Author Archives: Rob

Top 7 Memes

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The internet is an amazing network that facilitates global collaboration and the rapid spread of ideas. Sometimes people collaborate to produce new tools and technology. Sometimes people organise popular movements. Sometimes, it’s just funny.

 

Memes demonstrate that the internet is essentially a global petri dish for ideas. Wikipedia describes a meme as “an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” As content can spread across the internet at an astonishing rate, it’s no wonder that companies are investing vast sums in online marketing campaigns with the intention of going viral across social media.

 

If you’re new to memes, here’s a collection of my personal favourites.

 

7. Inception
Back in 2010, Christopher Nolan pushed our cerebral capacity to the limit with the brilliant Inception, in which organisations attempted to steal sensitive information from within dreams. It wasn’t long though before the internet took a couple stills and made it all more light-hearted.

 

6. Thom Yorke Dances I’m a massive Radiohead fan, but the video for Lotus Flower was ripe for being mashed-up. Within hours of the new single appearing on YouTube the internet had chopped it up and soundtracked Thom Yorke’s unique dance stylings with a host of other tunes. Personal favourite: Thom Yorke vs Beyonce.

 

5.Invisible X

I’m also a big fan of cats and I’m not ashamed to say that lolcats is near the top of my bookmarks list. All you need is a perfectly timed photo with a caption and you’ve got something hilarious like a cat riding an invisible bike.

 

Cat Riding an Invisible Bike

 

4. Guile Theme Goes With Everything

Each character in the classic 1991 video game Street Fighter II had their own theme music. Thanks to the power of the internet and a series of mash-ups, we have discovered that Guile’s theme music can soundtrack any video you can imagine. Remember that classic stampede scene in The Lion King? Well, you’ve never seen it like this.

 

3. McKayla Is Not Impressed

Still not convinced about the power of memes? Even the most powerful person on Earth gets in on the act. When Olympic gold medal favourite McKayla Maroney came second in the Gymnastics, a well timed photograph of her scowling during the victory ceremony went viral and was Photoshopped into various scenes. It seems there’s a lot that McKayla isn’t impressed by, even meeting Mr Obama himself.

 

2. Jonathan From Spotify Ruined Your Playlist

Spotify is a fantastic way to explore new music. When it first started, the ads seems a small price to pay for free music. But then, just a few songs into that amazing playlist you put together, up pipes Jonathan from Spotify encouraging you to subscribe. Curse you, Jonathan and your annoying voice. In a truly collaborative effort using Google Docs, the internet protested. Jonathan From Spotify Ruined Your Playlist allows you to make wild accusations about what Jonathan gets up to, often with some other pop-culture reference thrown in. Each time you refresh, you get a new statement like “Jonathan from Spotify doesn’t have his Oyster ready at the barrier” or “Jonathan from Spotify listens to music loudly on the bus”. Strangely, I haven’t heard from Jonathan from Spotify for a while now…

 

Jonathan From Spotify Wears Crocs In Business Meetings

 

1. Business Cat

Speaking of business, here’s a cat who gets things right! When a picture of a cat wearing a tie was Photoshopped onto a rainbow background, the natural thing would be to add some puns that cross the business and feline worlds. Well, with the catty comments that go around some offices, they’re not that far removed!

 

Worked hard, made it to the top. Now I can't get down.

 

Memes are becoming a big deal in wider society – there’s even a biennial convention celebrating them. All this shows how the internet is constantly evolving and shaping our popular culture. If you have any personal favourites, post them in the comments section below.

 

What Instagram really says about us

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Instagram have had a tough week, haven’t they? The photo-sharing social network was forced to make a U-Turn on planned changes to their Terms of Service after users protested in a hysterical backlash. The debacle revealed a lot about how the internet works and how people expect to get something for nothing.

 

The depressing thing is that the public reaction was so disproportionate to an announcement that actually improved the situation for Instagram users. The past few days have demonstrated how powerfully news – and public outrage – can spread like wildfire across the internet, and how quickly people will jump to conclusions after reading just a short headline.

 

This is all fuelled by the desperate and relentless quest of every news outlet across the internet (and other media, for that matter) to be the first to break a story. Let’s take how BBC News Online broke the announcement:

 

“Instagram seeks right to sell access to photos to advertisers

Facebook’s photo-sharing site Instagram has updated its privacy policy giving it the right to sell users’ photos to advertisers without notification”

 

Headlines need to be short and punchy to capture our ever-shrinking attention spans, but here the details of Instagram’s announcement were rendered very misleadingly. That didn’t stop thousands of people – and numerous celebrities – jumping to false conclusions, taking to social media to vent their rage and threaten to boycott Instagram. The vast majority of these people won’t have actually read beyond the three lines quoted here, let alone the announcement from the horse’s mouth.

 

Let’s backtrack a bit. Instagram has, like every other web-based company that stores user data, an ‘expansive’ licence to host your photos. Like anything you post to a social network, you are essentially giving that social network permission to display your content.

 

Through their existing Terms of Service, Instagram essentially have the right to use your photos in ads pretty much how they like. It’s always been this way, and thousands of people worldwide unknowingly agreed to these terms on sign-up because they wanted to use the service Instagram provides. It’s only once changes to our privacy are cast in a harsh public light that people take any notice…and have a strop.

 

Ironically, Instagram’s new Terms of Service actually improved the situation for users by removing ambiguity and making the definition of how advertisers can use your photos clearer. Under the new terms, advertisers can pay to display photos and any related info (location etc), but they can’t sell or modify those photos. This is very similar to the ‘Sponsored Posts’ system that Instagram’s owner, Facebook, uses. If you took a photo of Big Ben, advertisers could pay Instagram to include your photo in a post about ‘Our Favourite Instagram shots of London‘. They wouldn’t have any rights to change that image – it’s still yours.

 

The old agreement – which has now been reinstated – actually permits modification of photos. So the fear that advertisers could take your photos and add their logo to them has become a reality… just like it always was.

 

There’s no denying that Instagram handled the case badly – explanations and clearer wording were needed. But what this boils down to is that people expect something for free without any strings. First and foremost Instagram is a business which provides a service free of charge – they have to make money somewhere. The user is not just the consumer, they are also the product. A simple rule of common sense should prevail here – if you do not want others to use your content don’t put it in the public domain.

Olympic Tickets and USPs

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Earlier this week, I received my Olympic tickets in the post. Sure enough, there were two tickets to Wembley, but there was something in my Olympic pack which I hadn’t expected: two free travelcards which allow me to travel anywhere across the capital.

 

This was a really nice surprise, and I was amazed that the organisers had not made a bigger deal out of it in their PR. It strikes me as a missed opportunity, as I imagine that a lot of those people who were put off by the travel costs for the games would have applied for tickets had they known about the free travelcards. I even did a quick Google search, just to make sure that travelcards weren’t given out for certain events, and found a lot of people who were also pleasantly surprised.

 

All of this made me think about how important it is to make the most of your Unique Selling Points. In this modern world where we are all fighting to capture everyone’s ever diminishing attention spans, it’s vital to make yourself stand out, and do it quickly.

 

You might have noticed that a lot of the top businesses in the world are making big efforts to crystallise their USPs and key benefits into short, snappy bullet points. Take Google as an example. Each time you log into your Gmail account, you are given three bullet points that sum up that service:

 

  • Lots of space
  • Less spam
  • Mobile access

 

Each of these perfectly sum up what you want in an email provider. Oh, and for those that don’t even have time to properly read those bullet points, there’s an icon that illustrates it.

 

These days, it’s so crucial to not miss the boat with an opportunity to get your message out there. Think about what makes your business special, what features are winners and make them stand out from the crowd. If you can reduce these down to short, snappy bites, people are far more likely to notice and remember them.

 

If you would like help finding and selling your business’s USPs, drop us a line. We’re here to help.

 

Managers and Monitoring Metrics

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With the England squad being announced this week, I thought it would be a good time to revisit a blog post I wrote a few months ago which discussed a tongue in cheek idea I had for using social media to elect the new England football manager.
 
Evidently the FA decided not to go with my flight of fancy idea, having appointed Roy Hodgson as the man who will lead England out in Poland and Ukraine this summer (maybe it’s a good thing – for what it’s worth, I think Hodgson makes a lot more sense long term).
 
My main justification for the social media scheme was to ensure that the new manager was – in the FA’s own words – a ‘popular’ choice. Roy’s appointment hasn’t been universally popular, with many lamenting that ‘Arry’ Redknapp wasn’t given the job.
 
The reason I bring all this up is because, had the social media poll been used, we could very clearly see how ‘popular’ a choice the new manager would be. To me, the divided opinions over the incumbent England Manager highlighted the value of measurable metrics and the difference between qualitative and quantitative data for monitoring social media.
 
Sentiment isn’t always an easy thing to measure in social media as people essentially have free reign to write what they like. As a result, you’re collecting a vast range of unrestricted and unquantifiable information that isn’t formatted all in the same way. Ask a thousand people to write their opinion on a subject and you’ll probably get a thousand different responses. That’s a lot of data to manually process.
 
That’s why surveys have always been a popular way of measuring the opinions of a large group of people – rather than comb through all those responses, you’re simply working with quantitative data. The England Manager job is a good example. Imagine trying to measure sentiment just by reading everyone’s opinions – that’s going to be very time consuming. Now, imagine how much easier it would be if we could monitor specific metrics: we could see the number of votes cast and for whom, and whether there was anything in particular that drove that sentiment, like a popular journalist influencing opinion.
 
To make things a bit easier, here are our two golden metrics you must measure to make the most of social media:
 
1. Timing
Social media runs around the clock – we might check it on the commute to work or whilst we’re relaxing at the weekend. It’s important to find out when your audience is most receptive to your posts – there’s no point writing great content if you post it at the wrong time. People often only check the most recent posts on their stream or timeline, so you need to make sure that your content is at the top of their list. Experiment and when you identify a pattern of high response, hone in on that window of opportunity.
 
2. Content
It’s all very well being bang on time, but what’s the point if you’ve got nothing worthwhile to say? If anything, irrelevant or uninteresting posts will encourage people to click the ‘unfollow’ or ‘unlike’ buttons. Experiment with different types of content to discover what resonates with your audience. The key metric to watch out for? The number of actions a post receives (think opens, shares, likes or retweets). If people like your content, they’ll want to tell others. We often find that top tips articles work well: they are concise, quick and easy to read – perfect for the busy modern world.
 
If your business needs help monitoring your metrics, or anything else with social media, get in touch.
 

LINk Dignity in Care Campaign

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We have just completed some brand design work for West Sussex LINk.
 
Local Involvement Networks (LINks) are made up of individuals and community groups who work together to improve health and social care services. Having worked with Smart Monkey on previous campaigns, West Sussex LINk asked us to create new branding to help promote the Dignity in Care campaign.
 
Dignity and respect are two of the most important elements to providing good quality care. As the aim of the campaign is to spread the good work already being carried out around dignity and respect, we came up with branding to reflect this: the West Sussex Dignity Wave.
 
Just as small waves grow bigger, even the smallest acts of dignity and respect make a big difference. The Dignity Wave is a network which helps to spread the cause of Dignity in Care across the county, and provides support to those who help Make A Difference.
 
As part of the Dignity in Care campaign, the West Sussex LINk is supporting Dignity Champions – positive role models who demonstrate a commitment to creating a care system that has compassion and respect for those using its services.
 
The branding was used across leaflets and posters at events across the county. Take a look below.
 

Find out more about the Dignity in Care campaign or LINks.
 

‘Redknapp new England Manager’. Fabio Capello likes this.

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Following on from a theme I explored last week, I’ve thought of an innovative use for social media:

 

England manager – who goes to Euro 2012? You decide!

 

With Fabio Capello’s resignation England have just four months to find a new manager before the Euro 2012 Championship begins. England could lead the way in using social media to elect our new manager.

 

FA Chairman David Bernstein was careful not to exclude any potential candidates from the shortlist being drawn up, but stated that he thought that the manager should be a ‘popular’ choice. Surely, what better way to ensure this than by a Facebook poll?

 

After all, you can’t walk into a pub at the moment without someone discussing their preferences.  Not only does every football fan in the country have an opinion on the matter, it’s usually more nuanced and carefully constructed than their opinions on the politicians that actually run our country. In fact, the process could become a model for future political elections. Well, it would increase the accountability of the manager at least.

 

Sure, you might be thinking this is a far-fetched idea – maybe it’s too risky when the interests and passions of millions are at stake. But the role of social media in election campaigns has precedent. The most powerful man in the world is a big advocate of social media for engagement and canvassing opinion and used it extensively in his election campaign: step forward, Barack Obama.

 

But what about those who couldn’t give a monkeys about football? I bet a lot of them would enjoy debating the voting system used to elect the manager; should it be first-past-the-post or AV?

 

If nothing else, and if England fail at a major international tournament again, it would quieten all those ‘fans’ who turn on the team the moment we lose and bemoan the manager for not being good enough.  You chose the man, it’s your responsibility.

 

So, who would you vote for?

 

Innovative uses of social media

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A lot of people get social media wrong because, like every new bandwagon they hastily jump onto, they see it as the sole answer to all their problems. It’s important to think of social media as a toolset for engaging with your customers in new and exciting ways, rather than just another channel to shout your tired message through. After all, a bad workman blames his tools.

 

Whilst it takes a lot of creative thinking to break the mould and use social media in a truly original way it’s often the simplest of ideas that work best. It’s about looking at what tools each social network offers, and thinking about what you can do with them.

 

Some time ago, Beth wrote about how a Texas coffee shop used Twitter to take orders from customers in advance. It’s so simple isn’t it? The brainstorming session can’t have taken that long:

TexasCoffee_Twitter_Brainstorm

 

Last Thursday Beth and I headed down to Brighton for a CIM Sussex seminar on Digital trends and the impact on traditional marketing. In his typically laid back style, Ross Breadmore from NixonMcinnes highlighted some implementations of social media that were really thinking outside the box. Here’s some of our favourites to get your creative juices flowing:

 

1. Diesel Cam

Trying on a pair of jeans and want your friends’ opinion? Post a picture to your Facebook account using the booth in Diesel store changing room. I imagine the most popular caption is “Does my bum look big in this?

 

2. Fiat Eco:Drive

Fiat’s Eco:Drive system tracks your driving, relays it back to a central server and then provides you with easy to read graphs and stats to help you monitor your driving performance. It’s all about staying green and reducing your carbon footprint – something that most environmentally conscious people don’t mind talking about. So it’s handy that you can share this info with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

 

3. Miista – Cheaper With A Tweet

Hackney based shoe retailer Miista launched a Twitter campaign to beat the January blues. A single Tweet to @miistashoes and the price of your chosen item drops for everyone. As a further twist, the level of discount applied was proportionate to your klout score – a measure of your Twitter influence. Higher Twitter klout had higher klout on prices.

 

4. IBM

The interesting thing about one of the world’s largest companies is that they don’t have a single corporate Facebook or Twitter account. Instead, they have 17000 internal blogs from employees where they are free to write their own thoughts – as well as strong employee presence on Twitter and LinkedIn. All this helps humanise a huge company.

 

When given the time, none of these ideas are that hard to come up with. In fact, similar campaigns have been conducted with more traditional methods. Miista have taken the ‘do something for us to get a discount’ idea and applied it in the social media realm. Think about what advantages and tools each social network offers and don’t be afraid to experiment!

 

New Year, New Twitter Brand Pages

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In December, Twitter announced a significant revamp to their site to be launched in the First Quarter of 2012 which will make everything easier to find and manage.

 

From a marketing perspective, the most exciting part of the redesign is the introduction of new Brand Pages. Currently, there is no differentiation between Twitter accounts – every user, from Average Joe to Coca Cola, has the same options available to personalise their Twitter page. Following the examples of Google+ and Facebook, Twitter Brand Pages will allow companies to have a stronger corporate presence on the social network.

 

Twitter is a fantastic way to engage with your customers, and the Brand Pages will provide some great new ways of capturing their attention:

 

1. Use your head

Under the standard account type, branded elements of the page can easily get lost in the tweet timeline. The new Brand Pages will have large customisable header images to allow your company to demonstrate a strong corporate presence as users scroll throughout the page.

 

2. Pin up

The revamp provides the ability to pin tweets to the top of the timeline. This is a great way to get users to see recent pictures or videos of your latest products or service. HP took an alternative route, using a fun, unrelated image to grab users’ attention and encourage them to explore the page further.

 

3. Bursting media

Unlike standard accounts, Brand Pages will also be able to set pinned pictures or videos to open automatically. This presents your company the opportunity for a mini-landing page or introductory video to show off what your brand is about.

 

4. Sharing everything

Embeddable tweets will allow users to use a simple line of code to embed your company’s tweets on their own site in their full glory, not just as a boring link.

 

 

However, a word of warning – you need to strike a delicate balance. Whilst the advent of official Brand Pages presents an exciting opportunity to extend your brand into the social media world, the important thing to remember is your audience. People are following your company on Twitter because of its simplicity, accessibility and, most importantly, because it’s a quick way of receiving news updates from your company.

 

Twitter’s userbase has grown so large because people find it an easy way to engage with others. A recent Simple Usability eye track study noted that, out of the 21 companies currently trialling the new Brand Pages, HP scored particularly highly because it engaged with users, even answering common technical problems. Conversely, heavy advertising – such as on the McDonald’s Brand Page – distanced users, who said the page felt ‘too corporate’.

 

When presented with an opportunity to get creative, it’s very easy to get caught up in the moment, making the flashiest page you can imagine. However, consider whether that’s what your audience will want. Typically, Twitter users get updates through their home feed, not by visiting each page directly. Thus, users are unlikely to visit your page frequently, but instead rely upon your tweets reaching them. The key role of your Twitter Brand Page should be to get followers you can then communicate with long-term.

 

Twitter is a fantastic way to spread good content, but if your page is more style than substance, you’re likely to lose followers, and potentially customers. Twitter users love simplicity – unless your Brand Page does something truly original, keep it simple, and your brand will shine through.

 

Google+ and your business

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It’s estimated that 60% of the world’s biggest brands are now on Google +, so what could the search engine giant’s social network mean for your business?

 

Google has done its homework and adopted an open approach to social networking in stark contrast to the close walls of their main rival, Facebook. Facebook users sign in, do what they want, then sign out. Google+, however, is fully integrated with the company’s other initiatives, including Google accounts. As most of the world’s internet users access information through Google searches, having a profile right next to the search button is likely to change how we use social networking.

 

Social media already has some impact on how pages are ranked and indexed by Google, but the integration of Google’s own social network within its search engine will shake things up in terms of SEO. To help you stay ahead of the game, here’s our Top Tips for why Google+ could mean big things for your business.

 

1. All in one

Google+ is fully integrated within the Google platform, which will mean big changes for SEO. A typical search within Google+ not only finds content on the web containing the chosen keywords, but posts, photos and pages created by other Google+ users. For your customers, this self-contained system means they can find out more about your company whilst doing all their normal social networking. For you, it provides an easy way to monitor the buzz around your business and helps you capture a wider audience by focussing content on relevant, trendy keywords.

 

2. Direct Connect

Google recently retired the ‘+’ operator from their search engine in preparation for Google+. Why? To give higher visibility and allow direct access to Google+ pages without waiting for search results. Try typing ‘+’ followed by a brand name – Google will automatically suggest the Google+ page for that company. The upshot is that your business could have a social media presence at the top of the Google page each time someone searches for it.

 

3. +1

Noticed a small ‘+1’ button next to search results or content on the web recently? This is Google+’s sharing button and is similar to ‘Liking’ something on Facebook. Google says this is designed to help you discover the best and most popular content on the web faster. It’s important to read between the lines here: ‘best’ means good content; ‘popular’ means naturally recommended. Spamming this button in an effort to make you go up in the SERPs is more likely to alert Google that your website is spamming. The ‘+1’ system is likely to be used as a barometer of social opinion to back up Google’s own algorithmic results – consistent +1’s could reaffirm the quality of a page’s content. As the social network continues to grow, this little button could mean big things for your business.

 

4. Social media counts

Social media itself is no substitute for good content; indeed, one of social media’s main roles is to share good content. Prior to the introduction of ‘+1’, data from Facebook and Twitter had significant influence on Page Rank (where a page appears in Google’s search results). For example, the number of retweets a link receives has an impact on how it’s indexed by Google. Whilst Google have altered their algorithms to prevent link spamming through Twitter, tweets do still aid in page indexation. It’s hard to imagine that ‘+1’ won’t have similar impacts upon search indexing.

 

5. More relevant searches

Forbes recently argued that Facebook achieved in seven years what the CIA failed to do in over half a century: find out what 800 million people think, read and listen to, what they like and who they know. Google+ will provide Google – the world’s largest search engine provider – with a goldmine of nuanced data which can be used to refine its searching algorithms to produce increasingly relevant search results. Additionally, as data from the +1 system accumulates, Google will be able to provide increasingly personalised results – think “people who +1’d this also +1’d this”. The correlation between personal interests, what people search for and the content they enjoy will help Google to tweak its algorithms. The upshot of this is that smaller, lowly ranked pages with strong social media presence could become more relevant and feature as a Top 10 search result.

 

The growth of Google+ in just a few months is both considerable and impressive. As the social network gains extra users the data Google will accumulate will have substantial impacts on SEO. If your business is not yet on Google+, set up and optimise a page now and you’ll be well prepared for the changes on the horizon.