Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
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Six Seconds of Divine Banality
28th January 13
Posted in culture
There have been a few attempts to create the ‘instagram of video’ – social, accessible, allowing a moving moment to be captured, broadcast and shared with minimal effort. So far many of these have failed because of the inherent difference between still and video photography; stills can be understood in a microsecond, a video is a sequence that the eyes and brain need time to process.
Now we have Vine, from Twitter, which seeks to address this difficulty by allowing a maximun of six second films that autoplay as soon as they hover into view. It’s new and there are obvious missing pieces (Vine embeds and links? Inability to save a Vine in progress etc etc) but the launch buzz is there and within a few hours of launch brands were already adding Vines (as I guess we’ll have to call them) to their twitter editorial programme.
In this piece, Nathan Jurgenson says that for him it is when Vines are collected together, as on peekvine or justvined, that value emerges from the banality of videos so far shot:
“The trivial nature of most of the individual Vines becomes fascinating in aggregate. It might be the very triviality that seems profound: that so much minutia from across the globe comes together so instantly just for us on our screens.”
I’m not convinced that collating triviality is in itself a game-changer. But in the same article Jurgenson talks about how Vine ‘asks us to see the world as potential quick cuts stitched together’ and this is potentially a more interesting behavioural differentiation from video apps that have come and gone before.
For just as instagram has taught us that with the right filter applied, any moment on earth can look more beautiful, more profound, perhaps we will see stop-motion animation elevated to the form that documents our shared social existence, six seconds at a time.
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Maybe one day we’ll be daring enough to go back
30th March 11
Posted in Shorty awards
No argument with this image from astronaut Douglas H Wheelock (@Astro-Wheels) winning the Shorty Special Award for Best Real-Time Photo of the Year
The rest of the winners and shortlisted twitterati can be found here.
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Effyeahpretzelcrisps
7th March 11
Posted in social media
Author: Emily Woolf (@emii), Strategist, BBH New York
It’s Monday. Almost an average Monday at the office, but today I went above and beyond my routine and made myself a salad for lunch! Partially due to the fact that Fresh Direct came this morning and partially because I’ve been attempting a gluten free diet, this leafy green point of pride made today special and I couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Some may call me an oversharer (cough: @barneyrobinson) and some may make fun of my food Instagram tweets (cough: @saneel), but I wasn’t going to let either rain on my parade. So, I sat at my desk savoring my spinach and beet salad, fork in one hand, iPhone in the other snapping away to get just the right shot, then scrolling through to apply just the right filter to capture the magic of my homemade goodness. And I did. And I sent my color saturated, Lomo-fi filtered picture straight to Twitter. And guess what happened? Within 5 minutes @PretzelCrisps had started following me and had Tweeted at me.
Of course I immediately DM’d back, excitedly starting a conversation with a brand that I had no opinion of about 5 minutes prior.
As you can see, the conversation centered around what they could do for me and they always responded within a minute. All in all, an extremely, and refreshingly human exchange.
This experience got me running around, ducking in and out of offices to tell people about it. Everyone was in awe of @PretzelCrisps’ behavior, as well as how they continued to engage me. It was a quick, powerful burst of brand dialogue, in the vein of a social media fling. @PretzelCrisps just proved that creating a relationship isn’t that hard in a conversational environment when you’re adding to the experience (complimenting me) and not asking much for much in return (an address for instantaneous delivery). They just made a huge impression on all of @BBHNewYork, both as consumers, and as industry folks aspiring to help make brands human.
Kudos and thanks @PretzelCrisps.
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The answer to this Quora? No.
10th January 11
Posted in Rants
The question-and-answer site Quora is a big deal. It has some powerful supporters, with early content posted by a diverse group of digerati from Steve Case to Robert Scoble. It’s the talk of the media (see Google Trend of the word Quora). There are weekly articles on how Quora will be bigger than Twitter.
So, I guess it was inevitable that I’d hate it. To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth. In a missionary effort to reach those few that are yet to form an opinion on this site equivalent of an Uwe Boll movie, I offer the following 3 reasons to resist boarding this bandwagon.
It’s spam.
This site diabolically infects those with the largest spam potential. I guess when a site is launched by the former head of Facebook Connect, it’s inevitable. By launching after Facebook established critical mass and Twitter became a big deal, Quora made a splash in the saturated question-and-answer site category. So, giving people the opportunity to be in the spotlight with their answer to an already-answered question is an ingenious way to drive audience and usage by appealing to ego. And I don’t even mind ego-stroking. I just don’t want to be repeatedly spammed across my various feeds as people whose content I otherwise love and trust fall victim to name-in-lights syndrome. Then again, if I could convince people I invented tape, it might be worth it….
There are dozens of Quoras about what Quora is.
OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people. But until we admit it, we’ll just keep tweeting how awesome he looks in that special toga (author’s note: this has nothing to do with how awesome I think the hashtag #emperorsclothes would be, promise).
Quora is attempting to differentiate itself via answer quality.
This is defended through its use of Facebook Connect (real people!) and an interest graph (curated topics!). Here’s the thing about quality: it’s inversely related to scale on the web. Generally, users or an algorithm are required to remove the noise. Last I looked, countless services already do this. They go by ticker symbols like GOOG, have David Fincher movies made about them, or add a new user every second (most of whom request a professional recommendation after a single meeting together).
So, let’s sit this Quora thing out. We were able to resist Google Wave and Ping. Let’s make it three in a row that we tried and let pass quietly. This isn’t to say I don’t respect the effort or experimentation of any company trying something new (Google & Apple are incredible at innovation investment). In Quora’s case, I just think if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it via my newsfeed.
Now world, if you’re not on board, pretty please give me a heads-up that I’m taking on a lost cause.
Then I can start a new Quora-related Quora: “How can I get a job at Quora?”
{Update: I’ve agreed to write a follow-up post to either eat my words or discuss what I got right after some, ahem, encouragement from readers. So keep an eye out!}
{Update #2: We asked Leslie Barry to elaborate on his comment below and he’s posted a rebuttal, explaining the unique value of Quora I’ve neglected in the post above.}
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Status of Africa: the Facebook app with a difference
10th May 10
Posted in creativity, social media
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Mapping Twitter Part 2: The Tweet-o-Meter
10th March 10
Came across this today. Tweet-o-Meter (link) is the beta version of a platform created by University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Tweet-o-Meter supposedly updates every ten seconds (not sure it does quite do that right now), showing the number of tweets in each city per minute. The ambition is to log and analyze all geo-located tweets in these major cities. Once logged, they will be used to show Twitter activity over time and space. Various kinds of maps will be the main output. I imagine a variety of delicious visualizations will be forthcoming.
We are possibly attracted partly by the simple analogue-feel, dial-based interface. But we’re also struck by yet another work-in-progress attempt to bring life to the data spawned by Twitter (see also Getting to Know Your Twitter Followers & Why that Matters from earlier this week).
Tweet-o-Meter is part of a broader project called NeISS (National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation), another UK Government-funded project. Read more about it here.
And of course it also reminds us of of the work by Google’s Aaron Koblin on visualizing SMS messages sent on New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam in 2007 (see below). We imagine as Tweet-o-Meter moves forward through beta they’ll need to figure out how to marry Koblin-esque visualizations to their gushing pipe of data. Bringing magic to the mayhem.
Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.
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Will social media eat itself?
19th February 10
Posted in social media
Here at BBH Labs we’re big fans of all things social. We’ve spent time evangelising about the power of the social web and speculating about a future dominated by social businesses. We’re inspired and excited by a future where we can take our social graph with us anywhere we go on the web-a future beautifully articulated by Undercurrent’s Mike Arauz.
”There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand, company, product, or service that disconnected from all the people they know, and the people that share their interest in that experience.”
So we were more than a little taken aback by the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer that shows we trust our friends and peers as a source of information considerably less than we did two years ago. The decline is particularly marked in the US where just 25% of respondents view friends and peers as very/extremely credible-a decline of 20 percentage points on 2008-but is also reflected in the global data.
It’s an extraordinary finding which calls many of our assumptions into question. The trust consumers place in peer to peer recommendations versus corporations has been one of the primary drivers of the social web, the excitement we feel about the potential for social business and the shift of marketing dollars from above the line to social media.
So has all our excitement been founded on a false set of assumptions? Is this simply an anomaly in the data? Or is social media sowing the seeds of its own demise? Read full post
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When everyone’s a broadcaster, is everyone an advertiser?
28th January 10
Posted in social media
Now social media has made it possible for everyone to become a broadcaster, is it inevitable that everyone becomes an advertiser?
In the early weeks of 2010, there’s already been considerable debate (and indignation) around brands, businesses and even bands incentivising users for Tweets. Twincentivisng, if you like (and I must admit I can’t resist a pun).
Is everyone an advertiser? Image by Mike Cogh, Flickr, under a creative commons license
Should brands pay for tweets? Should twitterers take the cash or resist? Is there a sustainable paid for media model here or a fundamentally misguided reaction to the rise of social media? Is pay-per-tweet the end of the Twitterverse as we know it?
In many ways this is an inevitable response to a number of factors:
- The extraordinary rise and equally extraordinary media profile of Twitter
- The increased premium placed on peer to peer recommendations
- The collapse of on-line display advertising and the rise of SEO
- The socialisation of search
Any and all of these factors suggest a pressing need for brands to find a way to harness the power of social media and for media agencies to find a way to monetise it. Viewed from one perspective, the asymmetric nature of Twitter relationships make it particularly ripe for the adoption of a “broadcast” model. 1 in 5 tweets already mentions a brand so monetisation of these mentions seems, from that perspective, to make eminent sense.
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Twitter – the Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
14th April 09
Posted in social media
The crescendo of noise around Twitter grows by the second. Yet while for many this delivers a symphony of Web 2.0 magnificence, crafted by millions of tweeting voices (Aaron Koblin managed only 2000, though it was far from symphonic), others hear nothing more than deafening silence. I’ve been trying to think through this paradox. Two events of the last week illustrate this tension well.
I had a message from my brother Tim (@malbonster), co-Founder of social media agency Made By Many in London, when I woke up here in NY. Tim is ‘into Twitter’. His message was subject titled: ‘I hope it’s not, but the fun bit feels like it’s almost over’. He was lamenting a tweet he’d read this morning from a friend (@netgrrl) which read: ‘Ah… I’ve mentioned coffee too many times now, I’m being inundated with follows from coffee marketers.’ Yes, I found myself nodding subconsciously, it’s being ruined. The crazy experimental bit with no rules, where no one has any idea how to monetize, or even whether it will be successful, and where marketing has been wrong-footed; that’s all gone . . .
(for full post click below)
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Linking intelligently (or why I love bit.ly)
3rd April 09
I transitioned from tinyurl.com to bit.ly earlier this year. Probably way after most people started using it. It’s awesome. But I’m guessing the reason I love bit.ly is not the reason most people would give. Yes, bit.ly delivers super utility simply by shortening a link of seemingly any length to virtually no length. And it makes it easy and quick. That’s part of it.
But I’ve become addicted to the data which bit.ly provides on every link you shorten. Because with bit.ly the shortening is just the beginning of it’s magic. If you register on the site you have a record of all the links you’ve shortened. And if you hit the ‘Info’ function underneath a link you are presented with a treasure trove of metrics & insight. Traffic (clicks) with time & date information, geographical location, platform used to access the link, conversations the link featured within, RTs, and so on.
So one learns that a link posted on Twitter that touches on industrial design is 50% more likely to be clicked on in Brazil than in the UK. Or a link that relates to LEGO is three times as likely to be clicked on in Denmark than in Canada. Or that the optimum time to post is 10pm ET, or that actually one needs to re-post because the two peaks are 10pm ET and 10pm GMT, or that if you want to provoke an Australian audience one should post after 11pm ET. Much of this might seem intuitive, but accessing the data that proves (or refutes) some of the assumptions we work with when we share links is a revealing exercise. Above all, it provides much greater depth of feedback on what’s popular (or not) than simply the crude measure of how often your message is RT on Twitter. And it’s not just Twitter – you can add a bit.ly add-on to your Gmail (http://bit.ly/Xd1yM).
Bit.ly allows you to do a whole lot more than fire-and-forget; it promotes smart linking, and that makes it cool in my (Excel work) book.
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Mel Exon
Jeremy Ettinghausen
Tim Nolan
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