Oct31Observations
Why Auto-Expanded Images + Vines on Twitter is Bad News
This week Twitter rolled out a major change to the tweet stream: auto-expanded photos and vines in users main feeds. Now instead of having to click to expand the Twitter card to view some rich media content, a 437×218 px thumbnail will be clearly visible directly below the respective linking tweet. The tweet stream change rolled out across web, iPhone and Android all at once.
While at first this might not seem like a big deal, auto-expanded content could have an immediately negative effect on user behavior:
1. Auto-expanded images break the democracy of content in your tweet stream.
Instead of scanning all content equally, users’ eyes won’t be able to avoid skipping to the next image. And instead of engaging with the most interesting content in their stream, users will be drawn to the most visually stimulating. With Twitter prioritizing rich media over text, conversation and link sharing no longer has equal standing. In other words, Twitter is on its way to becoming another Facebook or Instagram, instead of the maintaining its status as the world’s quickest and most robust news feed.
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The effects of images in the tweet stream may not be immediately evident when everyone is just getting adjusted, but consider Facebook. While much has been made over the years of Twitter’s 140 character limit, the optimal post on Facebook is actually 80 characters or less. With Facebook’s emphasis on photo + video in the news feed, written text (even a minimal 140 characters text) can’t compete for attention. Is this what Twitter wants for its future?
The auto expanded images and videos are also accompanied by now immediately visible reply + retweet + favorite buttons. The buttons makes the tweet stream feel much busier and slower to scan than ever before. This is most notable on the desktop, where as many as twenty or more buttons in repeating rows of four now clutter the page above the fold.
2. Brands were just given a back door to banner advertising on the homepage.
Brands invest a great deal of time, energy and money in building communities on Twitter and communicating with their followers on a regular basis. Planning for auto-expanded images + vines will become an immediate best practice for brands that want to maximize message exposure and engagement. Many brands also have more human and capital resources to invest in creating imagery to accompany every post, which contributes to the uneven playing field in the tweet stream.
This reality will be even more apparent when brand tweets are paired with Twitter’s paid promoted tweets platform. Promoted tweets are published “above the fold” in the first few tweet placements. Promoting a tweet with an auto-expanded image will allow brands to serve up a prominent visual banner ad on the homepage of Twitter for the first time ever.
It’s important to note that while brands will (and should) take advantage of the new Twitter format, high quality + high value content will still be critically important. This is reinforced in two ways: users being able to easily unfollow brands that clutter their tweet stream with noise, and Twitter’s auction model that factors a brand’s quality score into the cost of advertising.
3. Two links and minimal text per post becomes the norm.
Since including images in posts will be required to attract viewers, images will now be included in posts even when the goal is to share a link to an article. This is immediately becoming the standard for publishers, who are pairing image links with article links to draw attention to their articles. Because Twitter requires 22 characters per link to wrap the link in their URL shortener, two links eats up 45 characters (including a space in-between) before any copy is even written.
It’s worth noting, as well, that the new auto-expanded images appears to break article preview Twitter cards. So when publishers pair images with their article links to maximize attention in the tweet stream, they’re prioritizing the new form of banner ad over the valuable content + context they were providing to their readers upfront, before the click.
4. Twitter images + Vine videos get preferential treatment.
Ever since Instagram pulled support for Twitter cards, images that were uploaded directly to Twitter have been more visible on the platform than photos shared from their competitor. However, while the Twitter cards imbalance was Instagram’s choice, the new auto-expanded images feature now gives Twitter’s own image format a distinct advantage over any other image hosting service.
Now users can expect to see plenty of Instagram photos (and images created using other tools) downloaded and re-uploaded natively directly to Twitter’s image platform. Popular API hacking tool IFTTT already has a recipe for automating the process of porting a photo from Instagram over to Twitter images. This will create fragmentation in engagement around the same content, duplicated across platforms.
This home court advantage will likely help boost Vine’s success, as well, which is critical as Instagram begins to roll out its own advertising format. Branded video on Instagram, with its :15 second time limit, is expected to be incredibly popular with advertisers looking to bring video spots to the 150 million strong Instagram audience. Auto-expanded vines paired with paid promoted tweets will be a powerful tool for Twitter to combat Instagram’s new offering.
With Twitter’s IPO just around the corner, auto-expanded Twitter images + vines may just be one of many big changes coming to the platform. For the health of the platform and its long term potential, Twitter must think through the impact all of its design decisions will have on user behavior. It also needs to evaluate clearly which values Twitter wants its platform to stand for. Choices like auto-expanded rich media may seem small at first, but they could do more to disrupt the democracy + dialogue the platform has been known for than any other changes Twitter has made to date.
Disclaimer: This opinion piece was initially posted on Kevin’s personal blog.
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SS+K leads this year’s Digiday Sammy Awards finalists for its work with the Obama for America campaign:
SS+K Leads Sammy Awards Finalists
The finalists have been decided for the annual Digiday Sammy Awards, which recognize excellence and breakthrough achievement in social advertising, media and marketing. Three finalists were chosen in most of the 12 categories, and five categories were narrowed down to four or five. See here for our panel of 10 judges who determined the finalists.
New York-based social engagement agency SS + K’s work with Obama for America was recognized in four categories for two campaigns. The “For All” campaign is a finalist in the “Best Social Engagement Campaign” and “Best Social Creative,” the “First Time” campaign was recognized in “Best Branded Viral Video” and both campaigns emerged as finalists in “Best Use of Social Media for a Cause.”
Read more here.
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You might see SS+Kers in an unexpected spot this summer – right on the shores of Lake Michigan. SS+K is spending the summer mentoring startups of the inaugural class of Coolhouse Labs, a brand-new business accelerator founded by former SS+Ker Jordan Breighner, a Michigan alum.
More In July, SS+K founding partner Lenny Stern and I took a trip to Coolhouse Labs to meet the teams in person. We gave a talk on SS+K’s approach to brand strategy + social engagement, and met with each of the teams daily to work through challenges each were facing at their particular stages of development. Engaging with the teams at Coolhouse Labs, we’ve been fortunate to meet a host of smart and ambitious people – and can’t wait to see what Lorious, Novi Times, TRNK, Project Travel and Every Last Morsel have accomplished by the end of the summer and beyond. If you’re interested in learning more about this first class of graduating companies, or are a member of the Michigan creative and technology community seeking an opportunity to share your work, join Coolhouse for their special culminating event August 23rd – 24th. Less
Throughout the summer, several SS+Kers and SS+K alums have been spending time on Skype with the each of Coolhouse Labs’ five teams, working on business and product positioning, messaging strategy and communications planning. SS+K alum Nathan Phillips, a copywriter, comedian and founder of The Oratory Laboratory, has even been coaching teams with their presentation skills.
SS+K Partner and President Brad Kay was quoted in Digiday on the merger of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group and how small, independent agencies should respond:
“Rivals: Smaller agencies will gleefully point to the 130,000-employee behemoth as all that’s wrong with the mechanized, commoditized ad world. The sheer amount of bureaucratic infighting during an integration will provide an opening for rivals. What’s more, the clear conflicts this presents will provide an opening for WPP and other rivals to swoop in to woo away big clients. Brad Kay, president of independent shop SS&K, summed it up this way: “To-do’s for small, independent agencies: 1) review client list of Omni-Pub; 2) identify top talent; and 3) exploit six months of utter distraction.”
Read more here.
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This afternoon Facebook held an event to announce video capture would finally be available to Instagram’s 130 million users. The experience of creating a video is ripped right from Vine (touch and hold to record, lift your finger to pause), which is good because Vine was the first mobile video product to be welcomingly easy to use. Instagram video also has some interesting new bells and whistles that differentiate it from its video predecessors– video stabilization, filters, and the ability to import content, to name a few. With Instagram video you certainly have the ability to create a more visually compelling product than ever before, in a way that feels very native to the Instagram experience. But I have to ask, after the initial excitement is over, will people really want that?
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Part of the magic of Instagram is its innate ability to make any photo instantly attractive. It essentially created the idea of “one touch magic button” apps that is now a benchmark for how simple and powerful a mobile product should be. But while adding stabilization and a filter might make any video more attractive than it was to start with, it does not in itself make every video interesting enough to spend 15 seconds with. In fact, applying the promise of Instagram magic to video content might even make viewers more upset when they stop flipping through beautiful photos long enough to watch.
That’s my biggest concern with Instagram video. It’s great that Instagram has developed such amazing tools to make regular video better looking. But if the Instagram community starts being bogged down by :15 second videos that would have been a lot more interesting and native to the experience as photos, it will make spending time in Instagram a lot more weighty. Almost like your friends ran a :15 second ad in the middle of your beautiful photo stream. I’m already feeling this in the first day– browsing the feed is slower, and it’s more complicated to discover new interesting content in the “Explore” tab. Myself and many others open Instagram countless times a day to briefly scan through the latest photos for a moment break and smile. A steady stream of sub-par video will make that a bigger lift, and less enjoyable.
Now how does this all compare to Vine? Vine has been so successful because if provides the right balance of capability and confinement. In 6 seconds people can be as creative as they want to be (and there’s been some truly impressive Vine art). But 6 seconds also limits uninteresting content in a way that doesn’t disrupt the flow of scanning content that is necessary in social platforms like these. Vine’s limitations somehow lower the bar for what video content has to achieve to be compelling, and that’s what so differentiating and impressive about it. It’s also established itself for what it is– browsing the Vine stream you get exactly the experience you’re looking for. Wouldn’t it be strange if people could suddenly start taking pictures with their Vine app?
So while I’m very impressed with the video product that Instagram has put together, and I’ll probably even use it every once in a while, I don’t think it’s going to be the market disrupter that Instagram originally was. I don’t think it’s going to be the magic bullet to make ammateur video instantly more proliffic and compelling than before. And I do actually think one of two things will happen– people will not use it all that often, or Instagram will add some sort of view filter that lets people browse only photos if they want to, to preserve the amazing experience they’ve been cultivating since their launch. And Vine, and other single-purpose apps, will continue to flourish despite Facebook’s relentless attempt to take the whole cake.
At least I hope so.
Disclaimer: This content is cross-posted from Kevin’s personal blog. The SS+K Lab that he co-founded built the popular Vine search engine VineViewer and has previously built applications for Instagram, as well. We love both equally 🙂
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Jun19Work
A Launch Spot for FWD.us
We’re proud to announce SS+K’s new spot “Emma” for our client FWD.us, premiering first online to FWD.us volunteers and the FWD.us community. Inspired by Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” that greets immigrants at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, the spot is the group’s first in support of “sensible immigration reform.” The spot was named a Creativity and AdAge pick of the day.
FWD.us is a nonpartisan advocacy group from Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley tech leaders invested in enhancing the tech community’s voice in the nation’s public discourse. The organization, launched in April 2013, was named and branded by SS+K.
On June 13th Facebook announced the implementation of hashtags, allowing users to add context to posts and aid content search + categorization. While Facebook had resisted including one of Twitter’s most popular features for several years, its acquisition of Instagram made hashtags all but a certainty. At face value Facebook’s initial implementation is a similar experience as on Twitter, where clicking on a hashtag allows you to immediately explore other posts by users who have tagged their content with the same keyword. However, nuances of the Facebook platform make hashtags a very different experience from other platforms. The following are initial insights and recommendations for brand implementation based on our early testing:
Exploration is a More Engaging Experience Than on Twitter
Facebook hashtag exploration can be more visually pleasing experience than Twitter. This is due to the much more prominent usage of imagery and video on Facebook, allowing the user to quickly digest rich media content without having to click a link to expand or leave the site as you do on Twitter. While this speeds up individual content consumption, inversely it slows down the scannability of a large amount of hashtagged posts given the diverse nature of content types and how they are showcased.
TIP: Tie hashtags to high impact, visual content posts to help cut through the clutter of hashtag streams
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Facebook’s More Personal Nature Makes Hashtags Searches Awkward
Facebook is built around the idea of creating meaningful connections, where Twitter is focused more on quick conversations and content “snacking”. This built up user expectation of meaningful personal connections disrupts the Facebook hashtag experience because it can be jarring to find yourself peering into random, disconnected user’s posts. As hashtag adoption increases, Facebook will likely have to evolve the way hashtag streams are shown, with a focus on people and brands that are closer to your own interests, increasing relevancy and theoretically engagement. Alternatively, users may begin to embrace more public sharing to embrace the open stream that hashtag provides.
TIP: Focus content on being as personally tailored to its potential audience as possible to increase its relevance to users’ searches
Hashtags Infuse Open Graph Search with Content for the First Time
In its initial incarnation Facebook’s Open Graph Search Engine had a major weakness– it only indexed metadata, such as likes, as opposed to actual page content. This initial content provided little value to social search because it had no sense of time; rather, it often revealed outdated profile information about users (for example: a movie someone liked two years ago may not reflect the person’s tastes today). Facebook hashtags broke down the wall between profile search and content search by surfacing any hashtagged page content in Open Graph Search for people to discover. With hashtags, Facebook’s search functionality can now return valuable real-time content to its users, more in line with what users likely expect from a social media search engine.
TIP: Before adopting a hashtag, check how it’s being used already; incorporating popular hashtags can insert your brand into the conversation stream, while creating new unused terms can help tie together a brand campaign
Hashtags are Easy to Spam Because Most Personal Content is Private
With many users opting to keep their profiles and post content private, the content appearing for any particular hashtag search is often mostly filled with page posts. Unlike Twitter, where the average user keeps their profile public, hashtag search results will be largely incomplete in comparison to their actual overall usage. Until users start incorporating hashtags into public posts more regularly, brands who excessively hashtag posts may begin to be seen as spammy. Hashtag streams will also likely become a target for less legitimate pages to spam and takeover.
TIP: Manage how often a hashtag is used to avoid being seen as spammy
The Mold Isn’t Dry with Much More Still to Come
Hashtags on Facebook are still in their infancy with inevitable updates to come: clickable hashtags for mobile, showcasing hashtag usage/trends and paid media support to name a few. As hashtags become more pervasive, their functionality may also impact user behavior. With so much still to be done to give hashtags their complete implementation its tough to say whether or not Facebook’s latest development will be a success or go the way of the “Poke.” Regardless we are hopeful of the opportunities that hashtags will provide brands in expanding their reach to new audiences in engaging and dynamic ways.
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This week, SS+K partners Brad Kay and Lenny Stern participated in Mondelez International’s Fly Garage project, a weeklong experimental ideas session and innovation lab with industry leaders in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The lab, sponsored by Contagious Magazine and brought to life by the innovation house Castro, helps the global snacks leader think in new ways about how it does business, shapes the snack world, engages consumers and tells brand stories. The industry thinkers invited were tasked to help Mondelez crack the code of what the future holds for its global businesses, and how consumers’ expectations, experiences and brand relationships will evolve in the coming decade.
Brad and Lenny are looking forward to putting Fly Garage’s ideation and open thinking models to work at SS+K. Here are some snapshots from the week:
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SS+K partners Rob Shepardson and Bobby Hershfield were featured in Contagious Magazine‘s the Feed last week, in an article on our For All and First Time campaigns for Obama for America. Read the article, by Lucy Aitken, below.
CONTAGIOUS INTERVIEWS SS+K’S ROB SHEPHARDSON, FOUNDER, AND BOBBY HERSHFIELD, CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER, ABOUT ENGAGING YOUNG VOTERS
When President Obama was re-elected in November 2012, SS+K, a New York-based agency specialising in creative social engagement, helped the Obama/Biden ticket reach out to younger voters. To start with, it launched an effort targeting first-time voters with writer, director and actor Lena Dunham, best known for New York millennial drama show Girls, at its helm. She produced a video, First Time, which was viewed more than 2.5 million times. According to SS+K, that made it the most viewed piece of YouTube content of the entire campaign.
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A second effort, called For All, tapped into visual culture and was based on the Pledge of Allegiance. People were invited to write an issue on their hand, take a photo and post it on Instagram. The For All effort was helped by celebrities getting involved and was picked up by 76,000 Twitter users who used the #ForAll hashtag. Details of both campaigns can be found in the film above.
On polling day, young people made up 19% of the electorate in 2012, an all-time high, and 60% of them voted for President Obama. Analysts have said the youth vote made the difference in four key battleground states that helped keep the President in the White House.
Contagious interviewed Rob Shepardson, a founding partner at SS+K and Bobby Hershfield, chief creative officer, about the campaign, which was this week awarded a merit for integrated branding at the One Show awards in New York and is one to watch in Cannes.
What were the big differences between the 2008 and 2012 elections?
2008 was a historic elec.on and it was incredibly exciting. We s.ll had the educa.onal challenge about how to get younger people to vote, but they were thrilled with the opportunity not just to throw out Bush but also to elect a cap.va.ng figure like Obama. In 2012, it was an entirely different scenario. People were hammered by the economy and young people were alienated from poli.cs and disillusioned by it. The challenge for us was to remind them that the president had made a lot of progress on issues they care about. We just had to remind them that they shared these values and that was a big part of the campaign.
How important were celebrities in engaging younger voters?
With ‘For All’, celebrities could reach out through their social media profiles and express their own values. Many were interested in getting engaged and this was an opportunity for them to do that. Because it was about ‘for all,’ we shot it with iPhones, not high end photographers, so it was done in a very grounded way. The thing was to make it feel about equality, so celebrities and everyday people were treated exactly the same.
Lena Dunham engaged in the For All campaign by tweeting a photo about gay marriage. Given her obvious appeal to this demographic – almost more than any other celebrity at the moment – she helped attract 18 to 22-year- olds who hadn’t voted in 2008 with a film that equated the first time voting with losing your virginity. We were aware that this was a controversial approach to vo.ng and the right wing would be upset and we’d get some criticism about it. But that helped prove to our audience how out of touch the right wing was: the values that the president shares with millennials are in stark contrast to those of the extreme right wing. This was a very creative manifestation in the voice of Lena Dunham and it created that clear divide. The right wing responded in the way we predicted they would and went crazy: Fox TV had shows criticizing it. It proved a point and stayed in the media for 10 days.
How are you preparing for the 2016 election?
We monitor younger voters and millennials and how they share a very strong set of progressive values around tolerance and open-mindedness. No candidate would ever be advised to take them for granted.
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We’re proud to announce the launch of The Red, a campaign developed in partnership with American Student Assistance (ASA). The cornerstone of The Red is a short psychological thriller directed by the Sundance-award-winning trio of Borderline Films – the team behind critically-acclaimed movies Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer. See more at Face the Red.
The Red tackles the crushing anxiety that often accompanies student debt, and shows viewers the path to relief via SALT, a free online debt-management resource created by ASA. The campaign was created help young people confront their student debt and inspire them to take meaningful action. Both the film and related partnerships with The Onion, Buzzfeed, College Humor, MTVu and Rotten Tomatoes talk to the audience on their terms and use entertaining content as a way into a conversation around a challenging topic.
Adweek called the film “a cross between The Blair Witch Project and Black Swan, with a dash of Lost.” Here’s more on the campaign in the New York Times Bucks blog.
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