Attention! New Blog URL.

Thanks for visiting Attention! We’re still updating, of course, but we’ve got a new and improved home for our blog -

http://blog.attentionusa.com/

Please find us there for current updates and all our thoughts on social media, marketing & PR. If you have a chance, be sure to update your bookmarks and blogrolls as well. See you over there.

How much is your tweet worth?

Last week TechCrunch reported on Be-A-Magpie a new service that automatically inserts ads into a twitter stream (something that the Icon Factory has been doing with Twitterific for ages).

What’s most interesting about this service is that it puts Twitter into the same situation that Facebook recently went through. When Facebook allowed third parties to create applications they realized that RockYou, Slide, and Social Media were monetizing relationships that Facebook hadn’t been able to. So Facebook responded by segregating applications and widgets out of the main interface.

Twitter founder Evan Williams has repeatedly said that they will not insert ads into feeds, but now that a third party is doing it, will Twitter be able to hold out and if not will users flee?

Tragedy in Mumbai

Our thoughts this weekend were with the victims of the tragedy in Mumbai. One of our clients Flora2000 is based there. Rehan yar Khan, their founder, sent this note that is too important not to share.

Hi everyone, 

I hope you are safe and your resilience not too shaken by these shocking and distasteful events that are now ongoing for 48hrs in Mumbai. 

These attacks by cowards on unarmed civilians at the leisure centers of our city, in the evenings when people were relaxing after working hard, and on those places which Indian & International company executives frequent, have been designed to disrupt Indian business activities and demoralize teams. They are meant to cast fear into the minds of foreign visitors and parents/families of our cities’ workers. And they are meant to breed mistrust. They want us to abandon our work so that we as teams fail, so that investments into India stop, so that our growth fails, so that we descend into chaos. 

Our response to these cowards will be that we will not fall for the fear that they are attempting to create. They do not realise that while we Indians may be an easy going, jovial people, we are not weaklings that will scare and run away. Our response will be that we will get back at these people by growing our country to great heights and making our country stronger. We will leave our opponents frustrated, not by attacking them in return, but by becoming successful and secure. 

With several 100 dead and many more deeply wounded, this is also a time for deep reflection on the India that we are building and why we have been repeatedly subject to attacks, both from within and from external forces. For too long we have built a lawless India where the legal system is in shambles and people cannot get justice, breeding deep frustration; for too long we have built a corrupt India that robs efficiency, leading to unemployment and poverty; for too long we have built a greedy India with a great gap between the haves and have nots; for too long we have built a divisive India where we have divided up each other on the basis of caste, colour, state, wealth and religion; for too long we have built a disrespectful India where we do not value other people’s opinions, always asserting ourselves; and for too long we have built an India befrit of teamwork, so that it becomes virtually impossible to get good results in anything, including basic security. 

Some things thus that we must henceforth pledge:
- we will never ever hinder or criticize any security measure or officer that is undertaken on the roads, malls, airports or offices. We will coorporate fully
- we will not attack each other, verbally or physically, over any issue, big or small.
- we will treat each others’ point of view with immense respect and listen to it carefully
- we will work hard, sincerely and with 200% honestly
- we will strive to become more productive and increase our growth beyond even our own expectations
- we will be united and work tightly as a team
- we will spread the message of sincerity and teamwork wherever we go
- we will never complain when we have to stand up for the national anthem, because the reason we stand is in respect for those who lost their lives defending India. 
- we will work hard to build the legal system
- we will work hard to remove corruption from it’s root
- we will not divide people or get divided

I would like to take this moment to express my grief and sympathy for the families of the security officers and civilians who lost their lives and were injured. My heart goes out to these victims, these brave people and their grieving families. Let us become more dignified, better people and more productive so that their sacrifices are not in vain. 

Regards & Love,
Rehan 

P&G on Facebook and Social Media advertising

AdAge (via SAI) has a great summary of Ted McConnell’s talk at the Digital Non-Conference.

Ted’s basic points are:

• Facebook isn’t social ‘media’ as it is a communications platform and he doesn’t want to advertise on a page where someone announces their relationship breakup.
• Facebook’s micro-targeting is powerful, but scary.
• Branded Facebook applications are the only valuable way to interact with Facebook users.

We would also add that having a worthwhile community for your fans on Facebook creates not only customer touch points, but does so in an entirely opt-in and authentic way.

Facebook should be very very scared when (however unofficially) P&G says that it’s not worth advertising on your platform.

It should also be no surprise that Facebook is now trying to monetize these branded applications.

Attention update

I am extraordinarily proud of our team at Attention. They deserve credit for the most “I am truly excited to go to work every day” environment in my career, and pouring themselves into our clients’ businesses. Attention is formed as a partnership, and it shows.

Colin Nagy is our exceptional new director of social media, and Dina Fierro, who many of you know from her Beauty News NYC, juli b, Are You a Beauty? and eye4style, now heads our beauty & fashion team.

Our new clients are equally exceptional: CNN, TOMS, The Daily Beast, NFL, Crocs, Clearwire, Ritz-Carlton, and Mashable. We are thankful to them for their friendship and success.

Curtis

Attention’s own Naomi Hirabayashi is a HuffPo contributor

A heartfelt congratulations to Naomi for her outstanding contribution to Huffington Post on youth apathy.

Education on social media changes starts in-house

Our own Curtis Hougland was recently quoted in PR Week for a story on staying ahead of the social media learning curve.

The article entitled “Education on social media changes starts in-house,” published on September 29th and written by Tonya Garcia, included quotes by Curtis, Sam Ford of Peppercom, and Ted Weismann of Lois Paul & Partners.

With Curtis, the article highlights how he built Attention “by using the Web as a word-of-mouth tool where data collection and measurement are key parts of the communication process.”  The article continued to point out Attention’s practice of producing a social media report card (SMRC) at the beginning of each assignment.  The SMRC benchmarks a company’s performance in social media, measuring tonal sentiment, engagement, among others.

Curtis is quoted as saying, “We don’t find many people off the street that are able to bridge the math with the communications side.  You have to learn math, data analytics, and production to succed in 2009.”

PR Week: Education on social media changes starts in-house (registration required)

PSFK Conference Asia

Attention’s Colin Nagy will lead a panel discussion at this Friday’s PSFK Conference Asia in Singapore.  In his session, Colin will interview space scientist and social media/grassroots expert Andrew Hoppin of NASA (USA) and noted architect Mark Dytham of Klein-Dytham/PechaKucha (Tokyo). The group will explore the nuances of collaborative co-working and how companies and institutions can benefit from engaging their audience, staff, partners and the community to drive innovation.

From PSFK: “PSFK Conference Asia is a creative business event with speakers from companies that include MTV, NASA, and Panasonic; agencies that include Flamingo International, Mindshare, Profero and Wieden + Kennedy; and leading creative visionaries that include Jeff Staple and Mark Dytham.

Held in Singapore, this event will be PSFK’s 6th conference following successful installments in London, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.”

Facebook redesign kills widgets dead

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook (via ValleyWag) has a post up about how the new Facebook redesign is killing widget traffic by segregating them into their own boxes and off the main page:

Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.

Nick provides the traffic chart for his application:

Nick make an incredibly astute point about the nature of the widgets:

While my application was only build as a joke some applications were attracting hundreds of thousands of daily users. My application was completely a widget though and provided practically no interactive substance. Other applications which actually provide users with a valuable experience in addition to help them share information appear to have survived the shift over to the new design.

There is a real division between these widgets that offer a one-off novelty and full blown applications that give users a reason to continue their interactions after Facebook’s redesign and limiting of incentivizing viral growth.

2001: An Index Odyssey

As part of Google’s continuing 10th birthday celebration, they’ve just released (for one month only) their index from January 2001.

 

 

Some other things we take for granted today that just didn’t exist in 2001:

Facebook

MySpace

iPod

Skype

Gmail

WordPress

Twitter

Bit Torrent

Firefox

Flickr

Del.icio.us

Digg

Gawker

Technorati

Michael Arrington

And despite the 7+ year gap, people still were talking about the iPhone: