Percolate @ Tumblr

With “85 Seconds,” Getty Images shows what’s...

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:59:07 -0400

With “85 Seconds,” Getty Images shows what’s possible with stock footage.

(via Ad of the Day: Getty Images Tells Moving Story in 105 Video Clips | Adweek)

Consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner...

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:13:06 -0400

Consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads.

(via Native Ads Vs. Display Ads (And How Mobile Fits In) [Infographic] | Business 2 Community)

"All kinds of things [were discovered digging through bitly’s data]! Did you know that..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:55:10 -0400

“All kinds of things [were discovered digging through bitly’s data]! Did you know that different social networks are used differently in different countries? That stories about sports have the shortest half-life (meaning the attention drops off much faster than for other stories)? That you should post to Twitter during business hours? Or that there are actually more photos of dogs shared on the Internet than cats, even though cats have become symbolic of the silliness of things shared on the Internet?”

- Bit.ly’s data scientist, Hilary Mason
Data Science and Why Dogs Rule the Internet

Our Commitment to Culture and Clients

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:01:36 -0400

Our Commitment to Culture and Clients:

As part of building a strong and transparent culture, one thing we like to do a lot is take questions from everyone at the company. We are still very young, growing quickly and things are changing fast. We try and make decisions after a lot of thought and we also try to do what is right for our company, our employees and our clients. Nothing else really matters.

Over the past few weeks I read, Lean In, a book I have heard a lot of buzz in the office written by Sheryl Sandberg, whose career I’ve always admired, albeit from afar.

The book was great, and while it is primarily around gender equality in life and the workplace, a very serious topic and one that we can all stand to learn more about, I want to use some of the lessons from Lean In as it relates to the lessons Sandberg learned in scaling a growing technology company. She helped build two of the most impressive companies of our time: Google and Facebook. Her lessons from the book help explain why we make some of our decisions, what it takes to work at Percolate and why we will always do what is right for our clients.

Lesson 1: The most important thing to look for in joining a company: Fast Growth.

In Chapter 4 of her book she talks about wanting to join a technology company. It was 2002 and she had a long list of companies in Silicon Valley that were recruiting her and she had to make a decision on where she was going to go. At the very lowest priority of her organized spreadsheet, because of vague title and undefined role, was a company called Google. She went to then CEO Eric Schmidt and explained her dilemma. The other companies had her managing big teams, with big titles, a defined role and goals. At Google she was the first “business general manager”. When she said this to Eric Schmidt he responded with what she calls, ‘maybe the best career advice i ever got’:

He covered my spreadsheet with his hand…… Then he explained to me the only criterion that mattered for picking a job was — Fast Growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies slow down or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to do them. Politics and stagnation set in and everyone falters.

As leaders inside the company our goal is to deliver fast growth. If there is fast growth you can grow as people, you can be challenged and you will learn a ton that you can put on your resume as a signal that you know how to build that kind of business.

From Sheryl’s advice, we have to be conscious of two things as we grow our company:

Slow Growth
Politics

The good news is that most of the time, these two things are actually just one. By that I mean politics are a direct result of slow growth. This is generally why big companies become political, they are slowing down, or more importantly, slowly slipping into irrelevancy. It’s a land grab, fewer important positions and people can get nasty.

As a company we have to always keep our eyes on the opportunities that will drive fast growth, even if they are something we never conceived of doing before. One of the great things my co-founder Noah has taught me is how to question things that I’ve felt 100% sure about. Breaking down what I perceived as absolutes has helped me think in ways I’ve previously thought weren’t possible. This type of thinking has permeated our culture and I believe it has helped us find opportunities. A good exercise to challenge ourselves with is to ask: what is something that we absolutely wouldn’t do as a company and then try to actually do it.

Lesson 2: It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

Chapter 4 of Lean In is entitled, It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder, and in the opening of the chapter she tells a great story from her 2012 Harvard Business School commencement speech:

“When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it. My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Lori’s case. I said, you’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it. So Lori changed fields into something she never thought she’d do, went down a level to start in a new field and has since been promoted and runs all of the people operations at Facebook and has done an extraordinary job.”

Lori saw Facebook as a jungle gym and she took on the challenge and executed in a fast growth environment. There was no clear ladder and that was perfect, it allowed her to fix the biggest challenges the company was facing and it allowed her to take on additional responsibility within the company.

These two lessons are a great way to think about Percolate. We want to grow fast, we want to set people up to succeed and we want to create multiple paths for our employees to grow.

Now with those two lessons behind us, let’s shift the focus to the future and our clients.

To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We believe this quote is true for our clients and we have done our best to lay it out. Stock & Flow. Intersection of cultural relevance and real-time. Scale, Pace and Pattern of media creation has forever changed. Content is the lifeblood of social. And oh yeah, there is this: For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected. Where will they be connected? On social platforms.

We love the future, we want to live there but it does us no good to live in the future alone. We want to evenly distribute the future because we can all see it and we aren’t going to let any barriers to that future stand in our way.

For our clients and from our site entitled, How We Work:
EVERY STEP OF THE CLIENT EXPERIENCE IS CONSTANTLY EVALUATED. CLIENT HAPPINESS IS WHAT DRIVES US.

With our clients, we take this quote as literally as possible. They are coming from a world where messages lasted months, not minutes. Where reach was defined by cities, not continents and where content was a very expensive story that ended after 30 seconds instead of a continuous, pull-to-refresh, stream of media. The process to build these bridges aren’t easy and we know that. But we also know if we don’t build that bridge, someone else will.

Nothing matters more to me than our employees and our clients. We are aggressive in our viewpoint on where we see the world of marketing going and how we are going to get there. If you like what I’ve said above you will most likely also like working with us.

Get in touch and say hello.

from Blog @ Percolate http://bit.ly/17qcLt4

Percolate rises up to the Commuter Challenge!

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:23:07 -0400

Percolate rises up to the Commuter Challenge!

So, you want to ride a bicycle in NYC?

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:01:42 -0400

So, you want to ride a bicycle in NYC?:

In the spirit of NYC’s bike to work week, here’s some guidance around buying your first bike. Like most things you read on the internet, please take this with a grain of salt, but know that I’ve been riding a bike to work for about 7 years (5 in SF and 2 in NY).

First of all, get excited!

Riding a bike is incredibly freeing. What used to be a 45 minute G train ride from Williamsburg to Prospect Park is now a 25 minute cruise with plenty of scenic brownstones in between. And with the immutable presence of fried chicken in this town, we could all benefit from more exercise.

$$$?

But aren’t bikes expensive? Not really! Depending on whether you want a used or new bike, you can find yourself a reliable steed in the range of $500. If you consider a monthly metro pass is $116 or even the cost of owning and maintaining a car (gulp!), bikes offer incredible value.

Buying a Bike

Option one – go analog (also known as, support your local bike shop):

Physically going into a bike shop and actually checking out the models is a great way to get to know what you like and see what’s out there. Bicycling.com recommends calling two or three different shops to get a sense of the styles and brands they carry in advance to save time. You can also get a sense of how amenable the shops are to first-time bike owners.

Two bike shops I’ve found to be very good are Velo in the East Village and Bicycle Habitat in Soho. Even if you don’t end up buying your bike there, you can patronize these shops by picking up a light, or a lock there.

For a great first commuter bike, I recommend going single speed. New York is relatively flat, and single speed bikes are easy to maintain with less moving parts to break or have stolen. A bike with a flip-flop hub will enable you to switch to fixed gear. Even if you have greater aspirations of going from being commuter to a proper cyclist, the single speed will carry you through many a long ride up the Westside Highway or around Prospect Park.

Option two – the Internet:

Once you begin to familiarize yourself with brands, you can read up on various reviews. Bike forums are chock full of information and personal feedback around different brands so its easy to start to learn how models stack up in terms of quality.

For example, in reading up on a frame I was considering, I learned that an online retailer (Performance) had a house brand that was more affordable and getting great reviews.

Option two and a half – Craigslist is your friend:

Once have an understanding of what brands are good and pricing, you can take a much more targeted approach to your Craigslist search. For someone on a budget, Craigslist can be a great path to getting value. Just understand like anything else from Craiglist, caveat emptor.

The Gear

In my experience – some of the most important factors that play in when owning a good commuter bike are having a good comfortable seat, good wheels and durable tires (saving the headache of a flat).

For seats I really like the Fizik Arione, but everyone’s ‘seats’ are different. You can always go the route of the classic Brooks saddle, but don’t forget the not so classic Nylon chain to help keep it from being stolen.

As far as helmets, my number one recommendation is to wear one. After that, buy something comfortable and not too expensive, because that way you can lock it to your bike without feeling nervous. Giro makes a nice range at accessible prices and if you are looking for something more urban check out Bern.

Comfortable sneakers with a hard rubber sole like Vans, Superga or Chrome will do you right. If you’re aiming for a bit of a higher rung on the style ladder, maybe a good wedge sole will catch the discerning lense of The Sartorialist

Overall – Get a bike you like, that feels good to ride and you’ll be excited to hop on in the morning, or after a long day of work.

So, I’ve Bought a Bike. Now What?

My Go to Streets for Navigating Manhattan are:

North: 1st ave, 6th ave & 8th ave

South: 2nd ave, Broadway & 9th ave

West: Spring Street , 9th St. & 21st St.

East: Grand St, Stanton St., Bleecker St. & 20th St.

A PDF of the 2013 Bike Map for New York can be found here.

Tips & Tricks?

Don’t be a jerk. Running red lights into oncoming traffic, darting in front of pedestrians and riding the wrong way is a fast path to getting hit, or at the least bad karma. And don’t get frustrated with salmon, those impatient cyclists or even roller bladers who feel the need to go the wrong way in the bike lanes.

Sandwiches:

Reward your new purchase by riding to Ferdinando’s in Red Hook and having their focaccia sandwich. It’s not easy to get to by subway and you’ll never look at ricotta cheese the same way again.

–
There are no shortage of jaywalkers, double parked delivery vans, and errant food carts to complicate your ride, but if you ride with respect and keep aware of your surroundings, you’ll do great and have a blast. Now get out there and enjoy yourself!

Questions? Say hi on Twitter. I’m @brosbeshow.

from Blog @ Percolate http://bit.ly/18G9nJw

Why Brands should pay attention to their Moms this...

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:14:08 -0400

Why Brands should pay attention to their Moms this Mother’s Day (and every day).

When a tweet is not enough, pick up your phone. Happy...

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:40:15 -0400

When a tweet is not enough, pick up your phone. Happy Mother’s Day!

(via #MothersDay - YouTube)

Facebook, retro-imagined. (via These Tubes Are...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:21:07 -0400

Facebook, retro-imagined.

(via These Tubes Are Old!: Vintage Website Ads | Geekologie)

Scale, Pace & Pattern

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:46:28 -0400

Scale, Pace & Pattern:

Last week I wrote a piece for Forbes titled Social’s Impact On Scale, Pace And Pattern, And What Brands Can Learn From It.

Here’s the intro:

A few months ago I was asked to put together a presentation about the future of social. As would be expected, I was pretty overwhelmed with the topic and turned it over and over in my head trying to figure out the best way to approach the question. Whenever I find myself in a situation like this I turn to my personal intellectual hero and the person I believe to be the greatest media thinker of the 20th Century, Marshall McLuhan. While he wrote long before the web existed, his theories around how media evolves and interacts with culture are more relevant than they’ve ever been.

At the heart of McLuhan’s theories is his most famous saying: “The medium is the message.” Though like most things McLuhan it requires a fair amount of unpacking, at its core is the idea that we’re affected more by our interactions with the medium itself than we are with the content we experience on it. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan explained, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” In his book “Understanding Media” he goes on to give an example: “The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.” In other words, it realigned personal expectations and culture and expanded the definition of local.

What then, I asked myself, are the changes in scale and pace and pattern that have been introduced by social and what can brands learn from those changes?

Go read the whole thing.

from Blog @ Percolate http://bit.ly/YFbDyM

“Pinterest accounts for 25 percent of retail referral...

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:40:15 -0400

“Pinterest accounts for 25 percent of retail referral traffic.” Are you investing in the platform?

(via 15 Stats Retailers Should Know About Pinterest | Digiday)

"The notion of the “FIO” job description resonates with us at GE because it describes what’s behind..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:03:05 -0400

“The notion of the “FIO” job description resonates with us at GE because it describes what’s behind some of our most exciting innovations, especially in emerging markets. As a huge company with a long history, we’ve mastered the traditional approaches: maximizing efficiency and quality by relying on highly specialized and expert professionals and well-designed processes. But as we venture into new territory—say, a hospital or health center in rural China—we need radically different ways to solve problems. So we’ve established customer innovation centers close to where new solutions are needed, and we help our employees there abandon their assumptions about what customers need. Instead, they observe how people actually live and work. They create relevant offerings and improve on them iteratively, in real time. They figure it out.”

- Beth Comstock, CMO, General Electric
Figure It Out - Harvard Business Review

9am and the shades are on We’re a little...

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:15:12 -0400

9am and the shades are on

We’re a little ahead of National Solar Day, but the sun is so bright at HQ.

(via percolatehq: It’s a bright morning @percolateHQ. #spring)

"Advertising can, and should, enhance content discovery in a seamless and effective manner."

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:09:06 -0400

““Advertising can, and should, enhance content discovery in a seamless and effective manner.””

- Yahoo Rolls Out Its Own “Native” Ad Format | Digital - Advertising Age

Finding Inspiration in Unconventional Spaces

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:17:47 -0400

Finding Inspiration in Unconventional Spaces:

Some of my best ideas come from the most unusual places. Often it’s during a run around NYC or while I’m in the final resting pose in a yoga class. Typically, it’s a new reference point that gets me out of my familiar frame of mind and helps me look at something from a different angle. It’s almost as if that moment of shifted focus slows everything else down and allows me to surface combined ideas that might have seemed disconnected minutes earlier.

The principle that great ideas spawn from unusual recombinations isn’t a new one. For a long time people have pointed out that the best ideas are often born out of the collision of seemingly separate things. Cooking, for example, has exploded as a hotbed for this sort of recombining. Just one episode of Top Chef will open your eyes to a multitude of out-of-the-box, strangely mouth-watering concoctions. Even a stroll through a gourmet grocery store will expose you to odd, yet tasty, pairings, such as bacon-infused chocolate or cheese lined with edible ash.

The opportunities for these collisions only seem to increase in urban centers where there’s both high diversity (of people, industries, and ideas) and little space, making it more likely for people and ideas to meld.

In college I took a class called “Paris, Montreal, and New York” that spoke to this idea specifically by highlighting some of the literary geniuses and visionaries of the Beat Generation, such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cohen, and the cities that helped shape them. These three men frequently traveled between these three global capitals of art, music and literature, and some of their best ideas emerged from these diverse cultural immersions and intersections.

All of this came to focus for me lately when I was reading Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From.” The thesis of the book, in essence, is that ideas and innovations stem from unusual recombinations of tangential environments and from a slow build of inputs. It’s not those “Eureka!” moments where great ideas emerge, it is an amalgamation of experiences that shed light on a new way of looking at things. In fact, Johnson often cites urban centers as major sources of new ideas because of the close proximity of diverse subcultures.

So what does this have to do with Percolate and content? Ideas often spark from unconventional permutations of inputs. This is where great ideas and innovations come from and this same rule applies to content. At Percolate, we believe that in order to be a good content creator, you have to be a good content consumer. To do that, we’re helping brands identify the diverse set of sources that make up their interest graphs. The point of this is to help them combine ideas to create new, highly-relevant content. That’s because like great innovations, great real-time content lives at the intersection of seemingly disparate ideas: In this case brand voice and cultural relevance. The best brands make that connection the most effectively, and to do that means paying attention to the world around them all the time.

Is your brand looking for new sources of inspiration? If so, please get in touch.

from Blog @ Percolate http://bit.ly/12d8Fx6

Marketers, do you know your trends? Goats are the new cats when...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:30:15 -0400

Marketers, do you know your trends? Goats are the new cats when it comes to what’s viral.

(via The Ad Age Pop Thermometer: Spring 2013 | News - Advertising Age)

Dreaming of a new office and contemplating new book shelves. ...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:30:12 -0400

Dreaming of a new office and contemplating new book shelves.

(via Custom made wooden book rack / bookshelf in Wenge by OldAndCold)

Before Nintendo, there was Spectravideo! Here they are, showing...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:45:13 -0400

Before Nintendo, there was Spectravideo! Here they are, showing us they were a classier kind of computer company. We’ll take our gaming console, shaken not stirred, please.

Top brands on Twitter prove again that the web is a virtual...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:03:08 -0400

Top brands on Twitter prove again that the web is a virtual one.

(via 25 Of The Most Engaged Brands On Twitter)

Microsoft, the Forefront of Design“It turns out...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 06:50:03 -0400

Microsoft, the Forefront of Design

“It turns out [Microsoft’s] decision to focus on “flat design,” a type of visual scheme where everything has a smooth and even look, was a few years ahead of the rest of the technology and user interface industry.”

(via The Flattening of Design - NYTimes.com)