It’s officially here: Facebook IPO Week. GM started off the week by announcing that it would be pulling $10 million in paid advertising from the site, stating that the investment was ineffective in terms of sales. Many people wrote articles about being sick of hearing about Facebook. Unfortunately, readers proceeded to “Like” and “Recommend” those articles thousands of times.

My goal this week was to not make one mention of Facebook. I wasn’t going to mention the hoodie, or the app store or how they are helping military families and veterans by introducing suicide prevention tools. I wasn’t going to mention any of this. Well, I failed miserably, obviously. And with the looming Facebook IPO next week, I won’t be getting any gold stars next week either.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the addition of a “life-saving” feature that allows users to publish their status as an organ donor and Spotify launched a very overdue iPad app. YouTube showed its support of 100 original channels of programming to the tune of $200 million, while at the same time taking away from the world the one-of-a-kind Cat Diddy dance (who comes up with these dance names?) as performed by Kate Upton.

How many of you were up late Tuesday night installing Google Drive, only to find out that, yes, Google now can publish and “publicly display” any content that resides in Drive? Don’t be too upset. Most other cloud services, including Dropbox and SkyDrive have similar policies, and so I’d shy away from uploading any rants [...]

The Facebook/Instagram deal continued to dominate headlines this week. Information began to leak detailing the three-day meeting of Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, who eventually agreed upon the $1 billion deal (down from $2 billion). Only after the negotiation was the unaware Facebook board brought in for an obligatory head nod. We were still reeling from the number of zeros and deciding whether Systrom sold out or realized that his 14-person company with zero revenue was no match for the man who beat the Winklevoss twins.

In case you were living under a rock this week, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Please take this opportunity to make a Justin Timberlake Social Network reference of your own making. Thanks. Will this mean more pictures of people’s dinners in your News Feed? This will never be okay with me until those photos include a delivery button.

Hopefully you didn’t get hit too badly with any April Fools’ jokes. Or perhaps you were really excited about Google Maps now in 8-bit. Here’s a quick round-up of pranks from around the web from TechCrunch. Most importantly, there’s a pug wearing a monocle. Thanks, Internet! (But if we can get more Conashable, I’m totally okay with it)

I didn’t have a theme in mind when writing this week’s post, but it inadvertently became all about humanizing your brand. With three of the five articles dealing with personality in some way, I’ll let you be the judge of how important I think this element is. Survey Says Marketers See Social Media as an [...]