There’s so much to say about Google+ , but for now I just want to express how impressed I am with their intro video. Tone is just perfect. And the tag line at the end of the video — “Introducing a few new thoughts on sharing” — is spot-on. There’s something very humble about it that I really like.

Facebook does a good job introducing their new product, “Sponsored Stories” in this video.

While this is interesting from a marketing perspective and I’m curious to try it out for the brands I’m working with, I’m still not completely convinced that this will really work from a consumer/audience perspective.

If the purpose of these “sponsored stories” is to lengthen the lives of status updates (as they appear in our News Feeds and get buried before we know it), I ask myself if an ad really lengthens that time any further? An ad is also very short lived and disappears after a refresh, right?

It sounds to me like this is just another way to get brand messages to the people in a more palatable way. I think Facebook is getting there and I appreciate their creativity, but I do think it’ll take some time before the average Facebook user actually pays attention to their Facebook ads.

I tuned into a great webinar this past Friday by Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group. The webinar was hosted by social media monitoring firm Radian6 and offered a great many nuggets of wisdom.

Here’s one point I really liked. Charlene mentioned that people always came to her with this question — “how do I get more people to comment on my Facebook page?” Her answer to this question was really interesting and something I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about.

She said that it was important to respect how people wanted to engage with your brand. In other words, not everyone is the type to write a comment; many people are just content watching your status updates and that is fine too.

She supplied the above slide and emphasized that a huge part of the online population were “watchers” while fewer shared and and even fewer were passionate enough to produce something for the brand.

In my mind, that’s a really great reminder and will also keep us all a little more sane in the process.

During a recent team meeting, one of my co-workers voiced a sentiment a lot of us had been thinking about for a while.

“We can’t be running Facebook pages forever,” she said.

While Facebook is clearly a powerful tool in engaging customers, developing brand evangelists, and encouraging word of mouth, we knew as digital professionals we had to be doing more than just operating at the status quo.

We needed to be thinking beyond Facebook, we needed to be identifying digital trends, and we needed to be thinking about what was coming next.

Here’s my attempt at answering this challenging question — WHAT’S NEXT?

Recently, Calvin Klein inserted a QR code into a billboard (which allows people to watch a video ad on their phone when aiming their phone at the billboard). Forever 21 also recently launched an augmented reality billboard.

Feel free to take a look at the articles and let me know what you think, but here’s a bit of what I’m thinking about as I read these articles…

I’m thinking about how it’s really easy to get caught up in the technology aspect of these two examples and become convinced that augmented reality or QR codes are the hot new thing. But honestly, these two examples just show me that what’s “next” is not anything NEW, it’s not a flashy toy.

It’s merely this—finding interesting ways to connect old media with new media.

Outdoor advertising and billboards have been around forever. We consider them old media, but they are still very much effective in getting a brand message across. We need to help old media and new media come together and intersect in a stronger and more meaningful way.

Because at the end of the day, that’s the spot we’re in today in 2010 as a society—our lives consist of our offline lives and our online lives. Sometimes they feel like two separate things, but the greatest thing is when they come together.

Think about the times you’ve read someone’s tweet, found it interesting, and then saw that same person the next day in the flesh and started talking about that interesting tweet from the day before. Isn’t that the best?

This is exactly the sort of activity brands should be mimicking—this unique offline + online experience.

What a crazy + hilarious idea! @datingbrian to go on 30 dates in 30 days, asking the world 4 suggestions along the way! http://bit.ly/9IErBW

Intriguing article explores how u produce the same chemical when ur feeling affection as when ur on social media http://j.mp/dieYtQ

I must say, I walked out of the Future of Media panel last Tuesday, feeling that the future of media was really quite bright.

Panelist Dan Abrams (from NBC News and Mediaite) really summed up that sentiment best by pointing out something that I had never noticed: the Huffington Post was only 5 years old (having just celebrated its birthday) and there was already talk of the site surpassing The New York Times! We were only at the beginning, at the infancy stage for online media, Dan said.

Besides Dan’s comment, the industry leaders on the panel exuded confidence about the industry as a whole as well as where their companies were specifically headed within the online media landscape.

The moderator NYU journalism professor and I Want Media founder Patrick Phillips asked all the questions we wanted to know and more.

• To Google New’s Josh Cohen — “Are you stealing content?”

• To HuffPo’s Ariana Huffington — If there’s any truth to recent rumors (as reported by Techcrunch) of Yahoo looking to acquire HuffPo. (The answer was no, but they have a “deep partnership.”)
  

• And to everyone on the panel — “How do you judge your journalists?” “Have you considered a pay wall?” and the ultimate question “is the ad model supporting your business?”

Below is a list of the panelists at the event, as well as a snapshot of some of the interesting conversations that took place on stage.

PANELISTS:

Dan Abrams, NBC News, Mediaite

Josh Cohen, Google News

David Eun, AOL Media

Jonathan Geller, Genius Boy Report

Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post

Cindi Leive, Glamour

James Pitaro, Yahoo Media

SNAPSHOT OF CONVERSATION (PARAPHRASED):

• How Do You Judge Your Editors?
  

Phillips: Ariana, where do you think HuffPo will be in a couple of years?

Huffington: I don’t make predictions, I take it day by day.

Phillips: How about talk of HuffPo surpassing NY Times’ traffic?

Huffington: We’re always looking to increase our traffic…but, if you become obsessed with traffic, you forget your DNA—we don’t judge our editors by traffic.

Phillips: Then how do you judge your editors?

Huffington: If they stick to the DNA. If they’re columns are a great place to go—great content, great conversation. Otherwise, if we judged editors in other ways, editors would stoop low and do all sorts of crazy things to get traffic.

• Google News, Are You Stealing Content?

Phillips: Are you stealing content?

Cohen: No. We distribute legally. If you don’t want us picking up your stuff, then you can block us.

Phillips: Do people do this?

Cohen: No because we give them tremendous traffic, which is hugely valuable to them. Though, Times UK is blocking all search engines. Is this a good move? It remains to be seen. Clearly they’re going for scarcity factor. Maybe it’ll work to their advantage, we’ll see.

Huffington: Well, it’s good for us, bad for the consumers. Ruport Murdoch calls for a paywall, well that’s good for us! We’ll take your readers!

• Have You Ever Considered a Pay Wall?

Phillips: What do you think of pay walls? Have you ever considered it?

Huffington: Well, I see the pay wall working for sites that either provide people with excusive information private financial information or for weird porn.

Pitaro: If you’re going to create a pay wall you need to have a high quality brand really differentiate yourself, and then have a user base that is primarily expensing your cost—then you can get away with it. But in general, it’s hard. If you change to pay wall, readers will navigate elsewhere—and honestly when I hear that sites are going to create a pay wall, the competitive part of me comes out and gets excited—we can get those users to Yahoo!

• Is the Ad Model Sufficient?

Phillips: So no pay wall—so then I assume the plan is to make money on ads? (audience laughs)

Cohen: Google News is making money from ads. But right now there is no efficiency in buying a display online ad— we need to fix that and make the process more efficient. But let’s take a step back—this idea of a pay wall is meant to get ad-free experience, correct? Then, according to the pay wall thinking, ads are bad. No, we need to prove that ads are useful. What more can we do to make ads a more engaging experience?

Pitaro: Exactly. When we talk to advertisers they always tell us—great, we know about the banner, but what else can you give us? In fact that word “banner” has become a dirty word at Yahoo. We don’t want consumers  to just see an ad but we want to challenge them to think about the ad. You know, people always ask, you just have ad model? No, we’re getting creative. We think about —what is goal of advertiser, what does the user want, bring it all together. Here’s the analogy I always think about…I was an early adopter for Tivo and when I first got it, I would fast forward commercials, but now I watch the commercials because they look so good. This needs to happen online! Here’s a story — Discovery came to us and wanted to try something new where the ad pushes everything down. Everyone resisted, because it was interruptive, but then we saw the ad creative and we decided to do it. And we actually saw engagement go up 12 percent on that 1 day. It’s all about making the ad part of the entertainment experience.

Very cool. @Klout to Launch FB app that recommends Twitter influencers for u based on your FB likes http://goo.gl/fb/VQLXY via @steverubel