The Facebook IPO has both the financial and marketing communities abuzz, and with good reason. Facebook is the king of the social media hill, and its growth and ability to attract a loyal and highly networked audience is to be admired.

For brands, however, online social networks are far from the Holy Grail of marketing. The research is increasingly clear and compelling that for brands that want to be social and generate conversation, a far bigger and more powerful force is real world, face-to-face conversation.

A Chicago “L” station is about the last place you would think of to pick up a carton of milk.



But online grocer Peapod has turned a busy CTA station at State and Lake streets into a virtual supermarket aisle, enabling commuters to use their smartphones to scan and buy any of 70 items.



Appearing overnight on once-barren walls, 7-foot-tall virtual shelves line both sides of a 60-foot tunnel, filled with everything from paper towels and diapers to fresh produce. Android and iPhone users can download a free Peapod mobile app to load up their electronic grocery carts for delivery the next day.



Chicago, Peapod’s largest market, is the second U.S. city to roll out the interactive supermarket shelves, which first appeared last month at Philadelphia train stations. Other Chicago locations might be added, as well as locations in other cities, depending on what happens during a 12-week run at the station, which averages 17,640 commuters each weekday.

It’s been a scary few years for the housing market. But at some point, the nightmare has to end (please?). Is now the time? Should first-time home buyers consider jumping into the market?

After all, home prices have fallen 34% from their 2006 peak and mortgage rates are hovering at or near record lows.



On one side are those who argue that homes are more affordable than they have been in decades, based on how much monthly income a mortgage consumes and whether owning is less costly than renting.

An uptick in home buying by investors already is under way, they say—an indication that those who wait may miss out on a good buying opportunity.

I made $970,000 last year. How much did you make?

IN BRITAIN, if you want to sell your home, an estate agent will list the property, find a buyer, help you negotiate a deal and guide you through the transaction, all for a commission of 2-3% of the sale price. In America, realtors provide the same services for roughly double the fee.

Are they worth it? The shouty realtors in David Mamet’s film Glengarry Glen Ross (pictured) certainly think so. (“[My] watch costs more than your car…that’s who I am.”) Others disagree. Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago finds that American property brokers cause “social waste” of $8 billion a year via overcharging and inefficiency.

Three steps to a successful approach



The equation used to be: money x media = business.



The new equation is: time x media = business.



In other words, every company is a media company.



What does this look like in the real world? Here are three steps to creating a “campaign” that will last:

The era of mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple and Google, is driving among the largest shifts in consumer behavior over the last forty years. Impressively, its rate of adoption is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet Boom of the 1990s. Since 2007, more than 500 million iOS and Android smartphones and tablets have been activated. By the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion. According to IDC, over 800 million PCs were sold between 1981 and 2000, making the rate of iOS and Android smart device adoption more than four times faster than that of personal computers.

Powerfully, smartphones and tablets come with broadband connectivity out-of-the-box, instantly combining the best of “Silicon” and “The Cloud” for consumers. The Internet, which served to connect the installed base of PCs, grew to 495 million users by the end of 2001, according to the International Telecommunication Union. With the Internet beginning its commercial ramp in 1996, iOS and Android devices will see double the number of device activations during its first five years compared to the number of Internet users reached during its first five years (Internet 1996 – 2001 vs. Smart devices 2007 – 2012).

Learn more about our 4th generation native iPad, iPhone and Android apps, here.

The idea that rapidly rising home prices are positive is often based on unrealistic expectations.

What would happen if, as so many people are hoping, home prices were to go up dramatically again as they did in the early 2000s? Would such a change really benefit society?

People who most ardently desire this are homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, who took out mortgages at the peak of the boom and now find that their homes are worth less than they owe on them. They would just feel relieved to get out of the red as soon as possible.

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

More from Tom Tunguz.

“With ‘Don’t be evil,’ Google set itself up for accusations of hypocrisy anytime they got near the line. Now they are on the defensive, with their business undermined especially by Apple. When people are defensive they can do things that are emotional, not reasonable, and bad behavior starts.”

Roger McNamee, a longtime Silicon Valley investor whose investments include Facebook in The New York Times.

When companies get defensive, they do unnatural things, they lose their way. This deviation from tactics comes when companies find themselves facing market saturation at a time when consumer behaviors change. It is something I have learned from observing Silicon Valley giants closely for many years. Google is but the latest example.

Why, for all our knowledge, do we so poorly understand what is going on in our business world?



Since the advent of the world wide web and corporate intranets we have had unprecedented access to information.



Are we that much more effective, productive or creative? I don’t think so.



I could give you all the information you desired. Perfect information. But would you be able to readily act on it. Probably not!



We don’t need more information or knowledge. We need to understand what we have better. We need to make better sense of it all.



How have human beings made sense of the world since the dawn of time? Through conversation! Through storytelling and anecdotes.