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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Friday Wrap #104: United still breaking guitars, Google loses mobile search share, and more

Friday Wrap #104: United still breaking guitars, Google loses mobile search share, and more

Friday Wrap #104
Dalek cupcake wrappers
Greetings from Toronto, site of the 2014 IABC World Conference. The city has dished up some great weather, which I plan to enjoy as soon as I finish up this week’s Wrap, a review of news and posts from the last week that might have flown by under your radar but are still of interest and use to communicators. During the week, I curate everything I find interesting on my link blog, Links From Shel, which you’re welcome to follow.

News

United still breaks guitars—For social media to work, companies need to do more than just use the tools as a communication channel. They need to listen and act based on what they hear. United clearly didn’t hear Dave Carroll back in 2008 when the web went crazy over his “United Breaks Guitars” video. Musician Ellis Paul tells the tale of United breaking his Taylor guitar and refused to pay for repairs. If a company can’t learn a basic lesson, they’re suffer the same consequences over and over again. Read more

Facebook business page redesign is here—The new look for Facebook business pages was due to happen yesterday, June 5, for those brands that hadn’t already voluntarily made the switch, and it will be visible to all Facebook users by June 13. Changes affect the admin panel, the cover photo (your company name, category, and follow/share buttons will overlay the image), custom tabs, the news feed (all posts on the right side of the page), and page information. You’ll need to make some decisions, such as prioritizing your tabs and ensuring your cover photo will still look good with the new overlays. Read more

John Oliver proves cable TV is still relevant—Last Sunday on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver devoted half the episode to net neutrality, concluding with the link to the FCC’s comment page. In response, viewers deluged the site with with enough traffic to bring it down. The YouTube clip of the segment has been viewed close to a million times. Read more

Google plans video ad exchange—Google will launch a marketplace where Web video producers can sell their ad inventory. The company calls Google Partner Select a “programmatic premium video marketplace” aimed at TV networks’ video inventory along with ad space from top digital companies. According to The Wall Street Journal, the move “comes at a critical time for Web video, as more marketers are shifting ad dollars from TV to the Web.” Read more

Can’t PR and Wikipedia just get along?—That’s the question asked at the first national WikiConference USA, held in late May and early June in New York Wikipedians agreed that “PR firms have the right to correct factual errors posted to the online collaborative encyclopedia. According to one Wikipedian, the days in which “PR people’s shadows are never to darken the door of Wikipedia” are over. But many attendees were skeptical. Read more

Trends

The world isn’t taking Google along on its shift to mobile—Google has dominated search since it first launched, but it’s being left behind as the world pivots to mobile online access. Two years ago, Google commanded 82.8% of the mobile search market, as users had few alternatives. But the adoption of single-purpose apps has driven people to use Yelp to find restaurants and bars, Shazam to find music, and Kayak to find flights (among others), dropping Google’s share to 68.5% in 2013. Google still rules mobile web search, but people are using it less and less. eMarketer expects Google’s share to drop to 65.7% this year, while the other categories will grow to 27.3%. Read more

Foursquare moves past the check-in—Foursquare heralded the era of the check-in, emulated by Facebook and others in an effort to catch up. But check-ins are, like, so 15 minutes ago. And Foursquare realizes it. Soon, the app won’t even let you check in. Instead, it will learn your preferences and notify you when you’re near something it thinks you’ll want. Checking in will require that you install a separate app. Read more

Financial industry investing in social as compliance concerns diminish—Regulatory concerns kept most of the financial services industry out of social media for a long time, but according to data from American Century Investments, those days are over. Regulatory and compliance issues remain the industry’s top concern, those citing it have declined from 47% in 2010 to 36% today. Meanwhile, industry views about the value of social media have improved. More than one-third of professionals in the industry say social media is valuable for their business. Read more

Is producing an original Web video in your future?—No doubt the brand folks at Subway would have laughed five years ago if you told them they’d become producers of original programming, but on Tuesday the company announced it was sponsoring an original-scriptedweb comedy series, “Summer with Cimorelli,” which tells the tale of six singing sisters who have become YouTube stars. Subway has been behind “The 4 to 9ers” since 2012, another original scripted web comedy the sandwich chain is likely to renew. Read more

Research

Companies getting value from social software are embracing social business—Sixty-two percent of mangers surveyed by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Deloitte report their social business initiatives have been at least somewhat successful and nearly as many said social business helps them operate across borders. “Perhaps equally compelling,” the Management Review reports, ” is the extent to which individual employees indicate the value of social business to their daily work. A surprising 57% of respondents say that it is at least somewhat important for them to work for companies with mature social business practices, while 46% of respondents say that social business is at least somewhat important for decision making in their day-to-day role.” The study’s conclusion: Many companies are deriving value from their social business efforts, but the degree of that value depends on the company’s social business maturity. Read more

Consumers are wise to your SEO efforts to bury negative content—And they’re none too happy about it. Research conducted by YouGov, Bloomberg and the UK-based Chartered Institute of Marketing found that 67% of consumers believe the use of SEO gimmicks “to hide negative content within search results” is unethical. Not surprisingly, only 38% of marketers have the same view. But wait; there’s more. Nearly half of consumers also think it’s unethical to give “products away to encourage positive reviews online,” while two-thirds of marketers are okay with the tactic. According to the report, “Only 20 per cent of consumers report high levels of trust and confidence in the information they see on social media, and 62 per cent say it’s difficult to know if brands are using questionable methods on these platforms.” Read more

Know the science to produce great infographics—Most of the infographics polluting the web make me want to gouge my eyes out. There are great ones, though, and yours can be great, too, if you understand the science behind how we perceive infographics. Dr. Ruth Roseholtz, principal research scientist in electrical engineering and computer sciences at MIT, leads a team that studies human vision. She provides insights into the way the brain uses peripheral vision to view images—which is important to understand if you want readers to stop and spend time with your infographic. According to Rosenholtz, “A fundamental constraint on our performance of visual tasks is what we can see in a single glance.” This article is well worth a read if you use infographics in your communications. Read more

Readers prefer stories where problems also have solutions—A study in which participants read six stories found that across all 16 measures included in the project, readers preferred the articles in which problems were accompanied by solutions. While the study was focused on journalism, there’s a clear call to action for those working in PR and marketing. Read more

Don’t give up on Facebook just yet—Yes, organic reach is declining, but that’s not the whole story. In a study of Facebook Insights data, ad agency Hill Holliday reports that engagement rates and viral impression rates rose during the same period organic reach declined. The first is the percentage of people who like, comment or share; the second is the percentage of impressions to non-fans. While Facebook may be showing your content to fewer people, a greater percentage of those who do see it are more interested in the content. Read more

Innovation

Breathe Right gets the real-time thing right—Far too many brands stretch real-time cultural references to the breaking point and beyond in their efforts to tie their marketing to what everyone’s talking about. That’s not the case with Breathe Right, the GlaxoSmithKline brand of nasal strips. For a while, it seemed Triple Crown hopeful California Chrome would miss the third leg, the Belmont Stakes, because of rules prohibiting the nasal strips the horse has worn in all its races. The publicity around the issue led the company to co-sponsor the race. They also plan to distribute 50,000 of their strips to adults attending the race, encouraging them to share selfies of themselves wearing the strips via social media. The key to getting real-time right is relevance. Read more

CBC relives D-Day on Twitter—No channel is better at the real-time thing than Twitter, the most immediate of the social media channels. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is taking advantage of that to let you experience the Allied invasion of Europe in real time. The CBC is bringing today’s 70th anniversary of D-Day to life by sharing events on Twitter just as if they were reporting it live today. There’s still time to follow events in real time at @CBCDDayLive. Read more

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