Facebook's Auto-Play Video

Facebook's new auto-play video feature — in which videos in the stream begin playing as the user scrolls past — is a clear indication of how important social media is becoming for video discovery says Cooper Smith.

Facebook's new feature is not just for ads, it's also for user-generated and user-shared videos. With this change, Facebook eliminates yet another moment of friction between viewer, and video content.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we look at the power of social video and its growth trajectory, examine social video audiences and their demographics, analyze how marketers and advertisers are getting into the mix, compare the major social video platforms, and detail how social is influencing video as a content medium.

Here are some key developments in social video:

Social media-influenced video has eclipsed non-social video on the Web in terms of audience size: Online video audiences are expected to double in 2016, reaching 1.5 billion globally, according to Cisco. A majority now, and an increasingly significant portion of them in the future, will discover or watch video and TV content on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and new mobile-focused social video apps like Vine. This is a big deal for content creators, whether they are filmmakers, amateurs, or brands. The social web has created a cost-effective way to distribute video. But the nature of what we watch and how we engage with video is also changing based on our appetite for social video discovery.

Teens, a sought-after demographic, love video: 

While data on the demographics of social video are scarce, teens seem to be highly represented. 

Vine is believed to have a very teen-oriented user base. BuzzFeed chose a small sample of 152 videos on the app and discovered that 80% of them were posted by teens.

Social media is having a profound effect on the video medium: 

Video length is shrinking, in part to accommodate the preferences of social media audiences who like to snack on video. The intersection of mobile devices and social media will likely be crucial to video's future. Videos are increasingly discovered and shared on mobile devices, but through social media channels. Video content that is well-suited to small screens and social contexts will do well.

Advertisers want to be associated with social video:

85% of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in April 2013, and video advertising is now up to 13.2 billion monthly views in the U.S. alone. Data shows that consumers are more likely to enjoy a brand video and remember the brand involved if they come across it thanks to a social media recommendation. Also, socially-referred video starts are more likely to be completed than non-social video, according to Adobe.

And social is key to the all-valuable viral video: Brands are keen to spur video virality. The push for “earned media” is driving this. For a brand, a video that goes “viral,” and earns millions of views on YouTube means that a brand has earned millions of impressions that it didn't have to pay for. Brands are experimenting with cracking the code to videos that will tap the right emotions and trigger mass sharing.

Facebook Reading Your Private Messages

Will Oremus reports that Facebook has been hit with another privacy lawsuit.

The class-action suit takes aim at the social network’s alleged practice of scanning users’ private messages in order to profit from their data. For instance, the suit complains, if you send a private message to a Facebook friend that includes a link to another website—say, this article on Slate—Facebook takes notice. Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston explains:

The plaintiffs describe how Facebook effectively “clicks” on links within Facebook messages, an activity that it doesn’t explicitly disclose to users. The lawsuit claims Facebook crawls the linked page to see if it contains one of Facebook’s “Like” buttons. If so, Facebook registers that private-message link as a “Like” on the relevant site’s Facebook page—a strange example of turning a private communication public. The lawsuit also claims that Facebook “uses a combination of software and human screening to comb through private messages” to mine for user data for broader uses, including selling to third parties.


This allegation is not entirely new. Facebook seemed to confirm last year that it counts links shared in private messages as likes on public websites.


The problem, the suit argues, is that Facebook goes out of its way to advertise these messages to users as “private,” encouraging them to share things more freely than they would in a status update. “Instead,” the suit charges, “Facebook mines any and all transmissions across its network, including those it labels ‘private,’ in order to gain any and all morsels of information it can about its users.”


As Marketing Land’s Greg Sterling points out, Google has faced similar chargesover its longstanding practice of scanning Gmail users’ emails in order to show them targeted advertisements.


The Facebook suit claims that, in essence, Facebook is “intercepting” and “reading” your private messages, a violation of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Facebook is likely to argue that there’s a difference between having its computers scan your messages automatically for certain types of content and actually reading them. It will be interesting to see whether the court agrees—and, just as importantly, whether Facebook’s users agree.


My guess is that people are more comfortable having their messages scanned by computers than read by humans—but that, on the whole, they’d prefer not to have the contents of their personal communications analyzed by third parties at all. Then again, in an era when big tech companies and government spies alike are mining all the data they can get their hands on, we may not have much of a choice.

Google+ could do for live video what YouTube did for recorded video

Whether you’re a fan of the ever-expanding Google+ integration or not, as far asGoogle is concerned, there’s no turning back now. In an interview with Livemint, Google’s Steve Grove, director of partnerships for Google+, went into some detail about how the company plans to stretch Google+ even further in the future: “We’ve been consolidating the different services, so today Search, YouTube, the Google Play app store, all this plugs into Google+. And the reason for that is that Google+ is kind of like the next version of Google.”

Google is doing everything it can to attract more people to Google+, a service which has been ignored at the best of times, and reviled at the worst. By partnering with celebrities and major companies, integrating all of its products and requiring real names for commenting, Google has been taking the necessary steps to grow the social network, even if some of the methods have been unpopular.

According to Grove, mobile is the next target for Google+. “[Google+ is] going to create a network future with people uploading live videos from their phones, said Grove. “Google+ could do for live video, what YouTube did for recorded video.”

Google To Bring Android To The Auto Industry

Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Businessweek reports that early this morning, Google (GOOG) announced the Open Automotive Alliance. It’s a group of technology and automotive companies, including General Motors (GM),Honda Motor (HMC), Audi, Hyundai, and chip-maker Nvidia (NVDA), that want to customize Google’s popular mobile operating system for vehicles. The technology companies get a chance to place their wares into hundreds of millions of cars. Meanwhile, the automakers have an opportunity to modernize the software inside their vehicles and try to keep pace with the mobile devices that are starting to make high-profit infotainment systems obsolete.

The announcement comes the day before the official opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show held this week in Las Vegas, where the theme of car-as-gadget (also called “the connected car”) is expected to dominate. Volkswagen(VOW)‘s Audi unit and GM are among the slate of auto companies at CES, which is promoting the growth of car-related exhibits.

Car companies have traditionally rejected the latest and greatest gizmos, preferring stable, proven technology. It’s a stance that makes sense given the safety and reliability concerns they face. The rise and rapid evolution of smartphones and tablets, however, has put a great deal of pressure on these automotive traditions. The mapping services that come free with smartphones have become a compelling alternative to pricey built-in navigation systems. Similarly, a parent might prefer to hand a child a tablet or phone loaded with movies, games, and apps rather than rely on a single DVD playing on backseat screens.

So far, car-makers have largely responded with custom in-car software systems. Ford Motor (F) and Microsoft (MSFT) collaborated on MyFord Touch, which ties cars to mobile devices and allows for things like voice commands. Other car-makers use the QNX software acquired by BlackBerry (BBRY), homegrown software, or variants of the Linux operating system. While the strategy helps car companies create products that differ from their rivals’, it also requires software companies to write different applications for each car-maker—a costly and time-consuming process.

There have already been attempts to solve this problem through partnerships. In 2009, BMW, GM, Intel (INTC), and others, for example, announced the Genivi Alliance, a stab at collaborating around the Linux operating system and supporting software that has had modest results. (Genivi is sponsoring a panel at CES called, alarmingly, “Collaborate or Die.”)

Android, a variant of Linux, has an advantage over other software because of its dominance in the mobile device industry. The electronics and computing supply chain throughout Asia, Europe, and the U.S. tends to test and tune new components first for Android, providing intense interest and deep expertise around the software. For the automakers, this could translate into access to newer, better technology and lower costs for testing equipment. App makers are also used to creating software for Android. In addition, the likes of BMW, Kia, Audi, and Toyota Motor (TM) already use Google technology for search, maps, and other functions.

Tesla Motors (TSLA) is among the cutting-edge automakers that have popularized the notion of a computer on wheels as the next evolution of the car. The company’s all-electric Model S sedan ships with a 17-inch touch screen and ready access to things like streaming radio. With a few finger swipes, you can split the screen to have a massive top section for Google Maps and a lower section for music.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, new companies like CloudCar are working to bridge the technology and automotive realms. The company has built a small computing device that can be plugged into a car to give it a modern infotainment system. The idea is that automakers could then upgrade the small unit as needed to bring new features to their vehicles. In addition, software makers would have a common device to aim at with their applications. Ford has also set up a research center in Palo Alto and open-sourced some of the innards of its cars’ control software to let people create things like custom speedometers.

I Love Roller Coasters

If you are like me then you love a good roller coaster.
If however, you buy stock then Twitter (TWTR) might not be the one for you right now.

The stock has had an unreal ride in 2013 surging to an all time high of $74.73 gaining 3 to 5% daily it seemed. Now comes the coaster ride though after Morgan Stanley cut the stock to "downgrade" Twitter has been losing ground.

As I write this blog I am watching the stock on my second monitor and it has dropped 1%.
For the day Twitter is down over 4%. I would expect this drop to continue this week to a final bell on Friday of around $55-59.

But then again, if I could predict stock I would be writing this blog on the beaches of sunny Hawaii instead of in my house with outside temperatures at 10 and wind chills at -10 below.

Justice Department Spends Over $500,000 For LinkedIn Profile

Elizabeth Harrington reports that the Justice Department is spending more than $500,000 to “enhance” its company profile on LinkedIn and increase its “brand awareness.”

The contract, awarded on Christmas Eve, gives the government “unlimited access” to each of the networking site’s 250 million users through LinkedIn’s “Recruiter” service.

The DOJ’s Criminal Division, which enforces federal criminal laws, will use LinkedIn Recruiter to post job advertisements and seek out potential employees. Carahsoft Technology Corporation, a government IT company, will receive $544,338 to administer the service, according to the award.

The contract will allow the division to “reach a large-scale professional network of existing and potential Criminal Division audiences,” the agency said.

“This will include an enhanced company profile within a large-scale, professional networking platform, and targeted online job advertising to attract highly-qualified Criminal Division employees and intern applicants as well as use the already existing Criminal Division presence,” the document said.

Our Tax Dollars at work. :(

LinkedIn and Pinterest more popular than Twitter?

More U.S. adults use LinkedIn and Pinterest than Twitter, but that website attracts a greater proportion of blacks and young adults than do its social media peers, a Pew Research Center study released on Monday showed.

Photo pin-up site Pinterest spiked in popularity over the past year, according to the survey, a poll of 1,445 Internet users aged 18 and older. About 21 percent of respondents said they employ the service, up sharply from 15 percent in a similar survey conducted a year ago.

The figure was 22 percent for LinkedIn and 18 percent for Twitter, holding roughly steady from a year ago. About 29 percent of the blacks surveyed by Pew made use of Twitter, well above 16 percent for whites and Hispanics, the study showed.

Twitter ranks higher than Pinterest in terms of engagement, however: 46 percent of users surveyed go onto the online messaging service daily, versus 23 percent for Pinterest and just 13 percent for LinkedIn.

Industry experts have said Twitter is less intuitive than Facebook and thus can turn off users, curtailing its growth as a mainstream social media platform.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in October, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. In contrast, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account.

The Pew study polled users of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest - five of the largest U.S. social media services.

About 71 percent of respondents said they used Facebook, up from 67 percent a year earlier and granting it the highest popularity ranking. But some analysts speculate that younger users are gravitating away from Facebook, the world's largest social network, and toward newer services such as SnapChat or Instagram.

"Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms," the Pew study read.

"Pinterest holds particular appeal to female users (women are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users), and LinkedIn is especially popular among college graduates and Internet users in higher-income households."