Linkblog 5-10-15

Back in the day, many of us would share slightly annotated lists of useful or thoughtful links we’d found. Then Del.icio.us came along and made a community out of that. Then Del.icio.us got swallowed up and disappeared. There were others for a while. Pinboard.in is fantastic, but deliberately not social like Delicious was. I’ve always hoped that Tumblr would evolve into something that could be a visual and persistent (and well structured) archive of finds, but that doesn’t look like it’s in the cards. The closest thing around today is Pinterest, but that’s really not about well structured archives of useful information – the ever growing Costanza wallet. So until I figure out how to get that in 2015, I’m going back to sharing lists of links with some annotation around them. If I can get this going, maybe I’ll also go back to my curated “heh” lists.

All I’ll say about the type and selection and curation sensibility here is: if you’re in to some of the same things I’m in to, professionally and personally, then you’ll find some value here from time to time.

  • Why Paying For Social Is Better Than Doing Social – A provocative take (and accompanying thought experiment) on what the social media tactical landscape looks like for brands in 2015, and why amassing organic followers by playing the day-to-day game should not be taken as the de facto baseline strategy. Here’s a healthy snippet to think about:

    For businesses that want social media clicks: At current rates, a brand that has fewer than 1 million followers on Facebook or Twitter is better off paying to promote its best content via sponsored updates than it is paying someone to post social content all day long. And it probably won’t pay off the cost of acquiring followers it already sunk, versus paying just for clicks. As organic reach continues to decline, it will soon be unprofitable for brands with more than a million followers to feed their followings.

    Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester, writes:

    “It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave … Yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts—thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources.”

  • Embracing Content, Intimacy and Collaboration – On the flipside, if feeding the daily beast and playing Facebook’s algorithm games isn’t the right approach, perhaps a better one could be thinking about the individuals and groups that matter to you and how you can earn their attention by doing things that are valuable to them.
  • Dog Trails Shoppers Around A Mall On Its Billboards, Hoping To Be Adopted – Just a major golf clap for this. It makes me happy to see simple, smart execution.
  • Machine Learning For Emoji Trends – The Instagram team devises some ways to look at the semantic patterns around Emoji.

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