A recent survey done by Bazaarvoice, only cements these facts about millennials and how they relate to their world and therefore interact with companies and brands. Bazaarvoice writes, “the bottom line is, millennials shop and interact with brands differently. As they start to control spending, their habits will inevitably change the way businesses sell – and with it, the way all consumers buy.”

One of the most stunning facts from the recent survey is that when trying to learn about a brand, product or service, 51% of millennials trust user-generated content significantly more than any other form of information, including brand messaging, news articles and advertisements. Perhaps even more surprising is that millennials say they trust advice from strangers more than recommendations from friends and family (49%).

In addition, the study found that 42% of millennials share their brand experiences (positive or negative) across their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) compared to only 17% of boomers.

This study leaves no doubt that brands need to continue to utilize social media to engage with the millennial generation. By embracing social media, reacting in real time and adopting a policy of authentic transparency, brands will earn respect and trust from millennials. Even more so, brands need to inspire their advocates and superfans to create user-generated content to influence millennials about their products.

As Peter says, “We are heading into a market in which 75-80 percent of all online ad dollars will be spent in a highly automated environment, essentially the entire display budget for standard creative running in a square box. The remaining 20-25 percent will be designated for deep integrations, social-media programs and highly customized marketing programs. This is reality. Accept it. More importantly, prepare for the ramifications.”

Media companies and ad agencies will need to address the inevitable sooner or later. Just one example came earlier this week as P&G announced they would lay off 1600 employees and rely on digital advertising for cost savings. “In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient,” says P&G Chairman/CEO Bob McDonald.

For our own take on what’s next, watch our blog and site for exciting announcements in the coming week or two! Can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on.

Peter will also be speaking at the DigiDay Agency conference in LA on this topic on February 29. He’ll be joined on a panel by Dave Goodrich, President, Targetwise and Suhaila Suhimi-Hobba, EVP, Director Digital Communications, Initiative.

Over the past few months, Halogen has been working with our influential publishers to create creative, authentic and engaging content on behalf of Intel and the 2011 Always On campaign. The goal of the campaign was to boost awareness and drive association of Intel among their target lifestyle audiences.

Through our genuine, enduring and direct relationships with influencers like Matador Network, Fora.tv, uInterview, Design Milk, PSFK, ScreenCrave, Geekosystem, Technabob, Jamie Oliver, Guest of a Guest, Global Post, Dealbreaker, Big Girls Small Kitchen, Gear Patrol, Fashionista and Food52 we effectively created an always-on social content channel to align with Intel’s marketing calendar.

Check out some of the content our publishers created:

Gear Patrol: Smart Lives of Smart Men

Watch the 2nd installment, Smart Lives of Smart Men: Tomorrow here.

Global Post: The Futurists: The Science of Cyborgs

In addition to videos, our publishers created many unique content pieces. Some examples include Matador Network’s 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021 and Design Milk’s Designer Tools of The Trade.

The biggest nod to our fantastic publishers and our internal crew is that the program is up for a Social Media Influencer Award! You can check it out and vote here! (It’s the ‘Smart Lives of Smart Men’ icon).

- Reports to: President/COO

- Direct Reports: Director of Product Development

- Compensation: competitive salary, stock options, performance-based bonus, and competitive health benefits.

Job Description

We are currently developing V2.0 of our proprietary enterprise software called Chorus. A preview can be found at www.socialchorus.com.  The product is on track to launch in Feb 2012 with a variety of highly valuable features and functionality. Additional upgrades and features are planned for releases/upgrades for the foreseeable future.

The VP of Product Management will report to the President & COO and work collaboratively with the Executive team to define and develop the vision, strategy, and product roadmap for a world-class SaaS platform for social media marketing for global brands.

The candidate will manage all product initiatives through the entire lifecycle from ideation and inception through development, testing, launch, measurement and ongoing enhancement. The VP of Product Management will also be a product representative, involved in marketing & selling and communicating product benefits to clients and potential clients.

This position is responsible for building and managing the team that is developing our proprietary software platform, and for deploying a final product that is completely functional allowing hundreds of major brands to quickly deploy in multiple global markets.

Strategic vision and leadership:

-      Collaborate with the CEO, President/COO, and Executive Team to define and manage the product vision, strategy, and roadmap that will fulfill user and client needs and stay one step ahead of the market.

-      Provide inspirational leadership, motivation and hands-on direction to all product development and engineering staff.

-      Cultivate a milestone-driven culture, in which consistent innovation and progress are expected. Provide strong process management to a ‘sprint-based’ development environment (using the Rails stack).

Direct Responsibilities:

-      Manage the product roadmap, getting internal consensus and incorporating feedback from clients and prospects. This will delight our clients with product excellence that is fast, easy, smart, and fun

-      Define the development schedule, based on team size/capabilities and product priorities

-      Manage the development team to hit weekly and monthly milestones for major and minor product releases.

-      Recruit and mentor world-class product team, including product managers, designers, and product marketers.

-      Ensure Q&A approaches consistent with serving Fortune 500 brands.

-      Plans, develops, and establishes policies, procedures, and objectives of all the Company’s research and development functions in accordance with objectives

Leadership Style:

-       Inspirational leader who can thrive in a fast-paced environment

-       Self-starter who can simultaneously manage multiple internal and external initiatives/projects and deliver outstanding results

-       Ability to work collaboratively with employees at all levels of the organization and establish and maintain strong relationships with strategic partners

-      Strong project management skills

-      Thinks quickly on his/her feet, is practical and “street smart” – and wants win.

Desired Skills & Experience

-      BA/BS required.  MBA preferred

-      Minimum 6-8 years experience leading development teams that delivered consumer or enterprise facing software solutions that dominated their competitors.

-      3-5 years experience building and releasing SaaS or PaaS software in both start-ups and established companies.

-       Highly technical, able to communicate with engineers on technical topics.  Past development experience a plus.

-       Consumer social/community/marketing software platform experience preferred

-       Proven success with rapid development environments and tools.

-       Preferred experience with Ruby on Rails.

-       Tenacious and resourceful problem solver with deep analytics skills

-       Proven ability to influence and lead cross-functional teams.

-       Demonstrated financial management experience, including the development of financial projections, budgets, resources and managing to these appropriately

-       Strong business acumen and the ability to synthesize and analyze data to identify trends and marketing opportunities

-       Excellent communication and presentation skills, written and verbal

-       Strong project management and performance management skills

Company Description

We believe that brands should develop direct and enduring relationships with influencers and advocates. We are a software and services company that enables brands and agencies to create and distribute content and social currency to their influencers, soon-to-be influencers and superfans across all major social networks.

Our platform powers on-going, transparent relationships with these social influencers, and enables the brand to manage and reward these relationships directly. Our technology tracks all the marketing outcomes, and demonstrates the media and business ROI.

Our focus as an organization will be on software platform sales (bundled or unbundled with services) with global firms that deploy our solution quickly across multiple brands and markets.

If you are interested, please contact us at jobs@halogennetwork.com.

Although it may seem like Pinterest is just the “women’s version of fantasty football,” Pinterest has already seen an influx of companies and brands that are ready to be a part of the pinning phenomenon and some are quickly seeing real results. Real Simple recently told Ad Age, Pinterest drives more traffic for them than Facebook.

In case you aren’t familiar with Pinterest, here’s a quick rundown. Pinterest is a social networking site that allows users to create virtual pinboards for collecting and sharing beautiful content online. Users collect photos and links to pretty much anything they find online that they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people or brands whom they find interesting.

While the site is still in beta and currently invitation only, Pinterest has experienced explosive growth in the last six months. The latest data from ComScore (December 2011) shows that Pinterest has over 7.5 million monthly unique visitors up from 4.9 million in November. When it comes to engagement, Pinterest users spend an average of 14.8 minutes on the site per visit. These recent numbers skyrocketed Pinterest into one of the top 10 social networks according to Hitwise.

So why should brands care?

1)    Engaged Audience

Social media has given the consumer back their voice and on Pinterest that voice is the ability to share what they like, what they want to buy and what inspires them. Brands should use this as an opportunity for consumer research. Follow those people who are already posting about your brand or specific keywords that are important to you. Pay attention to what they are sharing to pick up on key trends among your target audience. Engage these users by commenting, liking or re-pinning their pins to a VIP board. If you don’t know who your audience is yet, host a Pinterest contest and follow those who participate.

2)    SEO Benefits

Content shared to Pinterest directly from your site or blog links back, even when the item is re-pinned. The description field of the pin lets you enter relevant keywords as well.

3)    Show Off Your Brand Personality

Sites likes Pinterest give brands an opportunity to humanize and expose a little brand personality. It is a great opportunity to promote the lifestyle or essence of your brand. Show off your team working hard on the latest product or your employees enjoying an office party. Make it personal.

Now let’s see these in action.

Below are a few of our favorite ways we’ve seen brands use Pinterest.

Chobani

This yogurt brand brings their product to life with inspirational quotes, recipes, and even a flavor inspirations board.

Bergdorf Goodman

The department store uses fashion trends to inspire their boards (eg. Spring Trend: Tribal Beat)

Whole Foods Market

The high end grocery chain highlights recipes, party ideas, and even their Whole Foods foundation on the Pinterest page.

And let’s not forget some of our own publishers: MatadorNetwork, Glitter Guide & Design Milk have also started to share the essence of their sites using Pinterest.

Like any other social network, before you join, make sure it makes sense for your brand. But if it does – what are your hesitations about joining Pinterest (if any)? Will you be jumping on the pinning wagon?

Anyone who needs an invite, leave your email in the comments below and we’ll make sure you get one.

Instagram could reach 1 billion photos by April, hitting this mile-marker over twice as fast as Flickr.

Tablet users spend 50% more per purchase than smartphone owners, and 20% more than laptop/desktop users said a study put out by Adobe. Retailers should take advantage of their mobile consumers.

A report put out this week by social marketing company Wildfire Interactive says that Facebook is still the dominant social network in terms of marketing. 94 percent of respondents said they use Facebook in their social media efforts. Twitter was a close second, at 74 percent.  In 3rd place, 41 percent of respondents said they use blogs for their social efforts, more than LinkedIn (32%) and YouTube (30%).

When: January 23, 2012

Where: George Washington University, Washington DC

Why: What’s Next DC, a conference all about brainstorming, case studies, energy, networking and strategy, takes place this Monday and boasts an impressive roster of speakers and strategy sessions. Speakers includes Bonin Bough, Global Head of Social Media, PepsiCo; Sabrina Caluori, Vice President of Social Media & Performance Marketing, HBO and Robert Harles, Global Head of Social Media, Bloomberg among numerous others.

Our CEO, Greg Shove will be in attendance so make sure to say hi.

Follow us at @halogenmedia and follow Greg at @gregshove for live discussions from the event. You can also follow the #whatsnextdc hashtag for all the chatter.

The platform is now open to all developers, meaning the opportunities are endless for what ‘actions’ Facebook users can take. Ford has already created two applications that integrate with OpenGraph to take advantage of the instant sharing. Expect more brands to join them and thousands of applications to be released in the coming months.

Facebook, through their Open Graph, is quickly cementing themselves as the infrastructural backbone for emerging social sites. When a new service pops up, logging in via Facebook Connect is the easiest way to find friends already on the service and invite others to join. Tying this into the timeline will expand the viral opportunities for new services. This will also be important for brands, but it will require new thinking in how they interact and engage with their consumers and followers. Now every interaction with the brand is a potential marketing opportunity. This is a truly authentic way for brands to spread their message and also underscores how important it is for brands to have relationships with the right influencers.

Below is a full list of all the applications:

Music

Spotify, Rdio,  Slacker, Turntable.fm, MOG, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, iHeartRadio, Earbits, Jelli, Saavn, Songza

News & Links

Washington Post, Rockmelt, Wall Street Journal, Digg, The Daily, Buzzfeed, The Guardian, Yahoo! News, The Independent, IBNLive, Wetpaint, InHindi, USA Today, Joinsmsn

Charity

Causes, Artez Interactive, FundRazr

Travel

Where I’ve Been, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Gogobot, Wipolo

Food & Dining

Foodspotting, Urbanspoon, Yummly, Snooth, Foodly

Shopping, Design & Fashion

LivingSocial, Sneakpeeq, Polyvore, Oodle, Pose, Lyst, Pinterest, Fab, Payvment, GiftRocket, LAX World, GiantNerd

Fitness

MapMyFitness, RunKeeper

Entertainment

Flixter (Rotten Tomatoes), Goodreads, Words With Friends, Castleville, Bubble Island, Hulu, DailyMotion, Zeebox, Draw My Thing, Cinemur, Kobo,  DiamondDash, Snapstick

Events/Ticketing

StubHub, Ticketmaster, Ticketfly, ScoreBig

Miscellaneous

BranchOut, Ford – Mustang,  Ford – Grab-a-Badge, Autotrader, Appsfire, Color, [s]edition, Grockit, Chegg, Artfinder

Will you be adding any of the latest applications to your Facebook Timeline? Access them all here.

The infographic below gives us all the details on how Facebook’s potential IPO breaks down.

Some standout stats:

- Facebook’s IPO will be the biggest of any tech company in history – 6 times bigger than Google’s.

- Only 3 other companies have had $10 billion IPOs – AT&T, GM & Visa.

- Mark Zuckerberg will rake in $25 billion!

Infographic created by: Accounting Degree Online

The eleventh annual release of Google Zeitgeist went live yesterday, revealing top ten lists for the fasting rising and fastest falling global queries for how the world searched in 2011.

The interactive experience illuminates our interests and fascinations, from the high ranking Apple queries to Rebecca Black, Adele, and Google+. Most of all, it tracks our voracious appetite for information and our inclination to turn to the web as life progresses.

For more information about the Zeitgeist project and access to additional tools (including a real-time tracker of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms), check out the Google Zeitgeist Index.