Obama’s support for gay marriage

Twitter’s gone crazy this week following Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage. It has been a place where celebrities, media and various politicians have reacted with a mix of criticism, support and open debate. As well as generating huge discussion on Twitter, it’s also increased Obama’s profile on Twitter with a huge rise in positive sentiment and retweets.

Microsoft goes green

Taking a step in the green direction, this week Microsoft has announced they will commit to reducing its carbon footprint from 1^st July. This will involve making labs, office buildings and air travel carbon neutral by introducing a new ‘accountability model’ so every Microsoft business unit will be responsible for the carbon they generate. The initiative will be incentivised with rewards for increasing efficiency and reducing their environmental impact.

Giant cupcake tree

A very cool masterpiece from London based cupcake bakery, Crumbs and Doilies, who were commissioned by a Japanese TV show to create a cherry blossom tree (significant symbol in Japanese culture) out of vanilla sponge buttercream cupcakes. Feast your eyes on this…

Scan-to-gram

Scan-to-gram is  a new way to follow people on Instagram, developed by Scan (the QR code scanner which has more than 12million downloads on various iOS devices), and allows users to scan QR codes and instantly follow a company and its employees.

Have a great (and hopefully sunny) weekend!

Facebook launches filters for every phone

Some might call it a coincidence but Facebook says its recent purchase of Instagram had nothing to do with the new “Facebook for Every Phone”. A Facebook app which allows users to add photo filters to their images.

Pinterest feels the burn of Facebook’s Open Graph

Pinterest experienced healthy but not staggering growth through 2011. But the service was one of the first apps to get access to Facebook’s Timeline and Open Graph, which helped them massively. However, since the Facebook disabled auto-posting, Pinterest activity on Facebook plummeted. Its daily active user count has been cut in half, from a high around 2.2 million to 1.1 million today….ouch!

A lot of people are about to make a sickening amount of money from Facebook…

…as the social platforms floats. Will Zuckerberg be a trillionaire soon?

Also from Tech Crunch: LinkedIn acquires SlideShare

This week, professional networking site LinkedIn announced that it has acquired SlideShare – a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations. We think this is quite an interesting and sensible takeover from a business user’s standpoint and will definitely improve LinkedIn’s current user offering.

Mind your language!

We’re all guilty of a bit of profanity now and again, especially when we thing no one can hear us! We found this amusing Twitter analysis from the Guardian, showing us where in London is worse for their use of expletives!

That’s it from the Wolfstar pack for this week. Enjoy your weekend, whatever you’re up to!

The problem with these metrics is two-fold. Firstly, simplification – when you try to condense large amounts of mostly unstructured data into a single number you necessarily factor-out almost any attempt at nuance. Secondly, it’s a lack of transparency. It’s almost impossible to understand how this simplification happens, what nuance sacrifices are being made for the sake of simplification and, because of this, it’s very difficult to use the metrics effectively (or to ethically recommend their use to clients).

Into this mix comes Kred – Peoplebrowsr’s version of Klout and PeerIndex. On the surface it’s very similar (in-fact I’d say it’s headline number is slightly less accurate than that of it’s competition), however, underneath the surface it has one very distinct advantage – transparency. Users can see an activity log that shows exactly how someones score is being affected and, agree or disagree with how it calculates influence, at least you can understand it.

So, over the last few days we’ve thrown together an experiment designed to see if our understanding of Kred has allowed us to create something useful to people. The tool is designed to help you get a big picture of who you’re followers are – it allows you to download a spreadsheet of all your followers with separate tabs for the key influencers in different communities of interest. The idea is that once you’ve done it you should be able to isolate key groups of people within your followers who have a particular area of influence and cater to them accordingly.

We use Kred’s global and community influence scores, set minimum numbers for both and then look at the ratio between influence on a given community and overall influence. The result should be that people who are quite influential on the overall ratings but particularly influential within specific communities get ranked highly on the tabs for that community. People who are just uber influential on everything (think Stephen Fry / Hootsuite) should come out lower down as they are really only ranking highly because they have a bazillion followers. People who are influential overall but not particularly influential within a given community get heavily penalised so that when we outline a community, you get people who are specialised in that particular area.

Sorry if that sounds complicated but, it turns out, nuance is important.

We’d love it if you would check out www.followrz.com and let us know whether the results match your expectations. It’s a free tool and we’re limited by Kred’s api so please be patient if it takes a while to get your results to you.

The Barack-ness Monster

Obama strikes again. This time he takes to the stage on the campus of the University of Carolina with TV presenter Jimmy Fallon and house band, The Roots. Together they proceed to ‘slow jam’ the news in a comical skit on Congress’ proposal to increase tuition fees. With over 1.5 million hits on YouTube so far, it’s definitely got more views than any party political broadcast.

Head in the clouds

This week Microsoft and Google announced their Dropbox-like apps for online storage – SkyDrive and Google Drive. Here’s a great little comparison, so you can see how they all measure up.

TED-Ed comes to the classroom

Many of you reading this will be well aware of TED, the non-profit organisation devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading” – a fantastic resource of talks and global conferences held by some of the world’s most inspiring individuals. Now, in an effort to spice things up in the classroom, it has announced its new education initiative, TED-Ed, designed to enable teachers to create unique lesson plans around its video content. No more falling asleep at the back of the class then, you hear?!

Roozt – online shopping with a conscious

Etsy – and its UK compadre Folksy – are online marketplaces for people to buy and sell all things handmade including art, clothing, furniture, jewellery…you get the gist. The latest spin-off in this e-commerce trend is Roozt – an online marketplace for social entrepreneurs and mission-oriented brands. Shoppers can browse by categories such as ‘cause supported’ or ‘region of the world’ to find new and interesting products to buy. We love it.

That’s it for this week folks. We hope you have a great weekend – whatever the weather!

Unsurprisingly, the company is looking to digital for growth (and has already seen some considerable success)  and the deck below explains exactly how they plan on doing it. For those who don’t want to click through all 60 slides, here is a quick summary:

- Get rid of daily papers in favour of weeklies

- Replace dailies with online, smartphone and tablet subscriptions

- Increased use of social media to foster better communities (they’ll be using pluck to do some of the heavy lifting here)

- Fewer staff journalists – move to using more community contributors and freelancers

- Aim for 50% of content to be user generated by 2020 (this seems a bit arbitrary to me)

- Create national hubs for aggregated local content (e.g. football info)

There’s alot more in there and if you’ve got time it’s worth a click-through – the stand out theme though from a PR point of view is that there are journalists at more than 300 papers who are going to get alot busier, they’re going to be leant-on by online editors to create content that works well online (both in terms of engagement and SEO) and, for those PR firms willing to be a bit smart about things, this will represent huge opportunity.

Tupac plays Coachella (video contains explicit content…obviously!)

Our jaws dropped simultaneously when we say the footage of Tupac Shakur on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre at this year’s Coachella festival. Based on a technique from the 19^th Century called ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ – originally used by actors – there’s a full explanation of how this mind-blowing method works here. Rumours are afoot that 2D-Pac may now also go on tour. Needless to say, we’ll want to be in the queue when the tickets go on sale!

Facebook advertising report

We love a good infographic here at Wolfstar, especially when they’re as intuitive as Social Fresh’s 2012 Facebook advertising report. A brilliant insight helping us to understand how Facebook advertisers use the platform for marketing and beginning to identify industry best practices.

What a ‘Good Idea’

Global publishing giants, Hearst Magazines, have only gone and done it. Good Ideas, an off-shoot of Good Housekeeping, is the latest women’s lifestyle magazine to launch with digital optimisation in mind. Smartphone-friendly typefaces, smaller articles and a greater emphasis on visuals are just a few of the characteristics that will make this magazine as accessible digitally as in print.

The world’s first ‘social games’

Less than 100 days to go until the Olympics and this nice little infographic demonstrates just how social this year’s games will be.

On your marks, get set, get shooting…

Since the billion dollar sale of Instagram, the race has been firmly on for the same model to be applied to mobile video. And it would seem that Viddy has taken an early lead, ploughing away from its competitors Socialcam, Klip, Mobli, and Color All, thanks to its Facebook Timeline app. Viddy allows users shoot 15 second clips and edit them using custom video overlays, add their favourite audio effects and share with friends across social platforms. With a reported 300,000 new users per day, it’s going to difficult for the others to catch-up if they want to compete.

That’s it for this week – have a great weekend everyone!

Facebook and Instagram

Just a week ago Android phone users were excited to learn Instagram was finally available on Google Play, after months of jealously towards iPhone users. This week saw Facebook buy the mobile sharing app for a whopping $1billion, continuing to maximise their market share. Instagram will stay as an independently branded app, but it will be interesting to see how they begin to work together in the near future.

Smart use of Twitter

Stepping out of the box from the conventional use of Twitter, Smart Car’s official Twitter account for Argentina has come up with an innovative way to engage with its audience. By using symbols on the keyboard, each status takes you on a journey of the Smart Car passing through a town with various features to demonstrate the ‘first Twitter commercial’, according to the company.

More Likes, more beard

Bronx Shoes has launched a cool campaign in South Africa with a mix of social media and advertising. The company has erected a huge interactive billboard

in Cape Town, with an image of a man with a stubbly beard. The beard then grows depending on the number of likes on Facebook, so the more likes, the longer the beard. It might not portray an obvious message but definitely gets your attention.

A dramatic surprise on a quiet square

This is a great PR stunt in Belgium to mark the launch of new TV channel, TNT. Not only does it create suspense, but it uses the public to activate the stunt by pushing a big red button which has been strategically placed in a small town square. A brilliant one to watch.

Have a great weekend!

The award nomination is for our work on the launch of Sony Mobile’s Xperia™ PLAY, which we put forward for the Best Global Consumer Technology Campaign category within the EMEA region. As the world’s largest awards competition for the PR industry, the SABRE Awards commend a range of campaigns which demonstrate the highest levels of creativity and effectiveness. It’s an achievement in itself to be shortlisted for this iconic award and we can’t wait to find out the result.

Looks like a few of us will be donning our suits and taking a trip to Brussels for the awards dinner at the end of May. Watch this space for photos and results!

Several of the speeches referred to the quality vs. quantity debate regarding fan numbers. This may not be a new concept within Facebook HQ, but as far as I am aware it has certainly never been vocalised to this extent externally, until now. As David Fisher, vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Facebook, quite rightly stated: “There is no prize for having the most fans.”

This is something that has been a key philosophy of Wolfstar’s since we began in 2007 and should be the same among any other social media agency worth its salt. Gaining fans and page likes isn’t the same as gaining customer engagement; this is where so many brands, and agencies, are getting it wrong.

Anyone can ‘like’ a page – it’s an instant reaction, a simple click of the mouse or tap of the smartphone. The challenge lies in getting that particular person to revisit your page on a regular basis, recommend it to friends and engage in the content that’s being posted. The key is to create a relationship with your fans, gauge their likes and dislikes and build content that reflects them.

Many people talk about the importance of a two way conversation in a social media approach, in fact this has become a mantra of the ‘social media guru’. However, many people seem to miss the point that companies engage in social media to improve their business, grow their market and enhance profitability, the fact that this can be done by listening to your customer is hardly a revelation. Companies need to be looking at the value social media can bring to their business and how to evaluate this – an approach that drives pretty much everything the Wolfstar team engage in.

The promising thing that’s come out of all this is knowing that the 500 or so attendees of this conference will have hung on to the Facebook team’s every word, absorbing the knowledge and insight provided by the people behind this social media giant.

It’ll be interesting to see how some of the major brands will use this information, as well as the restructure of Facebook pages to develop their channels and worry less about page ‘likes’ and more about the content that they’re posting. If they are in any doubt on how to engage in this, we will be more than happy to spend an hour or so introducing our approach and demonstrating its success!

Sony Mobile – Made of Imagination

Our client, Sony Mobile, has launched a global TV ad campaign based on a child’s thoughts and imagination on how a phone works. We won’t give any more away so take a look for yourselves!

April Fools!

With April Fools hitting on a Sunday this year, you’ve got just under an hour with your colleague’s PC to implement one of these naughty pranks before the office is deserted for the weekend! Don’t worry, we won’t tell….

Draw Something

It seems to have become an overnight success and we’re sure you’ve all heard about the latest addictive app – Draw Something. A simple game, styled on old-school Pictionary allows you to connect through Facebook and play your friends, or someone totally random! We had a personal demonstration from one of the Wolfstar pack, Jen, which we have to admit, did cause a bit of a distraction.

Look out for Haribo

As Easter is only a week away, brands are taking advantage of the occasion. We’d normally expect to see the chocolatiers making as much noise as possible as we choose our Easter eggs, but Haribo is also making a scene with its themed sweets, Eggstra. The well-known fried egg sweet will be on the loose across 11 towns and cities in the UK – spot it, and you can win a range of sweets and prizes.

Social media reports courtesy of Google Analytics

This week the lovely guys over at Google Analytics announced that they’ll soon be releasing social media reports for all users. This is will allow you to identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions. Cracking.

Have a good one guys!