Below are two screenshots from Facebook ad units that I think are noteworthy. The screenshots combine two ordinary components: - friend X likes page / brand Y - a popular or most recent post from brand Y The interesting part is that these actions are combined into a single unit: "Ryan likes Bing" sits atop of Bing's most recent post. This of course makes the action more relevant - but it also makes the unit far more prominent... particularly for certain content types (like Bing's photo).
I am frequently asked to recommend a handful of ESPN personalities and brands to follow on Twitter. So that I could have something to point to - below is a far-from-comprehensive list that includes a variety of sports, opinions and types.
Additionally, I am excited to announce an integration with Twitter using their new Twitter List widget. ESPN is one of two publishers (London Fashion Week) to be part of the widget launch. You can see them in action here (College Football Nation Blog) and here (Tennis & US Open).
@ESPNStatsInfo - really awesome nuggets of timely, relevant sports data
@Buster_ESPN - Buster Olney's baseball knowledge is extraordinary. You'll be smarter by following
@SportsCenter - Breaking news and integration with ESPN's hallmark show, SportsCenter
@SportsGuy33 - Bill Simmons, with frequent content from Grantland
@BillBarnwell - Bill Barnwell is a great NFL writer for Grantland
@AdamSchefter - If you are a football fan, Adam Schefter has the pulse of the NFL and is a must-follow
@DarrenRovell - Sports + Business (and lots of food mixed in). Darren is smart, fun and prolific
@MatthewBerryTMR - a must follow for fantasy sports fans
@ChadMillman - Chad is Editor in Chief of ESPN the Magazine and ESPN's "gambling/sports betting guy"
@ErikRydholm - executive producer for PTI, Around the Horn and DLHQ. Super smart. Co-founder of MotleyFool too.
@wrightthompson. Just terrific, terrific writer
@ESPN_RobKing - oversees editorial for print and digital media. Master of insightful writing in 140 characters. And great at sharing interesting, breaking, unique pieces across ESPN
@ClaytonESPN - No, I'm not adding him because of his fantastic This is SportsCenter commercial. Clayton has the best news around the NFL - all the time.
@ESPNCFB And since it's a Saturday... the official home of College Football on Twitter: breaking news, game updates, trending reports and highlights
Facebook's redesigned iPhone App (which is outstanding!) features in-line alerts for new content in the newsfeed. The treatment and interface are well done: simple, nonintrusive, yet obvious. Furthermore, it has become a familiar behavior (Twitter.com, Facebook.com and others). I had not noticed, however, that a similar treatment was provided for comments. When viewing a post, comment alerts appear in real-time via the below treatment. Again: it is a simple yet powerful visual. And because it
1) appears in real-time, and 2) is directly related to the piece of content you are reading
It drives users to read the comment, interact and spend more time. Small enhancement that is contextual and powerful:
Today, we released the new ScoreCenter for iPad. I encourage you to download it, customize it and give feedback. Starting this weekend (college football!) and next (NFL!), you'll surely put it to good use! TechCrunch covered the app this evening ("After 28.5M iOS Downloads, ESPN Launches A Faster, All-New ScoreCenter For iPad"): "ESPN’s ScoreCenter — which delivers live scores, news and standings just about every sports league to your mobile devices — has been downloaded 28.5 million times on iOS devices. While popular, the user experience has been far from perfect. So, it started from scratch and is today launching a complete overhaul of ScoreCenter for the iPad, meant to improve the app’s speed, utility and personalization as the first of its apps to fully utilize its new API program."
Congrats to Joe Alicata, Andy Peterson, and team.
ScoreCenter features:
- Personalized scoreboards, news, and video highlights from your favorite teams and leagues, highlighting the games you care about. - Expanded game views, providing in-depth game coverage. - Breaking news, scores, and videos from the top live events of the day. - Live scoring alerts for your favorite teams and personalized match-ups sent directly to your phone. - Live integrated Gamecasts, plus links to WatchESPN. - Calendar navigation, allowing access to previous scores and upcoming games. - Ability to share your favorite games, videos and news with friends.
I love Taco Bell's new television commercial for the Doritos Locos Taco. It features a series of user-uploaded Instagram photos of Doritos Locos Tacos: "no matter how hard you try, pictures just don't do it justice." It's fun, social, and conveys how popular and unique the product has been. The Doritos Locos campaign has been a smash success - and social promotion has been a key part. Creating a television campaign atop that activity (on Instagram no-less) is terrific. [youtube value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgGgQ_6a6s&w=560"]
Side note: the new taco has indeed been a smash success. Roughly 30% of Taco Bell orders include the Dorito's Taco and same store sales up 6% after launch. Taco Bell even responded to my tweet: "The people have spoken. And the people love #DoritosLocosTacos." (a very, very proud moment for me)
Nothing groundbreaking here but I thinks its worth showcasing visually:
Spotify yesterday promoted their embeddable play buttons and playlists via Facebook and Twitter yesterday. Those 'widgets' can appear on sites, blogs, etc and play in-line much like it works on Facebook within the newsfeed / ticker.
Those tweets are then embeddable as well - and you have started to see more and tweets appear in-line within stories, blog posts, etc. As Twitter content becomes more and more of a starting point for conversation (on and off Twitter), those embeddable widgets are terrifically useful.
And back to the Spotify post: notice the Facebook Social Plugin (right column). So the main post shows in-line playlists and play buttons - and the right column shows MY Facebook friends and their recent LISTENING activity within Spotify (on Spotify.com, on Facebook, and now through the web).
Big, virtuous cycle. And an example of Spotify, Twitter and Facebook moving beyond their .com homes.
Much has already been written about Digg - and two of the best pieces currently sit atop Techmeme. MG's "Requiem for a Digg" and Om's "In Memoriam: Even in losing, how Digg won." I encourage you to read both as Digg has been important - dare I say instrumental? - in how we think about aspects of tech, news, news feeds, gamification, community, algorithmic aggregation, etc. Digg can - and hopefully will - remain important. As MG wrote, "it’s hard to imagine a better steward than Betaworks to try to make that happen."
I wanted to also touch upon two themes related to Digg:
Most importantly, Digg is a fascinating paradox between aggregation and personalization. I have had blog posts hit the front page of Digg and received 75,000+ unique visits within the sixty-minutes (if my memory serves me correctly). That's a staggering amount of traffic and really, for non-major media sources, not available anywhere else. That amount of traffic and immediacy could only really occur from an aggregated, one-for-all feed (by the way, Digg's impact on the 'newsfeed' as we know it is very under appreciated). That one-for-all feed made:
- Digg such a valuable source of traffic - gave power users such power and authority - and made Digg's homepage a newspaper / Techmeme-like hub
The paradox of course is that consumers want personalization (Facebook's feed and the focus on Edgerank are an example of personalization effectively working) - but this weakens the power of the publishers and therefor the traffic generation to the top destinations. Tough to balance.
Secondly, there is a fascinating article on Slate about the imbalance of Wikipedia's power-users and what it means for content (creation, publishing, traffic): "How Kate Middleton's Wedding Gown Demonstrates Wikipedia's Woman Problem." I encourage you to also read that as it has timely parallels to Digg and its community.
Both themes are of course related: there is a difference between publishing and consuming. For those complaining that Kate Middleton's gown is not worthy of a Wikipedia entry, they don't have to read (or append) the entry. Some of that is personal choice and some of that can be affected by personalization.
Facebook homepage ads have begun. They are effectively static full page takeovers with a Facebook module overlayed in the bottom right corner. In this example you see an ad unit for eBay's summer electronics event. On the right corner is a mini-Facebook ad unit (as you would see it on the right column of a logged-in page): it contains the copy / creative and like / share buttons. It's prime real estate and a huge unit... even if on the log-out screen. The interesting note however is that, when users are logged out, the social features are obviously not as effective... for instance, users cannot like, share or comment with a single action because they are not logged in. I suppose this is a necessary consequence of taking over the homepage. To solve this, you would need to prompt users much more intrusively: on their feed page.
Nike is so good: - terrific Facebook campaign during the NBA Playoffs
- smart experimentation on Twitter with Promoted Tweets
- innovative personalized shopping engine (which now includes licensed products)
- and that doesn't include Nike+ and their terrific / innovative integrations with Path, Facebook and Twitter
Here is yet another great campaign by Nike. In an effort to promote Nike+ ("the future of sport"), Nike took to Facebook and highlighted a barrage of athletes training and collecting data via Nike+ and/or Nike Fuel. Like most of Nike's social work, it's very visual, fun and unique. It is also on brand and tapping into the personal data / gamification theme. Notably, this was also released the day of the NBA Draft - which is driven by similar data analysis.... and many of those athletes will soon be sponsored by Nike.
On Facebook, Nike does a great job of clustering photos into albums - whereas many brands / pages, highlight individual photos.
