Target's taking trick-or-treating onto Instagram

Since we've established that consumers are more inclined to engage with visually-driven content, it always surprises me how underutilized Instagram is as a marketing platform, particularly in Singapore. This week, Target rolled out the Instagram edition of its ongoing Halloween campaign, and it uses the channel in an ingenious and endearingly creative way.

Target invited its followers to go virtual trick-or-treating, by posting photos of intricately decorated haunted houses on its main Instagram profile. As with real life, you tap once to knock on the door. Unlike real life, tapping once on Instagram reveals all the profiles tagged in the photo, which in this case leads users to unique accounts. There, they'll find photo instructions on how to create a Halloween-themed trick or treat (think pumpkin brains punch and mummy pinatas) with products they can find at Target.

This clever adaptation of a well-loved childhood tradition absolutely blew me away, with its creative and strategic use of the Instagram platform to reward its followers a bit of spooky fun while at the same time giving them reason to go instore and make a purchase. As we know, the online community and content on life hacks/DIY tips have an affinity for each other like peanut butter and jelly - even more so during a season like Halloween that thrives on DIY crafting. Not to mention Target's endeavor is much more impressive than your regular dime-a-dozen, hashtag-driven campaigns.

If you're a brand looking to explore direct response marketing, Instagram may not be the best platform to do that since its capabilities for driving sales conversions or leads are still in its infancy. The only progress that's been made to reconcile between Instagram and e-commerce is the launch of Like2Buy, a platform that aims to help close the consumer loop by recreating a brand's Instagram page into a shopable, clickable gallery. But if, like Target, you want to run a brand building campaign on a shoestring (in a manner of speaking), then there's just one question: why aren't you using Instagram?

This week on social media

EBay's new Inspiration Hub will help you steal the styles of the event's trendsetting attendees

Photo from Fast Company

New York Fashion Week has always been just as much about street style as it is about the haute couture on the runway. While the fashion extravaganza is in full swing, EBay has created an Inspiration Hub where its Pinterest followers can keep tabs on what's in vogue on the streets. But they've gone a step further to use current trends to entice fashion-savvy Pinterest users to shop away - every street style shot will come with a full listing of similar outfits can be found on EBay. This certainly creates a nice little opportunity for EBay to make a little extra money on the side, say, if they paired up with preferred retailers to offer exclusive deals. It's just like those fashion spreads you used to see in the likes of Harper's Bazaar and ELLE - except this is the fully digitized version, optimized to drive sales leads. Good one, EBay!
From Fast company: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3035258/fast-feed/ebay-makes-new-york-fashion-week-street-style-instantly-shopable 

Melting in the New York summer? Quench your thirst with your Twitter account

Photo from AdWeek

There's a lot working to the water brand marketer's disadvantage. How do you set yourself apart from the competition, when you're selling an often overlooked and undervalued product that presents very little opportunity to look or taste unique? By going all out to surprise and delight your consumers with an experience they won't forget, of course.

In Evian's #Evianbottleservice Twitter campaign, users who tweeted the brand with the hash tag and described their location had a bottle of water hand-delivered to them by brand ambassadors within 5 to 7 minutes. This takes real-time marketing to impressive heights, and certainly paid off for the brand - Evian recorded an 11x spike in follower numbers relative to the same period last year, and its Twitter engagement rates surpassed industry benchmarks by over 80%. Kudos to Evian for not forgetting that building brand recall and affinity with consumers on social media is best complemented by offline campaign activations.
From Adweek: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/evians-real-time-marketing-reaps-big-social-stats-159898

And finally...Ikea's clever dig at Apple in its newest catalog ad

This is without a doubt my favorite ad of the week, which has been making its rounds on social media. The opener in Ikea's latest ad says it all: 'It's not a digital book. It's not an e-book. It's a bookbook.'

Click baiting: no more free rent for publishers?

Why Facebook's clamp down on click bait will stop publishers from using the platform for free

The Facebook Newsfeed algorithm is arguably the bane of digital marketers’ lives. A faceless force that determines who gets to see your content, marketers have relentlessly experimented with different means to circumvent the algorithm. And yet Facebook always seems to plaster loopholes just as quickly as marketers can find them. The latest development in the Newsfeed chronicle is one that has industry folk predicting the decline of organic reach for publishers like Buzzfeed and Upworthy – the clamp down on click baiting.

What is click baiting? You’ll very easily identify it from most publishers’ Facebook posts. They range from a subtle call to action like ‘Click here for more information on today’s weather’, to the more ostentious variety:  ‘YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. CLICK TO READ!’. Many Facebook pages rely to a certain extent on click-baiting to drive traffic to an external source, but more so for publishers, simply due to the nature of their operations.

Facebook’s efforts to weed out click baiting could very well be motivated by more than just a straightforward desire to ensure the content users see on their Newsfeeds is relevant and of high quality. After all, previous changes to the Newsfeed algorithm were contentious because they were perceived to have been made with one goal in mind – to entice brands to invest more heavily in Facebook advertising. This drives home the message that Facebook is indeed a marketing platform offering free rent, but only in a limited capacity, and only for now.

So how is this Newsfeed update going to affect publishers’ organic reach, and get them to allocate a bigger part of their coffers to Facebook advertising? To understand that, one first needs to understand the differences in the way brands and publishers use Facebook.

As a brand, community managers might publish just a handful of posts on Facebook every day and then amplify strategic posts with paid spend. This helps to ensure your organic reach doesn’t get spread too thinly over multiple posts. For most brands, the end goal is increasing page engagement and sales conversions; so strategic posting will help optimize your organic reach, as opposed to publishing a constant stream of updates with hopes that your fans will see as many of them as possible.

However as a publisher, the latter is more effective considering your end goal is website traffic. So the more content you post on Facebook to direct your fans to your publication, the more link clicks you’re going to receive. This means that publishers tend to adopt the 'carpet bomb' strategy, i.e. posting multiple stories to bait as much website traffic as they can. Which also makes them less inclined to put paid advertising into promoting their Facebook content to drive website views, since the more efficient way to do so is simply to post their articles on Facebook as frequently as possible. And what better way to drive organic reach then by enticing clicks with attention-grabbing headlines, otherwise known to Facebook as click bait? Perhaps this is the main reason they will get hit the hardest by the weeding out of click baiting, and be pushed closer towards the precipice of buying ad inventory.

So how will Facebook determine what it considers to be click bait? The criteria seems arbitrary, since it’ll be difficult for an algorithm to determine if a string of words look like click bait or not. But they’ve revealed two ways this will be done – the proportion of clicks to engagement, and the amount of time users spend looking at a story once they’ve clicked through to it. This doesn’t come without some obvious shortcomings – like what happens if someone reads an article they saw on Newsfeed on a new tab, but doesn’t close the tab even after they’re done? What if Facebook’s algorithm determines that headline looks like click bait, when it really is simply an essential part of the brand’s post?

For now, the questions are many and varied. Will phasing out click baiting also phase out a significant proportion of publishers’ organic reach? How will it affect the way that the likes of Elitedaily and Viralnova use Facebook? That is something only the coming months will tell - but if anything, brands and publishers alike can be sure that this is just one of the many incoming bullets they will have to dodge from Facebook, as the platform continues to work its way towards the gradual decline of organic (i.e. free) reach.

Instagram launches yet another mobile app, Hyperlapse

Hot on the heels of Bolt, Instagram launched its latest standalone mobile app Hyperlapse today, and it's pretty darn cool. I'm the furthest thing from what you might label an 'early adopter', but today the first thing I did upon waking up was downloading the app. User sentiment around Hyperlapse generally seems to be positive and run along the lines of the interface being intuitive, so that even those who aren't privy to any ways of technology can easily work the app to create a flawless time lapse video. But technical capabilities aside, will Hyperlapse make any real impact?

Hyperlapse does indeed make a skilled craft seem effortless, and like Wired has reported, it packs about $15,000 worth of technology into a compact yet surprisingly uncomplex (and free!) package. The image stabilization technology is unparalleled and makes it easy for anyone to create Wes Anderson-esque videos. To its credit, you won't find any other app of comparable calibre in the app store - for now, that is. Even Apple will soon launch their own version of a time lapse tool.

But both Instagram and Facebook have a rather unimpressive parental relationships with standalone mobile apps. Remember Slingshot, Paper and Bolt? No? ...exactly. It seems rational that two of the most widely used social network services in the world would have no trouble creating mobile apps that users would be drawn back to using time and again, but with their best attempts at standalone apps repeatedly fading into oblivion within months, both Facebook and Instagram have proven this to be nothing more than a logical fallacy.

After all, Hyperlapse is just a creative tool, but the content you create on it will have to be exported to another platform before it can be shared. There's very little social experience to speak of - which means the app is missing the very element that will keep users coming back for more. People who use the app aren't likely to be budding cinematographers. They're more likely going to be of the average Joe variety who might occasionally decide they want to turn something they see into a slick time lapse video, that they will ultimately seek to display on Facebook/Instagram. In other words, they're more likely to value the social element in the whole experience of content creation, rather than the actual end-product. Because the video itself, if not shared on social media, is going to simply end up forgotten in the recesses of your phone's photo/video archive.

Also, how many time lapse videos can one create before creative inspiration runs dry? Without the ability to natively upload and share videos on the app itself, it would stand to reason that it's only a matter of time before users find that there's not much within that walled garden to keep them entertained.

So, is Hyperlapse worthy of your your Apple device's storage space? You can't discredit the uniqueness of Hyperlapse, so my personal opinion is everyone should join in the fun and download the app so you can avoid FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). But the novelty will wear off soon enough and your inclination to use the app will likely die a gradual and natural death, anyway. In the meantime, you can check out my favorite Hyperlapse-created video:

The lowdown on social media this week

Here's a quick roundup of a couple of social media updates announced this week, that signal exciting times ahead for digital marketers - especially those who've made millennials their business:

1. Snapchat Discovery
Snapchat, the wildly popular ephemeral (euphemism alert) messaging app with a rather fallacious rep for facilitating sexting, is poised to bite into marketing budgets with the introduction of ad offerings called Snapchat Discovery, beginning November. It'll be interesting to see how brands start adopting it as a marketing channel because of the way the app is structured, and the characteristics of its users.

The engagement that Snapchat ads can offer is probably the biggest pull factor here. Because users have to keep their fingers pressed on the screen in order to view snaps from a brand, this creates a nice little 'opt-in' function - meaning that if users see your ad, they proactively chose to. Which also means no force-feeding of ads that no one really pays attention to, YouTube pre-roll style.

Taco Bell, which already actively uses Snapchat for marketing, calls the app's users 'crazy engaged'. That's really saying something, considering brands don't usually conclude that their fans get along with their social media ads like a house on fire. Apparently 80% of users who receive Taco Bell's snaps open them, and of this number, 90% of users view the entire message. That's the kind of reach many brands would grovel at Facebook's feet to receive.

While Snapchat hasn't released official user figures, the number is estimated to be in the region of 27 million. So...Snapchat isn't actually the most widely used messaging service. It's not even close. To put this into perspective, the number of monthly active users its competitors Whatsapp and WeChat have is 400 million and 355 million respectively. But Snapchat's advantage is its stronghold on the younger demographic - it's used mainly by those under 25. According to ComScore*, Snapchat is the third most used smartphone app among millennials (18 to 34 year olds), ahead of Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. Which makes its ad inventory prime real estate for brands looking to target this demographic.

2. Instagram analytics
Instagram's been slow to roll out any sort of monetisation strategy, with their main attempt being the controversial Instagram ads that debuted in the U.S. last year. But with the bumper crop of brands already using Instagram as one of their social media outlets, it's a matter of time before they start seeking ways to amplify the reach of their content beyond their fan base, and when that time comes they'll also expect visibility on the effectiveness of their efforts.

As a visually-driven medium, Instagram has such rich potential for brands to engage in content marketing. Especially the ones that rely heavily on photos to market themselves, like F&B joints and online fashion stores. It's also one of the platforms many Singaporean cafes like @statelandcafe and @nyloncoffee, and fashion brands like @lovebonito use to show their audience what they've got.

Instagram is going to take its time with offering these analytics tools and for now it'll only available to brands in the U.S. that have already acquainted themselves with Instagram advertising. But with such an offering on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see how brands will take it up. So much of brands' marketing budgets often get allocated to Facebook and Twitter, but there's a whole other world out there that remains to be explored!

*http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/Does-Snapchats-Strength-Among-Millennials-Predict-Eventual-Mainstream-Success?

Audi reunites the formidable Breaking Bad duo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovqM72em1dA

There are no words to describe how much I love this video, created by Audi of America to promote their sponsorship of the upcoming Emmy's. Who would've expected a luxury car brand like Audi to come up with a viral commercial that's amassed over 2 million views in less than 24 hours?

I suppose this is Audi's attempt at seeking out the ever elusive attention span of the millennial generation, and it's commendable. The video--'Barely Legal Pawn'--reunites the two lead actors of Breaking Bad in a hilarious 6-minute (yes, it's 4x the length of typical Emmy ads - very audacious, but it does pay off for Audi) parody of reality series pawn Stars, peppered heavily with clever Breaking Bad references. They even remembered to include Jesse Pinkman's famous last words: Yeah, b*tch! 

You'd have to be familiar with both TV shows to fully appreciate this commercial, but this is a solid example of what branded content should look like: entertaining (that's a given), but tasteful and relevant, without too many shameless brand plugs. That's one way to keep your brand top-of-mind in the midst of the buzz around one of television's biggest events.

The Ice Bucket Challenge, otherwise known as the clicktivist rally?

For my first post I figured I'd jump right along the Ice Bucket challenge bandwagon and write about the social media buzz around the bid to raise funds and awareness for ALS, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Matt Lauer, Today Show host and ALS activist extraordinaire

Social media activism has long had painful memories of trying to fend off its reputation for encouraging clicktivism and faux philantrophic pride, and many still think it has little potential for actually benefitting any charitable cause. Just think Kony 2012, the viral Internet campaign that pledged to accelerate the arrest of African warlord Kony. 99 million views later and two years later, has it achieved anything more concrete than simply providing millennials with 30 minutes of emotionally-charged video entertainment?

TIME Magazine's touted Kony 2012 as the 'Most Viral Video' on YouTube, ever. So what does this all say? That Joseph Kony is now an internet celebrity (granted, a notorious one, but is there such thing as bad publicity?) and little progress has been made on halting the atrocities the LRA is committing in Africa.

Which brings me to back to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The onslaught of online slacktivism/clicktivism over the years has slowly eroded my inclination to show any support for any cause I see on social media (let me lay this out - I never did share the Kony 2012 video),  so at first I took no interest in watching a motley crew of celebrities and civilians dumping ice water over their heads. There are presently 2.4 million such videos on Facebook, and more than 28 million people engaging with these posts to give their stamp of approval.* Unsurprisingly, the epicenter of the buzz is the U.S, where the challenge first took shape a couple of months ago.

The big question is - can the this massive horde of users, so determined for their little stunt to make a difference to the research of a complicated and often misconceived disease, somehow find a way to monetize their compassion?

Turns out the virality of the video has indeed done its bit in raising awareness (top-of-mind, for sure) for ALS. Search terms containing the phrase ALS or 'Lou Gehrig's Disease' have both increased by more than 1,000%  each, which points to a definite hike in people's interest in finding out what the disease is. The ALS Association has pulled in more than $2.3 million for ALS research so far, which is an impressive tenfold increase from that they received during the same period last year.**

Even J Lo's done it!

Perhaps one of the reasons the ALS Ice Bucket challenge has been such a resounding success is that the element of gamification and peer pressure (i.e. the premise of the challenge is that everyone who takes it needs to rally their friends to take it on too, and donate to ALS research while you're at it) drove the exponential reach that caused it to eventually land up on literally everybody's Newsfeed. The never-ending celebrity endorsements didn't hurt either.

So I guess my point here is, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss every charitable campaign that goes viral on social media as a mere tool in giving armchair activists a quick philantrophic fix, to rack up karma points. Yes, sometimes all social media does is raise awareness that may or may not translate into actual action. But if you can create awareness on Facebook or Twitter, you've successfully broken down the first barrier to getting your charity campaign out the door. With a good hash tag, a viable idea for a sharable video and by laying down a strong call-to-action that social media communities can identify and act on, maybe clicktivism won't be so unproductive after all.

*http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/the-ice-bucket-challenge-on-facebook/
**http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/how-effective-ice-bucket-challenge-raising-als-awareness-159500