Whatever social network you might be using when you see this post isn’t where I posted this from…it’s actually back on my blog that I own and control (but it should show up for you wherever you are).
Lots of marketing theory behind this.
You should do likewise 🙂
Yep:
Although closing down the third-party Twitter app ecosystem gave Twitter more control over the advertising dollars on their content, it eliminated many apps and services that were actually helping to filter and personalize Twitter content. Ironically those same apps that were eliminated, were actually helping to sustain and grow higher engagement on Twitter.
via Why Twitter’s Engagement Has Fallen | Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet.
Don’t discount the real time web in 2015 if you’re in any sort of business. With the advent and growing popularity of video streaming apps such as Periscope and Meerkat, things are only going to increase in their immediacy. That means more opportunities for better marketing.
Twitter’s most basic function is still its best. It gives you the ability to connect with almost anyone in the world. Imagine the ability to connect with one of the 280 million users who uses it on a monthly basis.
That instant contact is what makes Twitter the perfect fit for businesses. Businesses can see and respond to any tweet in real time.
I’ve deactivated my Facebook account before. To be honest, the only reason I keep it is for the professional pages we manage for clients. But I could do that with other means / accounts.
I’d much rather use this as my place of content production.
Contemplating…
We had the “viral singluarlity” happen on the internet last night and you can be sure that across newsrooms and marketing meetings this morning, there are discussions of dresses and llamas happening right this moment as the East Coast crowd goes to work and looks at all those sharing numbers and metrics.
However, only BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed.
Be yourself. Attract a different crowd with authenticity. Don’t listen to shallow marketers (hey, we’re not all shallow) telling you to “be viral” at all costs. There’s money and value in being different.
In this game, BuzzFeed is winning. It must boggle the mind at traditional publishers that seemingly the entire Internet is talking about content that was created not by a seasoned reporter but a “community growth manager.” These so-called premium publishing brands will inevitably lose their pricing power in the ad market as they continue to copy BuzzFeed. What’s more they’re playing catch-up in offering high-priced agency services that are fueling the models of BuzzFeed and Vice. There used to be an axiom in the tech market: It’s a bad idea to try to out-Google Google. Too many people tried that — Google “Accoona” sometime — and totally failed. These days, in viral publishing, it’s a bad idea for premium brands to try to out-BuzzFeed BuzzFeed. Soon, Time, Esquire, GQ and the like will become indistinguishable from BuzzFeed. And the problem with that is simple: BuzzFeed is better at being BuzzFeed than Time.
via The dress is white and gold. Or, why BuzzFeed won – Digiday.
One day Facebook will be gone. But your blog can live on…
Recently I’ve been writing stuff on Facebook, because the engagement level there is so high. But I’ve found that if I want people who don’t use Facebook, and there are still important people who don’t, you have to put it somewhere else, and for me that’s here on my blog.
If digital archaeologists ever “dig this up” 2,000 years from now, they’ll surely be puzzled by our lapse back into character driven hieroglyphics (complete with the ability to hover over emoji’s if you can’t figure it out):
Barack Obama said his address to Congress this year was all about “finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people”. And if there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s emojis. Hover over an emoji to see the president’s actual words.
Niels Ole Finnemann, a professor and director of Netlab, DigHumLab in Denmark, said: “The citizens will divide between those who prefer convenience and those who prefer privacy.”
via The Future of Privacy | Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
I’ve long said that as the web continues to evolve, particularly as a social medium, we’ll see privacy and the idea of a federated web help shape a new digital divide.
On one side, there will be people who choose convenience and ease by utilizing networks akin to our current ones (ie Facebook). They’ll trade their privacy and data for connections for social connections in a walled garden with pretty flowers.
On the other side will be the federated web by those who are able (either technologically or financially or both) to have and sustain their own web presence that they own and control.
This isn’t a geek vs non-geek distinction as it has been since the web started or something like we have in 2014-2015 where people who care about things like federation or privacy are outsiders.
Now we just need to kill apps.
Great thoughts on blogging in 2014 from Gina Trapani…
This is still a work-in-progress, notes-to-self kind of thing, but it’s been sitting in Draft for months now, so it’s time to get it out. With the obvious caveat that rules are made to be broken (with reason), my new rules for blogging are…
We were talking about this way back in 2006 (and probably before, but that’s when I started taking notice as the social web started accelerating) and it’s good to see that guardians of the web like Dave Winer are still hard at work thinking and talking (and making apps) about this:
Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that’s good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should also post to RSS feeds, which exist outside the context of any corporation. Now other generous and innovative people can build systems that work differently from Facebook and Twitter, using these feeds as the basis, and the investors will have another pile of technology they can monetize.
via How to stimulate the open web.
Go read and use RSS.
https://vine.co/v/MFTr7DiMjaQ/embed/postcard//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js
Vine is Twitter’s 6 second short video sharing social network that allows users to capture short videos that loop when viewed. Like Instagram, Vine is an app and the main experience is via mobile rather than the traditional desktop web. Accordingly, Vine is insanely popular with certain demographics (predominately teens – 24 year olds). It’s rather addicting and companies have caught on. Agencies have even been set up around the idea of “microcontent” marketing.
However, one of the stumbling blocks we’ve hit with client work has been the lack of sharing the number of views (or “loops”) that a particular Vine accumulates. One of the reasons Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc all share the number of views and shares particular content has over time is because it adds to the social “virality” of that content. These companies have done a great deal of research on how viewing numbers help to increase additional and long term viewing.
Looks like Vine is finally adding this feature too:
With this update, there’s now a new way for you to quickly get a sense of how popular and interesting a Vine may be –– based on how many times people watch a Vine loop. The number, which you can see in our mobile apps and on vine.co, updates in real time, so as you watch a video, you’ll know you’re watching with others at the same time.
via Vine blog – Introducing Loop Counts.
Vine isn’t right for every company, small business, or community group out there. However, if you can find your niche and aren’t afraid to “try new things,” then definitely give Vine a shot in your marketing plan.
There’s no formal announcement of “Twitter Shopping” yet, but Twitter has been making some strategic moves that would allow users to purchase items directly from tweets (such as a partnership with Amazon).
If so, this could be an interesting play for small businesses that sell niche products. Twitter is a level playing field (well, relatively) compared to other social networks in that most everything is public. This could be very interesting for both Twitter and e-commerce…
So did Fancy accidentally make public another Twitter Commerce experiment? Is Twitter starting to facilitate in-tweet purchases?
The companies aren’t saying. Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser declined to comment, and Fancy execs didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
via “Buy Now” Buttons Start Appearing in Tweets. Is Twitter Shopping Here? | Re/code.
Twitter has long had an advertising component available (especially for small businesses). With their recent acquisition (acqui-hire) of MoPub, a mobile ad network, they are now releasing ads specifically targeted for mobile app users on iOS and Android in the apps category.
It won’t take long for Twitter to open up their mobile advertising to other categories and businesses as well as they continue to seek a successful monetization strategy…
Twitter is kicking off the global roll out of mobile app promotion ads — units that either take users to app downloads, or to the apps themselves if they’re already installed, via a deep link. Along with that, Twitter’s unveiling new cost-per-app-click pricing for the unit and a dashboard to track usage.
via Twitter Rolls Out App Install And Engagement Ads, And New Click Pricing, Globally | TechCrunch.
While Facebook’s recent psychology study on 700,000 of its users feels “creepy,” it does offer a couple of takeaways for businesses and groups looking to use the social network for marketing…
Facebook found that the emotion in posts is contagious. Those who saw positive content were, on average, more positive and less negative with their Facebook activity in the days that followed. The reverse was true for those who were tested with more negative postings in their News Feed.
Specifically, if you’re using Facebook to promote your business, group, church, or organization, you need to take into account the ability of texts and postings to shape an interaction.
Facebook users, like most users of web services, zip through content at a fast rate and increasingly on mobile devices. You have a very short amount of time to make your mark, even if the user came to your page or post intentionally (it’s even less time if you’re trying to “grab attention”).
Make your posts positive, helpful, engaging, cheery, and (most importantly) personable. If you do run Facebook ads, try not to use generic language or phrases that we so often associate with marketing to our own detriment.
After reading this study on how 60% of Gen Y professionals think they’re entrepreneurs (found via Jim Kukral‘s Facebook post), I remembered an “old” post from 2011 that described the millennial generation (born in late 70’s up to ’90) as “Generation Sale.” A little googling helped me find the NY Times piece.
It’s a spot on good read:
The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.
I was born in 1978, so I’m not sure where exactly I fall in the Gen Y / Gen Millennial grouping. I grew up loving Nirvana, grunge, and the entire “Nevermind” aesthetic but find myself enjoying artisanal pizza.
Nevertheless, “millennials” will change how we do marketing and advertising (and business in general). You can see the differences in food truck lines, churches that make lifelong members uncomfortable, expectations for work place experiences, and how we view the concept of “jobs” in 2014.
So be prepared.
I keep wondering what to do with this site.
For a long time, I’ve been an advocate for folks having their own domain and using that as a “blog” of some sort to share ideas, thoughts, creations, stories, writings, photos, videos etc. When I was a middle school teacher, I was especially insistent about this to the point of having all of my students set up blogs for their portfolios (many of which still use the domains they set up years ago according to my Feedly account, which is great to see).
However, we are moving from an era of writing-for-the-web first into a nascent ecosystem of writing for an app first. Rather than concentrating on their websites as well developed marketing vehicles complete with many pages, subpages, and temp landing pages, many of my marketing clients these days (at least the smart ones that listen to me) are focusing on the notion that the mobile web (and / or apps) is the more profitable place for focus.
We’re watching companies like Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Facebook break down their once monolithic web portals into divergent apps that separate out their photo, newstream, chat, and video components. Even companies like Twitter have Vine. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that will only accelerate in the coming months and years as the web continues to change and bifurcate its various evolutionary chains. The web that my four and six year old knows will be very different than the web I’ve known for twenty years because of this evolutionary path as well as the rise of wearables, the web in our vehicles, and the “internet of everything” that will continue to bring transformations to our human dwellings.
In the meantime, I’ve been wondering about the nature of this personal namespace. I still think everyone should have a personal domain that they call their own. I love and cherish the idea of a web that is federated and based on a model of flowing river that routes around problems rather than being a flow of syrup that is held up by any barrier that is put up by walled gardens and monolithic user experiences. However, that’s not in the schadenfreude of 2014. I’m constantly caught up in the ease and reliability of using Facebook or Twitter as my blog, Instagram as my photo sharing service, and GOogle+ as my repository for photos and videos that are for family only.
But what if there’s a middle ground?
What if personal domain blogs (or portfolios if you will) have the possibility to be “apps” that represent our own content and offer an experience of who we are to interested people? What if these types of personal blogs like what you’re reading is less of a blog in the 2005 sense, and more like a “sam harrelson” app that gives glimpses into thoughts that I want to communicate and share? It’s a matter of semantics, to be sure, but in this case words do matter.
That icky feeling in your gut is a symptom of Social Media entering "The Trough of Disillusionment". Strap in. pic.twitter.com/8ddloDlN9v
— Social Media Insider (@SocialMedia411) May 7, 2014
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
For many businesses, attempting to put together an online marketing plan without including at least some aspects of social media is unthinkable. However, there was a time before Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram ruled our social interactions on the web.
Granted, the web itself has always been a social medium. Before the rise of what we’ve coined “Social Media” in 2005-2006 (along with the now maligned but important “web2.0” movement), there were plenty of forums, platforms, blogs, chat applications etc to keep us connected.
Yet the idea of social media as an entity has had a good run since the halcyon days of Twitter’s launch and Facebook’s ascendancy in 2006. Now, social media has grown up in terms of expectations, both for businesses and individuals.
What that means for businesses is that simply having a Facebook page or getting likes or trying to rack up retweets on your corporate Twitter account won’t pay for your social media manager. Instead, like all marketing, social media has to be done in a thoughtful manner if you want to actually see any long term productive results from the social web.
We might be entering a trough, but social media as a concept will continue to reap benefits if “done well.”
We’re big fans of Shareist in our office and in the work we do with contractors and clients around the world. In a nutshell, Shareist is a way to manage all of your (or a client’s) social media and content creation accounts with a high degree of team collaboration under one umbrella. We use it alongside Basecamp as our company’s project management backbone.
I was honored to be asked by the Shareist team to do a chat on how we’re using the tool in our agency and for the improvement of our clients’ campaigns.
Here’s a snippet, but go read the full case study on the Shareist Blog:
Harrelson, whose clients including political organizations, religious groups, local retailers and services, brands, authors and more, says Shareist solves many of problems of how to communicate and keep in touch – for both his team and his clients.
Shareist ensures that everyone on his team has immediate access to add, share, comment, collaborate and manage their client’s projects – which run the gamut from affiliate management, social media marketing, event marketing, political messaging, to billboards and T-shirts.
I’ve been using Shareist since it first launched years ago and can’t recommend it enough if you or your team does any sort of social media or web content creation and need a tool to help manage all the disparate social web apps and accounts that you have to participate in to be truly effective in 2014 and beyond.
http://www.indiegogo.com/project/646883/widget/2785874
We’ve spent the last six months working hard with Jack Krupnick and Fred Heys to launch ZeroScope. To say this has been a labor of love for Jack and his family would be an understatement. I’m so excited to see this project get its wings and move from pre-planning to production to full on launching this month.
Today, we’re launching an IndieGoGo campaign to help fund the manufacturing costs of the ZeroScope devices.
This is a very worthwhile cause and here’s a little info from the campaign page:
“Your doctors and nurses wash their hands, wear gloves, sometimes wear a mask, and cover or seal many of the instruments they use to provide you with healthcare. But why are stethoscopes not included?
We aim to solve that problem.
Stethoscopes should not be a cause of the spread of disease by healthcare providers. ZeroScope is a one-use and easily applied device that attaches to the drum of a stethoscope and provides immediate and complete barrier defense between the instrument and the patient receiving care.
We’re looking to raise the money needed to help us launch ZeroScope as a cost effective and ubiquitous device to solve the problem of hospital acquired infections that lead to more costly treatments or even death.”
We’ve made some huge leaps and bounds over the last 182 days since our first brainstorming session. We’ve had our first large batch of devices designed and manufactured and invested so much of our own personal time and money into the project. So, we’re looking for help to get the costs of manufacturing and shipping lower in order to provide more ZeroScopes to hospitals, clinics, burn clinics, urgent cares and physician practices.
It’s been an amazing ride, and we’re hoping you’ll help us reach our goal!
I happened on a post by Alex King this week and it reminded me of my ongoing desire to bring back most of what I do online to this site (or at least having it as the hub of my online content production):
I’m a big fan of owning your own online identity and owning your content. I believe that WordPress is a great tool for this, which is one of the reasons I’ve used it and supported it for the last decade. My personal site (alexking.org) is powered by WordPress, and it is my home on the web.
I blog there, I post photos and status updates, I have a list of my projects, and I point people there when they ask where they can find me or learn more about me. And I’ve been blogging there since 2002, so there is plenty of interesting stuff to find there.
However, my site is not an island. I have integrations with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (via Flickr), Pinboard, and GitHub. My site is my home, but I love interacting with my friends in these other communities.
The problem with “blogging” as it existed and exists today is that most folks interact with content via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc and it’s only the holdout nerds like me who still sing the joys of feed readers and RSS and federated content. I’ve gone back and forth over the last five or so years of searching for a solution to interacting with people on the social web while trying to keep most of my own content here.
I think Alex’s FavePersonal theme for WordPress might do the trick. It’s pretty straightforward to setup and includes some interesting dual flow between a blog and social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
I’m going to be experimenting with it in the coming days to see if this is the real solution.
I hope so!
Worth your time to go read as it will change the way you interact with other humans (and Alots)…
So the next time you are reading along and you see some guy ranting about how he is “alot better at swimming than Michael Phelps,” instead of getting angry, you can be like “You’re right! Â Alots are known for their superior swimming capabilities.”
via Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything.
Andy Beaumont on the plague of Pop-Ups 2.0 and the reason why publishers of all sizes are rushing to put them on their sites (hint.. doing analytics wrong):
I have tested this design pattern with real people, and a significant portion of them believe that they must do what the box is begging them for in order to close the overlay. These people remember, they’re people, not “conversions”, are signing up to a newsletter they don’t want. They’re then going to be irritated by it for several months until they work out how to unsubscribe from it. The analytics guru you brought in is walking away with a chunk of your money, in exchange for having pissed off a whole bunch of existing and potential customers.
I like this approach… I’ve been using it somewhat regularly here but need to be better about posting things like images or bookmarks here first and then letting them go out to the silos.
Networks like Instagram are still hard to do, but Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are pretty easy.
POSSE is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It’s a Syndication Model where the flow involves posting your content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with perma(short)links back to the original version.
POSSE lets your friends keep using whatever silo aggregator (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) they’ve been using to read your stuff.
It’s a key part of why and how the “IndieWeb” movement is different from just “everyone blog on their own site”, and also different from “everyone just install and run StatusNet/Diaspora” etc.
via POSSE – IndieWebCamp.
Good read…
The demand for commodified authenticity is an expression of consumers’ nostalgia for a never-existing time when one had total control over the development of one’s identity. That sort of authenticity has always been a fiction, but the very real existence of goods that signify authenticity masked that fact. Consuming authentically could seem to prove fidelity to our “real self.”
Interestingly enough, Sony has been a great study for how businesses (large and small) can leverage Pinterest to drive traffic and revenue back to a site.
Sony has done a great job of not just community evangelization and using Pinterest as a place to engage current and potential customers, but they have also successfully cross promoted their own account there with promotional emails to existing newsletter subscribers.
The one thing many companies, especially in the performance marketing industry, look over when creating social media campaigns is the need to promote accounts via something like an existing newsletter subscriber base. By combining those two, there’s a great potential left on the table for many companies…
Pinterest Suggestions from Sony
1. Send a dedicated Pinterest email to showcase your boards and encourage following
2. Add the Pin It button next to product shots in emails to get people pinning
3. Create unique boards that appeal to different groups of people
via Sony: Making email more interesting with Pinterest | Pinterest for Business.