Tag Archives: social media

INVERSO VERANO

 

 

How does Twitter reach influencers? Billboards.

“The micro-media app says it bought billboard space everywhere from Nice airport to the Palais.”

READ THE REPORT

 

 

Brooklinen (among others) drops Facebook to focus on OOH, broadcast and print.

“We’re trying to move away from Facebook as fast as we can.”

LOOK UNDER THE COVERS

 

Google Subtracts Ads (for Those Willing to Pay).

“Around 11 percent of internet users were running an ad blocker.”

SEE NEW WAYS OF NOT SEEING

 

From Madmen to FRENEMIES:

“If you ‘follow the money,’ Auletta writes, you’ll understand the importance of advertising and the significance of the threats against it, and maybe value it more, or at least disdain it less.”   High praise indeed!

TRY SIMPLY READING A BOOK

 

Is Social Justice Possible on Social Media? Online Redlining:

“Facebook allowed housing advertisers to block users from seeing their ads if those users had a black, Latino or Asian-American ‘affinity.’”

VISIT JIM CROW DOT COM

 

Next to Now – Early March Edition

TRUTHERS EMERGE TO DRAIN DIGITAL SWAMP

Following Procter & Gamble’s call for digital advertising that is more reliable (and less “crappy”) Stein says, “it’s interesting that we’re at a point now where we question what even is real.”*

Isn’t it?

* In a meta twist, who is “Stein?”  He is not otherwise cited or named in the article!  It may be a typo for “Scott.”

 

CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION?

“The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media campaign is supposed to accomplish: millions of Facebook likes and thousands of new Twitter followers. But it didn’t sell Pepsi. Pepsi Cola and Diet Pepsi both lost about 5 percent of their market shares over the course of the year — a calamitous decline. The brand returned to TV.”

Turn on, tune in, pop out.

 

CHOICE OF A MATURE GENERATION

“American users aged 24 and younger may decrease time spent on Snapchat as more people check out Instagram Stories” but those book-buying 45- to 54-year olds are helping Snapchat to grow its total audience anyway.

Instantly Snap

Next to Now: Mid-January 2017

MIDROLL WITH A TWIST

Facebook’s strategy creates a new opportunity for advertisers … while  incentivizing the creation of videos that people will actually want to watch.

Read about it here and here.

 

 

WHAT AD TECH INSPIRES TRUST IN 8 OF 10 USERS?

Spoiler … It’s not VR.

Don’t take our word for it.

 

 

WOMEN WANT FEWER AND MORE GENUINE INFLUENCER POSTS

Among other things, probably.

Learn to avoid pitfalls.

Thelonious Monk

Next to Now: The Week in Reading Links

The Week in Reading for the Week of April 10

April 3, 2015

Monk’s advice never gets old.

April 6, 2015

Top brands on Instagram know the difference between quality of posts and quantity.

April 7, 2015

Sports fans care more about speed than quality. Don’t let your ad slow down their experience.

The founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America notices ebook sales leveling off, says (essentially), “Don’t believe the data.” Does he count as a disinterested observer?

April 8, 2015

Get your gifs here: Hulu does a deal with Tumblr.

Good tips for presentations.

Instagram’s carousel ads would be GREAT for book publishers. Now if we can just get them to come down a couple hundred thou on their minimum spend.

Used right, YouTube cards could be a great way to show more information in ads—always a plus for book publishers.

Get your word nerd on: A lovely piece on the use of quotation marks. (via @GroveAtlantic)

We aren’t going to London Book Fair, but if we were this is a presentation we’d love to attend. Sara Lloyd gives great talks.

Want to go write in the Antarctic for a few months? You might get a book deal out of it.

Welcome LitHub! A brand-spanking new website with a nifty pedigree: created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.

April 9, 2015

A new video game lets you wander around de Chirico cityscapes!

Programmatic buys aren’t the end of creativity; they’re just the beginning!

April 10, 2015

iHeart Radio brings programmatic to broadcast. 

“Metaphysical Daring as a Post-human Survival Strategy” discussed in the French Embassy Ballroom at 5am. Who’s in?

Great take on advertising as seduction, excerpted from a book we were happy to work on.

The rise of the Instagram influencer (nice work if you can get it).

“This is terrifying and inspiring in equal measure,” says Google’s Ben Malbon about Chris Messina’s idea (reality) of “the full stack employee.” True dat.

Clay Shirky and the New York Times’ Margaret Sulllivan talk about the future of print news. Shirky’s “darker narrative” is about the print newspaper, but does it have relevance to the plateauing of print book share (versus digital)? Shirky says, “So it seems likely to me that after the early, rapid decline, we are now in a period of shallow, secular decay, which will give way to a late-stage period of rapid decline.”

Jason Fried on the differences between how platforms make you feel:

“Every scroll through Instagram puts someone’s good day in front of me. A vacation picture, something new they got that they love, pictures of nature, pictures of people they love, places they’ve been, and stuff they want to cheer about. It’s just flat out harder to be negative when sharing a picture. This isn’t a small thing – it’s a very big deal. I feel good when I browse Instagram. That’s the feel that matters.”

(via Almighty’s “Dark Matter” email)

The Vertical Video: An aesthetic disaster but a must for engagement. (via Almighty’s “Dark Matter” email)

 

 

Reaching readers through social networks

We know book readers are online, but where can we find them? The first place to look is on the major social networks, particularly Facebook. As reported in the May 18 New York Times, Nielsen confirmed that “Internet use for ‘short-tail’ sites with large audience reach has evolved since 2003. The change is from portal-oriented sites…to social networks.”

Facebook v. MySpace

While social networks were defined for a time by MySpace, American audiences—particularly the audience most likely to purchase a book—have gravitated primarily to Facebook. Despite its recent tailspin, MySpace remains a vibrant network for users interested in music. But for nearly every other category of interest, Facebook is now number one.

In the last six months alone, Facebook has grown from 50 million active U.S. users to 55 million and gains more everyday. Importantly for publishers, the fastest growing demographic is age 35+. It’s now even bigger than the 18-24 age bracket.

Advertising on Facebook, however, can be a challenge. By design, Facebook hampers our ability to deliver premium ad content and determine relevant location, pushing ads off to the side in an unobtrusive column with a small, single, static .jpg for art and limited room for copy. Facebook’s ability to micro-target means that ads do perform reasonably well on the network—in line with most online CTRs of .1-.12%–but certainly not as well as they could given the network’s ideal demo for readers.

Facebook Applications

Verso Digital currently recommends running campaigns on Facebook apps instead of on Facebook itself. Apps keep users within the FB environment and have all the advantages of Facebook—viral connectivity, ease of use, user engagement, and micro-interest ad targeting.  But apps offer several unique advantages, including a pool of highly engaged users (and thus increased potential for viral outreach), greater creative flexibility (including flash and video-enabled rich media), and superior adjacency to relevant content. Recent campaigns have shown not only a significantly higher CTR with Facebook apps than with FB itself, but also an even more potentially powerful viral component. One of the most prominent examples of this viral potential is the “Visual Bookshelf” app: every time a reader puts a book on his or her “Visual Bookshelf” or writes a review, that message goes out to all of his or her Facebook Friends—120 on average. That’s a lot of value for each action taken. And it suggests another kind of answer for publishers and authors to the problem of shrinking book reviews. Neither blogs, GoodReads, or Facebook alone will answer the fill the gap left by disappearing print book review publications. But each represents another strand in the fabric of how readers are making new decisions about what to read next.