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Fight club! Instagram’s 15 second video vs. Vine’s six seconds

It has often been said in filmic terms that if a story can’t be told in 90 minutes than it’s not worth telling. Try telling that to The Godfather.

However this certainly rings true on some level, especially in advertising where you’re engaging with a customer or selling a product rather than telling a sprawling, expansive story of gun violence and enemy disposal. 

Who does benefit from the longer format? For a customer it’s good to keep things brief, nobody needs to sit through another colossal Thomson marathon, but conversely six second Vines may seem too short for the purpose. 

Six seconds may be the prime length for our fleeting attention spans, but for marketing, this truncated length can be too much of a handicap to get a brand message across.

Perhaps, for this reason, the 15 second Instagram video is a far more effective method and may explain why there was a dip in Vine usage during its launch period. Let’s investigate…

How Coach uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

It’s that time of the week again when we take a closer look at a major brand’s social strategy and on this occasion I’ve chosen to examine Coach.

The luxury brand has a global presence so one would assume that it has a fairly large following on social platforms.

To find out, read on for more information how Coach uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. This follows on from similar posts looking at Macy’s, Red Bull, ASOS and Nike.

And for more information on the brand read our review of Coach’s ecommerce platform, which it launched way back in 1999…

How to bring your PR in-house. Part four: tracking

In parts one to three of the this series on managing PR and blogger outreach in-house, I’ve guided you through: The Network, The Message, and Discovery/Dissemination, talking shop on tools of the trade to cut cost but still rock like a PR all-star.

In this final post on tracking, I’ll show you how to define clear objectives then get your reports together for the boss.

Three ways for marketers to grow, maintain and drive business with mobile CRM

Consumers use their mobile devices to comparison shop, get directions to a business, or make reservations at their favorite restaurant. But often the communication from brands stops there. 

Businesses of all kinds should be better engaging via mobile with their customers. After all, engaged customers are your most valuable asset: optimising engagement can help you outperform the competition.

Seven great social campaigns from September

While scouring the internet for ideas and information I often stumble across interesting and innovative social campaigns that deserve to be highlighted to the masses.

Until now we didn’t have a forum in which to share these examples, so this is my first attempt at rounding up some of the most interesting campaigns that have launched in the previous month or so.

Just 11% of top spending advertisers use responsive design

Responsive design is widely accepted to be the most effective way of accommodating the consumer shift towards mobile technologies, yet a new report from the IAB suggests that companies have been relatively slow on the up take.

Just 11% of the UK’s 100 highest spending advertisers currently use responsive design, including Nissan, Direct Line, Go Compare, Microsoft and Chanel.

Some sectors have been quicker on the uptake than others, but due to the small sample size it’s difficult to really drill down into the percentages.

And though the number of brands that have gone responsive remains quite low, the report also found that in August 2013 58% of the top 100 advertisers in 2012 had mobile optimised websites.

The science of sharing videos: marshalling the subjective

As we’ve just had Social Media Week, I’ve been thinking about the unnatural relationship between the commercial considerations of brands and the social motivations of their customers.

If we admit it’s ludicrous to create a formula for making friends in the real world, then it’s also difficult to preach to brands on a definitive way to engage fans online. That’s because social media to a lot of people is considered respite from advertising.

The only way to advertise is to make sure your content is engaging enough to be considered not content. If you can do that, your adverts will be shared, my son.

With 100 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute, your brand has to understand the alchemy of boredom. Thankfully, Unruly Media has been taking steps to bring some sanity to sharing.

ASOS’s new homepage puts emphasis on content marketing

At the end of last week ASOS unveiled a new design for its men’s and women’s category pages, with a strong focus on product ideas and fashion content.

The retailer has totally overhauled the old homepage, which had a fairly standard layout with product categories down the left and a large carousel promoting various ranges.

It’s certainly a bold revamp and requires a lot of scrolling to take it all in, but it’s not too dissimilar to H&M’s ’& Other Stories’ off-shoot.

We write a lot about ASOS on Econsultancy, largely because it’s one of the best in the business. So to find out more about the retailer’s wider ecommerce strategy read our blog posts on its excellent on-site SEO and how it uses Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.

Or for more on its new homepage, read on…

Five retailers that do care about Google+

Google+ is never far away from controversy or a heated discussion, be it what affect it has on organic search rankings or whether or not the 359m members (May 2013) actually use the platform or not.

Whatever your thoughts on Google+ as a platform the one area you can’t deny is the improvement from brand participation and content generation.

A few months ago the post on do the top 20 US retailers care about Google+ implied that the big retail brands out there don’t create enough content or receive enough engagement to warrant sufficient investment, which inevitably leads to a poor user experience.

While in theory the top 20 US retailers ‘should’ understand how to use Google+ and reap the benefits, looking at the summary it’s clear that some of them don’t.

That’s not to say they don’t care about the platform, more likely the potential value has not been demonstrated properly or what future benefits in organic search considered.

Amazon and House of Fraser top multichannel customer experience survey

Amazon has topped yet another usability survey after delivering a consistently excellent customer experience across its desktop and mobile platforms. 

House of Fraser came a close second followed by Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and Interflora.

The report from eDigitalResearch consists of user surveys that analysed the customer experience provided by 19 retail brands across three digital channels – desktop, mobile web and apps.

It covered six different sections of each site, including the homepage, search, navigation, product pages, shopping basket and checkout.

Announcing our Festival of Marketing Vine contest winners

Vine is beautiful. It costs nothing but time, it rewards creativity, trial and error, and patience. Many brands have made great use of Vine, and the medium is magic when its potential is realised.

So we thought we’d see what we could get our audience to create, to promote the Festival of Marketing, where Ian Padgham, Professional Viner, is one of the many speakers at our PUNCH event, just one part of a packed week.

We’re giving away some Festival passes, and some tickets to Marketing Frenzy, the week’s showstopping party at Fabric in London.

So without further ado, here are our first winners. We’ve still got some tickets to give away, so send in your entries and we’ll do another roundup next week.

Google’s new ‘Hummingbird’ search algorithm: the experts’ view

Not content with taking away the little keyword data we had left this week, Google has again surprised the online marketing industry with a brand new algorithm. 

There isn’t an awful lot of detail out there right now, though Search Engine Land has some details, including the fact that this this new algorithm has been running for the past month. 

I’ve been asking some of the finest minds in SEO for their thoughts on Hummingbird… 

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