Last month I had the opportunity to meet and hear Randi Zuckerberg speak at Meredith College. Randi was visiting the campus to receive the President’s Award and deliver the 2012 Woman of Achievement Lecture. Prior to the event I was able to attend the VIP reception thanks to my wife (@mcdezigns) who won the Meredith Facebook contest.
Randi Zuckerberg is the former head of marketing at Facebook and brother to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and the next american billionaire. She left her advertising agency job to work with Mark when he was at Harvard to help him launch Facebook and was with the company until last fall. During her tenure she was able to see the development of Facebook and help with the launch of several of the platforms features.
Randi stated that she changes her presentation based on current trends and that it can change on a monthly basis. The top trends she discussed were:
- The sharing economy: social media has created a more caring community that shares resources instead of hoarding them.
- People as platforms: the ability for individuals to generate a fan followiong rapidly.
- Gamification of health and fitness: apps like Gym-Pact reward healthy behavior.
- Crowdsourcing: Kickstart is funding more projects than the NEA. Logos and corporate identity are being generated by sites like 99 Designs.
- Cover photos are making statements: people and brands are having fun with photos and creating a billboard type impression on Facebook. Examples include Girl Scout Cookies and Obama’s campaign pages.
- Mobile first: new technology is being designed only for use as a mobile app without a formal website. These new apps are building one use case really well versus a whole site.
- Curation is creating experts from individuals that never write, paint or create unique content. Sites like Pinterest allow users to create a strong following based off their taste not their own content.
- Creating social moments: what if you could recreate the Home Shopping Network within Facebook with real time stats on friends purchases?
- The opportunity to create more social moments via live blogging (which I wish I had known that there was WiFi at the event, I would have live blogged this post!).
- Philanthropy is offering brands the opportunity to dip their toes into social media by matching contributions or having contests. Target asked its fans to pick which charity they would give their annual donation to by voting on Facebook.
Overall I was very impressed with Randi both on a personal and professional level. She was very approachable when I had the opportunity to meet her before the event and I enjoyed discussing strategy with her. After seeing her speak to the crowd you could tell that she was a savvy marketing professional that understood that technology is cool but you need to provide value. Technology for wow factor fades fast.
I would like to thank Meredith College for bringing Randi to the Triangle as the event was free to the public.
