Now that SXSW has drifted from interactive to music, we’ve taken time to reflect on how much a part social media played over the five days of the interactive festival.
The folks over at Salesforce crunched the numbers for us so we could share some of their social buzz findings from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Connected experiences which seamlessly fuse second screens and connected TVs have been ‘the future of TV’ for so long it almost feels like a returning series.
Playing along with a quiz show, requesting a product sample during an advert, taking a breakfast news feature with you on your morning commute so you can finish watching, all could be routine.
But despite the enablers and technology being in place this seismic shift in the viewing experience stubbornly refuses to go mainstream. Why is this?
When Google purchased YouTube for $1.65bn in late 2006, some wondered whether the acquisition would be the Web 2.0 equivalent of Yahoo’s ill-fated billion-dollar purchase of Broadcast.com during the first .com boom.
It was hard not to be somewhat skeptical: YouTube was an expensive operation to run and was facing the same type of legal assault from Hollywood that basically killed Napster 1.0 years earlier.
As homes and offices fill with more and more internet-connected devices, consumers are increasingly consuming content on multiple screens.
Content creators and distributors know this. Advertisers know this. Analysts know this. Entrepreneurs and startups know this.
For countless companies active online, the ever-increasing importance of mobile is no surprise. It’s seen every day in the growing amount of traffic their websites receive from users on mobile and tablet devices.
The big question: what activities previously performed on the PC are being shifted to these devices?
Twitter’s purchase of social television analytics firm Bluefin Labs, its largest purchase to date, reveals both its interest in connecting the viewers of media, and in gaining some of the revenue currently headed to television advertising.
Though its business model may have seemed quixotic in its early days, Twitter is building a potential case as the network able to reach people based on their most immediate interests.
Social media monitoring company Brandwatch has recently undertaken a study to unveil how Twitter is transforming the way we watch TV.
The study, which analysed Twitter conversation during 50 of the top UK and US TV shows has highlighted a number of key TV ‘dual screen’ behaviours.
It has outlined the TV shows are taking full advantage of their Twitter presence in order to grow and retain a loyal customer following.
“The field isn’t level, but it’s more level than other playing fields,” said Erin Rackelman, CMO and cofounder of Portland-based Night & Day Studios, last week.
She was talking about the app marketplace, which offers more than 700,000 products in the Apple store alone and where previously unheard-of companies like Zynga and PopCap have bested more established brands with their sales volume.
Part of their success can be attributed to the newness of the mobile market, less than a decade old and forced to address constant technological change in that time.
There was a huge amount of buzz last year around the inevitable rise of connected TV, which sounded great but rather ignored the fact that viewers were already using their smartphones to interact with what they were watching.
New apps like Zeebox have achieved huge success by allowing people to share their TV viewing experience with others, but Twitter and Facebook remain as two of the main ways of talking about TV.
To highlight the depth of this link, Twitter has published a new report revealing some of the ways in which consumers use the social network to engage with TV shows.
Here are some of the most interesting stats and cases studies, but for more information on this topic checkout our Twitter for Business Best Practice Guide and this blog post on what can we learn from the top five retail brands on Twitter.
The electronics industry just wrapped another CES, where the latest innovations in televisions, wearable tech, and mobile computing were out in full force.
What can digital marketers infer about the future media landscape from the hardware giants and new startup entrants in consumer hardware manufacturing?
Here are five trends and thoughts on why they are worth following.
Following are my personal thoughts on what will be interesting and important in the world of digital marketing and ecommerce for 2013. As is traditional for my trends, there are around seventeen of them.
I haven’t spent too much time on giving extensive justification for any of these; they are based largely on the many conversations I have with industry influencers and practitioners.
Many are really just notes, or bullet points, but I’ve tried to give links to further information if you want to delve deeper. They are in no particular order though I’ve started with the more ‘strategic’ stuff.
As ever, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts, or feel free to post a link to your own trends or predictions.
Though the definition of social TV does expand beyond second screening to the advancement of technology in our TVs themselves and the interaction with programming, it still often relates to how consumers use their tablets and mobiles while watching traditional TV programming.
With the rise of video in 2013, it is only natural that we will continue to look at our relationship and interaction with all of our devices. As the use of mobile while watching TV is steadily increasing, 2013 may bring more overlapping content that moves beyond advertising.