doc will hold you accountable to yourself. You’ll easily be able to see who you’ve pitched, which ideas have worked and which haven’t, and whether certain posts have brought the results—traffic, product sales, subscriptions, and more—you hoped for.

Could this system work for you? Could you approach guest posting in a more strategic, more organized, more effective way? Share your ideas in the comments.

Alexis Grant is an entrepreneurial writer, digital strategist and author of How to Create a Freakin’ Fabulous Social Media Strategy.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Guest Posting Strategy for Bloggers Who Really Want Results

Back in September YouTube launched a major overhaul of their Video Editor, complete with a new look, new tools, effects and more.  This week the YouTube Video Editor has become even better, with an updated interface for video enhancements.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Which '90s celebs will Old Navy drag from the vault next, you ask? Well, it looks like they're sticking with the old Beverly Hills, 90210 cast for now. Crispin Porter + Bogusky follows up last week's spot starring Jason Priestley and Gabrielle Carteris with this new execution featuring, yes, Jennie Garth and Luke Perry. Garth here plays a teacher who introduces the chain's Famous Jeans back-to-school special. Perry, meanwhile, still has his motorcycle and is still hanging around high school long past an appropriate age. Shannen Doherty would be a great get for the next spot, though something tells me it would be Ian Ziering. Credits after the jump.

CREDITS
CLIENT: Old Navy
CAMPAIGN: Funnovations Inc. BTS 2012
EXECUTION: Why Choose?
AGENCY: CP+B
WORLDWIDE CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER: Rob Reilly
EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR(s): Jason Gaboriau
CREATIVE DIRECTOR(s): Robin Fitzgerald, Cameron Harris
ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR/WRITER: Alexandra Sann
ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR/ART DIRECTOR: Mike Kohlbecker
SENIOR COPYWRITER: Jamie Toal
SENIOR COPYWRITER HISPANIC: Jorge Ortega
SENIOR ART DIRECTOR: Tushar Date
VP/HEAD OF VIDEO PRODUCTION: Chad Hopenwasser
EXECUTIVE INTEGRATED PRODUCER: Deb Drumm
SR. INTEGRATED PRODUCER(s): Katie Porter
JR. INTEGRATED PRODUCER(s): Jackie Maloney
PRODUCTION COMPANY & CITY: Hungry Man, Los Angeles
DIRECTOR(s): Taika Waititi
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (PRODUCTION CO): Kevin Byrne
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (PRODUCTION CO): Cindy Becker
PRODUCER (PRODUCTION CO): Bridgitte Pugh
POST PRODUCTION & CITY: The Mill, Los Angeles
POST PRODUCER: Rachael Trillo
PROJECT VFX SUPERVISOR: Tara DeMarco
LEAD VFX ARTIST: Tara DeMarco
SET SUPERVISOR: Tara DeMarco
EDITORIAL COMPANY & CITY: Cut & Run, Santa Monica
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Carr Schilling
EDITOR: Frank Effron
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Russell Anderson
MUSIC COMPANY & CITY: Q Department, New York
PRODUCER: Zack Rice
COMPOSER(s): Q Department, New York
EXECUTIVE INTEGRATED MUSIC PRODUCER (AGENCY): Bill Meadows
SOUND DESIGN & MIX COMPANY: Lime Studios
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Jessica Locke
SOUND DESIGNER AND ENGINEER: Rohan Young
VP/GROUP ACCOUNT DIRECTOR: Danielle Whalen
ACCOUNT DIRECTOR: Kate Higgins
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SUPERVISOR: Mellissa Krumm
CONTENT SUPERVISOR: Georgette Young
CONTENT MANAGER: Tommy Cottam, Jennifer Hanson
EXECUTIVE BUSINESS AFFAIRS MANAGER: Amy Jacobsen
COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST(s): Lindsey Allison, Jennifer Hruska

Editor’s note: Benjy Weinberger is foursquare’s West Coast Engineering Lead. He previously worked on infrastructure and revenue engineering at Twitter, and before that spent eight years at Google, working on search and ads engineering.

[Full disclosure: I have never worked at Facebook, and own no Facebook stock, but I do know and respect many people who work there.]

The sharp declines in Facebook’s stock price since their IPO has lead to a frenzy of alarmed comment, some going as far to declare the company in a state of emergency. I’m not sure I agree.

First, the facts: Facebook has been around for only 8 years, has a mere 4000 employees, and yet has over half a billion daily active users almost a billion monthly active users.

Think about that. 500,000,000 people interact with Facebook every day. And these aren’t involuntary corporate connections, like when it turns out that your entire country’s water supply is owned by Bechtel. Facebook users choose, daily, to have an intimate, personal and emotional relationship with the brand. A brand that, it bears repeating, didn’t exist eight years ago. And all this is as true at $40B as it was at $80B. True, Silicon Valley is known for successes of this scale, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable.

Entire companies piggyback off Facebook’s success. The site has spawned a completely new way for businesses to connect with their customers. On the technology side, Facebook has created innovative systems to reliably handle their phenomenal amounts of very rich data, and has made many contributions to the open source community. Facebook is absolutely huge, a success story so rapid, radical and planet-changing that it inspired an award-winning Hollywood movie.

So about that stock price? That seems to me like a Wall Street issue, not a Silicon Valley issue. Sure, Facebook has monetization challenges to overcome. And the company would do well to sort out their developer relations and ensure a stable and cooperative environment, so that 3rd parties can add value to the Facebook platform. But they have incredibly smart and capable people who will surely figure all this out. But just because analysts’ pre-IPO valuation guesses may have been off by a factor of two doesn’t mean Facebook is anything less than a phenomenal success, one that I am confident can be monetized successfully.

And anyway, since when do we turn our noses up at $40B companies? That’s more than the market cap of the entire US airline industry combined, I believe. And was achieved with one hundredth the number of employees.

As long as Facebook makes enough money to keep operating successfully, and there’s no indication that they won’t, we in the tech industry should look at Facebook as a product, not a ticker symbol. Will the stock price hurt retention? Maybe. But it’s no less likely, then, to help with new hiring. So while it is, of course, relevant to report on it, let’s not overly focus on short-term stock performance. Leave that to the stock market blogs. We’re supposed to be in this business not because we love money but because we love technology and its transformative power, and Facebook has both in spades.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a columnist at TechCrunch since January 2011. He hosts a weekly TCTV show In the Studio and will now begin a weekly Sunday column, Iterations. Follow him on Twitter @semil.

“In the Studio” opens its doors this week to an entrepreneur who once founded a nonprofit charter management organization for schools in California, spent a summer in management consulting, and eventually stumbled upon a case study experiment in school that gave rise to founding his current startup.

James Reinhart and I met a few years ago in school, and I remember him talking about his new business, inspired by an operations case on Netflix. Over the next few years, Reinhart and his co-founders founded a small company in Boston, raised angel funding, packed their bags for San Francisco, and went through a number of fascinating shifts in their business model and vertical focus before eventually stumbling into something potentially big. And, for a nice touch of symmetry, the company just announced the appointment of two former Netflix executives to the company’s roster, one to lead operations and the other to the board.

Reinhart is the CEO of thredUP, a site where parents can sell their kids’ used clothes using their dead-simple process and/or where parents can buy certified, pre-owned clothes directly from the company. thredUP went through a few fascinating iterations, initially starting out as a service to allow peer-to-peer swapping of clothes, but then they found the most activity was around children’s clothing; then after focusing on the kids’ clothing market, they realized they’d need massive scale in order to capture enough value from those P2P transactions. And, as a result, Reinhart and his team may have stumbled into a big idea as a result of their constant hunt for a larger problem and bigger market, specifically to help working-class families buy and sell assets that are frequently needed and normally expensive to acquire.

In this discussion, Reinhart dissects the thredUP’s trajectory and how he made the key decisions that has taken the company to where it is today, as well as other areas they could expand once the model is proven to have a chance to scale. He is remarkably honest in the video, reflecting on the choices he and his team made and learned from. This would be useful video for any founder focused on marketplaces and online-offline operations and logistics.

Here's one of the more compelling YouTube montage ads we've seen. Target and Deutsch LA string together clips of college applicants' reactions to the news they’ve been accepted. It's a simple concept illustrated well with powerful, heart-warming moments. As the copy pretty well sums up: "Every kid deserves this moment. Great schools can get them here." The collegiate focus works well for Target, and not just because the retailer is known for its abundant stock of school supplies and dorm decor. Target has also committed to doubling its $500 million in donatons to K-12 educational causes over the coming years, in part by awarding gift cards to local schools through a Facebook voting competition.  As an aside, the commercial, which first aired during the Olympics, shares its basic idea—and at least one of its shots—with a recent online ad for the University of California system. The similarities are just a coincidence, per a Deutsch spokesperson, who said the agency had wrapped its commercial by the time UC's launched. Regardless, Target packages the message a lot more tightly. Credits after the jump

Client: Target
Agency: Deutsch LA
Chief Creative Officer: Mark Hunter
Group Creative Director: Karen Costello
Creative Director: Scott Hidinger
Creative Director: Jeff Bossin
Senior Art Director: Sara Oakley
Senior Copywriter: Melissa Langston-Wood
Director of Integrated Production: Vic Palumbo
Director of Broadcast Production: Victoria Guenier
Senior Producer: Eva Ellis
Associate Producer: Jamie Gartner
Editing: Arcade Editorial
Editor: Kim Bica
Assistant Editor(s): Pete D’Andrea
Producer: Amburr Farls
Post-Production: Method
Lead Flame Artist:  Claus Hansen
Flame Assistant: Krysten Richardson
Junior Flame Artist: Cary Welton
Executive Producer: Robert Owens
Producer: Ananda Reavis
Mixer:  Mark Meyuhas
Assistant Mixer: Matt Miller

[Editor's note: This is another in a series of profiles of social media influencers presented by the Social Media Club. The profiles seek to explore how social media influencers around the world became involved in social media, what makes them tick, and where they are going from here.] 

read more

Editor’s note: Rebekah Cox is a product designer at Quora and previously a product design lead at Facebook. This post is a followup to a recent tweet, and first appeared on Quora.

It’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature.

So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention. Those areas where your attention is focused assemble to form a set of experiences that shape and influence where you’ll direct future attention. But that attention is interrupted all the time by people, events, things, desires, boredom, weather, etc. and that process of interruption is, largely, contained to physical space because that is a natural gate on access.

Then there’s the phone. The “phone” part of the mobile phone is important not because of the voice communication it enables, but rather from the habit and etiquette that the ringing bell created in society and the direct access it grants to the caller. It’s the promise of instant communication at the cost of having attention interrupted and redirected. The key to unlocking that attention is a semi-random sequence of digits which you can give to someone else to indicate that the person now has permission to interrupt you and to access your attention directly.

Email works so well because it is another opportunity for access and people have formed a collective habit of actively directing attention toward their inboxes at regular intervals. We have all agreed to walk to our computers and check the new mail indicator and are generally addressable through a combination of a username and domain. It’s not as insistent as the phone, though, and provides just enough lag to enable some measure of control over granting access. Twitter and Facebook have feeds which abstract away both the To: and Subject: fields of email and represent two very different networks but are nonetheless an evolution of the habits email created. Facebook further improves the method of connection through friendship and the use of real names with the network itself providing necessary disambiguation.

Currently all these disparate forms of communication are competing[1] and in terms of mobile, specifically, have been fashioned into apps that exist without hierarchy on top of an identity agnostic framework. Identity is largely misappropriated or at most a small component of some percentage of those apps[2]. Then there are the notification systems which allow us to manage certain types of incoming information, but the experience is still essentially a channel for the applications’ own interests: ignoring, instead of reinforcing, the user’s identity.

It cannot be ignored, however, that there are benefits to that competition[3]. With several different communication channels, it’s easier to prioritize who gets direct access (texting, calling), who gets secondary access (email) and who gets excess access (feeds). Another issue is how quickly these systems become overwhelming and how easy it is for well intentioned users to dig themselves into an experience hole. But these are tractable problems when the design principles are focused around identity and the system is explicitly responsible for maintaining all material facts about its owner[4].

A mobile experience that truly represents your identity — in a way that both resembles and enhances an in-person conversation but still affords you control over how you portion out your attention and provides context — could tie the knot for the myriad communication channels available.

The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.

—
R. Marie Cox (@artypapers) January 29, 2011

[Image via typedvorak.com.]

________

[1] The Facebook Messages product is arguably the first step in the first large scale attempt to consolidate all these communication channels and create a central stream for directed information. Your Facebook profile is also arguably the best representation of your public identity and how you want the world to view you in context of your peers. Those are two huge parts to executing on mobile identity and why rumors about a Facebook phone are so ripe. It’s also possibly why the Messages product currently feels so awkward — because it remains as an incomplete thought until the later stages of the product materialize. This is all speculation on my part, however; I have no inside information about a Facebook phone.

[2] Address Book, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all serve to fracture your identity. Android has an excessively aggressive address book that attempts to manage your social connections but provides no true representation of a person’s identity within the system.

[3] If it were up to the carriers, we’d have identities composed of NASCAR ads and group buying coupons that require an extra monthly fee to connect to more than 10 people.

[4] Imagine priority calls, texts, inbox, feed, etc. And those are just the naive solutions, better ones are out there.