New stuff from me elsewhere

I’m a couple weeks late in pointing to some stuff that I wrote for both PN and Voce.

For Voce Nation there’s this post about how various companies are working to corner the “save for later” market with apps and tools designed to let you save things to read at a later time when you presumably have more time.

For PN I provided a POV on how the SEC has clarified how companies can use social media for material disclosure or other forward-looking financial statements. The long and short of it is there are still a lot of concerns to keep in mind but that it is possible if you adhere to some basic rules of the road.

Go read both. Now.

Brands need to exercise caution when it comes to social issues

Josh Sternberg has an interesting story at Digiday asking whether it makes sense for brands to make some sort of statement about social issues.

There are two questions in play here: First, should a company have a position on these issues in the first place; Second, should that position be used as part of the company’s marketing, even in such a simple way as changing their social network avatar to show solidarity with a particular cause or point of view.

The core problem here is that no matter what side a company might choose they’re going to offend a subset of their customers. And the side that’s chosen might change over time as new CEOs, new owners and other management shifts happen. Personally I would advise a client to remain neutral on this sort of thing since the potential for it to blow up in their faces is just too high. Go too liberal and more conservative fans are offended. Go too conservative and the opposite is true.

While I’m certainly not an advocate of “everyone has their own truth so let’s just hug it out” I do think that the basic rules of meeting your girlfriend’s parents apply here: Don’t talk about sex, politics or religion.

Storify expands its feature set

I’m super-interested in Storify’s announcement of a VIP level of service that brings with it lots of cool features.

While the basic product will remain free, VIP will give publishers access to advanced tools, including the ability to customize the display of their stories and more. Most interesting to me, though, is that publishers can use it as a live-blogging platform. That could make Storify a very cool alternative to products like CoverItLive and others. The way publishers can embed their Storify stories on-domain and pull in audience comments, photos and videos gives this the potential to be pretty exciting and a new and innovative way to provide live feeds in a curated manner that’s cleaner – and less intrusive – that if you’re pushing all that to Twitter.

The Wolverine gets teased on Vine

I’m obviously a week or so late to this, but I can’t let the fact that 20th Century Fox became essentially the first movie studio to use Vine, an app so new it still has that smell, for movie marketing purposes, teasing the eventual release of a trailer for The Wolverine.

It’s a pretty cool implementation and seemed, most importantly, to do the job of whetting people’s appetite for the full trailer, which was released two or three days down the road. I’d be interested to know how Fox got the video assets into Vine since that doesn’t seem to be part of its native functionality, but it’s possible I’m missing something.

Regardless, it’s good to see movie studios among the early adopters of this new social tool, which has to date been primarily used by brands for the creation of funny little looping images of their products suddenly sprouting mustaches or something like that. While I still think movie-specific social profiles are the wrong strategy, this sort of innovative use is hard to argue with in principle.

The hashtag has evolved beyond Twitter

At a recent event a Twitter VP made the case for that platform still being the primary home of the hashtag, despite the fact that it’s also in use on other networks like Instagram and Google+. And Facebook just non-announced it is looking to bring hashtags to that platform in an effort to bring some immediacy there.

While my own thinking on the use of hashtags on status networks has evolved over the years from “never, ever, ever” to “I get where they’re useful for specific things, though most people still don’t understand them and therefore have a tendency toward overuse” it’s obvious that they are becoming more and more mainstream. A plethora of companies, whether they’re consumer-packaged goods manufacturers, movie studios, TV networks or just about anything else have seen their value as rallying points for audience conversations. So you see them in Super Bowl ads, in movie trailers, as additional “bugs” in the corner of your screen as you’re watching “New Girl” and elsewhere.

But what’s lacking is a consisten experience, and the widespread adoption of hashtags by multiple platforms could actually do more to dissuade companies from making them part of their marketing efforts. After all, if it’s not clear what experience I as a marketer am asking the audience to participate in then I’m less likely to make that ask. Let’s think this out:

I, watching TV, see a moment on X show that I’d like to discuss with my friend. Since the producers have helpfully suggested a hashtag to use in that discussion I go over to Twitter and do so. But while there is other conversation happening I don’t see any of my friends doing so. That’s because they’re over on Facebook talking about it. I missed out on an opportunity because the hashtag is now universal currency and in this case the call to action didn’t include “Discuss on Y platform” specificity.

I’ll admit that’s a bit of a straw man argument. But I don’t think that makes it any less likely. There are two ways to avoid this fate that come to mind:

1) An open hashtag standard. Yes, this might sound ridiculous. But the best possible user experience is that for clicking on a linked hashtag to take them to a central repository of updates on that topic that is platform-agnostic, pulling from everywhere to present the entire conversation regardless of where it’s taking place. This…is not likely.

2) An emphasis toward on-domain aggregation. So as a follow-up to the initial call to action to use a particular hashtag in the first place there’s another one telling people to head to moviestudio.com/#hashtag to view the entire conversation. This is more likely, though considering the advertising-centric motives behind hashtag adoption by status networks it’s not going to be their favorite option.

Interestingly, a service like Storify could be well positioned to take advantage of either scenario. It’s great at aggregation across networks and the “Stories” that are created are easily embedded elsewhere on the web. And, with what would admittedly be a lot of work, it could leverage its position as a platform-agnostic aggregator to pioneer some form of open standard.

Hashtags seem to have caught on, despite the protests of those who feel they’re an ugly and annoying intrusion onto the user experience. If more platforms are going to start using them then that user experience needs to become much better and more intuitive or this will be just another social media fad whose time comes and goes.

Visuals increase Twitter engagement rates

Not surprising that putting a photo or other image in a Twitter update increases engagement with that update significantly. It’s the same logic that applies on Facebook and is the reason Pinterest and Instagram have such high engagement rates: Visuals pop.

The consistent display of multimedia updates has been one of the driving factors behind Twitter’s clamping down on the ecosystem of apps in the last six months or so. It wants photos and videos to display in a uniform way for readers since it knows that people like visuals and it wants to encourage that as it looks to attract more media company attention.

Google cleans up Google+ profiles

Google has rolled out a number of small updates to Google+ that, in aggregate, add up to some nice features.

Included in the updates are better profile management in the form of more clearly labeled boxes for personal information that you may or may not want to be public and a much larger – about twice as high – cover photo for your profile.

Better profile management and enhanced ability to show off photos are two common concerns among moderate-to-heavy social network users so these are likely to be very popular.

Quora adds reviews to attract more eyeballs

I tell you…as much as I’m tempted to think Quora is kind of flailing in their “let’s just add one new feature after another” pattern of late, I’m kind of digging the fact that they’re not throwing in the towel until someone actually rings the damn bell.

Their latest rollout is of Reviews, which give people the ability to add star ratings to what they write up. The idea is that when people ask if X show, movie, book or whatever is good people can leave a response that has a quantifiable star rating, thus hopefully making it more of a destination for those seeking such opinions before they go anywhere else. It’s also a huge SEO play since these pages will likely come up highly for searches for “X Movie Title review” and the like.

Most people don’t mind brands listening to their conversations

The majority of those responding to a recent survey by J.D. Power & Associates say they don’t mind brands listening in on the social media conversations being had about those brands.

The study found that most of those between 45 and 54 were aware brands were monitoring what was being said, while many young people 18 to 20, about 40% of respondents, weren’t hip to that fact. More than that most of those who knew this was going on were also completely cool with this happening.

Where it gets interesting is in the number of people who feel such monitoring is invasive. That means, tactically, that any engagement based on what’s being said is going to be seen as unwelcome at best and creepy at worst. The eMarketer story rightly points out that the best advice is often to not respond or engage unless there’s an overt call to do so. If someone wants to get a brand’s attention it looks very different than someone who’s just sharing an idle opinion. But, of course, this goes against the thinking prescribed by those who feel engagement rates of less than 100% are completely unacceptable, despite that never being all that realistic.

On a related note, a SimplyMeasured study found that 30% of companies in the Interbrand 100 have Twitter profiles specifically dedicated for customer service purposes. In such cases, where people have a much different expectation of what sort of listening and interaction is likely, the response rates by the brands are much closer to that 100% mark. But again, that’s a whole different type of program that has it’s own goals.

Your pitch may not be all that interesting

Adria at SearchEngineWatch speaks truth when she lists what are, in reality, just a fraction of the reasons a blog writer may not be interested in what a PR person is pitching.

It has, thankfully, been quite a while since I had to personally engage in any such activities in my role as an agency person. For a while there I was pretty good at it but somewhere along the road things shifted and those who were starting blogs started expecting more than what was being offered, mostly in the form of compensation for writing anything about the client I was pitching.

This corresponded, I think, with the rise of not just more pay-for-play tactics but also platforms like Twitter and Facebook along with more brands getting in the publishing game themselves. The dynamics changed drastically to put much more of the power in the hands of the blog owners themselves, which is a good thing in the long run but which has made this sort of social media outreach a much more difficult trick to turn successfully.