This week's #SocialSkim is Vine-rich and Twitter-friendly. Find out how Twitter's getting into e-commerce and why Vine may unseat Instagram as the go-to app for live events. You'll learn how best to use Vine for campaigning, how to maximize your content marketing with Pinterest's Secret Boards, and what elements leaders need to create a truly social business. Skim for social transcendence!
Why panic when you can plan? Had a good Valentine's Day? Foursquare launched Dream Date, a subsite that lets users plan the perfect date, from flowers to chocolate to dinner. Its geolocalized data lets you find the perfect hotpots for planning romance. Not the V-Day type? A Dream Hate variant lets you choose what bar to spend the night in.
Guess the Oscar winner. The official poster for the 85th annual Oscars took on a social element when Olly Moss envisioned an Oscar tailored to every film that has won Best Picture. The deliciously playful quality of the image has pushed it viral. Can you guess which film each Oscar represents? We'll give you a hint: the little red-coat Oscar is Schindler's List.
Does your Twitter need a promote-me-up? Publicis Groupe tried attracting more followers to its @PublicisGroupe corporate Twitter page by disseminating this weird video of what people Tweet/talk about at its enormous headquarters. Turn on subtitles to see the "conversations." The video's unexpected fun for the buttoned-up agency, but it would be funner still if @PublicisGroupe's Tweets reflected some of that whimsy.
Tweet to tickle your credit card. Welcome to the Tweconomy. Twitter and AmEx have teamed up to enable AmEx users to buy goods using a special hashtag. To shop on Twitter, sync your American Express card (if compatible) to Twitter. You'll be able to choose select products, like Amazon's Kindle Fire, a Sony Action cam, or the Xbox 360, by Tweeting a certain hashtag. @AmexSync will Tweet back with a confirmation hashtag, after which your card will be charged.
Vine steals the NYFW spotlight... right out of Instagram's shutter. Here's a first: Digital Trends illustrates how much better Vine was for capturing events from New York Fashion Week. Direct punting from Twitter definitely helps: It was easy for fashion lovers to follow new videos on the #VineWalk hashtag. But, more important, it has distinct advantages over Instagram, the previous NYFW darling: It captures models in movement, enriching the shared experience; and the lack of filters puts the fashion, not the photography, in the limelight. All to suggest that Vine may become an obvious promotional darling for events in which capturing movement on the fly—or a great product demo—are critical.
Over the knee pumps, yes, pumps. #nyfw vine.co/v/bnjn9B0dMZ9 — Man Repeller (@ManRepeller) February 7, 2013
Tips on how to Vine it up. We've talked a lot about Vine, which lets you Tweet six-second videos in a loop, but how do you use it? Here are five ways brands can use Vine: handy tips on taking advantage of geolocation, launching contests, and creating product demos.
Six social media skills for leaders. McKinsey Quarterly has produced a chart detailing the six skills leaders need to produce a social infrastructure that favors interaction across boundaries. Each dimension is interdependent. Read the complete article for details on each part of the pie:
Tech buyers: social media-serious. The latest Social Media@Work report finds that over 90% of tech professionals use social media, with a strong preference for LinkedIn (90% of them use it). Two-thirds use information from those channels to make purchasing decisions, meaning B2B marketers need to up their social ante if they want to set themselves apart from the competition. Thankfully, that seems to be the case: Since 2010, B2B marketers have doubled their social media presence.
Brands: hammering in the #hashtags. Remember how, last week, we pointed out that 50% of Super Bowl ads featured a Twitter mention? Most of them took the form of a campaign-custom hashtag. Digiday's Giselle Abramovich writes about brands' latest hashtag strategies, dubbing this "the hashtag era." "Brand-related hashtags were mentioned 300,000 times on Super Bowl Sunday, an increase of 273 percent from last year," she writes.
GE, which uses its #iwanttoinvent hashtag to get people to talk innovation, weighs in: "Hashtags are all about shared conversation, so as a brand you need to put conversation at the heart of any hashtag strategy. We use hashtags either to join in larger conversation or to surface a focused conversation on a topic of passion for @GeneralElectric." Food for thought.
Maximize your marketing with Pinterest Secret Boards. Search Engine People gives us the skinny on an under-used Pinterest resource: Private Boards. Use these Boards for collaborative brainstorming, testing the value of images before taking them live, and creating a complete collection before making it public. You'll look like a pro from the first Pin.
Facebook ads: now with more agency! Facebook's gearing up to buy Microsoft's Atlas ad server, which will enable advertisers and agencies to connect directly to FB to place ads—effectively letting Facebook expose its data to advertisers in a way it can control, without exposing it to third-parties.
The virtues of social business for brands. We'll wrap up this week with some inspiring words from AKQA's new social director, Ron Peterson. He defines social business as a next step for brands using social media as a unified channel, versus a fragmented set of destinations.
Asked what issues face brands seeking to adopt social media, Peterson pokes straight into the window of your soul: thinking differently is by nature very difficult, and working together to break down silos is a big toughy too. The third challenge, though, is thinking about innovation. And it's a growing necessity: Everything is only getting faster, he points out.
