If the iPhone 5 taught us anything, it was that Apple is a brand that has a swirling web of rumors that ebb and flow on a daily basis. There are posts online, almost daily, from numerous sources that talk about the latest features of the iPad 3, the iPhone 5 and speculation as to when they will be released. One of the more intriguing rumors that I’ve heard has been the talk of a Apple television set. Originally it was talked about as a totally fantastical idea that would probably never come to fruition, but since the passing of Steve Jobs and the increased pressure from Apple’s ravenous customer base, it appears that the Apple TV will be Tim Cook’s chance to take the company to the next level… if that’s even possible.

Personally, I love the idea of an Apple TV set. If Cook has even half of the ingenuity and creativity that Job’s had then it could be a very cool thing. That being said, creating a television that revolutionizes the category the same way that all Apple products have in the past, is a very tall task. The television has come so far in the last few years with features like Wi-Fi and smart apps, and it will take some major creativity to come up with something that expands the way we view televisions. That being said, here are some things I think HAVE to be included in the new Apple TV, for it to really live up to Apple’s standards.

1. Beautiful Design

This pretty much goes without saying. This is Apple’s signature, and it has been the reason they’ve been so successful. Up until very recently Apple’s products have been by far the most aesthetically pleasing in their category. Their television has to continue that tradition. This will be quite challenging for them because, out of necessity, many of the companies that compete with Apple have changed their focus from brawn to beauty. You see products today that are created to look like a piece of art, and that will be something Apple will need to try to out do.

2. OLED Screen

So, if you followed CES 2012 you undoubtedly saw the emergence of the OLED Screen. This is the newest technology in televisions and, if Apple uses this technology, will set their system up to be far ahead of the curve for years to come; a very “Apple” goal. This would also go a long way to achieving the aesthetics that Apple is known for.

3. Total integration with iOS and all of the Apple products.

This is something I think they will make a must have on their Television, because similar to the Apple app store, when it first came out, it was what set their products apart from the rest, and as a result they sold a boatload of them. They need to create a TV that is can be operated with your iPhone or iPad, has a full range of apps, and gives you access to the cloud. Ideally, I should be able to site on my couch with my iPad and look at pictures, watch my saved movies, play Angry Birds, surf the web, and even type word documents, all on my television. I imagine something similar to the dual screen system on the Nintendo DS where they Television would display “screen” and the iPad, or iPhone, would be the keyboard, the mousepad, the remote control  or would contain whatever buttons I needed to do what I wanted to do. That would truly be revolutionary.

4. Totally Wireless

Now, this is something that might be a few years off, but if they threw the money at it, like they’ve been known to do, and could get this out in a year or two, it would definitely make their TV, no matter how obscene the price is, well worth the money. One of the problems I’ve always had with these super slim televisions was the fact that you could never mount them flush to a wall… unless you wanted to punch a huge hole in the wall to run the cords. So you had this TV that was less than in inch thick, but you had to mount it 4 inches off the wall, and then have cords hanging; it totally defeated the purpose, and made spending an extra $1000 a total waste.

I imagine an Apple TV to be OLED, meaning less than a half of an inch thick, and be TOTALLY wireless. I imagine the TV hanging on any wall with no cords to hook up to it whatsoever. They already have the technology to power items wirelessly, and we all know what you can stream with WiFi and Bluetooth. I imagine a table top box, with all the cords plugged into it that transmits everything to the screen. This would achieve Apple’s goal of making something that will put them in the drivers seat of the television industry for years to come; something that is VERY hard to do, especially right off the bat.

5. A reasonable price point

If they manage to jam everything I’ve listed into a television set it would be extremely expensive. Apple products are known to be pricey, and for the most part they are worth every penny, but with the top quality products already available, and coming down in price, a $10,000 TV just isn’t reasonable. If they really want to put a stranglehold on the television market, for the first few years, they might need to pull a Sony. Sony looses a LOT of money on each PS3 they make. It costs almost $900 to make each unit, and as you know, they don’t cost nearly that much. Where they do make their money is on the games and accessories. Videos games cost a few bucks to make and since they sell for $60 a pop they are almost all profit. The controllers, while not as profitable, cost little to make. This will have to be something Apple needs to consider if they want to establish long term success in the market. My recommendation would be for them to subsidize the cost of the hardware with TV specific apps that, at $5 – $10 a pop will generate a lot of profit after they are downloaded millions of times. They could also partner with someone like DirecTV or AOL, where they pick up some of the bill, and in return they get exclusive content rights on the most popular unit out. It could work.

An Apple TV would be seriously cool, especially if they had these features. Like i said before though, these are only rumors, and as equally possible that it NEVER happens as it is that they announce it next month. You just never know.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month there is a good chance you’ve heard of Pinterest. In case you actually HAVE been living somewhere off the grid, Pinterest is the newest craze online. It is a site that is dedicated to finding, gathering, organizing, and sharing the visual representations of everything and anything that interests people. Sound confusing? Well it’s really not. That was just a fancy way of saying “It’s a site where people can gather images and videos of things they like and organize (or “Pin”) them to into themed pages (boards). Then they can share those boards, and their pins, with their networks. So, for example, you can create a board that is dedicated to “My Dream Garage“. As you stumble around online and come across cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, scooters, or anything else you’d put in your “Dream Garage” you simply click the “Pin It” button and add it to that board. Not only is it a great way to organize all of your interests, ideas, and inspirations, but it is another great way to connect and share with the world.

As you could imagine, as with all of the social networks out there, this means that it can benefit your business. It is yet another way to quickly, easily and uniquely share content, drive traffic, and establish brand identity for your business. Here are some tips and pointers on how to use Pinterest for your brand.

1. Understand exactly what Pinterest Is -

Pinterest defines their mission as :

Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.

This means that people are on there to find cool stuff. They aren’t on the site to read, or to see advertisements. They are there to find cool stuff to add to their boards and show to their friends. This means that if and when you set up your account, you don’t want to be filling it with stuff that no one will understand. Post things that people will WANT to repin. This will be an important thing to remind yourself as you build your profile.

2. Understand WHO uses Pinterest.

The second thing to understand is WHO uses Pinterest. This will, and should, affect how you gear your pages (if you are a “gender neutral” brand). There was a great article posted by Ignite Social Media recently that provided a look into the demographics of Pinterest users. What it told us was that, of the 5+ Million users, 80% of them are women, and 71% of those women are between the ages of 25 and 54. This isn’t exactly the news of the century if you’ve been following the site, but what was interesting was that they noticed that 85% of the users had at least some college experience. They also noticed that people in the Midwest are far more likely to use Pinterest than in other areas of the country. In addition they noticed that 70% of the users had a household income between 25 and 70k a year. When you put these all together it paints a much clearer picture of who REALLY uses Pinterest.

Once you understand who is most likely to come across your content, you can create boards that will intersect between your brand and your audience. Now, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t go out of your way to do this (Car dealerships don’t need to post on their favorite spring outfits), but it’s important to think outside of the box and come up with aspects of your business that could be interesting to your audience. For example, If you own or work for a gym, you could post Yoga poses, or find diagrams with body part specific exercises. This both bolsters your message of health and fitness all while appealing towards the audience available to you. We’ll get into this more in a bit.

3. Integrate Your Current Content with Pinterest -

This goes back to the Flickr/Youtube question. If you have already spent a great amount of time creating, optimizing and posting content on any of the other networks out there, there is no reason why you can’t integrate them with your Pinterest page. Now, there are some areas where this just isn’t a good idea. If your pictures are mostly of people taken at company events, then that probably isn’t something that will do you any good on Pinterest. On the other hand, If you are a hotel that has a wedding reception venue, it might not be a bad idea to post any pictures you might have of previous weddings that people had in your venue. This way, when people are looking for wedding inspiration, it’s possible that they see that picture and say, “I want to get married there” or maybe they’ve already decided to get married at your venue, but they’re just looking for decoration ideas. This would help both people as well as your business. There are plenty of possibilities of what to share, it is just important to remember the first rule of using Pinterest for your business, as well as content marketing in general, and that is to create content that people will WANT to share.

4. Use Pinterest to highlight specific areas of your business.

So this is the main way a business would use Pinterest. You would use it to curate pictures and videos that are complementary to a specific area of what you do. I’ll go back to the example of the hotel that wants to promote the fact that they do weddings. By creating boards like “Unique Wedding Cakes” or “Traditional Wedding Flowers” they are able to make pages that are full of content that is highly searched and promote that part of their business. Another example would be a local Toy Store that has a special department for baby stuff. They want to promote the fact that they have more than toys so they create a board about “Educational Toys for Babies” and fill it with pictures to products that they carry in their store. This is great content, that has a lot of value to the person looking for it, and it all promotes their business.

Now, in most cases, this isn’t easy to do. There aren’t many places that do the type of business that can be represented visually. For example, I work at a digital marketing agency, and it would be very hard to create visual boards of pictures that promote our marketing business. Think about it, and it’s possible that there is a creative way it can be done.

5. Curate content that establishes your brand “Personality” -

Another great advantage to using Pinterest is that it allows you to establish a FAR more definitive brand identity and “personality”. I’ve always been a huge proponent and advocate of using Social Media to create and reinforce your brand image. Everything from the content you post to the exact words you use in your tweets establish the tone and character of your brand. This can either be great, or terrible for brands. I’m sure a hospital, or law office, wouldn’t want to give off a “laid back” or “hip” vibe by using slang or short codes like “WTF” or “LOL” in their posts. Likewise, a small record store, or a local bar wouldn’t want to post super “square” posts that make them seem rigid and boring.

This is where Pinterest can really make a clear impression. It’s very possible to misinterpret the meanings behind words, but if you see a company page with pictures of Internet Memes or their list of favorite movies with titles like “Dumb and Dumber”, or “The Big Lebowski” you can very clearly interpret the “personality” of their brand. In addition, the personality that your brand puts off will attract a certain type of person. That’s something to keep in mind because everyone at your company might be laid back, but if you are in a “serious” industry, you’ll want to tailor your page to that. You want to establish your brand personality as something that would attract your target audience. With that being said, it would be a smart idea to sit down and establish who you want to reach, and the brand personality that you think they would want to deal with. Once that is done, you can start to curate content that promotes that.

There are several examples of what you could do to achieve this. The obvious ones are boards like “Bands We Love” or “Must See Movies” or “Books We Recommend”. These are very clear. Some less clear examples would be boards like “Things That Inspire Us”, “Life’s Little Pleasures” or “Beautiful Design”. These have the ability to not only communicate interests, but they can also communicate emotions that people can relate to. It all depends on what you’re going for. The point is to be creative with it, and think outside the box to make content that people will enjoy.

6. Optimize your content

One of the aspects of Pinterest that many people don’t utilize is the optimizability (new word) of the content. Now, making the few little changes won’t affect your Google rankings or anything, but it could increase the likelihood of your content being found, furthering the reach of your content. There are a few little things that people should think about while they’re building their pages.

- Optimize your profiles – If you are creating a brand page, make sure people know it’s a brand page. Name it after the brand, add an optimized and detailed description, include links to your page and put your brand logo as the image. It’s simple stuff.
- Connect your profiles -Pinterest gives you an option to connect your page with all of your current networks. This does two things: first, it allows you to easily post your pins to the other pages (if you choose to do that) and second it adds large links to those pages on your Pinterest profile. I’m sure you can figure out why that’s good.

- Use your links with your content- So this is something I thought was interesting, and has sparked some debate in the office. First let me point out that Pinterest gives you the ability to change the link that is attached to each Pin. This means that you could go in and change the links on all of your pins to your page. This way when people click on your pin it will take them to your page, increasing traffic to your site (a common online marketing goal). Some people think that that is dishonest and there’s a good chance that if people are clicking on your pin it’s because they want more information and if it takes them to an unrelated page it could cause a negative reaction. I tend to agree with this sentiment, but I do think there is a fine line as to where it’s acceptable.Obviously I believe it’s another advantage to posting your own content. If you are that hotel with a wedding venue that posts the pictures of their venue that it should link back to your weddings page; that makes sense. But what if you want to expand the reach of content that links to your page. Well I determined that it is possible if what you are posting is something that is “common knowledge”. For example, if you own a bar, you could post pictures of mixed drinks with the recipes and link back to your bar. Since those recipes aren’t unique to any page or company than you can use them as a way to promote your establishment, since you could make them those drinks at your bar. That is my personal opinion and both arguments are certainly understandable, but the point of this was to let you know that you can change the links of your pins, if you so choose.

- The Pins are searchable – Well this is obvious to anyone that has every used the site, but have you tailored your content to the search? Doing little things like using keywords to name your boards, or putting keywords in the description of each pin, will make them show up in Pinterest search. This is an easy step to making your pages and content findable. The easier it is to find, the more people will find it. The more people find it the higher the odds that your content will be shared. The more it’s shared, the more people see it. You get the point.

Today was a big day for us internet folk. Unless you live under the proverbial “rock” then you probably know that today was the f8 conference where Facebook announces their new changes and updates to their social platform. Today’s event promised to be especially groundbreaking as it was said that Facebook was going to overhaul their site completely and totally revolutionize how we interact with one another online. There have been some mixed reviews lately in regards to some of the changes they made to their homepage, but it was said that today’s event would put that all in to context. We think it did.

Now, a lot of what was present was stuff that was predicted by the online gossips and new sites, but some of the new stuff was just that; new. They announced their partnership with music and video providers and detailed how the new systems would work. They also announced their new app system known as “Open Graph” that would change how we interacted with the many apps on Facebook. In addition to those predicted announcements there were a few other surprises. Here is a look at the best new features to look forward to on Facebook.

Homepage Redesign: This is the first change that has already taken place. Many people don’t like this, but once you realize how this fits in to how the site plans to operate it makes more sense. They added the lists feature (in response to Google+) and the ability to easily access your pages from the left toolbar. They also added a ticker to the top right of your screen which, at first, seems redundant and confusing, but once you read about some of their new features you’ll grow to understand, and possibly even love it. Its purpose is to take all of the “unimportant” information that currently clutters your page (for example “Bobby bought a bucket in Farmville”) and put it in a fast moving ticker that stays out of your way unless you want to pay attention to it. This saves your home feed for the important things like status updates, new pictures and the like.

New Profile Design: Perhaps the most sweeping change they are making is a COMPLETELY redesigned user profile. It is so new that I almost can’t really describe it. The only thing that will really stay the same is the profile picture on the right side towards the top. They are adding a “banner” picture of sorts and with the new “Timeline” feature it completely changes how the site appears.

Timeline: This is by far my favorite of the new features. This feature takes all of your posts, pictures, updates, videos and everything else you do online and turns it into an interactive timeline. This is what makes up the new profile pages. So when you go to someones page you’ll see their basic info, and their picture and a line will run right down the center, from there you will see all of their posts organized chronologically starting with the most recent. Now, what makes this cool, apart from the cool look of it, is that Timeline goes back to the day you were born.

The way your profile is currently set up, you can scroll down, click on the “view more posts” and see a little more, but at the most you can only see that past few weeks or months. With this new feature you can just keep on scrolling and see a persons entire history on Facebook. If you aren’t big on scrolling you can click on a particular year (located at the top right of the profile- part of the new redesign) and it will take you to the most important content from their page from that year. To make it better you can go in and add stuff to the timeline in the past. So, I can go in to my profile and add a picture from the year 1996 and it will add that year to my page. Now, I know what you might be thinking, “Why is this cool?”.

Take this feature, and fast forward 20, 30, 40 years. You are now an old man or woman with kids, and grand kids and have lived a long and wonderful life. By now your Facebook profile is a treasure trove of every memory, thought, event and noteworthy feeling in your history. I honestly can’t wait until I’m 60 years old and I get to show my grand kids the pictures of me and their grandmother in college. It is truly an exciting prospect that makes Facebook into so much more than a “keep track of my friends” tool.

Open Graph: This is the meat and potatoes of their new system; their new app platform. This will be the most substantial new development from today’s f8 conference. The Open Graph refers to making apps, pages, and generally just the whole experience, more social. They have opened up the Open Graph platform to several partner companies and created a much more social way to enjoy all the things we already do online. The Open Graph system is what necessitated the creation of the ticker on your homepage, you’ll see why as you read.

Music: The first one is music. With this new platform they partnered with many of the biggest music providers to create apps that will promote sharing and discovering. The one they highlighted, and the one I’ll use, was the new Spotify Facebook app. By linking the two accounts you can share with your friends all of the music you are listening to. Now, I know what you are thinking, “Great, so now I’m going to have 934 posts about random songs people are listening to?” and that answer to that is “NO”. That is why they created the ticker. Now every time I play a new song my friends will get a quick “Tick” about it and move on.

Now here is the social part. If they are sitting on their page, and they notice that I’m listening to a song they like, they can just click on the “tick” and it will allow them to listen to that song with me. They will essentially “join” me in that song. It will also open a window that will allow us to talk about that song if we see fit. Now, I don’t know that I’ll use that feature much, but just being informed of what my friends are listening to will be great for me because I really like to discover new music.

Movies and TV: This is the other big one that was being talked about for the last few weeks. This system works pretty much exactly like the music apps. You watch a video on Hulu, or Neftlix or whatever other video platforms you use, and it will appear in your friends tickers. Now, what makes this very cool, is that if they click on the “tick” to involve themselves in the viewing then it opens up what Facebook calls “Canvas Apps” which are litte boxes that slide up and take up the left corner of your screen. It will open the video and a comment box. Now you are watching a movie, or tv show with your friend and you can talk about it as you watch. This is a great feature and will prove to be a great way to bring people together. I can just see me watching a Netflix movie on Facebook with my mom who lives in Idaho, or my wife if I’m away on business. Very cool.

News: This one is probably one that I’ll use a lot. It’s pretty straight forward: your friends read something and it posts to your ticker, then you click on it and it opens in your window. Facebook already has several apps created to promote people reading online and hopefully redefine how news is shared, read, and discovered online.

Other Apps: This is where the future of Facebook is still incomplete. In addition to the music and video apps that everyone was expecting, they also have teamed up with other companies to create some new apps. Now you can share your Foodspotting posts, or your Nike+ running data with your friends on Facebook and see what they are doing as well. This will be a great way to discover new things about the people in your network as well as express yourself through the things you like to do.

“Likes” Evolved: This is another cool feature that will allow people to connect to a great deal more things. In the beginning you were allowed to connect to people, then you could like things and places, now you can get far more specific. How many times have you wanted to like one song by a band without liking the band as a whole. Or have you ever wanted to talk about, say, “hiking the northern trail” without having to “like” the whole state park. Well now you can. This feature allows you to connect to more things by allowing, as Zuckerberg put it, “A noun AND a verb”. Now you can post that you “Hiked the Northern Trail” and it will post a map of the Northern Trail to your page and your friends can also connect with the trail.

Now, obviously these aren’t the greatest examples of what you can do with this feature, but you get the point.

Overall I think that these new changes really will change the way people connect and “get to know each other”. It will be really interesting to see what apps come out in the future, and how Facebook will evolve their Open Graph platform in the future. Anyway, these are some of the new features that will be rolling out in the next few months and I’m sure there will be more to follow. Enjoy.