PHOTOiD is a new mash-up Nike has created that allows you to use an Instagram photo to inspire a pair of personalised Nike iD trainers. It’s built in HTML5, is lovely to look at, is intrinsically linked to social platforms, and produces great user-inspired content for people to share. And, most importantly, its hero is the product.

What Nike has done, in this case, is brilliantly understood a number of the key trends driving audience behaviours, such as the creative self-promotion that the likes of Twitter and Instagram encourage and celebrate, and turned those into what is, at heart, an ad. The key is that that it adds value as much as it advertises.

In hindsight, we can see that Nike has been doing this for years. In many ways; PHOTOiD is an evolution of the original Nike iD iPhone app, which allowed people to take photos and use them as the inspiration for their shoes.

Meanwhile, Nike+ creates content out of people’s activities, then turns that content into something that acts as social currency. Their commercials have long been short movies rather than simple TV ads; for instance, the track recorded by Kanye West in honour of the 25th anniversary of Air Force One is undoubtedly one of the coolest-ever pieces of marketing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As someone who has worked on Nike (disclosure: they’re a client), I know that some people dismiss such praise because, “Well, they’re Nike.” And whilst they are certainly “lucky” in that trainers are inherently more interesting than washing liquid or other household goods, that doesn’t negate the fact that the way they approach their marketing can provide lessons for us all.

What Nike does brilliantly is understand the trends and cultural shifts that are influencing people and determine how they can build those into their products and marketing. And, with the rise of the likes of Nike+, they’re creating products that are marketing.

Whilst most brands may not get to work with the likes of Michael Jordan or Wayne Rooney, we can all think about how the stories our brands tell might be of interest or even of use to our customers.

Disclosure: Nike is a client of Mindshare.

The most recent and impressive example of this was the decision by Yahoo! to pay a rumoured $30 million to buy Summly, an app with less than a million downloads and its team of five — led by its photogenic founder, 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio.

Whilst this will undoubtedly inspire any number of teenagers to develop their own app, it also highlights other trends around how content is being created and consumed, which will have important consequences for brands.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Social Reading Apps Impact News Consumption

Summly is like a cooler, more intelligent Flipboard. It aggregates content that you’re likely to be interested in, and also summarises the content to make it easier to decide whether or not you want to read, watch or look at it.

It’s not the first social reading app to be bought this year. CNN recently snapped up Zite, whilst LinkedIn is rumoured to be buying Pulse.

What all of this represents is a sea-change from the days when news companies, such as the New York Times (whose motto I’ve re-imagined for this post), would decide exactly what was important for people to read or watch. Now, decisions that used to be made by human editors are made by computer algorithms.

Brand PR Strategies

What this means for brands is that PR strategies are going to have to adapt, as they no longer need to create content or events that will get them published, but rather make things that will get them shared.

Whilst PR has always been about creating talkability, this is an important change, as it is likely to impact the types of things that generate this. So, events where you invite all the top journalists are likely to be less shared than interesting infographics that appeal to a particular audience.

Consumer Reading Habits

At the same time, as these reader apps change the way that we read articles and posts. Changes to the business models of the traditional news companies are also likely to have a similar impact.

Many news businesses have followed The New York Times to models that ask some people to pay for access, therefore changing the balance between advertising and subscription revenue. Therefore, these businesses will become less concerned with simply generating as many page impressions as possible and more concerned with creating truly engaging content that people would want to pay for. This example of a truly absorbing story about an avalanche highlights this perfectly.

Screenshot by Ciaran Norris

What all this means is the sort of churnalism that has created an awful lot of news content over the last decade should become less prevalent, at least on quality sites. Instead of just spamming press releases to journalists desperate to hit copy deadlines, brands will need to think about how they can create stories of real interest and depth.

As I explained last month, one way to do this is to make use of existing media budgets so the news companies themselves generate and promote that content for you.

Brands Need Social-PR Strategy

In summary, brands need to reconsider what constitutes PR, but also what constitutes social. Whilst many brands have spent huge amounts of time trying to find ways to talk to customers, and to get customers to talk to them (which is to be applauded), the rise of the readers highlights the fact that it’s equally relevant to think of ways to get customers to talk about you, or to enable existing conversations with truly share-able content.

Real people don’t necessarily want to talk about the products that brands make; however, thinking about what they might want to talk about and getting professionals to create it might mean people end up talking about you, anyway. And, as this fantastic presentation from Martin Weigel (Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam) highlights, remembering exactly this is the best way of ensuring that your brand doesn’t end up failing.

But, all that notwithstanding, there is a very good reason that the idea of content marketing has gained such traction recently, and that it gives brands a story to tell, and consumers something to share.

Most posts about content marketing tend, I find, to assume that the brand itself will produce the content. Presumably this is because many such posts are aimed at smaller businesses that don’t have the budgets to piggy-back off of professionally produced content and that also have smaller, more flexible teams that can turn their hands to things like making videos.

With that in mind, I thought it would be useful to consider three ways that big brands can also look to put content at the heart of what they do, with the aim of becoming truly social.

1. Make The Most Of Newspaper Advertising

We all know that the publishing industry is struggling. But, at the same time, there are plenty of major news organisations, from the New York Times to The Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald, that have massive numbers of highly social followers and also have hundreds of brilliant content producers. Or, as we used to call them, readers and journalists.

Many of these publishers have become experts at crafting truly social content, and just as many of them are eager to do exactly this for advertisers. By briefing publishers as brands would traditionally brief advertising agencies, it’s possible to create truly shareable branded content, that also comes with the kudos of a major publisher’s name on it. In fact, some publishers are even buying agencies in order to truly scale this sort of offering.

2. Singing Your Own Song

Some of the biggest social successes of the past few years are the major music streaming services. The likes of Spotify, thanks to their direct tie-ins with Facebook, are building massive user bases and then using those to create huge amounts of sharing activity back into Facebook through frictionless sharing. One exec at a streaming service recently told me that they have created something like 500 million impressions on Facebook in this way.

Many companies don’t feel that they have a ‘right’ to play in music; yet, with the right approach, marrying consumer insights to brand truths, nearly all should be able to find something to sing about. Whether it’s simply a case of making the soundtrack to your most recent TV ad Shazamable, or helping your customers build playlists that match your product (driving for autos and singing in the shower for shampoos being two obvious examples), every brand should be able to tell a story through music. And, they tend to be stories that consumers are happier to re-tell than ones that don’t have a tune.

3. Making Your TV Truly Social

I’ve written a few times about social TV, but it’s worth thinking of some of the easy ways that brands can make the most of it. If sponsoring a show, use your sponsorship budget to ensure that you get access to exclusive content which can be shared during the broadcasts.

As event TV increasingly becomes one of the few types that guarantees a live audience, it’s essential to capitalise on this by taking things on to multiple screens. Equally, if you’re investing in advertising around different types of TV genres, you should plan your activity around the likely audience interaction. Twitter has helpfully broken down how people tend to tweet based on what they’re watching.

4. Plan Your Media

With the purchase of Bluefin Labs, it’s likely that Twitter is trying to create a new way of measuring TV audiences, based on how engaged they are. It’s entirely likely that they will then try to sell this back to TV stations and advertisers (and agencies such as Mindshare).

Whether or not they succeed, will likely decide whether, this time next year, TV advertising plans will actually be planned based on social data.

TV genome image courtesy of Bluefin Labs.

As if to prove me right, Facebook then had its very own Valentine’s Day massacre, as well as launching a full-on competitor to Google, whilst Twitter released Vine, a service that seems very similar to a number of others already on the market, including the relatively successful Viddy.

What’s interesting here is that both of these developments highlight how these platforms are trying to create tools that, whilst not unique, are embedded tightly enough into their other services that loyal users wouldn’t want to use anything else.

So, in Facebook’s case, cutting off Voxer seems to show that they plan to make a lot more of their messaging service, presumably to head off all the other messaging services that might start stealing users (and their very valuable data) from the social giant. Data which, lest we forget, powers Graph Search.

Equally, Twitter’s new mobile app Vine, which allows people to create 6-second videos which display perfectly in Twitter Cards, suggests that other video services that currently piggyback off of Twitter probably ought to start thinking about whether they have an alternative business plan.

Twitter has made a lot of the fact that the Vine videos are viewable within a tweet, suggesting that they believe that this will prove to be something of a unique selling proposition. Which will only be the case if other videos, or other videos of that sort of length, aren’t.

As I said in my last post, what this means for brands is hard to define as yet, but I would argue that they should be using the leverage they have to push for platforms to continue to allow some level of cross-compatibility. Spending the time and money to build up content libraries and loyal audiences is much easier to justify if doing so on one platform also allows a brand to engage audiences in other places.

Whilst the platforms might think that they are strengthening themselves by ring-fencing users, and cutting off cross-service support; in fact, they could risk lessening their worth to the advertisers who ultimately pay the bills.

Twitter obviously thinks that lots of people will want to create tiny little videos, and that brands will run after them, creating their own Vines, like moving Instagrams. And, it presumably thinks that this will make its service even stickier.

Facebook, meanwhile, presumably sees definite risk in allowing Vine, and others, to access its social graph (something it’s getting a lot of stick for, despite the fact Instagram did exactly the same last year on more than one occasion.)

But, what’s interesting is that it might actually be necessary for both of them to think about whether they can extract data from sources other than their own, if they really want to build on their existing success.

At present, most of  Facebook’s data is still built around the like; it’s their atomic unit of interaction. I’ve said before that I think there’s massive opportunity to make more of Facebook’s decision to open up its system to allow apps to create new interactions: people could socialise the fact that they’ve read a book, that they’ve run a circuit, cooked a recipe, etc.

But, for whatever reason, few brands have taken up this opportunity, and people aren’t really flocking to give more granular details of their daily lives — when was the last time that you checked in somewhere on Facebook?

Google made the world’s most successful search engine by building systems to understand the data that people were willing to create.

Might Facebook not need to look at tapping into existing apps and platforms and the data that people are already sharing, rather than trying to build its own version of everything, if it wishes to build the next generation’s Google?

And mightn’t Twitter be better off if it worked with existing tools that allow self-expression, and concentrated on being the best platform for the delivery of that content, just as Google did with the likes of Google News?

During the halcyon days of the web 2.0 revolution there was a lot of talk of consumers using social media to turn the tables on big brands. Yet, we now find ourselves in a situation where brands, if they are sensible, will start taking on the social media giants on behalf of the consumers who were supposed to hold all the cards.

But, whilst the minutiae of this isn’t likely to really interest many people outside of the tech-blog bubble, it is throwing up some interesting choices for consumers and brands alike, choices that are particularly apt as we all look ahead to the new year, full of (yet to be broken) resolutions.

Social Media Platform Wars

One such choice suddenly became urgent when, in a sign that the wars were kicking off in earnest, Instagram withdrew support for Twitter’s Cards product, which displays media, such as pictures, within tweets. Suddenly, people were being asked to choose: Instagram or Twitter, a choice that many found hard to make, and disliked being asked to make.

But, pretty quickly someone had found a solution: using If This Then That (IFTTT), it was, and is, possible to bypass the spat and push Instagram images into tweets.

Who Owns The Data?

What’s interesting about this is that IFTTT is an attempt to allow consumers to take control of their digital lives by connecting the various services and platforms that so many of us use now. Yet, even IFTTT, despite being used as a solution in the Twitter/Instagram spat, has become a victim of the increased desire of the various platforms to take control of what they view as ‘their’ data when it had to turn off the ability for people to use the service to push tweets to other channels.

Whilst it is understandable that platforms such as Twitter, or Instagram, should wish to maximise the amount of traffic they receive, and the money they can make around that traffic, it could well start to backfire.

Whilst I have argued in the past that there are simply too many social platforms and apps for people to use them all effectively, particularly as they all ask more of us, it is also unlikely that any one service will be able to be all things to all men (and women), or that people will, going forward, trust one service to hold all that data.

You can see this when the editor of an ad-funded blog blames the fact that so many social platforms are ad-funded for the fact that they often seem to treat users as an annoying necessity. Or, when a renowned tech blogger announces that, having turned off Facebook, he now plans to leave Instagram, too, not just because of the (badly handled) changes to the terms of service, but also because:

“In my search for technology products and services that somehow enrich or add value to my life, Facebook and Instagram have been a net negative not only in their usefulness, but also in other, subtle ways most people don’t often consider… As technology companies work overtime to make it easier to sign up and maintain accounts, little regard is given to the long-term ownership and use of our data… There are other costs to letting accounts go dormant, too. The final time I loaded Facebook to click the delete button, I noticed weeks-old friend requests from my grandmother and one of my cousins… Perhaps worst of all, in an era where we meticulously prune our online personae, services like Facebook require constant diligence and maintenance.“

What’s ironic here is that the first thing I did after reading this article was to post it to RebelMouse, a service that aims to create a mosaic of all your social outpourings.

Align Business Objectives With Digital Footprints

It’s yet another attempt to make sense of the cluttered, disjointed mess that qualifies as a digital footprint for so many of us these days. I’ve chosen to trust them with access to my Twitter and Instagram feeds, and I’m even contemplating using it as the homepage of my often unloved blog.

I may well come to regret that decision. It’s even more likely I’ll forget that I ever made it. But the big question for me, as it should be for everyone and every brand involved in the social space, is not just whether I should trust them with this access and data, but whether I have what it takes to keep it up-to-date and make sure that it stays relevant.

Whilst Ryan Block’s reasons for quitting Instagram and Facebook won’t convince everyone, and don’t even entirely add up (I’m not really sure that LinkedIn and Twitter give users that much more control), they do provide a compelling reminder that we should all make a resolution for 2013 and stick to it: to ensure that we’re making the best use of the platforms we use the content we create, and the data that we ultimately own, to meet whatever personal or business objectives we all might have. Because although IFTTT may just have secured several million dollars of investment, I can pretty much guarantee that we will all increasingly have to sacrifice this for that, rather than being able to have both.

But to do so, we also need to think about the things that are likely to have an impact on our businesses, and the products and sites that they increasingly rely on. So, let’s think about what the key factors are likely to be that will impact how social platforms and technologies are used for marketing in 2013.

1. Whose Data Is It Anyway? 

2012 saw Facebook undergo a large investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), due to the fact that their global HQ is in Dublin. This led to it having to rewrite what used to be called its Privacy Policy (it now goes by the much more sensible name of its Data Usage Policy). The DPC is likely to play a big part again next year, particularly as it has objected to the most recent changes, allowing data sharing with Instagram.

This issue isn’t going anywhere. A recent WSJ article highlighted just how much personal data the likes of Facebook and Twitter hold. With regulators around the world still focusing on things like cookies, major advertisers should be pushing the social platforms to use data more sensitively, if they don’t want to risk politicians stopping them using it at all.

2. Anti-Social Media

There’s probably not a court in the developed world which hasn’t witnessed the ongoing Apple vs. Android battles* over the last 12 months. But more recently, we can see a similar battle playing out in Social. First, Twitter told the eco-system of apps that had grown around it since its launch, that it was going to start controlling who used the data from its API and how. They’re now being sued for doing so.

But it’s not just David vs. Goliath. A recent spat between Twitter and Instagram, with the latter withdrawing its support for Twitter’s Cards product, hints that in 2013, there won’t be anything social about how different companies in social media treat each other (or their users).

For brands, and for users, this should be another reminder that if you build your business, or your life, around a 3rd party platform or application you need to start planning for what happens if it changes, or even disappears.

3. Wisdom Of Crowds, Or Mob Mentality?

When a prank call by an Australian radio station ended in tragedy, with a nurse taking her life, I think most people would agree that it was probably time for some thought and reflection.

Instead, large numbers of people took to Twitter and Facebook to bombard the DJs in question with abuse and even death threats. In 2012, this sort of chain of events (the anonymous hordes taking to Twitter to vent their fury) became the norm.

Brands, too, have found themselves on the wrong side of these twitchfork mobs, including a spate of incidents where consumer complaints made on Facebook have gone viral. Whilst many will argue about whether this is due to changes in Facebook’s algorithm, or whether Twitter will look to protect commercial partners in such cases (they have said that they don’t), what’s not up for debate is that this trend is unlikely to disappear.

This means that marketers will need to have thorough crisis management processes in place, particularly now that, in some markets, the comments left by consumers on brand pages are the brand’s legal responsibility.

4. Integrating Paid, Owned And Earned

When Facebook updated its ad formats earlier this year, I suggested this meant that it was more important than ever that strategies around paid, owned and earned media should be fully integrated. In 2013, this will stop being an option, and become a must.

In the last couple of months Facebook has made a number of anouncements about how it is going to start plugging in its ad products, and the data it holds on users, into external technologies and networks.

And, with recent reports that Facebook is in discussions to buy the Atlas ad server from Microsoft, it seems inevitable that 2013 will see Facebook launching its own ad network, essentially turning the Open Graph into an advertising platform.

Get ready for a socially powered version of AdSense.

5. Expect The Unexpected

The worst thing about making predictions is how often they prove to be wrong. And if the last twenty years or so of the Web has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t take anything for granted other than the fact that, more often than not, you’re likely to be caught on the hop.

Pinterest, Instagram and many others all suddenly exploded, though Pinterest was a slow-burning “overnight sensation,” having originally launched in 2010. Equally, many apps and platforms, such as Gowalla and Quora, that were expected to take over the world, have since seen stalled growth, or even disappeared entirely.

As marketers, it’s important that we keep up with overriding trends in consumer behaviour and the technologies that power these. But we should be careful about getting swept up by hype and piling into the “next big thing.” So, we need to stay nimble and open to new opportunities; but, we equally need to be realistic about what deserves our focus and attention.

Because whilst there’s always a new big thing, it’s more than likely that the “next Facebook” hasn’t even been built yet, and with the increasing difficulties involved in scaling on mobile – which is quickly becoming the defining consumer access point — it may well never be.

Image courtesy of Facebook.

I’m talking, of course, about the fact that within a few hours, a photo posted on Twitter had become the most retweeted since Twitter’s creation. Obviously the photo itself was pretty historic, marking as it did Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential elections, but that’s a subject for a different blog.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

What was fascinating about the “Four more years” photo is that it highlighted once and for all, as if we needed any further confirmation, that people now experience major events on two, if not three, or even four, screens.

Tens of millions of Americans were still glued to their TV screens (not to mention the countless other millions around the globe); but, at the same time, many millions were furiously tweeting and picking up news from the social platform. And whilst this is great news for Twitter, it highlights growing issues for traditional broadcasters and brands.

Just as it shouldn’t be news anymore that people are using digital platforms to connect with each other around content and events such as the election, or a show like American Idol, it’s also not news that TV stations, like newspapers before them, are trying to work out how to turn the rise of the Web to their advantage.

And whilst Twitter COO Dick Costolo might claim that they are “saving” TV, I would argue that many networks probably view them with as much suspicion as love: as a frenemy, if you like. Because what TV stations have always sold to advertisers is attention, and data around what that attention can do for the advertisers (in terms of awareness, recall, etc.). But now, that attention is, as often as not, focussed on products like Twitter.

This means that Twitter has access to huge amounts of data about what people are doing, and the TV stations want this data, too.  You have to guess that it’s a large reason that NBC signed a deal with Twitter. It’s also why TV stations around the world are either investing in, partnering with, or creating their own social TV applications. The problem here, of course, is that they all have to battle with the mass audience that Twitter already has, and that could be a tough battle, indeed.

So what does this mean for us as marketers? I would argue that it means that whilst it almost certainly makes sense to look at how to integrate Twitter into broadcast campaigns, as I’ve said before, it also means that, just like the TV stations, we need to be thinking about the data that our campaigns create, or about how we can work with content creators to learn more about our audiences.

Because, if we don’t, Twitter (and Facebook et al) will hold all the data, and we’ll all end up — media owners and brands alike — having to pay them to find out about the people who watch our shows and buy our products.

It was also, according to many, the first social media Olympics and so, as we pack away the memories of a fortnight of sporting excellence, let’s see what marketing lessons we can take away.

1. Free speech comes at a price. Twitter has often spoken very proudly about being “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and has an enviable record of resisting efforts by governments and legislators to get access to its users’ data.

But when a British journalist started ranting about NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremony, someone at Twitter contacted NBC and prompted them to report one of the tweets. This then saw the account being frozen and an entirely foreseeable backlash.

Twitter had just announced a commercial tie-up with NBC prior to the start of the games and this particular PR fail goes to show how difficult it will be for a company that allows people to express their every thought, no matter how inappropriate and unpleasant those may be, to keep commercial partners happy.

[Editor's Note: Twitter itself denied that the account was suspended to please NBC and curtail speech but rather because the account holder, Guy Adams, tweeted an email believed to be private.

Twitter did admit that someone on its partnership side suggested that NBC might report this issue, which it apologized for. Our previous post, Twitter Apologizes, Admits One Department Helped NBC Get Journalist’s Account Suspended, explains this more].

2. Dual-screening has gone mainstream.  The idea that people will interact with the web at the same time as watching TV is hardly a new idea (the first time I wrote about it for Search Engine Land was back in 2009 and I wasn’t saying anything others hadn’t already).

But with smartphones shipments now outstripping those of PCs almost two-fold, dual-screening has gone from something that is talked about at conferences to something real people are actually doing. Data released by Google show massive spikes in search traffic, particularly on tablets and smartphones, at times when people were watching the games. This is a really interesting trend and one that marketers need to exploit, although the fact that large numbers of people don’t appear to know who Paul McCartney is, is slightly worrying.

3. You don’t have to be in it to win it. One of the main criticisms in the run up to the games was that it was overly commercial. And considering that sponsors pay tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to be associated with the Olympics, it’s no surprise.

But, once again, Nike showed that you can capture the spirit of an event, and start conversations, without being an official sponsor. I might be a little biased as they’re a client, but I think it’s safe to say that Nike’s amazing content and its strategic use of paid media was a textbook example of how to integrate paid, owned and earned media.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. There should be medals for self-promotion. A lot of the athletes taking part in the Games have seen surges in their social profiles, some by almost 4,000%. And just in case he didn’t win a medal (he did), Irish boxer Paddy Barnes actually plugged his Twitter profile during the Opening Ceremony in a cheeky attempt to gain sponsorship. Hopefully a few brands were listening.

5. Time is money. The criticism that NBC was getting was due to its delayed and edited coverage. Due to the fact that audiences, and therefore ad revenues, tend to be greater during prime-time, NBC delayed a lot of the footage.

But in the days of Twitter, Facebook & YouTube, that’s going to be hard to keep doing. If people allready know, via Twitter, that Mo Farah has just got his second gold, or that Usain Bolt is still the 100m champion, are they likely to want to watch it two hours later?

Thankfully for NBC the next Olympics will be in Rio, which is only an hour ahead of the East coast. But when you look at how people consumed these games, on multiple screens and multiple platforms, I’d be willing to gamble that one of the big winners at Rio will be someone like Google, as I’d imagine they’d love to have a go at taking NBC’s coverage away and putting it all on YouTube.

And that would be even more of a shake-up than Britain turning out to be good at sport and a bit rubbish at music.

Or how about this: created by a team of Northern Europeans, but based out of London, it was the coolest social music product on the scene. With a free streaming product, and social built into its roots, it was set to take on the music labels.

So, did you see what I did there? Whilst I could have been talking about Instagram and Spotify (both currently valued at, or, in Instagram’s case, sold for, around $1bn), I was, in fact, talking about flickr and last.fm.

I started thinking about this yesterday when, having logged into last.fm for the first time in some while, I was met with a message suggesting that I change my password due to a suspected security breech.

Now, I may not read every single tech-blog out there, but I do tend to keep up with many of them, and this story hadn’t even crossed my radar. Yet, when the same thing happened to LinkedIn, it made the mainstream press.

And today, as I’m writing this, the entire last.fm site is down. If the same thing happened to Facebook, or Twitter, you could probably be forgiven for thinking that the world had ended.

The slow decline of last.fm, from being the coolest kid on the block, via a purchase by CBS, to a place most people don’t even notice when it disappears, alongside the much reported travails at flickr (note: the article linked to includes some rather adult language), highlight that the ever-shifting waters of the internet can be just as treacherous for natives as for the types of companies we’re used to seeing as its victims, such as newspapers and record labels.

So, what can we learn from these sites’ shifts from darlings of the Web 2.0 crowd to social media also-rans?

Firstly, with free services, the only things stopping people leaving is either high levels of interaction, or low levels of energy — in other words, they either need to be really excited about using your site or app, or too lazy to use someone else’s. And, as I’ve said before, this matters just as much for the companies using these platforms to market to their users, as the actual site or app owners themselves.

Because whilst multi-screening means that we can now tweet at the same time as watching TV, or update Facebook whilst having lunch, there are still only 24 hours in the day and, as we move towards the “web of want,” those services we use tend to ask more of us. This will, I think, eventually lead to polarisation around certain services as a mixture of interaction and ennui locks other players out of existing sectors.

Secondly, you need to stay ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead, mind. Flickr lost out because it took its eye off the ball and lost out in mobile at the same time as Yahoo! took its eyes off of Flickr and failed to realise what it had (at exactly the same time that Facebook was building its entire platform on photos).

Last.fm’s demise was probably down to something similar — a missed opportunity in mobile, possibly caused or exacerbated by the incomprehension of a less-flexible parent company. Having said that, whilst a recent article provides a nice retort to the common-held that SecondLife was a failure, it also highlights the fact that being too early to the game can be just as limiting to growth as coming too late.

Traffic Trends at Flickr.com

Of course, what’s really frustrating is that in both these instances, even ignoring the obvious balls that were dropped, there were so many other opportunities that weren’t properly exploited.

Last.fm moved to an ad-funded model, in a world where ad margins are dropping to the point that Microsoft has just had to write-off $6bn, with no free listening available in some markets due to the fact that the ad revenues couldn’t cover the licensing costs.

All this despite the fact that, considering that it’s owned by a record label, it could have done much more interesting things around discovery and true integration into CBS’ other products.

And in the same way, Yahoo! really has no excuses for not having cracked social search years ago, considering that, in flickr and delicious, it had two of the biggest sets of user-generated tags on the planet.

Finally, flickr, last.fm & aQuantive (the company Microsoft has just said isn’t worth any of the $6bn it paid for it) all go to show that an exit, whether through sale or IPO, really doesn’t mean you’ve arrived.

Companies like SAS and, indeed, SecondLife, show that there’s more to business than a quick buck. Hopefully the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Spotify won’t find out the same thing.

So, in conclusion, whether you’re a marketer, developer or a brand owner, it’s important that you concentrate on the product, not the exit. Think about whether your product would be better served with a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

Don’t sit back and believe the hype about the latest app or platform — get out there and test it, but only when the time is right.

You don’t want to be the first one to join, but you sure as hell don’t want to be the last, unless all you’re looking to do is turn out the lights.

I’ve certainly been guilty of it, including during a presentation where I used to it to describe the fact that more smart phones are now shipped globally than desktop computers (whether Windows or Mac based), and that in many developed markets now, smartphone penetration is at, or about to reach, 50%. Whatever we call it, there’s certainly a tipping point around the corner.

But the fact is that, if we think about what PC actually stands for, it’s clear that we are now closer than ever to a truly PC era. PC, as most people know, stands for personal computer. The terms came about because, compared to the monster sized mainframe computers that powered the world before Jobs & Wozniak changed it (along with plenty of others), desktop machines were designed for personal, or individual, use.

But when we consider the devices that most of us now carry in our pockets and purses, the word personal has never been more apt. Because, at the end of the day, smartphones are more computer than they are phone, and more personal, in every way, than the machines that still sit on the desks of millions of people around the world. Not only do we carry them with us wherever we go, the things we use them for are, increasingly, personalised.

These devices, and the apps and services we use on them are also creating ever more personal data which can be used, with proper guidelines, to create truly personalised marketing.

Imagine The Future of Personalised Marketing

Let’s try to imagine what this might look like. A department store might want to drive awareness of a special sale it’s having.

Because mobile phone networks know what sex their customers are, and what their home adresses are (for billing purposes), they can immediately create a contactable database of women who live within three miles of the store.

Imagine that, on top of that, they also overlay calling data, so that they only target people who tend to make calls from the city centre, during office hours, on at least 3 days a week — this means that they’re predicting which of the customers have jobs, and therefore might have more disposable income.

Layer, on top of this, data about average monthly bills, and which promotions customers have responded to in the network’s loyalty programmes, and all of a sudden you have a very sophisticated data selection process.

Now what you do is send a video message (MMS) to all of these people, inviting them to an exclusive fashion show in the store, with the video showing catwalk footage. Then encourage people to tweet or Facebook their location when they’ve arrived and been given a glass of champagne.

Here you have a great example of what many are referring to as SoLoMo (social, local, mobile). Or, what I like to think of as marketing using the most personal computers the world has ever known.

And the punchline? A campaign pretty much identical to the one I’ve just described was run in Dublin, Ireland, earlier this year.

As a wise man once said, “the future’s already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed yet“.