Matt Kapko

When Facebook burst onto the scene nearly 11 years ago, it was battling for a position in the new Internet medium called social networking. All it had to do was beat MySpace and a few other lesser-knowns at their own games, and it did so quickly and effectively.

With Facebook at Work, a new version of the platform limited to internal corporate communications and released to a small group of partners last week, the company is trying to break into the close-knit, old boys club that is the enterprise. Unlike the consumer social media market, the business sector isn't dominated by fly-by-night organizations funded by venture capitalists that are focused on daily active users.

Facebook's plans to enter the ring with some of the stalwarts of enterprise raise many questions for the IT staff that will use and support the new services. 

Facebook and the Crowded Social Enterprise Market

Facebook is making its move at a time when the social enterprise market is well past its saturation point, according to TJ Keitt, senior analyst with Forrester Research. "Instead of finding virgin territory, Facebook will have to grapple with entrenched collaboration software veterans, incumbent social software plays and scrappy startups." 

Facebook at Work will put the company in the crosshairs of established businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Jive, Zimbra and Slack.

"Facebook has been a consumer social media innovator as well as a shrewd assembler of adjacent social media products," Keitt says. "So it stands to reason that as Facebook gets more comfortable in the enterprise space, it may seek to pull in more of these interesting consumer applications into an enterprise offering," similar to how Google rolled its family of apps into Google for Work.

Facebook at Work doesn't offer document-sharing tools or enterprise-class messaging, but Keitt says the company could move into these markets by integrating its WhatsApp chat app or another platform that it already owns.

However, features and functionality are only one piece of the pie. Facebook will also have to adequately address security concerns, effectively integrate with legacy business systems and demonstrate regulatory compliance.

Facebook at Work Is a New Channel for Internal Interaction

Corporate Facebook at Work profiles and features are only available to the employees of the companies that implement the service. Those profiles automatically include sets of information provided by the employer, and users can then add additional details.

From a Facebook at Work information page: 

"If you share something with everyone at your company, anyone with a work account at your company can see it, but it isn't visible to people outside of your company … The people who manage Facebook at Work at your company can access anything you share from your work account, just as they might access your work emails and other work files."

Facebook is showing up late to the enterprise party, but its pedigree in social media and engineering could provide the wherewithal it needs to make up for lost time. The greater challenge is in developing an entirely different model and objective for a new class of user.

Facebook Lacks Enterprise-Class Security, Services

"Facebook's big issue is that they have no enterprise presence outside of ad sales and marketing analytics," according to Daniel Rasmus, founder and principal analyst atSerious Insights. IT departments are still extremely cautious about bringing new apps into the fold, regardless of whether or not they embrace BYOD, he says.

Facebook also does not have a proven enterprise security model, according to Rasmus. 

"Facebook's algorithms aren't keyed to enterprise work, and over the years it has been demonstrated time and again that work communication is fundamentally different from social or public communication, Rasmus says. "So what is known about consumer communications may be useless — or worse, wrong — when applied inside the enterprise."

John Baptista, associate professor of information systems at the U.K.'s Warwick Business School, is skeptical of Facebook's moves in the enterprise because the dynamics at play are so different.

"Social interactions within the enterprise largely support structured communication, collaborative work, finding and sharing experts and expertise," Baptista says. Facebook may try to emulate that, but it will "struggle because its nature is instead to support user-centered, unstructured postings and to follow emergent activity streams."

Rasmus says "the real threat to CIOs … is individual teams adopting Facebook outside of any standards or permissions from the enterprise."

Organizations may also be concerned about Facebook's controversial record on user privacy, particularly its widened use of that data for advertising.

"Facebook might take a different approach for this new Facebook at Work initiative but the perception is still that documents and information shared through their systems are less secure and more open to be exploited commercially," Baptista says.

"Facebook, like Google, has built its core business on collecting huge amounts of information on people, so they're going to have to create policies that reassure business leaders how they're gathering and using data," says Forrester's Keitt.

Advertising and Facebook's Consumer Shackles

AJ Bellarosa, director of digital experience for business consulting firm Bluewolf, says employees at work don't want to be distracted by ads.

"Companies need to feel that they can communicate and collaborate internally without being tracked by the host platform," he says. "An investment in technology needs to positively impact employees' lives to drive engagement and adoption."

Plenty of options exist for organizations seeking social tools, but none of them meet every enterprise need, especially in an evolving market where those needs fluctuate and are often ambiguous, Rasmus says. "Facebook's entry will just add to the confusion. It will be seen as a solution in search of a problem."

Baptista agrees and suggests that Facebook has a challenging path ahead of it if it hopes to succeed in enterprise.

Mondelez International, the food and beverage conglomerate behind such well-known brands as Cadbury, Dentyne, Oreo and Ritz, sells about 8 billion products each month. It's a stretch to suggest that technology is part of its DNA, but that will very likely change during the next five years.

"We might become one of the largest technology companies in the world," said B. Bonin Bough, Mondelez vice president of global media and consumer engagement, at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show.

How exactly could a company that sells sugary drinks and unhealthy snacks transform into a technology company and then draw from the same talent pool as Facebook, Google and other tech-centric startups with billion-dollar valuations? 

Digitized Mondelez Products on Every Aisle

The transformation will start with innovation, according to Bough. But it won't be easy. "Introducing innovation into organizations is very hard," he says. "It's hard for organizations to rapidly change."

Why is Mondelez so different than Facebook and Google? For starters, Mondelez has 12 times as many employees as Facebook, and its staff more than doubles Google's current headcount.Bough says his company will need to adopt an entirely new mentality on something he calls the "hackonomy." As part of this hackonomy, organizations create value by breaking things and breaking careers to compete in the digital age, he says.

However, transforming to a digital business isn't about creating Facebook posts, he says. "It's about setting yourself up to operate like a real-time business."

Too many businesses focus on an ambiguous desire to become digital or solve a specific problem, he says, but they should be thinking about how to attract and empower the talent that's in such limited supply.

"Our real competitors are the tech companies because they are the ones that are sourcing the top talent in the world right now," Bough says.

The Low Supply and High Demand for Top-Notch Talent

Less than one percent of the top 100 business graduate schools have course descriptions with any mention of mobile, emerging or digital technology, according to Bough.

"Have we prepared the talent that sits there to be competitive in the marketplace? I would argue that we haven't," says Bough.

He believes that companies like Mondelez must empower individuals to unleash creativity and unbounded growth, and in turn, convince new talent that they shouldn't simply focus on the familiar tech giants.

Google has an enviable track record for new services it unleashes on the masses, but not all of its bets pay off. The company supplanted many industries and carved significant roles for itself in emerging businesses during the last 16 years, but there have still been rough patches and complete misses.

No company succeeds in all of its endeavors. However, when Google fails or decides to throw in the towel on one of its many projects there are often far reaching repercussions. It sometimes doesn't matter if Google decides to sunset or shut down an underperforming product. Other times, when projects are left to die on the vine, companies that bet Google are left in the lurch.

Despite the company's ascent to a household name brand, there are still many things Google can't, hasn't or chooses not to pursue. Companies that follow Google with too much misplaced admiration run the risk of making large bets on unproven concepts. IT managers and CIOs can learn valuable lessons from Google's failed Wave (a collaboration tool), Buzz, Reader, Jaiku (a micro-blogging service), Dodgeball (the early Foursquare-like app from the same team), Authorship (a search product for publishers), Google+ and its other less-than-successful offerings. Google's experiment with its Glass smartglasses stands out as a cautionary tale for enterprises.

Google Fallibility Is Inevitable 

When a company bets on a Google product, the investment can quickly backfire so it's important to remember that Google is just as fallible as any other company. The Google name alone carries no guarantees. While Google and its employees may embrace the lessons that come with failure, smaller companies with fewer resources may not be able to afford to make such mistakes.

"Google has all the resources to do their 'moon shots'," says Joanan Hernandez, founder of the mobile augmented reality startup Mollejuo. "We don't. It's very easy for them to throw away money on experiments, but that's not our case."

Hernandez says he remains excited about those Google moon shots, but he's also careful not to embrace everything that comes out of its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Take Google Glass, for example, an aspirational project that seems to be in perpetual beta after missing its original plans for consumer release this year. "If Google doesn't have the guts to publicly stand behind their product and release it as a consumer product, why should we?" says Hernandez. He still has a bad taste in his mouth because of the way Google treated its Wave social network and worries the same fate may hit the company's smartglasses. 

Glass suffered some setbacks beyond Google's control, but the company hasn't shown enough commitment to the project to outweigh Hernandez's concerns. "It's one thing to internally develop those products, it's another to invite people to experiment with you. In the end, finances will get you sooner or later."

If Google expects others to join the party, it must demonstrate a greater commitment, according to Hernandez. "Wearable electronic glasses will come, they're inevitable, but whether they come from Google or another manufacturer remains to be seen."

Glass a Microcosm of a Larger Google Problem

Nick Selby, a police detective and CEO of StreetCred Software, says he invested a "few thousand bucks" on Google Glass as a law enforcement tool before his team eventually decided it would never go anywhere. "All I got out of it was a very expensive paperweight and some snickering friends," Selby says.

"A lot of companies were considering law enforcement applications for Glass," Selby says. "Since our product ranks the likelihood of finding and capturing fugitives, and provides situational awareness for officers that can be easily expressed geospatially, our thought was that we might use Glass to project attributes onto buildings."

Selby's optimism toward Glass quickly diminished the minute he tried on a pair. "In our experience the technology both wasn't ready and wouldn't likely be ready for the kind of nuanced display and interactivity we would require to make this useful and cop-proof."

Facebook last week detailed a number of initiatives meant to help it form a more cohesive strategy for implementing its arsenal of recently acquired advertising technology.

"It has taken us some time to figure out what we uniquely offer to the world," Brian Boland, vice president of ad tech at Facebook, said during a media briefing at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., last week.

Boland says the company wants to "reconnect the pieces" of the ad tech it acquired and built, and explain how they fit together to form a clear vision for Facebook's future. Facebook reframed its ad tech products to better enable advertisers and publishers to reach their target audiences and accurately measure the effectiveness of the ads it serves on Facebook and on the Web.

Facebook's People-Based Marketing

"People-based marketing" is the new name of the game for Facebook, according to Boland, and it's pulling out all the stops to give advertisers and publishers more confidence that the social network's tools can help grow their businesses.

"This will help you understand everything you'll see us do for the next couple of years," Boland says. "Every product you see us come out with on the advertising side will hang in this framework."

Facebook serves different interests, sometimes narrow and specific to Facebook, other times much more broad in the digital space, and the company has no plans to combine its suite of ad tech businesses into a single platform.

"There are certain tools that advertisers need to run all their digital that are independent of what you do on Facebook," Boland told CIO.com during a quick follow-up after the event. "The tools we're building here will enable marketers to have a comparable view of all their different publishers."

However, the most difficult challenge for Facebook and any other online business that sells ads across multiple devices is measurement. "We think the current systems are fundamentally outdated," Boland tells media and colleagues assembled to hear Facebook's plans.

Brian Boland, VP of advertising technology, Facebook

Facebook believes it made progress on this front, and it is now taking a more direct approach to how it pursues ad dollars from publishers and brands.

Facebook Ad Tech and ROI

Boland says businesses shouldn't advertise on Facebook if they're not sure of the ROI. "Don't spend a dollar unless you know that dollar is delivering ROI," he says.

However, a robust CRM system is required if marketers want to reach the right individuals and then match their online and offline activities to track sales. That's where Facebook thinks it can help.

The advertising and publishing industries have invested billions of dollars in CRM, but they still struggle with getting the most value from the data, according to David Jakubowski, head of ad tech at Facebook. "What do I do with that big data? These [Facebook] tools…enable that at scale, from personalization through to reach and measurement," Jakubowski says.

Facebook's utilities include its recently expanded Audience Network, an ad serving platform for mobile apps; LiveRail, a technology platform for video ads that Facebook acquired last summer; and Atlas, the ad platform it acquired from Microsoft and rebuilt so marketers can measure and manage all of their digital campaigns.

With Atlas, Facebook is trying to solve two industry-wide problems: bringing mobile marketing up to speed with mobile usage and reaching the right people with the right ads, according to Erik Johnson, who runs sales and service for Atlas.

"Mobile marketing hasn't kept pace with the usage of mobile," Johnson says. "People are tired of seeing bad ads, and they see bad ads because they're not targeted the right way."

Mark Trefgarne, former CEO of LiveRail and current director of product management for the ad platform at Facebook, says this disconnect is stems from a hesitance to embrace new technologies and approaches.

"Right now we're in a world where we think mobile is substantially underrepresented," Reframe says. "It's a case of changing decades-old practices to make sure they keep pace with where people spend their time."

With Facebook Users' Time Comes Responsibility

Boland says Facebook feels a sense of responsibility for the time that people spend on the site. "That time is going to have a portion of their lives taken up with marketing messages and advertising," he says. "I feel a responsibility to make that time is really worth their while." 

When asked about competitors, Jakubowski immediately mentioned Google and Sizmek and specified a set of weaknesses that he thinks will serve as competitive advantages for Facebook. 

"We have without question the largest real-name identity platform on the planet, so there's nobody who can do it at exactly our scale," Jakubowski says, noting that Google is working to address this problem and is expected to release something related in the near future. 

Jakubowski cites Amazon, Twitter and Salesforce as companies with notable data assets, but he also said those companies still aren't on Facebook's level. "You're talking a couple hundred million against 1.3 billion" monthly active users on Facebook today, he says.

The media session at Facebook's sprawling campus along the San Francisco Bay ended on the topic of privacy, and more specifically, a line that Facebook doesn't want to cross.

"We want to make sure that targeting is valuable and additive, and not creepy," Boland says. "The tools that we create [could let] marketers to do things that would be uncomfortable for a person."

Facebook provides details at the bottom of each ad on why users see specific ads and gives them controls to see more of less of those ads in the future. However, this solution to privacy concerns may seem lacking to some. 

In just a few short years, advertising technology has become one of the fastest growing areas in the tech world. There are now hundreds, maybe even thousands, of ad tech companies vying for a piece of the digital marketing pie, but few are self-sustaining businesses.

The crowded space of startups building tools and solutions for ad management, analytics, targeting and optimization is ripe for consolidation. As companies run out of capital or drag on without appropriately evolving in this opportunistic but complex field, acquisitions are likely.

"There are a lot more ad tech [mergers and acquisitions] coming," says David Berkowitz, CMO at creative and technology agency MRY. "There are so many companies out there trying to solve marketers' challenges, and challenges keep getting more complex with more money going into digital."

An Opportunity for CIOs — and a Challenge

Complexity and uncertainty about ad tech are leading companies to make decisions — sometimes based on nothing more than gut instinct — that directly impact the CIO. Framing this challenge as an opportunity for the CIO is critical.

"The CIO will have no shortage of technologies to vet in the years ahead," Berkowitz says. "Marketers may keep commanding larger tech budgets, but that doesn't mean marketers understand the ins and outs of tech."

Berkowitz says marketers will need support from their CIOs in coming years, as they face steep technology learning curves. "CIOs can also prove to be indispensable by helping marketers understand what to watch out for, and whether threats or opportunities involving technologies are being utilized."

Healthy relationships between CIOs, CMOs and their legal teams will be essential in the future, according to Berkowitz. 

Ad tech consolidation won't resolve all the complexity over night, but comprehensive technology suites are emerging as large companies cobble various pieces together from within or via acquisition. 

"We will see content marketing technology stacks begin to emerge," says Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst with Altimeter Group. "These are end-to-end software solutions that will integrate all aspects of content marketing: planning, production, analytics, targeting, optimization, governance, legal, compliance, etc.," 

The Irony of Ad Tech 

Adding to the complexity is a bevy of new buzzwords, according to Berkowitz. It's all about "programmatic," "native advertising," big data or some other catchy term.

"The more people use these terms, the less they mean," Berkowitz says. "Programmatic and native are almost entirely at odds with each other, and yet you see some ad tech companies talking about 'programmatic native' without appreciating that it's an oxymoron."

A select few ad tech companies recently went public, but many others were acquired and even more will likely flame out over time. The opportunity for independent success is on the decline, while the group of potential suitors grows. Ad tech startups used to hope for companies such as Google, Microsoft or AOL to come knocking, but today's buyers also include social networks, publishers, ad agency holding companies and major brands.

Facebook has made "big advances" in ad tech, according to the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke on a recent earnings call during which Facebook expanded its Audience Network, closed its acquisition of LiveRail and re-launched Atlas, the ad platform it acquired from Microsoft.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg described these "large and strategic investments" in ad tech as long term and hinted at a heightened period of investment to come. "We're investing in ad-tech for a simple reason. Consumers are shifting quickly to mobile and the advertising industry is not keeping up," she said during the earnings call.

Marketers and advertisers balk because they lack confidence in the measurement of mobile ad performance, Sandberg said, adding that the most commonly used systems are largely cookie-based, and they overemphasize the value of the last click.

Berkowitz of MRY agrees and says most publishers and marketers struggle to make money in mobile, especially those that don't sell app installs. "There are a lot of buyers who are clamoring to improve the breadth and depth of their mobile-driven media offerings," he says.

Ad Tech is Never Fully Deployed

Marketers and publishers clearly need better tools for mobile, according to Sandberg.

"This is an industry problem that we believe we are well-placed to solve," Sandberg says. "I think we're in the middle of what is a very fundamental shift from marketing that is cookie based on a PC, one desktop, to people based marketing on multiple devices, to marketing that is primarily for online sales, to marketing that affects those online and offline sales on mobile." 

Merged content and advertising will eventually comprise what many refer to today as the marketing cloud, according to Altimeter Group's Lieb. "These software stacks will absorb social media software solutions as well as talk to the stacks that manage digital advertising."

However, there's still a lot of work for Facebook and others to do before this happens, and there will always be something new and different to tackle.

"I think we're pretty far from being fully deployed on even this big shift," Sandberg says. "But I think in our industry nothing is ever fully deployed, that as soon as we catch up here, there is going to be another movement and something else that happens that we have to react to and build the technology for."

Most people don't want to be caught at work with Facebook open on their computers or smartphones, but that may change very soon. Facebook is working on a new social network for the workplace, called "Facebook at Work," that would pit the king of social media against more business-savvy stalwarts such as Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn, according to the Financial Times.

Social media has slowly percolated into business life, but for the most part it remains a separate function and utility during working hours. No company has successfully made the leap from consumer to enterprise and combined the two together at any scale even remotely similar to Facebook's 1.35 billion monthly users.

Facebook at Work will reportedly look and operate like the traditional version of Facebook, but it will allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate on documents in a space that's separate from their personal identities and activities. The product's success will almost certainly rest on Facebook's capability to convince CIOs and IT professionals that it can deliver these features in a secure, private and non-intrusive way.

Many businesses have no interest in seeing their employees' professional and personal lives mix any further. Ongoing user privacy concerns must also be resolved if Facebook wants to convince CIOs to embrace a tool many have purposely blocked on corporate networks for years.

Sameer Patel, senior vice president and general manager of SAP's enterprise collaboration product Jam, welcomes Facebook's entry into the enterprise space and calls the move a significant step forward for in an industry that's seen many companies waste time and money on social tools that were quickly abandoned.

"Buying bloated, heavy software that promises to do what Facebook does doesn't make any sense," Patel says.

Polarization of the Social Enterprise

The social enterprise market is polarized around two specific use cases, Patel says. Lightweight communication software such as social feeds or instant messaging sit on one end of the spectrum, while deep business applications that enable large-scale collaboration and improve core functionalities including CRM, human resources and supply chain sit at the other.

Both models see high rates of adoption as more businesses and employees start to understand the complementary nature of both, according to Patel. Facebook could further validate that polarization by offering its lightweight tools and familiar user experience in a business setting.

"If your world requires you to toggle between internal and external, this becomes a natural place to do some of your fringe collaboration," Patel says.

Social enterprise tools that remain in the middle ground and that don't solve process problems or offer lightweight tools will be harder to justify, according to Patel. "There's been too much stuff in the middle of that paradigm that CIOs are just scratching their heads."

Rob Koplowitz, vice president and principal analyst with research firm Forrester, says that although Facebook appears to be following Google's lead into the enterprise, it's not clear how far it intends to go. Facebook's current capabilities could, however, already compete with some popular enterprise social offerings including Yammer, Chatter, IBM Connections, Lync orCisco Jabber, he says.

From a Forrester research note written by Koplowitz:

"Facebook certainly has a familiar user experience that people love, and could blur the lines between employees and customers in a compelling way. They have the ability to drive enterprises toward new levels of customer activation. It's not clear how far they would want go with an offering like this. To fully compete in the enterprise requires deep and complex capabilities that aren't required in a consumer offering. It can also be a tough, low margin business where cost of sales can be high."

Facebook's move into the enterprise could also bolster its overall value. By elevating the role of its platform to an enterprise level, Facebook could become much more relevant and gain an understanding of the traditional 9-to-5 workday. "It's a third of your day that they don't know what you do," says Patel. "It's starting to learn about another dimension of your life that they would have never known.".

If Facebook makes significant inroads in the enterprise it could become the purest example of the successful consumerization of IT to date. Despite its sagging interest among teens and younger users, Facebook remains the one place that ties the entire digital life together, according to Patel.

Twitter's director of ad research wants to piggyback on the surprising success of the weekly "Serial" podcast to illustrate his company's capability to amplify even the "oldest form of electronic media."

"Social media is getting interwoven into this pretty old storytelling device, which is the weekly radio show," Jeffrey Graham said during his keynote at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Summit in Hollywood. The show's fans connect on Twitter, and they create offline listening parties and meet-ups to discuss the twists and turns of true murder mysteries.

The show's producers began promoting the show on Twitter months before it aired, and the excitement continued to grow ever since. Every Thursday, following the release of a new episode, conversations about the show spike on Twitter, according to Graham, who presented data to demonstrate just how much the conversation grew after each of the last seven weekly episodes.

"Every week people are sort of waiting to hear the next evidence of whether this guy is going to be exonerated or not," he says, referring to Adnan Syed, who is currently serving a life sentence in Maryland for killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee.

"The show is a serious show. It's about some dude who may be innocent, and he's been sitting in jail for 10 years," Graham says. "Social media is allowing this very traditional form of storytelling to get more interesting and get more powerful for audiences, but it's also creating power for NPR as they are able to use social media to spread and grow the audience."

Serious Show Equals Serious Branding Opportunity

"Serial" is the no. 1 podcast on iTunes, and the show's sole advertiser is one of the most obvious beneficiaries. Fans will no doubt recognize the Nick Thorburn song that so beautifully and simply weaves one segment to the next, and they'll also very likely know the corny MailChimp advertisement that runs at the beginning of each episode.

Graham played the song and the ad during his keynote and spotlighted how MailChimp capitalizes on how the child in the ad amusingly mispronounces its name as "MailKimp."

"It's really interesting how this ad became part of the conversation about the show," says Graham, who shared related tweets with the hashtag #MailKimp.

MailChimp also registered the domain name mailkimp.com, secured the @mailkimp handle on Twitter, and the company's CEO and founder added the hashtag #MailKimp to his Twitter profile, according to Graham.

"It's a strange world that we live in right now where all these things sort of come together," Graham says.

Much of Twitter's recent research focuses on how its service affects personal relationships and user behavior with respect to television. There's still, however, a lot that Twitter doesn't know. For example, Graham can't say (or even guess) how many "Serial" listeners discovered the podcast on Twitter.

The enterprise sector is undergoing such a transformation that companies recently deemed unfit for the corporate world are now sitting at the head of the table. So if IBM's partnership with Apple seemed like a hell-freezing-over moment in the middle of summer, last month's follow-up deal with Twitter would have to be characterized as a deep freeze.

Enterprise is no longer exclusive to the stodgy or empowered companies that coast by on conformity. IBM and Twitter proclaim that they will "change the way business decisions are made" by integrating Twitter data into IBM analytics tools, developing mission-critical apps for enterprises and training 10,000 outside consultants to create other custom apps.

Once the initial shock of IBM making such a profound bet on Twitter wears off, CIOs might find at least some of what they've been looking for all along in Twitter: unprompted, real-time sentiments and insights from consumers. It could also provide a much-needed boost or reinforcement for CIOs who feel especially threatened by the rise of CMOs.

"It's about social data maturing and coming out of its own little bubble, and starting to flow through the veins of big business and big organizations," Will McInness, CMO at the social analytics platform Brandwatch, tells CIO.com.

IBM Validates Twitter's Value for Enterprise

"It feels like a real mainstreaming of social data," he says. "What happens if you merge social data with point-of-sale data? What happens if you apply big data competing to that? Not in some sort of theoretical way, but in a practical corporation or government context."

Twitter and IBM want to bring structure and context to the 500 million tweets that are posted every day. Although most companies still base their business decisions on an incredibly small set of data, the companies are confident that tweets deserve to play a much greater role.

Twitter aspires to become the "world's largest archive of public human thought that has ever existed," Twitter's vice president of data strategy Chris Moody said during last week's day-long presentation to analysts.

"Our data does tell businesses what the world is thinking about any topic at any given time," he says. "In the future, every significant business decision will have Twitter data as an input."

CIOs will have to look beyond the inherent and perhaps more natural marketing strengths of Twitter to get there, however. While most CMOs have already worked through some of their questions and doubts over the past few years, most CIOs are still rather skeptical of social media and Twitter in particular, says McInnes.

"[CIOs] will have questions about the utility and integrity of the data" and "some valid questions about the ability to derive useful sentiment analysis from this data," he adds.

"I think this kind of initiative is a really powerful way for [CIOs] to show value beyond backroom IT infrastructure," McInnes says.

Extracting Sentiments from a Giant Petri Dish of Tweets

Twitter's value proposition for the enterprise isn't so much about what's contained within 140 characters of a single tweet, it's all the other data washing around that provides context and actual insights, he says, likening the effect to a giant petri dish.

"Twitter is the best we've got in addition to expert forums," says McInnes. And compared to Facebook, he says: "Twitter is a bit looser, it's more decentralized, the networks are messier, and I think that plays to a business advantage."

No wonder Moody says there's an "endless set of applications you could build around our data." Twitter data is already being gleaned for product insights, customer relationship and supply chain management, logistics, inventory forecasting and fraud prevention. But with IBM's help, Twitter data could also expand to vertical industries like healthcare and finance.

"We're talking about putting our data in mission critical applications for IBM customers," says Moody.

These accomplishments may not get Twitter on the evening news, but it could lead to much more meaningful revenue and business outcomes. "Finding efficiencies in your supply chain can be tens of millions of dollars in uplift," says McInnes.

Twitter says many enterprises have shown a growing interest in its data and that more deals will be coming soon.

Snapchat just recently started to include advertisements in its popular ephemeral messaging app, but its advertising strategy is notably different than its competitors' strategies. Snapchat says it has no interest in tricking its users into clicking ads by blurring the line between advertising and organic content created by actual users.

The company's ads are clearly identified as sponsored content, and they aren't placed in users' personal communications, such as "snaps" or chats. "That would be totally rude," the company wrote in a blog post announcing its first ad for Universal Pictures' film "Ouija." "We want to see if we can deliver an experience that's fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted."

The majority of social media platforms purposefully gather as much user data as possible to help brands place relevant and targeted ads. Snapchat calls that strategy "creepy," but the reality is that it can't deliver targeted ads even if it wants to.

"Snapchat is falling back on an old advertising technique — if you have a weakness, turn it into a strength," says Adam Kleinberg, CEO of interactive agency Traction. "The weakness is that Snapchat doesn't have rich data to collect if they wanted to because the majority of the messages on that platform are visual in nature. And since they have no data, they're doing the best they can with the hand they're dealt — telling users that they don't collect data because they don't think it's the right thing to do."

Kleinberg says Snapchat could become particularly valuable to marketers due to two things: passion and promotion. "When people are passionate about a brand already — maybe it's in entertainment or fashion or a brand like Red Bull that people are drawn to — this is a great platform to be on because people on it are eager to get messages from those brands."

Most brands simply aren't that popular or appealing, Kleinberg says. "Kraft salad dressing releasing a new flavor is not going to have the same success as Eminem releasing a new album." 

Snapchat Advertising: Old School Format, New School Delivery

Universal Pictures wasn't the first company to place an advertisement on Snapchat, but it was the first to pay Snapchat for an ad. Taco Bell experimented with the service during the past few months, and it amassed more than 200,000.

The select brands that embraced the platform early are seeing their bets pay off with phenomenal engagement rates. Taco Bell recently told Adweek.com that about 80 percent of its followers open its snaps and 90 percent of those people view the messages in their entirety. It's easy to understand why brands might be willing to overlook some of Snapchat's weaknesses when you compare that success to the low single-digit engagement averages for organic posts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, as Snapchat attracts more brands that are willing to pay for ads, those engagement numbers could significantly decrease. The company is young and just beginning to evolve into an ad-supported network, and determining performance is a challenge. Brands that consistently attract engaged audiences, however, could want to strike while the iron is hot.

Snapchat also appears to be focusing on linear TV-like ads, which have always fallen under the "spray and pray" category of big media advertising. The 20-second Snapchat spot for "Ouija" is similar to a traditional movie trailer. Measuring accountability for these types of ads isn't easy, but Snapchat brings one clearly unique feature to the table.

Touch as a Game Changer for Snapchat Ads

Snapchat users must keep their fingers on mobile device screens to view snaps in their entirety, and the company's ads work the same way. "The fact that you have to touch the ad to watch it does give a higher indication of engagement," Kleinberg says. "If you don't want to see it, you can just let go."

By eschewing data collection and targeted ads, Snapchat could also solve digital marketing's reach issue, according to Kleinberg. 

"Marketers want to reach large audiences and they want to target as specifically as they can," he says. "The problem with that is as soon as you start honing your target, you reduce the size of the audience you reach. By eliminating the capability to target, marketers can buy larger audiences without feeling bad about 'going too broad.'"

Social media apps that promise ephemeral communications or true anonymity frequently fail to live up to all meaningful expectations.

User locations are tracked without permission. "Disappearing" photos and messages are hacked in massive numbers. Users who thought they were communicating anonymously are discovered and linked to their real identities.

That's just the start of the laundry list of allegations against services including Snapchat and Whisper. If there is a lesson to be learned from the past few months, it's that nothing disappears forever, and people are often tracked by the apps they willingly use every day.

Privacy in the era of social media is a promise left unfulfilled. The events of the past couple of months make this abundantly clear. In almost every case, the companies place the onus of managing, maintaining and securing privacy entirely on users.

Last month's hack of more than 100 celebrities' personal iCloud accounts spotlights the inherent vulnerability of Web-based services, regardless of the company in charge. Apple accurately claimed that it wasn't hacked, but the personal accounts of some of its most high-profile users were overtaken. 

Snapchat Hack Exposes More Than 260,000 Users

Snapchat is again in the privacy crosshairs barely a month after the iCloud debacle. Another anonymous hacker claims to have gained access to Snapsaved, a third-party app that lets Snapchat users save the pictures they receive via the service before they self-destruct. 

Some estimates suggest more than 260,000 Snapchat users were compromised. Snapchat quickly distanced itself from the snafu by claiming it's not at fault if users share their login details with outside parties. 

The company later followed up with a blog post that outlined its opposition to third-party apps, but it did little to stop the bleeding or effectively shut down such apps. Instead, Snapchat blamed its users.

From the blog post: 

"When you give your login credentials to a third-party application, you're allowing a developer, and possibly a criminal, to access your account information and send information on your behalf."

Snapchat did not respond to a CIO.com request for further comment. 

Overall, the response is woefully lacking for a company that already settled charges with the FTC over the amount of data it collects and in relation to false promises about the disappearance of messages sent through its app. Snapchat owes its users a more deliberate mechanism to ensure privacy, especially because more than half of its users are under the age of 18.

The company says it's working with Google and Apple to remove apps from their app stores that use Snapchat's API. The real questions: Why are these apps able to access the API? Why is there an API at all? Snapchat says it plans to release a public API for developers but until then, "any application that isn't ours but claims to offer Snapchat services violates our terms of use and can't be trusted."

Cloud-based leaks and hacks are mounting, and Snapchat should do more to slow the trend. The hacked Snapsaved app amassed almost 13GB of photos, including images from users who never used the app but unknowingly sent photos to others who had.

Users sometimes expect more privacy than Snapchat could ever realistically provide. While it wouldn't do the company much good to admit this fact, it could at least come clean about how it exaggerated the promise of privacy in the past. Telling users to stop using third-party apps just doesn't cut it. 

Whisper Unwittingly Exposes Privacy Flaws 

The dust had barely settled around Snapchat when things took a more damning turn for one of it competitors. Whisper, an app that promises user anonymity and promotes itself as a safe haven for open and intimate communications, was hit with serious accusations from The Guardian.

During meetings about a potential partnership, the newspaper discovered that Whisper was tracking the location of its users, monitoring the activity of users deemed potentially newsworthy and storing that data indefinitely.

Whisper's trove of data has a full history of every message posted using the app, including messages that were previously deleted, according to The Guardian. Users who opt out of geolocation services were reportedly still tracked via IP data, which can be used to determine location within 500 meters.

A war of words erupted, including a point-by-point rebuttal from The Guardian after one Whisper executive dismissed the reports, on Twitter, as "lousy with falsehoods" and a "pack of vicious lies." 

Whisper Editor in Chief Neetzan Zimmerman responded first, and CEO Michael Heyward eventually stepped in a couple days later to address the claims in a blog post.

The split response highlighted a gap in the pair's response to some of The Guardian's most alarming claims. Zimmerman quickly dismissed a series of unattributed quotes as fabrication and "outright lies," while Heyward said the company was still investigating the matter.

"Our top priority is to ensure people feel comfortable sharing their most intimate and personal thoughts," Heyward wrote, after mincing words over what specific user data is collected and the extent to which users can be identified based on the information.  

Heyward says Whisper collects IP addresses and deletes them after seven days, collects the GPS location only of users who opt in, and does not collect any personally identifiable information, such as names, email addresses or phone numbers.

The Whisper CEO also says the company does not actively track users, but his comments suggest some employees (particularly those who spoke to The Guardianabout tracking users) may be doing just that. An investigation into the matter is ongoing, and the company is withholding further comment until it learns more. 

"Above all else, we always strive to do right by our users. We have zero tolerance for any employee that violates that trust," Heyward writes.

If there is any silver lining for Snapchat, Whisper and other services that fail to live up to users' privacy expectations it's that they're not alone. A recent survey conducted by HPfound that on average companies are hit with one successful cyber attack or hack every four days. 

Facebook is trying to take cross-platform advertising to uncharted territory with a complete revision and relaunch of its Atlas ad serving platform. It's the second ad network of sorts from the world's largest social network and some are already suggesting how it could unleash Facebook's vault of data in ways never seen before.

The company and some of its initial partners are describing Atlas as a watershed moment for digital advertising because of its capability to track the effectiveness of ads as users jump from one screen to another. Facebook is also taking direct aim at Google's DoubleClick display ad business with an infrastructure designed to deliver ads outside Facebook based on an approach it calls "people-based marketing."

Atlas measures ad campaigns and tracks the path to purchase as consumers switch devices, was acquired by Facebook from Microsoft last year but has been running independently until now. With Facebook's trove of user data now integrated into Atlas, the company says it can provide more targeted ads to users when they visit sites outside of Facebook on their desktop, tablet or mobile devices.

Atlas claims it can also measure offline sales by tracking digital campaigns from first contact to the point of purchase. Marketers can target consumers based on their age and gender, but Facebook could eventually add more interest-based data to the mix similar to the way ads are already targeted on Facebook.

40 Percent of Ads Don’t Reach the Right People

Speaking at the IAB MIXX Conference during Advertising Week in New York earlier this week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said 40 percent of the ads that target age and gender are not reaching the right people. Today's other ad servers are underperforming because they "don't take advantage of the new world," she says.

"Today's technology for ad serving and measurement -- cookies -- are flawed when used alone. Cookies don't work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can't easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world," Erik Johnson, head of Atlas, writes in a blog post announcing the relaunch.

Facebook is trying to solve a tremendous challenge for brands. Of course marketers want to put the right ads in front of the right eyeballs, but they also want to know when those ads lead to definitive results.

These things don't always happen right away. Maybe that consumer who first saw an ad on their smartphone (it could have been on a site or mobile app) later made a purchase from their laptop or in an actual store. The generally accepted truth among digital marketers is that there's no way to tell for sure.

But Atlas claims it can now help marketers track the effectiveness of their ads around the Web and help them buy more effectively targeted ads on other sites and apps using Facebook data.

User Data Will Not Be Shared

Facebook maintains that user data will kept private and anonymous, and that no personal data about users' identity will be shared with its advertising customers. But since Facebook knows who you are, it could presumably match your profile and identity with customer profiles shared by retailers and other brands.

If you're not comfortable with Facebook collecting and using your data for profit you probably shouldn't be using the service at all anyway.

Facebook is already tracking its users' activity when they visit non-Facebook sites or apps by using cookies, pixel tags and the unique hardware identifier on smartphones. But what's unclear is how Facebook can effectively track users who are not logged into Facebook on all of their devices all the time.

Without that social login or persistent cookie, there will be gaps in the measurement and value for marketers' overall media mix. Still, Facebook has data on more people than any other entity on the planet. The company's massive reach of 1.3 billion people is unmatched, so when it can say for certain that a specifically targeted user received an ad most brands will not hesitate to take faith in that opportunity.

Facebook is positioning Atlas as a simple and holistic platform for advertisers to create, buy, measure and optimize digital campaigns across mobile devices and the Internet at large. Atlas has been rebuilt from the ground up, according to the company, to help advertisers gain insights into what drives incremental reach and new sales.

The ad server provides marketers with near real-time views into ad performance so they can uncover and reduce wasted spending. It’s an ambitious effort from Facebook with massive upside potential.

The global advertising conglomerate Omnicom is the first holding company to sign an agency-wide deal with Atlas for ad serving and measurement, but there will no doubt be others in the months to come. Early access has its benefits too with Omnicom’s clients Pepsi and Intel being among the first brands to test the new platform, according to Atlas. Facebook has also signed agreements with a dozen creative partners and 17 publishers.

I could not have been more wrong two months ago when I suggested that Apple was finally getting serious about social media by adding features that replicate many of the most popular messaging apps today.

Apple's iOS 8 brings a flurry of new features to iMessage, including disappearing audio and video messages, but the experience is unintuitive and feels like an after-thought for a company that so famously copies and then improves upon services first introduced by others.

If Apple's goal with the introduction of these in-line ephemeral messaging features was to threaten or even throw a wrinkle into the rise of apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat, it has failed rather fantastically.

Apple isn't getting serious about social media, it's just playing catch-up. And it's doing a pretty poor job of it at that.

The whole process is just confusing, so bear with me as I run through the settings and explain how Apple designed this mess.

A Broken and Vague Process

To set expirations for audio and video messages, go to settings > messages > and scroll to the bottom. From there, Apple provides a couple basic options, allowing you to set those messages to expire after two minutes or never. There's also a toggle button to activate the "raise to listen" option, which allows you to listen or reply to audio messages by raising the phone to their ear.

Now here's where it gets even more confusing. The only way to be sure that your audio or video messages will actually expire after two minutes is to record and send them in-line. In other words, you can't send a video or audio file as an attachment and expect it to expire. Because it won't.

The camera icon (on the bottom left-hand side) and microphone (on the right) of any message window must be tapped and held in order to record and send any disappearing messages.

Finally once you've sent an audio or video message to another iMessage user, a small underlined link reading "Keep" will appear just below the audio or video content. Clicking on that link will remove the expiration time and keep that message in the conversation for perpetuity.

Hundreds of millions are using those messaging apps because of their simplicity and global ubiquity. Apple was on the right path by trying to add more social-like features to iMessage, but it failed to design any flow or creative mechanics to make the experience enticing or fun.

Why Bother at All?

If Apple isn’t going to design something fun and simple for disappearing messages on iMessage, why bother at all? It’s already one of the most widely used services on the planet without all the ephemerality. If Apple users want something quirky, different and a little more edgy from their messaging apps, they should continue to set their sights (and carry on those conversations) elsewhere.

Apple tried to make it in social media years ago, and it doesn’t plan to revive that fantasy any time soon, says CEO Tim Cook. Cook does, however, offer his thoughts on Google, Facebook and Twitter – and he doesn't hold back when it comes to Apple’s take on customer privacy.

Apple CEO Tim Cook unequivocally tells PBS' Charlie Rose that the company has no plans to be in the social media business. "We have no plans to be in the social networking area," he tells Rose without hesitation.

The question arose over the course of a two-part interview when Rose asked Cook: "Who is your competition?" To which Cook replied: "Google, clearly."

When Rose prodded Cook further, he essentially balked at the notion that there may be others with an extended period of silence. While many in the technology space consider Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon to be the strongest and most important platforms in existence today, Cook seems to take a different view.

"When I think competitor, I would think of Google," he says, declining to name the other two as an actual threat. "I don't consider Facebook a competitor. I consider Facebook a partner. We're not in the social networking business," he adds.

"We partner with both Facebook and Twitter, and we have integrated both of them into the operating system. So we work closely with both of them so that our customers can get access in a different and unique way to their services. And we like both companies," says Cook.

That strongly worded confirmation clarifies Apple's aspirations, or lack thereof, in social media but also puts one recent and anonymously sourced report into even greater uncertainty.

None of that is true, zero. We would never allow that to happen. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that.Tim Cook, Apple CEO

If Apple plans to acquire the struggling mobile social network Path, as was reported by Pando last week, it would almost certainly be an acqui-hire. Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin worked in product marketing at Apple for two years before he left in 2006 to take a job at Facebook for the next three-and-a-half years, so it wouldn't be completely random or surprising if he returned to the company with at least some of his team in tow.

Morin declined to comment on the reported acquisition by Apple during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt the following day, but that's pretty much par for the course in these situations. Rumors of an acquisition by Apple, whether true or not, are virtually guaranteed to drive up the perceived value of Path until the other shoe drops.

During Cook's interview with Rose he reserved his most pointed criticism for the companies (including those he considers partners, apparently) that collect and sell data on their users.

"We've taken a very different view of this than a lot of other companies have. Our view is when we design a new service we try not to collect data. So we're not reading your email, we're not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessages, we can't provide it. It's encrypted and we don't have the key. So the door is closed," he tells Rose.

'You're Not Our Product'

Days after the interview aired, Cook penned a letter on Apple's site that lays out the company's commitment to privacy in greater detail. "A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn't come at the expense of your privacy," he writes.

"Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don't build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don't 'monetize' the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don't read your email or your messages to get information to market to you," Cook adds.

Apple's business is "based on selling these," he tells Rose, pointing to a pair of new iPhones on the table during their interview. "Our business is not based on having information about you. You're not our product… So we run a very different company. I think everyone has to ask how do companies make their money. Follow the money, and if they're making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data I think you have a right to be worried and you should really understand what's happening to that data. And the companies, I think, should be very transparent about it."

Apple Pay, the company's new mobile payments system slated to launch next month, is another example where Apple is determined to stay above the fray, he says. Apple doesn't want information about the purchases its customers will make with Apple Pay because "we're not in that business," Cook says.

"One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that's iAd," Cook writes in his letter about user privacy. "We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn't get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether."

Back in the hot seat with Rose, Cook says he's "offended" by the troubling revelations made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as he reaffirmed his belief in peoples' right to privacy. Apple never worked with a government agency from any country to create a backdoor to its servers, as was reported in the press, Cook tells Rose.

"None of that is true, zero. We would never allow that to happen. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that," Cook exclaims.

While Cook understands that it can be difficult to balance the needs of national security with individuals' right to privacy, he believes the U.S. government failed to find the right balance by erring too much on the "collect everything side." "I think it's a careful line to walk. You want to make sure you're protecting the American people, but there's no reason to collection information on you or 99.9 percent of other people," he tells Rose.

What's Next For Apple?

Apple continues to make bets on the future under Cook's leadership, as he put it, but as should be expected at this point he was incredibly secretive about the details. "There are products that we're working on that no one knows about, yes. That haven't been rumored about, yes," he says.

Very few of those products will see the light of day, and Apple has always liked it that way. "A lot of what leads to innovation is curiosity. It's curiosity to begin pulling a string and you see where it takes you," says Cook.

"Most companies begin to do larger and larger portfolios because it's so easy to add. It's hard to edit. It's hard to stay focused. And yet, we know we'll only do our best work if we stay focused," Cook says. "The hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on frankly, because there's lots of things we'd like to work on that we have interest in but we know we can't do everything great."

Social media can wreak havoc when students become distracted in the middle of class. Some educators have gone so far as to ban social media in the classroom, but others says that learning to control social media is part of the learning process and the benefits outweigh the negatives.

Remember the days when back to school meant a trip to the store for new pencils, paper and maybe a spiral notebook or two? Today's students, particularly those in the higher grades and college level, have little time or interest in those analog commodities -- they're carrying laptops, tablets, smartphones and other gadgets.

Putting technology in the hands and laps of students opens a vast pool of opportunity and knowledge, but it can also be distracting. Especially when students are using those devices to check Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or any one of the hundreds of social platforms that beg for their attention right in the middle of class.

Some administrators and educators have taken things to the extreme by outright banning the use of mobile devices in the classroom. Meanwhile, others believe that classrooms are the perfect environment to break bad habits and encourage students to embrace these tools for productive means.

"The biggest challenge I face as an educator is that students use social media as a toy instead of a tool," Kathleen Stansberry, assistant professor of public relations and social media at Cleveland State University, writes in response to questions from CIO.com. "It is often assumed that millennials are social media experts because they grew up with interactive media. They may know how to use the technology behind sites like Facebook and Twitter, but they don't understand the strategy that goes into using social media to accomplish professional, personal, or organizational goals."

Social Media is a 'Constant Temptation'

Stansberry says she allows students to use mobile devices during class time because the "constant temptation" they face from social media sites won't end after graduation. "I believe learning to control social media use in professional situations is part of the learning process," she adds.

"As with any disruptive technology, social media must be assimilated into our lives -- and during the process, there will be negative impacts. Technology in the classroom results in bullying, distraction, and cheating… and also engagement, deep and authentic learning, and global interactions," Jane Owen, professor emeritus of educational leadership at Midwestern State University in Texas, writes in an email response to CIO.com. "As an administrator, I would never let the negatives overrule the positives."

Teachers have to educate students to be disciplined and responsible in their use of technology, Owen adds. "Why should the next generation have to power down when they come to school and thus receive their educations in a 60s' style classroom because educators can't figure out a way to successfully harness technology?"

Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles, says the impacts of social media in the classroom are mostly negative. "It has devolved into a tool of distracted students looking at photographs of ex-girlfriends' or ex-boyfriends' vacation photos during a lecture. How do we know that? The fact that they are smiling at their laptop during a rather plodding lecture on reliability and validity of diagnostic classification," she writes.

Virtually Impossible to Police

"Now only the most disciplined and focused students can focus on the task at hand, and not get lost in the mindless ravines of Instagram and Facebook. In that way, social media may be a great tool for separating the men from the boys," Durvasula adds. "It is all but impossible to police unless I put a mirror in the back of the room, and now I as the faculty member am distracted playing policewoman instead of focusing on the matter at hand - our curriculum."

Durvasula says she plans to ban the use of laptops and other mobile devices in her classroom because she's found that most of her students lack the discipline or the intellect to manage having such a distracting tool in front of them. "I have never had a social media trolling student in one of my classes perform better than average, which speaks volumes," she adds.

The challenges presented by social media in the classroom are even more difficult for those teaching in the lower grades. Gail Leicht, an eighth grade language arts teacher in New Jersey, says social media and more specifically the obsession with the self indirectly makes it more difficult for her to connect with her students.

"Eight years ago, when I started teaching, I could make a social reference and my students would get it," Leicht writes in response to questions from CIO.com. "But now, because kids are only interested in their small circle and anything that constantly reinforces what they already know and validates their own existences, they lack any sophistication or know-how or just basic awareness of the immediate and not-so-immediate world around them."

Reinforcing Students' Obsession with Self

Leicht says her students no longer relate when she references Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert or Bruce Springsteen. "I used to try to mention current events or make social references by way of examples or as a way to connect with the kids. Now it's very difficult to find any topics on which I can do that," she adds.

Scott Silverman, associate director of student affairs at University of California, Riverside, says there are four primary cons that arise from the use of social media in the classroom: distraction, academic dishonesty (or cheating), discerning fact from fiction and cyberbullying.

"I think that the cons can be effectively managed if the engagement strategies the teachers employ for social media use are well-thought-out," he writes. "A teacher could have his or her class contribute to a wiki study guide for the upcoming exam, or students can use social media to tweet with others and learn more about a current event."

Silvermans' research for a doctoral dissertation on the effects of social media on college students' experience concluded that the benefits of social media still outweigh the risks. "Student will be more engaged when they can use all of the tools at their disposal, including social media," he adds.

Instilling good behavioral traits and educating students about the proper and more productive use of social media is paramount, says Cleveland State University's assistant professor Stansberry. Her ongoing study on the impacts of social media indicates that students feel unprepared to use social media professionally because they aren't learning about it in their college classes.

Your customers are growing tired of all the marketing being thrown their way on social media, says Forrester analyst Kim Celestre, who offers a list of five different ways brands can offer utility marketing.

MARINA DEL REY, CALIF. – Less than half of the audience here at ThinkLA’s Social Media breakfast raised their hands when they were asked if they find marketing useful in their personal lives.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement from the hundreds of marketers, advertisers and other media professionals who filled this seaside banquet hall.

What many here know and fewer will readily admit is that most marketing is junk. That truth persists with little regard for differences in medium, format, audience or data.

As the old and oft-repeated saying goes: half of all the effort and money spent on advertising is wasted, they just don’t know which half.

Social media doesn’t change that scenario so much as it amplifies what out-of-control junk marketing looks like. Any marketing that fails to provide value to a consumer is junk and there’s a lot of it making the rounds on social media.

“The reality is most of us don’t listen because the message doesn’t pertain to us,” says Kim Celestre, senior analyst at Forrester. “The fact is, your audience is getting impatient with the marketing you’re putting out there.”

Affluent, always-connected consumers may be some of the most valuable targets for marketers, but they’re also especially good at ignoring advertising, she adds.

Celestre encourages brands to embrace "utility marketing" – marketing that their customers can use. “You need to demonstrate your brand promise and not just talk about it,” she says.

Social data can inform utility marketing strategies, but brands must also be sure to look beyond standalone programs, she says. Building a community that promotes utility requires detail and attention to every potential social medium.

As a quick takeaway, Celestre provides five ways brands can offer utility marketing:

Become a trusted agent and establish the brand as an intermediary between itself and other related brands.

Solve a customer’s problem and consider how your brand can help solve adjacent, but still relevant needs they may have.

Get out of the way by helping your customer skip steps during their research and purchase consideration process.

Automate mundane tasks and determine how your brand can provide immediate value.

Fulfill a need that the customer doesn’t even know they have.

Of course social media isn’t just for brands, not in the traditional sense at least.

On the publishing side, Mashable’s CMO Stacy Martinet is tasked with commanding every social media platform under the sun, in our pockets, on our wrists or online. “Social media is at the heart of all that we do,” she says.

Mashable has amassed 18 million followers across all of its social channels, which helps explain why she says we’re all in a “continual cycle of marketing” now.

“We only plan for the first mile because we don’t know what the second mile’s going to be,” she says. “You just know you’ve got to be prepared and you have to change the course… We have to be nimble and we have to be ready to fail often.”

The goal and the platform are the most important components of any successful marketing campaign, she says. Understanding that what works on Snapchat is going to be something completely than what works on LinkedIn may sound obvious, but it’s crucial to keep in mind as plans are implemented.

Is Tinder an app for dating, hook-ups, making friends or a game of good old fashioned judgment? The service might be popular because it delivers on all of those fronts.

There’s a good chance someone you know is using Tinder as you read this. He or she is swiping left or right, looking for someone, somewhere for something. Each of those variables contributes to the service’s serendipity, which makes it fun with just enough different and unexpected turns.

Chance encounters are the type of magic that Tinder is bringing to millions who use the app every day. The company is riding high on exponential growth, but has kept a low profile this summer amid the fallout from a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by one its co-founders in June. Tinder was generating more than 10 million matches a day in February and passed 1 billion total matches in March.

Just ask around, don’t be shy, and you’ll quickly realize there’s a lot more people on Tinder than you think. You might also be surprised to learn that there’s a lot more to Tinder than one-night stands.

Tinder the Travel Guide

“Everybody is on Tinder,” the 50-year-old Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz told Huffington Post last week. “My married friends are on Tinder. Seriously, there is nobody who is not on Tinder at this point. It’s a video game. My married publicist who told me not to go on Tinder is on Tinder, and so is her husband.”

Celebrities, artists and athletes may fall outside the norm, but there is an entire community of Tinder users who are making the service their own for a variety of reasons and purposes.

Brian Penny, a writer who travels often for work, tells CIO.com he uses Tinder to get a feel for a new city. “I’ll swipe right on every profile and see who chooses me. I can then throw out a quick question about the area to each one,” he says, adding that he’s made a few friends on the service but nothing beyond that. “I’m not the type of guy to have a fling.”

Others who shared their experiences with Tinder emphasize the simple, yet seemingly boundless potential of the service. They describe the app in straightforward terms and remark on how little effort is required.

Little Effort for Possible Big Reward

Lisa Amarao, a marketing and communications manager, tells CIO.com that she had reservations about joining Tinder, especially because it pulls data from Facebook, a service that she uses professionally. “It freaked me out that it showed my mutual connections with possible matches. I got over that, obviously,” she writes in response to questions.

“I like that I can limit my search by age and location. The rest didn’t require much thinking. Yes. No. Match? Cool,” Amarao says. “I met a variety of people, most of them seemed nice and I’ve made a few new friends, but no real romantic connection with any. One of them I’ve referred to another single friend of mine.”

Amarao says she was using the app every few days but is on a break from Tinder now, as she spends time getting to know someone she met in the real world. No thanks to Tinder there, but she adds: “If things don’t pan out, I will definitely turn discovery back on.”

Sitting on Twitter, Killing Time

Other users like Will Kruisbrink, an account director at a public relations firm, have been on Tinder since the service launched almost two years ago. “It’s the hot-or-not for the mobile generation … My goals have always been to pass the time while sitting on the L or in a boring meeting,” he tells CIO.com.

“My experience has changed in that where I used to swipe everyone right just to get matches, now I’m highly selective. Also, I infer much more from women’s pictures now. Selfie? No way baby, swipe left,” he adds.

Tinder has never been a serious way for Kruisbrink to meet people, but he says he did connect once with a girl who broke up with him before. For him, Tinder isn’t so much an app for dating as it is a “judgment app.” Kruisbrink was using the app every day at one point, but has scaled back to about once a week now.

“Women always see way, way more matches than guys. It all depends on how picky you are. There is a way to game the algorithm though. The app will front load women that have already swiped right on you. That means of the first dozen or so people presented, you’ll see a greater number of matches,” he explains.

“One of the most interesting things about Tinder is its approach in increasing success in a marketplace driven by serendipity and random chance,” UsersThink CEO John Turner tells CIO.com. “Instead of trying to increase likelihood of matching you with higher relevancy results, their bet is on increasing the rate at which serendipity can occur by accelerating the rate of random encounters.”