All posts in “Tumblr”

The Next Wave of Visual Content Curation

March 19, 2012 / Comments Off on The Next Wave of Visual Content Curation / Posted in: Blog

Last month, during Social Media Week, SMG hosted an Ignite-inspired event called Spark. I was thrilled to be one of the six speakers and chose to speak about a topic near and dear to me: Vistual Content Curation. Over the past year, visual content curation sites have been making some big waves. The most popular are Instagram, Tumblr and, of course, the new kid on the block, Pinterest. In my presentation I spoke about how brands are leveraging these platforms to engage with users and showcase their products. I also gave some data points about the number of users on each platform; Instagram had 15 million users, Tumblr had 44.3 million blogs and Pinterest had broken the 10 million-user mark with 11.7 million.  To me, a month in internet land is like six months in real life, and some exciting and interesting news has been announced in that short time that will really push these visual content curation platforms further into the mainstream spotlight.

Instagram announced last week they have reached 27 million users on the iOS-only app, nearly doubling their user base in two months! With more and more brands utilizing the application to promote products and integrating the API for content creation, the pressure to expand to more mobile devises is on. There have been rumours swirling for months of Instagram expanding to an Andriod app but last week at SXSW they announced it was in beta testing and would be coming “very soon”.

Tumblr boasts 48.6 million blogs to date and recently rolled out their ‘highlighted posts‘ feature early last month. Well-known for not wanting to integrate advertising to the platform, Tumblr has struggled to turn a profit. The highlighted posts feature could be a way to remedy this and get brands to pay for their posts to be featured. Essentially, for one dollar you can mark a post ‘highlighted’ and it will show up on the dashboard with a customizable sticker. This announcement was received with mixed reviews. Understanding and commending the desire to keep Tumblr authentic for artistic expression, some still feel that ‘highlighting’ is the same as advertising.

Pinterest, which estimates to be at 13 million users,  announced last week at SXSW that it would soon be introducing new and improved profile pages which were launched Friday. The profile esthetic is very similar to the new Facebook timeline, clean and visual with less content, and allows for larger images to be visible on the profile. For brands, this is an exciting opportunity to create a customized brand experience in an interface that users are familiar with. The infograph below has some really great information the growth of the platform and features brands that are seeing success on Pinterest.

What can we expect in the coming months as these content curation platforms continue to grow and more and more brands get on board? How can you leverage your brand now on these exciting platforms and prepare for what’s to come? Check out my full presentation from Spark to inspire and ignite your content:

 

 

Some interesting points on Pinterest:

The Power of Pinterest

 

Social Media Roundup for January 13

January 13, 2012 / Comments Off on Social Media Roundup for January 13 / Posted in: Blog, Social Media Research

 

Kirsten McNeill is a Co-ordinator, Content and Community at Social Media Group.
Follow @kirstenmcne

Social Media Comments in Your Search Results

This week Google implemented “Search plus Your World,” a bit of a controversial change to its searches – it integrates Google+ comments into standard searches. Google+ members or those just signed into Google will be able do a regular search of the web as well as their own Google+ network – circles, photos, posts and more. Jack Menzel, product management director of search at Google explained this as, “search across information that is private and only shared to you, not just the public web.” For example if you searched “Nars,” you will be given their company website, product offering, company history, etc. and if anyone in your Google+ network had any thoughts on the brand, maybe loved their Winter palette, that post will also appear. In addition to these results, public profiles of those that aren’t in your circles will be recommended for you to follow that may be experts in the topic you are searching and you will conveniently be able to follow them right from the search results. But if you’re not into this, you can switch it off by selecting the world icon in the top right, as opposed to the person icon.

 

Among competitors, Twitter has been most verbal about their thoughts of this announcement, saying that further integrating Google+ into regular search results is “bad for people.” But Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt addressed this in an interview with reporter Danny Sullivan that it was Twitter’s choice to not continue integrating its data in Google searches by not renewing their agreement that gave the search engine access to public tweets. Check out the rest of the interview below:

What are your thoughts on having Google+, Twitter or any social media data showing up in your searches? Would their inclusion make your results better or would they just be unnecessary noise?

Mashable is running a Poll:

MySpace Making a Comeback?

comScore‘s latest social media report reveals some interesting data – MySpace is bigger than Tumblr and Google+! People are even spending more time on MySpace than they are on Google+.

 

Justin Timberlake, who partnered with Specific Media in June to purchase MySpace from News Corp, said “We’re ready to take television and entertainment to the next step by upgrading it to the social networking experience.” Is JT bringing MySpace back?

Sponsored Stories in the News Feed

Facebook launched Sponsored Stories in the News Feed this week but there are a number of controls around them to ensure that the user experience is respected. As promised, the ads are marked as “Featured” and they will only be showing up in the Ticker or Feed of user’s that have already liked the page. But these Sponsored Stories will also find a way to promote growth for a Page by highlighting fan activity, such as a Page Like or a Post Like. These ads will be shown to the friends of the person who did the action. ‘Page Like Story’ – ad will show to friends of people who liked your page, and ‘Page Post Like Story’ ad will show up when people like a specific Page post.

Facebook is slowly rolling these out to avoid user backlash and disrupting the user experience, so you will likely only see one Sponsored Story per day and they will not yet be appearing on mobile devices.

If you are a fan of Ben & Jerry’s Page, you likely saw this:

Listen to Music with your Friends – Even if you’re not with them!

Also announced this week from Facebook is a new feature called, ‘Listen With,’ enabling you to share the songs you are streaming via Spotify and Rdio. Users were already able to see what their friends were listening to but now they can listen together in a virtual environment and even sing along together. In the next few weeks you should start to see a music note in your chat sidebar and this will indicate who is listening to music. If you hover over their name you can hit “Listen with x,” which will play the song via the service your friend is using. When your friend changes the song, yours will change accordingly and more than one friend can listen in on the music so the entire group can chat about it together.

Facebook’s $100 Billion IPO

Facebook’s rumored April – June IPO is drawing nearer and its looking like it will be the biggest of any technology company in history (six times that of Google’s!) – its expected to be a $100 billion IPO! Accounting Degree Online has put together an Infographic breaking it down for us.

 

SoundCloud and The Battle for Music-Based Social Network Supremacy

December 8, 2011 / Comments Off on SoundCloud and The Battle for Music-Based Social Network Supremacy / Posted in: Blog

A Place for Music?

Although the MySpace of today looks as if it’s barely holding on by a thread, there was a time when it proudly wore the crown of social networks.

At its core was music, a key component in both its initial growth and the tail end of its usefulness. At the time, MySpace’s approach to music was incredibly innovative. They were one of the first web services to allow anyone making music, be it major, indie or an unsigned act, to upload their work to “the cloud” free of charge. Once uploaded, the music was streamable for audiences to enjoy.

This revolutionary approach to online music helped launched the careers of countless artists and forged new networks of friends connected through a shared fondness for a band or genre.

In fact, music played such an important role in the rise of MySpace that the site’s motto was simply “a place for music” for the better part of its glory days.

As the cons of using MySpace started to outweigh the pros, users began to naturally seek alternatives. Facebook offered a superior social experience and a mass migration soon followed. It’s a story we’re all familiar with, only there’s one thing missing. What happened to music on Facebook?

To be fair, Facebook hasn’t completely abandoned music. They’ve experimented with apps, artist pages and have recently started integrating services like Spotify and Rdio into profile timelines. It’s a nice start, but for the most part, it’s clear to any user that uploading and streaming music is not a significant part of the Facebook experience.

Enter The Void

Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, MOG, Turntable FM, Last FM and Ping are just a few of the new services currently looking to fill the online music void left behind by MySpace. While the theme of “listening to music” is common to all of these services, their methods of delivering the experience differs dramatically among one another.

Spotify, Rdio, and MOG rely on licensing deals to secure the rights to streaming content, Turntable FM requires similar rights yet adds an element of gamification, Last FM and Ping depend on capturing and sharing existing listening habits in an effort to pair like minded individuals based on similar taste.

Closely mirroring the model of MySpace, SoundCloud stands out from the pack by allowing any artist the ability to upload their music to the SoundCloud servers free of charge, the result being a clean, intuitive streamable audio portfolio of their work.

SoundCloud

I was lucky enough to participate in Soundcloud’s beta program back when I was writing my music blog. Their dropbox feature was a new, superior alternative to email for accepting demos by the public. Now looking back on this early sign of ingenuity, it’s no wonder the service has gone on to grow at a staggering rate.


In a few short years, SoundCloud has grown to a network of over 8 Million users and now comes in a variety of mobile, tablet and desktop app flavours. Unlike services that depend on licensing deals to secure content, SoundCloud relies entirely on user-generated content, often leaving people to describe it as the “Flickr of Music”.
Like Flickr, SoundCloud’s wonderland of content offers an incredible experience to the listener. By simply following artists of interest, listeners are rewarded with an endless stream of free music including forthcoming releases, demos and rough takes.

Moving Forward

Looking past simply dominating the space of music, SoundCloud has recently expanded into the areas of podcasting and live recording. Possibly, the most interesting development is their recent interoperability venture with Tumblr. Through the partnership, artists are able to seamlessly embed SoundCloud content directly in to their Tumblr blogs, resulting in band pages eerily familiar to those of MySpace.

As we inch closer towards an age of streaming music libraries in the cloud, choosing a go-to service becomes increasingly murky when confronted with issues of copyright, licensing and delivery. I for one prefer the “open” model of SoundCloud, not simply because it’s free, but because its model helps put the control of content back in the hands of the artists.

A perfect example of this creative control is shown below. Taken from Matthew Dear’s forthcoming EP is the song Headcage. Uploaded by his label Ghostly International and made free to stream and download for all.

Enjoy!

Instagram – a movement in the making.

December 2, 2011 / Comments Off on Instagram – a movement in the making. / Posted in: Blog

Part instant picture, part telegram, Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks today. In as little as nine months, over seven million users have downloaded the iOS-only app and contributed over 150 million pictures. What began as a way to share mobile photos in real time has transformed into a content curator of live world events and has spawned several clever offshoots to boot.

So what makes Instagram so unique? It’s a global movement. The top 10 downloads come from four continents: Asia, North America, Australia and Europe, which makes it one of the only social networks to crossover continents. Not bad for a four person operation from San Francisco, right? Following users from around the world is one of the my favourite features because at any given moment I can see pictures from Spain, Japan and Brazil without even knowing the users, just by following their feed. It’s a very intimate thing to share moments of your day through photos. It’s also very comforting and somewhat rewarding when I start to receive comments and likes on my photos from users who are thousands of miles away. My follower list continues to grow, as do the likes and comments on my photos. For me, it’s the most innovative social network I am a part of.

Instagram is one of the world’s biggest content curators. What took Flickr almost two years to accomplish, Instagram completed in less than half the time. Over eight short months Instagram produced 100 million photos, that’s 15 uploads per second. And we’re only talking Apple users here, pretty incredible. Social sharing is fully integrated so I can post my latest shots on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and even my Tumblr account which has transformed into a photo blog thanks to all of this. Following real live events has also been a great feature of Instagram. From the Royal Wedding to natural disasters, there are even countless feeds dedicated to the global Occupy movement. Instagram makes it easy to keep up to date in real time to what is going on in other cities and countries.

So now you have all this great content, what do you do with it? This is where the really cool stuff begins. Countless awesome offshoots have sprouted up in the past few months to leverage and amplify Instagram content. A few of my favourites are:

Statigrams – allows you to instantly turn your Instagram stats into cool, sharable infographics.

StickyGram – allows you to turn your Instagram images into lovely little magnets that are delivered to your door. You can also enter your images to weekly contests to win free magnets.

CanvasPop – recently integrated Instagram images to create stunning wall art printed on canvas.

I thought I would share my own Instagram content experience, (yet to be publically marketed, I might add). I recently decided to get new contact cards from moo.com and used 45 of my favourite Instagram photos as the backside to my cards (which I appropriately took a photo of and published to Instagram). They look fantastic and are great conversation starters.

With the recent launch of the Flickr integrated app on Android and no word on a Blackberry app, it looks like Instagram is going to dominate the Apple-only space for a while. I eagerly await the other amazing features, apps and off shoots Instagram has in store over the coming months and, I might add, am completely addicted to this app.

 

 

iOS App Loopcam and the Animated GIF

July 28, 2011 / Comments Off on iOS App Loopcam and the Animated GIF / Posted in: Blog

Oh Internet, look how far you’ve come. From AOL optical disks, IRC chat rooms, GeoCities and <blink>questionable design standards</blink> to celebrity profiles, Klout scores and rounding web company valuations to the nearest billion, you’ve seen a lot.

Throughout these times of exponential growth, dynamic change and elevated user expectations, one lone image format continues on, leaving smiles in it’s wake. I’m of course, talking about the Graphics Interchange Format, more commonly known as GIF.

GIF animated banners were a hallmark of the 1990’s Information Super Highway. Often garish and obnoxious, they prompted users to BUY NOW or CLICK HERE with moving images at a time pre-dating HTML5, Flash rollovers and YouTube.

Yet time marches on. And on today’s modern web, the GIF is technically flawed. It’s palette is limited to a spectrum of only 256 colours and it’s file size can become considerably large as new frames are added for increasingly more complex animations. These technical limits, and the death of the GIF’s most popular authoring tool Adobe ImageReady in 2005 played a key role in the formats descent from the public eye.

Until now.

Largely credited to the runaway success of Tumblr, the GIF is beginning to make it’s return to computer screens across the globe. Today’s GIF is supercharged. Gone are the days of banner ads or Peanut Butter Jelly Time, the GIF’s of today are personal short stories told in only a handful of frames.

Introducing Loopcam.

At the time of this post, the freshly pressed iOS app Loopcam might still be news to some. Introduced as a free App to the store in July of 2011, Loopcam let’s users create GIF-loops on the go and share them with their friends across networks like Twitter and  Facebook.

In addition to basic social sharing capabilities, users can also post their GIF-Loops to a shared Loopcam branded Tumblr where uploaded GIFs can be tagged with a username. By linking directly to the tag, users can in essence, hack their way towards a custom profile.

I’ll be completely transparent here. When first using the app, I felt it was missing something more “social”. Perhaps I was expecting something closer to Instagram, where I have an established profile, I can follow friends, add comments and so on.

Yet despite not meeting my expectations initially, I still couldn’t pull myself away from the app and began to realize that Loopcam is a social network (of sorts). It’s not a full blown offering with mass amounts of VC funding and hype like we’ve come to expect but rather a hand-rolled social offering reminiscent of web efforts from a forgotten time.

As if it were mirroring the struggles of the GIF format, Loopcam is also technically limited, yet it’s making excellent use of free web services like Tumblr to remain viable in today’s social web. And yet again, smiles continue to be left in the wake as Loopcam user-base continues to grow daily.

Call it nostalgia or simply a desire to root for the underdog, the fact remains, Loopcam is new, on the rise and trailer loads of fun to use. It’s taught me to not always expect that new web offerings be fully baked and sometimes, it’s the limitations and idiosyncrasies of a service that truly defines it’s value.