I’m sure we’re about to see a flood of articles and posts about if this is another sign of a tech bubble, if Pinterest is really worth that valuation, how they haven’t established a revenue model, how they infringe on copyright, and other various attempts to knock them down. It should be noted that these days, that’s probably a big sign of success to receive that kind of criticism.

The biggest implication of this though is that an investment at a $1.5B valuation means that Pinterest is virtually taking themselves out of being an acquisition target. For investors to get any sort of positive return on that money, they’re looking at a multibillion dollar deal. The only companies that have the cash and business fit to be interested at that price are Google and Amazon, and until Pinterest is generating a ton of revenue it is tough to justify for those companies.

There are a few more things I find interesting about Pinterest along with this news.

Not an overnight success

Pinterest has been portrayed by many as being an overnight success. In reality, it’s been a four year journey, although it’s quite true that it accelerated exponentially in the last year.

Pinterest is not a mobile-first company

A great deal of the “hot startups” lately are mobile-first companies like Instagram, and a lot of the startup advice is that mobile is the future. While mobile is obviously important to Pinterest and their future, the company originally pivoted from being an iPhone app to being a desktop-driven experience where it took off. How many times has that happened successfully?

Huge valuation without much technical difficulty

Don’t get me wrong, obviously there are technical challenges involved in scaling to the size of Pinterest, but their initial product was not a challenging technical problem. Like Instagram, they took something that was already being done by many other services but designed it better and made it a great experience. That IS challenging, but not for hardcore technical reasons.

Another Valuable Company Built on the back of Facebook

Facebook’s platform and access to the social graph has been a huge boon for many businesses. However, thus far Zynga is really the only company anyone can point to that really grew to a billion dollar company thanks to the Facebook platform. Pinterest may be the second company that can fit into that class now. While it’s not an app that lives inside Facebook, and you can sign up with Twitter or email, it’s clear that Facebook was a major piece of Pinterest getting viral exponential growth.

Where’s the revenue?

As I pointed out above, we’ll probably see many upcoming articles about Pinterest’s lack of revenue so far. But to be fair, they have barely tried. The product obviously has a very natural fit with ecommerce, so it will be interesting to see how they can profit from being the source of discovery for so many purchases.

Overall, raising an investment round like this does not mean Pinterest is assured long-term success. They need to keep innovating and pushing forward, but this investment should give them plenty of runway to go for it on their own and become an important independent company.

You can follow me on Pinterest as well.

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Just days after introducing zip code targeting to Google AdWords, Google announced another set of changes to the AdWords property, this time an update that will improve matching behavior for keyword or phrase in search queries.

Following this update the traditional “keyword or phrase” and [exact] match rules will now include misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents, abbreviations and other variants.

According to Google:

Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.

Advertisers who already have misspellings, variants, abbreviations, etc in their AdWords campaign will not be affected significantly by this change. However for those who do not have these variants already included; Google’s new Matching Behaviour could prove to be a beneficial tool to tap into the pool of potential traffic that might have gone unnoticed due to keyword misspellings, variants, and abbreviations usage.

Google warns that advertisers must be aware of two things:

1. The new “Matching Behavior” will be automatically activated and set as the default behavior to all AdWords accounts unless advertisers decide to ‘opt-out’ an option Google will offer to advertisers in this controlled feature. If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, Google will begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options”.
2. It is important, that advertisers are careful while assigning acronyms, misspellings (that are relevant to their ads) etc to their ad campaigns as it will have a direct impact on their ad performance and campaign budgets.

The actual matching won’t start until mid-May to give users a chance to opt out if they’d like.

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What they found was that 65% of people thought ranking searches based on previous searches was bad and that 73% believed using past searches to personalize search results was not okay. So it sounds like an overwhelming majority, in both cases, valued privacy more than customized search results.

This next infographic from Loeb & Loeb LLP. illustrates some key finding in regard to gathering and protection of our personal information and the ability to opt-out of the collection of our behavioral information. It’s a hot issue right now and there are many protection in place to protect consumers, but like any system it can only be trusted as well as it is enforced and that’s most likely where we are coming up short.

It’s loaded with information so read carefully and enjoy:

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To that point there were some very minor sounding changes that accompanied the design change and one of those is worthy of your attention.

The change I want to bring out is one made to the administration function and it’s something called the Activity Log. Accessing this function allows you to view a timeline of engagement on your page so you have a nice tidy little list of your posts as well as posts on other pages that tagged you in chronological order.

To the right of each post you can hover and see the number of likes, shares and comments as well.

To me this is a great way to manage some of your own engagement. I jump to this page to view and comment on updates that I’ve been tagged on and to talk back with folks that have commented on my updates.

I find this format to be much handier than jumping around and responding to update notices. I’ve been doing a better job of participating since this format came online.

To access the activity log you must be using your page as the page admin and not as your personal profile. You can switch by clicking dropdown arrow at top right of page. Once you do this you need to open the Admin Panel if it’s not open and then click on the Manage button and select Use activity log.

Once you complete these steps you’ll be presented with a list of activity that dates back to the time you created your page.

You can more info on the activity log from Facebook help pages

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Leveraging Social Media to Recreate Panem

Through a dynamic digital campaign, you can become an official citizen of Panem. First, you have to visit the Capitol Network and register for your District Identification Pass. By logging into Facebook or Twitter, the system will register you as a citizen of Panem and assign you an occupation, district and Panem Citizen Number. Your District Identification Pass (DIP) also holds a QR code that scans back to the Capitol website. You can download your DIP as a Facebook profile or cover photo, Twitter profile photo, Google+ profile photo or even a mobile or tablet wallpaper image. You can also go as far as ordering a physical DIP through CafePress for free off Facebook. Unfortunately, you have to pay a few bucks for shipping but the ID card is good quality.

Once you have completed this process, you are prompted to join your district on Facebook. Each District has its own Facebook page complete with a district mayor, recruiter and journalist. These individuals are fans and genuine enthusiasts of The Hunger Games who participated in elections, held earlier this year on the Facebook Wall and were chosen by ‘The Capitol’ to be administrators. The mayors act as leaders for the Districts, and are responsible for celebrating its citizens and relaying communication from the Capitol on Facebook. The recruiters help spread the word through the Districts primarily on Twitter and the journalists (who are established bloggers) receive ‘tips’ from citizens and periodically write about Hunger Games news.

By giving enthusiasts responsibility to participate in this alternate reality of Panem, The Hunger Games is able to push its message further than it would through one channel. Normally, I would recommend against segmenting fan pages in this manner but for The Hunger Games it makes sense. For fans of the book and upcoming film, they have provided huge incentive to play along by rallying behind a District to gain a sense of community and get exclusive content such as watching sneak peek movie clips or becoming a beta tester for their new video game. Also The Hunger Games Facebook page proves to have more engaged fans in comparison to another popular young adult book turned blockbuster phenomenon, Twilight. On average, the Twilight Facebook page receives .20% engagement where as The Hunger Games page receives .90%.

A Deeper Look into District Pages

Each District page on Facebook has a tab called The Square, which was the main gathering area for all districts in the book. These tabs are fan-gated so only those that Like the page can receive information.

The Square tab does a fantastic job of staying in character with a message board to wish tributes good luck on their way to the Hunger Games, warnings about dangers in the district, advertisements for Capitol fashion, film promotions positioned as District Sponsorships and a video player of “Capitol TV“ showing the latest trailers. Just recently the pages also announced their partnership with Get Glue to unlock District specific stickers before the movie release March 23rd.

Additional Social Media Campaigns

Using Twitter, The Hunger Games Advanced Screening Program presented by Nook allowed users to tweet special hashtags to unlock cities to show the movie before its release. If the city you tweeted was ‘unlocked’ you also were entered into a drawing to win free tickets to attend. Yahoo! also sponsored a giveaway to the red carpet premiere in which you received more entries for social sharing. As a consolation prize to participants, they also provided a live stream from the premiere hosted on Facebook to those who weren’t chosen. And finally, in the spirit of giving back, The Hunger Games also partnered with Feeding America and World Food Programme to fight against hunger. By taking a short quiz, fans can be entered to win an autographed poster and spread awareness to their networks. The tab also allows users to donate through PayPal, SMS or Credit Card.

Thanks to my friend at the Nashville Public Library, I personally became obsessed with The Hunger Games trilogy in 2011 and have been very impressed with their social campaign efforts thus far. With the correct strategy, The Hunger Games will be able to leverage these networks as a base to promote subsequent movies, allowing their alternate online universe to morph and change with the story line.

And until then, may the odds ever be in their favor.

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