If you have any sort of social media account, then you’ve probably heard of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that has been going around for the past couple of months. In the summer, I would see Ice Bucket Challenge videos pop up on my feeds every day, created by both friends and celebrities alike. The social media campaign directly helped the ALS Association to raise $15.6 million in 3 weeks, nine times what it normally makes in the same time frame.

Another major news topic in recent months has been the Ebola crisis in West Africa, which is just starting to gain awareness in North America. During the past summer, five people from Sierra Leone started a website called EndEbolaNow.com, which aims to raise awareness and money for the Ebola crisis.

EndEbolaNow has teamed up with Emergency USA to create a new video dance challenge called #ShakeEbolaOff. Essentially, it is the same concept- you film yourself dancing, post it on social media, and nominate your friends to do the same and to donate to Emergency USA.

In my opinion, while I feel that there is potential for virality, this campaign just doesn’t have the shock value, the simplicity, and the comedic effect that the Ice Bucket Challenge did. All it did was require you to dump a bucket of ice water over your head- simple and funny, no matter how many times you watch it. But the #ShakeEbolaOff challenge requires a lot more thought and and creativity, and not everyone is comfortable with dancing AND posting it on social media for everyone to see.

However, the campaign has already attracted celebrities such as Kevin Bacon to take up the challenge, and their goal is to raise $1 million for the fight against Ebola- so if the Ice Bucket Challenge could raise $100 million within a month, let’s see how much we can raise to end Ebola.

Snapchat, the hugely popular messaging app famous for its vanishing photos, is introducing disappearing news “snaps” and advertisements in the next two months.

This new service, called “Snapchat Discovery“, will push videos, news articles, and ad content to its audience of an estimated 27 million users. People can simply hold down a finger on their screen to view daily publications, video content, or TV and movie clips.

The company is capitalizing on its huge ad revenue potential by attracting marketers who want to cut through the cluttered digital ad space to reach a younger, more tech-savvy audience. 50% of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13-17.

As a marketer, I think that this move by Snapchat is brilliant, and an essential next step to drive ad revenue. But as a Snapchat user, I am not looking forward to seeing advertisements dilute the organic content posted by my friends.

Earlier last year, Snapchat introduced “Snapchat Stories”, a way for users to send out multiple messages (hence “story”), and is available for your contacts to view for 24 hours. I’ve also noticed on my own feed that Snapchat has introduced “special’ Snapchat Stories, where events such as music festivals and sporting events are showcased.

The above screenshot is from my own feed. For example, “College Football” is a series of snaps from people attending football games across the United States, although representatives say that this was not a marketing collaboration. It seems as if Snapchat is slowly easing its users into seeing paid promotions and longer snaps on their feed.

Snapchat Discovery is said to be rolling out this November, so I will be tracking this developing story as it unfolds.

Ello, the self-proclaimed “Anti-Facebook”,  has gained much virality over the past few weeks. After discussing this new social network in class, my curiosity was piqued and so I decided to do some research myself.

There are several things that are helping the site generate buzz:

1. It is currently invite-only, and exclusivity breeds curiosity. Ello is reporting 40,000 sign-up requests coming in per hour.
2. Its manifesto promises zero ads, no data-mining, and most of all, no turning users into products. It aims to be “simple, beautiful, and ad-free”.
3. The site will be free for basic users, with one-time costs for premium features that can be added at the user’s discretion.

My biggest concern isn’t with its interface, its exclusivity, or its functionality. My problem is with Ello’s value proposition. What is Ello’s competitive advantage over other social networks? Its promise of being an ad-free experience. But can it stay ad-free? Where is the revenue going to come from? According to Gawker, Ello secured $435,000 in venture capital funding earlier this year. There will certainly be pressure from their investors as well as internally to make money.

It is near-impossible for a digital entity to remain 100% ad-free, as this makes up the bulk of the revenue streams for most companies. At the end of the day, it is a business, and every business has a bottom line, and stakeholders to keep happy. Their introduction of new premium paid features demonstrates their intentions to keep the site ad-free, but can one-time costs by an unknown percentage of users really generate enough money to keep the site afloat?

This is a story in development- the digital world will most certainly keep its eye on Ello to see what it’s next moves are.