Facebook: A visual history

Sit down. Strap on your virtual reality headset. Now you're navigating the crowd of your online friends, sparking face-to-face conversations in a virtual world peppered with branded "experiences." Gone are the days of clicking through images of your friends' far-flung vacations; now you walk the beaches of Fiji, sipping tropical drinks, watching and hearing the waves crash like you're there -- because you are.

At its start, it was a college-only collection of user profiles and groups based on shared interests.
In the not-too-distant future, our online interactions could feel a lot more real. That's why Facebook has invested $2 billion in Oculus VR, anyway. It's attempting to own the next big shift in computing and communication. Acquiring a startup with popularity on the upswing is a move that we've seen before from Mark Zuckerberg, but there's more to his company's sustained growth. Back in 2004, The Facebook looked more like a database than a key player in social networks. At its start, it was a college-only collection of user profiles and groups based on shared interests. Students on college campuses around the US were logging on and spilling all of their deets on a bare-bones interface. However, the rather sterile aesthetics wouldn't last long.
Before The Facebook arrived, Myspace was the largest social network on the web. It launched in 2003 and morphed into its then-popular social format while amassing millions of users through 2008. In fact, it has been reported that in 2005, Myspace considered buying Zuckerberg's site for $75 million before passing. Moving through a News Corp. acquisition and other key transitions, Myspace stuck to portal-like functionality that relied heavily on music and other entertainment content. In the meantime, emerging social media darlings like Facebook and Twitter sought to develop and roll out new features on the regular. The new kids on the block paid attention to how people used their sites and services, and made sure to keep ease of use at the forefront of any new functionality or design tweaks. It turned out to be the difference in continued growth.

Myspace implemented design updates along the way, but they were largely aesthetic and lacked the introduction of key features needed to foster a loyal long-term user base. The site relaunched last year after a "community-led" redesign process, but it still has a heavy focus on entertainment -- music in particular. There's an artist-curated My Radio feature and mobile apps that serve up easy access to content, however it appears to be too little too late. The choice to keep the profile-centric setup, and its inability to roll out new features quickly, doomed the site.
THE BEGINNING
In the early days, user profiles on Facebook were all about information. As you can see from the above image of a profile page in 2005, a person's favorites, relationship status, birthdate, interests and, most importantly, contact info were compiled into a single, easily accessible page. It was very much a digital Rolodex, and not too far removed from the likes of Friendster and Myspace. Each piece of data that you entered placed you in a group based on that criterion. Holmes High School Class of '02? Your classmates are there. Graduating from that college you're attending in '06? Your fellow graduates are a click away. Heck, you could even harness the power of cult classics like Donnie Darko when searching for fellow enthusiasts. Of course, the Wall was there for leaving notes, too.
GOING MOBILE
NEWS FEED
FACEBOOK ADS
THE CONSTANT REDESIGN
THE NEXT BIG THINGS
While declining traffic amongst teens may be a growing concern, Facebook's track record shows it's willing to rejigger its offerings to cater to what users want, even if that means spending some cash. The company nabbed up Instagram in April of 2012 for $1 billion, adding a loyal base of users concerned with sharing even the smallest details of everyday life. In response to Snapchat's rising popularity and a reported failure to buy that particular service, Instagram Direct added photo swapping between users outside of the regular snapshot timeline in late 2013.
Global efforts ramped up last month with the whopping $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition, locking down its several hundred million users and proven success in free messaging and upcoming voice features -- an area that's been of interest to the social network for quite some time. When expanding its reach and increasing shared content, Facebook's moves show that sometimes design isn't enough, and expanding by buying up the competition's unique feature set is another avenue for growth. It's even banking on virtual reality as the next big thing for not only gaming, but also for communication as a whole by snatching up Oculus.

With all of the successes, questionable moves and an increasingly mobile mindset, Facebook is still the largest social network on the web and tallies 1.23 billion monthly active users, far exceeding its closest rival, Twitter, which counts 241 million users per month. Investing heavily in design and letting form follow function, with a little shopping thrown in, is still paying huge dividends 10 years in

Vodafone and Disney to launch Vodafone games & apps

Vodafone India has teamed up with Disney India’s Interactive business to launch Vodafone Games & Apps. This announcement comes in close succession after the successful launch of Vodafone Music and Vodafone Sports by the company. Vodafone Games & Apps powered by Disney India’s Interactive business will offer customers premium games and apps on both feature and smart phones. Through this association, Disney India will service the complete content catalogue along with the portal for this offering. Via this portal, consumers will gain access to well-known apps and games like Where's My Water?, Where's My Mickey?, Where's My Perry?, Toy Story : Smash It!, Brave, Chennai Express, Disney Utility Apps including Mickey Planner, Donald Photo booth, Goofy Weather and many more


Speaking on the collaboration,Sameer Ganapathy, VP & Head, Interactive, Disney India, said, “Our endeavour has always been to provide engaging games to existing and new users in India through multiple digital access points and in turn cultivate an active gaming culture in the country. Our association with Vodafone is a step forward in our strategic relationship with them and creates an additional destination for exciting games and apps for their users.”

Vivek Mathur, Chief Commercial Officer, Vodafone India, said, “The launch of Vodafone Games & Apps will bring across best of premium content on an interactive platform. Our association with Disney India will help us build a successful gaming business. Following the launch of Vodafone Music and Vodafone Sports few months ago, it complements our strategy to expand our digital offering and tailor it to mobile internet users who are increasingly consuming content on the go.”

Customers can avail Vodafone Games & Apps by visiting live.vodafone.in/games or sending a simple text message <GAMES> to 111. The HTML 5 portal showcases the best content as per handset compatibility. Vodafone Games & Apps supports all common platforms - Android, Java, Symbian and Blackberry.

In addition to this, it also offers personalised features like rating and reviews, loyalty points along with smart recommendation. For every rupee spent, customers can earn a loyalty point which can be redeemed for purchasing more apps and games.

Cadbury & ABP come together for 3rd edition of Cadbury Mishti Shera Shrishti

Cadbury Dairy Milk and Ananda Bazar Patrika have come together for the third edition of the Cadbury Mishti Shera Shrishti initiative.

Activated in February-March 2014, the initiative is all about paying tribute to West Bengal’s favourite sport – football. Though both mishti and football are very dear to the Bengali, yet the two are not usually coupled together on many occasions (except for ‘mishti mukh’ to mark celebrations after a victory). Keeping the natural misfit in mind, Cadbury and ABP have rendered the creative expression of the campaign as ‘Anashrishti’, with the tagline: ‘Football and mishit eki anashrishti’.

This year, Cadbury Mishti is travelling to more places outside Kolkata and Durgapur, to areas such as Bardhaman, Asansol, Krishnanagar and Berhampore. Participating sweetshop outlets have increased from 55 last year to 100 this year, which include iconic sweet makers such as Balaram Mullick, Ganguram, Felu Modak, Nalin Chandra Das and Hindusthan Sweets, to name a few.

The campaign celebrates the best of world football, remembering the eight World Cup winning countries – Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Uruguay. Each outlet has created eight special ‘Cadbury Mishtis’ celebrating each team, named as Argentine Magic, Brazilian Samba, English Freekick, Spanish Tiki-Taka, etc. Regional stars such as Parno Mitra, Tanusree, Rupam Islam and others were roped in as ‘Captains’ of each team who campaigned for their team.

The campaign is promoted extensively through print, outdoor, locality posters, outdoor innovations, on-ground promotions in malls, etc., roadshows and digital media with star campaigners

Live web TV news conversation channel, IndiaPost Live, launched

IndiaPost Live, touted as the country’s first live web TV news conversation channel, has been launched. This media initiative offers interactive video journalism through news conversations on a variety of topics, with the focus and emphasis on comprehensive interactivity of the people. Based in Delhi, IndiaPost Live will go live at 11:30 hours on March 31, 2014.

In the first phase, IndiaPost Live will live stream four hours of original programming five days a week, with highlights of past and popular shows during the period live streaming is off.




“IndiaPost Live will be integrating live, one-on-one and group dialogues and debates from the community. The news conversations are built around segments spotlighting happenings and ideas that generate maximum attention and involvement, especially from and in social media,” said BC Jojo, Founder and CEO, IndiaPost Live.

IndiaPost Live brings together diverse and multidimensional editorial resources ranging from professional editors and reporters to bloggers and social communities to individuals expressing their opinions through live video as well as through other modes of contribution and interaction such as recorded video, audio, pictures and text. Each of the topics being presented through live streaming will be open to participants across the globe who can join the conversations via webcams, smart phones and tablets using Skype, Google+ Hangouts and other means.

Through the platform of IndiaPost Live people would get an opportunity in the process of stating news in real time.

McDonald's Has a Pretty Good Comeback to Taco Bell's Hijacking of Ronald

The Digital Audience Platforms master Winning Brands

Everyone is scrambling to keep up with the constant proliferation and evolution of the digital audience platforms. These are any number of technologies connected to large publisher or aggregated audience environments that enable automated, targeted, personalized experiences to individuals (known and anonymous), utilizing insights from first- and/or third-party data. Digital marketing leaders, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are just a few of the platforms whose technologies enable data-driven marketing and addressability -- at previously untouchable scale. And exchanges, such as DoubleClick and RightMedia, that allow publishers to put their audience impressions out for auction, and advertisers can bid for impressions.
Addressability at scale, as afforded by these digital audience platforms, is the foremost opportunity for competitive advantage in today's environment of the "always-on consumer." It represents the ability for brands to deliver targeted and personalized experiences at the individual level, but at massive scale. This is enabled through the application of data and analytics within the platform.
Today, through a series of innovations and acquisitions, the audience platforms are not only growing and evolving organically, but expanding in ways that will allow them to reach beyond their native publisher environments and into the broader web. This is what will drive the hyper scaling of addressability. Examples are Google's acquisition of DoubleClick; Facebook's acquisition of Atlas; and Twitter's strategic purchase of MoPub – and all their ensuing expanded capabilities.
An example of the speed and scope of these advancements is Facebook, whose progress in just two years has turned the practice of digital audience targeting on its ear. Initial Facebook advertising capabilities limited marketers to display advertising that was served based on Facebook profile data. Then Facebook Exchange broadened the opportunity, allowing marketers to bid in real time for retargeting ads, based on anonymous web browsing activity.
With the rapid uptick in mobile usage, Facebook opened up the NewsFeed for targeting, which creates a more seamless cross-platform experience. The advent of Custom Audiences changed everything by allowing marketers to use identified customer data to reach a specific set of users on Facebook, using email address, phone number, and Facebook ID to define audiences.
Within the past year, Facebook expanded its Custom Audiences solution to allow a combination of both Facebook and first-party data to be used to create models that identify look-alikes based off an initial custom audience segment for individual-level targeting. And more recently, the network announced it would begin working with third-party data partners to create even more customized targeting solutions for marketers, which will both enhance the consumer experience and create greater outcomes for brands.
Just this year, with the release of Website Custom Audience Retargeting, experiences can be linked across device, so that individuals based on desktop or mobile website activity can be matched or resumed on Facebook across the mobile, tablet, or website applications. With 1.2 billion users who consume, engage, and share, the opportunity for scale is immeasurable.

Twitter vs. Facebook: Who's the Copycat?

On Wednesday evening, Twitter announced two big feature changes to photos on its mobile app: The ability to tag up to 10 people within an embedded photo and include up to four photos in a single tweet.
This, of course, caused a bunch of knee-jerk reactions from people accusing Twitter of copying (or becoming more like) Facebook. Not so fast. When it comes to features, let's remember that Facebook has been aggressively riding Twitter's coattails. Let's take a walk down Facebook memory lane…

1. Follow
From its earliest days, Twitter was designed around non-mutual followership. In September 2011, Facebook launched the ability to "subscribe" to an individual's public posts. And in December 2012, it changed the name of this feature from "subscribe" to "follow" -- the exact term Twitter uses.
2. Hash tags
For years, hash-tags and Twitter were essentially synonymous. When you saw a hash-tag, you immediately thought of Twitter. But then Instagram adopted the familiar tagging lexicon, and last June, Facebook began supporting hash-tags.
3. Instagram video
In January 2013, Twitter's Vine app launched, bringing embedded short social video directly to the Twitter platform. Six months later, Facebook-owned Instagram began supporting video.
4. Verified accounts
In 2009, Twitter launched its Verified Accounts program so that the general public could ensure that celebrities and other public figures are who they say they are. In May 2013, Facebook did the same thing -- even making its icon (a small checkmark in a blue circle) eerily similar to Twitter's.
5. Embedded posts
In May 2010, Twitter launched the ability to embed tweets into third-party web properties. Eight months ago, Facebook launched "embedded posts."
6. contests/promotions
As a marketer, I can say it's much easier to run a contest on Twitter than it is on Facebook. Historically, the only way to execute promotions on Facebook was on a separate tab, and at times a lot of red tape. Last September, Facebook loosened the reigns on promotions by allowing the use of its main platform functionality for contests.
7. Trending topics
One of the most powerful features on Twitter is the ability to see "Trending Topics" -- which have been credited for breaking news stories. In January, Facebook launched its own version of "Trending Topics."
8. Social TV
While Twitter gets most of the credit and attention when it comes to the mashup of social media and live television, Facebook's been trying to increase its piece of the social TV pie. Last September, it released tools to help TV networks integrate Facebook conversations into their live broadcasts. Have you watched American Idol recently?
In the end, who cares?
Whether you feel Twitter's copying Facebook or the other way around, the fact is that Twitter's latest update is a big deal for brands. Multiple photo embeds give brands a more flexible canvas on which to share impact "now moments" with their Twitter communities.
Brands can also give their advocates a powerful form of social currency. Tagging a brand's community members in (relevant) photos is yet another way to recognize, connect and share. Isn't this the essence of what social media is all about? In a time when it feels like social is getting sucked out of "social media," this is a step in the right direction.

Brands Experiment With Twitter's New Photo Collages

Twitter announced earlier this week that it would start letting users share up to four photos within a single tweet, as well as tag up to 10 other users in a photo in a Facebook-like way.

Some early-adopting brands are already experimenting with the ability to share more photos -- which appear in a collage format underneath the text of a tweet -- and effectively pack their tweets with more content.

The new features are a continuation of Twitter's efforts to give tweets more visual impact and another step away from the spareness and simplicity the service was known for back when a post could include only 140 characters and nothing else.

In October, Twitter introduced "media-forward timelines," a design change that caused photos to automatically display in users' streams. Previously, a user needed to click on a link to see a photo.

The change let users and brands take up more space in people's tweet streams. Now photo collages have the potential to let them do more storytelling with the space they have and go well beyond the former 140-character boundary.

Mankind Pharma: Do products revolving around sex help the Rs 3000 cr company?

 IT sounds like a newspaper "sexpert". "Use Adiction deodorant before sex," he recommends, "and if you have erectile dysfunction, then pop a Manforce Tablet. If at all you suffer from premature ejaculation, then Manforce Gel is for you." The prescription continues: "If you don't want babies, use Manforce Condoms. After unprotected sex, you can opt for Unwanted 72. And if you want to know whether your partner has conceived, Preganews is there." 

For many Indians, sex talk is taboo, only spoken of in permutations and combinations of macho swagger, secretive leering and copious nervous giggling. But this passionate act is translating into pleasure of an entirely different sort for this Delhi-based pharma company.

"Sex sells," says Juneja. He'd know since his Rs 3,000-crore company has built a marketing model around sex with its blockbuster OTC (Over The Counter) products, available without prescription from a chemist. These incl .. 

"It has never been an OTC story, it's a pharma story," he says. But one with a fairytale twist. Mankind started in 1995 and closed its first financial year with a modest Rs 3.8 crore. It took a decade to clock Rs 350 crore. But in just six years the company posted a turnover of Rs 2,000 crore in 2011-12. And now it is an over Rs 3,000-crore firm that aims to cross the Rs 5,000-crore mark by 2017!

The company covers around 3 lakh doctors across the country. While it had just one manufacturing plant in 1995, the number has shot up to 20 where over 85% of its products are manufactured.

Obviously, such growth is driven by more than just OTC. The company has been sitting firmly on the No 1 slot in terms of prescriptions per doctor per month over the last decade. Analysts say it is marketing that's taken the company far. This began with low-cost anti-infectives and now continues with with a sharp focus on the chronic disease segment and OTC products.

Rebooting Bata: Will its new campaign help the footwear brand get there?

 
An impressive pedigree and legacy is no longer enough for Bata, fighting for a place at the cool table. Will its new campaign help the footwear brand get there? 

It's not an Indian brand but it has been here for close to a century now — 83 years to be precise. It sells over 45 million pairs of footwear annually, serving over 120,000 customers almost every day through 1,100 stores across 500 cities. 

Czech footwear brand Bata has yet another distinction: it's not been on television for over a decade. 
Finally, the heritage brand is rising from its slumber rolling out its first commercial in years on March 14. So, why the return to TV? "Somewhere along its journey," explains Sonal Dabral, chairman and chief creative officer of DDB Mudra Group, "the brand needs to reach out to consumers, highlight its offerings and build a fresh connection with the youth." The brief is to contemporise the brand, showcase its aspirational and trendy products and reach the evolving consumer; all centred around it ..