2012 Resolutions We Wish Social Tool Providers Would Make

• Jan 4th, 2012
• Posted by JR Pelkola
• Posted in #2012, Social Tools

Around the office we use social tools whenever possible to help us manage client accounts and bring scale to our programs.  These range from startups to enterprise level software solutions, all providing their own set of strengths.  However, much like a doctor tackling an unknown disease with a cocktail of pills, we’re often forced to use a variety of tools to help us accomplish everything.

We’ve come to grips with the fact that no tool is going to fit perfectly with any program, but there are a few key items we seem to always be searching for.  Most of these items always seem to be on the “road map”, but it seems we’ve been asking about them forever.  We hope some of these tool providers are resolving to solve for these gaps in 2012:

• Real-time Facebook Data – Often, the tool providers aren’t completely to blame.  The fact is, Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to pull data from their system and only their tightest partners have unlimited API calls.  The trouble is there’s a mismatch between who gets the data and who’s good at managing the data.  For massive pages this delay becomes a serious issue.
  
• Collaborative Editorial Tools – Sure, you can draft, schedule, and approve content in most sCRM tools at this point, but that’s far from the elegant editorial experience that we know technology is capable of delivering.  We shouldn’t have to rely on desktop apps to really plan and collaborate on editorial content.  Where are the multiple views? Where is the merging of PR, Marketing, and product calendars?  It’s 2012, can we have an all-up communications overview already?!?!
  
• CRM integration – We know this is a big ask for 2012, but it seems like a few tools are on their way to making this happen.  This is going to take real collaboration between multiple tools.  We want to understand a customer’s complete relationship with a company, not just twitter conversations.  We need to become more sophisticated about how we communicate with customers and that requires a holistic view of all touch points including marketing channels, customer service, and social.

This past year saw the formation of our Social Technology Research team at SCG. The STR is tasked with researching, assessing, and bringing to bear for our clients the best tools and solutions in the social space. As SCG becomes a more integral part of the IPG Mediabrands family, that work will only increase, and the team will contiue their push to be the most-knowledgeable group of industy experts in the social tools space.

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Last Minute Gift-Giving AKA Hooray for Technology!

• Dec 22nd, 2011
• Posted by Vanessa Au
• Posted in Good Ideas, Shopping, Tips & Tricks

It’s that time of the year again. You’ve got a long list of friends and relatives you need to buy gifts for and you’ve left holiday shopping to the last minute. And by “last minute,” I mean you’re too late for overnight shipping and you can’t (or simply refuse to) brave the hordes of other last-minute shoppers at the mall.

Lucky for you, it’s not 1983. Nope, it’s 2011 and there are options for online gift-giving aplenty! Hooray for technology! Here are just a few ideas:

1. Event Tickets. I’m a big fan of giving the gift of experiences — doing stuff is so much better than accumulating stuff. One of Seattle’s music and arts festivals (and a #client), Bumbershoot, is having a great holiday sale on their tickets for the 2012 festival. Gifting tickets for concerts, beer festivals, film festivals (like the Seattle International Film Festival) and other events in the future also buys you time (just include a message in your holiday card that tickets for the event are in the mail, ready for them to print at home, or available for will call pick-up on event day).
2. Lessons. Like concerts and festivals, the gift of learning is something that friends and family aren’t going to redeem until the new year. So get online and get them enrolled  in lessons in wine tasting, belly dancing,  guitar, stand-up comedy, yoga, tai chi, writing, home brewing,  pottery, cooking, salsa dancing, trapeze, photography, or even hula hooping. They’ll have something exciting to look forward to long after they’re bored with their other gifts.
3. eBooks, Apps, Music, Movies. Nothing says instant gratification like downloading an ebook, app, movie or album. Check out Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Books, Amazon’s Kindle books, and the Google eBookstore for the bookworms on your list.  The iTunes Gift Card is an easy choice for gifting iPhone/iPad apps, movies, TV shows, audiobooks and, of course, music. Giving the gift of an app for Android and BlackBerry isn’t quite as simple but there are workarounds for that too.
4. Online Piggy Bank. Help someone start an online savings account or contribute to an existing one at Smarty Pig. You can search for people using their Facebook or Twitter account, or their contact info. You might just find that a friend is already saving up for a vacation, a new bike, or a laptop and you can chip in to help them reach his or her savings goal sooner!
5. Memberships and Subscriptions. From ad-free streaming music and television to free shipping, being an online VIP is about memberships and subscriptions. Netflix,  Pandora One, Hulu, Rdio are great choices for media. Give the shopper in your life the gift of free shipping at stores like Toys R Us, PetSmart, Calvin Klein and many others with ShopRunner. Amazon Prime memberships, unfortunately, are not so easy to gift for now so you may have to wait ‘til next year.
6. Domain Name. There is nothing cooler for the geek in your life than his or her own domain. Register one at Green Geeks, iPage, or FatCow. Don’t forget to check your spelling, and have a friend sanity check the URL (See “Who Retweets Me” for an example of a not-so-stellar domain name).
7. Gifting a gift. The best gift of all is a gift for someone less fortunate given in your friend’s or family member’s name. Several fantastic organizations have made this easier than ever. TisBest and Charity Gift Certificates offer charity gift cards redeemable to 250+ charity partners, including ChildFund, Habitat for Humanity, Doctors Without Borders, the ASPCA, and many others. With Heifer International, you can gift a goat, sheep, or even a camel to families worldwide suffering from hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Happy (online) holiday gift-giving!

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Tweets, Posts, and Whiteboards Too

• Dec 20th, 2011
• Posted by Jason
• Posted in Uncategorized

With a laptop or desktop, an external monitor, and smartphone on nearly every desk at Spring Creek Group, it’s true that paper and pencil aren’t tools that we regularly use. Sure, from time to time, you’ll catch someone jotting down notes on lined paper, but more often than not, we unplug our computers and carry them along to meetings.
But when it comes to erasable markers, we like red, orange, blue, green, and the classic black. In nearly every room, some hanging from walls, others perched on wheels, we have whiteboards. Some small, a few large, and yes a few that stand nearly six feet tall.

Here are a few things to consider when using a whiteboard:

• Avoid using permanent markers; their markings are permanent
• To cheat, use word magnets
• When they’re on wheels, they can be used as rolling barriers
• Bullet points of all shapes and sizes are welcome
• Unlike your favorite digital devices, they don’t need software updates, recharging, and screen protectors
• They’re honest and may inspire you to practice your print and cursive

At SCG, we all tweet and post to Facebook too, but whiteboards, we also like our whiteboards.

• 2 comments

LinkedIn Group Polls: How Brands Can Take Advantage of Taking Polls

• Dec 15th, 2011
• Posted by Ron Schott
• Posted in Influencer Engagement, Influencer Management, Influencer Outreach, LinkedIn, Polls

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, LinkedIn is moving to make interactions on their site more valuable and therefore is offering brands a space where they can receive feedback and opinions based on polling questions. The new polls are outlined on the LinkedIn Blog.

Functionality

Creation of polls is very easy. All rules that apply to poll creation apply to discussion creation as well (approvals, submission queues, etc.).

Character Limits

• Question: 200
• Answer choices (up to 5): 40

Sharing Options

Once you create a poll you can easily share the poll via Twitter by clicking the share button.

Answering + Commenting

Users will be presented with a radio button voting screen, which allows them to input their answer from the pre-selected answer field. Once they have voted, they may also add commentary below the poll.

Permissions

In open groups, any group member can create a poll, just as any group member can initiate a discussion.

Moderators may restrict creation of new polls only to managers and moderators in their Group Settings.

Brand Implications

LinkedIn created the poll feature in groups at the request of brands. The overall point of this feature is to create easier interaction points within groups (all within the LinkedIn environment). For B2B brands that rely on customer feedback and insights, this is an incredibly rich offering. A number of implications are listed below:

Product Feedback

By offering a chance for constructive feedback on products and services, LinkedIn has given brands a way to interact with thought leaders and brand enthusiasts in a way that once required them to use a third-party polling application. This way, brands are not only able to see real-time feedback to their questions, they are able to take that feedback and turn it into conversations in the LinkedIn environment.

Influencer Identification and Profiling

Thanks to the Top Influencer measurement in LinkedIn Groups, brands have been able (as of late) to identify and track top influencers in their groups. The introduction of polls, which offer influencers a chance to not only add their vote, give brands a chance to look deeper into influencers’ opinions as they add comments below the polls. This can lead to better content creation, as well as increased visibility into influencer behaviors for future influencer engagement projects.

Increased Engagement

Last, but not least, is the fact that polls often generate high levels of interactivity among groups. Users like to give their opinions on issues, but aren’t generally willing to do so unprompted. By putting polls out to the groups, brands have a way to generate conversation and engagement around topics that are pertinent to brand goals, marketing, and business objectives.

• 1 comment

Lost, Found, and Shared: Content Discoverability Goes Big

• Dec 6th, 2011
• Posted by Lily Croll
• Posted in Social Media, Spring Creek Group

Channel-ification

YouTube’s doing it. StumbleUpon’s doing it. Reddit’s been doing it for ages. Everywhere you look, older social-driven sites are adopting a channel-based format. The concept isn’t new: categorize content into topical buckets, making discovery easier and encouraging more content consumption. For users, the biggest boon is (theoretically) finding more content in a simple way that is relevant to their interests. For brands, the channel format provides some semblance of structure in a relatively fluid space.

In YouTube’s case the channel format mimics the distillation we’ve seen in the cable TV space, with whole broadcast channels dedicated to a specific interest area. In the cable realm this gamble seems to have paid off, but the question remains whether YouTube users will embrace the new format.

With StumbleUpon the shift towards interest-based channels is matched with the Facebook-esque introduction of official brand/persona channels. StumbleUpon was long overdue for a revamp and this may be the catalyst to drive new membership and longer time spent on site.

In either case, brands will likely be the biggest proponents of a channel-based structure, as it provides easier paths to reach consumers and lessens the burden of driving discoverability.

Community-Driven Meta Tagging

For other community-based sites, instead of implementing a formal channel structure sites have facilitated user-driven ways of tagging and sorting content to encourage exploration and discovery. Tumblr has its Explore section, Pinterest has its board categories and Instagram’s tagging system accomplishes the same thing. This trend allows users to self-designate categories for their content, meaning there’s simultaneously crazy cross-tagging on some posts and a total lack of tagging on other content.

User-driven tagging systems can empower consumers to create categories around interests that otherwise would have gone unrecognized (I’m looking at you Christmas Nails and Robopocalypse). This makes it harder for brands, as the “categories” of content are constantly shifting and it’s near impossible to keep up with the emerging tags.

What It All Means

• Channels and tagging are here to stay: Whether any of the sites’ strategies mentioned above are the golden ticket remains to be seen. However, as the mountains of content grow brands and users alike are going to develop systems to try to sift through and sort what’s generated. Structured channels and comprehensive tagging are just two methods, with countless more sure to join.
• Brand identity: These days, a brand is what it shows on social. By cultivating a content pool that tells the brand story beyond their own products or services, brands are taking what it means to be “Gap” or be “Burberry,” and making that part of their digital presence. When users are then experiencing the content through a new network, they’re consuming all this brand content, minus the branding, and experiencing what it means to be a part of that brand at a deeper level.
• This may actually make content harder to discover: Users gravitate towards the channels and tags that align with their current interests. This means they’ll be able to go deeper into those familiar topics, but decreases the likelihood they’ll stumble on those random internet finds. This essentially means it’ll get easier for brands to reach customers already interested in (and actively looking for) content in their interest category, but harder to reach the peripheral audience.

Undoubtedly, this issue isn’t going to be resolved any time soon. Are there sites (or brands) you think are tackling this issue in a more graceful manner?

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Semi-regular, Always Informative Social Media By the Numbers

• Dec 2nd, 2011
• Posted by Cody Goins
• Posted in Munchin', Social Media, Social Media by the Numbers

The Internet is pretty good for information, but the main problem it has is that there is sometimes just TOO MUCH STUFF ON IT.  Sometimes we want to grab a website by its lapels and say: “Hey! This is way too much wordreading! Skip to the factnumbers!”  That’s why we did all you TL;DR-er’s out there a favor:  we took this week’s social media news, turned it upside down, and shook it until the numbers fell out.

• Minimum amount of time a camera that washed up on a Deep Bay, BC beach spent on the ocean floor:  440 days
• Amount of time it took the camera’s finder to reunite it with its owner, via Google+: ~7 days
• Minimum number of Spring Creek Group clients named to AdAge’s “America’s Hottest Brands” List: 1
• Number of awards won by UM N.A. + Initiative North America in 2011: 31
• Number of official Google Waves that will be created after January 2012: 0
• Total duration, in seconds, of the 60 entrants’ submissions in this Mont Blanc film festival clip: 60
• Number of steps needed to successfully see every doodle ever created by Google: 3
• Approximate amount, in dollars, that will be spent on social marketing by 2016: 5 billion
• Number of Spring Creek Group Blog posts this week about the WWE’s successful social media campaign: 1
• Minimum number of Spring Creek Group employees who have smelled what The Rock is cooking: 4
• Minimum number of websites devoted to crowdsourcing the identification of whale songs: 1
• Rank of article discussing changing Zodiac signs on Facebook’s list of 2011’s Most Shared Articles:  3
• Rank of a graph on that same list illustrating Bush and Obama’s respective impacts on the national deficit: 23
• Rank of story about a giant crocodile: 9
• Projected 2016 revenue of the sports and health mobile app market, in dollars: $400 million
• Number of skeleton-free robots demoed by Harvard researchers: 1
• Minimum number of nightmares this demo has caused Spring Creek Group employees: 1

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WWE’s Social Media Smackdown

• Nov 29th, 2011
• Posted by Lily Croll
• Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Media News, Spring Creek Group, Twitter

Last week Mashable announced its 2011 Mashable Awards Business category nominees, with the WWE snagging nominations in the Must-Follow Brand on Social Media, Best Social Good Cause Campaign and Digital Company of the Year categories. If you’re someone whose knowledge of entertainment wresting (or as I affectionately deem it, “fake wrestling”) is limited to hazy memories of its former WWF moniker, The Undertaker, Hulk Hogan or steel cage matches then you’re missing out on one of the most interesting and social-savvy brands.

The Setup: The WWE has brought its already monolithic Facebook and Twitter communities (>7M fans and almost 700k followers respectively) together in its social media portal, InterAction. Beyond aggregating fan activity, InterAction’s SuperStar Chat feature gives fans a chance to chat directly with some of the brand’s biggest personalities.

This lets the WWE provide steady content to fans on non-broadcast nights and encourages fans to log on for behind-the-scenes or color commentary from non-featured performers commenting on live-broadcast events including Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown as well as the company’s many PPV events. As witnessed in the Mashable nomination, the WWE has received kudos for its Facebook-based Be a STAR Alliance campaign created in partnership with the Creative Coalition. The Be a STAR Alliance is an anti-bullying initiative that has used traditional and social campaign elements to showcase anti-bullying testimonials from a wide range of celebs, including WWE performers.

The Takedown: The WWE doesn’t relegate social media to just a handful of corporate marketers; it’s infused social throughout the brand. Earlier in 2011, the Monday Night Raw franchise featured a plotline that hinged solely on tweets from an anonymous General Manager. Throughout the year the WWE has been bringing its talent online and encouraging each performer to play an active role in social media, especially on Twitter. The brand has been quick to jump on the hashtag bandwagon, and has seen remarkable success with regular trending topics during both its regular Monday/Friday night broadcasts and its large-scale PPV events.

The Face: While its focus has largely been on Twitter, the WWE has seen more employee buy-in with social media than most brands. Not only does the talent participate, but their content is interesting, engaging and shows personality. The WWE also sees engagement rates many brands would swoon over, as its Facebook page’s multiple posts per day earn an average of several thousand likes and several hundred comments apiece. The kicker? Virtually all of the Facebook fan commentary is on-topic and comes from unique authors.

The Heel: None of this is to say the WWE has landed on the magic formula for social media, not even with its own clearly dedicated and highly engaged audience. The backlash against the Twitter saturation has already begun among well-respected entertainment wrestling bloggers including Alan Donahue at WrestlingInc.com, Drake Oz at BleacherReport.com and The Masked Man (aka David Shoemaker) at Grantland.com. It’s hard to argue the WWE hasn’t gone Twitter crazy, as witnessed last week on Friday Night Smackdown when wrestler Dolph Ziggler’s costume featured a hashtag… smack dab on his rear end.

The Swerve: While the WWE has rightfully been both lauded and criticized (sometimes simultaneously) for its social media efforts, only time will tell if the brand is able to find the balance between social integration and social overkill. One thing’s for sure: I’ll still be tuning in and tweeting.

Bonus Match: Fellow fake wrestling fans, if you’d like to geek out a little, check out this fantastic compilation on Wikipedia of professional wrestling terms. Can’t go wrong with “monster heel”, “paper champion” or a “dusty finish”!

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Tweet Me Out to the Ball Game

• Oct 29th, 2011
• Posted by admin
• Posted in #WorldSeries, Fall Classic, Industry Insights, Infographic, MLB, Twitter, Uncategorized

The Cardinals of St. Louis are the champions of the baseball world. This #WorldSeries was one of the most social media heavy sporting events to date. Fueled by our childhood love of baseball cards, we put together this stat-filled card which looks at how the Fall Classic played out on Twitter. Feel free to share (and stick it in the spokes of your Schwinn).

Special thanks to our friends at Simply Measured for all their help.

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Mashable Can’t Take a Joke (and either can most of the Internet)

• Oct 27th, 2011
• Posted by Ron Schott
• Posted in Schrute Bucks, Twitter

Rainn Wilson (local boy gone Dwight Schrute) tweeted a series of posts yesterday that caused Social Media/Gadget/Internet/Business/Start Up/What do they report on now site Mashable to quickly announce that he was caught in a deal to send paid tweets for Del Taco.

Today, Mashable ran an updated story that correctly pinpointed the tweets as satirical content – which Wilson never does… ever.

The best part about the whole kerfuffle has to be the string of tweets send by Wilson after:

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The Blogging Battle Royale: A Closer Look

• Oct 26th, 2011
• Posted by Lily Croll
• Posted in Social Media, Spring Creek Group

Here at Spring Creek Group, we’re big fans of Tumblr and we’ve been driving out clients to evaluate the platform in their social media programs. We love the platform not just for its crazy/wonderful memes (like Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, Garfield Minus Garfield and Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses) but for how straightforward it is to use, and for how quickly you realize the point of Tumblr is as much about exploring others’ content as it is about sharing your own.

With over 30 million blogs to date, it’s only in the past year that we’ve seen big brands make a foray onto the platform. Publishing and broadcast media brands like The Economist, LIFE, Sesame Street and the Travel Channel were quick to embrace the platform’s multimedia-friendly design and to share behind the scenes or bonus content with followers. Recent Tumblr blogs from companies like IBM, Bungie and Huggies have showcased the platform’s flexibility in creating a blog right for each brand.

It was big news this week for Tumblr when President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign launched its own Tumblr blog, but the article that piqued our interest was this quick blog post from Compete.com’s Damian Roskill: “Tumblr vs. WordPress vs. Blogger: Fight!” To kick it off, Damian illustrates that when it comes to unique visitor rates, WordPress is head and shoulders above the rest while Tumblr is ascending and Blogger is seeing steady drop-off.

According to Compete.com’s data, 2011 has seen huge gains for Tumblr, with the platform tying WordPress for overall blog visits. The most compelling (and frankly, astounding) chart Damian shared outlined page view trends:

While Tumblr trails WordPress in unique visitors, Tumblr’s visitors are viewing a dramatically larger number of pages. This illustrates Tumblr’s true potential: it encourages visitors not just stop by, but to stay and explore.

We agree wholeheartedly with Damian’s assertions that Tumblr’s success is likely tied to the platform’s emphasis on reducing barriers to publish content and making it easy to tag content across blogs, while also encouraging users to build a network of bloggers with whom you mutually share content. Make sure to check out the rest of Damian’s post for some other interesting tidbits about the three platforms.

We’re excited to see how Tumblr’s future plays out and what brands create using the platform. In the meantime, make sure to sneak a peek at two of our Tumblr guilty pleasures: Barack and Gary, BFFs and Scanwiches.

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