Mark Zuckerberg posted under an hour ago that Facebook is acquiring Instagram, the incredibly popular photo sharing app. His statement is copied below:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Here are my top predictions:

1. Facebook will increasingly push its mobile strategy, with a focus on making photo sharing even simpler. Most newsfeed items published are graphical in nature, so we can expect things like one click instant photo uploads from your cell phone.
2. With Instagram’s effect filters integrated into Facebook photos, we can expect a much higher increase of the (often nauseating) effects added to profile pictures and other photos. Hopefully this won’t be driven into the ground as everyone begins pretending to be a vintage 70′s photographer.
3. There may be a move to see popular content in my area that may be outside of my network – leading to a way to discover events around me, and even meet new people in my area based on shared interest through photos and videos
4. An interesting point to note is that Mark mentioned that Facebook will be developing Instagram independently. To date, they have absorbed all of their acquisitions into their Facebook products, or simply killed them off in order to hire the staff. With Facebook approaching maturity, this is a wise move on their part as it diversifies their product line without causing a conflict of interest to themselves.

The South African Brandometer is an online ranking of the most influential brands on social media, in South Africa. Since Fuseware released it this week, it has had tremendous media exposure – some good, some bad. I would like to use this post to clarify many of the questions people are asking.

1. “Why is Julius Malema even listed, nobody likes him anyway”?

The Brandometer rankings are not determined by a panel of judges, by voters, or by the opinions of Fuseware or its partners. It is a completely unbiased index of online brands, based on their actual influence on social media. This influence is measured using many different factors, including reach and number of followers, engagement with social network of fans and followers, and how influential the brands’ content is within their network. Each brand is measured exactly the same way, so if Malema happens to come in number 2 in the Politics section, that is because he has been ranked as that influential in the social media space.

2. What do you mean by “social influence”?

Social influence isn’t exactly like real influence, although the two have a strong correlation. For example, the South African president account is less influential than the Malema account on Twitter, according to its social scorecard. This, of course, does not mean the same for actual real-world influence. What social influence means is that if that person posts a tweet on their social account, more people will read, respond to and share that content than less influential brands. This influence isn’t a popularity indicator, nor is it a sentiment indicator – it is merely a brand scorecard on how much weight they have in their social network to spread a message.

3. Why release it for free, or at all for that matter?

There are many free ranking tools out there, but none are backed up by an official social media analytics company. Fuseware has been in the analytics game for over two years – not only do we understand social media metrics and how best to combine them into rankings, but the rankings have a greater level of trust than a random website that pops up a score for you. The Brandometer is and always will be free to use – I feel it is a valuable service that the public can use to discover amazing brands, and that agencies can use to gauge relative influence levels of the brands they work with to assist their campaigns.

4. I don’t like the idea of benchmarking brands.

Every established form of media where brands play in has some form of regulation and ranking – from radio to TV, and more recently the digital space. Rankings are a fact of life and help us disseminate the most valuable brands and content in an easy to read format. When you use Google every day, Google ranks all websites by an “influence” metric that they have crafted together to best serve their customer base. Social media has been very fragmented in this context, and I hope to bring a level of knowledge and categorization in this space through the Brandometer.

5. How can a brand increase its influence ranking in social media?

We currently rank 4 of the largest social networks in the country – MXit, Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. Each network has its own metrics by which we measure influence, but broadly speaking the following are the major variables taken into account:

1. Size of your network– this is the number of fans, followers or connections you have. The bigger, the better.
2. Engagement – this is how often you connect with your network, and how they connect back with you.
3. Influence of your network – if you are connected to other influencers, you become more influential yourself
4. Sharing potential – how likely is it that your network will share the content you produce, through retweets, Facebook likes, social shares and the like.

If you have any questions regarding the Brandometer, please shoot me an email at mike [at] fuseware [dot] net.

My company uses Mongo DB for our backend infrastructure – it works like a charm. Mongo DB has become the de facto database of choice for web-based companies and startups.

They have a page listing all of the web companies using their database on production deployments. This, of course, screams business ideas at you – a total of 362 interesting, innovative companies are listed. If you’re an entrepreneur in the digital space, a lot of these companies will fascinate you and perhaps even spark that creative idea for your next startup!

Enjoy the Mongo DB company list.

Being self aware is a choice we all can make, and with enough concentrated mindfulness becomes effortless, making life more vibrant, colourful and crisp. Once achieved, even eating becomes an overwhelming burst of flavours instead of a mindless robotic movement to satiate a primal need.

Do yourself a favour, right now. Look away from the screen, and focus on every detail of your breath for the next five minutes. Its only 5 minutes of your day, and you probably won’t do it later if you try work it into your schedule. Just stop everything and breath; feel your self awareness come to life.

Viva la information! Here is a collection of completely free online courses and lectures, from the world’s greatest educational institutions.

MIT Open Courseware - Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.

Khan Acadmey - a library of over 2,700 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 306 practice exercises,

UPenn Online Books – Listing over 1 million free education related books, by University of Pennsylvania

Tufts OpenCourseWare - Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online

University of Berkeley’s online webcasts, ready to be downloaded to your iPod or PC.

Harvard’s collection of free courses. Although not very extensive, it is from one of the world’s top universities.

Stanford on iTunes U provides access to a wide range of Stanford-related digital audio content via the iTunes Store.

Stanford Computer Science Library - This online library collects education CS material from Stanford courses and distributes them for free.

Princeton’s collection of archived media lectures

Carnegie Melon - Carnegie Mellon University’s Online Learning Initiative (OLI) is an open educational resources (OER) project. They provide web-based courses based on a detailed, science-based understanding of how students learn.

Utah state Open Courseware – following in MIT’s path, they have a large colleciton of free online courses available for download.

JHBSPH – Medically related, The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW) project provides access to content of the School’s most popular courses

The Open University - Try over 600 free online courses from The Open University.

Social media ROI has been the elephant in the room for many years now, as marketers and analysts struggle to address it and calculate it, even though we know how important it is to drive corporate social media investment forward.

Fuseware has developed some great algorithms for detecting how many eyeballs have seen social media conversations related to a brand, topic or event. For example, the recent Deloitte fun run in Pretoria garnered a social media response of close to 20,000 views from the mentions of only 50 people. In social media, even a few influential people can have a tremendous market impact when they speak about the same topic.

The question now is, how does the number of views translate into hard and fast ROI that a marketing director can present to justify the social media investment. I have been asked this question several times by my clients, and would like to give an official response.

The advertising industry has a metric called the “advertising equivalent value”, which calculates an approximate ROI based on the number of views and demographics of a piece of content. Many companies take the easy route and use this metric in social media, but I don’t think it quite fits due to the vast differences in conversations and demographics. Firstly, I don’t think social media ROI can easily be automatically calculated. The value from 20000 people talking about a fun run is different to the value of 20000 people talking about a 20% discount sale by a large retailer. The ROI needs to be determined strictly from the market’s conversion potential, that is the rate at which people who view the content end up converting to what the company may be offering, and the downstream revenue that they eventually may give to the company. For example, 20000 people who convert at 1% for a R100 offer are more valuable than 20000 people who convert at 1% for a R10 offer – so even if the social media impact is the same, the ROI would be different.

The first metric to find is the probability that a person on social media will convert, if they have been exposed to your social media content. This then boils down to a problem of statistics, for which we can use Bayes Theorem to solve.

Let’s define A as a conversion. Essentially, this is the desired action you want your customer to take.
Let’s define B as a social media user, who has been exposed to your brand related content.

P(A|B) is the probability of converting a customer, if they have seen your social media content. The variables we need to solve are as follows:

P(B|A), which is the probability of a social media user having seen your social media content, once they have converted. This can be found by surveying which of your converted customers have done so because of your specific social media efforts. If you have an online store, you can build the metric into your e-commerce system by tracking users through cookies as they click through your social media links onto your site.
P(A), which is the probability of a conversion. This is taken from the company’s existing conversion rate data that exists for its past advertising campaigns, and is independent of social media related conversions. This can also be taken from existing advertising initiatives, such as PPC campaigns.
P(B), which is the probability of a social media user seeing your content on social media, whether or not they have been converted by your current offer. This is the tricky part, one which a company like Fuseware can help you solve. It requires calculating how many users are in the brand’s market in social media, and how many have been exposed to specific brand related content.

An important note to make is that the more accurate you make P(B), the more accurate the final ROI calculation will be. For example, if you are monitoring  your entire brand’s mentions as social media content, you will find that there are a combination of positive and negative mentions, as well as many mentions unrelated to your conversion – many of this will be irrelevant to the ROI calculation of your campaign. This is why one needs to be able to track a campaign using a specific hashtag on Twitter, so the exact exposure of that hashtag can be determined, and the content involved with the hashtag is guaranteed to be campaign-related.

With a probability value calculated, and the number of social media content views determined via analytics, it is now the company’s task to put a value on a single conversion. A conversion could be a product sale, in which the value of a conversion is the revenue from that product, or it could be more intangible, such as getting the person to sign up for a mailing list, which may have a downstream value of R100 per year, on average. In any case, this will need to be defined by the company and its unique conversion targets, for which they should already have the value.

The final ROI then becomes fairly trivial:

The investment gain is calculated from P(A|B), multiplied by the number of views on social media for the specific campaign, multiplied by the value of each conversion. The cost of the investment is calculated from the expenditure on social media by the company, including time billed, agency rates and the cost of producing social media related content such as viral images and media.

Some points to note

1. Engagement has an indirect effect on ROI and is very important, but the social media exposure metric indirectly absorbs it. More engagement also drives intangible brand loyalty, which has not been considered in our equation.
2. The quality of content related to calculating P(B) is critical to the calculation. 5000 views of “i love vodacom” will have a vastly different response to 5000 views of “i hate vodacom”, even if both have the same exposure. However, due to the calculation of P(B|A), there is a direct relationship between exposure to this content and converting a customer.
3. In the end, viral laser-focused brand campaign content is what drives the ROI equation.
4. This equation calculates ROI from a purely monetary perspective. Intangible things like reputation, PR value, trust building, and market differentiation are not taken into account, which of course should be.

I would love to hear your opinion of this in the comments below. If you would like more information or elaboration, please contact me at mike [at] fuseware [dot] net.

I was feeling nostalgic and going through some of my older posts on this blog. I made a post over two years ago about giving your all in business and life, and realized yet again how important the advice Russel gave is.

I have been running Fuseware for over two years now, and I would be lying if I said it was an easy journey. I have given my mind, heart and soul to it because it perfectly connects my two passions of technology and psychology. I have done the 16 hour a day, 7 day a week thing. I have lost friends and girlfriends because of my chosen lifestyle. I even landed up in hospital just over a year ago after being overworked and overstressed. And I came quite close to giving up on several occasions.

But I stuck to my guns. There is no better feeling than watching something you have worked on for so long finally start to ripen. I still work very hard, but due to having great partnerships and working with smart contractors I have balanced out to roughly 10 hours a day, and even take most weekends off. The network I’ve built, the high level discussions I have with influential people, the thought of doing something that might change the world in a small way – it all makes the long journey worth it. If you don’t give up and keep riding the crests and absorbing the troughs, your dreams finally start coming true.

The point of this blog post is to note the importance of never giving up. This is a key point that many successful entrepreneurs talk about, and I have realized it from direct experience. Running your own business takes everything out of you, so if you make the decision to go into it make sure you are prepared to go all the way.

If you have a dream,  the market conditions are right, and are prepared to absolutely never give up and never stop learning, I can guarantee that you will find success. If you have recently started a business and want some words of advice, or would like to connect with me and just get to know my story better, I will be glad to assist where I can.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

If you look at a brilliant musician play, he does not have to consciously think about where his fingers need to go to play the next note. It just happens seamlessly and subconsciously, with them being completely immersed and connected to the present moment.

A similar thing can be said about letting emotions take hold of you – be it love, anger, fear or excitement. These also have ways of taking away your conscious thinking and completely immersing you in the moment. Similar to an animal that can be angry, excited or scared, we can let these emotions completely envelop us (sometimes negatively).

One of the gifts of being human is that, using our conscious awareness, we can choose which states we can put our conscious mind in, so that the subconscious mind obediently follows. In this way we can reach a positive state of flow where we maximize our outputs without the need for constantly consciously double checking ourselves. Malcolm Gladwell mentions this state in his book “Blink”, where he describes how we can make fast and accurate decisions without having to second guess ourselves and over-analyze the situation.

What is the ideal human state for maximum productivity? It is this state of flow – of being fully in the moment with an energized focus. An experience of being in flow consists of the following ten factors:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
• Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
• A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it)
• Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

My Tips for Getting into Flow

1. Minimize or eliminate any and all distractions that would take your focus away from your task. Social media breaks, checking websites and news all need to go. I found that music helps put me into flow, as long as it doesn’t have distracting lyrics that take my focus away.
2. Have clear goals for what you are doing. This adds conscious direction and structure to your task which is fed back into your subconscious processes.
3. A confident understanding of the task at hand and your abilities to carry it out. Ideally the task needs to have a high level of challenge that matches an equally high level of skill that you possess to carry it out.
4. Clear and immediate feedback, so that any errors that you make are corrected immediately and without a break in state.
5. Elimination of ego and self centredness. Judging yourself, others or your work just gets in the way of what you need to be doing.
6. Using NLP techniques once the state has been reached. I personally use a concept called anchoring, where I attach my experience to a physical sensation. For example, when I’m in flow I hold my hands together touching the  front of my face. This anchors the physical sensation to my experience. When I want to get in flow faster in the future, I simply act out the anchor again.

If you think someone you know could find this blog post useful, please share it!

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, C-11, info secrecy bill, Twitter’s censorship policy – the governments and powers of the world have jointly decided that the golden age of free and fair information needs to come to an end.

I don’t want to tell my grandson one day the story of an open Internet that contained all of mankind’s human knowledge, instantly accessible – later locked down and sanitized to the tune of 1984, or probably more accurately a ‘Brave New World’. I don’t have much power, but together people have always been superior once mobilized with a common cause. We know our cause – free, fair, easily accessible information.

I don’t have a solution, and am not advocating revolution – all I am saying is please be aware of what is happening around you and spread the word. I really fear we are approaching a tipping point that may either enslave us Huxley style, or give us a sort of information enlightenment with which to better understand the human condition – perhaps leading to greater peace and compassion for our fellow man.

With the unprecedented boom of social media, many brands are still trying to figure out the space. Ad agencies have jumped on board this band wagon and tacked on social media to their offerings, including social ad campaigns, account management and online reputation management.

We can probably all agree that social media brand presences can be used to connect with their audiences, share relevant content and keep their consumers in the loop with what’s happening. However, brands have not yet come to realize that they are sitting on a goldmine of data ready to be mined.

I’m not talking about social media monitoring, which is also critical to keeping up to date with a brand’s health in realtime. I’m talking about a relatively new market opening up – social media analytics. Its about extracting social media consumer insights from the wealth of online conversations, profiles and connections. These insights can be aligned with the brand’s marketing and social media strategies in order to maximize the effectiveness of things like advertising spend, audience identification, discovering unique trends and maximizing return on engagement of brand related content.

We all know that advertising is not dead – advertising budgets are shifting to the digital and online ad spend is set to surpass traditional. Both Facebook and Google earn an overwhelming majority of their revenue from advertising. Social media analytics can be used as a tool to increase the ROI of ad spend by aligning content, copy and distribution of ads according to the insights given from social media audiences.

When a brand starts using social media as a research tool a lot of interesting insights become available.

Brand Auditing

One can evaluate brand related conversations on social media channels to better understand how the brand is being discussed in those channels, the differences across the channels and whether there are notable circles of influence in specific channels that can be engaged with.

Audience Identification

More than just demographic profiling, one can identify existing consumer segments or discover new segments within social channels that have not been optimally engaged with. Understanding a brand’s audiences’ emotional affinities and interests paves the way to laser focused social media and advertising campaigns that target the individuals that would respond most to that message.

Brand Perceptions

One can discover what resonates with the brand’s audience based on the way the audience interacts with and mentions the brand on social media channels.  With a large enough profiling of conversations, it is possible to determine market perception directly from the word of mouth of the brand’s online followers. Additionally, imagine the possibilities of connecting these perceptions with niche interests the segment may have, such as certain celebrities, music, fashion, sports or food.

Trend Discovery

Finding trending topics that your customer base is talking about is critical to understanding the kind of content they want to engage with. Social media is very much a real-time medium, and if a brand can stay on top of the trends as they occur it becomes very easy to resonate with their audience.  You can also determine unique insights such as the reach and engagement of each piece of content to determine the media equivalent value (MEV).