Facebook already allows advertisers to reach mobile users by device type, as well as different device models and operating systems. Now it’s expanding mobile targeting further by allowing marketers to tailor ads based on the speed of a user’s network connection — 2G, 3G or 4G. The new feature is aimed especially at high-growth countries like India, where people mainly access the Internet through mobile devices but may have widely varying network speeds and rapidly changing telecom infrastructures. “This fragmented environment makes it difficult for businesses to reach people with valuable experiences on their mobile devices,” stated a Facebook blog post Wednesday. The company said the ability to target by bandwidth connection will help ensure a smooth user experience on any given device and network speed. A video ad targeted to people in Indonesia, where many have only 2G connections, for example, would be a waste if users couldn’t load the video easily. “Optimizing the creative — for instance, targeting a video campaign to people with high-speed connections, and swapping in an image or link ad for people with slower connections — means ads can perform more efficiently for the people seeing them,” wrote Brendan Sullivan, a Facebook product marketing manager, in the post. Facebook said advertisers like Vodafone in India are already seeing positive results in testing the new bandwidth-targeting capability. Today’s announcement comes about a month after the social network highlighted steps it is taking to connect advertisers with its 1.3 billion users globally, especially in emerging regions. One example in India is that someone can place a “missed call” by clicking a Facebook ad from their phone. In the return call, that person receives content such as music, cricket scores or celebrity updates along with an advertiser’s message, without using airtime or data. Last month, the company also said it had extended targeting features available in the U.S. and U.K., like reaching people according to life-stage and geotargeting to high-growth countries, such as India, Nigeria, Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia. Bandwidth targeting is now available to advertisers worldwide -- including in the U.S. -- through Facebook’s Ad Create and Power Editor tools, as well as its API. The company noted that all user data is anonymous, and that audiences for mobile network targeting are based on aggregate groups of people based on their primary connection type.
Snapchat is said to be rounding up more capital at a valuation of $10 billion, but Alibaba Group Holding appears to be out of the mix. In its place, Kleiner Perkins is reportedly placing a big bet on Snapchat. The highly visible venture capital firm has already committed upwards of $20 million to the messaging service, according to multiplereports. Snapchat representatives did not return requests for comment, on Wednesday. To date, Snapchat has raised roughly $100 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners, among others. Some notable investors have said they expect the anonymous social networking trend to be short-lived. Yet, the numbers tell a different story. Beating out its social rivals, Snapchat experienced the highest growth in time spent, in July, with total minutes up 114% year-over-year -- from 2.6 billion to 5.5 billion minutes -- according to a recent note from JPMorgan, citing comScore data. (To put those numbers into perspective, Facebook saw its time spend rise from 137 billion to 178 billion minutes, during the same period.) The Wall Street Journal also reported this week that Snapchat has hit 100 million active monthly users. Some industry watchers say Snapchat’s popularity is bad news for advertisers, because it represents a turn toward personal privacy and digital anonymity. Snapchat, however, has every intention of making its network a friendly place for brands. Among other efforts, the company is reportedly developing a new service, dubbed Snapchat Discovery, which will “show content and ads to Snapchat users,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Sources told WSJ to expect Discovery to debut by November. The company also recently added location-based filters to its growing list of personalization features, which hinted at some big opportunities for brands. Indeed, a video demonstrating the “geofilters” featured users snapping selfies in front of a SoulCycle, a Groundwork coffee shop and Disneyworld. Suggesting a clear path to promotional initiatives, each location offered visitors branded images to include in their snaps. Upon its launch in July, agencies and social media pros said they saw dollar signs in the new feature. “For brands, while it's still a fairly shallow way to engage with the program … the opportunity to position a logo on snaps taking place at a retail or event location is of course an attractive prospect,” said Grace Gordon, strategy director at social agency We Are Social. Many on Madison Avenue have been happy to experiment with Snapchat. Following Taco Bell’s lead, McDonald's joined the service earlier this year, while Heineken recently relied on Snapchat to connect with festival goers at Coachella. Among brands, other early adopters include Juicy Couture, Seventeen, NPR and HBO's "Girls." To bolster its business side, Snapchat also recently poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. Randall officially serves as vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Snapchat. For a while, vanishing pictures helped Snapchat stand out in a messaging market dominated by giants like Facebook and Apple. Yet, the company has been pushing into other areas, such as live-event coverage and more mainstream mobile messaging services. For example, the company recently hitched its “Our Story” feature to FIFA’s World Cup final. The service’s entire community was given access to a stream of curated content created by those lucky enough to attend the big game between Argentina and Germany. Snapchat debuted “Stories” late last year -- a feature that lets users save and share photos for up to 24 hours. Adding a collaborative component to the service, the start-up more recently unveiled “Our Story,” so people at the same events can combine their own “snaps” into a single “story.” Snapchat also recently rolled out a text- and video-messaging feature named Chat, while making it easier for users to save their exchanges with friends.
Pinterest will launch Tuesday its first global business tool in 31 languages that analyzes pinning behavior in profiles and boards. The platform will allow users to search and find specific metrics on profiles, common interests, impressions, highest-performing pins generating social actions, and more. The data will give marketers insight into their publishing strategy performs and ways to optimize the campaigns on the site, per Jason Costa, Pinterest product manager. "We will give them insight into repins and referral traffic; how many users we send their way," he said. Pinterest will dig deeper into data on boards that generate the most pins in the past month, and allow marketers to analyze the highest performing pins in search and social shares, clicks, likes or send. Costa said the tool also will analyze audience demographics and location, such as city, languages, gender, and areas of interest. The company's analytics team worked with "sets" of translators to support local users worldwide, Costa said. One set of translators will translate the information for a specific language, and a second set will verify the accuracy of the translation. Using the analytics tool requires companies to open a free business account. It aims to give brands, retailers and other companies the insight into what consumers like best about their products and services. A pin on Pinterest of a Vineyard Vines' belt no longer manufactured generated a "ton of traffic" back to the brand's Web site. "The pin generated so much traffic, they restarted the manufacturing line based on the amount of pins it got on Pinterest," Costa said. Likewise, Lowe's put together a DYI product strategy for floor mats after giving users the ability to create them in different colors in a tool on their Web site. Costa said it generated so much buzz, a couple of hundred thousand re-pins, that the home improvement retailer built out a full product line based on the user behavior on Pinterest. Last year, Pinterest also received buzz from retailers like Nordstrom during the December holidays. Nordstrom put signs on retail racks around clothing featured in boards by consumers on Pinterest. The retailer capitalized on user pins similar to the way broadcast network shows pull in tweets from Twitter.
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance have divided opinion among Americans, according to surveys. But a new study shows people have been less likely to share their views on the Snowden-NSA story in social media than in person.Specifically, 86% of Americans were willing to have an in-person conversation about the surveillance program, while only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms. Further, social media didn’t provide an alternative forum for people unwilling to discuss the case. Of the 14% who wouldn’t talk about it in person, only 0.3% were willing to post about on social sites.The findings come from a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, based on a survey of 1,801 U.S. shortly after Snowden first leaked details about the NSA collection of metadata from emails and phone calls in 2013.Keith Hampton, associate professor at Rutgers University and an author of the report, noted that research prior to the Internet had shown that a “spiral of silence” descends when people fear their opinions are in the minority compared to those around them.“Some had hoped that social media might provide new outlets that encourage more discussion and the exchange of a wider range of opinions. But we see the opposite — a spiral of silence exists online, too, stated Hampton.The research also showed that in both personal and online settings, people were more likely to share their opinions if they thought their audience agreed with them. For example, those who felt their coworkers agreed with their opinion were about three times more likely to say they would join a workplace conversation about the Snowden-NSA situation.Regarding Facebook, if someone felt that people in their network agreed with their opinion about the Snowden-NSA issue, they were about twice as likely to join a discussion on Facebook about this issue.But Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to share their opinions in face-to-face situations. The average Facebook user (someone who uses the site a few times per day) was half as likely as other people to say they’d be willing to voice their opinion with friends at a restaurant. Similarly, the typical Twitter user was a quarter as likely to discuss the Snowden case in the workplace than someone who doesn’t use Twitter.Other Pew Research Center polls have indicated Americans are split over whether the NSA contractor's leaks about surveillance were justified and whether the surveillance policy itself was legitimate or not. What about concern with government monitoring as a cause for self-censoring in social media? In an interview, Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet Project, pointed out that that work on the study was completed before Snowden made subsequent disclosures suggesting Western intelligence agencies monitored and manipulated the content of online discussion and the NSA recorded the content of foreign phone calls.“Future research may provide insight into whether Americans have become more or less willing to discuss specific issues on-and offline as a result of government surveillance programs,”said Rainie. “While this study focused on the Snowden-NSA revelations, we suspect that Americans use social media in similar ways to discuss and get news about other political issues.”The Pew survey was conducted between August 7 and Sept. 13, 2013, in English and Spanish, and by landline phones and cell phones. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. Some 1,076 (out of 1,801) respondents were users of social networking sites and the margin of error for that subgroup is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
Looks like one of the biggest winners at this year’s Emmys was social TV. While the broadcast ratings for "The 66th Primetime Emmy Awards" was down from last year, it was a bigger hit within the Twittersphere, with Nielsen Social reporting that 8.8 million people saw one or more of the 1.1 million tweets sent during the program. And interestingly, says Deirdre Bannon, Nielsen Social’s VP Product, the Twitter audience is growing up a little, “with 40% of the evening’s tweets sent by people 25 and older.” Some 370,000 unique authors sent tweets about the show, which were seen a total of 207.1 million times. Beauty marketers got a big bump, with both Dove and L’Oreal Paris getting an increase of more than 50% in average daily tweets, compared to the prior week. “And we also found that over 50% of tweets sent on the day about each brand came from authors who also sent tweets about the Emmys.” L'Oreal Paris used the night to carve out new digital territory for itself, partnering with the StyleHaul network for the launch of their Destination Beauty channel. StyleHaul influencer Evelina Barry, for example, created a video of how she created her own red carpet look for the night, which generated 700 comments, engaging with 74,000 followers, and creating two million impressions, says Alison Kennedy, chief revenue officer for StyleHaul. “And that’s just one girl posting content,” she says. “This is the way Millennial consumers are engaging with brands. It’s not necessarily about the live screen, it’s about being able to connect and engage with an influencer. Brands like L’Oreal are trying not just to reach consumers, but also to engage with them in a more meaningful way. These bloggers are influencers are, in a way, the new celebrities.” That second-screen strategy doesn’t surprise Bannon. “People who talk a lot about TV programs also talk a lot about brands,” she tells Marketing Daily. “We find that 64% of people who tweet about brands also tweet about TV.” And those people are much more enthusiastic about their brand Tweeting than those who don't also post about TV, she says, “which means if you’re looking for an audience that are likely to amplify your brand messaging, finding really social TV programs is a good place to go.” What’s more, she says, these brand ambassadors have twice as many followers as people who just tweet about brands, “so they are far more influential.” It all comes back to the way second screens are driving engagement, says Bannon. “Social media has an increasing impact on TV viewing, with people saying they watch more live TV because of what they see on their social media channels. And these numbers are growing year over year.”
For college football fans, Saturday can’t come soon enough. In the second year of its partnership with ESPN’s College GameDay, Coke Zero is not just celebrating one day of football, but the anticipation and countdown to it all week via a new marketing campaign. “There’s joy in the preparation for game day, and Coke Zero provides fans the uplift they need to support their team throughout the season,” Sharon Byers, SVP, sports, entertainment and community marketing for Coca-Cola North America, tells Marketing Daily. “Rather than living on Saturdays alone, this year’s campaign allows us to be in front of football fans all week long, then culminating each Saturday.” At the beginning of the college football season, the brand will launch a new advertising campaign, themed “Zero Means It’s Game Day.” Five 15-second spots will show — by focusing each on a specific weekday — how intensity for college football grows throughout the week. The spots will be cut together into one 30-second version that shows the progression of the week. The longer spot will break during the first week of the season. The rest of the campaign will appear online and on NBC, CBS and ESPN networks during the college football games. “We know the biggest college football fans don’t just wake up Saturday morning to get fired up,” Byers says. “Rather, they spend the whole week in preparation mode to make sure when game day arrives, it’s even better than the last. This campaign gave us the platform to celebrate the rituals that are often overlooked when creative focuses solely on game day.” As part of its affiliation with ESPN’s popular College GameDay pre-game show, Coke Zero will once again be giving 50 fans at each campus the show visits t premium seating at the games. These “Section Zero” seats will also be integrated into the program itself, reaching fans nationwide. “‘Section Zero’ was conceived by Coke Zero and College GameDay before the start of last season to bring to life the brand’s ‘Enjoy Everything’ tagline,” Byers says. “Though our tagline has since evolved, Section Zero will continue to provide [premium] access to fans who enjoy everything about game day.” The brand will also be using its social channels to engage consumers with content, employing the hashtag #CountdowntoZero. As the brand revs up for the beginning of the season, Coke Zero’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram channels will feature a mascot of ESPN football analyst Lee Corso, counting down his cross-country journey to the beginning of the season. Fans will be encouraged to do the same, Byers says. “Throughout the season, [we will encourage] fans to show how they prepare for game day by posting stories, photos and video using the #CountdownToZero hashtag,” Byers says. “We will be monitoring the conversation and engaging with fans. The hashtag also will appear in campaign creative.”
Century 21 is promoting a series of videos featuring cleaning expert and best-selling author Jolie Kerr. The real estate company is providing the six-part video series, #C21ReadyToSell, to show home buyers and real estate professionals how to best clean and stage a home. Viewers who vote for their favorite video will be entered for the chance to win a $250 gift card. Century 21 created a custom page on Century21.com specifically for this video series and for the giveaway. The videos are also being shared on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as on the company’s blog, @C21 Home Matters. The is the company’s first time working with Kerr, says Century 21 CMO Bev Thorne. “In her weekly column for Deadspin.com, Jolie answers the most difficult cleaning questions from homeowners,” Thorne tells Marketing Daily. “Who better to help Century 21 agents and sellers prep to a list a home than Jolie? Her arsenal of easy and inexpensive tips can really go a long way for a homeowner looking to stage to sell.” Videos and other social media are an important part of marketing for Century 21 because the way people buy and sell real estate has been changing, she says. “With the home buying and selling process becoming more social than ever before, we’re always on the hunt for relevant ways to connect and engage with this new generation of buyers and sellers -- and videos are a great way to do that,” Thorne says. “This particular series is short, visually appealing, and chock-full of tips -- a mixture of all the right ingredients to engage people looking for tips on staging their home.” Thorne would not rule out the intro of future videos “We’re focused on this video series for the moment, but based on the reaction we receive, we would certainly consider doing another series either with Jolie or with other experts,” she says.
Toms Shoes, the brand built on “One for One” giving, has gone corporate, inking a new partnership with Bain Capital. In a deal said to be worth $625 million and including debt, founder Blake Mycoskie, whose official title is “Chief Shoe Giver,” retains 50% ownership, the company says in its release. And Toms is reportedly opening a boutique in New York, marking the first East Coast presence for its funky espadrilles-with-a-conscience. “This partnership will enable Toms to grow faster and give to more people in more ways than we could otherwise,” says Mycoskie in the announcement. “In eight short years, we've had incredible success, and now we need a strategic partner who shares our bold vision for the future and can help us realize it. We’re thrilled that Bain Capital is fully aligned with our commitment to One for One, and clearly they have the expertise to help us improve our business and further expand the scale of our mission.” The U.S. fashion footwear market is estimated at about $41.52 billion, according to the NPD Group. Besides their availability online and in other retailers, Toms are also sold at boutiques in Austin, Tex. and Venice, Calif. The company launched back in 2006, with the promise of giving away a par of shoes for every pair it sells; since then, it’s distributed 25 million pairs. It has since expanded to eyewear and coffee, each replicating the original “One for One” donation concept. (In the case of the coffee, the company gives one week of clean water to a person in need for every bag of coffee.) In doing so, it has become one of the most active brands in social media, with strong followings on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. Mycoskie also says he plans to give away plans “at least half” of the profits from the deal to a fund for social entrepreneurship, and other causes.
Facebook already allows advertisers to reach mobile users by device type, as well as different device models and operating systems. Now it’s expanding mobile targeting further by allowing marketers to tailor ads based on the speed of a user’s network connection — 2G, 3G or 4G. The new feature is aimed especially at high-growth countries like India, where people mainly access the Internet through mobile devices but may have widely varying network speeds and rapidly changing telecom infrastructures. “This fragmented environment makes it difficult for businesses to reach people with valuable experiences on their mobile devices,” stated a Facebook blog post Wednesday. The company said the ability to target by bandwidth connection will help ensure a smooth user experience on any given device and network speed. A video ad targeted to people in Indonesia, where many have only 2G connections, for example, would be a waste if users couldn’t load the video easily. “Optimizing the creative — for instance, targeting a video campaign to people with high-speed connections, and swapping in an image or link ad for people with slower connections — means ads can perform more efficiently for the people seeing them,” wrote Brendan Sullivan, a Facebook product marketing manager, in the post. Facebook said advertisers like Vodafone in India are already seeing positive results in testing the new bandwidth-targeting capability. Today’s announcement comes about a month after the social network highlighted steps it is taking to connect advertisers with its 1.3 billion users globally, especially in emerging regions. One example in India is that someone can place a “missed call” by clicking a Facebook ad from their phone. In the return call, that person receives content such as music, cricket scores or celebrity updates along with an advertiser’s message, without using airtime or data. Last month, the company also said it had extended targeting features available in the U.S. and U.K., like reaching people according to life-stage and geotargeting to high-growth countries, such as India, Nigeria, Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia. Bandwidth targeting is now available to advertisers worldwide -- including in the U.S. -- through Facebook’s Ad Create and Power Editor tools, as well as its API. The company noted that all user data is anonymous, and that audiences for mobile network targeting are based on aggregate groups of people based on their primary connection type.
Snapchat is said to be rounding up more capital at a valuation of $10 billion, but Alibaba Group Holding appears to be out of the mix. In its place, Kleiner Perkins is reportedly placing a big bet on Snapchat. The highly visible venture capital firm has already committed upwards of $20 million to the messaging service, according to multiplereports. Snapchat representatives did not return requests for comment, on Wednesday. To date, Snapchat has raised roughly $100 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners, among others. Some notable investors have said they expect the anonymous social networking trend to be short-lived. Yet, the numbers tell a different story. Beating out its social rivals, Snapchat experienced the highest growth in time spent, in July, with total minutes up 114% year-over-year -- from 2.6 billion to 5.5 billion minutes -- according to a recent note from JPMorgan, citing comScore data. (To put those numbers into perspective, Facebook saw its time spend rise from 137 billion to 178 billion minutes, during the same period.) The Wall Street Journal also reported this week that Snapchat has hit 100 million active monthly users. Some industry watchers say Snapchat’s popularity is bad news for advertisers, because it represents a turn toward personal privacy and digital anonymity. Snapchat, however, has every intention of making its network a friendly place for brands. Among other efforts, the company is reportedly developing a new service, dubbed Snapchat Discovery, which will “show content and ads to Snapchat users,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Sources told WSJ to expect Discovery to debut by November. The company also recently added location-based filters to its growing list of personalization features, which hinted at some big opportunities for brands. Indeed, a video demonstrating the “geofilters” featured users snapping selfies in front of a SoulCycle, a Groundwork coffee shop and Disneyworld. Suggesting a clear path to promotional initiatives, each location offered visitors branded images to include in their snaps. Upon its launch in July, agencies and social media pros said they saw dollar signs in the new feature. “For brands, while it's still a fairly shallow way to engage with the program … the opportunity to position a logo on snaps taking place at a retail or event location is of course an attractive prospect,” said Grace Gordon, strategy director at social agency We Are Social. Many on Madison Avenue have been happy to experiment with Snapchat. Following Taco Bell’s lead, McDonald's joined the service earlier this year, while Heineken recently relied on Snapchat to connect with festival goers at Coachella. Among brands, other early adopters include Juicy Couture, Seventeen, NPR and HBO's "Girls." To bolster its business side, Snapchat also recently poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. Randall officially serves as vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Snapchat. For a while, vanishing pictures helped Snapchat stand out in a messaging market dominated by giants like Facebook and Apple. Yet, the company has been pushing into other areas, such as live-event coverage and more mainstream mobile messaging services. For example, the company recently hitched its “Our Story” feature to FIFA’s World Cup final. The service’s entire community was given access to a stream of curated content created by those lucky enough to attend the big game between Argentina and Germany. Snapchat debuted “Stories” late last year -- a feature that lets users save and share photos for up to 24 hours. Adding a collaborative component to the service, the start-up more recently unveiled “Our Story,” so people at the same events can combine their own “snaps” into a single “story.” Snapchat also recently rolled out a text- and video-messaging feature named Chat, while making it easier for users to save their exchanges with friends.
Pinterest will launch Tuesday its first global business tool in 31 languages that analyzes pinning behavior in profiles and boards. The platform will allow users to search and find specific metrics on profiles, common interests, impressions, highest-performing pins generating social actions, and more. The data will give marketers insight into their publishing strategy performs and ways to optimize the campaigns on the site, per Jason Costa, Pinterest product manager. "We will give them insight into repins and referral traffic; how many users we send their way," he said. Pinterest will dig deeper into data on boards that generate the most pins in the past month, and allow marketers to analyze the highest performing pins in search and social shares, clicks, likes or send. Costa said the tool also will analyze audience demographics and location, such as city, languages, gender, and areas of interest. The company's analytics team worked with "sets" of translators to support local users worldwide, Costa said. One set of translators will translate the information for a specific language, and a second set will verify the accuracy of the translation. Using the analytics tool requires companies to open a free business account. It aims to give brands, retailers and other companies the insight into what consumers like best about their products and services. A pin on Pinterest of a Vineyard Vines' belt no longer manufactured generated a "ton of traffic" back to the brand's Web site. "The pin generated so much traffic, they restarted the manufacturing line based on the amount of pins it got on Pinterest," Costa said. Likewise, Lowe's put together a DYI product strategy for floor mats after giving users the ability to create them in different colors in a tool on their Web site. Costa said it generated so much buzz, a couple of hundred thousand re-pins, that the home improvement retailer built out a full product line based on the user behavior on Pinterest. Last year, Pinterest also received buzz from retailers like Nordstrom during the December holidays. Nordstrom put signs on retail racks around clothing featured in boards by consumers on Pinterest. The retailer capitalized on user pins similar to the way broadcast network shows pull in tweets from Twitter.
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance have divided opinion among Americans, according to surveys. But a new study shows people have been less likely to share their views on the Snowden-NSA story in social media than in person.Specifically, 86% of Americans were willing to have an in-person conversation about the surveillance program, while only 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms. Further, social media didn’t provide an alternative forum for people unwilling to discuss the case. Of the 14% who wouldn’t talk about it in person, only 0.3% were willing to post about on social sites.The findings come from a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, based on a survey of 1,801 U.S. shortly after Snowden first leaked details about the NSA collection of metadata from emails and phone calls in 2013.Keith Hampton, associate professor at Rutgers University and an author of the report, noted that research prior to the Internet had shown that a “spiral of silence” descends when people fear their opinions are in the minority compared to those around them.“Some had hoped that social media might provide new outlets that encourage more discussion and the exchange of a wider range of opinions. But we see the opposite — a spiral of silence exists online, too, stated Hampton.The research also showed that in both personal and online settings, people were more likely to share their opinions if they thought their audience agreed with them. For example, those who felt their coworkers agreed with their opinion were about three times more likely to say they would join a workplace conversation about the Snowden-NSA situation.Regarding Facebook, if someone felt that people in their network agreed with their opinion about the Snowden-NSA issue, they were about twice as likely to join a discussion on Facebook about this issue.But Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to share their opinions in face-to-face situations. The average Facebook user (someone who uses the site a few times per day) was half as likely as other people to say they’d be willing to voice their opinion with friends at a restaurant. Similarly, the typical Twitter user was a quarter as likely to discuss the Snowden case in the workplace than someone who doesn’t use Twitter.Other Pew Research Center polls have indicated Americans are split over whether the NSA contractor's leaks about surveillance were justified and whether the surveillance policy itself was legitimate or not. What about concern with government monitoring as a cause for self-censoring in social media? In an interview, Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet Project, pointed out that that work on the study was completed before Snowden made subsequent disclosures suggesting Western intelligence agencies monitored and manipulated the content of online discussion and the NSA recorded the content of foreign phone calls.“Future research may provide insight into whether Americans have become more or less willing to discuss specific issues on-and offline as a result of government surveillance programs,”said Rainie. “While this study focused on the Snowden-NSA revelations, we suspect that Americans use social media in similar ways to discuss and get news about other political issues.”The Pew survey was conducted between August 7 and Sept. 13, 2013, in English and Spanish, and by landline phones and cell phones. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. Some 1,076 (out of 1,801) respondents were users of social networking sites and the margin of error for that subgroup is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
Looks like one of the biggest winners at this year’s Emmys was social TV. While the broadcast ratings for "The 66th Primetime Emmy Awards" was down from last year, it was a bigger hit within the Twittersphere, with Nielsen Social reporting that 8.8 million people saw one or more of the 1.1 million tweets sent during the program. And interestingly, says Deirdre Bannon, Nielsen Social’s VP Product, the Twitter audience is growing up a little, “with 40% of the evening’s tweets sent by people 25 and older.” Some 370,000 unique authors sent tweets about the show, which were seen a total of 207.1 million times. Beauty marketers got a big bump, with both Dove and L’Oreal Paris getting an increase of more than 50% in average daily tweets, compared to the prior week. “And we also found that over 50% of tweets sent on the day about each brand came from authors who also sent tweets about the Emmys.” L'Oreal Paris used the night to carve out new digital territory for itself, partnering with the StyleHaul network for the launch of their Destination Beauty channel. StyleHaul influencer Evelina Barry, for example, created a video of how she created her own red carpet look for the night, which generated 700 comments, engaging with 74,000 followers, and creating two million impressions, says Alison Kennedy, chief revenue officer for StyleHaul. “And that’s just one girl posting content,” she says. “This is the way Millennial consumers are engaging with brands. It’s not necessarily about the live screen, it’s about being able to connect and engage with an influencer. Brands like L’Oreal are trying not just to reach consumers, but also to engage with them in a more meaningful way. These bloggers are influencers are, in a way, the new celebrities.” That second-screen strategy doesn’t surprise Bannon. “People who talk a lot about TV programs also talk a lot about brands,” she tells Marketing Daily. “We find that 64% of people who tweet about brands also tweet about TV.” And those people are much more enthusiastic about their brand Tweeting than those who don't also post about TV, she says, “which means if you’re looking for an audience that are likely to amplify your brand messaging, finding really social TV programs is a good place to go.” What’s more, she says, these brand ambassadors have twice as many followers as people who just tweet about brands, “so they are far more influential.” It all comes back to the way second screens are driving engagement, says Bannon. “Social media has an increasing impact on TV viewing, with people saying they watch more live TV because of what they see on their social media channels. And these numbers are growing year over year.”
For college football fans, Saturday can’t come soon enough. In the second year of its partnership with ESPN’s College GameDay, Coke Zero is not just celebrating one day of football, but the anticipation and countdown to it all week via a new marketing campaign. “There’s joy in the preparation for game day, and Coke Zero provides fans the uplift they need to support their team throughout the season,” Sharon Byers, SVP, sports, entertainment and community marketing for Coca-Cola North America, tells Marketing Daily. “Rather than living on Saturdays alone, this year’s campaign allows us to be in front of football fans all week long, then culminating each Saturday.” At the beginning of the college football season, the brand will launch a new advertising campaign, themed “Zero Means It’s Game Day.” Five 15-second spots will show — by focusing each on a specific weekday — how intensity for college football grows throughout the week. The spots will be cut together into one 30-second version that shows the progression of the week. The longer spot will break during the first week of the season. The rest of the campaign will appear online and on NBC, CBS and ESPN networks during the college football games. “We know the biggest college football fans don’t just wake up Saturday morning to get fired up,” Byers says. “Rather, they spend the whole week in preparation mode to make sure when game day arrives, it’s even better than the last. This campaign gave us the platform to celebrate the rituals that are often overlooked when creative focuses solely on game day.” As part of its affiliation with ESPN’s popular College GameDay pre-game show, Coke Zero will once again be giving 50 fans at each campus the show visits t premium seating at the games. These “Section Zero” seats will also be integrated into the program itself, reaching fans nationwide. “‘Section Zero’ was conceived by Coke Zero and College GameDay before the start of last season to bring to life the brand’s ‘Enjoy Everything’ tagline,” Byers says. “Though our tagline has since evolved, Section Zero will continue to provide [premium] access to fans who enjoy everything about game day.” The brand will also be using its social channels to engage consumers with content, employing the hashtag #CountdowntoZero. As the brand revs up for the beginning of the season, Coke Zero’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram channels will feature a mascot of ESPN football analyst Lee Corso, counting down his cross-country journey to the beginning of the season. Fans will be encouraged to do the same, Byers says. “Throughout the season, [we will encourage] fans to show how they prepare for game day by posting stories, photos and video using the #CountdownToZero hashtag,” Byers says. “We will be monitoring the conversation and engaging with fans. The hashtag also will appear in campaign creative.”
The phrase, “You’ll never believe what happens next,” may never appear in your Facebook News Feed again. The click-bait era is officially over. Recently, sites like Upworthy, ViralNova and BuzzFeed have built massive audiences in an incredibly short time. Key to that has been an analytical approach to the age-old practice of sensationalistic headlines. What newspapers invented to compete for attention at street-side newsstands, these new-age entertainment rags perfected through data science in the Facebook News Feed. Let’s dissect the case of BuzzFeed. In the last four months, BuzzFeed has grown its Facebook fan base from 2.6 million to 3.4 million users. On August 13 alone, BuzzFeed’s posts raked in over 185,000 Likes. The growth of a more traditional media metric, unique visitors, has increased at a corresponding rate, with BuzzFeed.com now boasting over 150 million monthly uniques. In many ways, Buzzfeed and businesses like it have reinvented publishing. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, recognizing that disruption, is the latest investor to place a big bet on the booming content aggregator market, providing BuzzFeed with $50 million in funding, and bringing its total valuation to roughly $850 million. As New York Times editor Lydia Polgreen tweeted, this is roughly $600 million more than it cost Jeff Bezos to snag the Washington Post. Ouch. But as quickly as these new publishing Goliaths have risen, they may fall even faster. That’s because Facebook made a sweeping move on Monday, releasing a blog post promising to curtail News Feed click bait. In the post, Facebook announced its intention to update the algorithm that selects content for the News Feed, in an effort to “help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see.” Before this announcement, brands were also poised to invest heavily in these sites, thanks to considerable advertising innovation on their part. In the Web 1.0 world, BuzzFeed would have had to monetize by selling ad placement through various networks and intermediaries. Today however, media is increasingly delivered through “native” channels, weaved organically and sometimes indistinguishably with content. The content is the ad; the ad, the content. The News Feed is a delicate thing. In order to maintain the experience, Facebook must make sure that all of the organic content flowing in front of users is as valuable (Read: contextual and useful) as possible. But to continue its financial growth, Facebook will have to balance that value with ad placements, which traditionally haven’t added much value to user experiences elsewhere on the Web. If advertisers can continue to create more valuable ads -- through better content as well as precise demographic and interest targeting -- then consumers, advertisers and Facebook all stand to benefit. This could reposition BuzzFeed, Upworthy and the others in their space to be among the best advertiser “enablers” for brands in social media. This is a strategy we’ve recently begun to see from Upworthy. While I’m not sure exactly how the economics of social advertising will shake out for these businesses, I’m 100% sure that advertisers have come to recognize the value of native advertising over interruption-based ads. And if more and more of the old-school publishing monoliths continue to learn these new rules of the game, then you really might not believe what happens next…
Century 21 is promoting a series of videos featuring cleaning expert and best-selling author Jolie Kerr. The real estate company is providing the six-part video series, #C21ReadyToSell, to show home buyers and real estate professionals how to best clean and stage a home. Viewers who vote for their favorite video will be entered for the chance to win a $250 gift card. Century 21 created a custom page on Century21.com specifically for this video series and for the giveaway. The videos are also being shared on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, as well as on the company’s blog, @C21 Home Matters. The is the company’s first time working with Kerr, says Century 21 CMO Bev Thorne. “In her weekly column for Deadspin.com, Jolie answers the most difficult cleaning questions from homeowners,” Thorne tells Marketing Daily. “Who better to help Century 21 agents and sellers prep to a list a home than Jolie? Her arsenal of easy and inexpensive tips can really go a long way for a homeowner looking to stage to sell.” Videos and other social media are an important part of marketing for Century 21 because the way people buy and sell real estate has been changing, she says. “With the home buying and selling process becoming more social than ever before, we’re always on the hunt for relevant ways to connect and engage with this new generation of buyers and sellers -- and videos are a great way to do that,” Thorne says. “This particular series is short, visually appealing, and chock-full of tips -- a mixture of all the right ingredients to engage people looking for tips on staging their home.” Thorne would not rule out the intro of future videos “We’re focused on this video series for the moment, but based on the reaction we receive, we would certainly consider doing another series either with Jolie or with other experts,” she says.
Toms Shoes, the brand built on “One for One” giving, has gone corporate, inking a new partnership with Bain Capital. In a deal said to be worth $625 million and including debt, founder Blake Mycoskie, whose official title is “Chief Shoe Giver,” retains 50% ownership, the company says in its release. And Toms is reportedly opening a boutique in New York, marking the first East Coast presence for its funky espadrilles-with-a-conscience. “This partnership will enable Toms to grow faster and give to more people in more ways than we could otherwise,” says Mycoskie in the announcement. “In eight short years, we've had incredible success, and now we need a strategic partner who shares our bold vision for the future and can help us realize it. We’re thrilled that Bain Capital is fully aligned with our commitment to One for One, and clearly they have the expertise to help us improve our business and further expand the scale of our mission.” The U.S. fashion footwear market is estimated at about $41.52 billion, according to the NPD Group. Besides their availability online and in other retailers, Toms are also sold at boutiques in Austin, Tex. and Venice, Calif. The company launched back in 2006, with the promise of giving away a par of shoes for every pair it sells; since then, it’s distributed 25 million pairs. It has since expanded to eyewear and coffee, each replicating the original “One for One” donation concept. (In the case of the coffee, the company gives one week of clean water to a person in need for every bag of coffee.) In doing so, it has become one of the most active brands in social media, with strong followings on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. Mycoskie also says he plans to give away plans “at least half” of the profits from the deal to a fund for social entrepreneurship, and other causes.