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6:10 pm - Wed, Feb 8, 2012

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How Tumblr Should Do Promoted Posts

caterpillarcowboy:

Thoughts expressed in this post are derived from conversations with Julie Fredrickson and Greg Battle.

As you all have seen, Tumblr recently began playing with the idea of publishers paying $1 to highlight posts in the stream. As I said then, I’m glad Tumblr is experimenting, and every time a community-based site makes changes, it always runs the risk of backlash, so kudos to them for having the fortitude to try new things.

With that said, who is it for? Regular users who tumble for fun about cats and last night’s dinner? Brands like Newsweek and Vogue? The $1 price points to “it’s for everyone” but the nature of announcements & promotions is dominated by organizations with an agenda. Given the desire of the latter group, I’d make them the focus.

If we were to start from scratch and think about how organizations could best promote their posts while maintaining the integrity of the Tumblr eco-system, I think we should take a page from Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. In the right rail of the dashboard, underneath (or instead of) the Radar, Tumblr should show a post by someone you already follow if they’ve paid to have their post featured there. The purpose is to reinforce the message of the post in case you missed it or forgot about it. Advertisers can pay more for more impressions, which is exactly what they want. Users don’t feel like they are being spammed, because they only see posts by people they already choose to follow. And Tumblr finally gets to monetize what they have in abundance - dashboard page views (hundreds of millions every day).

gbattle sez:

OK, I’ll bite.

I have a little different take than David (who I think is right about Sponsored Stories replacing Radar).

For my $1, I’d love to make sure that I get exactly one impression per user such that the post isn’t simply emphasized visually, but guaranteeing the impression via enforcing each unique delivery.  That’s something I’d pay for, such that I don’t have to worry about the timing of my post on Tumblr because my followers are guaranteed to see it at least once.

OR…

For my $1, I’d love to have a way to encourage reblogs, which could be done by allowing a certain number or time window of reblogs to also gain the promotional certification.  Each generation of reblog, the promotion fades into the background until, say, 4 or 5 levels deep, it disappears completely - the utility of the promotion is complete.  Or, maybe you can add more money to extend the levels of promotional ability - $1 for every level.  If I want to enable 5 reblog levels of promotional juice, I pay $5.  I can buy as much AdWords or Sponsored Stories juice as my wallet can handle, why not create the authentic sharing version of this within Tumblr?

OR…

What else could one get for $1?  Well, this month, you could spend that $1 to utilize the entire Social Flow platform for a month to promote your services across Twitter and Facebook to users who don’t normally see your posts, all optimized for audience receptivity.  (And no, I’m not being paid by Social Flow, but I do dig Frank and the gang).

As much as I like my ideas, I think the last option is the smartest use of your $1 as you can use it for all of your posts for a month.  Optimized content delivery beats pixel perfect design.  The idea of promoting content to people who already receive that content seems somewhat inauthentic.  That’s not encouraging discovery, that’s shilling.

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11:47 am - Tue, Feb 7, 2012

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10:17 am

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8:19 am

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8:09 am

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4:09 pm - Sun, Feb 5, 2012

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6:12 pm - Sat, Feb 4, 2012

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10:17 am - Fri, Feb 3, 2012

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7:34 am

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Letter From Alexander Graham Bell : 1915

American Telephone & Telegraph Company was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in AT&T understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At AT&T, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the Pony Express — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to food, water, shelter and electricity — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. AT&T aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At AT&T, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

…

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

… The Phreaker Way … [blah blah blah]

=====

gbattle sez:

I’ll leave the search and replace to create Facebook’s future Wikipedia entry as an exercise for the reader.

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7:07 am

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4:36 pm - Wed, Feb 1, 2012

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8:32 am

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What turntable almost looked like

turntable-fm:

We were perusing some old files and this was what the first designed version of turntable looked like.  It’s funny looking back at it and feels like something out of TRON.  Ultimately it didn’t fit in with the feel we wanted to give (making turntable feel like a small trendy, but homey venue).

gbattle sez:

This is hot, if only for the option of using it.  I wish Turntable.fm allowed room owners to skin their venues like old school WinAmp (or Trillian, or your fave customizable desktop app from back in the day).  That would be pretty awesome to personalize the rooms and not merely the Avatars, reflecting the vibe of the room.  Imagine going to a club where all the rooms have different music but looked the same like some Agrestic community?  Yup [Lame Button].

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3:13 pm - Mon, Jan 30, 2012

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5:57 am

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