Use Facebook to show off pictures of your dogs — or, better yet, videos of your dogs — or whatever. But don’t use it to spread bogus stories about Betty White’s death. That’s the newest edict from Facebook, which says it is cracking down on hoaxes, scams “or deliberately false or misleading news stories.” [Read More]
Hold your phone (and maybe take a video) because Snapchat just had a stormageddon all its own. The photo + video messaging app just got attacked with a news blizzard courtesy of its brand spankin’ new features and we are totally all about it. [Read More]
More than four years after introducing advertising on its platform, Twitter has changed the way businesses create ads. And as with any game in which the rules have shifted, players adapt by developing new strategies. [Read More]
If it’s starting to feel to you like every visit you make to Facebook these days is full of videos, you are not alone. Facebook today reported in a strong set of Q4 earnings that there are 3 billion videos viewed on its site each day. With the company also reporting daily active users of 890 million, this works out to more than 3 videos per day. [Read More]
Some people still aren’t allowed to use Facebook at work. But the social network wants people to use Facebook *for* work. Facebook has begun testing a work-only version of the social network called Facebook at Work so that companies can use Facebook as an internal communications tool without employees boring their families or oversharing with their bosses. [Read More]
Does the saying “The Internet never forgets” still hold up? This reverse amnesia of the Information Age has sparked many global discussions on privacy and online reputation, and it is reflected more and more in the changes made by those in charge of our online information, like social networks and ISPs. [Read More]
We get it, managing your business’s social media accounts can be daunting: from tweaking tweet lengths to mastering Facebook tone, to using the right hashtags at the right times. But what savvy social media users know is that there’s a science to getting it right–if you follow certain parameters, you’re almost guaranteed to get the results you were working toward. All it takes is some knowledge and forethought, and anyone can be well on their way to posting engaging content. [Read More]
A Boston-area university has pressed pause on an ad campaign launched this summer that was described as bold and provocative. Suffolk University made noise in July when it began a campaign that described the small, private university as anti-elite and a haven for hard-working students. It was the university’s first broad campaign in eight years. [Read More]
Pinterest is stepping a bit closer to helping its retail advertisers understand their actual ROI. Publications have inferred the social media platform’s revamped advertising plan through some of its updated privacy policy documents; chief among these updates will be the ability for advertisers to directly target those Pinterest users who are already customers. [Read More]
Tired of being shown all those spammy ads on Facebook when you’re trying to figure out what your friends’ kids are up to? Do you wish there were a social platform that didn’t treat you like a piece of metadata? You’re not alone. Ello has been getting considerable attention recently, and we can almost guarantee your parents won’t use it. The service is opening to new members by invitation only. Invites for the service have been sold on eBay for up to $500, according to several reports. [Read More]
By now we’ve all heard about it. During the Super Bowl, J.C. Penney appeared to either have a hacker tweeting from their Twitter account, or had someone on staff drunk tweeting from it.
Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0
So let’s evaluate. How did this tactic do for J.C. Penney?
Brand
J.C. Penney has been making a shift in brand over the last couple of years (technically a couple of different shifts), and I think has definitely been trying to move to a more hip feel, attracting a younger clientele, and making it more than “just another department store.” Unfortunately, I’m not sure faking drunk tweeting or a hacked account is the right way to accomplish this brand image. As a consumer, this doesn’t give me the confidence in the brand that I would expect to have. Especially among all the hacking going on with credit card data recently, I’d like the reassurance that the store can keep it’s Twitter account from being hack at the minimum.
On the other hand, if you read through J.C. Penney’s tweets, this type of humor does fit in with what they post. So they are not completely off the mark, but I now definitely feel a difference between their social media personality, and what I know J.C. Penney as.
Audience
I feel like these kinds of Tweets don’t fit well with who J.C. Penney is talking to. I’ll be honest, I could be wrong on this, but I think J.C. Penney’s audience is diverse across many age groups, and that this may not resonate with that audience. Even if it was a joke, I’m not sure everyone got it, and I’m just not sure it didn’t leave a bad taste in customer’s mouths.
Reach
If you look at the retweets and favorites of the three tweets above, the first misspelled tweet received 19,874 retweets and 8,724 favorites, the second had 23,188 retweets and 10,365 favorites (at time of posting). The tweet with the brand message and contained the punchline received 3,838 retweets and 2,139 favorites. There is a huge difference between these! Way more people saw that J.C. Penney made mistakes on their Twitter account than saw that it was a joke. I know that there will always be more engagement on the “mistakes” than the punchline, simply because people would much rather see a train wreck, than a social media stunt, but that is a risk you take with this kind of posting. In this case, I think the difference is huge, and I wonder how many people still don’t know that J.C. Penney was just #TweetingWithMittens.
Content
J.C. Penney has been pushing these Go USA mittens for a little while now to support Team USA in the Sochi Olympics. But, they tweeted this joke during the Super Bowl. Both teams belong to the USA, so it didn’t quite make sense to me. They could have attempted the same joke during the Opening Ceremony or another big Olympic event, and I think the content would have resonated much better. Instead, personally I was confused. Maybe it was J.C. Penney’s way of not rooting for a specific team, but if that’s the case, they didn’t do a good job of staying impartial, since they “said” “Go Seahawks” in one of their tweets.
Followers
J.C. Penney’s #TweetingWithMittens did have a very evident positive, 8,824 new followers. They have definitely been acquiring new followers over time, with a recent large spike in addition to the Super Bowl spike. Time will tell if this spike of followers were worth it, when we can see if those followers remained, or unfollowed after the joke was up.
Follower gains on the day of the Super Bowl.
J.C. Penney’s follower growth over last three months.
Winner or Loser?
Personally, I give kudos to J.C. Penney for taking a risk during a huge Twitter traffic time. Part of social media is finding out what your audience will react to, and you have some go tos that you know will accomplish what you need to, but you always have to be trying to find the next thing, and attract new audiences. The only way to do that is with a little trial and error. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this risk paid off.
What do you think? Did J.C. Penney make the right move?
That song comes on the radio, the one you really like, but you haven’t been able to figure out the artist of, and you immediately reach for your phone, open the Shazam app, wait for it to listen and tell you every bit of information you could ever want to know about that song. We all do it. Personally, I’m quite thankful for it. Shazam keeps me from having to search for a song without knowing all the information, which is extremely difficult. But Shazam has jumped from being all about music, to finding its way into TV commercials, and more recently the X-Factor.
Shazam has found a way for users to easily engage with TV content that comes natural, since more than 375 million users already use the app. I’ve noticed the icon with instructions on a number of commercials over the last year, but as an X-Factor fan, I couldn’t help but notice that the app had made its way into voting for the singing-contest show.
You can now Shazam a competitor’s song during the show, and it will bring up a “Vote Now” button, along with telling you the artist and the song. This is a newer way for audiences to engage with television. We’ve all seen the hashtags in the corners of a TV show, but this is more than talking about it, this is a direct sign of engagement, in an innovative way.
I think the piece of this that is the most important is the analytics available through this technique. You have a direct way of knowing how your user continued through content, and that they converted, or didn’t. This is a challenge with TV, because you provide a web address many times, but don’t have any way of knowing for sure that someone arrived from TV, rather than another channel. This depends on how exactly you set things up, but I can recall a number higher education TV ads with a generic .edu address as the call to action.
Shazam even has an engagement metric for TV, called the Shazam Engagement Rate, which tells you how many times an ad was tagged during an airing divided by the Gross Rating Point (provided by Nielsen) of each airing. Applying this to X-Factor, you then have a second level of metrics, the vote button, to show how much the user engaged with the content. As you can imagine, this is extremely valuable data.
I see valuable opportunities within television as a whole, but I can also see some possibilities for higher education, especially those with large TV ad buys.
Do you have any interest in using Shazam within your TV ad campaigns?
Instagram announced that it would start adding advertisements into the feeds of users a few weeks ago, but they finally gave us a first glance of what they would look like. And surprisingly, it’s not too crazy.
Many have been wondering when this would happen, ever since Instagram was bought by Facebook for that $1 billion price tag. And the time has come, but Instagram is being cautious about the introduction of ads. You can see from the first “sponsored” Instagram post, that they are making the ads blend in with normal posts, and making sure they don’t overpower the content from your followers.
Instagram is known for having a young audience, and they may not be as willing to see advertisements instead of more selfies from their friends. I think that Instagam is going about this in the right way though by making the ads unobtrusive. It will be easy for users to scroll by ads they don’t care for, and since the ads will be targeted based on Instagram and Facebook data, they won’t seem out of place. By taking a slow, almost laid back approach, Instagram is trying to give their audiences an acquired taste.
So, will ads be the death of Instagram? I don’t think so, of course there will be a ton of outraged users upon mass rollout, mainly the people who still didn’t realize the change was occurring. But I think Instagram’s communications on the change will help curb this some, and even will make it a shorter time period that users will be outraged. But users will continue using the app, because it’s already part of their day.
What do you think? Will advertising kill Instagram?
Your social content across the board should be treated as a type of ad. Witty content with a photo of product? You want it to cause an action. Promotion that you want to have a WOM domino effect? You are indirectly advertising to them. Manipulation through data is key to get people into the stores. [Read More]
Just because modern technology has abbreviated our language with “GTG,” “BRB” and “IDK” (all AP-approved, thx) doesn’t mean that modern professional PR writers should throw vowels to the wind. [Read More]
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel’s hands are shaking as he points to his iPhone. He’s unmistakably nervous, and not in a sweaty, early-Mark Zuckerberg kind of way. There must be a lot on his mind as the young CEO of a company bounding toward a $1 billion valuation — a company that has changed the course of being a teenager in the year 2013. Spiegel brushes off Snapchat’s latest bragging right: the service sees 350 million snaps sent per day. He seems anxious, as if he’s about to interview for a job or deliver a commencement speech to his graduating class. [Read More]
How concerned are you with sharing your location with businesses from your mobile device? A new study says almost half of respondents are willing to share their location information with companies. They do so in order to get things like relevant offers, timely alerts and to connect with customer service. [Read More]
