share some Ideas with you about Social media and something i Like

P&G are really trying to bring together all their products into one campaign, the “thank you mom” umbrella.

Being a mom is the hardest job in the world. But it’s also the best.

This Procter & Gamble commercial honors everything that all moms do to help their children succeed by showcasing the amazing moms behind Olympic athletes at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The hardest job in the world is truly the best job in the world.

Join P&G in saying “Thank you, Mom” by sending your Mom a message of thanks at: www.facebook.com/thankyoumom

As Google lines up to take on the likes of Apple’s iClould and Dropbox, the Washington Post has a look at what the new Google Drive could look like. It’s a big launch and it should happen next week.

The popular fundraising website for entrepreneurs Kickstarter has hit a new record with a watch that links up with your smartphone, raising a huge $3.3 million with over a month still to go.

There has been a huge amount of hype about the new Google smart glasses that will bring computing technology to your eye lids, but it turns out Oakley have been at this sort of stuff for years already.

The biggest deal in social media is more than a week old, but we continue to get interesting analysis and opinion from both sides and this piece says Facebook’s Instagram Buy Won’t Alter Twitter Strategy.

Is this the best Facebook Timeline design ever? (source)

Everybody is starting to get used to the new Facebook timelines so with that in mind, the guys over at social media examiner come up with 5 Ways Businesses Are Using Facebook Timelines.

The war of words is still going on between Google, Apple and Facebook and Danny Brown offers his take with some wise words of his own – Sergey Brin Paints His Kettle Pot Black Over Facebook and Apple.

Twitter has been extending their advertising platform over the last couple of months and although it is still very early days, you can now start to target the ads based on the devices the tweets are being accessed on.

The Huffington Post has been one of the huge success stories of the last few years, and this fantastic piece has a look at how they have achieved that success: Six degrees of aggregation.

There has been a huge amount of buzz over the last 36 hours over the Tupac Hologram that we featured here on the site yesterday, and in this interview with the creator, we learn a little more about the process.

The lines between bloggers and journalists have always been very blurred, but this piece over on Gigaom argues that the debate has really passed and there is no point trying to tell the difference any more.

This is a long watch at 20 minutes, but we spotted it over on AdFreak and its a great reminder of the issues faced by the homeless.

The analysis on the Instagram deal just keeps rumbling on and on, and this piece in the Wall Street Journal explains how the board of Facebook was more or less out of the picture and Zuckerberg did all the decision making.

Apple shares have been on one of the biggest surges ever seen for a large tech company, gaining 60 per cent since the start of the year. This article has a look at if there are turbulent times ahead for owners of the stock.

Facebook is trying to push social readers by pushing ‘trending articles” into users’ feeds.

There are lots of graphs out there at the moment that point to Facebook starting to take on Google, but this chart from Brazil shows how Facebook has overtaken ALL of Google’s properties at the same time very quickly.

These slides in Munich university are a seriously cool way of getting people to their classes on time while having a bit of fun at the same time. Reminds us of Google but only better.

When it comes to blogging, there are lots of practical resources and guides out there, but this one for the beginner blogger is topical, up to date and simple to follow.

When it comes to technology and who’s changing the social world, Brian Solis always has some great insights and here, he discusses Disruptive Technology and How to Compete for the Future

Even though email marketing tends to get overlooked these days in favor of newer social tools, this post shows that the numbers are still incredibly strong when it comes to this marketing channel.

Paying with smartphones to outpace credit cards by 2020, experts say. This is certainly happening at the moment ,but it will probably take at least five more years to be done properly.

Roger McNamee always has some pretty forthright views when it comes to technology, and this video sees him discussing the future of Apple and digging the knife into Google in a pretty big way.

Apple have a bit of an uneasy relationship with the carriers – who give them large amounts of money – but could they all be about to gang up on Apple and start demanding lower prices?

34 Game tracks played to rock music on this incredible ten minute video featuring some of the best known video game songs in the world.

Social media and good design haven’t always gone hand in hand. Myspace saw the concept of design reach lows few of us could ever have imagined. When Facebook Pages first emerged for brands, there was little in the way of customisation, and that which was available was fairly clunky and standardised.

Social media is also responsible for the rush to place buttons on every single page on a website. Never mind what it looked like, your webpage has to have every single social media button under the sun, lest you forget a random site with ten users where you might not get bookmarked.

Now it’s starting to change. Design is coming to the fore of digital technology, whether it be brands, websites, social apps, social profiles or mobile. It’s seeing designers becoming a core part of founding teams and early stage development, where beautiful designs take over in a way we’ve never seen before. This can be seen across the industry with a range of benefits coming from good, clever design.

Design can get you insane traffic

Pinterest is (un)arguably one of the biggest social media success stories of late, thanks to a meteoric growth in traffic. This is due, in no small part, to the role that design plays on the site. Evan Sharp is part of the founding team at Pinterest and in a recent interview, he explains the design process on early versions of the site, which included 50 iterations of the pinboard layout we see today. And similarly to Steve Jobs at Apple, Sharp didn’t necessarily draw his inspiration from other websites, but instead looked to physical objects and spaces such as bookstores and museums.

While we’ve seen the role of the programmer become more and more fundamental to the early rise of tech startups, now design is becoming as important, if not more.

Design is (almost) more important than the product

The founders of fab.com are a testament to the importance of design. Not only is their product focused on design – with daily design inspiration and supporting offers, but the design came way before the product itself. At a recent talk, the fab.com founders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer explained how they launched the site after a failed attempt at a social network, and they started with just a simple homepage, beautifully designed with a signup box. Only there was nothing to sign up for. This didn’t put people off however, with the design concept drawing people in, and even seeing the business into profitability just six weeks in.

Design matters to users

For those who are still unconvinced of the importance of design to any product or site, or those that think features outweigh design, look no further than Instagram. Taking off in an incredibly crowded space of mobile photo applications, Instagram succeeded because it allowed individuals to achieve quality design, easily.

This was executed brilliantly by Instagram. Not a free-for-all as we’ve seen with the likes of Mypsace, where anyone could make endless iterations and addons to make something look cool, but you simply choose from a number of filters provided for you, bringing your photo from standard to awesome. Instagram is popular because it allows us to add good quality design to the wealth of content being shared online and it clearly matters to us, and our communities.

Design doing the hard work

While it may be a slightly cynical way to look at it, design has also risen in importance out of necessity. Whereas once we browsed fairly leisurely with far fewer sites and apps demanding our attention, now we are faced with a glut of content and because of this, our time online is at a premium. Interestingly, we are also condensing the same amount of browsing activity into shorter spaces of time, meaning we’re taking in just as much, only a lot faster.

A recent survey by Sandvine found that while peak time online decreased by 2.5 hours to 2 hours over 6 months in 2011, the per-subscriber usage remained the same. What this means is that websites have to work harder to get our attention; garish design, multiple features and buttons, chunky text and multiple buttons are not going to do the job here. Instead, what we need is beautifully designed corners of the internet, simple but breathtaking that capture our attention and provide a haven from the online noise.

Design in Demand

As a testament to the rise in design heroes in tech, a recent study by Elance (an online employment solution) found an insane rise in the growth of creative jobs posted on the site. Creative postings overall account for 42 per cent of vacancies on the site, with graphic design being the second most in-demand skill across the Elance network. Good news for designers.

Of course, this renewed focus on design isn’t suggesting that you should hide a poor product behind beautiful design. But if you’re planning on activating a brand through social media or digital technology, whether it be a company launch, app or social media campaign, ensure that design is front and centre, put the designer in the driving seat and see what happens.

When measuring the performance of any online advertisements, the main method is to measure clicks, cost per impression, and user interaction rates. It’s a one size fits all service that has been implemented into the different online mediums. Yet Google is looking towards a medium that they’ve ignored until recently for inspiration in measuring ad performance: TV and its metric, Gross Rating Point (GRP).

Google is introducing it as part of their new Brand Activate initiative, Google’s attempt to create a different system to measure advertising performance for brands. The metric at the center of it is GRP, which is calculated by multiplying audience reach by frequency (the number of times an ad is exposed to an average person during a certain time period).

While the main strength of GRP is that while it provides a rough measurement of how you approached your target audience, it weakness is just that: it’s a rough estimate that provides no real analysis of how well a campaign did. However, Google is hoping that combining it with real-time analytics and its simplistic nature will make the service more accurate and entice more advertisers to use its services.

Writing on the Google Agency blog, Vice President for Display Advertising Neal Mohan said: “We’re working to build truly useful metrics into the tools that advertisers already use to manage their campaigns, so they’ll be actionable withins seconds.”

Active View & Active GRP

There are two Brand Activate features being rolled out to advertisers. The first is ‘Active View’ which will be made available in the coming weeks within Google Display Network Reserve. The feature will only count viewed impressions – defined by the Interactive Advertising Board (IAB) as a display that is at least 50 per cent viewable on the screen for at least one second – meaning that advertisers will only pay for viewed impressions.

The second is called ‘Active GRP’ which is a feature normally associated with offline media campaigns. There are two main features behind Active GRP: The first is that it’s built into the ad servicing tools that Google’s publishers and marketers already use, meaning that users can make decisions about their advertisements in real-time. Currently it’s being tested with clients using DoubleClick for Advertisers before it’s rolled out to other products.

The second is its methodology for measuring Active GRP, calculated by combining aggregated panel and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided) and working in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions. Both methods will be submitted to the Media Rating Council for accreditation and Google aims to introduce other measurement initiatives for brand marketers, including a brand lift measurement product in the form of campaign insights.