Author: Richard

Let’s begin with a couple of “So What?” questions: A brand has 20 million Facebook likes. So what? A brand’s tweet “breaks the Internet.” So what? What’s achieved, other than an honorable mention at Cannes? A paradigm shift is needed: from conversation to narrative. Yes, what technology has wrought is truly amazing. With one big huff and a puff, time and space have been blown away. And in a couple of gasps, marketing has gone from the need to consider person-as-viewer, to person-as-participant, to person-as-content-creator, to person as channel. But one last transformation is still needed for marketing success. Marketers…

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram—they’re all free platforms businesses can use to directly engage with their audiences. But the idea that engagement is easy, free, and quick is false, according to Amy Vernon, social marketing consultant and cofounder and CMO of Predictable.ly. “One of the biggest false assumptions about using social media for marketing is that it doesn’t cost money and it’s fast,” says Vernon. “Like all good things, ‘getting the word out’ takes time.” Luckily, she says there are things you can do to help speed up the process. Amy Vernon BUILD YOUR CHANNELS EARLY “Don’t wait for launch day…

With 36 million Facebook likes and 10 million Twitter followers, Starbucks has clearly mastered the art of social media. It’s also translated social fans into real revenue: The company’s famous Tweet-a-Coffee Twitter campaign, for instance, generated $180,000 in direct sales in less than a month. Starbucks, of course, has an entire team of social media strategists working round the clock. There is, however, a lesser-known secret to its success: Its own employees do lots of the tweeting and posting themselves. A unique employee advocacy programactively encourages staff to share updates about the brand on their own social media accounts. You…

With 1.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook has proven that it knows how to scale up a web business at least as well as any other company on the planet. But its sheer overwhelming enormity has a tendency to set the bar incredibly high for anything else it does. That may be one reason why many of the company’s efforts to create new things, including apps such as Home, Paper, Poke, and Slingshot, tend to be instantly dismissed as tiny and insignificant. It also goes a long way toward explaining why Mark Zuckerberg was willing to invest billions to buy…

As busy as Mark Zuckerberg’s day job keeps him, he finds time each year to give himself a personal challenge. Here’s a look at his last seven years of accomplishments—and the progress his company has made along the way. 2009 Personal Challenge: Wear a tie every day. Company Milestone: Facebook is taken more seriously by advertisers and becomes cash-flow positive a year ahead of schedule, transforming it from startup to long-term comer. 2010 Personal Challenge: Learn Mandarin. Company Milestone: Although Facebook isn’t available in China, the service exceeds 500 million monthly active users, becoming the world’s largest social network. 2011…

The most interesting thing about Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, California—humbly known as “Building 20,” and connected to the nearby, ex-Sun Microsystems campus the company has occupied since 2012 by Disneyland-style trams—isn’t that it was designed by Frank Gehry. It isn’t even that it’s one sprawling, 434,000-square-foot room, topped off with a (windy) roof park. What’s striking about Building 20 is how hard Facebook has worked to preserve the stripped-down, collaborative atmosphere of the workplaces that preceded it. The floors are still bare cement; girders and vents remain exposed. Staffers, as before, are encouraged to write on walls. Everyone—CEO…

In early 2007, Fast Company senior writer Ellen McGirt got a rush assignment from the magazine’s editor, Bob Safian. Both were newcomers to the publication, having recently decamped from Fortune. Safian, who had decided to kill the planned cover story for the May issue, asked McGirt to fly to Silicon Valley and do a piece on Facebook and its 22-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. With 19 million users, Facebook was clearly a startup on the rise. But it wasn’t clear to all observers that Zuckerberg’s determination to keep the company independent was a sage strategy. After all, MySpace had sold out…

Facebook is firing on all cylinders. Now Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the decade ahead, from AI to VR to drones. BY HARRY MCCRACKEN “Mark is fixing stuff.” I’m killing time in the Frank Gehry–designed Building 20, whose signature feature is its soaring 434,000 square feet of open space, the latest addition to Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California. A PR handler is explaining why CEO Mark Zuckerberg is running slightly behind schedule for our chat. I express surprise. Mark still fixes stuff? “To say he’s actively involved,” she confides, “is an understatement. He notices things that are broken before…

There are now more than 2 billion active social media users worldwide, and that sum is growing at a brisk clip of 25% each year. Businesses haven’t failed to noticed the runaway expansion of social media. Nine out of 10 U.S. companies are now active on social networks. The same overwhelming percentage of those are reporting seeing increased exposure as a result, and more than half say their social media efforts are boosting sales. So what’s in store for 2016? Here’s a look at five trends that appear set to change how businesses use social media in the year ahead.…

With threats mounting, an unusual alliance has begun to fight back against ISIS’s social-media war. Governments have launched offices that monitor and refute terrorist propaganda in real time. Companies have set new rules of conduct to prevent ISIS from using their products. Community activists seek to identify and reach out to youth in danger of falling under the sway of ISIS recruiters. And members of the Anonymous hacking collective hunt and destroy ISIS websites in the darkest corners of the Internet. Together, this loose coalition seeks to rob ISIS of one of its most powerful weapons: kicking it out of…