One of the least understood social media platforms by people of my, shall we say, seasoned generation is Snapchat, which means we tend to ignore it.
And that means we're missing out on one of the fastest-growing and largest communities of younger-generation people - ten billion video views per day, according to investor data (having a hard time working that out, population-wise, but still...)
Like other social media channels, Snapchat is a great way for brands to reach consumers; perhaps more than other channels, Snapchat gives consumers a way to reach brands and other consumers with image-led content.
I'm a novice myself, still mostly in observation mode and frankly baffled by much of what goes on there - despite the best efforts of some dedicated users to tutor me.
Even so, it's clear that like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram before it, Snapchat is blurring the lines between who controls what and how our brands and organisations are portrayed.
On Snapchat, “conversations are not only including a photo or video, but are being started by them,” Robert Peck, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, said in a report this week. “People’s behavior is changing so that photos are being used as speech instead of a repository for memories.”
