Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board that lets you categorize and organize all of the images you find online, is the newest social network to take the market by storm. The appeal of its design and usability has everyone talking, with 11.7 million unique monthly visitors and a growth of over 4000% in the last 6 months.
What’s even more intriguing, people aren’t just taking a quick look and leaving; the average visitis 72 minutes – Facebook is about 16. The reason Pinterest is making such a big impact – lots and lots of pretty pictures. Basically, it’s a visual wish list on display for the world. Pinterest’s platform promotes unobtrusive consumer driven “advertising,” which leads to sales (duh).
What does Pinterest gain from the process; they have to make something, right?
Initially, Pinterest tested out affiliate links to generate revenue. Last week it was announced that Pinterest decided to part ways with (Skimlinks), which is most likely in response to recent scrutiny. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermannindicated: “The use of Skimlinks was a test, not a business plan. Making money isn’t our top priority right now,” we are more focused on growth.Currently, the company relies on outside investments from entrepreneurial and venture capitalists. Our guess is that Pinterest will continue to run “tests” until they figure out the right avenue: one that keeps users happy while simultaneously making money.
Although Pinterest is playing around with things internally, the potential for your business or brand remains the same. Here is a short breakdown of what your brand gets from Pinterest and why you should have a presence:
Brand Exposure
Every “Pin,” “Repin,” and “Like” is shared across its particular category as well as the network of the user who “Pinned” the image.
Product Discovery
Pinterest allows users to find products before they even knew they wanted or needed them.
Increase SEO
You can place a price tag on your pins and link to your site, when you do this you’re creating important “back links” that pull people to your site. All pins link back to their source site, but pins with a price highlight that you’re selling the product.
Brand Advocacy
As the images from your boards or website are shared throughout the Pinterest network, users are sharing their support for your product, service and brand with their personal network.
Mimosa [mi · mo · sa] – A cocktail-like drink composed of one part champagne and one part thoroughly chilled orange juice. It is traditionally served in a tall champagne flute with a morning brunch as hair of the dog or to guests at a wedding…or of course, Rational Fridays!
It’s all about Harry Potter in the studio today. Check out the handmade t-shirts. Jose wins the award for best dressed. And for the fact that he rode the bus in costume, carrying a monitor.
Spending the last decade immersed in the Harry Potter craze, these three will be seeing the finale in its entirety late tonight. Looks like we’ll be getting quad-shot lattes in the morning…
These three all came to work this morning in costume for the finale tonight. You’ve just got to love them for it.
From whale-watching boat rides to pole dancing lessons, daily deal giant Groupon has made quite the footprint on global consumerism since its launch in 2008. Now at an estimated net-worth of 15 billion and counting, Groupon is featured in more than 500 markets and 44 countries. It didn’t take long for Groupon look-a-likes to tap into the daily deal pool; there are now hundreds of Groupon clones of all flavors flooding the scene. Even world-renowned Google wanted in, offering 6 billion for the ownership of Groupon—only to find rejection. And Google did as Google does, moved on to bigger and better things—Google Offers. Launched this month exclusively in Portland, this Groupon-esque service has proven itself popular. Google Offers’ first guinea pig, Floyd’s Coffee Shop, experienced quite a ‘jaw dropping’ response. Within minutes of the deal going live, customers were in the shop to redeem the–$3 for $10 worth of drinks and food–offer.
With this daily deal hoopla has come its skeptics. Groupon was originally created to give local businesses further exposure and to get new customers in the door, ideally resulting in a loyal customer base. Many people believe that, as Groupon struck gold, the once-humble business has grown a greater interest for its own profit. And the effect has landed directly on small businesses. Groupon’s rapid success has attracted attention from big-boy brands such as the Gap. Because Groupon acquires a slice of dough for each daily deal purchased, it would only be in Groupon’s best interest to sell more daily deals—at qualities and/or prices that are infeasible for smaller-scale businesses. It’s as if Groupon is becoming the “Walmart” of the online demand generation.
Many would agree that the local angle is what originally made Groupon so appealing. Now that it appears to be shifting focus away from local business owners to larger corporations, some consumers are turning away: “I think that if Groupon just keeps opting for the big nationals they’ll lose users. I don’t need Gap coupons. Heck, I get plenty of coupon spam already,” says one Groupon user. Most daily deal sites, however, are listening to these negative reactions. Google has been attentive to small businesses throughout its launch of Google Offers—Floyd’s coffee shop is after all a locally owned small business. And Groupon, for instance, has created the “Groupon Now” application where a user can open the smartphone app and be presented with two options: “I’m hungry,” or “I’m bored.” Clicking either button will prompt a list of time-specific daily deals, according to his or her location.
Even with the addition of these fancy bells and whistles, some still aren’t sold. Marketing professor at Rice University’s business school, and author of a recent Groupon study states, “The sites offer great deals to the consumers at the expense of the small businesses.” His study concluded that 32 percent of businesses found their Groupon promotion unprofitable, and a whopping 40 percent of his respondents said they would not repeat the promotion. Clearly many businesses that promote themselves on these sites do so at a loss, justifying their unsuccessful promotions by calling them, “marketing investments.”
So what if daily deal sites steered away from large corporations, remained loyal to small businesses, and found ways to become more profitable for the little guys? That might not cut it either. While it’s impressive that businesses have found a new way to gain customers during a dark recession, there seems to be little discussion about potential long-term effects. Some speculate that the “Achilles’ heel” of the daily deal concept will inevitably lead to its destruction. That is, essentially training consumers to be cherry-pickers as opposed to loyal customers. Once a consumer buys a product or service at half off, paying full price suddenly becomes superfluous. So instead of customers sticking to their preferred retailers they hunt for the better deal, creating a cherry-picking epidemic.
“It’s like dynamite,” says Jay Goltz, a Chicago business owner and blogger for The New York Times. “It’s a great invention, but it could blow up your house,” he adds. “I wouldn’t predict the end of the bulletin board.”
You’ve probably seen the latest Best Buy commercial, “outdated world.” The ad shows clips of peoples’ frustration when they find that their brand new “high tech” gadgets are considered outdated.
The truth is, these things wouldn’t sell if they weren’t a step above the previous product. It seems the time increments between new technologies are becoming progressively shorter—along with our attention spans. While this is a ubiquitous trend across many industries today; it is exceptionally noticeable in the realm of technology.
This phenomenon isn’t necessarily counterproductive or harmful, but it does imply side effects on consumers that growing businesses cannot ignore. It’s almost as if today’s average consumer mirrors the behavior of a superbug. Bear with me. If it’s been a minute since your last 7th grade science class, here’s some review: A superbug is essentially a bacterium that develops several resistance genes through genetic mutation, in turn causing antibiotic resistance. As resistance becomes more widespread there becomes a greater need for more advanced treatment. Sound familiar? This superbug concept parallels behavioral trends in technological consumerism. The superbug being the consumers and antibiotics being innovations: in order to satisfy the consumers’ needs, the innovations must be that much more advanced, that much more creative, convenient, and/or efficient. With every “one-up” comes greater expectations from consumers.
In order to stay in the game most businesses will follow suit, adopting the “one-up” concept that had been pioneered by another company (whether it’s a new device, software, strategy, design etc). While initially ground-breaking, that original concept inevitably becomes standard, expected, and even boring.
Let me give you an example that almost everyone can relate to. Name a grocery store that does not have an “advantage” card from which customers receive discounts or points. I can’t. One grocery chain initiated the advantage card concept, and others have followed suit. We now find ourselves shuffling through our ridiculous collection of “advantage” cards at the register for a mere thirty cent discount on a gallon of milk.
This phenomenon partially explains why you cannot measure success by how many fans your Facebook page has. Much like a grocery store advantage card, having a Facebook page for your brand has become standard. The average Facebook user is connected to 80 community pages, groups, and/or events (http://www.Facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). In some cases, users will “like” a page only to later ignore updates and news feeds—I’ve done it. The second I see a long company-promoting blurb accompanied by a profile picture or logo, it’s an automatic switch off. My attention is immediately on to the next news feed.
How can we battle this? I have three solid recommendations.
1. Think out of the box—for real this time.
By this I mean go beyond the Facebook routines you’re used to. Think of how the Facebook platform can be manipulated to specifically fit your brand. Axe’s recent “multiple girlfriend” app illustrates this perfectly. It allows fans to change their relationship status—Axe style. Instead of, “John M. is in a relationship with Ashley,” the relationship status reads, “John M. is in a relationship with Ashley and 268 other girls.” This is effective on many levels. First, people don’t initially recognize that it’s marketing a brand. All they know is that their buddy John has a pimp relationship status, and they want one too. Secondly, you’ve made your fans look cool and in-the-know. They stand out because of your app—your brand has raised their baller-factor, if you will. And finally, you’ve put your mark directly on your fan’s profile. Instead of quick news update that’ll be buried within a few minutes, this will potentially remain on their profile for a long time. Can we say viral?
2. Keep updated with new Facebook features.
This is a no-brainer but certainly crucial. Keep your brand up-to-date with all new features. Facebook recently added capabilities to tag pages in photos. In other words, a photo with your brand in it can be tagged and one click will lead directly to your page. They may be small updates, but they count.
3. Be truly beneficial to your fans—what’s in it for them, really?
Sure special Facebook discounts and coupons are great, but they’re also standard. I’m talking about making the fans feel good about themselves. Whether one dollar is donated to a nonprofit for every photo with your brand tagged, or making Axe fans look like high-profile players, fans are cooler by associating themselves with your brand. This association is powerful, as it creates emotional investment in your brand…much better than printing off a 20% off coupon for a purchase of $50 or more that expires at the end of the month.
So the next time your brand is struggling to emerge from the pack, remember the superbug concept. In an ever-changing, ever-competitive world it’s a constant fight to the top. Tattoo these three suggestions to the back of your hand, or alternatively, keep them in the back of your mind. You’ll need them.
There are some misconceptions about what HTML 5 is and what it can do. I’m here to clarify and inform you of some of the neat little things that are available to us through the currently-in-progress update to HTML. I say “in progress” because it literally is still being developed and is not entirely final. That being said, it doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t–or shouldn’t–start using some of the new features laid out for us. A good majority of browsers already support the current spec and there are ways around the ones that don’t.
To start us off, for some of the new people out there, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is the standard for presenting and structuring web content. It does this through the use of tags. Tags generally are semantically named based on the content they are enclosing. For instance, “<form> </form>” would encapsulate “<input />” in which the user could ‘input’ their email address or password. Or for another example, “<button>Click Me!</button>” would show a button with the text “Click Me!”. We also have the ability to insert videos and audio using the <embed> tag, but this will generally require the user to have the necessary plug-in, such as Flash, installed. Now this is all well and good, but as the web becomes engrossed with more innovative websites and browsers become more robust, the need arises for more tags and features. We also should have the ability to embed elements and have them run natively (without plug-ins) in our browser. This is where HTML 5 comes in.
As stated previously, HTML 5 is the latest update to the HTML specification and it encompasses lots of new semantic tags as well as many different features and benefits. HTML 5 is not some magic panacea, though. I’ve heard people “Ooh” and “Ahh” over neat websites that use fancy JavaScript and say “That must be HTML 5!” Really though, HTML 5 is not a single entity that you just start using all at once. It is a collection of features that you can pick and choose from. In fact, a lot of the new features are not even supported in a few not-so-modern browsers. Does this mean you should wait until the lagging parties catch up to start using the cool, new stuff? Well, as I said before, HTML 5 is not a cure for a terrible website, so you shouldn’t think using it will solve all your problems. Truly, most of HTML 5 is already being used on your existing website anyway. This is because HTML 5 is just an update to an already very old, tried and true, HTML specification.
“So what’s the big deal then?” Well, HTML 5 is all about making things simple and easier to understand. When it comes to tags, there are many new and useful semantic tags to dig your keyboards into. The HTML 4 way of creating a layout for a page was to create many arbitrary <div> tags and assign them an id or class. Some examples are: “<div id=’navigation’></div>”, or “<div id=’header’></div>”. With HTML 5 we have a much simpler way. Similar to how the <form> tag specifies form content, we now have tags such as <header>, <nav>, <article>, and <section>. There are many more of these new tags, but that should give you an idea of the usefulness that comes with them. Along with new structural tags, we also have new multimedia tags such as <audio> and <video> which allows you to embed audio and video natively in the browser without the use of any plug-ins or APIs such as Flash or Silverlight. HTML 5 also brings us other cool things like a geolocation API in which you can use to access the user’s position on the globe. (With their permission, of course)
“All this stuff is cool, but I can’t use it unless all browsers support it, right?” Well, actually the structural tags in HTML 5 are almost completely backwards compatible with HTML 4. For any of the advanced, spiffy things like embedded video, audio or geolocation, you can implement detection libraries that will let your code know if the current browser supports it, and subsequently enable or disable those specific features accordingly.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that the new tags and features that come with HTML 5 are ready to be put to use and played with. Even if you’re not going to be putting them to use in a production level site, you might as well get acquainted with them because they won’t be leaving anytime soon.
Anyway, I hope I’ve shed some new light on this buzzword that’s been flying around the Internet. For some of you, I may have just made it worse. Either way, I hope I got you excited to learn more, because I have hardly scratched the surface in terms of all the newly available cool things you have at your disposal.
If you want to read more, there are plenty of in-depth resources that you can dig your hands into. Here are some sites that I’ve found most useful:
More and more users are connecting to the Internet through their Smartphone and a plethora of embedded mobile devices. While many businesses are still adapting their internet strategies, millions of users are going mobile every day. These days having a mere internet strategy just does not cut it. Mobile is the future and it is happening now. Do you have a Mobile Internet strategy?
It is very easy to buy into the current trend of rich user experiences using mobile applications. Everyone wants their own cool iPhone, Android, or WP7 mobile application, but it is neither viable nor cost effective for every business model. Here are just two things to think about when making the decision between trying to be relevant with a Mobile App and grabbing consumer mind share by building your Mobile Web presence.
Don’t just follow the trend for the sake of it. Mobile Apps are what’s in, but that does not mean it fits within YOUR mobile internet strategy. More often than not the mobile app route is chosen for the wrong reasons. Mobile apps should be utilized in situations involving lots of transactions and the exchange of large amounts of data. Does this sound like what you need? Many mobile web users are still using mobile sites as only a means of getting info like addresses and phone numbers. Creating a rich user experience may just be wasted effort, but more importantly wasted company dollars. Users want movies times and may not care about watching movie trailers. The biggest battle is going to be between how to stay relevant while remaining accessible to the broadest audience possible. The key to gaining consumer mind share is being accessible, and that will be achieved by creating a Mobile Optimized Web Presence.
It is important to have a Mobile Optimized Web Presence and User Experience, because everyone believes that their web site will perform the same on their mobile devices as on their PCs. Even with advancements in mobile device hardware and intelligence hence the smart phone, the caveat to this logic will be longer site load times. Many sites have gone ballistic with flash and rich media content. Without a separate mobile optimized user experience you will risk losing consumer mind share as more users go mobile with their internet surfing. Also as more users go mobile, creating a mobile optimized web presence will continue to give you visibility on search engines. This is because many users still rely heavily on search engines as the primary method of grabbing information from the web. Imagine users seeing your site pop up on Google, but then opt to go to the competitor because of your site load times. It will be a social circle nightmare. Soon, even being relevant won’t bring you back to life. Cool apps won’t be relevant without the proper amount of consumer mind share to be hypnotized by the app’s sleek and sexy appeal.
My opinion, you ask? Being relevant does not matter if you have an audience of two. A robust mobile strategy will first seek out consumer mind share through a pleasing Mobile Presence which will continue to be enhanced with a sleek and flashy user experience to keep their short attention spans. Be relevant but make sure you know the size of your audience. Otherwise you might find that you are throwing dollars out to capture an audience of two.
You’ve heard the buzz about social media. You’ve decided that since everyone else is doing it, you should too. You have a brand new Facebook fan page, and are ready to sit back and watch the fans come running in. Right? Wrong!
Social media is all about involvement and connectivity. The brands with the most active fans are the brands with the most active and highly thought-out campaigns. What better way to show a brand’s willingness to interact with its audience than to seek out fans (or non fans) who post comments about the brand on Twitter? That is the premise for the series of commercials done by Wheat Thins, in which a mobile squad by the name of @CrunchisCalling surprises fans who have Tweeted about Wheat Thins. A woman lamenting her lack of Wheat Thins is surprised with an entire palette; a man named Tim is given the solution to his problem: crunch-proof headphones; and someone who thinks the commercials are a fake is turned into a believer, as you can see at http://www.nabiscoworld.com/wheatthins/index.html. In this way, fans are now Tweeting about Wheat Thins in the hopes that they will receive a visit from the Crunch is Calling and Wheat Thins have never been the subject of so many updates.
Other ways to generate active audience involvement is through user-generated content, contests, or good-natured rivalry fan pages (think college Facebook group challenges like “I bet UW can get 100,000 fans before WSU.”) The Doritos contest for the best fan generated commercial was a huge success with the winning commercial being aired in a coveted slot in the Superbowl, and created a huge amount of participation from fans with the brand. All of these examples allow the audience to take a more active role and thus feel a greater connection to the brand.
Another great way to have a viral campaign is to create customized content for the audience. The Discovery Channel did an excellent job with their personalized Shark Week campaign, Frenzied Waters:
Frenzied Waters created buzz for a week long video series of famous shark attacks. The “frenzy” was started when several well-known bloggers around the country received capsules with artifacts from their own personal shark attacks, including clothing and obituaries. Naturally, the bloggers shared their strange packages on their blogs, which drove large numbers of followers to check out the Frenzied Waters site for themselves, and, with the use of Facebook Connect, be the star of their own shark attacks. Facebook Connect allowed Frenzied Waters to compile photos and profile information that was incorporated to create an eerily personal attack for the site visitor.
From delivering a mid-afternoon snack craving to putting your audience right in the action, social media can be used to create active and engaging campaigns for your fans. Still growing your fan base? These tips can help:
Have a plan. Creating a fan page is not enough to maintain a fan’s interest. Put thought into integrating social media with current company campaigns and make sure to maintain your brand image.
Start a blog. This will help you grow your audience and contacts, as well as allow your contacts to interact with each other.
Follow other blogs. Get out there! The more you interact with others, the more opportunities to connect.
Be Linkedin. Connecting to other professionals is important, as well as recommending clients (remember, recommendations work both ways!)
Update content and post regularly. Fans know when they are being neglected.
That said, keep posts and updates relevant. Remember quality, not quantity.
Have a solid site. Utilizing social media will direct more people to view your site; make sure it is ready for the added scrutiny and represents your company authentically.
Avoid gimmicks and spamming. You will lose your credibility and your following.
Allow comments. Positive feedback is always welcome, and negative feedback can be constructive and allow you to evaluate public perception of your brand.
Thank visitors for their comments. They invest time in your brand, you invest in building relationships and maintaining brand loyalty.
You now have your Facebook fan page, some helpful tips, and a burning motivation to create the next viral social media campaign. The only question that remains: what will you do next?
Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board that lets you categorize and organize all of the images you find online, is the newest social network to take the market by storm. The appeal of its design and usability has everyone talking, with 11.7 million unique monthly visitors and a growth of over 4000% in the last 6 months.
