For those concerned about privacy, Find My Face doesn’t automatically allow you to be tagged if you forget to toggle some settings (unlike Facebook). It defaults to keeping you as safe and protected as possible.

Product counsel at Google, Benjamin Petrosky, laid out some additional details about the product at a FTC forum for facial-recognition technology.

“When a Google+ user uploads a photo, for example, they will receive a prompt to opt-in to Find My Face, turn the feature on (see image below), or say no”, Petrosky said. “If you upload dozens of photos from a party the night before, the facial-recognition technology will look through those photos and suggest people to tag; anyone who is tagged will receive an email notification, with the option to untag themselves.”

There were reports earlier this year that Google was developing a facial-recognition app. Google denied this however. Later, Google purchased facial-recognition company called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (aka: PittPatt).

Our objective is to dramatically increase the quality of information in the world, via the feedback loop of crowd-sourced peer review. Think: Inverting Wikipedia and taking it out to the rest of the Internet (but with a better reputation model.)

We think this is humanity’s biggest challenge and that solving it is within our collective grasp.

The model of Hypothes.is is further explained in Dan’s intro video.

Note how Hypothes.is differentiates themselves from WikiPedia which Dan refers to as a, “Top-down editorial Bureaucracy”. Separating themselves from WikiPedia will naturally be a challenge for them – even if what they are doing is fundamentally different. Perception is still reality.

Nevertheless, Dan is an experienced Silicon Valley elite. He booked the first travel reservation in his living room – the software he built would eventually become a part of GetThere – a company that was purchased by Sabre Corporation in August of 2000, for 757 MM.  Why do I know all this you ask? Well, that’s where ‘yours truly’ had his start. In fact, GetThere is the reason that I was able to start my own business.  Do I have faith in Dan the man? Absolutely, as he – by way of fate and circumstance – allowed me to start Jivaldi.

So what does a startup do when it needs money and doesn’t want to be tied into Venture Capital right away? Well, it uses a service like Kickstarter. Kickstarter describes itself as the, “World’s largest funding platform for creative projects”.

Kickstarter allows companies to move away from investment or lending – allowing project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Sounds nice eh? I guess it then just boils down to having a good idea – one that will get family, friends and beyond to make a donation.

How can anyone argue Free money?

Good luck Dan & Team!

And on the sharing site we have AddThis – which has an obscene amount of options for people to share (way too much in our opinion).

All of these tools are great, but what happens when we become sharing obsessed? See below.

The irony here is that Mashable is probably one of the most shared and followed sites in the digital industry. But this just goes to show that we can all get a little too obsessed in our quest to become a sought-after source of information.

Mashable, you are in no danger of losing readership, just simplify and make it a little easier for your readers.

1. Cost = Advertising spend + Volume of work

You and your business partners have probably put in an enormous amount of time and effort into building your website or app. And utilizing good old-fashioned hard work, you may have accomplished a lot with minimal expenses.

So the first thing to understand here is that even though we’d all like to see the project go viral, the reality of the situation is that it will take a while to build up a user base. So if you are looking to build this user base with online marketing there will be costs associated with this.

And while the holy grail of marketing is when users start to share your application or service with their friends – reaching a mystical critical mass where ‘the people’ end up marketing the app for you – the fact of the matter is that you’ll need to work hard (and spend money) to get the first generation of users in your door.

So what does that cost?

Let’s just break it down simply. Here is a list of typical services that digital marketing agencies charge for:

1. Consulting
2. Creative Deliverables
3. Development Deliverables
4. Advertising Fees
5. Retainer

So keep in mind that there are different ways that an agency will get paid so it’s important to choose the right team to ensure that your spend creates a strong ROI. No one wants to spend money for the sake of spending; however, when you select the right agency (one that is well aligned with your goals) you will benefit greatly in the long run. Aside from their hourly or project rates, if there is advertising involved the agency will typically charge either a percentage of your advertising spend (plus any consulting or creative services they provide) or offer a monthly retainer.

It will help both parties if clear objectives are laid out and there is a solid understanding of what needs to be done, what will be charged, and the overall goals of the project. Maintaining focus on key objectives and measuring this performance will allow both sides to determine how the campaign is performing and make ongoing adjustments to the campaign.

2. Offering a Piece of Your Business

Some start-up clients want to offer a ‘piece of the pie’ – or the agency’s work in exchange for profit share. The agency may consider this if they think you are the next Facebook, but in most cases the firm you are speaking with have already been down this road before and will not be open to this scenario. Don’t be discouraged however when they look at your product objectively. They may not be jumping up and down screaming when you ‘reveal’ your product to them but if you have a good product and develop a solid relationship with the agency they will want to perform for you and make you come back for more.

Though you’ve poured your heart and soul into this project, it will come down to business when working with the advertising firm. They naturally will need to turn a profit and the ultimate goal is a win-win situation for both client and agency. There is another payment scenario referred to as, ‘Pay per Performance’, but that is a topic that goes beyond this blog post.

3. Who is the Expert Here?

Most companies will want to know whether the agency has ‘worked within their industry before?’ – and are concerned with how much experience the agency within this industry. Fair enough, but the agency will tend to view this from a different angle. Conversely, they agency will want to know if the company has worked with a marketing firm before and whether they have experience in this regard. This is equally as important to the agency.

The client knows that if the agency is familiar with their industry they won’t have to explain how things work and that this inside knowledge will help them be more effective when reaching out to prospective customers. This is a logical mindset, no doubt. But digital agencies feel that whether they are promoting a person, product, service or idea, the fundamentals of marketing remain the same. So to the agency, the idea and practices involved when promoting a financial product is very similar to, say a clothing line. The important part is knowing who to reach out to (the customer) and getting them to either purchase a product or fill out an interest form. Both sides are correct.

Education goes both ways.

The client needs to bring their expertise to the table as it pertains to their industry while the agency brings their specific knowledge and experience. When these two experiences are efficiently married, good things happen. It is important that both sides defer to the other when it comes to their specific body of knowledge.

4. “Willing to spend, but after we see results!”

Oftentimes, the client is seeking an agency after they’ve already built their site or application. After much work, they realize that they need traffic and users. Yet, the client is very hesitant to spend advertising dollars when they don’t know what the return will be. This mindset is perfectly understandable, but it won’t necessarily fly within the advertising world.

The first thing to understand here is that the process of driving traffic, leads and conversions is not a linear process. Think of an Internet advertising and marketing strategy as a fluid and dynamic game that changes constantly. The ability to make adjustments during the campaign is crucial. As the agency moves forward, the results will tend to get better over time, building and creating success. The company hiring the agency needs to understand that traction could take a few months. For example, Facebook advertising could be very effective, or not. PPC could yield positive results while display advertising falls flat (or vise versa).

It is during this period of time where the company (and agency) becomes more familiar with the target demographic, the competition, what it will cost to get the traffic and most importantly, how much it will take to convert the traffic. This takes time to understand and is typically why agencies will offer a test campaign.

The beauty of online advertising is that in many cases you can turn it on or off at any time. This is both a blessing and a curse. Turn it off too soon and you won’t have the data needed to make adjustments, learn patterns or tweak the campaign. So if the company is spending $xxxxx dollars the first month and bows out because of a mediocre performance in the first month, they could be missing out considerably on a natural rise in performance from fine-tuning that the agency can provide.

Understanding consumer behavior within a given market takes time and this is what we refer to as an absorption process for both the client and agency. Necessary adjustments, testing (a/b) and ability to course-correct throughout a campaign is crucial to performance. This means, that the client will need to be patient and watch closely for improving results even though they may not see the ROI they are looking for the first month. This is why test campaigns are set up to monitor performance so the client doesn’t feel locked in to a long term contract.

If the company is expecting to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product each month, a clear understanding and realistic ROI will need to be established. In other words, if you are trying to sell $30k of product each month, you may want to reconsider that budget of $1000/month you’ve been thinking about.

5. Preparation and natural project evolution

The project requirements, direction and scope will change over time. You can count on that. With this comes fluctuation in what you will need to spend to get the product out the door and market it. It can be difficult for an agency to forecast expenses until they have a clear understanding of what the finished product will be, especially if we are involved in the creative or development process.

Agencies will often field questions like, “We have a website and an iPad app that we want to build. How much will this cost?”. The agency then asks the client for a project overview document or detailed outline and they are told that nothing is on paper yet.

Do take the time to put your ideas down on paper even if they are in a bullet point format.

Not having any documentation or plan in writing is a red flag for an agency because it tells them that the client isn’t yet ready to hire an agency. It is important that the client has a clear understanding of who the app is for, how it will be built, the value that it brings to the consumer, the target market, how to get the user to keep coming back, the competition..etc. The agency can certainly provide consulting services as well to help create this project game plan, but it is important that some general information is provided to help the agency familiarize themselves with the project.

6. Function vs. Design

If the user needs instructions on how to use your app or website, it may need to be rebuilt. And while the site and or application doesn’t need to win any design awards, it needs to be intuitive and easy on the eyes. Design is way too often overlooked – cast off as being an unnecessary ‘bells and whistle’ approach to a good app.

Handing a poorly designed website or product off to an agency and then asking them to advertise and market it will put the agency in a bad position. They may be reluctant to tell the client that it needs to be redesigned. And even if they do, the client will simply think that they are trying to add $ to the project.

Beautiful, usable or both?

MySpace had the social networking world at its finger tips, and yet it was an utter mess from the start (both design and usability) which played a key role in its demise. Facebook on the other hand isn’t exactly beautifu, but it is usable. And Apple products?…well they seem to get it right all of the time. Beauty + Design + Usability = Apple products.

It’s not that a website or app has to be beautiful to be usable, but if it lacks in design and usability then it will be very challenging to keep people using it – even if we’ve gotten them to install it or try it out. This is an all-to-common scenario for businesses and start-ups that are entering into a new arena. They may have a good product and a market that has a need for said product, but they can’t get people to use and adopt it. And this is exactly the point where engineers (albeit reluctantly) must hand off their product to designers and usability experts.

Underneath the face of the application there are two very important attributes to design. They are User Interface (or GUI) as well as the User Experience (UX) – both of which are close in relationship to design. To an agency, the lines between design, development and user experience are very narrow. All must be working harmoniously together. Agencies will expect this and hence their push towards a good design. Remember the point above though, if you ask a marketing agency to advertise a poorly designed product it can make them look like the bad guys when they come back and suggest that you should re-think the structure, layout or look and feel of the app. So just remember, the agency wants the product to do well. Be sure and let them have their say.

7. Getting traffic, new users & keeping them.

This is probably the most common of all oversights that we see. Despite having seen the movie the ‘The Social Network’ and realizing the vast potential of the web, you’ll need to work hard to get users unless you have a lot of money to throw at this. Furthermore, you’ll need users that ‘continue’ to use your application. So you may want to devote some time to this strategy before you spend a lot of money building the app.

• To gain visibility you’ll need traffic.
• To gain market share, you’ll need users.
• To gain loyalty you need users to adopt your app.
• To make money, these users will need to tell their friends about it.

Outside of getting users to ‘try’ your app, the toughest part of all comes next. You’ll need them to *adopt* the service, application or tool that you have built. Having lots of initial users are great, but until they use your product on a regular basis and start telling their friends about it can be tough going and many months of work will be needed. It can take up to two years or more to acquire enough users to gain steam. Don’t let this discourage you – it’s just that it takes some time.

Facebook studio seems that it will be a site where advertising agencies can review and comment on the most effective Facebook ad campaigns, perhaps paving the way for different ad types. Facebook is looking past the idea of impressions and clicks and move more towards a concept of social advertising, which focuses on the consumer and what they have to say and less about what the advertiser wants to say.

“Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcast out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.”

Social media is widely being recognized as ‘no longer a fad’.  Assuming for a moment that we’ll eventually have more freedom when creating ads on Facebook in the future (without infuriating the social masses), everything will still boil down to metrics and performance. It’s not surprising that Facebook made their Facebook Insights | Product Guide more visible by sending it out in their recent newsletter.

Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s director of engineering said, “No longer would agencies be able to sell a bad product with a clever campaign…But for ad agencies that are good at what they do – it’s Christmas,” he said. “Because people will be talking about what you do and sharing it with their friends.”

One thing is for certain, this is not the last we’ll hear from Facebook in their efforts to bring more advertising and business through Facebook. They are simply treading very lightly, and rightfully so, in their efforts to generate ad dollars.

I rarely print stuff out anymore, but this download caught my attention. A lot of businesses have been asking about how to do this or that on Facebook, so I thought I’d post their recent guide here. And while Facebook Business Pages in my opinion  is a very un-intuitive environment for small business owners, I’m sure that Facebook will figure this out and create a more user friendly environment as they move forward. After all, I think that Google (Places) and Facebook (Pages) are locked in a race to take over the corporate website and small business marketing as a whole!

Anyway, you can download the Product Guide Here

On the other hand, Twitter caters to the tech savvy not your casual (or older) computer user – which FB is going after. This will need to change if they want to compete with Facebook in attracting marketing spend.

Here are some points to consider about the two mediums:

• Twitter is more of a communication platform, while Facebook is more of an online destination/community.
• Facebook is also more personal, Twitter is somewhat impersonal.
• On Twitter, anyone can follow you.
• Women love Facebook
• Older men tend to avoid it until they finally cave in
• Many people still look at Twitter and say, ‘I don’t want to hear about when someone brushes their teeth, I just don’t get it’.
• On Facebook, by default, they cannot be your friend, unless you give them permission to.
• For a Facebook Fan Page though, anyone can become a fan (or ‘like’ a page as it is now called).

There is certainly cross-over & similarities between the two, but for businesses this realm does represent significant potential. Only in the last 6 months have I really felt this as Facebook has opened the door wider to businesses.

On the web & technology front, Twitter tends to attract the tech savvy type and therefore can easily continue its momentum in this regard. Something tells me that Twitter will eventually be purchase – but by whom (don’t say Google) ? And how would they integrate it (would Google nix Buz if they did purchase it)

But I also think it boils down to the ‘type’ of business. For example, here is a very random sample of business/brand entities and what they might see with these mediums.

• Clothing company:
  Facebook is completely relevant, Twitter is less effective based on what we are seeing.
• Coffee shop (ie. Starbucks)
  Twitter is very relevant as customers tend to be tech savvy and ‘on the go’ but Starbucks has nearly 7 million fans on FB compared to under 800k followers on Twitter. Wow!
• Golf Course:
  Facebook is more relevant, Twitter is not very effective from what we are seeing.
• Marketing company:
  Twitter more relevant, Facebook not as relevant (yet)
• Company/Retail:
  Facebook will become increasingly a better medium for all retail business now that Facebook is integrating e-commerce.
• Food Chain:
  Facebook becoming more relevant than Twitter
• Celebrity or Athlete:
  Twitter is an amazing platform for these folks (who are already popular) to enlarge their following. A perfect medium for stars and athletes on Twitter. It keeps people (followers) at a distance, and allows them more 1 way communication without too much interaction if they don’t want it.
• Renewable Energy Company:
  They could rock both spheres but I think FB could generate a lot of momentum for these types of companies.
• Gym (Fitness)
  No brainer. Facebook. They can create a sense of community online and get their members to talk to each other outside the gym *Creating an Online Community* – which is the highest achievement of any web presence.

The way I see it, Facebook may not seem very inviting right now to many businesses, I think that is changing very quickly. They will be a juggernaut for businesses looking to tap into Social Media.

What about your business?

Years later, now older, wiser…better looking, many now come to me and ask for my team to provide the very services that I explained ad-nauseam for 10+ years on my soap box.

Make no mistake.  I bask in this warm glory.

The evolution of communication, websites, applications and online marketing is staggering, and the pace of this evolution has been unbelievably fast—the understanding of these changes on the other hand has not. Many businesses in the mid- to late 90′s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.  Those days, like the idea of a brochure-ware website, are finally being laid to rest.

Despite being able to say things today like, “I told you so,” events like these are nothing more than ego-boosters, small victories that simply become personal mementos of countless hours of work. And while everything that I thought would happen (hoped for) has come true – there is something that is nagging me – something that begs my attention.

• What is the future of the corporate website?
• Will it die?
• Will it morph into something else now that businesses are finally on board?

Let me first state that this is not a new topic. Others have written about this and I’m starting to climb aboard this thought process. A website, for many businesses, is still quite critical right now and will continue to be for some time. In fact, most good online marketing strategies still benefit from having the website site at the center of all their marketing efforts.  The landscape that supports this idea however is shifting as I write this.

For the time being, websites will remain incredibly important for businesses, campaigns and selling products and services. What I question is how long this will last.  Here are some factors that may start digging the hole for corporate websites as we know them:

• Facebook (slowly but surely, FB is becoming a juggernaut – and me thinks they will try to replace the Corporate website for small biz)
• Social media (new sites will creep up & some current ones will grow bigger)
• Mobile devices make it easier to get  info while away from the desktop
• Lack of consumer trust in anything ‘corporate’
• Consumer’s increasing reliance on alternate channels (ie. social media)
• Less of a need to sell products from the ‘corporate’ site and more of a need to sell easily via different channels via their social business accounts
• Google Local Business
• Automated or Super-simple website building (ala WordPress or Business Catalyst)
• Did I say Mobile phones or computers?
• Less centralized marketing efforts & the decentralizing nature of the web
• Future entity (FB, Google, other) that reduce reliance on traditional sources of information
• Virtual environments – some  kind of virtual world will catch on in a game-changing way, or has it already?
• Smaller processing and ability to project a screen anywhere, e-paper..etc

One of the bigger forces that stands out to me is the decentralization that is taking place with the Internet.  For the last seven years, the core of a businesses’ online marketing program consisted of the following three pieces:

• a website
• the customer database
• an email marketing program.

This still remains the de-facto plan for many businesses. Yet, this plan is not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, it is quickly becoming an antiquated model of thinking. Why though? Because it still is one-way communication. Businesses that aren’t able to create ‘conversations’ via the Internet will be at a major disadvantage.

Spewing forth mindless marketing and sales babble is just not enough any more.

In the end, a change is taking place and the old model of placing a ton of useless data on a website is coming to an end. The factors that surround this topic is enormous and this blog post is already too long, but an online marketing strategy has become much more important that designing a website. The traditional corporate website is dying – or perhaps in some kind of cocoon that will materialize as something else in just a few short years.

Don’t blink.