Photos Still Matter on Brand Social

People often stage their lives for social media, and they use Instagram’s own and third party image editing tools to refine the aesthetics of their images in ways that in the 20th century were only available to professional photographers.

The social web brought with it a number of real advantages. Building an audience was 10X faster. And reaching a social audience (in addition to email) gave brands an entirely new way to communicate at scale... But at the end of the day, the land still belonged to the King.

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are sharing content that sends other users off-site. But, over time, they try to get more content hosted on their own systems, and to promote it more relative to the competition. Google, while not a social pla... See more

While social platforms are proving effective at pressure testing and gauging the customer response for new ideas, sometimes the general public isn’t the best curator for what’s next. It’s not just about the critical mass (how many people like something), it’s also about the credible mass ( who likes something). As algorithms mature, I suspect socia... See more

Last week, Meta announced that the Facebook newsfeed would be shifting towards an algorithmic, recommendation-based model of content distribution. This announcement marked the most recent example of a major platform to formally make this shift, while other major platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been headed in this direction for a while. ... See more