Fancy
A new photo site, The Fancy, is steering Millenials away from Pinterest. Fancy is a digital magazine of sorts that caters to young people and luxury goods- an odd combination since Millennials have less money. Instead of ‘liking’ a pin, users ‘fancy’ it. Each ‘Fancy’ rewards users with points that add up to discounts on products they want. And for those who just can’t wait there is also a ‘Buy’ now button. The logic behind Fancy is that Millennials would rather “spend big and have less.” Fancy taps into the immediacy that Millennials have come to expect. The site is a retail marketers dream, borrowing Facebook’s community, the interface of Instagram, and the sales functionality of Amazon. I just started using Fancy this week and so far I have 5% off a $600 handbag. I think I’d rather pay rent this month.
Facebook Targeted Posts
Facebook announced “enhanced post targeting” for paid advertisers, which will let companies target posts to specific subsets of their brand, including age, location, gender, relationship status, education, workplace, and language. The targeted posts resemble Google+ ‘hangouts’, and although brands will see lower impression levels they will likely see higher engagement. The feature will certainly help marketers with segmented audiences and may cut down on the number of duplicate Facebook business accounts. At present only 1% of pages are using the new feature. One downside is that while fans will see only the targeted post, all posts will appear on the company’s timeline- so companies have to be extra careful to curate their page (or not mind that their marketing strategies are transparent).
Yelp Updates
Yelp is on the rise. The review-site has been expanding internationally and growing its fan base: “As rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. add local content, Yelp is spending more on marketing, adding mobile features and pushing into new countries such as Denmark. The company also announced a partnership with Apple Inc. to integrate its local content into software for the iPhone and iPad, as well as a deal to include local features in Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine.” And Apple plans to include Yelp in upcoming mobile software to let users check in at local businesses and broadcast their whereabouts to friends- so look out Foursquare. Managing your business presence on Yelp, and other customer review sites is an essential part of any social media and SEO strategy. Get started.
Social Soap
Pop culture icon Ricki Lake is starting her own social network, to coincide with her revived TV show, The Ricki Lake Show (airing September 10). While plenty of daytime talk shows have social media crossover, Lake’s will be the first interactive, real-time platform in which viewers upload video, vote, comment, and share across their social networks about the show. The platform was created by Youtoo – a company that calls themselves the “world’s first Social TV Network” – and they give thousands of average people their own TV show each year. Youtoo is currently in 15 million cable households in the US and growing. Youtoo could solve two big challenges for network execs: the decline in daytime viewing, and the loss of traffic to outside sites like Facebook and Twitter. If Lake and Youtoo can succeed in keeping viewers engaged through their own platform, they may be a game changer in social TV.
The week just wouldn’t be complete without talking about the Socialympics- what a week! NBC was criticized for its handling of the games- poor streaming quality, editorial mistakes, and live tweeting results before they aired in primetime outraged many viewers. There were more than 20,000 Olympic tweets that referenced #NBCfail. British journalist Guy Adams had his Twitter account temporarily suspended for tweeting the corporate email address of the President of NBC Olympics, urging viewers to barrage him with letters of complaint. Did Twitter overreact? Twitter and NBC formally partnered for the Olympics, so in one sense they had a right to manage complaints. On the other hand, Adams technically did not violate Twitter’s terms of service. But more importantly, Twitter has been a great defender of free speech in the past – they refused to turn over information on an Occupy Wall Street protestor and postponed a scheduled shutdown during the height of Iran’s postelection protest to let people speak. With great social media power comes great responsibility.
