Mediaboss Marketing

Kristina: Twitter has announced brands can now place ads on the Periscope platform. What does this mean for marketers?

Jason Beckerman, CEO, Unified: Twitter's move is another example of innovation causing video budgets to shift to social. Marketers have yet another ad unit to keep up with as social continues to innovate faster than any other channel.

Kristina: How is this move changing the video space?

Jason: Twitter's maneuver continues the trend we've been seeing of the growing connection between social and user-specific live broadcasting. Live streaming allows viewers to see compressed videos over the Internet in real-time, giving users real-time access to brands and companies, ultimately creating more transparency and authentic engagement.

Kristina: What benefits are there to this move?

Jason: The social video space allows advertisers to engage with their target audience in real-time, anywhere.

Kristina: What do brands need to know about the social video space before diving in?

Jason: As social video continues to grow, having a platform normalize the performance across all channels will be key to making intelligent decisions about future buys--and, on the heels of the Google scandal, placing ads like this makes transparency vital to limiting questionable content.

More from Jason and Unified next week, including his top tips for creating a solid social video strategy.

Tags: social marketing, social video trends, Unified, video advertising, video content

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Expert: What social video means for marketers - BizReport

April 18, 2017

The popular headwear brand wanted to update its social marketing strategy, and found success doing so through Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

LIDS, a sports apparel company that rose to prominence on the back of its stellar selection of ballcaps (colloquially known as lids), quickly established itself as a force in sportswear. But you don't have to be a sports fan to see the impact LIDS has had on popular and urban culture.

From the fitted cap era, though the snapback craze, and into the current five panel frenzy, LIDS has maintained a strong brand in urban fashion, and garnered hundreds of thousands of fans on social media. But for all its prominence, LIDS found itself in need of a more robust digital and social media marketing strategy.

As an org we know we need to become more digital and social, and more loyal. That's the expectation of the consumer today. They want to interact with brands socially, says Jeff Pearson, SVP of marketing and eCommerce at LIDS.

Pearson and his team went about meeting these evolving social challenges by implementing a social command center of sorts at its new headquarters in Indianapolis. Dubbed the Press Box, this social command center consists of eight 55-inch flat screen panels all packing into a large room at LIDS' revamped HQ. The screens feature a number of social insights, and are used by company marketers to optimize their social marketing in real time.

These TVs are powered by the Salesforce Social Studio product. We're able to show the content that we are promoting, communicating, and capturing across social channels, as well as aggregate the posts that we've made, Pearson says. Social Studio gives us a dashboard where we can post to social, and the command center aggregates all of that information and creates reporting dashboards around it.

Indeed Salesforce Social Studio, part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, is a key component to The Press Box, and facilitates much of the power of the initiative. Through the Social Studio, The Press Box works by pulling customer data, journey data, advertising data, and more to depict the customer experience as accurately as possible.

[LIDS'] Press Box brings all of the digital touch points together, says Rob Begg, VP of product marketing in social and advertising at Salesforce. Usually, there may be only a handful of people that are really aware of how a digital campaign is going. LIDS has really put that information front and center, so that the experience can be absorbed by anyone at the company.

The company has reaped the benefits of the Press Box almost since day one of its implementation, but before getting into the results of the initiative, it's important to touch on a powerful bit of foresight by the LIDS team.

We wondered how we could extend this social reach to our employees, because we're not able to put a Press Box in every store,Pearson says.

Instead of installing eight TVs in all of its stores across the country, LIDS opted to bring the insights garnered by the Press Box to its larger team through an app called the LIDS Access Pass. The app allows us to see the four key social channels we operate out of, and the posts we've made to those channels. We've trained our store managers and associates on how to use the app, Pearson says.

This company-wide to initiative to better utilize social media has been a runaway success for LIDS.

When we first put the box in place in last October, we were at 495,000 followers on Facebook. We've grown that by a little more than 300,000, and are hovering today around 800,000 followers, Pearson says. It took us years to garner half a million followers. In just six months, we've almost doubled that.

Of course, any marketer with experience on social media understands that followers are worth about as much as impressions in other digital media channels. Valuable to be sure, but not quite as much as other metrics.

Followers aren't enough. You need engagement, Pearson says. To garner that engagement, the brand reached out to its followers with content that it knew would resonate with sports fans. We ran various contests around fans' favorite teams or hats, and we've just rolled out a new rewards program in addition to a new app and we've had really good engagement, Pearson says.

Visit link:
LIDS Tips its Hat to Social Media - DMN

Everyone knows that China has some of the most sophisticated censorship tools in the world, but the details of how they actually work what they censor and when are often not fully understood. A new report by Citizen Lab, a research group studying the web, human rights, and global security, sheds some light on one particularly fruitful target for Chinese censorship: mobile messaging.

Citizen Lab looked at how the Chinese government censors discussion on WeChat, a popular messaging app. WeChat is the fourth biggest messaging service in the world, with more than 768 million active users, but is also deeply embedded in Chinese society, where its used not only for chatting, but for tasks like banking, paying bills, booking holidays, calling cabs, and much more.

The cornerstone of WeChat censorship is keyword filtering, which blocks messages that contain terms like human rights, mass arrest, and spiritual freedom. However, Citizen Lab found that the censors dont just block messages containing any one specific phrase, but instead look for combinations of different terms. So you can send a message with the words human rights lawyer in it, but if you combine that with the name of a specific lawyer Jiang Tianyong, who was recently disappeared by the government the message is blocked.

When a message is censored, users are not notified of this fact. They see it as sent in their own app, but it just never reaches its intended recipient. The system works by examining every message that is sent when it passes through WeChats servers. The list of filtered keywords is also reactive, and changes in relation to the news; and only to WeChat accounts using mobile phone numbers registered in the Chinese mainland. Citizen Lab says much of the censorship on WeChat is currently focused around the 709 Crackdown a series of arrests against civil dissenters that began on the 9th of July 2015 (hence the name).

An interesting quirk of WeChat censorship discovered by Citizen Lab is that its stricter when it comes to group discussions. The group found that more keyword combinations were blocked in chats containing multiple users than in one-on-one conversations. The reason for this isnt clear, but it could be the Chinese government thinks it prudent to allow limited discussion of sensitive topics, but that group conversations are more dangerous, perhaps leading to organized dissent. WeChat Moments (a feature similar to Facebooks News Feed) was also more heavily censored, with certain images filtered out as well.

The report notes: The greater attention to group chat and Moments in particular may be due to the semi-public nature of the two features. Messages can reach and inspire discussions among wider audiences, making it subject to a higher level of scrutiny.

For a full list of censored keywords and combinations, you can read Citizen Labs report in full here.

More:
China's internet censors allow one-on-one complaining, but won't let ... - The Verge

Last night the Newseum gave its second annual "free speech award" to Apple CEO Tim Cook. The honor was just one of several "Free Expression" awards that "recognize those who exhibit passion for and dedication to free expression." I can't be the only person who found this ironic.

It was only a few months ago that Apple removed theNew York Times app from the Chinese version of the App Store. "The move limits access to one of the few remaining channels for readers in mainland China to read The Times without resorting to special software," thepaper reported. Nor was this the first time Apple hadaccommodated the communist dictatorship in its quest to deny Chinese readers an independent media. "Apple has previously removed other, less prominent media apps from its China store." When theTimes asked Apple what was going on, the global corporation, with a market cap of some $700 billion, said it was merely complying with the request of the Chinese authorities. Funny:a year earlier Tim Cook had self-righteously refused to comply with an FBI request to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorists. Some authorities must be more authoritative than others.

The award illustrates just how perverse an institution the Newseum is.What connection does Tim Cook have to the cause of a free pressother than in suppressing itfor profit? His tenure at Apple has been more about political involvement than technological innovation. He's known foradvocacy of same-sex marriage, hiring former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the San Bernardino pose. He doesn't finance newspapers, he has made no standagainst political correctness. I've never heard him utter a word that would offend John Oliver or Trevor Noah, say something that wasn't a clich. "We must be open to alternative points of view, not alternative facts," he said in his acceptance speech. Unless you live in China!

The Newseum is famous for the huge slab of marble that hangs from its facade. On it is engraved the text of the First Amendment.That amendment also guarantees the right to religious liberty, but Cook opposes state religious freedom statutes because they "would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors." That's a tendentious interpretation, to say the least, and Cook has never shown any sign of reckoning honestly with religious believers who disagree with him. So he's 0 for 2.

If the Newseum had presented Cook the "Thank you for using your power to squelch dissident views and bythe way please donate to us award," I wouldn't be making a fuss. Itwould have been consistent. As it stands the museummay want to reconsider itsmotto and swap the First Amendment for Orwell.There are several passages from1984 that would work.

Why did Cook receive this honor? A reader points out that, according to the program, Apple is a "platinum sponsor" of the Newseum's Free Expression awards.

Mystery solved.

See the original post here:
Newseum: Let Us Now Praise Silicon Valley Oligarchs Who Abet Chinese Censorship & Oppose Religious Freedom ... - Washington Free Beacon (blog)

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of our site that students in American higher education do not have the foggiest understanding of their First Amendment rights.

Campus Reform is replete with examples of left-wing students calling for censorship of contrary viewpoints. Even mere affirmations of commitment to free speech get shot down on the grounds that they could create an unsafe space.

"Theres a dark future for our freedom that we ought to be fighting like hell to avoid."

Say something they dislike and they might try todisrupt your meeting,disinvite your speaker, orget you expelled.

And if theyre feeling particularly rowdy, they might just skip straight to punching you in the face.

At the University of California, Berkeley, socialist and anti-fascist student groups demanded the university cancel a planned appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos. When the university went ahead and hosted Yiannopoulos, rioters shut down the event and forced Yiannopoulos to evacuate for his own safety before damaging a Starbucks and a bank.

Were students and faculty embarrassed by the childish outburst? On the contrary, a series of op-eds in The Daily Californiandefended the rioting as violence as self-defense.

Campus leftists love to use this kind of language when building their narrative. They cast themselves as plucky, victimized underdogs by defining any speech they dislike as violence, thereby justifying their use of actual physical violence. They say theyre punching up. The problem with that, of course, is that its still punching.

With this kind of ignorance (or at least I hope its merely ignorance), better education about free speech and First Amendment rights are absolutely necessary. Thankfully, there are some efforts out there to defend free-speech.

Multiple state legislaturesare considering bills that would guarantee First Amendment rights on campus. The University of Chicago, whichhas an institutional commitment to free speech,has even proposed hiring free-speech deans to serve as pseudo-bouncers at events to remove disruptive students.

Its not enough, but its a start. Ideally, more universities should be working to educate their students on free speech, not slashing enrollment like UCLAs doing to a popular course onfree speech in the workplace, where students are so eager to take the course that they are literally sitting in the aisles.

Maybe if the University did so, they wouldnt have studentsblocking access to books ordisrupting speakers.

While all of these incidents may seem minor, todays students are tomorrows leaders. The first Millennials are now getting into Congress, and in a few decades time, the Supreme Courtwhich makes the rulings involving freedom of speechwill be made up of Justices who were educated in this kind of environment.

Thats a dark future for our freedom and one we ought to be fighting like hell to avoid.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @SterlingCBeard

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College: A 'safe space' for censorship - Campus Reform