Lynne d Johnson

The Chocolate Super Highway: Precursors To Black Social Media

Was in NC last weekend at Duke for the Black Thought 2.0 Conference #BT2Duke. Sat on the panel, "The Chocolate Super Highway: Precursors To Black Social Media." Embedded the video below and would love your thoughts and feedback.

Video streaming by Ustream

For a roundup of coverage, visit Mark Anthony Neal: #BT2Duke In the Mix: Responses to Black Thought 2.0 at Duke

Facebook Buys Instagram; What's Next for Popular Photo-Sharing App?

Facebook announced Monday that it will buy Instagram, the San-Francisco-based photo-sharing app for mobile devices. The purchase, which is a combination of cash and Facebook shares, is expected to close later this quarter. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the purchase will enhance Facebook users’ abilities to share great photos with friends based on their interests. He also said Facebook is committed to building and growing Instagram independently.

“Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spreadthisapp and brand to even more people,” Zuckerberg said. “We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.”

Lynne d Johnson (that's me), a content and community consultant and former senior social media strategist at R/GA digital ad agency, says it’s particularly important for Facebook to allow Instagram the creative independence, and hopes the popular new photo app company won’t just get absorbed into Facebook and lose its original appeal.

Read more...http://www.genconnect.com/career/facebook-buys-instagram-deal-photo-sharing-what-it-means-for-users/

Pinterest and Facebook Timeline For Brands

With the growing popularity of Pinterest, and the Facebook Timeline now being the only profile type for brand pages, I decided to take a dive into what both of these platforms mean for brands. Both offer the opportunity for a brand to visually tell its story, but regardless of the presentation, the bottom line remains that content (though it can be visually appealing) must be engaging and relevant.

Pinterest And Facebook Timeline For Brands

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Lynne d Johnson on Augmented Reality, Using Social Media Tools, And Building Communities Online

So, I'm not trying to turn this into a self-promotion blog but I've given a few good talks and interviews over the years. I'm not saying they're good just because it's me, I'm saying they're good because of the feedback I've received. So I decided to roll some of the videos that I could find on YouTube into a playlist, and here's what I've come up with: my talks on Augmented Reality as a Marketing Tool, as well as some stuff on building online communities, and on using social listening and analytics tools.

But one of my favorite videos of all time has got to be my off-the-cuff answer to Chris Brogan at SXSW a few years back when he asked me what's next in terms of the future of communities and media. That video isn't on YouTube so it's not in the playlist. But here it goes from Viddler:

What I basically said, and still think is relevant today, even more so as we enter this era of Information Overload (we've been in this era for a while though haven't we?) but with the increased amounts of content that people have exposure to it's even more significant. If you're a brand or a media company, sure, use all the social media channels you want, but be sure you have a homebase a place where all of this activity can land and live. In the era of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, mobile and social apps and the like, more and more we're dealing with shared spaces (the next rev of microsites really).

But what happens when those campaigns end? What happens when those social networks fail? If you can't export your content or create some solution on your own using APIs, what do you have left if all your eggs have gone into this one (waste)basket? I'm really talking about a managed digital presence that guarantees a historical base (timeline if you will). Digital is integrated and not siloed. How do we make what we do on FB or Twitter, come to life on our sites? That's basically what I'm talking about. See what you think.

Another series of videos I really enjoyed, was a program I did while I was working at the Advertising Research Foundation. Every day at one of our annual conferences, I interviewed social media folks about what's happening now and what's happening in the future. There was a lot of focus on social listening and market research communities, but so much more came out of the series that's still relevant today, nearly two years later.

I'll pull out two that I think really hit the nail on the head about what we're experiencing now in marketing and media.

Customer Engagement as the New Marketing

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media, The ARF interviews Samantha Skey — CMO, Passenger about customer engagement as the new marketing @ ReThink 2010: The ARF Annual Convention + Expo.

What is the Next Step in Social Media Research?

Lynne d Johnson, SVP Social Media, The ARF interviews Chris Wilkes — Senior Director, Social Insights, Ripple6, Inc. about what the future of social media research looks like @ ReThink2010: The ARF Annual Convention + Expo.

And I'm pulling one from the vaults.

Lynne d Johnson Interviews Sophia Stuart, Hearst Mobile Case Study, Blogher '08

Fast Company's Lynne D. Johnson interviews Hearst Digital media's director of mobile, Sophia Stuart, about their initiative to take content and community mobile...realizing the promise of mobile ubiquity. Hear how they brainstormed over what content made sense for their mobile platforms from nine magazine properties, and about how they evangelized this new content internally and with surprisingly intimate efforts externally.

So much of what I was able to understand about what Hearst was doing was because of related projects I spearheaded when I was at Vibe and Spin in terms of adding community not only to our sites, but to our mobile apps as well.

Is Augmented Reality Ready For Consumer Adoption? Layar Thinks So

In all of my talks about Augmented Reality, I've talked about consumer adoption being one of the hurdles to AR really taking off as a major marketing strategy. And while AR proves itself the best application of SoLoMo (Social, Local, Mobile) there's still a learning curve for consumers in terms of ease-of-use.

Layar, one of the first Augmented Reality Browsers is trying to change all of that by rolling out an AR application that's strictly for consumer usage. The app, Stiktu, enables users to combine digital images with real images and share them. Basically it's like sticking things on top of real-world objects. It's like virtual graffiti, allowing you to tag where you've been or what you've seen with your own marks of expression.

Layar produced the following video to show how it works:

(YouTube) ad:tech inspire Final Session—Lynne d Johnson, Dan Neely, Flash Rosenberg

So the Inspired By Augmented Reality talk I gave at adtech that I wrote about back in November is up on YouTube. Now looking at it, I realize that all of the examples I should have put in the deck should have been SoLoMo examples. But at the same time, I wanted to make a point that Augmented Reality was realizing ROI for many brands. Given that my argument is that AR is the best tool to deliver on SoLoMo though, I need to find more examples that have ROI case studies or start getting with making some of those case studies happen myself.

Anyway, here's the vid:

Lynne d Johnson, Content + Community Consultant
As smartphones proliferate, consumer behavior is radically changing. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to either make purchases or make decisions about purchases. To take advantage of this trend, marketers need to develop strategies that engage consumers with experiences that are social, local and mobile. No other technology makes better use of SoLoMo than Augmented Reality (AR). Join Lynne d Johnson as she explores how AR layers mobile commerce, social networking and location-based advertising in a seamless format for consumers and brands. Discover which brands are already using AR and why yours will too!

Dan Neely, CEO, Networked Insights
My Customer Does What?--Consumer insights have gone real-time thanks to social media. The challenge is no longer getting good consumer data, it's making sense of it all. Consumer data gathered across the social web can let you walk in the footsteps of your target consumer. A marketer's mission is now connecting the dots, finding actionable information and funneling it to all of marketing functions. Because knowing what's important in the lives of your target consumer lets you make better marketing decisions. Join Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely as he discusses how brands are now using real-time data to inform everything from the content they create to the media they buy just by knowing their audience better.

Flash Rosenberg, Artist & Attention Span for Hire, Flash Rosenberg Studio
Drawing at the Speed of Talk, Laughing at the Speed of Light—Flash Rosenberg will discuss her process of "live-drawing" to translate real-time discussions into animated images. She will offer strategies for how you can fluently harness the funny things you see, to be able to express yourself more accurately, as well as humorously. Flash will also explain how digital technology is boisterously redefining the way we look at images...and ourselves.

Inspired By Augmented Reality (Slides + Video)

Yesterday, I spoke at adtech Inspire (the opening session to this week's adtech in New York at Javits).

The gist:
1. consumers are flipping the purchase funnel (using the web and mobile devices to help them make purchase decisions via search, reviews, and social media)
2. marketers need to have mobile-ready advertising and mobile optimized sites ready to engage them in these new behaviors
3. but instead of thinking of strategies, think of creating experiences
4. why so lo mo is the new marketing and the new consumer behavior coming out of mobile
5. this is where the idea of using augmented reality to enhance social local mobile strategies comes in (there's a lot more about why AR is the perfect tech for this that i didn't get to say such as geolocation services and now NFC)
6. on a spectrum of AR i covered SMS and QR codes (Zoo records), to webcam virtual experiences (dabs/acer and tissot), to local (location-based) mobile experiences (like Quiznos and hotel.de/hotel.info w/Layar and Stella Artois Le Bar Guide and ), to POS (like the Lego's box virtual experience), to real-world applications (like AR-enabled ski goggles, Google Goggles and Word Lens, but also ways in which marketers are addressing the new customer journey via apps like GoldRun and Converse Sampler)
7. and I ended on a note of what's happening now with NFC (mastercard payments and the new jersey transit system payments with Nexus phones, to android beam making the ability to share info between phones much easier--it's like that bump app for iphones) and then what can come in the future when you use NFC with AR (the ability to mark items and spaces with coupons, codes, ads, information, etc. but then how virtual air rights will need to be solved)

Anyway, wanted to give the summary first before embedding the presentation. The presentation lays out the story, but it doesn't go into quite as much detail.

Inspired By Augmented Reality

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And finally, I didn't get to show how all of the AR apps and experiences, that I mentioned during my 15-minute presentation, actually work. Now it's time to roll the tape and show the video.

Zoo Records "Hidden Sound"

dabs.com augmented reality acer ad

Tissot Augmented Reality Application Demo

Tissot Augmented Reality

Quiznos Mobile AR campaign animation demo

Video - hotel.de App

Stella Artois Le Bar Guide

Lego Digital Box - augmented reality kiosk system

Zeal Optics Transcend Ski Goggles

Google Goggles

Introducing Word Lens

GoldRun

The Sampler

UN Social Media Bootcamp

On November 3, 2011, I gave a presentation at a UN SocialMedia Bootcamp put together by Huge at Barnard. It was a pretty awesome event, and not just because I was speaking. There were two sessions for two different groups of UN employees, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Some of the morning speakers were the same as in the afternoon, but some weren't. It didn't really matter though, because everything dovetailed beautifully.

Here's my presentation:

It's also available on slideshare here, just in case you want to download it. And just in case I didn't get that Google Docs version to show up publicly, here's the slideshare version embedded:

Social Media For Social Good: Tips & Rules Of Engagement

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Check out the speakers that Huge and Kirsten Cluthe of the frontier project put together.

Here's how the morning lineup played out

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON SOCIAL GOOD
Lynne Johnson, Content and Community Consultant and Adjunct Professor
at MCNY and SUNY Empire State College
Cammie Croft, Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement, Dept. of
Energy

LEVERAGING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS FOR MEDIA,
MARKETING, AND COMMUNICATIONS
Anil Dash, founding Director of Expert Labs
Dan Costa, Editor in Chief PCMag.com & SVP Content Ziff Davis

MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR CONTENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Sree Sreenivasan, Digital Media Professor, Columbia Journalism School

And then the afternoon:

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON SOCIAL GOOD
Lynne Johnson, Content and Community Consultant and Adjunct Professor
at MCNY and SUNY Empire State College
Sloane Berrent, VP Digital Marketing, Lippe Taylor (2:50 – 3:20)

LEVERAGING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY CHANNELS FOR MEDIA,
MARKETING, AND COMMUNICATIONS
Anil Dash, founding Director of Expert Labs (3:20 – 3:50)
Dan Costa, Editor in Chief PCMag.com & SVP Content Ziff Davis (3:50 –
4:20)

WRITING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Dan Blank, founder, We Grow Media (4:30 – 5:15)

It was an amazing day, as you can see by the tweets at #UNSOCIALMEDIA (don't laugh at the hashtag). Even I left with a few notes.

I didn't get to see Dan Blank speak in the afternoon, but I really wish I did. He wrote a nice follow up post: "People Deliver Higher ROI Than Technology."

I Have Too Many Blogs And Only Need One

Here's my challenge. http://www.lynnedjohnson.com/diary is my home and where I've been blogging since 2001. I've had maybe 3 or 4 total design updates in that time, and went from HTML coding to Moveable Type. I love blogging at my home base, but my site's design is pretty old and limits me from much of what I want to do within my blog.

Because of this, I've launched a Tumblr Blog style.lynnedjohnson.com AKA Change Clothes, as an outlet for my fashion/style and lifestyle interests. I even launched a Posterous blog, that I called The Future of Media Edition, to post infographics, slideshows, and videos I found of interest in the emerging media space. And most recently, I launched a blogger blog, called Lynne d Johnson's Interim blog, well because I'm not doing much blogging here, but I'm posting a helluva lot of content to my main Google+ profile (yeah, I have more than one) and I was looking for a means to integrate what I was doing there into a blog. Plus, I discovered that that blog's aesthetic is kind of what I want this blog to now look and function like.

Of course I don't have the time or wherewithal to do CSS and HTML updates on this blog to keep it in MT or even to transition it to Wordpress or even the Blogger Blog I recently started. I'd most like to move the MT blog and Disqus comments all to WordPress in as minimalist a two-column design as possible. What I'm most looking to do is make this website look a lot more like my blogspot website, and I don't really care which platform its on at this point, as long as it enables me to create good content.

I have peoples who usually help me with this stuff. Like Donald Andrew Agaratt of AnziDesign, who helped me stop manual HTML blogging and move into MT. And then there's J Smith of mrjsmith, who helped me upgrade MT and move one of my photoshop and flash designs into MT templates. And Nadege Decastro usually does all of my graphics the famous animations and caricatures. And in my early HTML days, raschan helped me with some initial HTML and button graphics and the godfather of blogging, George (allaboutgeorge) Kelly, always gave me advice on blogging and led me to my first BlueRobot two-column layout that yes, I coded all by myself. These are all really awesome people to work with and I plan to continue working with them in some way.

But that doesn't mean I can't add even more people to the team, especially now as I'm transitioning into more of a consultant/freelancer role (see my Linkedin for more info on that development). I'm thinking my site may need a few more moving parts and a lot more work overall.

Whatever I do, I really hope I do it soon. I really miss blogging. And right now my future and livelihood depend on it. The more people see how I think the better they'll get to understand my passions and the work that I do.

So, do let me know if you have any ideas about what the future of my blog (and overall site) could become in the comments. I'm currently on MT 3.3 and using Disqus for comments. Not sure if I should stay on MT, move to WP, or even move to Blogger. And should I leave my comments in Disqus, use Facebook comments, or just use whichever blog platform I use?

A history of Lynne d Johnson home pages:

2001 - 2003

2004 - 2006

2006 - 2011

It's time for change y'all.

Finally Enabled My Facebook Timeline

lynne http://lynnedjohnson.com/ lynne@lynnedjohnson.com

NABJ 2011 - Building Your Brand Online: Tools of Engagement

Last week I did a workshop at NABJ (National Association of Black Journalists) 2011 Annual Convention called Tools of Engagement: Assessing Online Audiences with Mike Street, of MSL Group and Influential1's and Matt LeMay of bit.ly.

There's a resource page from the event, but I've also uploaded my presentation to slideshare and I've posted it below. It kind of brings together different work I've done in the past and that was relevant for this audience of journalists who were interested in understanding metrics and engagement a little better.

Building Your Brand Online: Tools of Engagement

Building Your Brand Online: Tools of Engagement

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Will I Ever Update My Blog?

So, for a little while now I've been talking about a refresh of my blog. But a lot of what I'd normally end up blogging about ends up going into my Tweets, on my Tumblr, and on my Posterous (which by the way I haven't updated in a minute).

Twitter is like my free for all, where I send out links and talk about everything and anything I'm interested in. Tumblr, is sort of my lifestyle space where I share items of lifestyle/entertainment value, but mostly fashion. And then on Posterous, I was sharing all this sort of social and emerging media stuff I was seeing that I wanted to write about but didn't have the time to.

Anyway, I am in the midst of working on a plan/project, that will tie together what I do in all of these spaces (and perhaps some others like Flickr or last.fm that I haven't mentioned, as well as places that I might guest blog) and somehow bring that all together here in a new design (whew, FINALLY). Hoping it can wrap up this summer for a launch in the fall.

I'll be working with jbrotherlove on this. And I haven't revealed all of the elements of the project to him just yet. I'm still trying to figure it all out.

In the meantime, you can follow me any of the places I've mentioned, and you can always check out where I might be speaking next.

(Video) Social Connections: FastCompany/iMeet

Here's some vids from a virtual social media panel I moderated for Fast Company & iMeet back in March. It included:

Katie Bisbee, Senior Vice President, Marketing, DonorsChoose.org
Amber Roussel, Co-Founder, Ah-Ha! Creative
Teddy Goff, Associate Vice President, Strategy, Blue State Digital
Jim Moran, Co-Founder, Yipit

Topic: Can Social Media Start A Revolution?

Topic: Why Was The Obama Campaign So Successful?

Topic: Why Have Crowd Funded SItes Become So Popular?

Topic: Why Would A Brand Want To Build A Niche Community On Facebook?

Topic: What Is The Next Phase Of The Groupon Model?

Have We Forgotten About Influencers?

Right now, there seems to be a lot of work in social media marketing with Facebook (primarily) and Twitter (secondarily) as communications and engagement channels. Then there's the location-based service and deals options that the industry is working to try to get consumers purchasing more.

But I'm becoming more and more interested in Influencers and Advocates, especially since some of my early work building communities at BlackPlanet, VIbe, Spin, and FastCompany focused directly on this. I think it's become a missed opportunity for many marketers, especially those clamoring to get up an FB page fast and who forget all of the other social strategies that might work for their business.

Some recent findings out in the wild, got me to thinking more about influencers and how we can better work with them.

1. Klout recently announced the redesign of their site with a focus on helping people better understand and use their influence. Putting the power in the hands of the people, will only help individuals better understand how they can be of value to brands.

2. TrendWatching recently released a brief called The F-Factor, in which they focus on how the influence of friends, fans, and followers on consumers’ purchasing decisions continues to become more sophisticated and thus more powerful. This underlines Klout's claim that everyone has influence. This also highlights that it's not only important to focus on A-listers, A-bloggers, A-tweeters, or A-Facebookers, or whatever you want to call them, but it's important to focus on groups that have impact and influence for your brands. Like mommy bloggers for big box retailers. Or young African-Americans and Latinos who use social media for mobile phone companies.

3. Or how about the news from BlogHer and Devries earlier this year that: "Blogs are more than two times more likely (63%) than magazines (26%) to have inspired a beauty product purchase over the last six months."

Basically, blogs are still important. And not just blogs, but each and every person who posts an opinion about a product or service. It's like Joseph Jaffe's Flip The Funnel, the book that teaches us "How To Use Existing Customers To Gain New Ones." From his "Death of A Website" AdWeek Article (also in Chapter 14 of the book):

"That's not how the world works anymore. Web sites are not ends unto themselves; they are simply a means to an end. You don't want your customers to move into your stores-you want them to buy into whatever you're selling and take it with them into their own homes where they consume it, share it and tell their friends and families that they enjoyed it. So why should you expect something different from the Web? Today, consumers' digital homes are their Facebook profiles, their blogs, their custom-created communities. That's where they "live" in the digital world and that's where we need to hope they invite us to come and hang out from time to time, not the other way around."

The thinking is really no different than what I wrote in "Can Social Media Effectively Track Influence?" back in 2010:

"Both the A-list social media influencer and the niche community influencer can create impact (and influence) for your brand. But it's really those who tech blogger Robert Scoble once called passionates that will drive your brand advocacy. In that case, it's not always about how many people they're telling your story to but the actual stories themselves that they are telling about your brand—the ones that are engaging and in turn driving more people to tell your brand's story. That's real influence. And that's where quality and quantity converge. It's a blueprint for how companies should think about developing relationships with their consumers and potential consumers, as well as how they should think about measuring those relationships."

So as we think about how we create brand identities in digital/social spaces, let's not forget about the influencer--who is actually the everyman/woman.

Social Media Policies: A Roundtable Discussion

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a roundtable discussion on social media policies for BrightTalk.

I'm embedding the webcast for those of you who are still trying to understand the why and what of social media policies for companies and organizations.

A BrightTALK Channel