What if partygoers could automatically share Instagram photos? Or conference attendees could exchange LinkedIn requests without collecting cards? With Eventbrite's API, we are about to find out.
Every time you invite people to an event, you create a mini social network. Startup ticketing platform Eventbrite aims to help put that physical network to use through online apps.
Think about automatically sending a tweet when you walk into an event to announce yourself, Eventbrite CEO and co-founder Kevin Hartz suggests. Hartz goes on: “Think about using Instagram at an event. That could be better shared among [attendees]…You can imagine on the professional side, what could happen with LinkedIn after an event.”
None of these hypothetical examples is a priority for Hartz himself. Eventbrite is pretty good at selling tickets and plans to stick to it. But the company recently gave other apps the opportunity to bring these use cases to life by opening up its API.
For the last 18 months, developers have been able to easily add Eventbrite-powered capabilities to their apps. For many, this means simply using Eventbrite to sell tickets within their apps. But the API also presents an opportunity to integrate a new kind of social graph: one based on physical meetings rather than clicks.
Giving people the ability to share, mingle and keep in touch with the people who they attend events with is arguably more useful than offering new ways to interact with their 800 Facebook friends.
“There’s almost nothing as powerful as a live experience,” explains Hartz's wife and cofounder, Julie Hartz. “People actually gathering offline, it’s something you don’t forget.”
So far the implementations have been gingerly engaged. 5K races have used the Eventbrite API to send photos and race times to participants, Paperless Post uses it to link tickets with invitations, and services provided by MailChimp and Salesforce use it to help companies stay in touch with the people who attend their events.
Since it set up shop in 2006, Eventbrite has differentiated itself in the ticketing space by allowing anyone to sell tickets on its platform--whether they’re planning a cooking class for their friends or a . Throughout the last couple of years, however, it's been on a bit of a growth spurt. It has been quick to develop mobile opportunities like an iPad credit-card reader to help event coordinators working in non-tradition venues organize admissions and launched an aggressive international expansion. So far, it’s sold tickets in 174 countries.
Hitching a ride in other apps, whether as an enabler of online connection between eventgoers or a simple ticket seller, should further serve its growth.
“When you’re moving in to dominate a space, you can’t be everywhere at once,” Kevin Hartz says.
Apps with Eventbrite integrations, however, can be.
The inside story of Hipstamatic’s losing struggle to keep pace with Instagram, Facebook, and others in the white-hot photo-sharing space. In the third and final chapter of the series, Hipstamatic searches unsuccessfully for capital, and founder Lucas Buick and ex-employees ponder the future of the business.
Lucas Buick, the CEO of Hipstamatic, failed to define his startup’s mission over the past year. But several of his ex-employees seem to have no problem nailing precisely what set it apart. “Whereas Instagram was a social network that had a camera, Hipstamatic was the camera that shared to any other social network,” says one former staffer. “It was very clearly distinguished.”
To outsiders, the distinction may seem insignificant, even pointless. But inside the company, some felt it was Hipstamatic’s golden ticket, a chance to become the go-to smartphone camera for sharing with social giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Instead, the opportunity was squandered when the company lost its focus.
Since Buick launched Hipstamatic in late 2009, the service, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, has undergone relatively little change. It didn’t need to. The startup attracted millions of users and millions of dollars in revenue by selling in-app digital lenses and films that effectively turn your iPhone into an old-school instant camera.
If it’s common wisdom for founders to heed the call of social, then Hipstamatic proves that every founder should be wary of conventional Silicon Valley wisdom. Social for Hipstamatic was a siren song, and its turbulent journey over the last year only demonstrates the oft-overlooked dangers of pivots, especially ill-conceived ones that damage a startup’s core business so deeply that no amount of venture capital can repair it.
Throughout the summer of 2012, Buick says he and his cofounders took meetings with investors, hoping to raise the company's first round of funding. But the team could never find the right terms, Buick says, partly because of Facebook's bungled IPO. "We went down this path one other time, and the term sheets have gotten worse since the Facebook IPO, just from what we've seen," Buick says.
The other issue, ironically, was Hipstamatic's bottom-line, Buick says. While startups with no revenue can often drum up seemingly arbitrarily high valuations, Hipstamatic was plagued by its own market success. Instagram had generated no revenue since it launched, yet sold at a market valuation of roughly $1 billion. Hipstamatic didn't have the same “advantage.” According to Inc. magazine, the self-funded startup pulled in $10 million last year, and was on track to more than double its revenue in 2012. "For us, raising money was always super awkward because we made money," Buick says. "It fucked everything up and we'd get a different valuation. Like, 'Oh you have numbers? Well, I'm going to put the X here and the Y here, and this is what you're worth.' It's like, 'No, no, no, we don't make money! I lied!'"
"They thought raising VC money would be really easy--that they'd basically be picking money off trees," says Jonathan Wight, a former engineer at the company. "Every few weeks we'd get an update, and it would be, 'Oh it's a lot harder than we thought,' or, 'The terms aren't what we want.' Blah blah blah."
Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked at the company. Two of the VCs surmised the startup would have a very difficult time raising money after the Instagram acquisition. “Another billion-dollar photo-sharing exit is hard to imagine. The category is over and done with, and I’d be surprised if they can even raise,” says one of the topflight VCs.
The investor agrees that general market sentiment for social media investments is down because of Zynga’s and Facebook’s declining market caps. However, the VC disagrees with Buick’s argument that having revenue would hurt its chances to raise funding. “The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal,” the investor says. “Having revenue absolutely won’t hurt; if anything, it helps, though the idea and market size matter much more.”
At that point, however, Hipstamatic's biggest problem was finding the right idea, regardless of the size of its market or revenue. And its development team back in San Francisco felt completely disconnected from whatever the founders were planning. "They were gone for weeks and were impossible to reach," says one former employee. "Apparently they were meeting with VCs, but I don't know. We were just trying to ship this new product that was already behind. The original goal was to ship it when the new iPhone came out, but there was no fucking way we could do it. All we had was what we hacked together for them to demo to VCs." (Hipstamatic denies that its cofounders were impossible to reach during this time.)
By the time the “Wolfpack,” the self-appointed nickname for the company founders, decided to offer other members of the team stock in the company, many had already lost faith, multiple sources say. “All of us were like, ‘Dude, you’re never going to IPO,’” recalls Stuart Norrie, then a designer at Hipstamatic.
In late July, Buick and his cofounders went to New York, which Wight says felt like the “last chance to get VC money." (Hipstamatic denies that it was the company’s last chance for VC funding. It’s also worth noting that I had met with the team during their visit, and none of the products herein described were mentioned at that meeting. Buick was focused more then on ways to work Hipstamatic into third-party services.) When the team returned, however, there was no news of a round being raised. "Nothing was said. It was like, 'Well, I guess we didn't get any money,'" Wight recalls. "I confronted Lucas about it and he said, 'Yeah, we didn't find any terms that we liked, but we have something in China.' It was kind of obvious then that they weren't going to get VC funding."
Wight also says he pressed Buick on whether they could still go ahead with the social product without raising capital. "Lucas said, 'Yeah, we're going to mortgage [Hipstamatic's] building if we need to,'" Wight recalls. "He actually said, 'Our backup plan is to mortgage the building.' At that point, all my alarm bells went off. It was obvious that something crazy was going on. As far as I could tell, they were running out of money. That was about a week or two before the layoffs."
Hipstamatic says that it’s simply not true that the company considered mortgaging the building as an option. Hipstamatic also denies that anyone ever indicated the company was prepared to go forward with the social product without raising a round of funding.
If Hipstamatic’s product roadmap seemed slapdash, the rapidly evolving landscape of the photography space was only making its business even more chaotic. By mid-August, Instagram was racing toward 100 million users, in part due to the app’s successful launch on Android. Viddy, arguably the model for CS9, Hipstamatic’s squashed video product, had raised a $30 million round at a reported $370 million valuation. Path, Dave Morin’s private social network, had raised $40 million at a reported $250 million valuation. Camera+, its camera app competitor, was nearing 9 million users, more than double Hipstamatic’s user base, and would soon launch on the iPad. And Tumblr, Pinterest, and any number of other white-hot startups, which arguably served as inspiration for Hipstamatic’s social products, were flying into the upper-echelon of Silicon Valley superstardom.
But even in such a hectic time for the company, Buick was starting consider yet another pivot for Hipstamatic. Pivots, Eric Ries’ term for a change in company direction, are usually reserved to describe companies that have made successful shift in focus: Instagram, for example, is famous for pivoting away from its unsuccessful, complicated earlier iteration, called Burbn, which included a host of random features, such as game mechanics and future check-ins. Pivots are also used to designate startups that have lost focus, as was the case with Color, the proximity based photo-sharing app, which has become a punch line in the Valley for a startup desperately spiraling in all different directions.
But Hipstamatic never truly pivoted. If anything, it lurched. The startup performed a series of missteps throughout 2012 that snowballed and left the company stagnant by the summer’s end.
In further violation of Ries’s revered business principles, Hipstamatic seemed almost incapable of putting out a minimum viable product: most every prototype product was either killed or not given the attention it needed to get to market.
Worse yet, the company was not run like a lean startup. The company's headquarters, for example, a wide brick building on Langton Street in SOMA called the "Haus of Hipstamatic," cost roughly $1 million. Additionally, the cofounders decided to renovate the building's rooftop with deck and minibar, an upgrade that cost at least $800,000, explains Sam Soffes, a former engineer, who says he saw an invoice for the construction. “Lucas told me the stain for the deck had been imported from Belgium, and I was like, 'Dude, there's a Home Depot in Daly City--we could’ve just gotten it for way less than you paid to have that shit imported form Belgium!'" recalls Norrie. (Hipstamatic confirmed the cost of the building, but declined to confirm the cost of rooftop construction.)
Inside the $1 million "Haus of Hipstamatic" Parties at company headquarters were frequent. As Buick once told me, "Our entire lifestyle is built on the philosophy that work and play are one."
"It felt like a bloody frat house," says Wight, who says he was told the company's alcohol budget was $20,000. "I've never worked at a startup with an alcohol budget. People would be getting drunk at night and end up sleeping on the floor of the company. I think Lucas wanted a certain amount of rock n' roll there."
(Buick denies that the company had an alcohol budget, though he adds, “I mean, if we did have one, I’d be curious what it would be.” Buick also clarifies that, with all parties thrown--for product launches, say, or app updates--he always considered whether they’d generate short-term income or long-term revenue. Molli Sullivan, Hipstamatic's director of communications, says that much of the money spent on parties and other “fun events” was designed for team building.)
"We had a ton of parties--maybe that's what they meant by having a 'lifestyle brand,'" says one former developer, referring to Buick's company motto.
So while Hipstamatic was still generating revenue, it's perhaps no surprise why some employees started to wonder if the company was speeding toward bankruptcy. Employees were not privy to the startup's earnings; they only knew of revenue figures that had been reported by the press. When it became clear the company was not going to raise a round of funding, some started to think the worst. "I inferred that they were running out of money--that they had just gone through money way too quickly," says the former employee. "You've seen the office--it's really expensive. They all have really lavish lifestyles. I figured they were seeking out funding because they needed more runway to keep the ship afloat."
The truth according to Buick is, by mid-August, the company had several different options. Buick could've continued down the path toward social and raised a round of funding at less-than-pleasing terms. He also could've sold the company. ("We can't comment on who [we could’ve sold to], but it just seemed like a shitty option--it felt like giving up to cash in a check and buy a boat," Buick says.) Or he could've pivoted backward, scaled down the company's ambitions, and refocused on Hipstamatic's original photo app.
After much deliberation, Buick says he went with the last option. (Also in early August, one of the company’s iOS developers quit voluntarily, which helped reinforce Buick’s decision, he acknowledges.)
Over dinner in mid-August, Buick presented the plan of scaling back to several other founding members of the startup. "From the time we decided to pull the trigger to the time we executed was about 48 hours," Buick says.
On Aug. 16, the company began laying off employees, either in the office, over the phone, or over coffee. Employees were (not surprisingly) unhappy when they were told the news. "Yeah, I got my pink slip, or plaid slip, whatever hipster term you want to call it," says the former employee.
At the Mondrian Soho in mid-September, over dinner and drinks, Buick appears genuinely unfazed by the internal drama at Hipstamatic and the way it negatively spilled into the press after employees were let go. Later, when I ask Buick whether Hipstamatic is going bankrupt, he immediately responds, “No, we are not.” And even when I press him about the startup’s runway and burn-rate, he retorts with a giggle, “You're using startup terms that we've never internally used. I mean, I've heard burn-rate and runway, but let me say this: I have no idea what our burn rate is. I have no idea how long our runway is.”
Throughout our dinner, Buick’s general nonchalance gave the impression that the layoffs were not a financial decision, regardless of whether they actually were or not. (Molli Sullivan, the company’s spokesperson, says the company is not running out of money, and explains the layoffs had nothing to do with “paying the bills.”)
"The honest truth is I took a lot of bad advice and started building stuff we weren’t passionate about," he says. "That whole product development was all about how to make money and maximize users, and we were focusing on the shit that we didn't really care about. We started focusing on money and talking to a whole different scene, and we started to lose touch with our community--the photographers, for example, who totally got ignored for a year. I don't know what the trigger was but the honest truth was we hadn't shipped anything, and that drove me nuts. And what we were building was still so far away from being available that I didn't even like coming to work.”
Ex-employees can’t speak fast enough to list off the many problems that plagued the company: a lack of transparency, an incoherent product roadmap, and so forth. Almost every source I spoke was offended that Buick would say the layoffs were due to not shipping products—the ex-employees chalk up the dearth of shipped products to the company’s poor leadership. And many sources place the blame on the ever-mounting disconnect between the cofounders and new hires, who say they were not given the agency to push new developments forward. (At least three sources I spoke with said the cofounders had a “death grip” on the original Hipstamatic app, for example, and only gave developers read-only access to the service for much of their time at the company.)
While one could certainly argue Hipstamatic had many original ideas, Hipstamatic’s central problem was execution—and it was a problem that worsened as the team’s cohesion deteriorated. The startup could not act as a functional whole.
When I ask Buick what went wrong, he reflects for a moment, and answers, "I think we totally got caught up in the San Francisco bubble. If you don't leave enough, you forget that not everyone has an iPhone, and not everyone reads TechCrunch. The rest of the world doesn't care about that stuff. The San Francisco bubble is a sounding board for the same idea heard over and over in a thousand different ways. We fell into that, and it led to a lot of frustration and wasted time and resources. So we took a left turn."
Adds Buick, "We should coin this the unpivot."
Stuart Norrie, the former designer, summarizes the company’s issues most eloquently: “In this industry, it’s inevitable that you’re going to pivot. You should be expected to be switching direction at a moment’s notice. But not weekly--not changing direction completely every week. They were trying to become Camera+ and Instagram, and that’s a losing battle. It’s suicide to take them on. And if you focus too much on your competitors, you’re going to lose sight of your own business, and that’s what really happened.”
He continues, “The biggest problem with Hipstamatic is that [Lucas] didn’t focus on Hipstamatic. What did Instagram do when lightning struck? They did nothing but focus on Instagram. What happened when Hipstamatic got successful? They made [separate products such as] Swankolab, Incredibooth, D Series, Family Album, Snap Magazine, and splintered off in so many different directions. They lost sight from the very beginning, and it still makes me sad because it was a golden opportunity to make something really amazing.”
Other members of the team echo Norrie’s sentiment. Says one former employee, "The people I worked with at Hipstamatic were the best people I've ever worked with."
Buick agrees. "It sucked," he says. "We've let people go before but it was always justified because they weren't doing their work. This had nothing to do with that. They were all really awesome and talented. What we did was build a Ferrari and we didn't know how to drive stick. So we had this awesome machine that wasn't able to perform like it should. We built the wrong type of team to solve the wrong kind of problem.”
Finishing up his second or third old-fashioned at the Mondrian Soho, Buick transitions away from the past to talk about Hipstamatic's future. As he takes me through the roadmap, I can't help but be intrigued by what he and the company might have to offer--if the surviving team can even pull it off. All the while, a song by a French pop band blares over the restaurant's sound system. Then, later, another song by the same group. Then a third in the course of an hour. The band is Phoenix, the name for the mythical firebird that rises from its own ashes--not that anyone catches the heavy-handed, trite symbolism. Says Buick, "This fall we're launching a bunch of stuff…"
Facebook has struggled to generate mobile revenue, which could stunt its potential. But Instagram could be the key to changing Zuck's fortunes. GRP Partners' Mark Suster, Big Spaceship's Karina Portuondo, Percolate's Noah Brier, and Ad.ly's Walter Delph share their ideas.
Call Sheryl Sandberg! Facebook stock, which rallied 32% since it was announced CEO Mark Zuckerberg would make his first post-IPO appearance on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, is once again on the decline, and it looks as if the Zuck bump was short-lived at best.
The share-price drop comes following a report in Barron's that called the stock "still too pricey," and specifically questioned Facebook's potential to generate mobile revenue. The company has struggled to tap into the mobile market, and is said to be generating less mobile ad revenue in the U.S. than even Twitter, which has a much smaller user base. But its $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram was seen by many as an opportunity to tip the mobile scales in its favor. Will Facebook be able to monetize Instagram?
The problem, as Barron's Andrew Bary pointed out, is that Facebook's bet on mobile is "no sure thing." Due to condensed real estate on the screens of smartphones, Bary contended, Facebook isn't left with "much room to configure ads without alienating users." Even Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom has acknowledged the startup's focus on scale rather than monetization. At a recent hearing in California related to the approval of the acquisition, state officials asked Systrom how Instagram generates revenue. "That's a great question. As of right now, we do not," said Systrom, who said the startup aimed to "grow something that people really loved."
So how can Facebook tap into Instagram to start generating mobile revenue? We asked four experts in the space to find out.
I think there is no wild idea to monetize Instagram. There are straightforward, practical ideas, and one would have to test people's willingness and interest in these types of products, but let's start with the basics.
Sell Ads The most common one that people talk about is ad insertions. It would be very easy to insert ad-based products into Instagram. That's kind of obvious. When I say advertising, there are maybe five different ways you could advertise. You could, for example, have what are called interstitials, which means, if I look through 20 pictures, out of every 20 pictures, the twentieth is always an ad unit that's inserted into people's streams, like promoted Instagram photos. I could have tools for advertisers that help me to build more interactions--Instagrams, say, that are clickable. I'm not going to say it's inevitable that they do something like Pinterest, but there are 10 different ad products there, and that's only one of them.
Offer Premium Service Other obvious low-hanging fruit relates to how the product is free now. So one could design a version that is premium. The nice thing when you're dealing at scale, even if people are willing to pay a modest sum, say $5 per month, and even if you're converting five to 10% of your user base...well, when you have 100 or 200 or 300 million users, that's a lot of money. Of course, there is a culture in social media of not charging people. But look at Dropbox. Dropbox charges people, and people seem willing to pay, and that's become quite a large business. So one could easily imagine a service where they design features that people are willing to pay for.
Print Products I mean, we already know images can be monetized. Just look at Shutterfly. If you created an offline product, something related to printing, where I could take those moments--the photos that I love and that look good and that are filtered--and connect them with a way to print photo packs, or create albums, or to do mugs, or T-shirts.
Harvest Data And the final component that is obvious low-hanging fruit is the data, and being able to sell the data. I know when you talk about selling the data, people assume you mean private confidential data. But that's not the case. There are opportunities to sell aggregate information that are valuable to people, either about people's shopping behavior or restaurant behavior, or what their interests are. Know more about individuals and who they're following and connecting with--these fabrics of networks have become very valuable data sources, and in particular Instagram has an attribute that's very similar to Twitter, which is that it's an open network. When you started using Instagram, just like Twitter, your starting assumption was, unless I made myself private, everyone was going to be able to see it. You know the data and photos are already public.
And there's a ton that can be done with the data. I'm involved with a company called DataSift, which has already built a very fast-growing business around helping to monetize Twitter data. I know firsthand how much businesses crave market intelligence that can be picked up from open-data sources. So let me just give some examples that won't seem so obvious. It's possible for governments to crack down on terrorism and hooliganism by looking at open-data sources like Twitter and Instagram. It's possible for people to make predictions that might help with crowd control by monitoring behavior. It's possible that in the legal field, as you're looking to do jury selection, and you're going in and interviewing jurors, to figure out what their biases may be with public data. A lot of that can be down at a lower cost without having to bring people in.
I could go on and on. You think about news sources. Right now, Twitter is doing a great job of aggregating real-time news. But in a world where Instagram is as widely diffused as Twitter, news organizations could aggregate real-time photos and they could do it in a way without having to have photographers on the ground. So say, okay, I know there was a major fire in the zip code 90272. I could mine the Instagram data from the last hour in 90272 if I wanted to look for images of the fire.
There's so much that could be done with public open data that people don't understand. Those are the immediate obvious business opportunities.
Get Into Sponsored Filters Well, one way would to be to monetize filters. Could Marvel sponsor a filter that changes your pictures into comic styles? Could the Met put a Renoir filter on your photos? Could Crayola put specific coloring filters on your photos? And so forth. Facebook could target it so people don't have an endless amount of filters to choose from.
Offer Promoted Pics Of course, you could do promoted Instagrams like Promoted Tweets. But I see that as an obvious place to go. I don't think it's the most innovative thing they could do with Instagram. I'm leaning against the idea of Promoted Photos on Instagram, and leaning more toward more utility-based things--a way of marketing that users of Instagram would appreciate more than something they expect from a platform like Facebook or Twitter. So another kind of twist would be to do hashtag takeovers. I found myself recently since the update spending a lot of time in the Explore section, seeing who is using the same hashtags I am. That I think is an interesting stop for an ad placement. Like if #Catstagram was taken over by Purina, with all pictures of cats or dogs all over it.
Leverage Location, Deals I also really think Instagram should be used like Twitter in terms of the one-on-one responses. So a lot of people are geo-locating their photos. We recently went to the Brooklyn Cyclone's game, and took tons of Instagram photos while we were there, which were all geo-located. What would've been cool is if there were deals, so say, if Nathan's, which is right down the street, commented on our pictures and said, "Enjoy the game! Come over afterward to get free waffle fries with purchase of a hotdog!" I think there is the timely, surprise-and-delight reaction that is getting common on Twitter that hasn't transferred over to Instagram yet, but should.
So for brands to get involved, I think it could be very similar to Facebook in that there's the lo-fi way to do it that's perhaps more manual. But then there could be packages where Instagram actually helps brands find the right people at the right time, and makes sure they get the right message.
Sell Exposure Well, first I'd say that now that I'm running my own business, I no longer try to tell people how to run theirs. But what I'd say for Instagram is that the basic model for brands on asymmetrical networks seems to have been solidified. Facebook created it: the ability to get fans and build your network, which solves a huge issue brands had, which is, How do I get people to pay attention? Facebook solved the audience acquisition problem. If you are willing to spend the money, you can have the audience. Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all have that model now.
The other side of that model, which all three platforms have, is the ability to promote content to additional audiences. So with Instagram, I suspect the end game is going to be the same as everywhere else. Ultimately brands want exposure. We've seen Instagram being used so far for behind-the-scenes looks. So GE has a really good Instagram feed that's basically behind the scenes. But it's for very specific reasons. Part of the company's mission over the last few years is to communicate that GE is a maker and an innovator and a real manufacturer of things. So going back behind the scenes is communicating that in a visual manner. It does what it needs to do. I don't think we need someone to leave [Instagram] to do that.
People keep asking about mobile advertising, and I think we're looking at it already. The mobile winners are going to be Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Ultimately they're going to win because the ad product is content, and it translates perfectly to mobile. Like Promoted Tweets on Twitter, you don't need to do something special to make it run on mobile. It's just there. I think everybody is having these conversations about trying to find the silver bullet in mobile advertising. But I think it's here. You're looking at it.
And you also have to remember it's still very early on. Facebook only introduced Promoted Posts in the last three or four months.
Keep Building Value, Cash Out Later My perspective is that Instagram is an amazing platform. The killer app for Facebook is photos. I used to help run Photobucket--I know photos are the killer app. And if you have people taking pictures, posting pictures, and distributing and sharing them, and not utilizing the Facebook platform, well that's a massive detriment to Facebook. So I think its acquisition of Instagram was partly a defensive move.
As to monetization, I believe there's a great opportunity with photos, but no one has really done it. If anyone is going to do it, it's going to be a Facebook or Google. But they haven't really figured out how to make money off of photos yet. The problem in mobile and with photos is that there aren't as many ad units that people can sell.
So we'll have to wait and see. I really don't have an answer to this one. If I did, I'd be a lot wealthier.
Blog posts became Facebook updates and Tumblr posts, which shrunk to Tweets and finally to Instagram or Pinterest. Here's how smart brands are navigating the new visual social-media era.
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have ushered in visual marketing as the breakout trend for 2012. When it comes to their products, businesses are learning to show, not tell, and visual content sites are fueling our desire for beautiful photography and sensational design. Two years ago, marketers were spreading the maxim that "content is king," but now, it seems, "a picture really is worth a thousand words."
"Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words," says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. "When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest."
This trend toward the visual is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.
A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it's the pictures they took that are enjoyed the most. Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media. Pictures have become one of our default modes of sorting and understanding the vast amounts of information we're exposed to every day.
Detavio Samuals is the EVP and Director of Client Services at GlobalHue, one of the nation's top market advertising agencies. He explains that pictures are a bit like movie trailers for written content--they provide a snippet of what an article, brand, site or other piece of content is about, so that you can quickly decide if it's what you wanted or not.
"Pictures have also become a short form way of communicating lots of information quickly and succinctly," says Samuals. "The need for publishers to get to the point quicker than ever came about as humans became more pressed for time and content became more infinite. For publishers, it was evolve or risk losing their audience, and the only thing shorter than a tweet or post is a picture."
So what does all this visual stimulation mean for brands?
Fashion designer Kahri-Anne Kerr uses visual social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook to market her Kahri collection. In the fashion world, visual fantasy sells product, as customers need to see the cut of a garment on a model and feel as though they could make that item work in their own wardrobe. "When I post pictures on Facebook, they get the most feedback of all my posts," says Kahri. Visual media is a great way to share more about what inspires the designs, as well as linking to your online store and straight product shots."
"I am just getting into Instagram, which I use to give a personal look at the person behind the label by taking shots around my studio and in my everyday life."
Designer paper/analog brand Moleskine has harnessed the power of visual media to create one of the world's most active, prolific, and creative online communities. Their visual content strategy focuses on user-generated content: They create large-scale projects that users participate in by posting their own images and videos.
A popular campaign called What's In Your Bag? had users update pictures of the contents of their bags into a Facebook album. The project generated thousands of likes and comments as readers looked at the contents of other bags (which included Moleskine notebooks, naturally), and shared photos with their friends.
Inspiring fans to create and spread images, customize their notebooks, organize online competitions, and otherwise engage with the brand on a creative level has set Moleskine apart in its highly specialized market.
Search engines now rank content based on social conversations and sharing, not just websites alone. Brands can use visual content on their social media to increase engagement and inspire sharing and viral marketing. The rise of platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and Facebook's multimillion-dollar acquisition of the latter, shows how visual content is becoming an increasingly important force for communication online.
Brands that can rock visual media will find themselves market leaders.
--Ekaterina Walter is Intel's social media strategist. Follow her @ekaterina.
