The Nielsen Social Media Report Q3 2011. Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency? This is post I’ve been meaning to write for a quite some time now, it’s spawned from a number of conversations I’ve had with people in several digital and mobile agencies around London. Aside from an odd 14-months at Nokia, I’ve spent all of my professional working life within agencies and it’s always felt like the right fit. The combination of creative and technical minds plus big brands has always had that lure and promise of creating amazing work. The process of getting a bit of paper containing a brief and turning it into a real life experience is pretty great. So with all the right ingredients, creative juice and technical ability on tap I posed the question - Can The Next Instagram/Hipstamatic/Klout/Angry Birds Be Born Within An Agency?
Actually my question was more like why hasn’t this already happened? I’m not just talking about internal projects that agencies do in spare time (or better still, dedicated time) but for client work too. But we can do better surely. But fuck that. Tweet late, email early, and don’t forget about Saturday: Using data to develop a social media strategy. Tweet more, and embrace the weekends. That’s according to Dan Zarrella, a social media researcher (with 33,000 followers himself). Zarrella works for HubSpot, mining data on hundreds of millions of tweets, blog posts, and email newsletters to help marketers find trends. News organizations should pay attention, too. Zarrella says the right Twitter strategy depends in part on what your goals are.
Want to accumulate as many followers as possible? Then tweet a lot: Twitter’s A-listers — those with the most followers — tweet an average of 22 times a day, and more tweets generally lead to more followers. But if your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you should show a little more restraint; accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one. It’s an inexact science, but at least it’s an attempt at science where so much social media strategy is driven by intuition.
Here are the slides from Zarrella’s webinar: Facebook Places, Foursquare: Social Media's Tiny 2% Impact On Businesses. "You've got your Groupon and Living Social, and your Foursquare and Facebook Places," says Jonathan Marek. "What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury? " That's the question on the mind of most every marketer and retailer--and Marek might finally have an answer. Marek is senior VP at at Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), a software company that provides data and analytics to some of the biggest retailers and restaurants in the world, including Starbucks, Staples, Subway, and more. As he explains, APT essentially runs "clinical drug trials for businesses," measuring the incremental impact on sales of everything from traditional ad and social media campaigns to storefront physical remodeling and relocation.
Like an FDA trial, the company uses "test and control patients," and a proprietary algorithm to measure campaigns against stores with similar traffic, sales, and characteristics. The Other Kind of iPad Magazines. For the past few days I’ve been using and enjoying TweetMag on my iPad, a new app from the smart folks at Toronto design studio Teehan + Lax. It’s a beautifully designed reader-style application that “uses your Twitter account to create simple magazines.” It’s very much in the mode of Flipboard, which also transforms your social media stream into magazine-like presentations of eclectic content. I’ve often spoken of Flipboard as a promising hint at a truly new kind of reading experience, one that employs the power of social graphs and the magic of superior user experience design to present users with a coherent view of the world.
Flipboard, in my opinion, is the first step on what will either be a long road or a steep climb towards a new way of interfacing with written content. How to Use a Magazine To me, Flipboard and TweetMag haven’t yet established a clear use case for themselves. More Relevance, More Social What could amplify this value is relevance. The 5 Social Media Game Plans for Super Bowl Advertisers. Imagine you're an advertiser contemplating spending $3 million or so on a Super Bowl ad. Maybe you've never done this before or maybe you do it every year, but at some point, you have to justify to someone — your CEO or maybe a procurement expert at the company — why this is a good idea.
Now imagine there was a cheap way to get a better return on investment on that $3 million. All you had to do was create some kind of buzz before the ad ran on TV. You could do this by running the ad or maybe video related to the ad on YouTube, writing about it on your company blog, premiering the ad on Facebook, or maybe talking it up on Twitter. Or perhaps you could release an app related to the ad around the time of the big game. You could also get fans to actually create a video for you and then have them talk about it via social media channels for months before the game. 1. These days, Frito-Lay starts its Super Bowl push in September. 2.
Anheuser-Busch took the latter approach. 3. 4. 5. Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software. TNS Digital Life | Internet Statistics & Social Media Usage | Online Behavior & Trends. SPINNING AROUND: SEVENTY SEVEN THINKING OUT LOUD: TWENTY FIVE BRANDS USING TWITTER RATHER WELL ...
This is a relatively unrepresentative starter-for-ten (or twenty five, in actual fact) list of brands that are doing good and or interesting things with Twitter. Some of them are doing some really very clever things. Some are doing some really, really bloody simple things, but they seem to work. There are some not really very clear rules we set ourselves. We have deliberately excluded media brands - hence BBC, ITV, The Times, Guardian et al Twitter feeds are not in the list. And we have also excluded individual or personality brands - hence Scott Mills, AplusK, Britney and the like don't make it in here. We'd also be the first to admit that is a far from exhaustive list. We're really interested in getting any more suggestions from people who think that they're doing interesting things, have a good war story to tell or think they've seen something that might qualify. Thanks to those who've already made suggestions, including @wadds, @chris_reed, @r_c and @dekhmcclelland.
So Moo is. Impressive. FlowTownMobileSocial.jpg (480×1238) How to Style an Application Like Facebook - Devtacular. Introduction So you have a great idea for an application, and you've developed your idea into a somewhat functional Facebook app. The only problem is, it looks completely out of place in the space Facebook has designated for your layout. Let's look at how we can change that.
Facebook invested a lot of money in creating the fluid graphic design work you see in front of you, but we won't have to. Using a few handy tools right in our browser you can figure out the majority of what's going on. I won't go into detail about this process, but we primarily used the Firefox extension FireBug and Chrome's built in inspection tools to ferret out the pertinent style attributes. Let's look at the crucial elements of the stylesheet by category and then discuss how to implement them.
The Colours of Facebook Facebook keeps their colour model simple, and it's an effective approach. Let's take a look at the full reference chart. Facebook BlueText ColoursGrey BoxBlue BoxInformation BoxError Box Icon Dimensions. Apple Introduces A Social Network: Ping. Ignore social media? Not a cat’s chance… » pr-media-blog.co.uk. August 25th, 2010 by Jon Clements Type “woman” into Google search today – in fact, go as far as “w-o-m” and you will be presented with “woman puts cat in bin”; 1.97m searches on this term alone, just a day after a Coventry woman was filmed putting kitty in the litter. Not only is the story a shocking example of animal cruelty, it’s a salutary lesson to any organisation that hasn’t yet recognised the power of social media.
Imagine that the hapless Coventry woman at the centre of the furore was, instead, your company or brand. Look at the facts: number one in Google search; more than 50,000 views on YouTube; nearly 30,000 fans on Facebook, posting nearly 1,000 comments on the matter; 743-and-counting online news articles and, now, a police guard on the offending woman’s home. Granted, the ire of the British animal lover should never be underestimated. But where did this firestorm take hold? About Jon Clements. The UK’s media consumption habits / we are social.
Ofcom released its seventh annual communications market report last week. Its a goldmine of information about media consumption habits in the UK and is worth reading in full, the internet section in particular. In terms of social media usage, it reveals interesting data such as: Social networking (in blue) is an all day long activity, filling the gaps between traditional media: The data above illustrates the popularity of television in the evening, when over half (52%) of all media activities undertaken involves watching television on a TV set. In the morning, radio is more popular, but declines by the evening when TV is at its peak. Text communications (including social media usage) and voice communications both make up a fair proportion of media activity during the daytime and after the end of television peak timeComputer, mobile phone and hand-held devices all have higher levels of use among younger age groups.
Almost all homes with computers are now connected to the internet. Videos Posted by Facebook: Why to Check In? [HD] Who, What, When, and Now...Where. Like Box. Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Ups by 29% Twitter recently redesigned their sign-up process to boost new user engagement. Though the new sign-up process added one more screen, conversions went up 29%. How? Gradual engagement. Gradual engagement is the process of moving a user through an application or service – actually engaging with it, and seeing it's benefits.
With gradual engagement, new users are not just presented with a registration form and then dropped off a cliff (typical process in many Web applications). Instead, registration is either postponed, or handled behind the scenes and the first time experience is focused on giving people an understanding of how they can use a service and why they should care to. When done right, gradual engagement communicates the core essence of a service with a few lightweight interactions. Through their user research, Twitter found that while celebrities (and their tweets) were a big reason people came to Twitter, they did not keep them there. More About Twitter's Sign-Up Redesign. Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location - Bits Blog - NYTime. Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.
Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services. In preparation for the introduction, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November.
The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.” At that time, the company also offered some foreshadowing of the new feature: “If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.” 5 Essential Social Media Infographics For Marketers. We have covered a couple of infographics over the past months, and we thought it would a good idea to gather 5 essential ones that would help marketers understand the social space better. The first two infographics below will provide details on two often used social tools, Facebook and Twitter. The third infographic will be for marketers whose products are gender oriented. The fourth will give a big picture on how each social site fare on 4 important digital marketing aspects.
Lastly, the fifth summarizes the big social media marketing plan. 1. Understanding Facebook Description: Facebook is the world’s largest social networking site, and this infographic, done by @msaleem for Facebook’s 6th birthday provides insights on Facebook’s dominance on each continent. 2. Description: Besides some Twitter fun facts, this infographic provides information on Twitter users’ behavior. 3.
Description: This infographic quickly tells us the gender proportion of each social site. 4. 5. Facebook Design: One Brand, One Button - or - One Button to Rule Them All: A Note. Twitter’s most radical idea yet: advertising that adds value « B. Guest post by Patricia McDonald, Planning Partner, CHI This is a rare event for us, a guest post from an ex-BBHer, Pats McDonald. Pats has written a fair amount on related topics in the past here and we’re delighted she agreed to do this follow-up.
Hotly anticipated at South by SouthWest but held back for the first ever Twitter developer’s conference in April, Twitter unveiled its long-anticipated advertising platform last month. While the announcement has been slightly overtaken in the hype stakes by the launch of the Facebook Open Graph, the iPhone OS4 and the Apple versus Adobe showdown (quite a month we’re having), there is nevertheless some serious food for thought in the nuances of the Promoted Tweets platform.
I’ve written before about some of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies the very idea of sponsored tweets and more recently about the very real danger that by polluting the stream, over-advertising in social media may strip the medium of much of its value. 1. 2. Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay.
Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org. For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. While content aggregation has been around for a while with sites using algorithms to find and link to content, the relatively new practice of editorial curation — human filtering and organizing — has created what I'm dubbing, "The Great Creationism Debate. " The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. It turns out that lots of smart and passionate people are taking sides and voicing their opinions. The Issues at Hand Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News.
Who are curators? Where We Stand Now. A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples. The collected game design rants of Marc LeBlanc. Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources - Big Spaceship | Think Blog - The Future of Foursquare.