Tag Archives: Twitter

When You’re Looking Like That

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October 21, 2011

 The internet and social media have allowed people to define the terms on which they interact with the media they consume. For example, The X Factor may be seeing a drop in viewer numbers but this doesn’t stop fans from tweeting about the contestants or the judges. The latest figures show that 59 per cent of 16-23 year olds use social networking sites to discuss their preferred television programmes with their online friends. What does this have to do with us? Well recently 52 per cent of people have admitted to shopping online whilst watching television. What’s Hot decided that it was about time we had a look at how consumers are interacting with TV and digital simultaneously.

 The act of watching television whilst using another screen, whether that be laptops, tablets or smartphones, is known in the industry as ‘dual-screening’. Dual-screening isn’t particularly new, but only an astonishingly small handful of companies have used it to their advantage. Of course it is by no means unusual to see a television programme ‘#hashtagging’ to encourage Twitter interaction from their followers. However very few have embraced dual-screening for its marketing potential, perhaps the logistics of co-ordinating marketing on two devices limiting what they feel they can do.

 One company to attempt to incorporate dual-screening is Honda. After its highly successful ‘Grrr’ campaign, Honda decided to create something that could interact with its television advertisement. Their creation was a mobile app which could be ‘swiped’ at the television whilst the advertisement was being played. The application would recognise the soundtrack and automatically download a character from the advertisement, with a total of six available. This encouraged the consumer to actually interact with the advert, anticipating the next time it will be screened in order to download their next character.

Dual-screening may not be such good news for the television industry. Even for the most tech-savvy user it is practically impossible to be concentrating on the television content whilst discussing it on social platforms. Furthermore if consumers choose to use their second screen to research the brand or programme, whilst having it on their television, they are automatically transferring their concentration into the hands of the digital world. The television advertisement will have little chance to influence the user after they turn their eyes to a search engine or social network.

We are yet to see the direction dual-screening will take in regards to advertising potential. What is certain is that advertisers can no longer take for granted the effectiveness of any single media type.

 Consumers are communicating their likes and dislikes over many different levels, and advertisers need to keep an eye on it.

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Material Girl

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September 23, 2011

London Fashion Week has never been so popular. Increasing numbers of brands, retailers, media, and consumers are getting involved, resulting in many more opportunities for the advertiser. But with all this additional activity, how are brands ensuring they stand out from the crowd?

This year saw more social opportunities than ever before. Burberry took the exceptional lead of launching its collection on Twitter – posting photos of each look, live, backstage – moments before the model stepped onto the catwalk. Burberry quickly hit no.2 on the global trending charts and broke their personal mentions-per-minute record. With social media platforms working to increase their advertising products, who knows what opportunities this kind of activity could generate next year. As well as their massive online presence, Burberry perfectly dovetailed this activity with the more traditional advertising channels to ensure they achieved outstanding cut-through throughout the whole week.

Traditional media, more than ever, are embracing new media platforms, offering advertisers increasing ways of being seen – and heard. Publications such as The Sunday Times Style, Grazia and Stylist were blogging, using social networking sites and broadcasting enormous amounts of content through their own sites. Grazia also provided more direct opportunities by distributing their magazines in branded tote bags to all the London Fashion Week VIPs – a great way of getting a brand directly into the hands of some of the most important people in the fashion industry. Nails Inc lead the way on this by partnering with Grazia to provide a sample in each bag. Like Grazia, the Metro were also handing out copies of their special edition issue, but they aimed their distribution at the masses – with teams giving copies away on the streets of central London.

Alongside embracing the new media platforms, newspapers and magazine continued to focus energies into their traditional London Fashion Week activity. Nearly all fashion titles and supplements increased the size of their publications and printed premium editions. This year Stylist doubled the size of their magazine and Grazia ran their largest ever issue – coming in at 300 pages – with 142 of those for advertising. Many titles used the time, both during and either side of London Fashion Week to run their fashion specials. The Sunday Times Style magazine run their special at the end of August – weeks ahead of the event – and then have over a month of fashion specials.

Burberry recently stated they are as much a media-content company as a design company. Where Burberry tread, others are sure to follow. With more content, there will be even greater opportunities for advertisers to access the fashion consumer. The trick will be to cut the wheat from the chaff and to connect and exploit these opportunities in the most creative and effective way.

(Photo above from the Burberry tweets of its Prorsum S/S 2012 collection – during London Fashion Week)

 

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HEARTBREAK HOTEL

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August 19, 2011

 

Being a traditional media owner is a tough game. Anyone who doubts this should take a look at the latest financial results from Trinity Mirror, owner of Mirror Group Newspapers and over 150 local newspaper titles including Birmingham Mail and Manchester Evening News.

A 65% drop in pre-tax profits for the first half of 2011, whatever the reason, is a disastrous result and has impacted heavily on the company’s value. Trinity’s market capitalisation is now lower than the value for which it sold the Racing Post in October 2007.

There is no doubt the recent closure of the News of the World gave Trinity’s national Sunday titles (Sunday Mirror and People) a welcome boost. But here at What’s Hot we still think this will only have a modest long term impact as the Sunday market adjusts to the new environment. In fact, early indications already suggest the boost to circulation following the closure of the NOTW (and the accompanying marketing support to the Mirror titles) is beginning to wane.

Trinity Mirror is in a difficult place. There seems no end in sight to the increase in the price of core commodities needed for printing (paper and newsprint) or the big declines in circulation and advertising.

Sadly its plans to move into the digital space are still not fully formed and don’t really give any indication of how Trinity intend to turn things around. The Mirror’s flagship site is not yet fully functional – Google stats suggests unique visitors are at best flat year-on-year. And while the Mirror Football and 3AM websites are good examples of what an old fashioned content provider can do when it puts its mind to it; these sites are relative minnows and cannot ever hope to make up for the losses at the main titles. And that’s before we even factor in the impact of the social media phenomenon created by Facebook and Twitter.

Trinity’s problems have been a long time in the making; its traditional readership base has been declining for many years and it’s hardly new news that local newspapers have been hit hard by a move towards digital classifieds. At the moment we can’t see any way back for Trinity. Another round of cost cutting might keep investors happy but it’s definitely not the answer to a secure long-term future.

The shame of it is that the troubles at Trinity are not unique. Trinity just happens to be the only public company which publishes its financial performance.

It’s going to take a significant re-engineering of Trinity’s business model and some ‘seat of the pants’ investment in new products if the company is to survive this latest and probably greatest of challenges.

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Reach Out

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June 22, 2011

Klout is the latest social media rating tool. It scores over 75 million people on their social reach using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn data to give you a rating from one to one hundred. Or one to Justin Bieber, as it currently stands.

It looks to be a popular metric, and has been mentioned in Forbes, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal and more. On Twitter, Klout’s influence score is based on users’ ability to drive action through tweets and retweets. On Facebook, it examines how conversations and content generate interest and engagement via likes, comments and more. For LinkedIn, Klout analyses who users are influencing, how they’re influencing them and how much influence they have. Klout places a heavy emphasis on quality not quantity – so collecting connections won’t necessarily increase a user’s score.

Klout’s eventual aim is to be the stock measure of online influence and it’s making good progress. It combines the major social platforms and, perhaps more importantly, champions integration of its tool into other reporting systems. For example, Postling has partnered with Klout to allow business owners to get alerts when they have influential new followers. ReviewPro, a social media management provider for the hotel sector has integrated Klout scores into its product to help hoteliers interact with their guests. Social dashboards Hootsuite and Xobni are also on board.

Clearly there is a saturation of data on social media networks. Klout’s advantage to businesses is in its ability to quickly identify who is behind comments, assess the level of user influence and determine the most appropriate response. Prior to Klout the only way of measuring social influence was through friends, followers and fans. Nothing actually measured how social a person or brand really was and how well they were engaging with their audience or leading on various topics.

Experimental brands and businesses are testing out programs that provide special perks to social network users with high Klout scores. Brands like Disney, Audi, Hewlett Packard, and Universal Pictures have already been involved. Klout Perks are exclusive offers or experiences, given as a result of a users Klout. Perks allow brands to connect with influencers in their area of expertise. For example, Audi invited top design, technology and luxury influencers to test drive their new 2011 Audi A8 at exclusive events.

Klout’s latest addition, ‘+K’, allows those in a users’ social networks to effect their score on a specific topic of influence. The +K system puts a +K button next to all users’ topics and clicks tell the system that the user has recently influenced the clicker in this topic.

Klout does have its detractors. You don’t have to look far to find people slamming ‘another’ social media influence metric. For individuals that are getting good information from their networks, generating interesting content, having good discussions with people, making new connections and can find who they need to find and can be found, a score doesn’t really matter. But for brands who need to quickly and efficiently find influential users Klout looks to be a fantastic tool.
Read more

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A Prettier Twitter

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October 22, 2010

Last month Twitter announced that it was to roll out a new site design over the coming weeks. That time has now arrived and it brings many new features to benefit users and advertisers.
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Twitter now has 2 panes. The right pane is equal size to the left, giving exposure to Trends, Suggestions for you, followings & followers. The right-hand pane also doubles as a multimedia panel: click on a picture or video link in a tweet and, rather than being bumped off Twitter.com and taken to a third-party site as before, images & video will automatically be displayed in the multimedia preview pane. Having new partners on board, such as Youtube, has also meant that uploading and sharing video content is much easier than before.
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Users can also click on tweets to reveal more related content on the right-hand panel, and clicking on the user’s Twitter name reveals a mini profile; all without leaving Twitter, or the current page.
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So how does this benefit Twitter and advertisers? Firstly, the new site functionality means that a lot more users will access twitter from the webpage and not from third party applications such as Tweetdeck. Although twitter.com is has the largest single traffic source out of all products, collectively the third party applications account for 75% of twitter usage. By clawing the users back to the site, this will give advertisers access to more members to target.
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Only this year has Twitter been testing different advertising formats. Like Facebook, Twitter has decided to move away from typical banner advertising and more towards integrated, less intrusive formats. Earlybird was a twitter account that promoted offers and news/launches paid for by advertisers, this was only around for 3months in the US before being abandoned. Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts are active – but predominately used by US advertisers, as America accounts for 34% of the total 106million twitter accounts worldwide

The UK has still relatively minor numbers in comparison, making up 6% of all Twitter accounts (roughly 6.3million users), and if we consider the 41% of twitter accounts that have never been tweeted from active members would look more like 3.7million (UK). Although smaller in membership to Facebook, Twitter’s awareness is near enough the same (87%, 88% respectively).
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In summary, Twitter seems to be adopting the non-traditional digital formats like its social platform buddy Facebook.  Although less developed at the moment and still very US-centric, however, it will only be a short time before Twitter formats are on media schedules.  Let’s hope that Twitter continue to improve their web functionality to drive more users to the website rather than arguably better 3rd party apps.

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