Social Media Promotions of the Week

Every Friday, the staff here at Social Media Frontiers choose the best marketing campaigns from the past week. The innovation, success and simplicity of each promotion is taken into account. Six of the best social media promotions are featured this week.

1. Christmas Carole
Company: Stella Artois



Stella’s new digital campaign hopes to return to the company’s heritage as a traditional Christmas beer. The campaign takes the form of a Facebook app, creatively called Christmas Carole.

With British actress Alice Eve as Carole, users can enter a friends name and address into the app and have Carole do the rest.

Marketing Manager for Stella Artois Uk, Phil Pick, said that: “Stella Artois was originally crafted for Christmas. In celebration, we’re excited to provide our fans with a unique Stella Artois experience that reflects our heritage and style . . . We think our fans will love this interactive Christmas greeting.”

Google And Twitter Revive Speak2Tweet Initiative To Help Syrians

The Speak2Tweet initiative has been revived by Google and Twitter who have joined efforts to aid Internet users in Syria who have had their Web access cut off.

The initiative was first used was Internet access was cut off in Egypt in February of 2011.

Speak2Tweet allows users to send messages to Twitter by phoning a hotline and saying what they wish to tweet.

Last year, the two companies explained that each call is automatically turned into a voicemail message and then a link to this message is tweeted from the @Speak2Tweet account.

Google+ Profiles Can Now Support Panoramio Photos

Panoramio users are now allowed to export their photos onto their Google+ profiles.

Google+ Local will also feature Panoramio pictures that are connected with particular places to add a more in-depth aspect and to add more visibility to the photos.

Gerald Sanz, Community Manager at Panoramio, says that: “sharing your photos in Google+ will be easier than ever as by uploading your photos in Panoramio, you will automatically upload your photos in Google+, so you can get the best of both worlds.”

“Two years ago, we launched a feature that allowed all Panoramio users to import their photos from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio so they could share them with the world via Google Maps and Google Earth.”

When exporting photos to Google+, users will be able to download security copies through via the Download your data link under the Google Accounts tab.

Will you be uploading your Panoramio pictures to your Google+ account?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.
 


Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

YouTube Updates Its Creator Playbook

YouTube has updated its Creator Playbook, an online guide on how to create a successful YouTube channel.

The new Playbook retains all the necessary information from its predecessors – how to create a channel, optimize your video output, and engage with the YouTube community – but the way the information is presented has changed: whereas the previous Playbook was a slide show, the current one has a tab format, allowing creators to easily navigate through the different sections.

YouTube released the first Creator Playbook in 2011, updating it earlier this year. The third and most recent version “includes brand new sections to address YouTube’s recent focus on watchtime,” says Audience Development Coordinator Lauren Vilders on the YouTube Creator blog, “such as, how to captivate your audience and how to create the best channel experience for your viewers.”

Facebook Can Now Send Your Christmas Cards For You

Starting Wednesday, you will be able to send custom Christmas cards to any one of your Facebook friends without knowing their address.

A British company that currently sends custom postcards, Touchnote, is offering the service with a new app interface which is available on iOS, Android, and the web.

The service lets you pick any holiday card image, allows you to add an Instagram style filter, type a message and select a Facebook friend to send it to.

Google+ Launches Blogger “Followers Gadget”

Bloggers can now connect their Google+ account to their blog, giving their readers the chance to follow them on Google+ and widening their potential audience.

Subscribing to the service provides users with a “Follow” button on their Blogger account and lists all their followers who are on Google+.

Visitors to the blog can also see the profile pictures of each other, giving them the opportunity to click on them, discover more about them and even ‘+1’ them.

“As a result,” of their update, says Google, “you can grow your readership across the web, and reach them either in the Google+ stream, or through your blog”.

Vimeo Launches New iPhone Application

Video sharing site Vimeo has released a new version of its iPhone application, what differentiates this one is that it has been created entirely by Vimeo staff.

Vimeo, one of YouTube’s main rivals, has released two iPhone applications before, but they have scrapped both in favour of designing a new one entirely from scratch.

Vimeo favours videos from independent artists and creators, and vice versa: a large number of indie filmmakers prefer Vimeo as their video sharing site of choice, having adopted the name “Vimeans”.

The original Vimeo iPhone application attempted to recreate Vimeo’s desktop interface on the mobile device, ending up over-complicated and cluttered. Vimeo’s new application has a simplified tab format, with easy navigation between channels.

YouTube Adds Six Languages To Their Automatic Captions

Google has announced that automatic captions on YouTube are now available in six additional European languages; French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian.

YouTube now covers a broad range of European languages since these options have been added.

Although the automatic captions are far from perfect, they are likely to improve over time.

The captioning feature was originally only available in English when the option was launched in 2009. The video sharing site also now supports Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Google says that “Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions.”

To choose the language that the captions are shown in, you have to select the closed caption button on a video that has this feature available to it.

YouTube say that they already offer about 200 million videos that come with automatic and human-created captions.

Do you use captions in YouTube videos?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.


Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Google Analytics Show Your Top Tweets With Campalyst

Campalyst, a tweet plugin by Google Analytics can help you find out which of your tweets generate the most traffic for your website, and from which users.

The plugin synthesizes very smoothly with Google Analytics which gives detailed information about your Twitter referral activity.

Although there is a free version of the plugin, it’s recommended that potential users of the service try out the Pro version. The free version gives data on ten tweets that have taken place within the past five days.

Twitter Fiction Festival Starts Today

Twitter has announced the 29 projects selected for the Twitter Fiction Festival.

The Twitter Fiction Festival, which starts today and finishes on Sunday, will put the 140-character format to the test, with the selected writers tasked with telling a compelling story in episodic tweets.

Twitter received numerous entries from over 20 different countries. The 29 projects selected were proposed by writers from 5 different continents and will be written in five different languages.

iTunes Gift Card Now Available Through Facebook Gifts

Facebook have announced another big-name partner to join their gift initiative, Apple’s iTunes. Users of Facebook can now give digital iTunes gift cards to friends using the Gifts service on the site.

As well as giving an iTunes Gift, users will have the ability to suggest artists, albums, songs, movies, and other things that are available on iTunes. The gift can come in denominations of $10, $15, $25, and $50.

Facebook have already announced other retail partners for their gift initiative. These include the likes of Brookstone, Random House, Lindt, Fab, Hulu Plus, and Pandora.

The gift service is slowly being distributed to Facebook users. As the iTunes partnership was announced, the social network seem to have rolled Gifts out to more and more users.

Gifts are already available to millions of American users and the site say that the service will continue to be given to more users in the coming weeks.

Do you think this is a good way of giving a gift?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.


Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Rutgers Combines Instagram with Google Street View

Google Street View can now be combined with Instagram images to liven up what could be considered a dull background, adding a human touch to the viewing.

Rutgers’ Social Media Information Lab, has just released The Beat. The Beat joins Instagram photos that have been geotagged with the location they are on a Google Street View.

As Google Street View is simply a camera placed on top of a car, the incorporation of Instragram photos can add an extra dimension to the experience.



People highlight interesting and exhilarating images with their Instagram photos, things such as food, other people, the skyline, etc. Another aspect we can relate to is time with pictures of events, sunsets, parades, holidays, and many more.

What do you make of the integration? Will you be using The Beat?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.


Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Tumblr Breaks Into Top 10 U.S. Networks List At No. 9

Tumblr have announced on their blog that after five years of blogging and content sharing they have broken into Quantcast's list of the top ten U.S. networks by size of audience.

“You guys have earned an audience bigger than the biggest TV networks,” wrote Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp in his address to Tumblr users, “and you continue to make some of the most thought provoking, insightful, inspiring, funny, diverse, and compelling content being created today”.

Twitter CEO Promises Tweet Archive By End Of 2012

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has promised that a system will be in place by the end of 2012 which allows users to download and save their tweets.

Over the last year, Twitter users have been clamouring for a service that allows them to download their favourite tweets. Having already affirmed back in September that Twitter will be introducing the feature, Costolo reiterated his promise at a recent talk sponsored by the Ford School of Public Policy and School of Information.

Facebook Messenger Now Available in Your Firefox Browser

You can now chat with your Facebook friends anywhere within Firefox without having to open Facebook itself.

A new Firefox feature allows Facebook Messenger to show up at the side of your browser window.

The integration allows users to see which of their friends are online and chat with them as you would from your Facebook profile, regardless of whether the website is open in your browser window or not.



This integration hopes to help keep you up to date with what’s happening on the social network without needing to constantly be changing between tabs to do so.

The new feature will also allow users to see their notifications when comments are made on posts and when they are tagged in a photo.

The new release is the first application of Mozilla’s new Social API and Facebook is the first to take advantage of the service.

The API now gives other social media platforms, such as Twitter and LinkedIn the chance to benefit from the feature as well.

To try out the new Firefox Facebook integration, download the most recent version of Firefox and then turn the feature on via Facebook.

What do you make of this new update? Do you think it will help?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.

 
Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

AIDS Awareness Twitter Campaign Unveiled by Belvedere

World AIDS Day on December 1st 2012 will be supported by vodka brand Belvedere and digital agency Essence as they hope to raise awareness for the cause.

Consumers are given the chance to win a case of vodka courtesy of Belvedere merely by tweeting a message that will help raise AIDS awareness accompanied with their office name in a hashtag. The campaign will give a case of Belvedere to the company with the most hashtags.

“AIDS is an issue that can and should be addressed by everyone. Through our Special Edition (RED) bottle, we at Belvedere are committed to raising awareness around this pressing issue.” Said the senior manager at Belvedere, Nick Ambridge.

U.S. Social Media Ad Revenues To Double By 2016

BIA/Kelsey, a leading media analysis and consultancy firm, forecasts that social media advertising revenue in the U.S. will grow from $4.6 billion to $9.2 billion in the next four years – that equates to a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%.

“The continued development of native ads, such as Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, and the acceleration of mobile monetization will be the primary drivers of social advertising growth through 2016”, said Jed Williams of BIA/Kelsey, adding that 2012 was the year of social advertising’s “coming of age”.

Yog Hopes to Connect Runners in Real Time

Yog, a new social running app, has been launched as a method of connecting runners around the world to get them running together in real time.

The app allows you to arrange a run and invite people from around the world to participate. Or, you could “Run Now” to join in with one of the many runs that other “yoggers” may be doing at that very moment.

Audio notifications and a social running map aim to make the experience feel like you are right alongside other runners during the exercise.

New Nokia Asha Models Feature Facebook Button

Nokia is about to release two models of the low cost Asha, the 205 and the 205 Dual-SIM, with a Facebook button integrated into the qwerty keyboard.

Most of Nokia’s recent advertising has been focused on promoting the Microsoft-powered Lumia range, but the cheaper Asha range is actually far more successful: 2.9 million Lumia phones were sold in Nokia’s fiscal third quarter, compared to 6.5 million touch screen Asha phones.

Social Media Promotions of the Week: 23/11/2012

Every Friday, the staff here at Social Media Frontiers chose the best marketing campaigns from the past week. The innovation, success and simplicity of each promotion is taken into account. This week the five best social media promotions that stood out from the crowd are as follows:

1. Do The Mobot
Company: Mo Farah Foundation



Double Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah and Virgin Media have teamed up in the hope to raise £100,000 for the Mo Farah Foundation by getting people to ‘Do The Mobot’.

An instruction video has been put onto YouTube to explain the steps and urge people to upload videos of themselves for the chance to appear in the music video which will be released in December.

Virgin Media will donate £2 (to represent Farah’s two gold medals) to the charity for every video that is uploaded as the campaign is supported by a social media impetus using a #dothemobot hashtag.
 

YouTube App Now Live on Nintendo Wii U

YouTube have joined Netflix, Hulu and Amazon by launching an app for the Nintendo Wii U console.

The video sharing site have launched the app that will give users the ability to search for videos, watch them and get additional information on their GamePads.

Users will be able to watch videos in up to 1080p with further details available to bring up on the GamePad’s screen. it also allows users to search for videos and browse other subscribed channels.

The new console is planned to go on sale in Europe and Australia on the 30th of November, and Japan on the 8th of December.

The YouTube app can be downloaded from the Nintendo Wii U main menu.

Will you be buying the Wii U?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.
 

Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Google Encourages Public To “Take Action” Over UN’s Proposed Ownership Of World Wide Web

Internet giant Google is urging people around the world to protest against the International Telecommunication Union’s proposed internet regulations.

Recently, news of a global summit was leaked onto the internet, where government leaders would debate over the possibility of regulating, and thereby censoring, the internet in certain countries.

Facebook Proposes Changes To User Voting Policy

Facebook has announced that it is considering changing its user voting policy on future changes to site governance.

Currently, Facebook informs users of proposed policy changes by email. If the change is commented on 7,000 times then Facebook opens the topic up to a user vote.

However, on two prior occasions users have abused the system, which was started in 2009, by copy and pasting the same comment over and over again. On both occasions, a fraction of the amount of users required to stop the policy change voted.

Instagram Rolls Out Profile Badges

Photo sharing site Instagram have just launched “Instagram Badges” as an easy way to help users promote their profiles across the internet.

The badges are similar to the buttons and badges shown on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and will link people from other sites to your Instagram profile page.

The badges aim to help brands and users to endorse their official profiles with fans and followers across the web. Now that users can follow other people’s profiles online, this update may increase social traffic.

Facebook is Launching a “Social Calling” Service

Facebook are joining up with Orange network to provide a “social calling” service which will allow friends to call one another without knowing each other’s numbers.

French carrier Orange have announced that they will offer “Party Call” which will be available on both desktop and mobile versions of Facebook. Users will be able to call one another and make “group calls” using Facebook connections without having to know their mobile numbers to do so.

The “Party Call” feature was described by Orange as: “A partnership with Facebook, to introduce more communication tools into social networks, with a first public teleconference service coming in summer 2013.”

Foursquare Adds “Recently Opened” Filter To Explore Tab

A new update to the Explore tab on Foursquare, which allows users to find recently opened venues, was introduced onto desktop devices on Monday and mobile devices yesterday.

On their blog, Foursquare encourages users to discover something new in their neighbourhood with the “Recently Opened” filter, then post about their discoveries on the site.

The check-in and exploration-based social platform also launched an easily accessible business guide yesterday, which helps companies new to Foursquare get the best out of its features.

Pinterest’s “30 Days Of Pinspiration” Advent Calender

This holiday season, Pinterest is offering its users “30 Days of Pinspiration”: an advent calender which, every day or so, reveals an advisory holiday board created by a brand, company or celebrity.



Obviously, if the advent calendar were to open every day, the unveiling would end well before Christmas, so Pinterest has chosen to extend the 30 day calendar until January 4th by missing out certain dates.

Facebook Feature Shows Views Can Be More Important Than Clicks

New statistics show that the impression of an advertisement is probably more valuable than the click.

Facebook’s view tag feature allows advertisers to track users who view their advertisements but not actually click on them. The feature reports that in one example, 87% of conversions came from impressions, rather than clicks.

The ‘View Tag’ program was initially distributed privately, but Facebook progressively allowed more advertisers to take advantage of the feature.

Earlier in the year, Facebook joined forces with DataLogix to find how often someone purchased a product having seen an ad for it on the site.

With view tags, businesses can see which of their ads has led to a purchase whether the user clicked on the link or not.

SocialCode started a campaign for companies looking to get people to redeem offers through Facebook. They reported that 5,127 out of 5,924 people had seen their ad and had redeemed. 797 people clicked through to the offer via the ad.

Another company, Kenshoo, revealed that view tags showed that 34.6% of conversions came from impressions where users didn’t click the ad. These conversions generated more than $31,000. This was 29% of the campaign’s revenue as a whole.

Have you been using view tags?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.
 

Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Amazon Releases Brand Pages, Analytics And Posts

Amazon have introduced a new social marketing service called ‘Amazon Pages’, which provides registered retailers with a brand page independent from Amazon’s parent site.



Registration for the service is free, but applicants must first be approved by Amazon before they are allocated a page. If successful, the company or individual is given a unique URL for their brand page, following the format www.amazon.com/‘brandname’.

Companies can then customise their brand page with the choice of three different templates, each featuring image embedding options, Facebook and Twitter buttons, and “merchandising widgets” linking the page to specific products on Amazon.

Facebook Testing New Events and Recent Albums Feature

Facebook is testing two new features to appear in it’s News Feed. An Upcoming Events and a Recently Released Albums feature.

All Facebook report that the Upcoming Events feature builds on the ‘Upcoming Concerts’ trial that was discovered last month. It will list nearby events regardless of whether you were invited to them or not.



By hovering over the question mark in the top-right-hand corner of the page as shown in the image above, the module explains that these are “Suggestions based on what’s happening nearby.” This already shows up in the calendar feature but now also appears in the News Feed.

The other feature will specify one recently released album by a particular artist that a user has listened to on Spotify, or theoretically other music services linked to Facebook. Users can then click on the link (as shown on the left) to stream the album through Spotify or other services.

These new features show that the social platform is experimenting with stories on the News Feed that do not directly come from friends, Pages that you follow, or Sponsored ads. These features are similar to the trending articles and videos that we have seen in the past.

What do you make of these new features that Facebook could be introducing? Do you think they will be useful?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter.


Daniel Barr

Follow us @SocialMediaF & @DanielAtSMF

www.socialmediafrontiers.com

Twitter Giving Away Free Advertising Worth $1 Million

Twitter have announced that, this Small Business Saturday, it will reward 10,000 businesses with $100 worth of free advertising each.



The first 10,000 eligible small businesses that apply will receive up to $100 worth of credits to purchase Promoted Trends and Accounts.

Twitter are hoping to build on the success they had with a similar promotion they ran in partnership with American Express last February, which led to thousands of small businesses setting up Twitter accounts.

Photo-Syncing Now Available on Facebook iOS App

A number of Facebook users now have the ability to automatically sync their iPhone photos in to a private album on the social media platform.

Photo syncing allows users to save photos from their phone to the cloud and makes these photos easier to share on Facebook.

Google has had a similar option available for Android and Google+ called ‘Instant Upload’ since the launch of their own social network site in 2011.

Facebook reproduced the feature on Android earlier this year but has not offered the service on Apple’s iOS operating system until now, possibly due to development challenges or because users may be less familiar with the option.

Literature? No, Lit-Twitter! Twitter Fiction Festival Starts 28th November!

The first ever Twitter Fiction Festival will commence on the 28th November and run for five days.



Flash fiction has been published on Twitter before: Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” was serialised on the site in May, before it was featured in The New Yorker, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author publishing the story at a rate of one Tweet a minute.

ModCloth Sets Up Pinterest-Inspired Style Gallery

Retro online retailer ModCloth has set up an on-site ‘Style Gallery’, where fans of the brand can post pictures of themselves wearing the latest ModCloth clothing.

Visually, the Style Gallery closely resembles Pinterest, consisting of three columns of photos over a plain background, with users having to scroll down on order to view more images.

Link Your Google+ Page With Your YouTube Page

Users will soon be able to link their YouTube page to their Google+ page using a channel name as your Google identity.

Google have been allowing YouTube users to use their Google+ profiles on their YouTube channels for months, using their real names rather than old YouTube account names.

They will continue to develop new engagement features that can take the best of both worlds from YouTube and Google+.

New SkinnyScoop Social Media Platform Adds Conversation to Pinterest-Style Recommendations

New social media site SkinnyScoop aims to combine the goal setting and daydreaming agenda of Pinterest, and turn these dreams into a reality.

The site that was launched in San Francisco targets women, and specifically mothers to combine the eccentric nature of Pinterest with the reality of a one-on-one friendly conversation.

Women can create lists similar to Pinterest boards, but will also be able to contribute to discussions with other users as well as following their accounts. Once you have signed up via Facebook Login or with an email account, SkinnyScoop offers pre-sorted lists such as “TV Shows I Watch” and “My Favourite Chick Flicks”, as well as the option to create custom lists.

Wordpress Now Accept Bitcoin Payment

Home to 57 million blogs worldwide, Wordpress are the latest company to begin utilising the digital currency, Bitcoin. As a way of paying for features on their site such as blog upgrades and custom designs, Bitcoin can help those unable to use other payment options.

Wordpress.com is a free blogging service built on Wordpress’ open source software. The currency will provide a payment option in places and countries where more mainstream methods of payment may not be available.

A news release from Wordpress.com said that due to many reasons, a lot of users have restricted access to all of the site’s features.

“We don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.”

Facebook Develops Conversion Measurement Tool, Stock Prices Rise

At the end of last week, Facebook released a conversion measurement tool for direct response marketers, allowing them to analyse their Facebook advert’s conversion rates.



Facebook have been providing a similar service to top advertisers on the site for the last year, but now a new version has been made available on their self-service ad platform.

With the tool, which is targeted towards online retailers who want immediate sales rather than publicity, marketers can code software to measure conversions on their website.

Social Media Promotions Of The Week

Every Friday, the staff here at Social Media Frontiers chose the best marketing campaigns from the past week. The innovation, success and simplicity of each promotion is taken into account. This week there were five social media promotions that stood out from the crowd.

1. Fenton Remastered

Company: 4GEE



One of the most popular viral videos of the last year featured Fenton the dog chasing a herd of deer while his frustrated owner tailed behind.

British telecom company EE remastered the video so that instead of a herd of deer, Fenton was chasing a herd of deer, gazelle, elephants, big cats, rodents and even a tyrannosaurus rex.

The innovative advert has over 160,000 views on YouTube.

Facebook Announces New Gift Options

Last night, Facebook announced the addition of hundreds of products to the Gifts application.



Facebook released the Gifts app earlier this month, which allows users to send a real life present to a friend with an upcoming birthday.

Sharing Tweets to Become Available Via Email

Soon you will be able to share your tweets via email, directly from your Twitter account. Already available on the mobile app, you will be able to send a tweet from your Twitter stream to anyone whether the recipient is a Twitter user or not.

As well as sending the tweet to a friend, you can also choose to add a personal comment to accompany it. The comment will be sent in the body of the email rather than on Twitter. This will able users to comment about a tweet without these comments going public.

A Twitter blog post said: “Of course, you can retweet any of these (posts) to your Twitter followers, but sometimes you want to share with another group, like your college roommates or your parents or a friend who isn’t yet on Twitter.”

Twitter Update App to Enhance Search and Discover

Twitter have updated their iOS and Android apps to enhance functionality particularly in the Search and Discover areas.

You can now preview article summaries and photos in the Search and Discover without having to tap on those stories to do so.

Mirroring the desktop version, the Discover option on mobiles will now let you discover popular tweets. The ‘View all Tweets’ button will show a stream of news, photos, and stories that have been shared by the people in your network.