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WTF Is Peach and Other Stuff You Need To Know Now

It’s 2016 and if you’re like “What’s Snapchat?” all of your younger coworkers are going to laugh at you. Seriously, you need to know what’s happening on social RIGHT NOW because, like Zen has taught us, the present is all we have. On social, the present was 5 minutes ago, 5 minutes ago was a month ago and 2015 is so far behind us everyone still had a Livejournal.

Ready? Here we go:

  1. Grab a cup of coffee and get familiar with this enlightening listicle on all things currently Facebook. Skim your way down to numbers 13 and 15 for the scoop. Everyone already knows too much about Facebook, but it’s important to be able to understand the ever-changing platform, how audiences are using it and how you can use it to your advantage. We’re no longer fishing in the ocean, but a man-made lake. Start approaching Facebook like Google searches where the algorithms for search engine optimization change frequently and you’re targeted based on what you’ve done previously. Ahem, judgy-judgy.
  2. Big internet news: @WhiteHouse is now on…drum roll… @Snapchat. But the real news is that their first story features White House apples, with which Black Sheep is very familiar.
    Now, it’s officially legit for any last minute Snapchat believers. Take a seat for a snappy retrospect on the importance of the platform for marketers. Step outside of digital and think of yourself as a museum curator. Your job is to collect, represent and display culture in the form of art, whether it’s understood or not. One wrongly positioned plaque, misprint, disagreeable angle and your career as a curator is done. That’s a lot of pressure.

    Snap back to reality in front of your computer screen with three tabs open to social media feeds; feeds and feeds and feeds of curated, scrutinized content. Snapchat gives the freedom to not give a f*ck, and only give pieces of your culture to those that care in real time.
  3. You might have seen a glimpse of the new app Peach, created by the Vine founders, that launched last week. We downloaded it and still think it’s a tad like GroupMe or WhatsApp with a glorified feed, but we’re ready to be proven wrong. Here’s the gist, says the New York Times:

    ​They can “shout” a message in big letters, use “here” for a place check-in, share the weather, reveal the charge remaining in their iPhone’s battery, tag the name of a favorite TV show or a book, and more. The app has several Slack-like shortcuts called “magic words” for these actions.

​Other misc. items that you should know:

  • Pinterest hired its first head of Diversity – Cheers!
  • Facebook Messenger is about to break into the business with more than 800M users – Think Slack.
  • Twitter thinks they can interact with text messages soon—we’re interested.

​Consider yourself in-the-know. ​and watch for other spontaneous social rants in the future. 

@ShearCreativity: