Twitter Brings “Banner Image” to Profile Pages, Makes Upgrades to Mobile Apps

Posted by: Matthew Bick // September 19th, 2012

Similar to Facebook’s upgrade to Timeline several months ago, Twitter has now brought a “banner image” feature to all profile pages.  For brands and regular users, this puts a greater emphasis on truly integrating aesthetics and design in general into social media.  The new creative real estate that Twitter has provided, just like Facebook before it, appears indicative of a general trend in social media; to make social spaces easy for individuals to customize, allowing them to visually define themselves or their social persona.

Before Timeline, the vast majority of social media was very difficult to truly aesthetically customize — profile pictures could be changed, personal information could be edited, but appearance in general was either not changeable at all, or the changeable area was on the periphery of a profile page.  In 2012, Facebook and Twitter have both taken strides to change that, making design an even more integral part of the social media experience.

Twitter also completely redesigned its entire app suite, with new versions becoming available for all major mobile operating systems.  The new app looks significantly different than its predecessor, but it does appear to shift the mobile interface much closer to the main online user interface.  In the previous version, links or images embedded in Tweets would slide open on the right side of the app.  In the new app,  Tweets are expanded with one tap, and the links/images/videos open in their own full-screen window, very similar to the way Facebook’s app now opens the same content.  Visually, the app now features a much smaller option bar on the left side of the screen, with navigation having the same options as the Twitter web interface (home, connect, discover, and “me”).

Mashable and others have guides on the new space’s specifications.  Some key information includes:

  1. Maximum image size is 1252 x 626 pixels, although the platform does drastically shrink that size for profile display
  2. The banner image loads behind a user’s profile picture
  3. The white profile information text does not appear to allow color changes to mesh with the new banner image

@MatthewBick

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How Much Do Your TV Spots Influence Search Activity?

Posted by: Neil James // September 4th, 2012

Few marketing activities are celebrated and scrutinized more than the TV spot, and rightly so due to their high cost. But a criminally overlooked component of a television campaign’s performance is its impact on search engine traffic. Do more people search for your brand as a result of seeing your commercial? Do they do it right away, or is their latency to any spikes in activity?

A new study by Sterling Brands and Ipsos studied this very topic and found something very interesting, yet intuitive at the same time – the rise in smartphone adoption is bridging the gap between Google and the 30 second spot. According to the study, more than one in five smartphone searches were prompted as a result of television. Seventeen percent of searches were attributable to a specific commercial!

@NeilAndrewJames

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Neurology Key to Social Media Success

Posted by: Matthew Bick // August 20th, 2012

Neuroscience is, for the most part, a relatively new exploration for advertisers.  However, Caroline Winnett of Digiday recently posted an article describing how neuroscience can help in the race to make social media efforts more successful.

Winnett’s article discusses how the brain takes subconscious “cues” and cites The Red Cross as one of the best Facebook pages in terms of its apparent neurological potency.  According to her article, “While Facebook has a proscribed format, page owners can limit the number of images and text on the initial page to make it less taxing on cognitive resources. The Red Cross achieves this through an uncluttered design. It uses an emotionally ambiguous face for its main photo, which makes users compelled to decipher the intent behind the expression, appealing to the survival nature of our brains. “

As the advertising industry realized quickly after investing in social media, a short and easily-digestible message is key in this medium.  Winnett confirms this as well: “In neuroscience, the term is “processing fluency,” meaning the ease with which our minds can receive and process stimuli. Complex commercial messages in a social media setting can serve to turn the brain off, because the mind perceives the amount of effort expended may not be worth any potential reward received.”

As science’s understanding of the human brain continues to increase, so too will the potential to use this new knowledge to find better ways to reach out to potential consumers.  Exciting times, indeed!

@MatthewBick

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Instagram Reaches 80 Million Users

Posted by: Kirsten Taylor // August 8th, 2012

In light of Russell Herder’s new branding, we launched an Instagram account! See one of our photos above. Because of our involvement, we began to wonder, what are the statistics about Instagram in today’s social media world?

Well, according to PR Daily, Instagram has topped 80 million users, with over 4 billion photos shared. And, it’s only two years old, which is much younger than the vintage-inspired photos the app allows you to share.

You can follow RH on Instagram at russell_herder. Have you joined Instagram?

@KirstenETaylor

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Profiling the Online Social Butterfly

Posted by: Neil James // August 1st, 2012

When are you more likely to be socially interactive with others? Is it when you’re at a bar with a cool mixed drink in your hand? Is it when you’re at gathering with friends or family? Is it when you’re popping back and forth between Facebook and Twitter? How has it changed over time?

According to a new survey by Ipsos and Burst Media, summarized by a new article for Marketing Charts, finds that 81 percent of Americans report socializing more in-person than online. Interestingly, according to Ipsos and Burst Media, 24 percent of U.S. women report socializing more frequently online than in person compared to only 13 percent of men saying the same. Perhaps less surprisingly, individuals under age 35 identify as being more social online 26 percent of the time compared to 17 percent of those ages 35-49 and 13 percent of those ages 50-64. Ipsos and Burst Media also reported that higher levels of education also correlated to increased proclivity to socializing online.

@NeilAndrewJames

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One in Five Brands Wholly Blindsided By Social Media Criticism

Posted by: Neil James // July 25th, 2012

It wasn’t supposed to be this way! All you did was listen to the speaker at that conference who said you had to be on social media. You set up your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram accounts. You were all set to engage with your ever-adoring customer base, and then WHAM!

Rather than winning praise for your brand for joining the conversation, a seemingly endless stream of malcontents are drawn to your sites like moths to flame. Only instead of bringing gentle flutter, these brand terrorists relentlessly assault your organization’s good name with complaints about your customer service, your marketing, your CEO’s choice of suit and your organization’s unwillingness to contribute to a niche charity.

But therein lies the challenge of social media – you’ve got to take the good with the bad and have a plan for both. That’s what makes a new study by Ethical Corporation and Useful Social Media so interesting. According to their July 2012 findings, 20 percent of companies who have found themselves on the wrong end of social media criticism described themselves as “completely unprepared” to deal with the blowback. Only 28 percent felt their preparation for such a scenario was above average. Worse, only 15 percent of companies reported they were fully engaged and working to deal with handling negative social media feedback.

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Sports Marketing: Finding Success Despite a Constantly Changing Product

Posted by: Matthew Bick // July 23rd, 2012

It’s a simple question with an enormously complex answer:  as a marketer, how do you successfully promote a product that you A) have absolutely zero control over and is B) hyper-analyzed?  Professional sports marketers face this quandary on a daily basis.  Marketers in this industry find themselves faced with unique challenges, especially when the on-court/ice/field product is suffering.  Keeping fans in the stands at that point becomes an enormous challenge, and marketing and sales staffs often must get creative in order to keep the cash flowing.

Recently, Drew Neisser of FastCo spoke with Philadelphia Eagles Chief Marketing Officer Tim McDermott on the challenges he and his staff face and his best tips to overcoming the hurdles placed in front of them.  As Neisser reports, the Eagles are not only seen as one of the most recognizable brands in the National Football League, but they have an enormous ticket demand with a season ticket waiting list with over 40,000 fans.  McDermott gave Neisser eight tips to successfully navigate the murky waters of the sports marketing world.

At the top of the list was creating a customer advisory board.  While fans know an organization cannot truly control player performance, they are well aware that the organization can take action to make the entire experience much more valuable than just the sporting contest itself.  Says Neisser on the Eagles’ strategy, “Lots of brands pay lip service to listening to their customers. With a 35-person season ticket holder advisory board that, according to McDermott, acts as ‘an extension of our marketing department,’ the Eagles are doing just the opposite.”

Another of McDermott’s recommendations is to think of a sports franchise as a sort of media company.  Sports teams in the United States amass millions of impressions through media coverage and social conversations.  McDermott has invested heavily in social media in order to create “a genuine dialogue with Eagles fans.”  Quoted by Neisser, he dsecribes, “you’ll see us acting and executing more like a media company, producing and distributing content.”

@MatthewBick

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A Twitter Bot that Average Users Interacted With…Really!

Posted by: Matthew Bick // June 27th, 2012

We’ve all seen them, been spammed by them, and gotten overly annoyed with them.  Bots are everywhere on Twitter, from the mildly entertaining @Horse_ebooks to random amalgamations of letters that automatically respond to you when you mention a celebrity, these bots pervade Twitter and aggravate average users.

However, one developer was smart enough to figure out how to make his bot better than the rest: act natural.  According to Wired Magazine’s Robert McMillan, Greg Marra’s “experiment to see if an automated program could worm its way into online networks of real people” has proven wildly successful.  McMillan reports that the @Trackgirl handle started by seeking out groups of tweeting runners.  According to the article, the bot “would scour Twitter for messages with running-themed keywords and post them as if they were her own. Three times a day, she’d pick five people to follow, and she’d always follow back anybody who followed her. Because she seemed connected to the right people, @Trackgirl started to gain followers, who thought her cut-and-paste messages about the agony and the ecstasy of long-distance running were coming from a real person.

And then a funny thing happened. @Trackgirl tweeted that she’d hurt her ankle.  And the very real followers she had began to send her positive messages, even asking how her recovery was going.  Suddenly, a piece of engineered spam had actually gotten user interaction, despite the ever-increasing measures that Twitter takes to prevent bots just like this.  Although the account has recently been suspended, Marra’s innovation represents a potentially very interesting social development.  As McMillan discusses in his article, if a bot like this can elicit interaction from a community of runners, it is entirely possible that it could do the same for any other demographic, perhaps influencing anything from a user’s perception of a brand to their perception of a political candidate.

@MatthewBick

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4 Surprising New Summer 2012 Online Facts

Posted by: Neil James // June 25th, 2012

Nearly a billion people on Facebook? That’s so 2011. Twitter now gets 400 million Tweets per day? Please. As marketers, we’re hungry for the really interesting trends – the nuggets of information that not everyone knows – the little details that inform superior strategies.

Enter the new report from comScore, State of US Internet in Q1 2012. Far from the standard reports on the bloated size of Facebook and Twitter, comScore has unearthed some interesting nuggets of particular interest to digital marketers:

  • The Asia-Pacific region now holds 41 percent of the world’s Internet population
  • Pinterest is growing faster than any other social media site in terms of both unique visitors and search engine clicks
  • E-commerce dollar sales are posting double-digit gains and are now ahead of pre-recession levels
  • Online ad spending is set to grow 18 percent in 2012

@NeilAndrewJames

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