Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

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Social Media Digest: Colin Was Here, Bing Adds Facebook and Eurovision Buzz

Friday, May 17th, 2013

Welcome to this week’s Social Media Digest! Let us know your favourite social media stories of the week (and if you know who/what/where Colin might be) in the comments or via Twitter – @Allllliiiii / @Umpf

1. An American restaurant has unleashed a very public and very embarrassing tirade of abuse on its Facebook page following its Amy'sappearance on the Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. The restaurateurs’ stubborn behaviour on the show caught the attention of Redditors who were quick to poke fun at Amy’s Baking Company on Facebook – leading to the most brilliant of meltdowns on Facebook. File under ‘what NOT to do’…

2. From today, search engine Bing will now show Facebook comments by your friends that are relevant to your search in its Social Sidebar. You can like and comment on people’s posts directly via Bing, or click through to see the original post on Facebook. Bing notes that this addition makes the link between searching and doing – for example, if you search for an event you can immediately see if any of your Facebook friends are attending. It’s a clever addition, but will it turn people away from Google?

3. Capitalising on the coolest feature of Google+, Google has announced that it will be upgrading its Hangouts service as a stand-along web app. Introducing the new app, Vic Gundotra said that Google aims to ‘get gadgets out of the way’ so that people could connect with their friends regardless of operating systems or platform. Hangouts can include text, photos and videos which will be stored so that they can be referred back to later and contacts will be ranked by how often you chat to them.

4. ‘Colin was here’. Three short words that caused uproar this week on Twitter when Sky News’ Twitter posted the mysterious tweet. The tweet was quickly deleted and Sky has blamed the tweet on a hack, saying that ‘action was swiftly taken and we are working with Twitter and our in house security to ensure this cannot happen again’, but of course the internet was quick to respond. Colin has not yet come forward to take the blame / spotlight.

Brandwatch5. Ahead of Eurovision this Saturday, Brandwatch have created a Eurovision dataviz that tracks Twitter buzz in real-time. As tweets happen, they’ll be categorised by country and then further drilled down into topic, including outfit, political, sex factor, appearance, dance routine, stagecraft, performance, voice and song. The dataviz launches Saturday night at 8pm – give it a go while you’re rooting for Bonnie!

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Picture-Perfect Uses of Instagram

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Since we last spoke about photo-sharing app Instagram’s growth back in July 2012, the platform has undergone a range of changes:

- Websites such as Pinstagram are no longer needed due to the introduction of Instagram’s web profiles

- The effects of Facebook’s acquisition of the app are becoming more obvious, especially with the introduction of Instagram’s new ‘Add people’ / ‘Photos of you’ feature last week – very similar to Facebook’s photo-tagging system

- Instagram now boasts 100 million monthly active users, with 40 million photographs uploaded every day and 1000 comments made per second

Fortunately there are just as many, if not more, Cats of Instagram as before…

Cat

Instagram has proved its staying power as one of the biggest social apps and this means that if it’s not part of your PR and social campaigns, you’re probably missing out on a huge demographic. So, who’s using Instagram, what are they doing and why does it work?

Michael Kors #FallingInLoveWith

To celebrate Valentine’s Day 2012, fashion brand Michael Kors launched its #FallingInLoveWith campaign with support from Fanbase Media. As part of the campaign, Instagram users were asked to take a photo of a Michael Kors item that they covet and upload the photographs to Instagram with the hashtag #FallingInLoveWith. Users posting with the hashtag were given the opportunity to win Michael Kors products, and all images uploaded were pulled through to a dedicated website. #FallingInLoveWith is a clever campaign encouraging fans to showcase Michael Kors products themselves, rather than the brand doing so. The chance of winning is an additional incentive to post photos – more than 1,700 photos have been uploaded using the hashtag. Giorgio Armani launched a similar campaign to showcase its range of sunglasses entitled Frames of Life, which received more than 3,000 images uploaded with the #FramesofLife hashtag.

Kate Spade

Rather than focusing on one specific campaign, fashion brand Kate Spade’s Instagram posts engage users with every photograph. Whereas Kate Spade would be likely to create a lot of buzz just by posting photographs of products, the team post more photographs of behind-the-scenes happenings, food, New York (where the brand is based) and seasonal images, such as these Easter egg-dyeing Kate Spadepictures – all of which promote the brand’s values of colour, playfulness and fun. Instead of showcasing this season’s colours using fabric swatches, Kate Spade posted a picture of ice lollies to do so and by posting images such as this four o’clock life saver, the brand makes itself seem approachable, down-to-earth and friendly. Kate Spade’s fun strategy is certainly working – the brand has over 332,000 followers on Instagram.

General Electric

While Instagram consists of mainly photographs of fashion, food, faces and cats, General Electric (GE) have created a surprisingly engaging feed. For example, a photograph of wind turbines in California received over 1,400 likes and a behind-the-scenes image of aviation expert Daniel Kerr received over 700 likes while showcasing some of the things that go on behind closed doors at GE. The GE feed makes technology and learning interesting and proves that Instagram lends itself to any subject if the team behind the photographs are creative enough. The GE Instagram has over 131,000 followers.

Comodo

Despite the trend of eateries shunning smartphones, New York restaurant Comodo launched an ‘Instagram menu’ last year, encouraging visitors to snap photographs of their food and post them to Instagram with the hashtag #ComodoMenu. Anyone that uses Instagram knows that it’s full of foodie pictures and it’s smart of Comodo to jump on this trend – Comodo added the #ComodoMenu hashtag to its menus and lets new patrons know to check the hashtag if they can’t decide what to order. The #ComodoMenu hashtag currently boasts over 900 images (warning: do not view on an empty stomach).

Nike

To promote its NikeiD customisable creations, Nike launched a clever PhotoiD campaign which allows users to log-in to its site and create a unique shoe based on their Instagram photographs. To create a shoe, users must visit http://photoid.nike.com and log-in to Instagram. You can then choose one of your Instagram photographs (Nike asks you to confirm that you own the images before you progress) and a style of shoe, and Nike will create a completely unique shoe based on your image! Your individual shoes can be shared directly to Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ or Facebook directly from Nike’s site and users can even buy the shoes they’ve created. Here are a few examples of creations made with the Nike PhotoiD site –

Nike4Nike3Nike2

Despite being a basic photo-sharing app, Instagram is a versatile platform that – as you can see – is being used by social media teams in a variety of ways. What’s your favourite Instagram campaign?

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Social Media Digest – Facebook gets less active and…. Ed Balls

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Facebook Q1 results revealed

Earlier in the week it was revealed that Facebook’s active user numbers have dropped in the UK by almost 2 million to 26 million, according to data taken from marketing research firm Nielsen.  Facebook announced in these results that it now has 1.11 billion monthly active users around the world, almost a fourfold increase from this time last year.

These growth areas are not in profitable regions for advertising revenue, especially important as Facebook is now a publicly traded company and subsequently answers to shareholders which shifts the companies emphasis to a profit based one.

Facebook UK numbers

Facebook’s UK numbers. Source: Nielsen

The report was positive for Facebook’s finances as profits were up to a total of $219m in the first three months of the year, up $14million from 2012. Total revenue was $1.46bn, up $400 million in the same period.

Perhaps the most positive aspect for Facebook is the continued rise in mobile access – mobile advertising now equates to 30% of all Facebook advertising and it is fast becoming the most popular access point for active users in the developed regions.

Twitter Celebrates “Ed Balls” day in style

No weekly social media report would be complete without mentioning Ed Balls day. The second anniversary was celebrated on Sunday the 28th April, in honor of the Shadow Chancellor tweeting his own name and for some reason not deleting it!Ed Balls Umpf social media stunt staff 550

Here at Umpf we organised our very own way of joining in on this momentous occasion, you can read all about our “Ed Balls” football shirts in a previous blog post here. The stunt was featured on BuzzFeed, MSN, The Mirror and others.

 Self-Destructing Tweets

A new Twitter app is offering the ability to post self-destructing tweets – think SnapChat for twitter. Users can compose a tweet and set the desired amount of time for it to automatically delete itself. The program is called efemr and it was inspired by the need to protect how information we post may be used in the future. The app itself is a standard Twitter connect set-up it then monitors for time related hastags, for example #5m will delete your tweet five minutes from the time of posting.  As this article from wired.co.uk states, it is likely that the big potential here is for marketers or agencies likes ourselves to exploit time based competitions or campaigns.

Social Brands 100

The Headstream Social Brands 100 list was published this week over 700 brands from 23 industries were included. The announcement was only a shortlist and we will have to wait till the 23rd May to find out the final rankings. Last year Innocent, famed for their slightly wacky social media style were the winners, we will have to see if they keep their crown.

Retail brands make up a large proportion of the shortlist, in total 16 industries are represented in the top 100. Brands were ranked for 6 weeks on their Twitter, Facebook and Youtube activities.

Do you agree with the list? Are there any brands you think deserve a mention? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Path

Big news for private social media platform Path which has this week passed 10 million users. The site launched back in 2010, the emphasis behind Path is that messages and photos can be shared very privately amongst specific friends and family, without having to be shared to everyone on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. According to The Next Web the site hit 2 million users back in February 2012, it then took four months to rise to 3 million. The CEO of Path, Dave Morin now claims the site is gaining 1 million new users every week.  Much like with Facebook, active users is probably the most essential statistic as this what advertisers will look at when making decisions.

Certainly good days for Path, we will keep an eye out for their progress.

Instagram Updates

A significant update is now available for Instagram, the app has enabled a tagging feature which is almost identical to the one you will find on Facebook. The new ‘Photos of Me’ section will collate all the images you are tagged in, previously the only way this could be achieved was to @mention users in the captions. It is important to note that currently only the owner of the photo has the ability to use the tag function, you do have full control of any tag a user makes of you allowing you to delete or hide them if you so wish.

This video from Instagram introduces the new service http://vimeo.com/instagram/photosofyou

 

 

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Social Media Digest: Trial by Timeline, The AP’s Hoax Tweet and Coke’s “The AHHH Effect”

Friday, April 26th, 2013

1. We’ve all heard about the hot water inappropriate sharing on Facebook can get you into, especially if your boss has the privilege of your updates. Over in New Zealand, Amnesty International is taking this to a whole new level after launching Trial by Timeline; a campaign that analyses your Facebook profile to trial and sentence you to crimes around the world. Punishments that may result include lashing, torture, beating and death. That Hen Do I’ve RSVP’s to has got me into a world of trouble in Armenia…

As tactless as it is for me to make light of such an important matter, the reason this campaign has been so successful is the fun, social sharing element that makes information on serious global human rights violations widely accessible and all so real. So go on, what are you guilty of? Try it here.

2. The US stock market crashed on Tuesday after a hoax tweet was posted via @AP claiming explosions at The White House had injured President Obama. Syrian Electronic Army has since taken credit for the hacking on Twitter using #ByeByeObama. The AP now joins the likes of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as the latest media company to fall victim to such a hack. However, instead of Twitter receiving the lion’s share of the blame, the flash crash has highlighted that any market thrown into chaos by one errant tweet has big problems.

3. 500+ LinkedIn contacts? Then you may be experiencing difficulties keeping up with the most important ones. Billed as a ‘professional rolodex’, LinkedIn aims to become much more with this week’s announcement of its new Contacts feature. Contacts will integrate your mobile address book, calendar and email to help you keep up with those you may have lost touch with. With this new feature, when viewing a person’s profile, you will see information such as a summary of your last correspondence, when it was and even set up calendar alerts – say every 3 months – to make sure you keep the conversation going. Currently exclusive to the US upon invite-only, the company plans to roll this out to international markets in the coming months.

What do you think to LinkedIn’s new feature? Let us know down in the comments below or on Twitter.

4. In other digital news, Pizza Hut has announced it will be launching an app for Xbox Live, letting users order a pizza through their Xbox 360. Welcome news for gamers who now don’t have to long delay an intense session of COD due to hunger pangs. The app lets you customise and visualise every aspect of your dream pizza, apart from the obvious walking to the front door to fetch it.

5. In the coming weeks, Coca-Cola will take to their Facebook and Twitter to encourage teens to interact with their newly-launched “The AHH Effect” all-digital campaign by creating their own software-based experiences for the brand. Following on from an extensive round of teen panels, this campaign is all about fun, ‘snackable’ digital experiences that will be built up gradually to contain 61 digital games based on the results. Want to experience if for yourself? Click here to be taken to a special happy place.

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Social Media Digest: Instagram for Charity, Dove’s Sketchy Viral and Twitter #Music

Friday, April 19th, 2013

Hello and thanks for checking out this week’s Social Media Digest! Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf / @Allllliiiii

1. As you will have heard reported on TV or in print or, more likely, seen via social media channels, tragically this week’s Boston Marathon was struck by a double-bombing at its finish line. At the time of writing, the act of terror had wounded nearly 200 and sadly taken three lives, and the culprits had not yet been found. However, despite the horror of the event, there were a few incredible acts of kindness which go some way to restoring faith in humanity – with many of these stories were first being shared via Twitter or Facebook. A Google Drive document was created to list Bostonians who are willing to open their homes to those affected by the Dropkicksbombing, while BuzzFeed’s list includes tweets of acts of goodwill such as restaurants opening their doors and videos of bystanders springing to action to help those in need. While social media was responsible for fuelling one or two rumours regarding the bombing, it also proved without a doubt to be one of the best ways of both spreading and finding information, giving hope for future disaster occurrences.

NB. One of my favourite bands, Dropkick Murphys, have just released a t-shirt that you can buy to benefit victims of the Boston bombing. All proceeds are going directly to the cause and $65,000 has already been raised – you can buy one here.

2. Twitter has this week unveiled its brand new Twitter Music service. As announced in a blog post on Thursday, Twitter Music will use Twitter activity to detect emerging and popular artists. You can view music listened to by people you follow on Twitter through the #NowPlaying tab, view music artists’ Twitter activity and tweet songs that you like directly via the app. Aiming to help users discover new music, the internet so far has high hopes for Twitter’s new app – will Twitter Music live up to the hype?

3.  A new app, FoodShareFilter, is aiming to add a charitable benefit to Instagramming your meals. The filter, created by DDB Spain, can be downloaded from the App Store for 69p – the cost of the app is donated to an agricultural charity in El Salvador. Each time an image is posted using the filter, the message ‘This picture helps millions of people not to suffer hunger’ is also added to the photograph. Surely no one can complain about taking photos of your meals before you dig in if it’s for a good cause?

4. LinkedIn has just updated its iPhone and Android apps – the social platform’s first app update in around two years. Following the introduction of sponsored content on its desktop and iPad app earlier this year, ads will now begin to be rolled out across the mobile versions. LinkedIn’s Head of Mobile Products, Joff Redfurn, said that the new apps had been tested on LinkedIn’s own staff – and they’ve received over 10,000 individual pieces of feedback during the process. The result is a streamlined and much slicker app.

dove_sketch_1_final5. Dove’s latest video, uploaded to YouTube on Monday, has already received over seven million views. The new video aims to teach viewers a vital lesson about the way they view and describe themselves – in the video, participants meet with a former FBI sketch artist and are asked to help the artist create a picture of themselves. Then, participants take turns describing each other. You have to view the video to be hit with the full effect, but the message will, without a doubt, stick with you.

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