Bits and Bytes

Market like it’s 2013: Motormouth, wine merchant and social media superstar @garyvee spoke at the Elevate conference in New York City about how marketers are behaving in 2013 as if it were still 2004. It’s a thought provoking, 20-minute talk that really hammers home the point that just blasting out messages to your subscribers, Adwords, MPUs and direct mail campaigns are about a decade out of date because they no longer earn the attention of people in today’s saturated media landscape.

This really shouldn’t be new to anyone in marketing, PR or social media, but it’ll serve as a good reminder because I am sure we all still tend to err on the broadcast side of how we use social, rather than spending the energy to really listen to what people are saying.

Some bits that stuck with me:

• Don’t treat social media like another push marketing channel – it is a two-way conversation. Treating it like another broadcast channel doesn’t bring any value what so ever to the end user
• Twitter should be more about listening and less about talking. It should be about responding to people, about looking for specific keywords that will allow you to tell your story to someone that is interested in your product or industry and bring value to them
  
• Make it your mission to “natively storytell” on social platforms
  
• Spend your time figuring out how to tell stories on platforms that you don’t think you’re going to use – keep your ears pricked for what Gary says about how Snapchat could be used as a real-time promotional tool that rewards only your most die hard fans
• Only if you understand why people are on a social platform, will you be able to understand how to bring value to the user, raise awareness for your brand
  

Netflix FTW: While we’re on the topic of paradigm shifts (I know, I said it wasn’t news, but I needed a segway), Kevin Spacey convincingly argues that releasing films in cinemas, on-demand and on DVDs at the same time would take a huge bite out of piracy. Queue many overjoyed Game of Thrones fans (the most pirated TV show on the planet because you can’t get it fast enough) who have had to resort to all sorts of shady methods to get their next fix. And no, I’m not over the red wedding.

Twerk beats F Bombing – special guest post by @A_Little_Wine: It was the MTV Video Music Awards 2013 on Sunday and as usual, it failed to disappoint. Miley Cyrus’ performance with Robin Thicke dominated Twitter overshadowing Lady Gaga’s opening performance of her new single, Katy Perry’s closing rendition of her latest hit, Kanye West’s auto-tuned selfie and even Taylor Swift dropping an F bomb live on camera. Miley’s performance beat even Justin Timberlake’s 15 minute epic montage including a reunion with ‘N Sync! Cyrus performed the infamous Twerk complete with giant gyrating teddies and a rather X-rated performance with man-of-the-moment Mr Thicke. You know it’s shocking when even Rhi Rhi looks a bit embarrassed. The ‘most shared’ reaction to Miley’s twerking however, would be that of the Smith family.

According to Nielsen’s SocialGuide the cringe worthy show generated 18.5 million Tweets on the night alone with the show being tweeted about 28 times more than the second most popular televised show across the globe.

Many tweets don’t (necessarily) make a trend: Cision have looked at a number of Twitter trending topics and come to the conclusion that just because something is trending on Twitter that doesn’t mean that many people are talking about it. A number of examples show that there seem to be some other factors in play, that sometimes topics trend long after the peak in mentions was achieved, or that topics trend with only a few hundred mentions (HT @MindyB_).

Traditional media doesn’t get social media shocker: The Daily Telegraph posted an article titled “Five biggest social media blunders of 2013“. Now, I’ve talked to you about my love of a good listicle, and given my day job, I clicked. Spectacularly, The Daily Telegraph goes on to list six social media ‘blunders’, only one of which (Tesco’s “hit the hay” tweet) can really be considered a ‘blunder’.

The other five ‘blunders’ – including the frickin news hook the entire piece was based on – were not blunders (ie. a stupid or careless mistakes), but rather the result of hackers gaining access to Twitter accounts.

I’m surprised they didn’t include the Syrian Electronic Army hacking the New York Times and Twitter this week. After all, they’re literally making up new meanings of words to suit the way they’re abusing. Oh, wait…

So, what is a social media blunder? Liverpool FC have the answer (HT @tomparker81 and @a_little_wine).

Painful Facebook competitions are coming: In a dramatic u-turn, Facebook have announced that you can now run promotions and competitions right there on your brand page. This means that you no longer need to build a special app that houses the competition (that cry of pain you hear is by app developers going out of business), instead you can ask your fans to simply like or comment on a post to join a competition.

There’s no mention of cost to the page owner in the Facebook promotion guidelines, which I find hard to believe as this simple mechanic will be something that brands will want to get into. I suspect it will lead to many branded competitions popping up in your newsfeed (after all, Facebook treats much liked and much commented content within your social graph as being particularly newsworthy) and – who knows – the unfollowing of brands who post too many inane competitions like this one from Condescending Corporate Brand (yes, I know this isn’t a real competition, but if you’re familiar with their collection of painfully poor posts you just know it isn’t far from the truth).

The thin blue Twitter line: Twitter has also decided to update its service – if you’re using their mobile app, you’ll now see that there’s a blue line that connects tweets in a conversation, displaying them immediately after the other.

The majority of Twitter users seem to be OK with this (going by my feed at least), saying that it helps make sense of Twitter’s confusing conversations. But then there’s those that believe by making conversations easier to follow, Twitter is encouraging people to use the service for something other than its essential function, that is following the news rather than conversations between people that may have concluded hours previously.

Videos of the week: The guys at GoPro posted this great clip from Man City’s pre-season tour of the US. What do we learn? Footballers are all about the garishly coloured shoes, it’s all about angles, Hart was pants even in pre-season (but is rather good at baseball), and in the States, a pre-season friendly between Chelsea and Man City is sold out, so dire is the quality of football there.

Climate Name Change propose a new naming system for extreme storms caused by climate change after the policy makers who deny climate change and obstruct climate policy.

And finally: A triple dose of Internet awesomeness, because I couldn’t pick just one. I present you Dubstep cat, Daily Express Bingo and What Rhymes With Hug Me.