Truffle Social

“The unknown is not what to be afraid of, it’s only when the unknown becomes known that one can decide whether to be afraid or not.”

―Markus Peterson

Business - The rapidly evolving platform upon which capitalist economies survive. From strategies to stocks, marketing to management, the key to a great business lies in its ability to adapt to its ever changing environment, through a combination of calculated risk taking, market prediction and education. However, one thing that will never change, is mankind’s fear of the unknown - arguably the biggest downfall of budding entrepreneurs. Never has this ancient human quality been so apparent than with the rise of social media marketing.

Remember Kodak? In 1975, Kodak made a leap in photographic technology when they invented the first digital camera, revolutionising the future of its industry. Around the same time, the brand was experiencing its peak operating period, controlling a staggering 90% of the US film market. Through a short-sighted lens, things were looking pretty great for the American giant. Now, Kodak’s downfall wasn’t a failure to recognise the change in the market, it was it’s ignorance to embrace it. They placed their digital camera on the back burner, lurking in the shadows of their film business for fear of cannibalizing their own successes, failing to accept the direction in which the market would soon be moving. It wasn’t until 1990 that the company finally made plans to enter the digital age, however, by that point it was far too late. Remember Canon? Of course you do.

Kodak, Blockbuster, HMV, Borders...the list goes on. What do these big brands all have in common? Bankruptcy, due to their failure to adapt to the growing digital consumer demand. Why for the life of me would I purchase Breaking Bad series three for £24.99 from a store when I could receive an identical product for £11.99 delivered to my door. The blind sightedness is unfathomable.

Make the Unknown...Known

The internet has changed things substantially, and it would be naive of any business owner to assume that this change hasn’t had a similar effect on marketing. As a company whose social media basis relies primarily on the foundations of the digital age, we pride ourselves in keeping one step ahead of the changing market, however, one challenge we seem to face time and time again is educating those who are yet to understand the importance social media plays (and will continue to play) in 21st century business. So, how do we go about making the unknown, known? Well firstly we can display the hard evidence. For example, 81% of French businesses that went bankrupt in 2013 had little or no presence online, an astonishing figure yes, but not enough to win over the most sceptical of business owners.

So let’s look at things in a metaphorical sense and imagine your online presence is your new shiny shop front. The UK alone has 33 million regular users of social media, that’s half of the population that have the potential to pass by your store. To put that into context, Oxford Street has an average daily flow of around 100,000 people. Now, what social media marketing can do, that your billboards/flyers/mannequins can’t, is reach out to these potential customers in an intimate and personal manner; planting that seed in the mind that will flower into your most loyal customers. You have millions of individuals in one place, with details of age, gender, likes and dislikes; It would be foolish to ignore the wealth of possibilities. To put this bluntly, the sun is setting on the days of blanket advertising.

A brand should always be looking to it’s competitors and completing a self assessment. What are they doing that I’m not? If it’s running successful accounts on a variety of social media platforms, you can guarantee that they will be winning over plenty of your brand’s prospective consumers. Never make the mistake of assuming your rivals aren’t that vital one step ahead. As business owners and members of a capitalist society you must learn from the mistakes of the past whilst embracing the unknown with open arms.

Winston

We just sat around our big screen to watch the live-streamed announcement by Facebook...war is definitely brewing between Instagra, (owned by Facebook) and those poor chaps at Vine. How far we have come since a few years ago when mobile phones were considered innovative!

With the success of Vine, the app that allows users to record 6 second-long videos from their phones, competitors have been scrambling to get in on the video action. Innevitably, we suppose, Facebook has now come marching in to take over one teeny bit of the market that they didn't  have total control over. Through Instagram (whihc Facebook acquired), now adds the option to shoot videos as well as beautiful images. And as much as we feel sorry for Vine, we think it actually has some really great points that we believe will make Vine something that people will have little to no memory of, come this time next year. Here's how:

1: Filters

Instagram has always allowed people to share photos using filters that alter colour, texture and focus. They can mundane look pretty and the ugly...well, not so ugly! In the broadcast it was mentioned that amateur video is often clumsy and drab and we have to agree; so now with Instagram's video filters, we're sure to see lots of stunning moving scenes.

  2: Using Previously Shot Clips

Apparently Instagram will allow you to upload previously shot clips. This is a HUGE thing for us as earlier this week we recorded a video on vine (in one take which took many takes to get right) and then, because it wasn't the right time to send the video, we waited. But when we came to open it again it was gone. It had luckily saved into the phone's photo gallery so, despite our efforts to find some cheaters' guides, we ended up recording it from the screen in front of us. Yes, we'd taken the easier route of uploading it and playing it on the computer.

With Vine, anything you post to it must be recorded in Vine. You can't pull videos from your library, which is definitely limiting and really quite frustrating. This means you can't edit things in other apps or use material from other cameras.

Instagram rids us of this problem as it allows you to use your previously recorded footage, as it currently does with photos, offering you more options and flexibility.

  3: The Instagram Website:

It took Instagram some time before it made its users' photo libraries viewable in their own self-contained web pages but Vine recording can only be viewed in the app, or embedded as a card on Twitter. It's obvious why centralised viewing of your media is so attractive and Instagram fulfills this well by incorporating video into the current user web pages. 

  4: Export as a GIF

Now, you may have seen that we here at Truffle are fond of the odd GIF. So does the rest of the crazy social media-obssessed internet world and so the option to export a video as a small, animated GIF would be the ultimate in share-ability. It would also make for a supremely portable file.

5: Editing Options

Vine's only option to edit is to use your finger held on the screen and a 6-second timer. We actually love seeing all the innovative way that fellow geeks have used their imagination to stretch the limits of what they could create. But at the same time it is also very limited. Instagram, as simple and sleek as it, it pushes things just a bit further than Vine in terms of editing and recording options—you can chaneg the order of clips around or trim them.

  6: Less Fragmentation

As we live in an at-the-click-of-a-button era, people don't want the hassle of using two different apps when they can use one. We're LAZY! So, with so many uses already using Instagram, we don't expect anyone looking to download a second video app when they've got what they need - and we hate to say it, but - and more, in one app.

The only thing that we'll miss is our Vine videos automatically populating our Twitter picture streams which we doubt Instagram (you might as well consider them Facebook) will be doing any time soon. So, while as social media marketers we're jumping for joy, it's all quite bitter-sweet as we surrender to the monopolising efforts of Zuckerberg and co, and we say RIP to Vine. You were a good'n while you lasted.

#RIPvine

You'll be able to see our future videos and images on Instagram soon here: http://instagram.com/trufflepr

Facebook and Instagram are holding a special event right now.

Will we soon be taking Instagram videos instead of pics? Will the giant social network integrate more closely with it’s billion dollar baby? Will Zuck sweat and spit as much as he has in the past? Will Zuck even be there?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and more by checking out Facebook’s live stream of the event. 

We're watching it now and basically, Instagram is now producing video at 15 second long clips. We think it's Facebook's way of monopolising the market; obviously they are just trying to stamp out #Vine.

Twitter now provides you with pretty extensive metrics and analytics for the performance of your tweets via its Ads dashboard in a move that looks designed to get more people aware of and using the Twitter Ads platform.

The new free analytics dashboard access allows anyone to see the performance of their tweets, including:

- Faves

- Retweets

- Replies each tweet has received

- Plus the option to sort by “Best, Good or All” for at-a-glance ranking of tweet performance.

Here at Truffle we do use paid-for software as well as our own software that we've been building for some time but for anyone who might not need to use Twitter so so seriously (we are #sm machines!) you can use to check your actual reach and engagement without signing up for a third-party product. It's a good way of being able to humanly determine which topics generate a better response.

You can also download all the information as a CSV for later use, and see how many people are clicking on the links you tweet, which is pretty useful for anyone who wants to track exactly how much Twitter is helping them in terms of generating engagement. 

We can only imagine that this is going to make those clever Twitter creators (or cree-ay-torrs as Keith Lemon would say), even richer as more businesses choose to go down the Twitter ads route. Good on them, we say!

To gain access, just go to ads.twitter.com, sign in with your Twitter creds and click the “Analytics” link at the top of the page (you don’t actually need to bother with the Twitter Advertising sign-up process).

Do let us know how it goes for you! Still some improvements to be made but it has got us all excited here at Truffle HQ - we hope it has the same effect on y'all!

Just reading an interesting article on Social Media Today this morning...

“Hey buddy, wassup? What’s shakin’? Anything going on?”

“Hello, how are you?”

“Good evening, sir. And how are we tonight?”

All three of the above statements are essentially conveying the same message, right? However, what makes them vastly different is in the tone of it; when you’re writing on behalf of your business, even more so than when you’re speaking, tone is of the utmost importance. It affects everything you post to all your social media streams!

We’ve discussed some of the “rights” and “wrongs” (very loosely defined, of course) of social media posting on this blog before, but the issue of tonality is so subtle, it’s easy to overlook when you’re preparing to launch your social media streams or writing your social media policy.

In a nutshell, knowing how to convey tone in your online writing – any writing online, including blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, pins, etc. – is to know your business inside and out. After all, just as signing up and posting on your personal profiles lets your personality show through writing and content, when you post as a business, you’re giving it voice, life, and personality as well.

If your business were a person, what would it look like? A relaxed, Type B, peaceful, serene person? Or a prim, proper, sharp-tongued overachiever? There’s no right or wrong answer, and that one of the most fun parts when writing a social media policy for your company, or considering what you’d like to write for your Facebook page.

Is this the image that comes to mind when you think of your business?

To approach writing with the right tone in mind, you must first define who your company is. This is important, because that’s what it your company will be perceived as online: a person. The importance of the word “social” in “social media” cannot be understated; unlike more traditional media, there is an instantaneous conversational style that just simply cannot take place anywhere else. Normally, customers don’t “converse” with businesses, and definitely not like they do with their friends. But online, all those walls come down.

Defining your writing tone also prompts users on how to interact with you. It’s just like when you have a conversation in person; your body language and tone of voice helps to guide the person you’re speaking to in how to respond.

Consider Momma Cherri. Featured on an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (the popular Gordon Ramsay show that highlight kitchens on the verge of shutdown), Momma Cherri instantly won over the notoriously aggressive chef with her fantastic cooking. The restaurant, unfortunately, has since shut down, but looking at Momma Cherri’s Facebook page her personality shines right through.

Yesterday we were excited to hear about Pinterest's new venture to make its pins ‘more useful’. By rolling out a new range of services Pinterest will enable users to share content on the site in an easier manner and improve the visibility of brands on the site.

In a blog on the social media site by software engineer Anna Majkowska, Pinterest has revealed that it has been working with a number of ‘popular websites’ in order to show more information on some pins with Product Pins allowing users to highlight clothes and furniture they like as well as their pricing, location and availability.

Recipe pins will allow users to select recipes by bloggers and from their favourite websites, while movie pins will enable users to show cast members or content ratings from their chosen films within the user’s feed.

This'll be good for our foodie and fashion clients...

Feel free to follow us on Pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/trufflepr/boards/