△ MENU/TOP △

Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
SearchClose Icon

Friday Wrap #139: Coke suckered, Nationwide pilloried, brand content ignored, & lots of Twitter news

Friday Wrap #139: Coke suckered, Nationwide pilloried, brand content ignored, & lots of Twitter news

Friday Wrap #139
Flickr photo courtesy of Juhan Sonin

Some Super Bowl follow-up was inevitable in this week’s Wrap, along with the usual mix of news, reports, posts, and studies. As always, I bookmark everything I might consider for the Wrap—and for my podcast—on my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

Coca-Cola suspends automated tweet campaign after being suckered—It was a cute idea: Mark negative tweets with the hashtag #MakeItHappy, which would cue Coca-Cola to convert the negative words into ASCII images. Then Gawker found the automated system handling the conversions had made art out of the slogan of white nationalism. Gawker next created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, which tweeted passages of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, accompanied by the hashtag, which Coke promptly turned into art. After discovering the hack, Coca-Cola shut down the campaign that was launched during the Super Bowl. “The debacle illustrates that major brands like Coke can’t make campaigns featuring automatic tweets without the expectation that it will likely get hijacked,” writes Adweek’s Krinstina Monllos. Read more

Insurance company mired in controversy after Super Bowl ad—Nationwide Insurance threw a wet towel into the Super Bowl. Amidst all the upbeat advertising, the company opted to feature a young boy explaining he would never experience the usual milestones in life because he had died. The ad was designed to start a discussion about preventable childhood deaths, and a company executive defended the spot, arguing that “if it saved on child, it’s worth it.” But Citi social media head Frank Eliason—one of many parents who suffered the loss of a child—writes that he has heard from hundreds of grieving parents sharing the pain the commercial caused them. He notes the company’s response to complaints has angered him and others. “It’s really sad that no one saw these issues before this ad was aired,” he writes. “Companies need to make sure they are listening, and truly understand where people are coming from.” Read more

Indiana governor pulls plug on news site—Indiana Governor Mike Pence has shut down Just IN, a state-run news source that was criticized for being a propaganda source designed to compete with the press. Read more

Instagram hiring editors—Photo sharing app Instagram is looking for at least five people to join a daily editorial production team that already has 12 staffers tasked with finding interesting users and writing features about them on the Instagram blog, driving interest in their photos and sparking greater use of the app. One recent hire is former Esquire, New York Magazine, and Sports Illustrated writer Alex Suskind. Read more

Twitter

Tweets return to Google search results—Thanks to a deal between Google and Twitter, it’ll be easier to find tweets in a search. Tweets will start appearing in search results as they’re posted now that Google has access to Twitter’s firehose. For Twitter, that means an opportunity to monetize logged-out users while increasing the frequency which which Twitter users check the site. Read more

New Twitter users see an “instant timeline”—Twitter newcomers are no longer faced with an empty timeline, vacant until they begin finding people to follow. The company will introduce an “instant timeline” feature that will populate the timeline with content based on an analysis of your contacts to show tweets from a variety of users about topics you’re interested in. Read more

Twitter ads to appear in third-party sites—Promoted tweets are destined for sites outside of Twitter, including Flipboard and Yahoo Japan, with the same appearance that is native to the experiences on those sites. Based on the MoPub ad network Twitter bought two years ago, the company can hit more than 1 billion users on mobile devices across a number of Web properties. Read more

An Apple bug cost Twitter 4 million users—Twitter’s failure to impress with user numbers during its fourth-quarter earnings report, and the company is placing the blame on Apple. A change to iOS 8 included a bug that affected the way the platform integrates Twitter, resulting in the loss of 4 million users. Read more

Data Points

Engagement slumped in Super Bowl advertising—While consumers have become more mobile and social, Super Bowl ads are becoming less of both. An analysis of the pricey spots over the last three years finds a 27% increase in the number of ads that had no Call to Action (CTA), which would diminish engagement with the ad. There was a 9% drop in the use of hashtags, along with declines in the use of a twitter icon, a YouTube URL, and a twitter handle. More ads contained phone numbers than calls to download mobile apps or engage with SMS. According to Jeffrey Rohrs, “Super Bowl ads just don’t work hard enough for the brands paying their bills. They need to do more than just brand. They need to engage meaningfully in the moment with consumers who are standing by, mobile device at the ready.” Read more

Race, ethnicity drive social media preferences—The use of many social media sites varies based on race and ethnicity, according to a new Pew Research Center report. Latinos, blacks, and whites use social networks about the same, with about 80% of Latino, black, and white adults who are online using at least one of five major social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter), but site choices can be different. Instagram is more popular with Latinos while Pinterest resonates with whites. Blacks also prefer Instagram to Pinterest. Facebook is the preferred network for all three ethic/racial categories. Read more

Employees want the company to communicate about politics and public policy—If you’re wondering what kind of content to focus on in your internal communications effort—content employees will actually consume—consider talking about politics and public policy issues that have an impact on the organization. A poll found employers to be the most credible source for that kind of information, and delivering it can encourage civic engagement as employees understand why their companies have taken a particular stand and then become advocates for those issues. The Business-Industry Political Action Committee poll found 31% of respondents ranked their companies as the most credible source, while 53% said management should actively promote public policies that serve the company’s interests and 63% said information sharing such information increases the likelihood that they will vote. Read more

Value of a Facebook fan varies by country—The more desirable a demographic on Facebook, the more you’ll spend to target an ad to it. According to an advertising software company that tracks what it costs to advertise via Facebook to different markets, there can be two or three orders of magnitude difference in cost. The cost per click for someone in Venezuela is 8 cents compared to $1.28 for someone in Norway, for example. Read more

Consumers are learning to ignore branded content—A study of consumer responses to branded content found only 20% of branded content posts appearing on Facebook produced any kind of emotional response, suggesting the other 80% were completely ignored. Study authors labeled the phenomenon “content blindness” and said it’s not unlike consumer ability to tune out TV or radio ads. The solution is more intense content, the authors say. Read more

Edison Share of Ear study expands to quarterly measurement—Industry demand has led Edison research to double the releases of its Share of Ear data from twice yearly to quarterly. The report, introduced in May 2014, measures the share of time Americans spend listening to all audio sources. In the most recent study, podcasting saw sharp rises in its share of ear. Read more

Trends

Are you taking SlideShare seriously as a social platform?—A SlideShare presentation from author David Meerman Scott touting his new book has been viewed over 160,000 times, shared more than 2,200 times on LinkedIn, been tweeted some 1,000 times, and has earned more than 500 Facebook likes. Scott suggests brands can achieve similar results if they follow a few simple rules, like focusing on what you’re offering for free rather than what you’re selling, putting your best work out there, and applying great design. Read more

Five apps to rule them all—Consumers spend the vast majority of their app time with just five apps, according to a Forrester report. Consumers in the US and UK use 24 apps per month but spend more than 80% of the time using their five most time-consuming apps. In the US, these include Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, Pandora, and Gmail. Read more

The rise of the mobile strategist—Three-quarters of companies have established roles designed to put someone in charge of unifying, managing, and deploying a mobile strategy across the organization, according to a study from Backend as a Service provider Kinvey. Read more

Comment Form

« Back