Blog @ Percolate

Starting Friday the tech world was abuzz with talk of Yahoo! buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. At the time it seemed like just a rumor, but it quickly coalesced, ending with a press release this morning trumpeting Yahoo!’s “promise not to screw it up“.

We’ve been working with Tumblr since we started and have been one of Tumblr’s A-List partners since they introduced the program in November of last year. A number of our brands are quite active and successful on the platform including American Express OPEN Forum, Denny’s and GE.

Anyway, since everyone is discussing the news this morning I thought I’d share some of my thinking around what this means for Yahoo!, Tumblr and brands.

First off, there is one main and simple reason Y! is buying Tumblr: It’s an entree into social and one of only seven global social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and G+ being the others). With all consumer attention moving to social it would be impossible for Y! To compete without a car in the race.

With that said, there are a few specifics Tumblr brings that are worth pointing out:

1. Streams: The consumer expectation for content these days is best summarized by the “pull-to-refresh” action. Streams are the primary way people are consuming these days and to compete at the platform level (which Y! clearly wants), you need to own your own stream, not just have your content live in the other platforms’ streams.
2. Mobile: One of my favorite quotes from David Karp was when he introduced Tumblr ads to the audience at the AdAge Digital Conference last year. What he said was, “You’ve already seen our ad unit,” it’s the post. This sort of content-as-ads is clearly the future of digital advertising, but not just because it works on the web in your dashboard/newsfeed/stream. It’s also the future because its the thing that works in mobile. While so many others are looking for silver bullet ad formats, the social platforms have recognized that promoted posts make the perfect leap to the small screen, something that’s clearly crucial to Y!’s future. Yahoo’s banner ad business just won’t work in mobile in its current form.
3. Data: Marissa Mayer has talked a lot about personalization since taking the helm at Y! To do personalization successfully in the next era of the web is going to be about combining the implicit data of clicks and cookies with the explicit data of the interest graph and the content people are producing day-in-and-day-out across social (if you want more evidence of this look at Google’s huge investment in G+ to fill the hole for them). While this data will be used to make content recommendations, it’s ultimately most valuable to the platform as a way to infer what brands and products people are interested in before they have shown any intent to purchase them. This is about top of the funnel advertising, the creation of intent, and to compete successfully Y! needed a way to deliver this sort of consumer insight to brands.
4. Always-On: One of the biggest challenges in modern marketing is moving beyond episodic, campaign-based thinking and into social content that is always-on. Like most traditional publishers, Yahoo! has the challenge that all banners are bought and sold around campaigns. With Tumblr, Yahoo! is now part of helping brands create an always-on content model.

Overall this is a big win for social and further proof that marketing is continuing to move towards real-time content creation at the intersection of brand voice and cultural relevance. While everyone is focused (and concerned) that we’re going to start seeing Yahoo! ads on Tumblr, I actually think the opposite is much more likely. As more and more brands come onto Tumblr as organic content creators and pay to promote their content, Yahoo! will find a way for this original brand content to live in the context of the broader platform, giving marketers expanded reach and engagement.

Overall a big congrats to the Tumblr team. It’s awesome to see continued success for NYC startups. We’re excited to continue to work together and see what’s in store.

I was also on WSJ TV this morning talking about the sale. Check out the video:

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.

I began working at Percolate in October after having spent the beginning of my career working for a Fortune 500 company in Columbia, SC. While there, I learned sales, interfaced daily with clients and was exposed to a variety of procedural training. I quickly realized that the job, culture and city weren’t for me.

I’d lived and worked temporarily in New York a couple of different times and wanted to move back permanently. I’d always admired technology companies and been drawn to social media so I started applying to startups that looked interesting and would give me the opportunity to grow personally and professionally.

My search led me to Percolate where we’re building multiple products for marketers to create efficiencies in content marketing. Historically, social content creation has been a very manual process from ideation to managing content calendars to publishing across multiple social channels. Percolate’s technology creates a system around the content creation cycle to strip away inefficiencies by streamlining that process and rooting it into software.

Most recently we’ve partnered with Getty Images and Aviary, aiding in ‘Art & Copy,’ to visually inspire clients, mitigate risks associated with copyright law and allow for creative image editing.

My prior experience helped me implement a process-driven approach to my work. From prospecting new clients to sales outreach to client tracking, I’m constantly thinking about how to reach my goals efficiently and effectively, and that always involves products. I use products to systematize my sales process and drive efficiencies.

One product that has helped me manage tasks better is Asana. It helps me self-impose deadlines and provides structure to my weeks.

There are many other tools in my toolbox like Sparrow, Evernote and others that I’ll share in the coming months which are all meant to create a seamless workflow and reduce frictions. If you have any products you think I’d be interested in to help drive more efficiencies, please get in touch at Michael.Harris@Percolate.com.

I have always been fascinated by why some startups succeed and others fail. Many companies have similar ideas about how they want to solve a specific problem, but usually, only one, maybe two come out on top. Do they execute better or faster than everyone else? Do they have smarter people working for them? Or, did they do something unique with the culture early to set the standard?

In my opinion, the best thing any startup can do is establish a culture early that inspires everyone in the company to believe in one mission and pushes employees to succeed.

I co-founded a technology company in NYC and helped guide the growth of that culture. Anyone that has been a founder of a company can attest to certain things being lost in the commotion of daily work or areas where they felt they might have neglected as the company grows. One of the most important indicators of a successful company is culture: Do people love coming to work every day? At my startup, I was so focused on building a successful business that in hindsight, I could have done a better job contributing to building the culture.

At Percolate, Noah and James’ commitment to culture starts from day one. Our entire team believes in one common goal: Re-define digital marketing and communication. As Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last says, “Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your enterprise on…for 100 years.”

Building culture takes constant iteration and a willingness to fail and try again. Each Monday morning, both the product and business teams meet to set strategic goals for the week. We all then support each other in reaching those goals, and once Friday comes around, we celebrate our weekly ‘Wins’ with an all-hands meeting. This structure is an important contributor to building teamwork.

That teamwork is extended to new employees when they’re assigned a “Percolator” who acts as their mentor for the first few weeks to get them up and running. It’s present in our recently formed Percolate clubs to align similar interests inside the company like: art and culture; winter sports; bread baking; running; and yoga.  And, it’s present as we build our internal knowledge network, Barista, that both Greg and Noah discussed in previous posts.

Percolate has given me the unique opportunity to experience the growth of culture at a startup from the employee perspective after seeing it as a founder. Does our culture sound like something you’d want to contribute to? We’re hiring.

Last Tuesday I took part in an American Marketing Association webinar sponsored by one of our clients, Aquent. The topic was brands in a social world and I talked about the shifts in scale, pace, and pattern (as inspired by Marshall McLuhan) that we’re seeing these days. (If you’re so inclined, you can watch a video of the whole thing here.) It went for an hour and I wasn’t able to answer all the questions. I got to a bunch on Twitter, but there was also a chat room in the webinar and I thought it would be good to take a minute to answer some of the questions that were asked in there. So …

For Facebook, you can represent yourself as the “Insider”, but can that “Insider” label work in other social media/channels

This specifically referred to one of the ideas I discussed around brands being a little more informal in social than they might be elsewhere because of the personal nature of the medium. Specifically I suggested that brands that are successful in social these days are doing so by bringing brands behind the scenes, either figuratively or literally. I think the answer here is yes, that same tone can work across all the platforms. The key idea here is interpersonal with scale: While social makes it feel like a brand or individual is talking directly to you, they’re actually talking to a potentially massive audience.

What are your thoughts about branding is dead?

Not really sure where this question came from or why someone asked it, but I think branding couldn’t be further from dead. In a world of infinite channels and websites and Twitter handles, brands are more important than ever.

What is your definition of content marketing?

I generally try to stay away from defining things that other people are arguing about because it doesn’t lead to much good. I think for most of the people who are talking about content marketing these days they’re referring to things like SEO and blogging. For me, the most exciting content streams are, obviously, on the social platforms. On top of that I believe all marketing and advertising is, and has always been, content.

What are your thoughts on selling access to your social channels for other brands to leverage your followers/fans?

I haven’t heard of any brands doing this, but I suspect it’s something we’ll see in the future. Brands are the ones amassing the largest followings and they’ll find opportunities to partner with like-minded, non-competitive, companies to help build audience together.

In terms of scale, how do you scale social for B2B audiences vs. B2C?

I’ve always believed marketing for B2B and B2C should be approached the same way. I’m obviously not the first to suggest this, but at the end of the day you’re talking to people and the big difference is that B2B audiences are much more contained and targeted. With that said, I do think B2B has more experience creating things like white papers and other similar documents, and there is an opportunity to take that sort of expertise and transfer it to social. There I’d suggest thinking about how you break those big stock assets into smaller bite-sized flow pieces.

What is the role of marketing research as it pertains to the immediency of the social context?

I think research will have a bigger and bigger role in social moving forward. We’re still in the early days and we’re using the data the platforms are giving back to understand how our content is performing from an engagement perspective, but brands aren’t doing enough to understand what that means from a brand-impact standpoint. Twitter recently announced that it’s working with Nielsen on Brand Effect studies and I’m hoping that’s a start to a long road of platforms doing more to correlate engagement with brand lift. However, I think research teams can start getting involved now with social teams and start working together to think about how to make these sort of correlations on your own.

How do you keep people engaged with the social pace of “snacking”?

I think the answer here, at least in part, is that they keep themselves engaged. The natural behavior here is for people to dip in and out of the stream. With that said, the clear trend in the way social content functions (led by Facebook) is that higher engagement equals higher reach (since more people are going to see something more people in your audience engage with).

With the emergence of mobile, do we need to reconsider how we present content for that platform?

Yes, definitely. The good news here is that the leaders in mobile are the social platforms and they’re naturally situated to help you with that. When you use Instagram or Twitter (or even, increasingly, Facebook) you have no choice but to create content that’s naturally optimized for mobile. Obviously as a marketer you also need to think about your other touchpoints as well and the level of social adaptation should probably depend on the type of company, product, consumer you have.

How can a brand avoid coming across as being self-serving in their social efforts?

Create a balanced mix of content. Instead of all promotional messages, mix in a healthy amount of interesting (but still brand-relevant) content.

Part of the Percolate engineering team attended this year’s PyCon, held in (comparatively) sunny Santa Clara, CA. Attending the conference was an enjoyable, productive experience for us; it gave us a chance to think about the direction of our system and development practices outside of the frenzy of everyday development. Not to mention it was nice to relax in warm spring weather over a few beers.

Many good talks were given, and the hallways were abuzz with enthusiastic creators.

Relaxing after a “long day” of conferencing

“Readability counts.”

Of the many topics that were discussed at the conference, there was one theme that resonated strongly with me: the community’s focus on clarity and simplicity in the language. In particular, Raymond Hettinger gave a number of good talks that promoted using Python language built-ins to simplify the expression of ideas in code.

Let’s take a fairly contrived (but illustrative) example. In Java, if I want to sum the squares of a list of integers, I’ll probably write something like

public Integer sumSquares(List list) {
    Integer sum = 0;
    for (Integer i:list)
        sum = sum + (i * i);
    return sum;
}

The same idea expressed in idiomatic Python would read:

def sum_squares(alist):
    return sum(i ** 2 for i in alist)

I don’t mean to pick on Java here; it’s a language I admire for many reasons. That said, the relative readability of Python is a big win. Less boilerplate for the eye to parse means quicker comprehension. Logical omissions or faults are more easily identified, which decreases bugs and time spent reviewing. A clearer language facilitates more frequent deploys.

The contrast above might not strike you as being significant, but if you consider magnifying that kind of difference to web applications that are thick lattices of complex business logic, the contrast goes from pedantic to essential. I won’t sell old news, though; this subject has been well covered.

Hettinger also mentioned exciting additions to the standard library in Python 3 that will help make commonly-expressed ideas concise. For example, take the way we’d disregard an exception in Python 2.7:

try:
    content = f.read()
except IOError:
    pass

versus a built-in context manager in Python 3.3:

with ignored(IOError):
    content = f.read()

Pretty nice, huh? There’s nothing like being in a big room of people who get excited about this sort of stuff.

@raymondh delivering the goods.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the talks at PyCon was watching core developers negotiate the balance between language simplicity and convenience. Any additional “conveniences,” by necessity, introduce added complexity to the language. But if no conveniences are ever introduced, the result is overly-verbose, stiff code. Python’s leaders do an impressive job of managing trade-offs in this department.

“One– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.”

So, readable code helps us build Percolate quickly and safely. But the speakers at PyCon weren’t just concerned with simple syntax: they also discussed conceptual simplicity. Oft quoted documents included the sometimes-cryptic but profound Zen of Python and PEP8, the canonical source of style.

We’ve found PEP8 in particular to be a huge aid as the size of our engineering team grows. Many other environments I’ve worked in have been wrought with argument and frustration around proper code formatting; Python provides a standard. This encourages a uniform, consistent presentation and allows us to avoid many style-related arguments by appealing to a neutral document. This kind of standardization allows us to use automated tools that ensure new code is easy to read.

“Flat is better than nested.”

One of the most exciting parts of the conference for me was hearing Guido Van Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, discuss his work on the new asynchronous framework Tulip. This project seeks to combat the hairy problem of asynchronous execution with a mechanism called coroutines. It is Guido’s attempt to unify a few disparate approaches in the Python ecosystem into a standard, consistent way within Python.

Almost every experience I’ve had with callbacks as a solution to an asynchronous problem has resulted in deeply-nested code that seems more difficult than necessary to trace through. The result is often lengthy debugging sessions. Guido’s approach with coroutines is exciting because it is an augmentation of Python’s flat function calls (prefix a “yield from” to the call), so we can read through code in a consistent way, independent of concurrency.

“Simple is better than complex.”

Percolate as a tool has many of the same aims that Python does, namely simplicity and effectiveness. Our trip to PyCon reminded me that there is huge value in studying the tools that we admire as we construct our own.

Monday marked a day that many who live on the internet have had on their calendars for months, Community Manager Appreciation Day.

It’s the little things that make a community manager’s job worthwhile and on the fourth Monday of January 2013, those little things transformed into a flowing river of appreciation if you followed the Twitter hashtag #CMAD.

Percolate celebrated community managers by hosting #SPEAKEASY #CMAD. A mix of brands, platforms and agencies presented their learnings on community building and social to a room full of eager community managers.  

If you weren’t able to join us or want to review the presentations once more, we’ve archived the slides below with links and brief descriptions of the presenters and their presentations.

Noah Brier, Percolate co-founder, presented the Evolution of Social Content.
Summary: The endless information ‘stream’ which has proliferated across social channels means that no one thing defines a brand anymore. Social platforms are mirrors reflecting consumer attention in real time, and good content lives at the intersection of brand message and cultural relevance.

Keith Cowing from LinkedIn presented marketing solutions for brands on the LinkedIn platform.
Summary: LinkedIn has evolved from being “who I am at work” to a much broader personalized professional content source. In fact, LinkedIn content creates five times the activity that job postings do. LinkedIn’s newest features, like LinkedIn Today, Groups, Slideshare and Network Updates, all aim at bringing the platform towards recognition as a community for professional content.

Tyler Fonda, Strategy Director at Gotham Inc., presented on the learnings of Denny’s social strategy “Cats and Babies.”
Summary: To create content, community managers and all social publishers need to optimize through experimentation: the risk is simply too low not to (no one will view the content). Gotham was able to experiment with content creation for its client, Denny’s, by creating memes around cats and babies. Here, and on other campaigns, Gotham has successfully used memes as trojan horses for getting into people’s facebook feeds.

Danielle Strle of Tumblr presented “why Tumblr should be your brand’s social hub”.
Summary: Tumblr is a special platform because brands can post anything they want and customize the look and feel. Many brands are seeing unmatched longevity and engagement around their content on Tumblr and the best examples of brands using the platform are available at http://brands.tumblr.com/.

Adam Sandler of American Express presented on how they’re building a community from scratch.
Summary: While a community is united around a certain shared interest, a social network is defined by shared existing relationships. The purpose of Amex’s OPEN Forum was to create a community of thought-leaders to drive “engagement, endorsement, and loyalty” around topics relevant to small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Jon Lombardo of GE presented on “How General Electric became a content company”.
Summary: GE has fascinating social content across virtually all the platforms and they achieved this by knowing their context, thinking about why people share and letting go of the brand (kind of). The result has been increased engagement and content creation across all their social presences.

Jennifer Stalzer of MasterCard talked about the evolution of their corporate newsroom.
Summary: Corporate Communications is currently at the intersection of content and code. In its strategy for building its own corporate newsroom, MasterCard focused on integrating its various social channels, curating content to fuel conversations around context, and creating content with third-party validation. For Mastercard, content creation is never a “one n’ done” process, and MasterCard uses the Percolate Brew to syndicate its content around owned media, bringing new relevancy to dated stock media content.

Matthew Murray of Getty Images showed how brands can co-create with Getty Images. To view please enter your email and password Percolate2013.
Summary: Getty Images now provides brands with a digital, rights-free multimedia library to assist in the content creation process.

Kristin Maverick of The Barbarian Group discussed how Pepsi NEXT and TaskRabbit tested the boundaries of community sampling in their latest campaign.
Summary: To introduce Pepsi NEXT on digital channels, the Barbarian Group partnered with an up-and-coming startup called TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for users to outsource their simple errands and tasks to local trustworthy people. Select contest winners outsourced their errands/tasks for an hour and spent their newfound extra time sampling Pepsi’s new low-sugar product.

Jack Pollock of IPG Media Labs talked about how they’re employees are signals for innovation externally.
Summary: Building an internal community within your own company can be difficult, yet it relies on bringing together technology, content, and audience and avoiding the challenge of diversification. IPG Media Labs consists of 60 thought-leaders across five continents vetting potential media technologies for use at scale.

After a day full of information sharing, Noah concluded with the following threads for the audience to consider: the evolving role of the community manager; the proliferation of new platforms; the diversification of social media presence; how brands are turning user-experiences into user-generated content; and how the industry has moved away from talk of ‘influence’.

Did you attend the event? Let us know your thoughts.

Thanks again to those who attended, presented and our friends, partner and sponsor Tumblr for helping make #SPEAKEASY #CMAD a success. We’re looking forward to doing it again next year and we’ll be post details for the next #SPEAKEASY community manager happy hour soon.

Curious George, the mischievous little monkey who encourages children to learn by using curiosity as a means to discovery, teaches a concept equally as important in adulthood. Curious George likes to try new things, test the boundaries and hypothesize in action. So should we. And while there’s a lot of buzz around creativity, if creativity is the end game, then we should pay close attention to its driving force: curiosity.

I recently read the book “Imagine” by the infamous Jonah Lehrer. His revealed-as-unscrupulous writing practices aside, the book was still interesting to read. Lehrer’s dissection of the creative process was published at the crest of a wave of interest in how to generate creative output — think of all the writing about companies known for their culture of creativity and innovation, like Google and Apple.

But it’s time to divert some of this focus to creativity’s predecessor and instigator, curiosity.

In the 60s, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was asked to design a most mundane, uninteresting structure just outside Montreal: a gas station. How could a gas station possibly be interesting, let alone beautiful? The end result, however, was not only utilitarian, it was elegant and convivial. Architects must constantly manipulate their medium to maneuver within conventional, existing ideas about the use of space, not to mention complex and inflexible constraints such as zoning regulations and budgets. They must be curious enough to try infinite iterations of one concept. Thousands of gas stations had been built before Mies’s, but he was curious enough to see what more was possible.

Marie-Antoine Carême, the famous 19th century French chef once said “the fine arts were five, including architecture, the principal branch of which is pastry-making”. Like architecture, pastry is a craft with rigid constraints, which only begin with the limitations of the scientific properties of various ingredients. Dubbed ‘chef of kings and king of chefs’, Carême insisted that pastry was the best training for chefs, as it taught both precision and perfectionism. Yet despite the constraints of such a precise craft, Carême is remembered for his elaborate, fantastical reconstructions of ancient ruins made of spun sugar, marzipan and meringue, the likes of which Parisian society had never seen before. (Carême also made Napoleon’s wedding cake. His obelisks and pyramids were especially popular at the time, when Napoleon had just conquered Egypt.)

Dessert, especially, can seem like a narrow genre. When Ferran Adria, famed Spanish chef of the now shuttered El Bulli restaurant, served his first savory ice cream in 1994, everyone thought he was crazy: dessert was supposed to be sweet, not savory. Today he is regarded as one of the greatest creative minds in the world. He is also known for his methodical pursuit to redefine gastronomy; El Bulli used to close for 6 months each year so Adria could devote time to research and catalogue his culinary discoveries in a laboratory kitchen. Adria’s kitchen was an extremely regimented place, and the execution of a meal was orchestrated to perfection with a system and a hierarchy. Yet it was a place from which great creativity emerged.

So how does creativity emerge from these very constrained environments? Shedding conventional thought or a way of doing things is no easy feat; as humans, we are creatures of habit.

At Percolate, we think a lot about the importance of context to content. Context is similarly important to creativity, and often presents itself as a series of real world constraints, like everyday rules and regulations, that make it seem difficult to be creative. By constantly questioning, probing and wondering ‘what if’, curiosity becomes the catalyst for change, breaking down otherwise ingrained and embedded constraints. It is the impetus to creativity, innovation and disruption. And this is the value of curiosity. Its potential is vast.

When I first emailed Percolate in search of an internship, I didn’t expect a response. As a recent college grad with a B.A. in history, I wasn’t the typical candidate for an internship at a tech start-up.

My dad made this clear when he cautioned, “They probably won’t email back.” This is partly why I, Sarah Ransohoff, began my cover letter with “People of Percolate!” rather than “To Whom It May Concern.” I figured if I wasn’t likely to hear back, I might as well have fun with the application.

But I did hear back, and from Percolate co-founder James Gross. I’ve now been a client services intern at Percolate for three months.

Since starting, there have been three major milestones for me:

1. Learning the vocabulary. Curation versus creation, owned content versus web content, agency, brand, EdgeRank, API, RSS and internal acronyms like NBDB (never been done before), to cite just a few.

2. Understanding how the elements of this new-to-me universe interact with each other. What is the balance between stock and flow? When is a Facebook post most effective? Remind me again which agency works for this brand?

3. Reading and speaking the language of marketing and branding fluently. And here is where the biggest changes occurred. No longer was Twitter’s sole purpose to tweet friends and follow comical geniuses like The Onion and Stephen Colbert. Now, among many others, I follow Adage, Adweek, Mashable, The Verge and HuffPostTech. I subscribe to a list called “Ad Nerds” because, well, Noah Brier does, and why not learn from the best? I use TweetDeck religiously, and while riding the train to work my thumb gets its exercise as I scroll for the day’s major news stories (thanks M train for riding above ground). Keywords like “ad campaign,” “virality” or “reach” catch my eye now. To my surprise, I now find myself comfortable and occasionally –dare I say — even fluent in reading and discussing marketing with other Percolators.

In sum, over the past three months I have been learning a new language while living in a new country. But the language is marketing, and the country is Percolate. And it’s not just any country — it’s one that is defining the future of digital marketing. I am learning the language from the people who are redefining the very language. So I’ll leave you with one question: for a newbie in marketing, does it get any more awesome than that?

You want to be awesome too? Come work with us.

At Percolate we think a lot about how brands must live at the intersection of Stock and Flow when it comes to creating social content. Brands need to be engaged in conversations based on topics and subjects that are culturally relevant and aligned with their values. Aspirational content that represents what your brand stands for will help elevate these conversations to a higher level and allow the brand to position itself as a magnet and not just a mirror.

Once brands begin producing diverse and engaging Flow content, they bring the story of Stock and Flow full circle by incorporating inspirational themes and topics from Flow content into Stock.

Flow no longer only complements Stock content; it now informs and influences it as well.

Here’s an example of how the most forward-thinking brands are taking cues from their social world and leveraging those concepts into their big budget, shiny Stock content.

AT&T is a brand that has built a business on connecting people and distributing content for decades. AT&T took a viral piece of content which was culturally relevant to their social audience and acted quickly by incorporating it into their latest Stock television commercial:

Remarkably, the ad was on air within the month which is incredibly fast as compared to the traditional 21 week production cycle:

The proliferation of social platforms provides many exciting opportunities for brands to connect with their audience. It also provides new challenges. One of the challenges of this fast-paced, real-time environment is brands have to be ever more nimble at creating both Flow and Stock content.

Going back to AT&T, if the commercial hasn’t made it to broadcast  within the first four weeks of the viral video gaining popularity it may not have been as relevant or timely. While many brands are spending time and effort to manufacture a viral video, AT&T capitalized on an organic viral video and weaved it into their story.

AT&T isn’t the only brand incorporating culturally relevant themes into their Stock.

Taco Bell did a great job of this with their recent Doritos Locos Tacos launch. Knowing that they target a younger, technologically savvy demographic, Taco Bell not only took a cue from relevant content, but they also incorporated an entire trending social platform into the content of the ad.

The trend for sharing food photos through Instagram was a key theme behind this Taco Bell commercial from this summer:

Brands might be faced with different challenges in this new media landscape, but they’re also presented with interesting opportunities to tie all points of engagement together in real time.

At Percolate we’re building technology solutions to make this process easier and more efficient by systematizing a brand’s content strategy with our interest graph and surfacing high level social themes through content briefs.

We know not all brands have the resources on-hand to create well produced YouTube videos in real-time response to tweets like Old Spice:

We’re working to get them there.