The Full Monty — May 2, 2016 ~ Social Media For Business Mag

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This week: upheavals and salves in the media industry; cord cutters' complaints; tech earnings surprises; mobile revenue drives Facebook; video revenue is more lucrative for publishers on Twitter; boosting video engagement with poll cards; why you don't get Snapchat; Uber's unlikely domination in London; watch the driverless trucks; the reinvention of Pandora; why marketers can't grasp storytelling; how Edward Snowden aided terrorists; new marketing analytics tools for 2016; how to tell a CEO apart from a toddler; a couple of PSAs; our weekly trivia challenge, podcast pick and more.

Virtually everything you need in business intelligence. If you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links — and additional ones — by subscribing to The Full Monty Magazine at http://smonty.co/fullmontymag.

If you're around at 9:30 pm ET on Sunday evenings, you can get a preview of a couple of topics from the week's via the live video on Facebook. If not, you can always catch the replay here:

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Industry

Gannett made an $815 million offer to buy Tribune Publishing. If the deal goes through amid a struggling newspaper industry, the combined entity would account for 17% of all daily circulation.
Your media business will not be saved. "Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter." The Twitter partnership definitely won't help.
- But the guy who wrote that piece is trying a blog and a Facebook page next for his company, Vox.
- Oh, and there's been an analysis about Silicon Valley bot culture.
If you're among the many who are fascinated by the continued success of BuzzFeed, you might note that its reach is far more diversified than most traditional media companies. They publish content daily to over 30 platforms across 11 countries in seven languages.
Comcast is lifting its data limit to customers: to one terabyte per month.
- Salesforce.com surveyed internet users who are cutting the cord. The top reason for doing so? It's too expensive. Followed by technical issues and poor customer service. The question is how expensive the alternative might be once some customers piece together their content choices.
- But hold on there — before you cut that cord, you might be interested to know that Hulu is developing a cable-style subscription service.

A number of tech companies shared their quarterly earnings results last week. Apple disappointed with its numbers, noting its first quarterly loss since 2003.
- One interesting nugget: Apple now earns more from web services than it does from devices. Which is amazing, since iTunes has an unwieldy interface, bloated features, and an inability to simply get better.
- Like Apple, Amazon saw a huge revenue boost from its services division.
We've got the secret formula for turning your email subscribers into fans. You do have email subscribers, don't you?
If you're concerned with the performance of your banner advertising, here are three other tactics to test out.
Have you noticed that there are more consumer products than ever? You can blame Facebook. And no, it's not an optical illusion.

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Platforms

Facebook
- Facebook reported Q1 earnings last week, demonstrating its dominance in and hold over the tech industry. The company posted a 52% surge in first-quarter revenue, underscoring the strength of the social network’s newer mobile-ad products and rising popularity of its video ads.
- Stated another way, mobile ads now account for 79 percent of Facebook's revenue.
- eMarketer expects 2016 to be Facebook's last year of double-digit user growth. Not to worry, if it were a country, it would still be the largest; and it's adding new revenue streams.
- Users spend an average of 50 minutes per day on Facebook. And that's probably low for many people. In the social battle for eyeballs, stickiness matters.
- Facebook is developing a stand-alone camera app to encourage its 1.6 billion users to create, and share, more photos and videos. This is how market dominance is solidified.
- Facebook has made Windows apps for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Wow. Zuckerberg isn't kidding around.

Twitter
- Twitter reported its quarterly earnings, disappointing on revenue and on projections. While advertisers are spending more on its higher-quality video ad products, the company said that marketers are cutting back on more traditional ads that drive users to their websites and that they are looking for better targeting before the commit more money.
- Twitter is a more lucrative option than Facebook for some video publishers. Despite Twitter’s smaller reach it has an easy solution for them to make money by splitting pre-roll video ad revenue.
- Twitter and Facebook don't want publishers to keep promoting their Snapchat accounts on their platforms.
- Good news for those concerned with online bullying: you can now flag abusive Twitter accounts by reporting multiple tweets at once.

Alphabet
- Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, lays out priorities for Google in his first Founders' Letter, with machine learning and AI playing a key role.
- Alphabet is building a new hardware division under Motorola's former CEO. The group includes Nexus phone, streaming device Chromecast, consumer hardware, OnHub wireless home router, ATAP experimental hardware and Glass.
- YouTube's new homepage on iOS and Android apps is now optimized for mobile.
- Here's how to use YouTube's poll cards to boost video engagement.

Instagram
- Here's a toolkit for creating a loyal Instagram following.

Yahoo
- Yahoo is worth exactly -$8 billion, according to one calculation. Yes, negative $8 billion.

Snapchat
- Snapchat is now serving over 10 billion video views a day.
- And yes, we know: you still don't get Snapchat.

Trivia question: Sir Ian McKellen released an app last week. What does it do? *

Collaborative / Autonomous Economy

Transportation
- London was the 11th city that Uber went into, but it was like no other taxi market that the company had attempted to disrupt. Any city with taxi drivers who need something called 'the Knowledge' to drive is going to be different. To understand how the $60B company is taking over the world, you need to stop thinking about cars. This is a fascinating story of Uber's take-no-prisoners approach in the market in which it was least likely to succeed.
- Time is money. And Uber would like to start charging riders who are more than two minutes late. However, no word on whether they'll let riders collect a discount for drivers who take longer than the app indicates.
- Somtimes, working at a pre-IPO company leaves employees with drastic options. To wit: Handcuffed to Uber.

Lodging
- Airbnb is going to try packaging deals, comparable to other hospitality sites.

Autonomous Vehicles
- While all of the autonomous vehicle attention is on cars, stop for a moment to consider the potential impact of driverless trucks.
- Alphabet, Ford and Uber are combining forces to create a lobbying group for autonomous vehicles. Remember, Google: don't be evil.
- The latest partnership in autonomous vehicles is Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler.

Audio

Edison's Share of Ear report found that 1 in every 5 minutes of audio listening is done on a smartphone.
Spotify bought CrowdAlbum to help artists with marketing their albums.
Pandora is reinventing itself. The plan includes on-demand streaming, ticket-selling, and live streaming concerts.
From Inc.: 7 digital marketing podcasts that entrepreneurs listen to.
Program of the Week. This week's recommendation comes from Frank Zolenski. Manager Tools is billed as "the best business podcast" and gives new and seasoned managers alike ideas, tactics and tools to help them do their jobs better. And it's one we've listened to for years. Do you have a program to recommend? Add yours to our Google Sheet: http://smonty.co/yourpodcasts

Content / Customer Experience

Flipboard has a great four-part series on content marketing:
Look to the video influencers for content creation, regardless of the platform. Ultimately, people care about the quality of the videos, not who distributes it.
Why marketers struggle with the concept of storytelling: "If advertising truly represents great storytelling then we would almost certainly be on the brink of our civilization’s decline. But while you talk of overcoming ‘conflict’, the fact of the matter is that you have next to no appetite for the kind of conflict that is the real stuff of story. Loss, greed, death, hunger, rivalry, injustice, isolation, desire… this and more is the stuff of great, enduring, insightful stories — no marketing department on the planet has any appetite for any of this stuff."
- Or, more prescriptively: 7 ways to improve your business storytelling.
Forget what you know about the customer experience. The way people learn about products, evaluate them, buy them, and interact with companies are being mediated today by social media.
Looking for more feedback? Here's how you do it.

Privacy / Security / Legal

The director of national intelligence claimed that Edward Snowden's actions sped up encryption by seven years and have helped terrorists.
In a move that would likely keep Apple in the dark about security weakness, the FBI has decided not to share its phone-hacking method. Magnanimous of you, FBI.
The government is now compelling witnesses to provide their fingerprints to unlock phones. This issue isn't settled yet and we're likely to see more in the courts about it.
The NSA doesn't know how many Americans it's spying on. Here's a hint: probably all of them.
An email privacy bill is heading to the US House of Representatives for approval. The law would require law enforcement authorities to get a search warrant before asking technology companies to hand over emails older than 180 days.

Measurement / Metrics / Data

You're probably not measuring your content the right way. Here's a better way.
Predictive analytics: Foursquare used foot traffic to determine the drop in Chipotle's sales. They were only off by 1%.
You'll want to get on this: 7 new marketing analytics tools to try in 2016.
This may come as a shocker: big data is meaningless. But not if you concentrate on insights and action.
In three years, analytics and big data skills will be the most in demand. Get educated.
There's a very serious conflict afoot, and it will affect analytics. Emojigeddon: the fight over the future of the unicode consortium. As more people communicate with emoji in chat apps and across the web, it will actually be imperative to nail this down, or we're in deep

* Answer to the trivia question above:

Sir Ian McKellen has developed Heuristic Shakespeare, an app that helps to make Shakespeare more understandable. Now we just need one that makes "heuristic" a more understandable term.

When You Have the Time: Essential Watching / Listening / Reading

Last week, we celebrated Take Your Child to Work Day. But in some cases, it was difficult to tell whether you were dealing with your CEO or a toddler.
Microsoft has developed a new iPhone keyboard that makes it easier to type with one hand. Great. Microsoft is making it easier to text and drive. Prepare for a wave of motor vehicle accidents.
- Such as this one, in which a teen got into a serious accident because she was playing with Snapchat's speed filter. The other driver was an Uber driver, who suffered brain damage. First, don't snap and drive. And second, Snapchat should really do something about its speed filter. [CLICK TO TWEET]
Online harassment is a real thing that needs to be stopped. Just see men reading hurtful tweets to these female sports journalists.
Coachella always seems like such an artsy and hip festival. Until you see the real vs. Instagram versions.
You'll want to know the reading habits of ultra-successful people. Besides The Full Monty, of course.
It's not just your suspicion (nor your inflated ego). You really do have smart thoughts in the shower.
Too much stimulation may be a detriment, or at least the explanation for why we're so bored. Or, as Dorothy Parker wrote:

"Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity." [CLICK TO TWEET]

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