Showing posts with label vine. Show all posts

Monday, 21 September 2015

Why Periscope Is the Next Big Thing in Social Media

07:00 android , apps , blogs , facebook , linkedin , Periscope , snapchat , social media , social media marketing , twitter , video marketing , vine

With more brands emphasizing the importance of a solid presence on media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, this article predicts that the next big marketing frontier is the Periscope app.

As social media becomes less of an afterthought among brands and more of an essential ingredient in the marketing mix, it is increasingly difficult to stand out on these online channels.

There is only so much attention from consumers and customers to go around, and the social streams are overflowing with content in all shapes and sizes.

So unless you want to be like the wallflower at the dance, being boring is not an option on social media. There are simply no excuses for not sharing a deep repertoire of content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and everywhere else your audience is hanging out online.

If your customers and prospects are spending time on Pinterest, Vine, SnapChat, YouTube, Tumblr, and Instagram, you need to establish your own solid presence there. Industry events and developments, company updates and corporate culture, promotions, offers, news and opinions - what you share is important, but sometimes where and how you share it is of even greater significance. Be there or be square.

That's where Periscope enters the picture. Launched on March 26, 2015, this live video streaming app owned by Twitter recently eclipsed the 10 million user mark and reports that over 40 years of video are watched per day. To say that Periscope is kind of a big deal right now would be an understatement.

Of course, you can and should use other channels to share your videos, but to ignore Periscope is to overlook an unparalleled, unprecedented way to connect with people in instantaneous, unfiltered fashion. The brand that uses Periscope comes across as both transparent and authentic, unafraid to cede control of the conversation and willing to share its true identity. What is likely to result is greater trust, better business, and a stronger bond between those on either side of the medium.

To use Periscope:

Download the app to either your Android or iOS device.
Log in with your Twitter username or phone number.
Adjust your settings.
Set your notifications.
Look for people to follow.
Prepare to broadcast your own videos live.

It really is that easy.

You can use Periscope for everything, from streaming breaking news to giving your audience a behind-the-scenes tour of your office. You can conduct interviews, give product demonstrations, take surveys - the creative possibilities are endless. What's streamed on Periscope is limited only by your imagination.

Here are three great examples of videos created with Periscope:

1. Ryan Pinkham's Live Tutorial

Constant Contact's Ryan Pinkham used Periscope to record a live tutorial from his desk entitled, Email Design Mistakes Your Readers Hate. He also turned his broadcast into a blog post, and archived his recording on YouTube to give his content an indefinite shelf-life.

2. Michael Hyatt's Blog Commentary

Another excellent example of Periscope use is author and speaker Michael Hyatt's discussion about his original blog post called No, You Don't Have to Work 24/7 to Succeed. In the blog, Michael also mentions that he broadcasts on a daily basis during the week at 12:30 p.m. CDT.

Keeping a regular schedule for Periscope broadcasts is a great strategy, regardless of what you're going to cover. It allows the audience to grow accustomed to tuning in to watch you at the same time every day

3. An Interactive Tour with the Mayo Clinic

Finally, the Mayo Clinic's interactive tour of its Rochester, Minnesota, campus was originally streamed on Periscope, like the two other videos above. This "after-hours, behind-the-scenes" tour has also been subsequently uploaded to YouTube.

Unfortunately, you can't watch a replay of someone else's Periscope video after 24 hours unless they've repurposed it elsewhere, such as YouTube or Vimeo.

That same inconvenience, however, helps spur real-time viewership, creating a sense of urgency every time you see the words "LIVE on #Periscope." Chalk it up to the fear of missing out.

periscope-tweets

Given its immaturity, Periscope is a relatively unproven app. However, that certainly hasn't stopped many brands from jumping on the Periscope bandwagon, tooting their own horns, and throwing any fears of revealing who they are as people to the wind. If you haven't already, now is the time to try the next big thing in social media.

Source

Twitter Acquires Niche, a Talent Agency for Social-Media Stars

08:58 blogs , Gap , NFL , social media , twitter , vine , Warner Bros

Twitter has agreed to acquire Niche, a startup that facilitates advertising deals for social media stars.

The social networking company announced the news today, with a blog post, but did not disclose terms.

Launched in 2013, Niche bills itself as a social media talent agency. It scours services like YouTube and Vine (another Twitter property) for breakout stars and signs them to mainstream media deals. According to a report from last year, Niche works with advertisers such as Gap, American Eagle, the NFL, Proctor & Gamble, and Warner Bros. Plus, it provides tools that helps stars use popular social services—and track their fanbase.

For Twitter, the deal provides a way of feeding the use of its online services, but it can also directly boost revenues. The kinds of deals facilitated by Niche can be lucrative. According to a recent story in New York Magazine, when Vine star Nash Grier made branded videos for Virgin Mobile and MTV, he pulled in $4,166 a second—compared to the $5,827 per second pulled in by Robert Downey Jr., the highest paid actor in the world, on The Avengers.

After going public in November, the company is under pressure to find new revenue streams. Recently, the company announced it would start selling ads on other apps and sites.

Source

Selfies on a Stick, and the Social-Content Challenge for the Media

10:22 facebook , instagram , media , selfie stick , selfies , snapchat , social content , social media , social networks , social sharing , twitter , vine , youtube

A family commemorates New Year’s Eve in Times Square using a collapsible pole that improves camera angles for self-portraits. Zoran Milich/Reuters

Sometimes you don’t need an analyst’s report to get a look at the future of the media industry and the challenges it will bring.

On New Year’s Eve, I was one of the poor souls working in Times Square. By about 1 p.m., it was time to evacuate, and when I stepped into the cold that would assault the huddled, partying masses that night, a couple was getting ready to pose for a photo with the logo on The New York Times Building in the background. I love that I work at a place that people deem worthy of memorializing, and I often offer to help.

My assistance was not required. As I watched, the young couple mounted their phone on a collapsible pole, then extended it outward, the camera now able to capture the moment in wide-screen glory.

I’d seen the same phenomenon when I was touring the Colosseum in Rome last month. So many people were fighting for space to take selfies with their long sticks — what some have called the “Narcissistick” — that it looked like a reprise of the gladiatorial battles the place once hosted.

The urge to stare at oneself predates mirrors — you could imagine a Neanderthal fussing with his hair, his image reflected in a pool of water — but it has some pretty modern dimensions. In the forest of billboards in Times Square, the one with a camera that captures the people looking at the billboard always draws a big crowd.

Selfies are hardly new, but the incremental improvement in technology of putting a phone on a stick — a curiously analog fix that Time magazine listed as one of the best inventions of 2014 along with something called the “high-beta fusion reactor” — suggests that the séance with the self is only going to grow. (Selfie sticks are often used to shoot from above, which any self-respecting selfie auteur will tell you is the most flattering angle.)

There are now vast, automated networks to harvest all that narcissism, along with lots of personal data, creating extensive troves of user-generated content. The tendency to listen to the holy music of the self is reflected in the abundance of messaging and self-publishing services — Vine, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, Apple’s new voice messaging and the rest — all of which pose a profound challenge for media companies. Most media outfits are in the business of one-to-many, creating single pieces of text, images or audio meant to be shared by the masses.

But most sharing does not involve traditional media companies. Consumers are increasingly glued to their Facebook feeds as a source of information about not just their friends but the broader world as well. And with the explosive growth of Snapchat, the fastest-growing social app of the last year, much of the sharing that takes place involves one-to-one images that come and go in 10 seconds or less. Getting a media message — a television show, a magazine, a website, not to mention the ads that pay for most of it — into the intimate space between consumers and a torrent of information about themselves is only going to be more difficult.

I’ve been around since before there was a consumer Internet, but my frame of reference is as neither a Luddite nor a curmudgeon. I didn’t end up with over half a million followers on social media — Twitter and Facebookcombined — by posting only about broadband regulations and cable deals. (Not all self-flattering portraits are rendered in photos. You see what I did there, right?) The enhanced ability to communicate and share in the current age has many tangible benefits.

My wife travels a great deal, sometimes to perilous regions, and WhatsApp’s global reach gives us a stable way of staying in touch. Over the holidays, our family shared endless photos, emoticons and inside jokes in group messages that were very much a part of Christmas. Not that long ago, we might have spent the time gathered around watching “Elf,” but this year, we were brought together by the here and now, the familiar, the intimate and personal. We didn’t need a traditional media company to help us create a shared experience.

Many younger consumers have become mini-media companies themselves, madly distributing their own content on Vine, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. It’s tough to get their attention on media created for the masses when they are so busy producing their own. And while the addiction to self is not restricted to millennials — boomers bow to no one in terms of narcissism — there are now easy-to-use platforms that amplify that self-reflecting impulse.

While legacy media companies still make products meant to be studied and savored over varying lengths of time — the movie “Boyhood,” The Atlantic magazine, the novel “The Goldfinch” — much of the content that individuals produce is ephemeral. Whatever bit of content is in front of someone — text messages, Facebook posts, tweets — is quickly replaced by more and different. For Snapchat, the fact that photos and videos disappear almost immediately is not a flaw, it’s a feature. Users can send content into the world with little fear of creating a trail of digital breadcrumbs that advertisers, parents or potential employers could follow. Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame has been replaced by less than 15 seconds on Snapchat.

Facebook, which is a weave of news encompassing both the self and the world, has become, for many, a de facto operating system on the web. And many of the people who aren’t busy on Facebook are up for grabs on the web but locked up on various messaging apps. What used to be called the audience is disappearing into apps, messaging and user-generated content. Media companies in search of significant traffic have to find a way into that stream.

“The majority of time that people are spending online is on Facebook,” said Anthony De Rosa, editor in chief of Circa, a mobile news start-up. “You have to find a way to break through or tap into all that narcissism. We are way too into ourselves.”

Facebook may be dominant, but Snapchat is growing much faster, over 55 percent in the last six months, whose younger-skewing audience tells you where things might be headed. Selfies are the dominant métier of Snapchat, an art form so addictive that New York State passed a law, to take effect in February, that outlaws self-portraits with tigers and lions, one trend that would seem, um, ill-advised.

Later on New Year’s Eve, along with more than 10 million others, I settled in with friends to watch the ball drop as Ryan Seacrest hosted the countdown on ABC. Aside from Taylor Swift, the big star of the evening was Hearst Magazines, which distributed pink top hats and balloons branded with the logos of Cosmopolitan magazine and CoverGirl cosmetics. Clearly, live broadcast television events still draw a crowd, and Cosmopolitan’s name was everywhere you looked, so in that sense, the old order had been restored.

Then again, Snapchat created its own New Year’s Eve event as part of its Stories feature, a collection of user-provided photos and video from celebrations around the world, including Times Square. All of it was captured with user consent, then disappeared 24 hours later.

Regardless of whether I looked in on television and or on the chat version of the event, I saw lots of images of happy if chilly people — most of whom were busy taking selfies to commemorate the moment.

Source

10 tips for marketers using social media to increase user engagement.

09:36 brand , customers , engagement , facebook , marketing , social media campaign , social media marketing , vine , vlogging

Brands should not use platforms such as Facebook to broadcast their marketing message. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Graeme Robertson

Social media is about people

Anna Lawlor, journalist, content creator and co-director, Social i Media

It’s not just about using new platforms and tools for the sake of it, I think it’s important to remember how crucial the old fashioned relationship and business communications are. Relationship capital...should be at the heart of any brand’s social media activity. Ultimately, social is about people. I wonder whether social technologies are increasingly separating us from this human touch whereas social technologies should be used as complementary/value-added facilitators.

Focus on your audience, not platform

Sam Haseltine, solution consultant, Adobe

Your marketable audience changes far less frequently than social platforms. Focus on them and where they’re at. Tumblr is by no means a new platform, but if that’s where your audience are moving to, you should be there. But validate it first.

Don’t use social media as a broadcast tool

Anna Lawlor, journalist, content creator and co-director, Social i Media

I think too many marketers have simply shifted their traditional approaches onto the social media platform, which has made it too much of a broadcast mechanism. The more successful brands use social to actually talk with (ie engage) their social connections. This shows the extent to which social media marketing, as a business function, needs to mature.

Let’s rethink how we use social media to reach customers

Tim Grimes, social media manager, Defected Records

I think the rise [of ad-free services] has been a welcome wake-up call for a lot of marketers to rethink how us brands use social networks to reach customers. We need to take a step back from the relentless quest for followers, clicks, and mentions, and instead think about why brands got involved in social media in the first place.

Commercial campaigns can damage the reputation of Vloggers

Tom Goodwin, CEO and founder, Tomorrow Group

Well, first of all, like so many modern uses of old fashioned techniques, we can’t really quantify in any real terms how valuable these tie ups are. Shares, likes, upvotes are not reported in company annual reports. Our collective gut feel is that like outreach programmes before and in other media, these are wonderful partnerships, but they do have to be done properly. It’s easy to damage the reputation of the Vlogger and the Viner by being too commercial, too quickly, it’s easy to waste time on things that affect remarkably few people.

Source

At the end of the day we need to focus on the goal of a campaign and then select the right tool. Sometimes this is Vine or Vlogging, but not every time. We need to stop using things because they are new, but use them because they are right.

Partnerships between Vloggers and brands may dry up

James Whatley, social media director, Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, London

Last summer, after the Channel 4 Dispatches programme ran an exposé on celebrities endorsing products on social media you couldn’t get a celebrity to tweet something for you for love nor money (trust me, I tried). Given the recent (and long overdue) clampdown on vloggers publishing videos without any kind of disclaimer, I would expect that that these might dry up very quickly. We’ll see.

Brands should use open data to improve the user experience

Uriel Alvarado, chief marketing and public relations officer, Saxo Capital Markets

I personally would like the social web to become more palatable. I believe that brands are there to create value for the users. If users are already sharing information openly, the better brands can understand and improve our experiences and needs based on this information, the more palatable advertising can become. That is a key role that programmatic marketing has to play to change user experiences from unwanted advertising to value adding relationships.

Experiment with interest based networks

Sam Haseltine, solution consultant, Adobe

Interest based networks are only going to become more important for brands (especially smaller ones). The way I see it, we all juggle multiple different personas across social. Same person, different hat. Brands, no matter how large or small, need to be in the environment and speak in the language of their customers...wherever that may be.

Watch out for scale

Tom Goodwin, CEO and founder, Tomorrow Group

I think one thing everyone needs to watch out for is scale. We tend to always consider social media to be free and therefore we don’t worry too much about the effort per engagement since the media is without cost. But the reality is that even on Facebook, hard work to make great content still doesn’t get shared much. So we need to be cautious about how much effort to pursue to track down ever smaller audiences.

Remember the importance of physical meetings

Uriel Alvarado, chief marketing and public relations officer, Saxo Capital Markets

It is important that brands do keep their doors open by hosting events and facilitating real face-to-face interaction. But the priority at the moment is to establish a digital relationship with their audience asap. As users get increasingly bombarded with content and apps overload, the window of possibility for brands to reach their audiences will be diminishing and become quite competitive. Brands need to start building strong lasting digital relationships now. The face-to-face aspect does accelerate loyalty. So my advice is for brand managers to both interact digitally and go out of the office and meet key influencers for coffee.

Source

Social media speak to power

16:30 # , china , facebook , Ferguson , government demonstrators , hashtags , hong kong , instagram , mexico , Michael Brown , news , ray rice , slacktivism , social media , st louis rams , twitter , vine , wechat , whatsapp

On Kings Highway in Cherry Hill, Unitarian Universalist Church members stand in solidarity with Ferguson residents protesting the grand jury finding in Michael Brown's death. (TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer)

'Nothing should be normal or everyday about accepting all this," says Ferguson, Mo., Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes. "Social media has helped ensure the images and agony stay fresh in people's minds."

Ferguson stays fresh. On Sunday, members of the St. Louis Rams did a pregame salute in protest of what they saw as police violence in the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown. That angered the St. Louis Police Association, which called on the National Football League to punish the players. The league declined.

On Monday, demonstrations around the nation - including at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania - organized around the #HandsUpWalkout hashtag. Protesters left schools or workplaces in solidarity with Brown, at the time of day of his shooting, 12:01 p.m. Central time, or 1:01 p.m. Eastern time. Rallies briefly clogged Market Street near the universities. T. Stokes of Philadelphia tweeted: "You know it's real when there's a police helicopter flying above your protest."

The year 2014 has been the year of social media as social protest. Again and again, people have used Twitter hashtags, Facebook posts, Vine videos, Instagram photos, and messages on WhatsApp, WeChat, and many other media to support and organize rallies, often on behalf of marginalized or mistreated groups. Racial injustice has been the issue in Jacksonville, Fla., (in the Michael Dunn trial) and Ferguson. It was gender-related violence in the Ray Rice controversy and the Isla Vista, Calif., shootings.

Worldwide, Muslims resurrected the venerable #NotInMyName hashtag to protest Islamist extremism. Demonstrators in Mexico and China use social media to organize and campaign. And all over the world, video game players joined in the #GamerGate controversy.

So, no question, this is happening. But bigger questions loom.

Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology, social work, and criminal justice department at La Salle University, asks: "What kind of legs do social media protests have? Do they change anything? Or is it all just 'slacktivism,' the lazy, next-to-useless click-and-take-credit social in-activism of the 2010s? No large-scale studies as yet can answer that question."

It's worth noting, though, that the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed slacktivism into its pages this year. It's a thing.

It's certainly a thing in China and Mexico, with massive, long-term protests honed and organized by social media.
The "Umbrella Movement" in Hong Kong was fanned by a viral image of a man waving off tear gas with his umbrella during a Sept. 29 protest, largely of students, against mainland control over local elections. "It wouldn't have had that name without social media," says James Carter, professor of history at St. Joseph's University. Within days, a statue of "Umbrella Man" had gone up as a symbol of protest. Carter says that hashtags such as #umhk "helped unify diverse protest groups under this one" - pun intended - "umbrella term." The protest is now into December, with government troops closing public squares and arresting demonstrators.

In 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Carter recalls, "it was the 'cutting-edge' fax machine that got the story to the outside world. That's dwarfed by the number of ways you can do that now. The government knows the world is watching." Authorities tried to throttle Twitter and the "Chinese Facebook," Weibo, but "the protesters are media-savvy, having grown up with social media and smartphones," Carter says. They did ends-around on censorship, turning to one-to-one media such as WhatsApp and WeChat to warn of crackdowns, organize meetings, and get out the story.

In Spanish, the phrase ya me cansé means "I've had enough" or "I'm tired of this now." In the wake of the horrible Sept. 26 disappearance of 43 students during a demonstration in Iguala, Mexico, allegations arose that the town's mayor was in league with local narco-terrorists. The students have not been found, and national outrage exploded, over both their disappearance and the larger issue of the paralyzing, savage lawlessness in Mexico.
"These larger issues are systemic in Mexico," says Mark Lashley, professor of communication, who studies social media at La Salle University. "It's fascinating to see its expression on social media there."

After a long and bitter news conference on Nov. 7, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said, "Ya me cansé" and tried to leave. Those words soon were shoved down his throat via the Twitter hashtag #yamecanse. According to tracking site Topsey, it was used more than 3.6 million times in November. "That phrase," Lashley says, "was tailor-made for a social-media backlash. This is a substantial movement poised to continue, and you're seeing lots of creative uses of the hashtag, both in the demonstrations themselves" - in which protestors sometimes lie down and pretend to sleep or be tired - and in YouTube videos and editorial cartoons, taking government down a notch and allowing social media to work as the people's voice.

The door of the National Palace on the Zócalo in Mexico City was set ablaze. On Nov. 20, tens of thousands marched down the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City and gathered in the Zócalo. Sympathy protests arose in New York; Geneva, Switzerland; and Cologne, Germany.

So - do such media-driven protests "work"? It can be very hard to tell. In Jacksonville, Michael Dunn, who fired a gun into a van and killed a black man, was sentenced to life without parole on Oct. 17. In Ferguson, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was not indicted, but he now says he is leaving the police force. On Monday, the White House published a report and guidelines on "Strengthening Community Policing." On the other hand, the Chinese protest seems as if it's being scuttled. And there have been arrests in Mexico - but not of those being accused.

So the question remains: When is social-media protest just slacktivism, and when is it something more? And how do we know when it's working?

Source

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites | November 2014

19:32 ask.fm , classmates , facebook , flickr , google+ , instagram , linkedin , meetme , meetup , pinterest , popular , social media , social media news , tagged , tumblr , twitter , vine , vk

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites | November 2014

Here are the top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites as derived from our eBizMBA Rank which is a continually updated average of each website's Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast."*#*" Denotes an estimate for sites with limited data.