For many brands and marketers the other Friday was a game changer – they just haven’t realised this yet.
As Facebook rolls out Timeline for brand pages, one of the most overused fan gathering tactics is on the way out. We believe this is a good thing. We are talking about “Fan gating”, often referred to as “Like gating” or “Like blocking”. Read More
This past 24 hours have seen the latest Twitter storm come hurtling through the social media atmosphere, sweeping up thousands before it in a big stinky cloud of outrage and bile. Not for the first time, the catalyst for the disgust was the Daily Mail, this time an article by Samantha Brick about “the downsides to looking pretty”. Whether or not they are cynically doing this stuff on purpose (1.5 million hits on one article is pretty impressive) is open for debate, but yet again they prove the sheer monumental snowball that can be created on social media if you do enough to sufficiently create the avalanche. Read More
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It seems so natural to many people now, that it’s a hazy memory of a time when it wasn’t possible to catch up on the latest news stories or updates from celebrities on your mobile, in the same amount of time it takes to step off the tube, jump on the escalator and order a latte in the coffee shop next door. In the modern world people want information quickly and in an easily digestible format, and this helps to explain the growth in popularity of Twitter since its inception six years ago. Read More
Everything is becoming more complicated.
It’s a given that consumers are spending less time on more tasks, giving everything less attention, and generally skipping around loads of subjects at any one time on Twitter, Facebook, TV, email, text and a thousand other digital touchpoints.
Now, the challenge of the digital marketer to gain entry into the consciousness of the time-and-touchpoint-squeezed consumer is greater than ever.
So it struck me as interesting when I read a quote in an essay by Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that ‘consciousness is not unlike Twitter – millions of mundane messages bouncing around, all shouting over one another, with only a few rising as trending topics’.
I used to have a boss with an amazing knack for sidling up to the desk of a junior researcher late on a Friday afternoon to ask, “How are you fixed?”.
This meant one thing: a flash poll or fast-turnaround survey put into the field that day and reported back to the client as soon as it was done. A flash poll in those days, for me, was the first sign that a client was in trouble. Some crisis had hit and we needed to dive in to understand how much people knew, how much they were affected by that knowledge and how to fix any damage to the brand or bottom line. We joked that we needed a big red button to push to set off a siren so that everyone would know that it was going to be a long night or two. Read More
Gordon Macmillan started the debate last month with a piece about the strongly conflicting views of views of two journalists on the role of social media. The piece itself and the ensuing comments raised an interesting paradox, and one which social media professionals are all too aware of. Many journalists, and indeed brands seem to fall into the ‘love’ or ‘hate’ category when it comes to social media – either thinking it has to be at the forefront of everything they do, or that it’s single-handedly destroying the essence of their industry.
People seem to get so het up about the social media question that they manage to overlook what its role actually is – to create, share and deliver content that is not bound by the traditional rules of mass media. The immediacy of this content, both in terms of time and availability, means that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook (and indeed Audioboo) provide a more direct route to people than traditional news reporting. However, this doesn’t mean that every single story should automatically be farmed out via any and every form of social media available. Content created for a newspaper, for example, may not work in a social environment, and journalists spending hours syndicating the same content across all platforms might miss crucial stories. Jack Lessonberry’s reaction to the memo, while a little wide of the mark, is understandable when you take this into consideration. Read More
I heard Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, on Radio 4 this week talking about Wikipedia’s problem in attracting a more diverse set of editors. Typically post-graduates, nine in ten of its 36,000 volunteer contributors are male and the average age is 26. This lack of variety means the content is not as ‘culturally rich’ as it could be, she said. Read More
Brand storytelling is a bit of a buzzword right now. You can’t read a magazine, blog or agency website without it cropping up in some form or other. I guess it’s not rocket science; people love stories. When they resonate, we connect with them, we remember them with ease and we pass them on. Looking at these potential outcomes, it’s no wonder brands and marketers are keen to understand how to create brand stories that give them these types of results. Read More
Instagram, the app which allows you to share sepia-hued photos instantly, currently has has around 10 million users with over 250 million photos shared so there’s plenty of material to crowdsource your video from.
The Vaccines decided to give their fans the chance to be in the latest music video for the song ‘Wetsuit’. Read More
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