Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
CES 2012: Part 2
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
The CES show floor is incredibly daunting when you walk in and look at the sprawling maps with each section marked off. I made it my goal to see every single booth on the floor – and I did it. Here are a couple more trends that I saw during my time in Vegas:
AutoTech
The auto industry has plenty of their own industry shows, but that doesn’t stop top automakers from trekking to Vegas for CES. In-car auto technology was a big part of the show with Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, and Ford showcasing how technology is powering the next generation of autos.
Kia’s new Uvo system, made by Microsoft (both clients of SCG/Mediabrands) was one of the coolest in-car systems I saw in Vegas. The new system pairs with smartphones to identify drivers, making the experience completely personal. For parents with new drivers, the system allows users to set up things like speed limits, curfews, and geo-fences that notify the car owner if/when these limitations are broken by the driver. That’s one piece of tech I definitely am glad didn’t exist when I was 16. The system also goes beyond the car and uses augmented reality to help drivers find their car once they’ve parked. No more wandering around aimlessly hitting your key fob in hopes of hearing your car honk.
SocialTV
There’s no doubt that people come to CES to see the next generation of televisions. However, this year wasn’t totally about screen size (although there were some huge ones) or crazy bells and whistles (there was seriously a TV that you could see through), but rather about how connected TVs could make users. Connected to content. Connected to their friends. Connected to just about anything.
Now, apps like Miso and GetGlue have brought a social aspect to TV and movies, but they require a user looking away from the screen to interact. While that’s not always a bad thing, the continued appification of televisions is bringing social interactions right to the set – and making them part of the experience.
Users can now Tweet or Facebook directly on their televisions while still watching content. They can join chats and discuss plots, characters, and developments in their favorite shows and movies. Look for this seamless integration to be a big part in network and motion picture companies’ push for social interaction around their titles in 2012 and beyond.
Social Everywhere (but No Connectivity)
I think one of the biggest fails of CES, besides the lack of available food/restrooms (which always happens), was the lack of connectivity in the exhibition halls. While yes, many companies aren’t really relying on me to pump their newest products out to the world, but rather a writer from Engadget who has guaranteed bandwidth, the space just wasn’t social friendly. QR codes were everywhere, but the content they accessed was nearly unobtainable in the conditions.
TMobile sponsored a contest (using Klout) to crown the king of social at CES. The only problem was, I’d guess most people actually being able to tweet about CES were not in Vegas, or had already left the show to go back to their rooms. Also, the screens showing content were kind of hard to find.
Weird Stuff
I’ve been to a fair number of trade shows in my day, but I have to say there was one thing I was really sad to see at CES in 2012… the continued use of “booth babes.” BBC did a piece on this which I think accurately depicts their use at the show. Notes the completely oblivious answer from the head of CES.
If you owned an iPad, iPod, iANYTHING, you could seriously spend the whole time looking solely at products made to connect to, hold, enhance, or otherwise augment your iANYTHING. These little weirdos were iPod speaker docks (iThink). I actually kind of like the ones that look like the ghosts from Pac Man.
Celebs were everywhere. Yes, some of them were there because they were launching a new headphone line (Luda/50), but others were obviously there just to get a check. Justin Beiber was there talking about robotics. Snooki was there, and unless she was talking about tanning beds, I’m going to guess she has no connection with the product she was there to support.
See Ya, Las Vegas
Overall, CES still is one of the greatest events I’ve ever been to. I’m not going to say that everything there relates to social – because it doesn’t. However, if we’re not keeping track of the consumers’ use of technology in accessing information, connecting with each other, and consuming media, then we’re missing the point. There’s so much more to marketing that happens outside the person-to-screen world that we often forget that there are opportunities in just about every aspect of daily life.
Check out our full gallery of SCG CES 2012 pics here.
Disclosure: Some photos and descriptions of products may reference clients of Spring Creek Group’s parent companies, Mediabrands and IPG. These are not meant as advertisements or endorsements and no compensation has been made to this blog or the author for their inclusion.
The Blogging Battle Royale: A Closer Look
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011Here 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.
Spring Creek Group Joins Mediabrands
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
Spring Creek Group was founded more than five years ago, during the emergence of social media in the form we now experience today. We have evolved and expanded our services for clients as content and social networks on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others have grown dramatically. Through it all, we have maintained a steadfast focus on opportunities to improve our clients’ customer advocacy and engagement. Simply put, our mission is to help customers better connect with each other and with the brands on which they spend their time and money.
Today, we are delighted to announce a major step in our continued growth and evolution as an agency. Spring Creek Group is joining the Mediabrands digital agency division of global media and marketing company Interpublic Group! You can read a little more about our exciting news here.
Spring Creek joins innovative digital agency leaders such as Cadreon, Reprise Media, and Ansible Mobile, and we will play a key role in the newly-formed Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP). By joining Mediabrands and the MAP initiative, we are bringing our expertise in all aspects of social media marketing strategy and programs execution to our new agency partners across Mediabrands, including leaders in media planning and management such as UM and Initiative, as well as others. In addition to the opportunities that this move creates for us to integrate our social media services more tightly with our new agency partners’ offerings; it opens many new ways for us to introduce complementary services to our existing and future clients.
As a founder of Spring Creek, I am so very excited about this announcement and this new step forward in our growth. I believe that the strategic and - as importantly for me and my team – the philosophical ‘fit’ for Spring Creek Group within Interpublic’s Mediabrands agency group is perfect. They are extremely committed to helping us maintain our vision for the future of Spring Creek, while we also build a holistic digital media marketing services model through the MAP. Above all else, Mediabrands shares a similar set of values to ours. In short, we are thrilled about what the future holds for us, as well as for all of our clients and technology and software partners.
In closing I would just like to say THANK YOU to all of those client stakeholders, partners, and many others who have been so important and valued over the past 5 years. I owe my deepest personal gratitude to each of you who have been a part of our ability to arrive at today’s news, including everyone who has been a part of our SCG team. I am most excited about the myriad new ways this move opens new opportunities for client services innovation and social media strategic leadership for our entire Spring Creek team. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us this far… let’s keep it going.
Warm regards,
Clay
3 Lessons We Can Learn From Twitter
Thursday, April 21st, 2011Recently I came across an article on CNN exploring the validity of Twitter’s place in the social media market, and those questioning the status of its dominance. We know that Twitter is the darling of many journalists and in-the-know technophiles. It has a thriving, niche community. But can Twitter connect with the average consumer? Or, is it purely for the types who are willing to put in the time to learn how to manage multiple stream of information?
Twitter is still very much in growth phase – growing roughly 500,000 accounts per day – and it certainly has a ways to go before it catches up to that other social network.
However, the Twitter structure, that tricky 140-character “status bar” which is referenced in the article, is already influencing the way brands are thinking about how to successfully connect with their customers in social spaces, regardless of channel.
So, think it’s just a tweet?
In my estimation, there are at least three things you can learn from Twitter, today, that will improve your overall communications approach and build stronger communities.
- Brevity: You can’t market your way into people’s hearts anymore. Well, that might not actually be fully true, but what is true is that consumers have less and less tolerance for fluff, so you better get to the point. The 140 character limit is not a limiting factor, it’s a very real challenge to force you to mean what you say and say what you mean. Cut out the excess and get to the heart of what your customer should care about.
- Think Before You Write: There are a lot of variables to consider when you’re using Twitter. Should you create a bit.ly? Should you use a hashtag? Should you look up someone’s handle to mention them in the tweet? All of these things force you to consider a variety of variables which might impact the success of your message. If you’re not thinking about these things, you should start.
- Provide Credit When Credit is Due: Perhaps more than any other social network, Twitter is constantly citing and crediting the source of information. Through RT’s or @mentions, taking credit for someone else’s idea or resource is a faux-pas and you’ll likely get called out. Whereas, taking the approach of thanking someone for their @mention or their article engenders a lot of good vibes, which go a long way to making your social presence authentic and trusted. That will lead to improved sentiment and brand perception, and encourage others to become fans of your brand on social media.
While it’s still to be seen just how big Twitter will be in 5, 10, or even 20 years, does it really matter? We’re already seeing the way it’s impacting the way people are communicating with groups of people, now. We better continue to read the trends and think bigger about why these communications are connecting with people, instead of falling behind. Read the article for yourself and let me know what you think. What else do you think brands can learn from Twitter?
The Tosh.0 Effect
Friday, September 17th, 2010
Surely by now most of you have heard of the relatively new show on Comedy Central show, hosted by Daniel Tosh, called Tosh.0. It airs every Wednesday at 10:30pm and has the main premise of commenting/mocking anything and everything viral. Most of the show is dedicated to making fun of videos that circulate through the web every day. Whether it’s a guy in awe of a couple rainbows or a kid freaking out after his mom cancelled his World of WarCraft subscription, you can count on Tosh.0 to analyze it, often in ways you didn’t think could be aired on TV.
One reason for the success of Tosh.0 has been its ability to receive its content and connect with its viewers by harnessing the immense power of social media. Tosh uses many different methods to connect with his viewers: he promotes user-submitted videos (most of which are men getting hit in the groin), answers Twitter questions sent to twitter.com/danieltosh during his show, and updates his blog on Comedy Central’s website on a daily basis. He says much of his outreach is met with hostility, especially in response to his raunchy tweets. He also jokingly states that he receives death threats on a daily basis.
Through use of social media, the show has been able to grow in popularity at a staggering rate. During the show’s first season each episode averaged 1.3 million viewers. Now in its second season, it has a weekly viewership topping 2.5 million.
Some have called Tosh.0 the new, and somewhat twisted, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Tosh.0 recently signed a deal for a 3rd season and with its large viewership, grasp of use of social media, and a seemingly never-ending vault of viral content, it is hard to think of Tosh.0 going anywhere but up anytime soon. Which is good because watching people fall in funny ways never gets old!
Social Media Goes to Washington
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Wouldn’t it be cool to live in the times when government was simple? When you knew all the issues that were out there and you could put in your two cents. That was like 200 years ago but those were the days. Now, in these fast-paced modern times, I have no idea what my representatives are voting for in my name. But I can guarantee that politicians that I’ve helped put in office have voted for bills that would make me cringe. This isn’t something I’ll be able to control anytime soon (until I’m 35 and eligible to be the next Barack).
But there’s hope! The YouCut program was introduced a couple of weeks ago on Eric Cantor’s website. Each week the site gives you a choice of five porky government programs to cut and opens it up for voting by text or web. At the end of the week the votes are tallied and the winner is proposed to be cut before the House of Representatives. In its first week 280,000 Americans voted to cut an initiative that scales back welfare requirements that would have saved 2.5 billion dollars. The cut failed to pass with a vote of 177-240.
Regardless of your political persuasion you have to admit that this is pretty cool. I’d love it if more representatives gave their constituencies a say in the issues. Eric Cantor and his fiscally conservative posse are blazing trails and hopefully we’ll see more politicians jumping on social politics bandwagon soon.
http://www.republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/
Spring Creek Group re-brands as SpringCreek9000
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010We here at Spring Creek Group are constantly on the lookout for new trends and thought-memes in the social media marketplace where we ply our trade. Well, we realized recently that what began as a few small rivulets has developed into a full-bore flash flood in the realm of social media technology and services firm naming convention. [BTW, like the way I subtly incorporated both a water reference AND a 10-dollar word into that last sentence? What can I say, we’ve got a lot of clever copywriters on the team here, and occasionally I go a bit overboard trying to keep up with all of these creative writing majors…]
Allow us, if you will, to drop the following list on you of industry contemporaries, partners, competitors, friends, followers, and those-we-do-not-yet-know… see if you, too, can determine the hip company naming convention that’s been sweeping our industry these past few years:
We know, and we agree: there really is just something so modern, so interactive, so un-old-school about a company name that dares to bring together both letters and numbers in a space-less string of alpha-numeric freshness.
And so, not wanting to miss the chance to ride this wave, we humbly submit our (potential) new company name to you, dear blog readers. What say you?
SpringCreek9000
100 Million People Taking Facebook on the Road
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
We’ve all seen the stats that texting while driving has similar effects to your vehicular dexterity as downing a case of Kokanee (a nod to our Canadian friends up the road). But maybe we’re not actually texting. Is it possible we’re all Facebooking?
A few weeks ago, Facebook announced the following:
“Today, we hit another milestone…with more than 100 million people actively using Facebook from their mobile devices every month. This usage happens on almost every carrier in the world and comes less than six months after we announced 65 million people on Facebook Mobile.”
Some marketing teams still have giant whiteboards with doodles, where they are “strategizing” a Facebook road map for the next 12 months. But, isn’t it high time marketers stop thinking about Facebook as a Web site, and instead focus on how it will follow you around everywhere you go? I agree with Mediapost’s David Berkowitz, who says the following:
“The safe bet is in time that the mobile user base will nearly mirror the overall user base, and that most of its usage will derive from mobile users. Facebook is in an especially strong position to benefit from the mobile boom, as mobile measurement firm Ground Truth noted this month that 61% of mobile Web pageviews are served by social networking sites.”
So here’s the question for the marketer who still has a 2008 Social Media Strategy in 2010: Do I need to catch up, or can I just jump ahead to mobile? Starbucks and their 5 gabillion Facebook fans may be an inspiration to Fortune 500′s across the nation, but maybe the smarter move for large laggards is to skip the whole catch-up game and join the mobile party. Meanwhile, SMBs may want to investigate hyper-local, location-based mobile social media strategies.
It won’t be about ads popping up on your mobile Facebook page, but a tighter integration with PayPal and potentially some partnerships with folks like Whrrl, Foursquare, and Gowalla, could allow you to buy a beer for your friend at a bar, while you sit in a movie theater across town. Or, you could order a Sounders jersey while your friend is at the game, and have him pick it up at the souvenir stand.
So, fear not brave marketer. If you missed the original social media wave in 2007, look at the 100 Million Facebook users on mobile devices, and realize you get a second shot at the growth curve.
Engagement
Monday, March 30th, 2009Our Services
Social Engagement
and Campaigns
- Experienced “Social Media Marketing Engagement Leads” team.
- Social media outreach, content syndication, and marketing campaign social graph promotion.
- Personal, direct, conversational marketing to complement your existing media buying.
- Identification and outreach to key strategic communities.
Direct customer engagement programs, branded social media communities built and managed, and custom brand marketing campaigns driven through earned media, all designed and delivered by a team of Social media channel experts – We gather your creative marketing assets to syndicate and promote them around the web transparently as representatives of your brand. We design, build, manage, and maintain branded off-site communities in strategic social media locations of high value to your business and customers – typically in sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Ning, Twitter, Hi5, and Live Spaces. We identify relevant blog posts, forum threads, and community conversations in which your brand or products feature prominently and engage consumers in ways that are always transparent and ethical, add value, solve problems, and that simply help connect people to useful information and content via personalized posts. Our Interactive Creative Content Team can plan and/or develop everything from branded backgrounds to sites and apps integrated with Facebook and other social media marketing platforms.
Strategy
Monday, March 30th, 2009Our Services
Channel Guidance
and Strategy
- Your brand’s opportunity identification: Where you could – and should – invest in a managed brand presence across the social media web.
- Collaborative strategic marketing plan development.
- Resource, budget, channel strategy, marketing plan deliverables.
- Content. Technology and editorial plan development.
Culling through the options to develop an efficient multi-channel brand marketing campaign – Now more than ever, large and small companies are forced with the decision of how to introduce Social Media into their Marketing, Customer Service or Product Development organizations. Executives face difficult questions around how to staff the team, what attributes to measure, how to provide content, who should own the responsibility and how to communicate this new philosophy to the organization. If your organization is tackling these issues, Spring Creek Group can help you with answers to these questions.
Once you are ready to implement your program, Spring Creek Group is ready to help you build a cogent and effective strategic one. The Social Media Web offers a sometimes confusing array of options, including the latest ‘white hot stars’ like Twitter and an endless ‘long tail’ of potentially valuable but difficult-to-target specialty blogs and forums. Social Media is more than just deciding when you focus your brand marketing and engagement efforts on Facebook, YouTube, or other key sites. Should you invest the time in building out your own blog or publishing comments to other blogs? How could you use Twitter for your business? We’ve developed a sophisticated social media marketing methodology that answers these questions and more. The outcome is a data-driven, strategic, and targeted social media marketing strategy custom-built for your brand and business goals.
