Tag Archives: Twitter

Brand Strategy, Portfolio

Instagram out of focus

We all know Instagram, the app to take photos with your mobile, apply beautiful filters and share them. Instagram makes pretty much any photo look good! Recently Instagram added the possibility to create videos, add beautiful filters and share them.

The question is: does it really matter? Will Instagram users care, follow and start sharing videos enhanced with filters en masse?

The answer depends very much on how Instagram is positioned in the minds of users. When users think “apply filters” but say “just Instagram it” then yes, users could make the leap.

But I have some doubts. First, Instagram is simply the #1 photo sharing site for photos with filters. The core of Instagram is photos + filters, it is not the other way around. This is very hard to change.

Secondly, in the photo and video online business it is not about convergence, it is all about divergence. Flickr has done videos since 2008, but videos are really hard to find on the site. In fact, there is not a single mentioning of “video” on the flickr.com home page. The same goes with professional photo editing tools. Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture both provide possibilities to edit videos, but no mentioning of this feature on their main product pages.

While the adoption rate for Instagram with video will be huge and we will see plenty of users trying it out, I do believe that the better route for Instagram in the long run would have been to keep focus and continue to bring only the best possible photos + filters experience under the Instagram brand.

At the same time Instagram could have expanded the business to video by either acquiring an existing company or by starting a new brand with a dedicated focus on video + filters. This would allow the company to innovate in both categories without dependencies. More importantly, in the long run, it might bring in users who are not using Instagram for photos or don’t want to use it.

Good examples are Twitter and Vine (which is owned by Twitter). Both are about snippets of information, Twitter in text, Vine in a 6 second looping video. Both are managed under a separate brand. A case could have probably been made for Vine to be called Twitter Videos, but luckily it got to remain as an own brand and look what happened!

This post appeared in Markkinointi & Mainonta

General

Best Buy offers real time support through Twitter

Getting support only gets better: real-time, online and using a big existing community. Best Buy at Union Square in New York City is promoting the Twitter support site: Twelpforce.

The beauty and arguably also the downside of care support on Twitter is of course that regardless the difficulty of the problem the question and answer will fit in 160 characters.

When looking at the Twitter page it is clear that it is not a stellar success yet, but who knows what this campaign will do.

What do you say: is support through Twitter a great idea or should we return to the good old discussion forums?

General

Twitter … what is happening… again?

Hello dear people at Twitter,

Once you become so important in people everyday’s life it hurts to see this message over and over. I am sure it also hurts your brand one way or the other. You are in a good position though, there is no real alternative to see Conan’s latest tweet. OMG… is there a new tweet? Please fix your systems:)!

Thank you!

General

Indexing what is happening now: Paul McCartney in NYC on Google and Twitter

There were rumors that Paul McCartney was playing in NYC… Well he actually did play in NYC and I was really curious where he played so I hit the search engines and realized that the essence of the Google and Twitter brands have taken shape.

By default I hit Google search only to find out that the first hits did not tell me where the gig took place. Sure, I could have looked a little further but it’s clear that mixing ‘what is happening now’ with traditional search indexes is not straightforward from a user experience perspective. So, I went over to Twitter and of course found out immediately where Paul McCartney was playing.

Google, first hits not relevant
Google: everything?
Relevant hits
Twitter: all about now

So, two brands and products with a different purpose: Twitter lives up to its promise “See what is happening, right now” and found a differentiating promise in the search engine space.

Google is the search engine for everything but “now”. Even when Google indexes everything real time it will need to do some serious user experience design to stay on top of being the search engine of everything: mixing the moment of now with the past and future in one elegant interface.

What is your bet: divergence or convergence in the search engine space?

General

Twitalyzer (Twitter) vs Interbrand and the power of the real time web

I just love Twitalyzer! After having used for a long time I really cannot say anything else… it’s GREAT! Twitalyzer offers  “a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any brand in Twitter”. Why I think it’s great? Because it is real time!

Twitalyzer measures:

  • brand strength – the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in Twitter
  • signal-to-noise ratio – likelihood that a brand mention will be coupled with a URL or a hashtag of some kind
  • favor – ratio of citations that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.
  • passion – likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly
  • clout – unique individuals referencing your brand divided by the total number of possible references

Results could very well vary day by day but hey… it’s real time after all! Below the top 10 from time and date of this post.

Twitalyzer top 10 on June 9 7:50PM EST: do you know them all?
Twitalyzer top 10 on June 9 7:50PM EST: do you know them all?

It’s really interesting to go through this list… sure some of the “brands” are actually not in the context of brands, twitalyzer just picks it up that way (e.g. heroes, ti) but never the less these are the “brands” being discussed, play a part in peoples live and/or their conversations… right now!

Now… compare that to the Interbrand 2008 list… none of the brands made it to the Twitalizer top 10… sure all of these brands are being discussed and used in conversations on Twitter but you see the difference.  Exception is Intel. In twitalyzer you find this brand on spot 16, with 2.46 mentions per minute from 1,097 unique authors.

Interbrand 2008... compare with the Twitalyzer top 10!
Interbrand 2008... compare with the Twitalyzer top 10!

I understand it is in a way comparing apples with oranges but you can see where this is going: the power of real time web with real time brand measurement will rule. And frankly it’s just great to see if a brand is part of the conversation… right now!