This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.

Tumblr Ads Coming to Yahoo (Read more at AdAge)

Tumblr sponsored post ads will soon be running on Yahoo properties, including Yahoo News and Yahoo Beauty, according to AdAge. Initial test partners include Tide, Lipton, Toyota and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.

The format will be heavily focused on images and will appear natively, next to editorial content and in content feeds with a light shade and a sponsored logo.The ads will be sold on a cost-per-engagement basis, so an advertiser only pays when someone clicks, shares, likes or follows the sponsoring brand.

According to Yahoo, this is the "most substantive integration between the two companies since Yahoo acquired Tumblr."

Tumblr's financial performance has been under scrutiny as advertisers have a difficult time understanding what Tumblr can offer from a measurement perspective as well as allocating resources to be successful on the platform. This is one way for Yahoo to generate some revenue from Tumblr and encourage advertisers executing buys through Yahoo to leverage Tumblr sponsored posts.

Facebook Officially Launches Slingshot (Read more at Inside Facebook)

Following an accidental release of its new app, Facebook has officially launched Slingshot, an iOS and Android app that puts Facebook squarely in competition with ephemeral photo and video sharing apps like Snapchat.

The app allows users to send ephemeral videos and photos to each other. Like Snapchat, Slingshot users can add text and captions to images sent through Slingshot as well as draw on the photos. Unlike Snapchat, users must send a reply in the form of a photo or video in order to see content sent to them. Otherwise, they can simply swipe messages away without viewing them. Opened messages go away once they've been viewed.

Videos sent through Slingshot loop like Vine videos, and they're limited to 15 seconds in length.

The app was created during a Facebook Creative Labs hackathon, and it joins Messenger as another direct message communication app separate from Facebook's primary mobile application.

There are really a couple ways to look at this. Facebook's approach is either extremely smart in that it invites people to create content on an ongoing basis, or it's an approach that keeps people from embracing the platform. Slingshot essentially puts a barrier between users and content sent to them, and it runs the risk of users constantly sending meaningless messages back and forth in order to see each other's responses. With other, established platforms like Snapchat, users may not feel a need to switch to something else that offers little else in terms of features.

Snapchat Tests Group-Sharing for Events (Read more at TechCrunch)

Snapchat is in the process of testing a feature that would pull posts from users attending the same event into one, collective Snapchat Story, a feature that allows users to view a collection of snaps collectively within 24 hours.

This new feature, called Our Story, uses geo-location to determine if users are together at one event and then creates a shared Story with everyone. This means users must enable location services for the feature to work. Users will have the option to share or not share their content to Our Story when posting to their personal Stories. From there, users who follow an event brand on Snapchat will be able to view the Our Story associated with the event.

The feature has the potential to be very interesting and compelling, especially for concertgoers and brands that are executing on the ground with experiential marketing. Snapchat has a strong user base of Millennials eager to share and connect, and Our Story allows them to contribute to a collective experience they can share with multiple people. The challenge Snapchat may face is that one of it's core features is privacy, and sharing your location and sharing outside of your personal connections does not easily fit into that brand promise.

Amazon Introduces Its Fire Phone (Read more at AdAge)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hit the stage to introduce a four years in-the-making smartphone dubbed Fire Phone.

The phone features a 4.7-inch screen, quad-core CPU with 2GB of RAM, 13 MP Camera and Kindle Fire-like interface. From a spec perspective, it's competitive with the iPhone 5C and Samsung Galaxy S4.

The phone comes with a free year of Amazon Prime, which offers free 2-day shipping and access to media like Amazon Prime videos. It also features Mayday, a customer service feature that makes technicians available on video at any moment to help answer any product questions and event control of your phone if necessary to help you out. Finally, it offers Dynamic Perspective to create 3D imagery on the screen using stereoscopic and infrared cameras.

What's most interesting for marketers however, is its Firefly button. The button allows users to use the camera to essentially scan almost any object, including media like TV shows and movies, to receive pricing and availability on Amazon. Firefly pulls from a database of 70 million objects.

Amazon's customers can't visit any stores, but now this phone puts Amazon in their hands 24/7 wherever they go and essentially serves as a real threat to competitors. With this phone users don't need to open an app. Instead, they can go into a store or out with a friend, see something they like and seamlessly add it to their Amazon carts, for potentially a better price. Amazon's offering instant gratification for intent to buy. Retailers may need to evaluate in-store tracking technology to push deals and messages to consumers based on their in-store locations.
The challenge Amazon faces is that it locks users into its ecosystem. They cannot download Google apps, for example. Plus, it's biggest and best feature is a better benefit for Amazon than it is for its phone users. While most smartphones are essentially computers, the Fire Phone is more of a shopping device.

The phone is slated to launch in one month for $199.99 to $299.99 through AT&T.

Twitter Acquires Snappy TV (Read more at Mashable)

Twitter has acquired SnappyTV, a video-clipping and sharing service. This is the latest move by Twitter to support its social TV focus. But this isn't the first time SnappyTV and Twitter have crossed paths. They've worked together before to help businesses share video content.
SnappyTV allows broadcasters to edit live TV broadcasts and then share them to social networks.

Twitter has really been pushing into more visual content creation with Vine, images displaying in user timelines and GIF support, so SnappyTV is a natural extension. This gives media companies one more reason to go to Twitter. This has the potential to allow them to promote and share more video content on the platform.

It also has potential for TV advertisers. For example, a World Cup advertiser could potentially create a tweet about an event that happened in real-time during a game and send the tweet quickly through the SnappyTV platform.

News Quick Hits

Facebook has updated its iPad app. It now includes a new column to the right of the News Feed to display birthdays, events, trending topics, videos and games. 'Trending' showcases what people are talking about on Facebook right now. 'Videos' shows you the most shared videos among your demographic. 'My Games' shows games that have been played recently with a link to jump back into them, and 'Popular Games' suggests games you might want to play. The update makes the iPad experience more closely resemble the Web experience and seems to be focused on improving engagement with and awareness of Facebook games. (Read more at AllFacebook)
Facebook Paper has received its version 1.2 update, which adds a 'Trending' section that visually highlights trending topics on Facebook. Users can see a quick snippet along with an image related to a topic that is being discussed on the social network. The move is a way for Facebook to more quickly deliver news and snippets of information, similar to how the popular news reader and news summary app Circa delivers information. Facebook also added other features with the update including the ability to mention friends in posts and comments, copy-and-paste text, selecting an audience for your posts, the ability to crop and resize cover and profile photos, an ability to easily view tags in photos and tilt and zoom to view photos wider than your screen. (Read more at TechCrunch)
Believe it or not, YouTube is the biggest music streaming service out there, and it wants to monetize that by unrolling a service that charges users to watch music videos, listen to songs and download music without ads. Some independent artists are against signing up for the service, so Google has said it will take steps to remove them from YouTube completely. YouTube plays a big role in the marketing of music today, and the service has faced backlash for displaying monopolistic behavior for the move. (Read more at AdAge)
Twitter has announced that users will be able to tweet GIFs from the web, iOS and Android apps. Twitter is among the last of the major social networks to offer GIF support, and it is essentially a me-too feature at this point. However, the move does signal an opportunity for advertisers to experiment with new types of content. (Read more at SocialTimes)
LinkedIn has launched a new app, LinkedIn Job Search. It's a free iOS app that allows users to search and apply for jobs. Any activity or actions within the app are completely private and not shared with a user's network. Users can search and apply for jobs in LinkedIn's primary app, but this app provides more detailed search, job recommendations, information on how your network is connected to a prospective company and notifications when new jobs are coming up or saved jobs are about to close the application window. (Read more at Mashable)