Posts Tagged ‘Pinterest’

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Social Media Digest: Facebook Privacy Folly, Pop-Up Pinterest and Stella’s Carole

Friday, November 30th, 2012

1. Many Facebook users have once again fallen victim to a privacy hoax. A ‘privacy notice’ spread across the site like wildfire – a statement full of legal jargon claiming that the user’s content was theirs and couldn’t be used by anyone else without their permission. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the statement (below) copied and pasted by thousands of users is useless:

In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, graphics, comics, paintings, photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!

(Anyone reading this can copy this text and paste it on their Facebook
Wall. This will place them under protection of copyright laws. By the present communiqué, I notify Facebook that it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, disseminate, or take any other action against me on the basis of this profile and/or its contents. The aforementioned prohibited actions also apply to employees, students, agents and/or any staff under Facebook’s direction or control. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of my privacy is punished by law (UCC 1 1-308-308 1-103 and the Rome Statute).

Facebook is now an open capital entity. All members are recommended to publish a notice like this, or if you prefer, you may copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once, you will be tacitly allowing the use of elements such as your photos as well as the information contained in your profile status updates…

If you want the real deal straight from the social horse’s mouth, read Facebook’s official T&Cs here.

2. A real-life Pinterest board has been created to celebrate the renovation of an American mall! The board take the shape of a frame sitting outside the Westfield UTC mall, featuring both images and real items as pins representing brands and retailers inside the shopping centre. Fans are invited to create their own Pinterest board, re-pinning items from Westfield’s board, for the chance to win all of the items. We love the idea of a pop-up Pinterest!

3. How many sales do you think Twitter was responsible for during Black Friday madness? 50%? At least 20%? Nope, Twitter generated exactly 0% of Black Friday sales and Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube weren’t much better at 0.34%. A report by IBM suggests that while users weren’t hunting down holiday purchases via social networks, they were still tweeting about them after the fact, and online sales over the Thanksgiving holiday were up over 17% from 2011. The real Black Friday champion was mobile – browsing via mobile sites rose by almost a quarter when compared to last year! Did you brave last week’s Black Friday sales, or are you a Cyber Monday shopper?

4.  Stella Artois has created a Facebook app on its American page which sends Carole, with her backing band of carollers, to your doorstep – virtually. Users can request a visit via the Stella Facebook Page, entering name and address details to receive a personalised video. The app uses Google Street View to place the carollers at your location. It’s an idea that’s been done many times, but still cute (and festive!) nonetheless.

5. We couldn’t not give this one a mention. This year marks the 100th birthday of heritage British cooker brand Belling, and to celebrate the occasion a giant cake has been created at the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham by quirky cake artist Connie Viney. A whole six foot of cake, depicting key moments of the past century! But as if that wasn’t exciting enough, the cake has a special interactive element – tweets using the #Belling100Years hashtag are automatically printed onto edible paper and used to decorate the cake! The perfect way to celebrate a milestone birthday in style.

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Social Media Digest: Pinterest Progresses, Instagram Updates and Social goes Silent

Friday, November 16th, 2012

1.Embedded Pinterest boards

Busy couple of weeks for pinterest after adding secret board functionality last week, which gave users the opportunity to create 3 boards only seen by themselves and designated users. The latest trick is providing pinteresters with the ability to embed boards directly on to pages. You can add buttons and widgets and all sorts. Here is one of our Umpf boards to demonstrate

2.Facebook gets busy with new features

Facebook has been busy recently; launching a new filter for your news feed which provides content sourced only from the pages you subscribe too, an interesting concept we will watch how users react to it. Zuckerbergs team have also been busy sorting out a new Facebook Jobs application as well as toying with the idea of adding the functionality to reply to a specific comment, that could get very cluttery.

Last but not least relationship joint pages, the less said about this the better though.

3.Thunderclap for Remembrance Day

The Royal British Legion became the first UK organization to use social media tool Thunderclap as it attempts to create a twitter silence. Thunderclap technology stockpiles tweets and specific messages and then distributes them in a single burst once a specific limit is reached, the tool is designed for maximum impact and exposure.

4.Instagram new profile pages

Instagram the ever beloved photo sharing site now owned by Facebook launched its web user profiles, making the site available in a Facebook style layout, all of your photos will be displayed unless set to private. You can access your individual profile by typing in instagram.com/[username].  I think they look very neat, the only draw back possibly being the lack of ability to really edit your profile but this will probably develop over time.

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Secrets, Shambles, Hacking and Obama!

Friday, November 9th, 2012

1. Yesterday, Pinterest announced the launch of their ‘Secret Boards’ for the Christmas holidays! It seems that they’ve finally taken note of what a lot of their users use Pinterest for: shopping! So, as of yesterday, we can use secret boards to keep track of Christmas gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project that we’d like to remain a secret. It’s quite versatile though – you can invite friends to pin and view the board too.

 

2. Joined with Adidas, England International launched a Q&A hashtag campaign, #AskStevie [Steven Gerrard], which received a lot of attention – maybe not for the right reasons!? The campaign was ambushed by the typical Joe Bloggs, a few celebs and a lot of parody accounts. Here are our favourites:

 

3. A handful of tweeters have been confused this week after receiving emails from Twitter informing them of a password reset. Apparently Twitter suspects that their account has been ‘compromised by a website or a third party which it has no affiliation’, in order words, HACKED! A Twitter spokesperson said: “In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.”

 

4. And finally, a huge congratulation is in order for Barack Obama who was re-elected this week (our Yanky-Ali is very happy!). Apparently Instagram was set alight with American users tagging more than 100,000 photos with #iVoted, and about 150,000 with #election2012 on Tuesday!

In addition to this, he also smashed Twitter records with his “Four more years” tweet which gained over 800,000 retweets (today’s figure), overtaking a previous record (200,000) held by Justin Bieber!

 

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Pinterest: The Continued Prominence, Popularity and Promise of the Pinning Platform

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Since writing about our top five favourite uses of online pinboard back in March, brands have continued to use Pinterest in even more quirky and engaging ways. Consider four quick facts…

 

 

- Over 5 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day
- Simply Measured has found that photos and videos drive the most engagement on Facebook’s top ten brand pages
- A study by ROI Research found that 44% of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures
- 42% of Tumblr posts are photo, rather than quotes, text or video

…and it’s obvious that posting visually-led content is becoming an increasingly popular way of sharing information online. No wonder that Pinterest, with its slick interface and 7,985,316 site visitors in the UK in September 2012, has become one of the world’s top brands’ favourite social channels. Here are a few of our most recent favourite uses of Pinterest:

1. In an unusual twist, Honda offered five of the most active Pinterest users $500 to spend on the things they’ve been pinning… if they take a day off from Pinterest. Called #Pintermission, the campaign to promote Honda’s new CV-R saw the manufacturer tweet the offer to selected pinners and in return for the $500, the Pinterest users will share images from their $500 experience on Honda’s Pinterest page. Unconventional, but very clever!

2. Designer Oscar De La Renta used Pinterest to showcase looks from a brand new bridal collection as it hit the runway. Images of hair, makeup and products were pinned to a dedicated board, illustrating the runway show from preparation to the final reveal.

Although Oscar De Le Renta CEO Alex Bolen revealed that the idea was a very last-minute one, the Bridal board currently has over 32,000 followers. Not bad for spur-of-the-moment!

3. FedEx shows off its human side with its Community Involvement board, which showcases FedEx employees’ philanthropic efforts. Each pin includes a brief summary of whom, what and why, and is a great way of showing that there’s more to the company than just boxes and shipping. PetPlan Pet Insurance also uses its Meet the Team board to a similar effect, showing that ‘Behind every person on the Petplan pet insurance team is a pet. Sometimes lots of them!’  and relating customers to staff.

4. American cinema giant AMC Theatres capitalised on the Oscars buzz by asking Pinterest users to pin a photo of their personal favourite Oscar-nominees to a ‘My Oscar Picks’ board. AMC then rewarded those who got it right with tickets to the AMC Best Picture Showcase – a unique way to jump onto a current hot topic.

5. We couldn’t do a Pinterest round-up without mentioning this one! To celebrate Lec Refrigeration’s 70th birthday, Lec teamed up with artisan ice cream producers Simply Ice Cream and asked for its Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest friends’ help to create a brand new and unique ice cream flavour. Lec asked its fans to choose from 24 million possible flavour combinations of 70 flavours (including everything from creme brulee to grass and coffee to Guinness!) and create a Pinterest board using their four favourite flavours. Entrants then tweeted their ice cream flavour using the hashtag #LecIceCream – over one hundred unique entries were received.

 

The ten best flavours were shortlisted by Lec and Simply Ice Cream and went to a public Facebook vote, with CocoCherryFudgetastic being crowned the overall winner. The ice cream flavour is now being made by Simply Ice Cream and will be given out to 20,000 visitors at the BBC Good Food Show Winter at the Birmingham NEC at the end of November.

 

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Social Media Digest: New Twitter (Again), Man City Hangouts and Exclusive Experiments

Friday, September 21st, 2012

1. A new study by Pew Internet and American Life Project is looking at social networking sites like Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram to see how they’re being used by online adults. The survey of over 1,000 people found that 46% of internet users are ‘creators’, who publish and share original images and videos. An additional 41% are curators, who share the creators’ content. Unsurprisingly, Pinterest is dominated by women although only 12% of online adults use the online pinboard. It was revealed that Instagram is dominated by young adults, but no conclusive data yet on how many photos are of cats!

2. Twitter has rolled out a redesigned version of both its desktop site and mobile apps, featuring a new ‘header image’ and ‘Me’ section. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo unveiled the updates this week, saying that “[The] changes are all about bringing that personality forward. More media forward, more photos forward, so it’s much easier to see these media experiences and flip through them”. What do you think of the new changes, and what’s your favourite use of the new header image so far? Batman wins our vote…

3. Manchester City Football Club has announced that it’s extending its social media arsenal and will be hosting pre-match question and answer sessions using Google+ Hangouts. Billed as a footballing first, ‘The Third Half’ Hangouts will be able to accommodate ten fans per session and will be hosted by Patrick Vieira, Retired World Cup winner and club ambassador. The first Hangout will take place on 23rd September ahead of Manchester City’s match against Arsenal.

4. Apple has launched iOS6 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch this week to both fanfare and disappointment. The new operating system now features even-better Facebook integration, allowing you to share a photo directly from the Camera or Photo Library or post a location from Maps. Siri can even post updates for you and events and info is shared across the Calendar and your Contacts. The update also features a new Panorama shooting feature for the iPhone 4S and upwards, but as it clocks in at 16MB you’ll need to resize before you can share it with the internet – check out this handy guide by Lance Ulanoff from Mashable here.

5. How curious are you? If you’re anything the team here at Umpf the answer is very, which is why we couldn’t resist signing up to The 11K Club. There are no clues about what it is, who it’s for, what will happen on 11th November or what the mystery benefit will be, but membership is restricted to 11,000 people and I want in. The team behind The 11K Club are treating membership as a bit of an experiment – co-founder Steve Whyley told Mashable: “I’m trying to see if people will sign up to a club that they know nothing about purely because it’s exclusive and because they fear they’ll miss out. What 11K Club is proving, at least in our minds, is that it almost doesn’t matter what your site does, how it looks, what the homepage says”. Wannabe-members have until 31st October to sign up – you can use my personalised invite link here to help me improve my chances of getting in!

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