Monthly Archives: November 2014

Snapcash

Mobile money transfers just got a whole lot easier thanks to a company most probably wouldn’t have suspected. Snapchat, the mobile app famous for its timed viewing of photos (and its association with lewd photos) recently launched Snapcash. Snapcash is a partnership with mobile payment tech company Square that enables Snapchat users to send cash by simply typing a monetary amount in a Snapchat chat window and pressing send. Banking information is stored within the app and the recipient receives the money as quickly as they received your last selfie.

Snapchat has entered into the mobile payment realm. Photo source: E! Online

This is a pretty big step forward for instant money transfers in North America. We, of course, have Google Wallet and Apple Pay which helps businesses collect more easily from consumers, but Snapcash is definitely geared towards transfers and payments between consumers. Owe someone $5? Snapcash it to them. $20 for the movie last night? Snapcash it. With a monthly limit of $1000, there is a lot of room for small payments for the ordinary user.

So what does this mean for marketers? As of right now, not a whole lot. It’s simply a cool feature in a very popular mobile app. However, I’d highly doubt it will remain this way for long. Payment transfer through the app simply screams app monetization. Techcrunch agreed: “For example, the app could one day send you a Snap or show a Story ad from a merchant, and let you buy the product shown instantly through Snapchat.” Collecting banking and credit card information, and having the ability to transfer funds, opens the door to possible advertising revenue — an area that many mobile apps and social networks have continued to struggle to exploit.

Personally, I’d struggle with the issue of trusting Snapchat with my banking information. Snapchat is a fast photo-sharing app – it has never required secure information before. Of course, we all trusted Snapchat with our photos with the notion that the photos are ‘deleted’ as soon as they’re viewed. We learned that this was untrue, and the developers never even made the app this way. Just earlier this year, Snapchat suffered a large data breach over the information of four million of its users. Very little has been said about just how secure the money transfer software is. It is supplied by Square, which has proven secure, but it’s offered over the Snapchat platform. Some people are skeptical of its security, and a data breach with banking information could be bad news for the company if it was ever to occur.

Sound Off: Are you going to use Snapcash? Do you think it’s secure? How can Snapcash be used for marketing?

The dangerous world of the Internet for politicians

It’s always good to branch out in an effort to reach more people – especially in politics. That said, the Internet can be a challenging place for people who want to run for public office. It’s political suicide to not have an online presence these days (website, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but it’s even worse to be online and to screw it up. As we hear time and again, what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet and it can spread quickly.

Thus, it’s vitally important that, just like for companies, politicians and political parties have proper online communication and marketing plans and personnel which are flexible and open to emerging trends, but also appropriately reactive in times of trouble.

Reddit, AMA’s, and Politicians

A growing popularity amongst political figures is to get onto Reddit and conduct an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session. As an almost unrestricted free open forum, these AMA’s are an opportunity for all anonymous Reddit users to throw whatever questions they want to the person hosting the session and wait for the responses to come in. Celebrities, authors, interesting personalities, and the likes do these everyday. Within the past couple years, politicians have been hopping on board the train – and it hasn’t always gone so well.

An initiative such as a Reddit AMA can gain a significant amount of online exposure, but it is essentially releasing any control an individual or organization has over the direction of a conversation. Some politicians, such as President Barack Obama, have been relatively successful by employing methods such as very short time limits of a half hour to answer questions. People don’t expect much in a half hour.

A “Train Wreck”

The same can’t be said for Matt McCall who was challenging an incumbent in a Republican primary. His AMA became Reddit-famous because it became a massive failure. People instantly began bombarding McCall with questions that he appeared unprepared to answer, such as: “In a previous comment, you said you wanted to keep the government “out of our bedrooms.” Yet immediately following that statement, within the same comment you said marriage is between a man and a woman. Would you like to take a moment to explain this comment and defend your position?” and “If you believe in shutting down the EPA, what do you propose to do about the growing environmental problems in the United States such as the pollution of major waterways such as the Mississippi river through fertilizer and manure runoff from farms, the poisoning of groundwater from factory runoff and fracking, and the regulation of emissions by cars on the road, or do you believe these are not legitimate concerns?”

These questions went unanswered. Attempts were made to delete the thread. Then McCall’s account. Then people on Facebook claimed the questions were “unfair.” Other Reddit users summarized the event in this way:

Martin O’ Malley, another American politician rumoured to be considering running for President, had his AMA covered by The Washington Post. The reason? He only answered a couple dozen questions and his responses were described as lacklustre.

Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of Ontario, attempted an AMA during the last election campaign. Hers was covered by the CBC. Again, she evidently ignored a number of difficult questions and responses with limp answers. One Redditor commented: “This was the worst AMA I’ve ever seen. She responded to the easiest questions possible and ignored almost everything of substance — even her answers to any sort of controversial questions were non-statements.” At the end of the day, she still won her election.

In the Vancouver mayoral election, the three frontrunner candidates also took part in their own AMA’s. None were as disastrous as Matt McCall’s, but even Kirk LaPointe’s had a number of criticisms for not answering popular questions and answering many with simply stating that he’d “study the matter.”

The Point

Kirk LaPointe conducting a Reddit AMA. Source: Huffington Post

The point is this: the Internet is a phenomenal tool to connect with populations the world over. Branding yourself properly and utilizing the Internet positively can make an individual appear in a very good light. However, some Internet communications streams can also be risky, and Reddit AMA’s for politicians are a prime example of this. They are unregulated and highly popular: the politician and his/her team either needs to be very prepared and open, or they need to avoid them altogether. Modern political campaign marketing plans might want to take these sorts of online forums into account.

For a compilation of the best political AMA’s, go here: http://www.topiama.com/cat/politics.

Get social, make profit.

Econsultancy recently covered an announcement by Dutch airline KLM that they generate 25 million euros per year off of their social media activity. This is a very significant amount of money to be made off of social media efforts. Although social media is very clearly an extraordinarily popular means of communicating with clients and potential customers, experts and the like are still measuring how exactly to determine ROI off of social media and social media marketing companies are still struggling to actually make money.

Still, a quick perusal of KLM’s social media and it’s not overly surprising that they’re finding ways to make money off of it. Take Twitter for example: browse their tweets and you’ll see numerous promotions, videos, and photos for people to interact with. Browse through their tweets and replies and you’ll see a plethora of responses. The company is consistently responding to people who inquire, even negatively, and in 11 languages.

Even more impressive, their Twitter profile cover photo is updated every 5 minutes and features the estimated response time. It’s like being at the DMV, except it doesn’t suck and they can only respond in 140 character or less.

KLM updates their Twitter photo every 5 minutes to update followers. Source: Econsultancy.

The company states that it learned how to effectively use its social media during times of trouble:

“Recounting the story of KLM’s social origins, Vogel-Meijer said that in 2010 the company learned a lesson by responding quickly when flights over Europe were banned due to the Icelandic ash cloud.

Previously the company had only been using social to push out standard marketing messages, however thousands of questions began pouring in on Facebook and Twitter as all other service channels were busy.

Faced with the dilemma of either responding to the queries or ignoring them all, KLM opted for the former.

It did so without waiting to form a proper strategy, but responded to the situation as it developed.

That was the start KLM’s social strategy and remains the basis of its success.”

Put simply, KLM sees success in its social media because it follows some of the most basic principles of social media that many companies consistently fail to follow:

It doesn’t just advertise. Amongst advertisements are valuable promotions and cool content previously curated.
They respond and engage. If you tweet KLM, they will tweet you back. Plus, they adapt to the person speaking to them and they sound human.
They monitor their social channels. They soon began to find that many of their customers and social followers wanted forms of “social payments.” Now, you can pay online over Facebook and Twitter. And they claim to be making 80,000 euros a week doing it.

I guess it goes to show that if you properly engage your audience and make your company accessible and human online, profits can follow – especially if customers specifically ask to be able to pay over your social media channels, like KLM customers did.

The rise of freemium?

Just recently, YouTube announced the upcoming release of it’s new paid streaming music service Music Key. Although some of the more specific technical details of the service have yet to be announced, the website promises three key things: (1) ad-free music, (2) background listening, and (3) offline playback. Reportedly, this service will be valued at $10 a month for subscribers. Mashable took a stab at explaining the rationale behind the new service.

This is actually a pretty big deal. Not because this hasn’t been done before. A quick look at a little old app called Spotify would disprove that notion. However, it’s no secret that YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world, averaging 1 billion visitors a month. On top of that, the site is owned by Internet giant Google. The launch of Music Key indicates an experiment with freemium subscriptions on one of the most widely used platforms on the Internet – and one that is very much known for being 100% free.

Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a product or service (typically a digital offering such as software, media, games or web services) is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features, functionality, or virtual goods.

Freemium appears to be popping up everywhere these days. From in-app purchases, such as in Clash of Clans that leads to media-reported £7,000 phone bills, to social networks such as LinkedIn that charge more for in-depth services and features, Internet companies, app developers, and the likes look to be diversifying the ways in which they generate revenue online. Gone are the days where ads paid the bills and generate revenue for artists. Now, there’s the possibility of raising money from those Internet browsers who need that extra bit of service hidden behind the paywall.

But does Freemium guarantee success? I would say no. Consumers are used to getting things for free on the Internet (unless they’re online shopping). There needs to be a considerable amount of incentive to pay a subscription fee, when it is so easy to access free information and/or content with just a few more clicks. A post on Forbes would agree stating that, for freemium, you need: the right market, with a gap in said market; a compelling reason to upgrade; and proper metrics to measure success.

So will YouTube Music Key be successful? It remains to be seen. YouTube is a massive Internet entity – so the success of its paid option will be watched by many. Success in the freemium market for such a popular, formerly 100% free website could cause significant changes to the Internet landscape.

Sound Off: Do you think freemium services are here to stay? Do you think YouTube’s new streaming music venture will be successful?

It might be okay to be chatty on the internet now.

Source: http://performancing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Freelance-Writing-Jobs-For-Beginners.jpg

I’ve never been one for levity when it comes to my writing. This has always been an issue. Day to day, I don’t necessarily talk a lot, but when I write I want to be thorough. I want the piece of writing to be properly structured, properly introduced, the subject matter explored from multiple angles, perhaps some opinion or commentary fused in, followed by a conclusion. Of course, this changes depending on what I’m writing: I’ve taught myself how to get to the point in a press release. I’ve taught myself not to drone on in an e-mail. But I’ve always hated the fact that it’s consistently drilled into people that the most successful blog posts and internet writing are short, 300-500 word posts.

That might not be the case anymore.

Marketing Pilgrim recently summarized a report released by Searchmetrics, an SEO and research firm. In this, they found a few interesting conclusions that could be very important for online writers and marketers:

• Content:High quality, relevant content ranks better on average, and is identifiable by properties such as comprehensive wording in regard to the co-occurrence of related terms in the context, a higher word-count and media enrichment

•    Technology: A well optimized technical performance of a page contributes to a good ranking, such as, robust site architecture with an optimal internal linking structure, short loading times and presence of meta tags.
•    Backlinks: The quantity and quality of backlinks remains crucial as there are many new features introduced this year that have been revised to improve the quality of the results.
•     Social Signals: The correlation values regarding coefficients out of the social sector have slightly decreased. The growth of the average total number of signals per position was rather small.
•     User Signals: For the first time, user signals were measured and as expected there is a relation between rankings and higher click-through rates, lower bounce rates and a high time-on-site. (Credit: Searchmetrics)

Average Ranking vs. Length of Text Post Source: Searchmetrics Report

Most important to note in this situation is the idea that a higher word count could leader to better search rankings. This, of course, is still very much interdependent on strong content. Writing pages of nonsense will serve no purpose – but it appears that people on the Internet are open to reading more in 2014 than they were just one year ago. Perhaps this indicates why site like Medium have caught on.

Very important to note is that, although readers are open to reading more, the ease of reading must also be considerably high. The top sites on Google, as determined by Searchmetrics through using the classic Flesch-value scale, are those sites that could easily be read by a 13 to 15 year old.

Additionally, key words are of utmost importance. In terms of Google rankings, all of your text means nothing if your key words are not directly related. Google will not rank highly those pages that use random keywords in an attempt to pick up more readers.

So, if this information proves correct, more long-winded writers like myself have reasons to rejoice: as long as we keep our writing easy to read and our keywords on point, we might now have the opportunity to write more online!

Honda: Press “R”

Honda just released a brand new advertisement online, and it’s super interactive. Titled “The Other Side” and hosted on YouTube, the advertisement is two minutes and fifty-five seconds and brings the viewer through the day of a guy driving a Honda. Or, if you simply hit the “R” key on your keyboard, you can view his adventure-filled evening.

The interactive advertisement plays two concurrent short films, and it’s up to the viewer which they want to see and at what time.

A split screen still from Honda’s new “Type R” advertisement. Image source: Marketing Land (linked in text)

Obviously, an advertisement that’s interactive can’t be played on traditional mediums, such as television. This is unfortunate due to the sheer amount of production and detail that went into it.

Still, the ad is featured on one of the most popular websites in the world and it’s gaining a lot of attention. AdWeek called the spot “mind-bendingly brilliant” and Marketing Land called it “amazing.” People are also buzzing about the advertisement on social media and online communities. Take, for example, this thread on Reddit where people are fawning over the interactivity and cinematography. This coming from an online community that prides itself on being adfree and has a collection of people constantly on the watch for subliminal advertising.

Honda hit it out of the park with advertisements. We’ve heard all of it before: people don’t trust advertisements, and people are getting tired of television advertisements. This work by Honda and Wieden + Kennedy London simply proves that people will still pay close attention to advertisements – if they’re well made and interesting. (Interactive is a big help too).

Ads such as “Type R” set a good example for businesses as more and more people make the transition to viewing the majority of their content online. If people are adapting to the digital world, so too should companies’ advertisements.