We’ve made it through another week and I have yet to start my holiday shopping. Knowing me, I’ll be schlepping through the mall on Christmas Eve, picking through depleted sales racks trying to find that perfect gift. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.
Speaking of shopping, our stories this week feature fashion retailer Banana Republic looking at innovative ways to improve the in-store customer experience, Facebook making moves to “copy” popular Snapchat features, and the NFL having a change of heart and warming to the power of social media. Here is this week’s edition of the Things You Need to Know This Week.
As Snapchat continues to become a social media force and, as a result, increasingly significant to brands, analytics company Snaplytics, has introduced an insights tool that offers competitor analysis to enable brands to research and assess what their competitors are doing on the social platform and make better decisions about their Snapchat campaigns.
.@Snaplytics debuts competitive monitoring tool for brands to assess rivals’ Snapchat campaigns https://t.co/kz3dkxbi4q @tobielkin pic.twitter.com/ZMd8A3UFi5
— MediaPost (@MediaPost) December 5, 2016
I love watching videos, and probably spend about two hours a day on average watching them. I would guess a lot of people out there watch more videos than I do, so when I saw this news from Business Insider I had to share it. Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO, seems quite optimistic about video and thinks you’ll eventually be watching it nine hours a day. There is only so much time in a day you can devote to binge watching your favorite reality show, so if Stephenson is correct, that means people will spend about 38 percent of their lives watching video. If you’re one of those people who get the average eight hours of sleep per night, that’s over half your waking life. Kind of scary, isn’t it? AT&T CEO says you’ll eventually spend over half your waking life watching video via Business Insider
Popular photo sharing app Instagram, a Facebook company, is finally making it easier for users to banished trolls, spammers, and unwanted followers—thank goodness! Now users will be able to like comments and remove followers from private accounts and they’ll also have the ability to anonymously report suspect posts describing self-injury. According to Instagram’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, “These updates still mark the beginning. We will continue to work to maintain Instagram as a welcoming and safe place for everyone.” What are your thoughts on this new feature? I love it! via Instgram
As IT consultant and social media manager Charles Milander shared recently, it looks like Facebook is turning to its users to help identify misleading news sources. The trend of widespread fake news sources was particularly visible during the past 18-month Presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That’s inherently dangerous as so many people rely on social media sites like Facebook for all their news and unfortunately, many believe everything they read online. After having its feet held to the fire on this issue, Facebook is finally going to take action—and enlisting users in the process.
Facebook is asking users` help to ID misleading news https://t.co/T16uYhAMCW
— Charles Milander (@charlesmilander) December 6, 2016
Mobile technology has come a long way in recent years and nowhere is that more evident than enhancing the retail in-store customer experience. Social marketing strategist Ted Rubin describes an interesting implementation by fashion retailer Banana Republic, who has partnered with a third party customer experience platform to deliver a more tech-friendly shopping experience. By going beyond producing the standard— a branded standalone app—Banana Republic is hoping to take the in-store experience to a whole new level.
Shopping can be dreadful and can easily get you frustrated when you are in a clothing store and cannot find the sales representative. If you are at Banana Republic and have a question, you can access a live chat function directly from the app. Just as live chat allows us to avoid a phone call when seeking answers online, in-store live chat allows for fewer interruptions during shopping.
How the in-store experience is evolving, thanks to mobile: https://t.co/pOCM1jYmaF via @TedRubin pic.twitter.com/LpU5ixrWSR #RonR #biSummit
— Ted Rubin (@TedRubin) December 9, 2016
It’s no secret that Facebook sees the meteoric rise of popular messaging app Snapchat as a direct threat to its increasing dominance of the social media space. Critics have accused Facebook of outright copying popular features of Snapchat’s platform in order to bolster its competitive position. The latest example of this emulation strategy is a new Facebook feature called “Collections,” which closely resembles Snapchat’s Discover offering. This latest effort looks like another attempt to distinguish between high-quality, vetted content from established media outlets and the recent deluge of low-quality, fake news stories that have been dominating recently. via Business Insider
The NFL, sometimes known as the “No Fun League,” and certainly perceived as a bit of a bonehead as it relates to social media, is changing its social media policy yet again. Only a few weeks ago, the NFL enacted a rather perplexing social media policy that severely restricted what content teams could post. Teams could be fined up to $100,000 for posting certain in-game video footage or GIFs to their social media accounts, which seems incredibly short-sighted for a league struggling to remain relevant to a new generation of fans. The media coverage of the news did not go over well, which seems to have prompted a change of heart. In this post shared by Yahoo Finance writer Daniel Roberts, the changes include a “test agreement” between the NFL and Giphy, the free GIF server, which will last until June 2017. Is this a sign that the NFL is finally ready to fully embraced social media? Time will tell.
scooplet: the NFL is changing its social media policy again, just 7 weeks after the latest changes https://t.co/1El57fzwia @YahooFinance pic.twitter.com/1QpCGpLjL9
— Daniel Roberts (@readDanwrite) December 2, 2016
Photo Credit: bill.sarris Flickr via Compfight cc
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
