We’re just weeks away from the Facebook IPO, and today, the company filed an amended S-1 detailing the price it will seek for its shares.

According to that S-1, Facebook plans to sell some 337m shares at a price between $28 and $35. In this price range, the company will be valued at somewhere between roughly $75bn to $95bn.

At the higher end of its price range, Facebook could raise more than $10bn, cementing its status as the richest tech IPO ever.

That may be sweat music to the ears of Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who plans to sell approximately $1bn of his stock in the offering, as well as other early Facebook employees and investors. But the valuation Facebook is seeking is less than the $100bn valuation numerous sources had claimed the company would ask for just weeks ago.

That has some of the investors who bought shares of Facebook stock through secondary markets on edge. The Wall Street Journal quotes one such investor, Kevin Landis, who has been accumulating shares of Facebook stock for $31 to $32 per share over the past year, as saying “I’ve been surprised before, but I’ll be surprised again if it ends up pricing at that low end of that range.” His hope is that the lower-than-expected price range will spark more demand for Facebook shares, which could result in an early pop.

Landis’ comments highlight the fact that Facebook’s IPO is really like none other before it. In reality, Facebook is already a publicly-traded company and its IPO is little more than a secondary offering for which members of the general public can get in on the action.

The big question is whether they’ll want to. On one hand, it’s clear that Facebook still has plenty of potential. The most recent evidence of that: frustrated advertisers who want to give the social network more of their money. On the other hand, there are more than a few ominous signs of challenges ahead, such as the company’s quarterly revenue decline and the fact that some social gaming companies are moving their focus to mobile.

At the end of the day, one thing is for sure: Facebook’s IPO will be one for the ages. Whether that means investors who buy in the coming weeks will be smiling six months, a year and five years from now is far less certain.

If you’re an SEO, chances are you’re familiar with SEOmoz.

The Seattle-based company is a brand name in the SEO space, and the company’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, a highly-visible figure in the industry.

For all of the company’s success, however, growing SEOmoz hasn’t always been easy. Last year, for instance, Fishkin revealed on his blog how he almost raised $24m in a second round of funding for his company, only to see the deal fall through.

Fishkin’s blog post attracted a lot of attention, and for good reason: it provided an uncommonly honest view of one entrepreneur’s view of the fundraising process. “I feel burned,” Fishkin wrote. “This is the second time in 3 years that I’ve gotten excited about raising a potential round of capital, and it turned out terribly both times. I’m not sure what I did wrong or what I should do differently next time.”

While SEOmoz didn’t close a funding round in 2011, the adage “good things come to those who wait” applied to Fishkin and his team and yesterday, he announced that SEOmoz has raised $18m from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners at a $75m pre-money valuation.

Once again, Fishkin took to the internet to reveal all about the deal, including the metrics that sold his investors on the company. The most notable: since 2007, when the company raised a small $1.1m round of funding, SEOmoz has grown its product revenue from just over $400,000 to nearly $11.5m in 2011. And the company is currently on pace to achieve $18m in product revenue this year.

“The [new] money is going to help us do amazing things, and it’s going to mean we can do a lot more of them faster and at greater scale than we could have on our own,” Fishkin wrote. He also revealed intimate details about his company, including the fact that he now owns 24% of equity and actually gave up some shares without compensation to keep his employees from being diluted.

Funding, obviously, is no guarantee of success, but in today’s frothy market, where twenty-something entrepreneurs raise seed rounds at multi-million dollar valuations with little more than rough prototypes and all-star founders can raise tens of millions of dollars just because, Fishkin’s refreshingly transparent chronicles of an experience that is often glamorized by the tech press is a valuable contribution to entrepreneurs everywhere.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network and arguably it knows more about many individuals than any other organization.

The data it collects from the hundreds of millions of users it serves has enabled Facebook to build a billion-dollar advertising business, and serves as justification for Facebook’s valuation, which may top $100bn when the company finally makes its public debut.

But Facebook also thinks it has the potential to encourage people to do good.

Inspired by conversations with his girlfriend, who is studying to become a doctor, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided that his company was in a position to help individuals who are waiting for an organ transplant. Some 7,000 of them die every year waiting, many because an organ does not become available before their ailment kills. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of organ donors.

So in an effort to encourage more people to become organ donors, Facebook is launching an initiative that will ask users in certain countries to share their organ donor status on their Facebook profiles under a Health and Wellness section.

Zuckerberg told ABC News, “Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories…We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.”

It’s an admirable goal, but is it a good one for the world’s largest social network to pursue?

Instead of allowing its users to communicate and tell stories of their own, Facebook is promulgating its own story here, one that suggests its users think about taking a particular action and encouraging their Facebook contacts to do the same. In other words, Facebook’s organ donor status demonstrates that the social network thinks it can just as easily influence what we think about and what we decide to do in some of the most private and intimate areas of our lives.

Whether well-intentioned or not, the type of social engineering Facebook is engaging in here could prove very, very thorny.

In this particular case, there are a number of issues. The most obvious, of course, is the fact that indicating on Facebook that you’re willing to donate your organs may be meaningless legally. Skeptics might even suggest that it will promote ’slacktivism.’ After all, it’s easy to declare your support for a cause, in this case organ donation, but how many who indicate they want to be donors will actually make sure they’re officially registered as organ donors?

Another major issue is where this all ends. Will Facebook eventually suggest that you eat more fruit, or will Mark Zuckerberg’s next cause of interest lead him to use his social network to push you to take action? Which causes are too big too ignore; which causes are too small to care about? Who decides?

Perhaps most interesting here is the possibility that Facebook will use these initiatives for less-than-altruistic goals. Some are questioning the timing of Facebook’s initiative here, and the company is also using its push to encourage users to supply other personal information, ranging from birth date and school to recent medical milestones, like a broken bone or weight loss. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see why Facebook would want this information for purposes other than encouraging individuals to become organ donors.

All these things highlight the major challenge Facebook has: it can be a platform for connecting individuals, or it can be a platform for trying to influence individuals. It arguably can’t be both, and Mark Zuckerberg has an important choice to make: remain the CEO of one of the most widely-used communications platforms in history, or follow in the footsteps of the great media moguls who sought to use their platforms to distribute their own messages.

If Zuckerberg opts for the latter route, Facebook effectively becomes a social engineering network, not a social network.

For today’s Twitter showdown, we’re moving away from the shelves and into the skies. With a look to two of the most talked about airlines, we’re pitting Virgin America against United Airlines.

With different approaches to social media, which airline do you think will win today’s social media media battle?

Virgin America

First up, Virgin America. Virgin is the more experimental of the two brands and it really uses pictures to share the experience of Virgin America. The Twitter background page is an image that makes you feel like you’re in the passenger seat with a view from the back to the front of the plane and Virgin uses the same image for its cover photo on Facebook. It also uses Pinterest and Instagram to share photos from airplane geekery to events and encourages its customers to share photos of their own experiences as well. 

One thing Virgin America does stress, is that it won’t address specific guest service issues on Twitter (or Facebook). What it clearly provides in its bio is the contact details customers can use to get the help they need. Virgin America provides both a link directly to its contact us page and its customer service number. This doesn’t mean the Virgin social media team don’t respond to people who need customer service but they often encourage customers to go directly to customer service when they can.

If you search for @virginamerica, the sentiment is neutral to positive. Either it just provides a good experience as an airline or people are getting what they need online/ are going directly to customer service offline. The nameless team behind Virgin America are on Twitter and Facebook 7 days a week and actually tweet the most on Sundays according to the numbers below. It makes perfect sense as that’s when most of us fly.

What is useful for me as a customer or potential customer, is that I can go directly to Virgin America’s homepage and its main social networks are listed on the top of the page. You can also click through to a social media page where Virgin America stresses what they do on each social network and how you can take part. Twitter and Facebook are also embedded so you can see what people are saying right now.

United Airlines

Now onto their competitor, United Airlines. Now United used to be very proactive about announcing their social media presence on their flights and on their website. Now if you go to their homepage, you can’t find an easy link to their social networks. They instead seem to be focusing on their own customer centre, the United Hub, where they are planning to pull all their social networks into one place where they will encourage customers to go to interact with them. At this current moment though, there is nothing there to show what people are saying nor are there links to where you can comment. It’s a bit like they’ve put up a construction shell stating “coming soon” with no indication of when it’s opening its doors to the public

Though United states that Facebook and Twitter aren’t for customer service issues, these messages aren’t signposted very well. United include a message on the background image on Twitter and the about section in Facebook (if you click through to it) but it’s not the first thing you see. Most customers won’t go looking for instructions. They want to be told up front.

As for engagement, they don’t engage on social networks on the weekend and though the United social team answer quite a few  questions, when you search for @united on Twitter the majority of comments appear to be negative. Its lack of customer service has been a thing of much publicity from United Breaks Guitars to it’s most recent issues in March when United merged its booking system with Continental so this isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise is why Unite haven’t become more savvy and been proactive about dealing with its customers online. Unfortunately, the complaints won’t go away unless you do something about it.

United do have a strong community on airline forums (some may eat you alive if you post a negative comment on there) but the positive customer forces may be diminishing as United continues to have troubles outside of social media and lacks the support to manage the issues that are cropping up online.

What the numbers mean

According to the infographic by Visual.ly below, Virgin America has a significantly higher number of followers, almost three times ass many in fact. Not that high numbers mean a lot with big brands but it could be because they do tweet on a regular basis and not just to follow up with customers. Virgin also follows a high number of its customers, probably so the Virgin team can DM them about any customer service issues they may have.

United, on the other hand, have a large number of mentions but as we pointed out earlier, the majority of the mentions United have lean toward negative issues rather than positive interactions with the brand. As it is deathly quiet on the social front on the weekend, the time a large number of people fly, this is not a good move toward fixing its negative customer service issues nor do United seem to really want to connect with us as its Twitter bio claims it wants to do.

The results

Sorry to say it United Airlines, but you’ve been had. Virgin America wins hands down.

Thanks to testimony in the Oracle-Google lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, we now know just how high Google’s hopes for Android were in 2011.

According to Google VP Andy Rubin, the search giant was looking for Android tablets to account for 33% of the tablet market last year. The good news for Google was that the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Fire may have brought Google within striking distance of that figure.

But that really isn’t good news, of course, because the version of Android the Kindle Fire is running is an Amazon fork that doesn’t include the key services, like Google Play, that Google bundles into the versions of Android it distributes.

And the news isn’t getting any better for Google. Yesterday, comScore revealed that the Kindle Fire now accounts for over half (54.4%) of the Android tablets sold in the United States. The next closest competitor, all of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab devices, has a 15.4% share of the Android tablet market.

While Google might publicly support the success of Android in whatever flavor it comes in, behind the scenes Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire is naturally disturbing to Google, which is rumored to be working on a low-cost Android tablet of its own designed to compete with the Fire.

Unfortunately for Google, time is not on its side. The Kindle Fire’s share of the Android tablet market grew from 41.8% in January of this year, and from just 29.4% in December. With Amazon reportedly prepping new versions of the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s momentum may be something Google simply can’t stop.

With Apple selling nearly 12m iPads in Q1 2012, and Windows 8 expected to ship later this year with a slew of Intel-based tablets in tow, it appears that all of Google’s hard work in creating, promoting and defending Android may be for naught when it comes to cashing in on the tablet market.

Social gaming on Facebook may be past its prime, but don’t tell social gaming juggernaut Zynga that casual gaming is.

The company, which went public late last year, yesterday reported $321m in revenue in the first quarter of 2012 — its highest quarterly revenue figure ever. All told, bookings rose to $329m, up 15% year-over-year, while the $321m in revenue represented a more impressive 32% year-over-year increase.

The numbers handily beat analyst expectations, but it wasn’t all good news for Zynga. Although the company earned some $47m in the quarter on an adjusted basis, increased expenses, some due to stock-based compensation, led to an $85m loss overall. And there were signs that Zynga may have challenges ahead: while monthly active users grew a healthy 24% year-over-year, daily active users were down 6% over the same period.

What matters, of course, is how many players turn to payers, and in that category, Zynga appears to be doing quite alright. Monthly unique payers rose to 3.5m from 2.9m in the past quarter.

Interestingly, the company’s bookings total for the quarter (which measures how many virtual goods Zynga is actually selling) saw the greatest growth from mobile, suggesting that the moves by Zynga competitors like CrowdStar to focus on mobile opportunities are wise indeed. Coupled with the fact that Zynga’s contribution to Facebook’s revenue declined last quarter to 15%, it would appear that Zynga’s finances are starting to reflect the attempts it has been making to reduce its dependence on the world’s largest social network.

That’s obviously good news for Zynga, but as it moves more into mobile and feels the need to spend big to acquire other companies, it will be interesting to see if Zynga can remain social gaming’s top dog.

Once again we’ve put together the most senior and influential job moves in the US.

This time we cover influential moves from Coca-Cola to Anheuser-Busch, another surprise resignation at Microsoft, a new hire at Banner Bank, new hires at CBS and a retirement at Benetton Group.

Anheuser-Busch InBev’s global chief marketing officer Chris Burggraeve has left the company after five years. Prior to his time with Anheuser Busch, he worked for Coca-Cola for 12 years. Burggraeve will be replaced by Miguel Patricio, who is the company’s current Asia-Pacific zone president.

Banner Bank hired Dianne Larsen Senior as Vice President and Director of Marketing. She joined them after leaving Washington Mutual where she led the commercial group’s marketing department.

Benetton Group’s founder and chairman Luciano Benetton is resigning after 47 years leading the company. His son Alessandro Benetton, who is the current executive deputy chairman of Benetton Group, will step up to replace his father.

CBS Corporation hired Terry Press to be Co-President of the CBS Films division. Prior to joining CBS, Press was Head of Marketing for DreamWorks SKG and then Principal of 7570 Marketing.

The Coca-Cola Company promoted Dr. Rhona Applebaum to the role of Vice President of the Company from her role of Chief Scientific and Regulatory Officer.

comScore has nabbed Beth Uyenco from Microsoft Advertising where she served as Global Research Director to be comScore’s Senior Vice President of International Research.

General Motors appointed former Levick Strategic Communications SVP Heather Rosenker to be its director of public policy and government relations communications.

JWT is losing its Atlanta CEO, Rob Quish, after seven years with the company. He is leaving the agency to return to his base in New York. While JWT searches for a new CEO, the agency promoted management director Marshall Lauck as interim CEO.

Lockheed Martin promoted Marillyn A. Hewson to President and Chief Operating Officer from her role as Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin’s Electronic Systems business.

MEC hired two new global strategy leaders. Coca-Cola’s 13-year veteran, Michael Dick, will be head of strategy for Global Solutions, London as a replacement for Charlie Wright who will be transferred to MEC’s Singapore branch to join its Global Solutions team. MEC’s second hire, Aegis’ Francesca Ronfini, will report to Dick in a newly-created role of strategy partner for Global Solutions.

Microsoft Advertising’s VP of global agencies and accounts, Richard Dunmall, has left the company to pursue other opportunities. Until a new VP is found, VP of US sales and marketing, Keith Lorizio, will oversee the global agency team. 

Rodale hired Lori Burgess to be publisher of the lifestyle brand Prevention. Previous to this, Lori had been Publisher of The Hollywood Reporter and Publisher of OK! Magazine and OKMAGAZINE.com.

Twilio brought Lynda Smith on board to be its Chief Marketing Officer.Previous to her role at Twilio, Smith served as Senior Vice President of Marketing at Jive. 

Universal Republic Records & Island Def Jam Music Group appointed EMI’s Executive Vice President, Global Brand Partnerships, Licensing and Synchronization Cynthia Sexton as its Executive Vice President, Branding and Licensing.

Last week, Facebook announced their new Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. This was a merger of the Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) program and the Marketing API Program (MAP) which have been running for three years. 

These programs connected brands with developers to help them optimize social plugins, build apps on the Facebook Platform, develop strategies, and manage ad campaigns for Facebook Pages.

One of the companies that has been built around the Facebook Ad space is Spruce Media. According to their website, it has a mission. Spruce Media believes Facebook will change the future of advertising so it has created a platform to help advertisers thrive on Facebook ads. 

We had a chance to talk to Lucy Jacobs, COO of Spruce Media, to talk about how the company works with Facebook, Facebook best practices, how Facebook has changed the ad space and benchmarks for success.

How has Spruce Media been involved with Facebook’s ad programs?

Facebook opened up its API 2 years ago. It was really building a space for the user but not really building tech around the ad space as well. With this in mind, Facebook created a platform for its ad space for third party vendors and the API program was opened to 100 companies.

Spruce Media helps advertisers buy cost per action (CPA) ads (amongst other things). At the start, we were mainly selling to businesses like large social gaming companies to help drive leads. But we have also helped businesses to use self service as ad buying become more intuitive for them.

This has helped us expand to agencies, trading desks and large retailers. By licensing our software to large agencies and brands, we’ve been able to help businesses navigate Facebook.

How has Facebook changed the ad space?

Facebook started off with standard banners in 2008. They quickly killed that and made all ad units social. I believe this is turning marketing on its head. This means companies can’t just repurpose ads as they do in other spaces. They have to respond to stories and page posts. In order for advertisements to really work on Facebook, they need social context. 

How can brands do well on Facebook?

To truly do well, brands need to completely embrace it. They need to ask how they can mobilize the whole brand around social. 

Brands can’t think of Facebook as just another channel. Rather, they have to think of Facebook as something the organisation rallies around. Look at what 1800 Flowers, Walmart, and Starbucks are doing. They are using Facebook to feed into all parts of their business from customer service to product design.

What are the benchmarks of success?

It’s about getting the right fans and keeping them engaged. Companies are missing the boat if they want sheer numbers. Instead, they need to look at what their engagement rates are compared to their competitors and create a benchmark. It’s about fans x engagement ratio.

How can businesses change their approach to Facebook?

To truly be successful, businesses have to have a holistic view of Facebook. You have to look at integration. Your pages are the hub of Facebook. It’s not just about ads, it’s about stories. The key thing is not to just run paid media. You want your ads to look like PR or earned media and get fans to post your ads to their friends.

But how do you amplify? Owned, earned and paid media should be integrated. To be effective, you basically need to understand who is interacting with you, how you get more of that type of fan and then target your messaging.

Speaking of changes on Facebook, which companies do you think are using Facebook timelines the best? Anyone doing it wrong?

I think New York Times is doing it the best. They’ve tracked the whole history of their company and it is beautiful. Starbucks’ timeline is good as well.

So far, there has been neutral to positive results on timeline. Companies still have to continue to customize what will resonate and the right frequency for their fans, but it’s still early.

No one is doing it wrong, per se, but it’s really tough to integrate apps. You can do it with pinning but for those brands who relied on apps to customize their Facebook pages, they will have to go back to the drawing board.

What are your top three Facebook tips for brands?

1. Understand your fan base and who’s engaging. Are they the right demographic for your brand?
2. Integrate pages and paid media. It’s important to integrate page posts into paid media/ ad strategy. They are the most effective ad unit that you can customize to your target audience.
3. Understand your metrics of success. The metrics of success on Facebook are different. Now that Facebook has introduced “People talking about this” you can see how viral your message has become. It’s not about looking at click through rates or reach, it’s about engagement. Don’t think of it as advertising. Facebook is all about building relationships with your customers.

After years of waiting, Google finally launched Google Drive this week.

Naturally, Google’s entry into the online storage market raised questions about some of the companies that have established themselves in the space, such as Dropbox. Will Google make it harder for them to grow and thrive, or will it fail to gain traction?

We’ll find out soon enough, but in the meantime, Google’s new competitors large and small are responding.

One of those competitors, Box, isn’t sure that Google has what it takes. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, basically suggested as much in a blog post entitled When Elephants Attack. According to Levie, Box’s enterprise focus is the key to the company’s success and that will keep it in good stead.

But that doesn’t mean that Box isn’t trying to make things more difficult for Google. Today, it announced “major enhancements” to its Box Platform, including a brand new API that the company says “makes it even easier for partners and developers to build products and services that integrate with Box.” It also unveiled new tools for developers, including an Instant Mode feature that allows developers to automatically create Box accounts that are tied to their apps.

According to Chris Yeh, Box’s VP of Platform, Box knows it can’t build everything its customer needs, so it’s making sure that its platform offers enough “glue” to make sure third party tools can be used with the company’s solution.

That approach appears to mirror the one Microsoft is taking. The Redmond-based software giant today published a blog post highlighting the APIs and SDKs for its SkyDrive offering.

“Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas,” Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo wrote. The timing of this post, of course, is not coincidental.

The platform strategies being employed by Box and Microsoft seem sensible. Google Drive has a collection of APIs, but they’re very limited right now. While that will almost certainly change over time, the question is whether Google can move fast enough to disrupt the developer ecosystems that competitors like Dropbox, Box and Microsoft have established and are trying to solidify. If the announcements by Box and Microsoft are any indication, Google Drive’s competition thinks Google Drive is most vulnerable in this area.

With literally hundreds of millions of consumers logging on to the internet and using social media every month, it’s no surprise that businesses have flocked to services like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Whether they’re looking to hawk their wares or listen to what customers are saying about them, there are numerous social media use cases that apply to just about every business under the sun.

But how many of the companies using social media are actually measuring what they’re getting from it?

According to a study conducted by Onepoll for software vendor EPiServer, the answer to that question is ‘not many’, at least in the UK. Of the more than 250 marketing decision makers surveyed about their organization’s use of social media, a disturbingly low (but perhaps not surprising) percentage (10%) indicated that they were effectively measuring ROI.

That doesn’t mean the other 90% don’t think they’re getting something out of social media. A quarter of those surveyed indicated that they’ve seen increased traffic, while a third are convinced that social media has increased customer loyalty and boosted customer engagement. A fifth even credited social media with increased sales.

The problem, of course, is that without an effective means of tracking ROI, it’s impossible to know just how much confidence companies should have in these figures.

Unfortunately, it appears the problem may only get worse. Over half of the decision makers surveyed indicated that their companies have increased the amount of time they’re spending managing their social investments in the past year. Nearly a third moved into a new social channel in 2011, and 17% expect to do the same this year. According to EPiServer, “Marketers now spend an average of an hour a day managing social media, with only 6% managing multiple channels centrally.”

Needless to say, the situation doesn’t look good. If companies can’t measure ROI from their social activities, but they’re spending more time and money managing their expanding social presences, social media has the potential to become a black hole for investment.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be. Measuring social ROI may be difficult in some instances, but companies can help themselves keep an ROI within reach by making sure that they don’t overinvest in the channel before they know how to measure its impact.

That didn’t take long. Just two weeks after Microsoft announced that it had purchased a major collection of patents from AOL for $1bn, Microsoft has turned around and sold 650 patents to Facebook, which is being sued by Yahoo for patent infringment.

Microsoft will retain a license to the patents, and as part of the $550m deal, Facebook will also receive licenses for AOL patents that Microsoft did not offer up for sale.

According to Microsoft EVP and general counsel Brad Smith, “Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction.”

Facebook, of course, was an eager buyer. The Yahoo lawsuit it’s fighting, which involves 10 patents, could have a material impact on the company’s business if it is found to have infringed. While the newly-acquired and licensed patents from Microsoft won’t directly address whether Facebook has infringed on Yahoo’s patents, something Yahoo was quick to point out today, Facebook is obviously hoping that its recent patent shopping spree will help it bolster its defenses. After all, Yahoo must be infringing upon one of the thousands of patents Facebook has either bought or licensed, right?

Perhaps, but that doesn’t speak to just how useful these patents are given that the value of a patent is not just based on whether it’s been infringed by somebody, but whether the damages that can be proved are substantial enough to be meaningful.

More importantly, Facebook’s patent-buying activity is another indication that the social network, which may go public in a few short weeks, is rapidly maturing. From its $1bn purchase of a 13-employee, revenue-less mobile photo sharing app to this $550m patent deal, Facebook isn’t quite acting like a scrappy upstart anymore.

Should it? With billions in the bank, billions in lines of credit and an IPO that could see its value pegged at upwards of $100bn, it certainly doesn’t need to. But at the end of the day, it’s important to remember that Facebook got where it is today because of the product it developed. Not because of products it acquired. And certainly not because of patents it bought.

So while Facebook spends freely to buy up competitors it fears may displace it and purchase expansive patent portfolios, it should remember not to skimp too much on big investments in what really matters — its product.

From infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) all the way up to software-as-a-service (SaaS), more and more companies are heading into the cloud.

There are plenty of good reasons. Using a cloud offering can often reduce a company’s technology capex, and pay-as-you-go pricing is an attractive proposition for companies burned in the past by large, expensive technology initiatives.

The cloud, of course, isn’t perfect. Massive outages have showed that poor application architecture can be a killer in the cloud, for instance, and there are plenty more areas for concern.

In a blog post entitled “Why We Should Not Use The Cloud”, Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio highlights some of them:

• Hosting data through a third party could cede some of a company’s competitive advantages.
• A company takes on risk when it puts all its eggs in one basket, and a bankruptcy, security disaster or terrorist attack could be fatal to a business.
• The internet could, contrary to popular expectation, become more expensive, making the cloud less attractive economically.
• Using cloud providers in other countries arguably helps economic development elsewhere at the cost of economic development at home.

The first three points are all legitimate. The cloud, as promising and potentially game-changing as it is, is home to significant risk.

Case in point: Ning, a provider of hosted social networks, has apparently been compromised. Early reports indicate that 100m user accounts may have been vulnerable to a cookie injection that those who discovered it claim Ning ignored. Clearly, those opting to use Ning instead of building (or licensing and hosting) their own social networking platform probably liked the idea of paying for their social network as a service for as little as $2.95 per month, but wouldn’t like the idea of their social networks being wide open to hackers and scammers.

But the problem here really isn’t the cloud. It’s how companies are choosing to use it, and how they’re using it in practice.

Unfortunately, too many organizations don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t care about what they don’t know. So they put everything into the cloud not recognizing that such an action requires certain knowledge and skill. What’s more: many organizations don’t perform adequate due diligence when evaluating cloud providers.

Whether you’re looking for an IaaS provider to host an application you’ve built, or purchasing a SaaS solution, understanding the cloud and doing due diligence on the companies you’re considering is crucial. Punting and praying for the best isn’t enough.

Gartner’s Di Maio suggests “the move to cloud computing is inevitable and necessary”, which is true for many organizations, but in the debate over whether to use the cloud or not, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the cloud is going to win doesn’t mean that all the companies that choose to use it will. Indeed, those that don’t obtain knowledge and perform the due diligence required are likely to fail.

Once again we’ve put together the most senior and influential job moves in the US.

This time we cover influential moves from Nokia to NCR Corporation, a surprise resignation at Microsoft, promotions at Yahoo, the first ever CMO for Jetsetter, new hires at Publicis Groupe and a new executive vice-president of global communications at Pepsico.

Business Wire has promoted Maria Van Wambeke to Vice President of product development and integration. For the past 13 years, Wambeke has led product development projects for the company.

Cheif Benelux has appointed former Ogilvy Amsterdam chief executive Peter-Paul Blommers as chief executive.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store appointed Laura Daily as Senior Vice President of Retail. Daily was formally the Vice President for HSN’s Ballard Designs.

PepsiCo hired Jim Wilkinson as executive vice-president of global communications. Wilkinson is the former managing partner of Brunswick Group. 

Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki Nerve Center is replacing current president Curt Hect with its vice-president and general manager of Audience on Demand, Kurt Unkel. Hecht is leaving for a role at The Weather Channel. Vivaki Nerve Center has also promoted Sean Kegelman to the global position of executive vice-president of partnerships and Marco Bertozzi to executive managing director of the Nerve Center EMEA.

HSN hired former Chief Marketing Officer, Anne Martin-Vachon, as Chief Merchandising Officer.

Jetsetter has appointed its first ever Chief Marketing Officer Barry Herstein, the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer. Previously, Herstein was General Manager Americas & Global Chief Marketing Officer at Snapfish and GM North America & CMO at PayPal.

Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Phone Product Marketing, Gavin Kim, quit after only five months. Before he joined the Microsoft team, Kim was Vice President, Consumer & Enterprise Services at Samsung to join the Microsoft team. Eugene Ho will take over for Kim as lead. 

NCR Corporation has nabbed Susan Somerville Johnson from Nokia where she was the Global Head of Operator Marketing to be its Vice President of global marketing.

RF|Binder Partners hired former MDG Communications principal, Marc Greene, to be its executive MD and chief media strategist.

Yahoo has promoted Mollie Spilman from her role of leading marketing for Yahoo’s Americas region to co-lead a new consumer commerce business unit with former PayPal executive, Sam Shrauger.

Yesterday, we attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York where Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon, gave the keynote speech highlighting how cloud services will transform how we do business. 

Though some critics think cloud services may have unforeseen challenges, Vogals somewhat salesy keynote also had representatives of companies using Amazon cloud services come to the stage to say why the cloud is enabling their businesses to do things they could never do before.

As these (and most) businesses are discovering, a data revolution is taking place. The amount of information we need to process, map and store is growing at exponential rates. So in comes cloud services. 

According to Vogels, the cloud is not just about saving money and doing things faster. It transforms what is possible.  Everything fails all the time so you need to be able to be flexible. Throughout his keynote, Vogels highlighted seven transformations he thinks cloud services will make. 

Transformation one: Distributed architectures made easy with high availability

When you are building distributed architectures using traditional infrastructures, it’s difficult to do. Single data centers can fail and this means down time for any services on them. 

For Amazon web services, their “data centre” is not a building but it is an availability zone. In any given area, you are backed up in multiple places so in cases of outages or natural disasters (or the hardest failures as Vogels called it), your service will still be available at a moments notice through an API.

Transformation two: Embracing the security of shared services 

Vogels likened most sites as a castle with a moat to protect it. He argued that a moat is not sufficient as a single breach will immediately expose services. So in order to protect an application, an application has to protect itself.

By having applications in the cloud, you can choose the right security model for each application and keep them separate from one another. 

Amazon’s number one investment area is security. Vogels rightly stated that you cannot do business on the internet and not think about security.

Transformation three: We’re moving from scaling by architecture to scaling by command

Traditionally, if you needed to scale your application to allow for more users, you would need to set up more servers, configure & tune, shard, test and then do it all again. This is costly and takes time. Sometimes, when applications suddenly become a hit, they have to scale quickly and can’t afford downtime.

Data is auto spread across enough hardware to deliver single digit millisecond latency so databases are no longer the bottleneck. In the past, database layers couldn’t keep up as you scales, so you would have to build bigger and bigger database clusters. This would slow down your application and become, frankly, a big web by mess. Now you can replicate data across availability nodes so it is available even if something goes down.

Take Pinterest, for example. They used Amazon web services to help them autoscale and they are now at 18 million unique visitors as of the end of February 2012 with only a dozen staff and one CTO. Without this type of service, he would have never been able to scale their systems as fast as they did. Arguably, this may have been detrimental to what is now one of the largest social networks of 2012. 

Technically, Pinterest contains an entire users account information in a single shard instead of spreading it over multiple locations which a lot of other systems often do. Using the single shard method, when a database server is too full, they can move the shards to as many physical servers they need to without a problem. They are now running on 64 servers in multiple zones around the world.

Transformation four: The cloud puts a super computer in the hands of every developer

Supercomputers today are the privileges of the elite. They are expensive, if you get to use them your time is rationed and its often only available for the highest value jobs. By using the cloud, Amazon web services built the 42nd fastest super computer in the world and made it more available and more affordable for everyone.

The business example presented by Cyclecloud in conjunction to this transformation, led to applause from the audience and rightfully so. The company built a 50,000 core supercomputer with Amazon web services and worked with Schrödinger, a company that offers molecular-modeling and drug-design software, to run a virtual screen to identify proteins that are responsible for cancer.

Normally a super computer infrastructure costs at least 20 million so this is out of the reach for most researchers. By using cloud services with 3000 servers at full capacity, Schrodinger were able to do 112 years worth of calculations in three hours at the cost of $4828.85 an hour. This means any academic institution can now do bigger science faster and really make the impossible big science possible.

Transformation five: Experiment often & fail quickly

Yes, we’ve heard this one before. Facebook’s mantra has been spread around and quoted in too many presentations to count. Many corporations and businesses need the lean approach. This way they can get the product in the hands of customers early on and leverage the tremendous power of the consumer. Though 95% of startups don’t make it but it’s still worth doing.

Transformation six: Big data without big servers

Traditionally, in order to store massive data volumes you’d need a huge data warehouse and invest in expensive server clusters to process the data. In order to make these work though, you need to know what it’s being set up for.

Now, you often may not know the questions you want to ask. But with the cloud, you just have to load your data, organize and analyze the data and then visualize the results.

Etsy, Playfish, Foursquare and Yelp all have analytics at their core but have to also be flexible in how they analyze their data which is one of the reasons they use cloud services.

Transformation seven: A mobile ecosystem is needed for a mobile first world

This transformation is one that is more future facing. Building mobile is hard. An application may need to involve rich media, multi-devices, be location and contextually aware, real time presence driven, social graph based, rely on user generated content and recommendations, need a built in virtual goods economy, be integrated with social networks, or contain advertisements.

With a cloud mobile ecosystem, companies can use tools like Panda, Social Gold, Simplegeo, Directed Edge, Echo, Animoto, Twilio and others. This makes application building easier and they are available through Amazon’s new marketplace which it launched yesterday to help companies find, buy and run software running on Amazon web services. 

For Dr Werner Vogels entire keynote with case studies from PBS, Pinterest, Washington Post and Cyclecloud, you can now watch it in its entirety on Youtube.

Many of the challenges being discussed at the Campaign Tech 2012 conference today in Washington DC will be familiar to Econsultancy readers in the brand world.

How do you reach influencers? What can you do with “big data?” What’s going on with mobile? Where are viewers headed?

And above all else, how do you get your message in front of them?

Many of the event sponsors who are here to get their services in front of electioneers, such as AOL, Google, XBox Live, would be familiar to brand-side digital marketers. Several hours ago, Facebook moderated a panel on how “timeline apps and social design will change campaigns.”

Now that several years have passed during which political and commercial marketers have developed their approaches to digital separately, it looks as though we’re now headed for a period of convergence of technique. The common digital platforms between marketing and electioneering fosters a commonality of tactics – but both sides come to the table with different strengths. 

The political side is long-used to running campaigns 24/7, moving opportunistically, and being utterly, completely focused on leading the national conversation. On the other hand, a quick guess is that on average, many commercial-side marketers have been in workplaces where executive-level digital buy-in happened earlier, and where the margins for error and experimentation are larger. They also have continuous team experiences.

One thing for political teams to consider that commercial marketing consciously strives to get right is team continuity. Campaigns win or lose and tensions are always high. After an election is over, teams are sometimes rapidly abandoned, including volunteer networks (some have accused the Obama camp of doing this).

An interesting question for politicians is how they can create and manage teams that can learn together, then keep that group learning and apply it to the next project. 

In the commercial world, the value of this group learning is the reason that many brands have very long relationships with agencies.

If you’re recruiting for either side, you probably stand to benefit highly from importing talent. If you’re a marketer or vendor who wants in on the record-breaking amounts of money that is being spent on American politics, or maybe want to “make more of a difference,” think about how to position and network yourself in. The same goes for electioneers who are tired of wearing a tie and want to move in the other direction. The rest of us stand to benefit by adding a little cross pollination to our media diets.

Here are some snippets of the talks so far today: 

I’m on frontline of trying to sell this to a candidate who doesn’t check email.

- Justin Germany, Founder and Partner, Craft | Media / Digital

What plays in social is different from what plays on wapo.com… there’s no cannibalization.

- Brandon Thomas, Director of Product Management at the Washington Post
 

In the online world, it’s so easy to click away… I like to open with a huge bang. Don’t bury the lede. In an online video it’s crucially important not to bury the lede.

- Casey Phillips, Co-Founder, RedPrint Strategy

I want two million views on my resumé, but I want the right two million. Engagement matters… one of our theories that we started with from day one was that we were going to take ‘viral’ off the table and judge it in different terms… I would suggest, or cause you to think about about viral campaigns – viral YouTube campaigns, versus a single video. If you get one 100,000 view video for a local race – does that give you a bump? If you produce ten 10,000 videos, you’ve achieved the same number, over a longer time. That’s something we’ve focused on doing. We’re constantly striving for singles. We want to do a video that gets 5,000 views a week, for 52 weeks a year.

- Justin LoFranco, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
 

What do you think? Disagree with any of this? Know more? Let us know in the comments.