It’s two years old, but it has more resonance than ever as to how organisations should approach their relationship with consumers.

Social media is only the first shift in how we communicate and consume. We’re already seeing the next frontier emerge in the form of wearable tech – from Google Glass to the iWatch, the world’s first Twitter dress to Adidas’s social media enabled running shoe. The boundaries between on and offline, personal and professional, fun and functionality are disappearing. We have become our own channel.

More than ever, brands must learn to symphonise with our lives. Not try to pull our attention away from our passions and towards their advert. Not pretend to be our friend when we have plenty of real ones. Not push their content when we’re busy sharing our own. I don’t use the word ‘synchronise’ because is too suggestive of automated processes. What we’re after here are brands with a deeply human understanding of how we live and buy. Brands that harmonise beautifully with those needs, helping us find greater harmony in the process.

Of course, brands should also surprise us, in a way that is meaningful and helpful. But the best don’t aim to intervene in our lives, steal our attention or distract us with their messages. They aim to integrate seamlessly into our multi-channel lives and occasionally surprise us in a way that gives us more of what we really want – time, fun, productive work and love.

They are the facilitators, not the hijackers, of our passions and our days. 

Which sort is yours?

NB. I’m presenting on ‘Learning to Think Like a Social Consumer’ at the Online Marketing Summit 2013 in Berlin if you want to delve into this in more detail. Come along!

YouCommentate

Hate Lineker? Love Balding? Sports commentary is one of those things we all think we could do better than those idiots on TV, if only we had the chance. Well, now’s our chance.

YouCommentate is a recently launched social sports platform that allows anyone to live commentate any sport. Yes, you can now mute your TV and either pick your favourite ‘alternative commentator’ to hear their take on the match, or if you’re feeling brave, pick up a mic yourself and go live to the world.

At the moment, the uptake is pretty small, and not every sport or game is  being covered live. However, with the recent launch of the Android app and the soon to be released iOS app we definitely have this pegged as one to watch. It doesn’t cost a penny, so all you couch pundits can sign up for free, have a browse and add your words of wisdom to the world.

Oggl

Remember Hipstamatic? The iPhone app was revolutionary when it first emerged in 2009, the first to introduce the framed images and filters we’re all now so hooked on thanks to Instagram. Back then, the company failed to focus adequately on the sharing element of the app, but a few years down the line and the Hipstamatic team is attempting a reboot with the launch of Oggl.

Oggl hopes to make Hipstamatic much more social, giving users more options with filtering and a deeper level of curation when it comes to browsing, liking and saving favourite pictures from their friends. It’s going to be challenge to try and persuade Instagram’s 100-plus million monthly users to defect, so the app is being positioned as a community for creative, artistic, photography lovers, rather than a mainstream tool for random lunch snaps and selfies.

Oggl is currently available as invite only but it will be interesting to see how the numbers stack up when it opens to the public soon.

BlinkBuggy

On my 21^st birthday my mother handed me a very large photo album, which captured my entire life up until that point, from nappies to university. It must have taken months to put together. I was totally blown away and I cherish that album to this day.

BlinkBuggy is an attempt by ex-Googler Emma Weisberg to digitise the process. The site’s baby book network lets you capture notes, memories, milestones and images, as well as import pictures from Google, Facebook and Instagram. Cognisant of parents’ fears about privacy, Weisberg has made a point of making sure it’s easy to know who can view your content, so that you have the option of completely locking down your books or sharing individual moments with friends or groups.

The user interface looks clean and easy to use. Try out the tour. Do you believe that a digital keepsake will never replicate the love and effort involved in a physically compiled album? Or is this the inevitable next gen of social scrapbooking?

Microsoft’s Bing is continuing to expand its integration with Facebook by allowing users to interact directly from their social sidebar. Previously Bing users had been able to see relevant Facebook posts but will now be able to like, comment and share those posts without leaving the Bing search page.

Read more on the Bing blog.

  
YouTube rolls out subscriptions

In a bid to offer more ways in which partners can monetize their channels, YouTube has rolled out its paid subscriptions on Thursday. The service allows qualifying partners to offer content via a monthly or yearly subscription. At the moment, the program is considered a pilot with only 54 channels currently part of the program.

The full list of paid channels available here.

  
Klout Experts preview released

On Wednesday, Klout released a preview of its new Experts feature that is designed to help Klout users share their passions and areas of expertise with the world.  The service asks users to answer a number of questions based on the topics they are most interested in. These answers are then served up to Bing users looking for help on the subject.

Currently the feature is only available to a small number of chosen users but others can sign up to the waiting list.

  
YouTube Trends Map shows us who is watching what, where

YouTube’s Trends Map aims to give us a window into what the world is watching by breaking down the most popular videos by location. Currently only available in the United States, the service also allows you to breakdown video popularity by gender and age. Not only is this service great for content discovery, it is also useful to see how different content resonates across regions.

To see how it works, and what 65+ females in Montana are watching, click here.

  
Bang with friends goes mobile

The controversial Facebook dating app, Bang with Friends, launched its mobile app on iOS and Android this week. For those unfamiliar with it, the app allows you to choose which of your Facebook friends you would like to get to know more intimately. If the choice is mutual, then you both receive a notification. If it is not, the interaction remains anonymous. The move to mobile comes hot off the back of the news that raising $1m in funding and a rather problematic privacy issue.

The Verge takes an interesting stance on the premise behind the app.

  
LinkedIn Today launches Channels

LinkedIn has given its news aggregator, LinkedIn Today, a make over giving it a more modern feel and implementing a new feature called Channels. Areas of interest are grouped together under umbrella categories such as social media or technology and can be followed by users helping them to find more of the content they care about. Content from Channels will also make its way into users homepage feed.

  
Branded Vines are 4xs more likely to be shared

According to research performed by video technology company Unruly branded Vines are 4 times more likely to be shared than other branded videos ensuring that the number of brands integrating Vine into their social strategy is sure to grow. Despite only being 100 days old, the nascent app has gathered enormous popularity with the research suggesting there are 5 Vines shared every second. Over 1 month, Unruly analyzed over 10 million Vines and found that Vine activity significantly increased during the weekend.

  
Google Hangouts update On Air

Google Hangouts recently announced some updates to their On Air service. On Air is the part of Google Hangouts that allows users to broadcast their session to the masses. The updates are designed to make participating in live Hangouts as easy as possible. The biggest change is that users can now rewind the live hangouts as they happen so that you never miss a beat. Additional changes include the immediate publishing of the video after the live session and increased quality on mobile.

  
Foursquare announces location filters

Foursquare announced on Friday a new feature for its website. Location filters allow you to further drilldown on the places nearby by allowing you to select additional criteria. Current filters include choosing a price range, places with specials, open now and haven’t been. Currently, location filters are only available on the Foursquare website although there are plans to bring it to the company’s mobile app.

  
Facebook to acquire Waze

It appears that Facebook has made another $1 billion purchase. 

Reports suggest that talks between Facebook Waze, the social navigation application for mobile devices, started 6 months ago. Waze are not strangers to acquisition rumors having been linked to Apple in the past.

Its research and development facilities will remain in Israel but company’s Palo Alto office will be merged into Facebook’s complex in Menlo Park along with all of Waze’s business operations. Its CEO, Noam Bardin, is expected to continue running Waze from within Facebook.

Read more on Techcrunch

  
Onion’s Twitter account hacked

Last week The Onion’s Twitter account was hacked by The Syrian Electronic Army.  The satirical news site responded in typical fashion by posting a series of related jokes on their Twitter account.

Full story over at AllThingsD

  
Facebook Home reaches 1 million downloads

The Facebook Home app on Android reached 1 million downloads this past weekend just one month after it was launched. Normally 1 million downloads is a huge milestone however for Facebook it represents a tiny portion of its user base. That, coupled with a poor rating in Google Play, suggests the app has had a luke warm reaction at best.

Read more here

  
Impromptu Karaoke

Finally, The Tonight Show hit the jackpot when their regular feature ‘Pumpcast News’ turns into one of the greatest impromptu Karaoke sessions of all time. The video has understandably gone viral with over 5 million views in just a couple of days. See for yourself below.

When it comes to the industry, women are also riding high. Forbes’s recent list of Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers outlined some impressive industry leaders and spawned a raft of satellite blogs naming many lesser-known behind-the-scenes players as well. And now a book published in the UK this month suggest that ‘feminine’ skills are essential to the sort of flexible, collaborative, socially-oriented companies we need today, and that the old command-and-control ‘masculine’ values are dragging many legacy companies down.

The Athena Doctrine

“Feminine values are at the operating system of the 21st century” writes social strategist John Gerzema, co-author of The Athena Doctrine: How Women (And Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule The Future, current No.2 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. He believes the “positive energy and collaboration and discussion”between women transforms the workplace, and although he emphasises that both sets of gendered traits are essential for a balanced outlook, the modern demand for openness, trust and sociability makes traditionally female skills more valuable than ever before.

On a topic like this it is so easy to fall into sweeping generalisations and untested clichés. If I’m honest, as a (youngish) woman that trains predominantly male, director-level teams in the skills and tools of organisation-wide conversation and collaboration, I think my main advantage comes in being able to slip under the defences of change-resistant leaders and challenge them with a strength that might raise their hackles if it came from a (youngish) bloke. Frankly, I find the distribution of ‘feminine’ skills to be pretty gender-agnostic; I know just as many women who cling onto brand control with an iron fist as I do men who are outstanding community managers.

But one thing I do agree with: these skills are essential. And if your business has a tendency to dismisses them as ‘soft’, you’re most definitely heading for trouble, beacuse they’re the way to hard profit in today’s marketplace.

Bitcoin is a ‘a peer-to-peer digitised crypto-currency’ (take a breath). In laymen’s terms, that means a unique virtual currency which allows individuals to trade online without a central authority such as a national bank. Invented in 2008, Bitcoin became popular on the black-market website Silk Road but is now the world’s fastest growing currency: there are currently around 11m Bitcoins in circulation with around 25 new ones produced every 15 minutes.

Bitcoin’s increasing popularity has been attributed to failing trust in our banks and banking systems, although this system is inevitably built on trust and group co-operation too. Bitcoin investors have to date seen a huge increase on their investment; however, this April a Reddit user who calls himself Bitcoinbillionare gave away $13,000 worth of Bitcoin via Reddit which caused a massive crash in value. There are hacking problems and traditional investors remain sceptical, but as the Euro continues to flounder, Bitcoin’s value is still on the rise.

Morevoer, Bitcoin is bursting out of its online constraints. The area around Gräfestraße (or “Gräfekiez”) in Berlin-Kreuzberg is currently the neighbourhood with the world’s highest density of businesses accepting Bitcoins. It’s also the area which just happens to be home to 1000heads’ Berlin office. Walking round and talking to local businesses, it becomes clear just how strongly this currency has captured the local imagination.

Surely the first place in the city to accept Bitcoins was the bar of Berlin’s c-base – a well-known hackerspace. But the niche currency has found acceptance outside of the obvious communities. One early pioneer was burger restaurant and pub Room 77. It has become the go-to point for Berliner Bitcoin enthusiasts, who now organise monthly meetings at the pub.

Unlike many who accept the new currency, Nadim, owner of Long Player - a small record store in Gräfestraße – doesn’t constantly check the exchange rate. His store started accepting Bitcoins as regular payment earlier this year and has already sold many records using the currency. For Nadim, accepting Bitcoins is “a bit of fun. As long as there aren’t 10-15 customers coming in daily who would like to pay with Bitcoins, I don’t really worry about the value of the currency going up and down.” As more of his neighbours start accepting the currency, Nadim is starting to use his own Bitcoins to pay at their stores. He swaps experiences and ideas with other Bitcoin enthusiasts on bitcointalk.org, and he’ll be visiting London this year and bring along his Bitcoin wallet to go shopping in compatible stores.

Bitcoin-friendly shops in Gräfekiez have been busy over the last couple of months as journalists fly in from all over the world to find out more about Berlin’s “Bitcoinkiez”. Although this picturesque area ranks highly in the Berlin edition of the Lonely Planet, the excitement over Bitcoins has finally put it on the world map.

We’ll be keeping an eye on how it develops; in the meantime, do share your own stories and thoughts in the comments below or via our Twitter feed.

Thanks to Lucy Simon for additional research and insight.

Fullscreen Labs released Fullscreen BEAM this week. With Fullscreen BEAM, Glass users can now record a video and then use the BEAM app to upload to YouTube automatically.

  
Weebly launches site planner feature and comes to Android

Weebly is a service that lets anyone create a free website and claims over 15 million sites have been launched using its service to date.

This week, Weebly launched a redeveloped site builder service with a site planner feature to help users find the right creative direction for their project along with a HTML5 site creator (complete with themes and customisable elements) and fresh new mobile editor that helps users optimize their site for mobile platforms.

Additionally, Weebly’s new Android app brings everything that was already packed into to the Weebly desktop experience to Android, including the ability to create blog posts using drag and drop, add photos and text to a blog, and add social sharing features. The new app also supports push notifications, commenting and analytics.

And to herald the changes, Weebly baked this handy infographic.

  
Instagram launches Photos of You feature

This week, Instagram launched a photo tagging feature which the company says has been a year in development. The update lets users tag any person or brand in their own photos, which then appear in the Photos Of You section of their profile. Users get notified when they are tagged and have the option to detag themselves.

The Photos Of You section of each person’s profile will remain unpublished until May 16th, giving users time to select whether they want to allow open tagging by any Instagram user.

  
UNICEF’s Likes Don’t Save Lives campaign targets social media apathy

UNICEF Sweden is the first major international charity to make a stance against social media “slacktivism” in new campaign that emphasises why they need more than the commitment of a Facebook Like from the public.

UNICEF’s Sweden Director of Communications Petra Hallebrant commented: “We like likes, and social media could be a good first step to get involved, but it cannot stop there. Likes don’t save children’s lives. We need money to buy vaccines for instance.”

Read more on The Atlantic.

  
40% of top app developers now using Facebook’s install ads

On Facebook’s latest earnings call, Sheryl Sandberg said 3,800 developers have used Facebook’s install ads to drive over 25 million installs and that 40% of the top 100 iOS and Android app developers had bought install ads in the last week of Q1 alone.

The app ecosystem will continue to get larger and more competitive as more businesses go mobile. Facebook hopes this will make its app install ads increasingly more crucial for app creators wanting to cut through the clutter. Install ads are one of the ad streams that has helped Facebook boost its mobile ad revenue to $375 million (or 30% of its total ad-based revenue), up from 23% last quarter.

  
Square to offer check-ins and local recommendations

Square is currently building a service for consumers to make local recommendations where they shop. The recommendation engine will then suggest places to visit based on a customer’s previous purchase history.

Square’s Ajit Varma commented: “We can tell you that people who like X might also like Y — and it’s a true representation of what you’ve bought.” Commenting on other location based recommendations, he said, “I think we can do something a lot better.”

Lots of apps and web services make recommendations for places to eat, drink, and shop, but Square is betting its payment data will give it a competitive edge.

Read more on The Verge.

  
Facebook settles Timelines.com lawsuit

Facebook has reached a settlement with Timelines.com this week. Timelines.com originally sued Facebook in 2011 over the naming of its profile page. The two parties have now agreed to settle the case out of court, but financial information was not disclosed.

  
Twitter brings tailored trends to mobile

Twitter updated its app for iPhone and Android this week adding the option to view trends from around the world or focus on locally significant events.

Located in the Discover tab, the feature shows you what’s trending on Twitter as whole but now users can drill down to tailored trends within the app. They’re based on users’ current location as well as who they follow. The idea is that Twitter users will start to see trends specifically catered to their own personal interests or related to events happening around their current location such as music concerts or sporting events.

Users can download the updated version of Twitter for Android and iOS now.

  
Tumblr continues mobile development with updates to iPhone app

More mobile updates from Tumblr. This week, Tumblr has updated its iOS app to version 3.3.1, adding several new features. New sharing enhancements now allow users to share posts across other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr devs have also added in a save for later feature by integrating with Instapaper and Pocket. There are a few other nice features also packed in. On later versions of iPhone, GIFs now animate even while scrolling (works only on iPhone 4S or later and iPad 2 or later), and the Following list is now alphabetized with a new search feature added.

  
WAYN signs content deal to bring sports and entertainment content to the platform

WAYN (Where Are You Now?) is a 21 million people strong travel and lifestyle social network. This week it announced a talent deal with CONTENTed digital media to carry sports and entertainment programming to the network.

WAYN will generate content campaigns based around major events and their geographical destinations, presented by famous celebrities. It will kick off with the British Lions rugby tour in Australia next month, with Lewis Moody, the content and commentary led by former England captain.

  
Spotify acquires music discovery service Tunigo

Spotify has acquired Stockholm-based music discovery app, Tunigo. Tunigo is actualy built on Spotify’s platform and also has iOS and Android apps. Tunigo lets users browse Spotify playlists, discover new music and read music reviews.

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks,” said a Spotify spokesperson.

  
Dextr aims to bring back conversation to email

Dextr aims to solve the problem of email overload. It’s a new app that filters users’ inbox, only surfacing emails from your friends and family. Once users have downloaded the app and signed into their email account, it presents a list of their contacts. Once the user has selected closest friends and family, Dextr only shows them emails from this select group.

Dextr acts more like a messaging app and repackages the experience of email in a more modern ‘guise. The downsides are lack of threading and support for attachments at this stage. Still, an interesting twist on a familiar theme.

  
Steven Soderbergh launches tweet novella called Glue

Ex big-time director Steven Soderbergh released a new creative project this week. It’s a novella, told entirely in tweets. The novella is a crime story entitled Glue told in second person with occasional images accompanying the 140 character updates. Chapters range from just a couple tweets to over a dozen.

Follow the story unfold via Soderbergh’s @bitchuation handle.

1. Show what your products can do

Don’t turn your Instagram account into a catalogue of product photos we can already find on your website. Be inspiring. Show your products in action. Bring your brand identity to life. GoPro uses Instagram to demonstrate exactly how awesome its cameras are. Every single image on Red Bull’s stream shouts ‘energy!’ Sharpie’s mission to illustrate the everyday provides a visual exemplar of both the product and the brand spirit.

2. Go live and get behind the scenes

Photos of live events taken by a real person, on the field, using a smartphone, will make the content of your feed aspirational and addictive. On top of that, it’ll inject some humanity to your brand, bringing your customers closer to you. American Express is a great example. Disrupting the finance industry’s reputation as bureaucratic and rigid, AmEx’s cool backstage photos of sponsored events such as concerts, fashion shows and the US Open brings a fresh, authentic and exclusive shine to its images.

3. Engage like a human being

Be natural. When you post images, include simple questions and affirmations to stimulate conversation and sharing amongst your followers without being too intrusive. Also engage reactively, browsing hashtags or locations in order to grow your community. Let’s take the example of the teddy bear manufacturing company Paul used in his post on Twitter. As a teddy bear brand, you can simply search for #teddybear and find 623,092 teddy bear evangelists from all over the world (and this figure doesn’t include #teddybears & #teddybearswag). That’s a hell of a lot of relevant people to engage with. And perhaps you might want to turn their beautiful teddy photos into personalised printed cards using Copygram?

 4.Determine your frequency

Too few photos and you’ll sink in obscurity. Too many and you’ll annoy your followers; users mainly browse the app on their smartphones and too many photos from the same brand over a short period of time looks like spam. So you need to find the right balance and keep it consistent. Think about the best moments to share your photos, in order to maximize your reach and your engagement: how many days a week, how many times a day and at what time will you post? There’s no equivalent of EdgeRank on Instagram (yet..) so use your common sense and learn from when you get the most reactions to your content.

5. Challenge people

One of the best ways to engage and retain your followers is to challenge them. It’s very simple to arrange competitions or collaborations on Instagram. Find a theme, create a new hashtag so you can track the participants, and you’re ready to go. The reward mechanism can be as simple as judging the best photos, crediting the participants and post them on your feed; giving others status and traffic is an easy win. Instagram has been running the Weekend Hashtag Project for a while now – a series featuring designated themes & hashtags chosen by Instagram’s Community Team and then featured on their blog - and it works fantasticly well. Sure, Instagram has the advantage of 23 million followers, but the basic principles are the same, whatever your scope.