“2014 is here and I am going to make a difference!” How many people you know actually DID something? Brands are all over the place showcasing their new products and services in the fanciest way possible! And screaming out how they are going to be bigger (and better) this year. Amidst the entire craze, partying right from Christmas into the New Year, how many brands have seen sticking to those resolutions?
How much of the content you put up throughout 2013 was planned strategically? (Think!)
The beginning of a new 12-month cycle is the perfect time to turn over a new leaf. Wasn’t that the whole idea behind having made resolutions? A New Year not only calls for a desk calendar change but a change in your brand’s content calendar too! And unfortunately, the general store near you doesn’t have it. So, here are a few things that you could consider while creating unique content for that calendar of yours (if you haven’t been awesome enough to have one already!):
The Need For A Handful Of Topics. If you have been a logaholic, you’ll know exactly what kind of content your targeted audience relates to. So why not decide on a few topics beforehand rather than rushing into things and ending up posting half the things that are going to get ignored? As a content creator, you are better off when it isn\’t abstract.
Get A Makeover Every Month. No, it doesn\’t cost as much as yours does. All you need to do is change the way you look on various social platforms. Go from festive to cheery to more cheery! Plan monthly themes so that you don’t have to deal with an “I don’t have anything to wear” situation later.
Start A Conversation. Half your customers complain of your brand not having considered their suggestions. Ask questions and become the listener they want you to be, and act accordingly. It’s time to make them feel important again.
Capture Your Content. Yes, you heard me right. Everyone evades text, and the solution to that is capturing your content – use infographics to send out the same message your text would have. It is far easier on the brain to comprehend.
More infographics for everyone!
Not Just A Sale, An Experience. People live in moments and your product shouldn’t just up your sales graph, but help create some! Connect with customers on all platforms and for a change, think of their experience rather than your brands. Give your customers an experience that they would enjoy.
Share Values. People adore brands that share their values – transparency about sourcing, local community giving and their customer values. I am not saying your brand doesn\’t have sophisticated value initiatives in place, but are they open for the others to see?
Work Together. Letting your customers in on behind the scenes product development processes, is one of the greatest opportunities a brand can get. The surprising part of this? Nine out of ten people want to be involved. So, the next time you compare your product performance against your competitors, involve them as well. Have contest and quizzes scheduled on social platforms. It not just lets you analyze customer engagement, but makes your customers feel involved too.
And while you’re at it, don’t forget to..
Tell Your Story. The on-going gossip that you miss out on is usually people’s take on how your brand came up. Instead of make believe stories doing rounds, give away your story. A brand’s heritage is one of the most powerful predictors in their success.
Suit up marketers! 2014 is going to be LEGEN – wait for it – DARY!
Maintaining content on all social platforms has been a never ending task for media marketers. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Google+ – the content just has to be relevant and \’super\’ unique at all times! Considering the hushed up scenario of you running from pillar to post to have your content promoted on all platforms, you wish for a platform where you could simply collect all your brand’s content and promote it with one swish.
Looks like Aaron Fessler heard your unsaid plea! Welcome your very own social hub – TwineSocial.
A platform that started as an in-house curation tool for his car-driving experience company, works by pulling in content from social media – using @usernames, hashtags, location and more information, if you want want to broaden your content horizon.
All Your Media Content On One Platform – TwineSocial.
There are times when you see your customers appreciate your brand and share your products in their circle. Every time you please your customer, you create a new success story that is unique. And that success story deserves being in the limelight. But how do you go about showing \’that\’ conversation that just upped your brand image, to the world over? You simply pull it on to one display board – one platform – your brand’s site.
As difficult as the idea may sound, the launch of TwineSocial is great news for the media marketers. This platform is certainly alluring to all those brands that wish to show their potential customers the conversations taking place around them. Yes, it’s time to strut your stuff!
TwineSocial not just collects all your social media content and arranges it in a magnificent and dynamic view, it also provides you with all the tools you need to grow and engage your social audience (isn\’t that the whole idea of social media marketing?).
For those of you who are worried about the set up of TwineSocial, relax! Setting up this platform is a cakewalk. Offering super user-friendly interface (regardless of how computer-literate you are), it offers highly customizable templates with CSS or Adobe Typekit (for the more experienced).
And once you are done deciding the look of your social hub, all you need to do is paste two lines of code onto your website. This curates content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and Vine, and displays it on your brand’s site or blog in real-time.
If I was in your place right now, the only worry left would have been – Does that make me share ALL my content?\” Well, let me take this off your head and let your breathe easy. The platform gives you complete control over what shows up on your site, with customizable filtering options. The content of course, depends entirely on you and your fans!
If you want to catch this platform in action, visit Aaron Fessler’s company website, World Class Driving.
TwineSocial In Action On Aaron Fessler’s Site.
Not satisfied yet? I’ll give you another reason to check this platform out – No Hashtag Hijack! Since that got your attention back, this platform lets you do some serious scrutinizing of content before it goes live on your site to avoid panicked damage control later when you see an increased bounce-off rate.
The takeaway of this article? Give TwineSocial a chance to un twine your media marketing and twine all your content.
When a brand sticks to only promotional ads, they get scrutinized for not being entertaining enough. With fidgety users as me, these promotional ads suffer from the ‘skip ad’ syndrome. All of us have skipped one ad or the other, haven’t we? (Admit it, I did too!) It’s what catches the eye that we wait long enough to buffer and the marketers seem to have gotten the point.
An advertisement is considered great if it nudges the viewer to buy. But when the viewers are hooked on to story boards, it’s time to do a retake on the marketing strategy. The best examples in 2013 saw marketers pull up their sleeves and dive into the vast arena of ‘storytelling.’ And yes, they took a more casual approach, learning from what works in movies and on TV. Not only did they come up with mind boggling entertainment, but a drastic change in their sales graph. Despite the many distractions today for the consumers, turns out that there is always time for an exciting tale. So clearly, the trick worked!
The Year Of Storytelling!
Here are some of 2013’s promotional ads that made you skip the ‘skip’:
THE ‘EPIC SPLIT’: VOLVO FEAT JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME
Volvo Trucks have always been the top entertainers, coming up with surprisingly captivating stunts (like the one in which the hamster gets to drive the mean machine). This time entertainment went a step further, collaborating with Jean-Claude Van Damme and presenting his signature split on two moving trucks. Thanks to JCVD the video went viral and I am sure, each one of us has seen it!
The stunt is believed to have benefited Volvo’s more traditional car division, making it cooler among the younger generation who may have never considered this brand before.
CHIPOTLE\’S FABLE TO GOOD HEALTH
Chipotle’s clever attack on processed food with ‘The Scarecrow’, developed by CAA Marketing, made the consumers stop and ponder about what they are eating. The short animated story, app-based game and the cover of ‘Pure Imagination’ by Fiona Apple has not just reached out to adults, but kids as well with its easy to relate narration. And guess the cascading effect of the same – “Promotion of their own products”.
Dove came up with a series of documentaries, wherein it uses a sketch artist to come up with sketches of the selected few without ‘seeing’ them. The idea of it all was to bring forward the fact how women saw themselves and how they were perceived by others. The comparison of the two sketches not just resulted in a life changing experience for the subjects, but the viewers as well. The improvement they brought about in their customer’s self-image boosted the company’s image in the market as well.
ANIMATION RIDING THE FLIGHT BIRDS
Animation. Admit it; you have gone for almost all those that were showcased in your nearby theater! So, Airlines got a little more creative in how they work with Hollywood to market movies to them. American Airlines, in its attempt to give their in-flight entertainment a makeover, backed the release of Disney’s “Planes”, featuring an animated version of its new jets. And if you thought they were the only ones, you are wrong and must have clearly missed out some other awesome promotions! Air New Zealand plastered the dragon Smaug on the side of its planes, to promote “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” and Delta Airlines helped promote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
VIRGIN AMERICA’S DANCE TO SAFETY
Virgin America has established a fun profile for itself over the years when it comes to airlines with its in-flight entertainment options. But an established profile hasn\’t stopped them from taking ‘fun’ a step further. Together with Virgin Produced, the company has launched the “VX Safety Dance,” a new safety video that passengers will ‘watch for sure’ and not sleep through. The video features dancers performing all the in-flight safety instructions – from how to put a seat belt to what to do in case of an emergency landing. The energetic video is sure as hell going to make other carriers rethink the way they present their safety procedures to passengers.
Are you someone who suffers from a News Feed filled with Bitstrips? You might just have to deal with another craze – Flipagram is set to rule Facebook! The latest to top charts in the App Store, it is easily available to iPhone and Android users for FREE.
This isn’t just another form of Instagram. Flipagram enables you to make short “video stories” – image slideshows with background music of your choice. The video lengths can vary from anything between 15 to 30 seconds and you can pull in photos from all possible platforms. Talk about reel life becoming more real.
And if creating your very own musical saga was not enough, the app lets you integrate your social profiles to share your creation (and go ‘viral’ maybe?). In a generation that is so obsessed with taking pictures of almost everything they come across, selfies topping the list; it isn’t hard to understand why this app is such a hit!
Here\’s a quick look at how Flipagram was utilized by a restaurant:
Just a quick walk through how to go about creating an authentic clip:
Log in to the app and go to the main menu, select pictures you wish to make a video of. The app lets you choose from pictures on Facebook, Instagram and of course, your phone.
The next step lets you crop, move and scale to size the pictures you have selected. Then, it lets you decide the order you want to see the pictures in (slideshow).
Once you are through with creating the slideshow, the next step lets you choose the length of your video – 15 to 30 seconds. Here, you also get to add a catchy title and a watermark to claim your territory (I mean, video).
The next screen lets you choose background music and adjust timing. Music can either come from your library or Flipagram’s library.
Features Of Flipagram.
And, voila! You are done.
As easy as may this sound, marketers are going to have to work a tad more to establish their brands on this platform. Considering storytelling is currently trending the marketing domain, the best use of this platform lies in creating musical sagas just like its users.
A brand cannot just showcase their products and have ‘I love shopping’ running in the background to nudge their viewers to buy. That is going to seem cliché.
So, don’t flip out over Flipagram and take some of these ideas into account while marketing your brand on it:
Premier your product. Capture behind the scenes moments of your product manufacture and add custom music to make a perfect free of charge social media commercial.
Highlights in the Limelight. Compile moments from trade shows, conferences and other events to establish your brand image (It isn’t always about marketing products).
Strut Your Stuff (Testimonials). Whenever you please a client, you create a unique success story and it deserves the limelight.
Peek-a-boo. Everyone loves an inside story. Gossiping is second nature to all and word of mouth is exactly what you need! (FYI: I don’t mean dragging down other company’s image) Create short documentaries or a series of short videos with photos of your staff, fan following and how you manage to please them ‘always.’
Reward Loyalism. Don’t just always focus on selling your products; you can always have some give away contests once in a while to keep your audience engaged.
Rumor or not, but the tweeting bird seems to be spreading the news of a possible edit feature that Twitter is planning to roll out very soon; whether this ‘word’ has some base or not, no one knows. But media blogger, Matthew Keys says that according to his sources, the feature would look something like this:
“Once a user publishes a tweet, an ‘edit’ feature will be present for a limited amount of time [Twitter is still currently working out the length of time the feature would be available]. The feature would allow a user to make ‘slight changes’ to the contents of a tweet, such as removing a word, correcting a typo or adding one or two additional words.”
Apparently just one edit per tweet will be permitted. Because Twitter has no patience for people who make mistakes more than once. Once the edit is made, it would be immediately visible on that user’s Twitter feed. The edit will also show up on the feed of anyone who republished the tweet using Twitter’s built-in ‘retweet’ feature.
Twitter to roll out their ‘edit’ feature soon!
(The features are a no-brainer; but really good for some face saving!)
All good but what if a tweet goes viral and then the tweeter decides to edit the tweet entirely? “Twitter doesn’t want a user to post a news story, accumulate a large amount of retweets, and then change the tweet to display a promotion or advertisement,” writes Keys. To support this news, there is also word that Twitter is working on a fancy algorithm to detect whether or not the intention of the original tweet is changed. So probably, the edit feature is going to come with a cap on the editing time as well as the number of words that can be altered.
But cap or no cap, this certainly is good news for Social Media Marketers; considering that in the hustle of keeping up their brand images on various social platforms, the chances of misspelled words, unnecessary commas, wrong people being quoted, wrong links being posted, etc have been very high. According to the old policy, tweets were not to be deleted; any correction that had to be made, called for publishing another tweet with reference to the previous one. We have all seen certain publications/ brands sending out tweets with a ‘*’ indicating some correction or the other. (How embarrassing!)
But then again, as it is rightly said, “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything”; and surely all the Social Media Professionals have their hands full – possibly overflowing.
This editing tool would allow such conscientious users to correct their mistakes, which would improve the overall Twitter experience, and also the brands marketing strategy. Tweets will now reach out to the right people, send out the right message, link to the right page and of course, not make the brand sound like a 5 year old making spelling mistakes. They have a reputation to maintain!
Here are some initial shots in the dark we’re going to take about what will be permitted in the edit feature:
Correction of spelling mistakes
Addition of a forgotten preposition (happens a lot, you know it!)
Capitalizing certain letters
Adding in punctuation (On Twitter?! Yes.)
Correction in the spelling mistake of a hashtag (Probably not the entire one, because the tone of the message could change based on the hashtag.)
What probably won’t be allowed, is:
Editing the image used in the tweet
Altering the link in the tweet
As mentioned, changing the entire message of the tweet
For some social media managers and even users, this change couldn’t come sooner. For those of us who are of course a little careful, whatevs man.
