How free is Google Drive?
Next week we'll be dropping stuff in Google Drive, feeling chuffed with the search giant for generously giving us all 5GB storage for free. But before you throw away your hard drive and start chucking in everything on your laptop, ask yourself the following questions: where are they going to keep all this stuff and what will happen to it?
Rather than being stored in a virtual cloud floating about in space, all our 5GBs will be stored together on an enormous computer system somewhere in Google HQ. The result is some extremely hot computers which need electricity to cool them down. Google don't get free electricity so, along with the cost to the environment, they'll be passing the charges onto you surreptitiously.
Of course Google aren't the first company to offer cloud storage to their subscribers – Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox and SugarSync host similar services, and how many VirginMedia and Sky customers have failed to take advantage of the free storage space granted with their broadband subscription?
But the reason everyone's getting so excited about Google entering the arena is because so many of us already use their mail, docs and Chrome. Google Drive will slot into these services much better than Google Buzz or Wave ever did, usurping docs along the way. Next week, Google will own even more of us. The algorithms they use on mail to target you with advertising, will be applied to your photos, music and videos. In fact anything you shove in your free Google Drive. And preying on all this rich data will be Google+, probably.
But what would happen if Google's back-up system got hacked? What if a solar flare knocked our all the electricity in California? Or if the Wi-Fi went down in your local Costa Coffee? You wouldn't be able to get hold of the latest draft of your novel or leaving party photos WHEN YOU WANT.
It isn't time to throw away the hard-drive. In fact if Google have any sense, once they've hooked you in with their free Drive offer, they'll tempt to you to buy a box in which to store your section of the Drive in your home, using your own electricity. Or you could just save all your cloud storage files to another device, like your existing computer or hard-drive.
Photo by Morten Skogly http://www.flickr.com/people/mskogly/
We're Recruiting!
Social Media Producers – freelance/permanent/contract
Go Crowd is looking for exceptional Social Media Producers to join our creatively minded, sharp thinking team in sunny Shoreditch, helping manage the digital content and social media for two FMCG clients, and assisting the team on new client pitches.
You will love content (we mean really love content) and completely understand what makes communities tick. Importantly, you’ll also understand what makes clients tick - and at all points along a project’s lifespan.
Responsibilities:
Day-to-day point of client contact
Maintaining Facebook, Twitter and other social / digital channels
Excellent digital content creation and copywriting skills (for social, web, mobile as appropriate)
Community management / reputation management
Working with third-party suppliers and developers (eg designers and application developers)
Collaborating with other stakeholders in the business to develop consumer engagement strategies across social media and branded content
Promoting best social practice and up-to-date learnings within the business
Ensuring the utmost quality in our creative / content work.
Skills and Qualifications:
We are looking for someone with at least 18 months -3 years experience working in an online environment within an advertising / marketing / digital agency, or a media owner.
The ideal candidate will:
Be personable and able to build strong long-term relationships with clients
Be a social media evangelist
Be experienced in using Facebook and Twitter from a business-to-consumer perspective
Be experienced in using a range of content management systems
Ideally have a basic understand of HTML
Have a high level of image editing proficiency, using programmes such as Adobe Photoshop
Ideally have a working knowledge of video production and editing skills
Be able to work across a range of projects at any given time and prioritise the workload accordingly
Have experience of working directly with clients
Be able to communicate with senior managers in an engaging way.
This is a great opportunity for a talented producer to join an exciting growth business.
Background – Go Crowd:
Go Crowd is an agency that places insight at the heart of content creation and community engagement across digital and social channels. The business combines the skills and experience of two award winning agencies: research agency Crowd DNA and comms agency Que Pasa.
For more information email mark@go-crowd.com
Why You Should Be On Pinterest
In the last few weeks you might have noticed the appearance of the Pinterest logo on your friend's Facebook pages.
Pinterest is the latest social media platform that everyone's suddenly joining, with 1.9 million UK visitors in January, nearly double October's figures.
But why do we need another social media platform when we're struggling to update our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles?
Like Instagram, the beauty of Pinterest is that it's image based. We all enjoy looking at pictures and apparently we retain information better when we see it visually.
It works like a digital scrapbook and asks members to pin images they like from the web with a few words about why they like them.
With it's lo-fi design, browsing through Pinterest is like looking at a hip independent magazine, one that is constantly evolving with great content and attractive images.
As one of my friends said: 'I can see I'm going to waste a lot of time on here looking at pretty pictures'
The format is perfect for organising a wedding, curating style ideas or saving recipes which is why it's audience is 58% female and 59% in 25-44 age bracket.
The social aspect allows members to repin things they see on the site and to follow others who share their style. It appeals to our need to make lists as well as our need to be defined by cool things. And you don't even have to buy the things you curate.
However the site is increasingly being used as a storefront because, according to research, Pinterest drives referral traffic more than any other site apart from Facebook, which considering it's so young shows how powerful it's destined to be.
Brands can become successful on Pinterest by seeding content and building a community around their page, encouraging fans to share their pins, engaging with fans and offering incentives for repins.
At the moment there is a heavy US bias to Pinterest - vintage online shopping site Etsy has 48,000 followers on its brand page while the Wall Street Journal used the site to amazing effect for their coverage of New York Fashion Week. With British users flooding onto the site, it's essential for UK brands to make their presence felt.
#savetheteapot
Last week it was reported that teapot use in the UK is 40% down.
Since one of our clients are the Tetley Tea Folk, we jumped on the story and started the #savetheteapot campaign on Twitter.
By lunchtime the hashtag was in the Top Ten trending topics.
Next we linked up with Debenhams to give away a teapot and tea cosy on @TetleyTeaFolk.
Now everyone's talking about the campaign including celebrities like novelist Alexander McCall Smith and etiquette expert Liz Brewer.
It's a great example of how Go Crowd uses social media to react to the news and gain mainstream media coverage for our brands.
The Rise of the Me Brand
In this next few weeks Facebook are going to introduce Timeline for all their users. If you've already changed your Facebook profile, you'll have had the opportunity to skim back over the past few your life, deleting embarrassing photos that you don't want to show on your Timeline. You'll have been asked to choose a cover image to represent yourself. These days Facebook has moved on from just being a way to catch up with your friends and has become more about creating an online image for yourself.
When David Beckham was declared to be a brand in the late 1990s, most of us thought that was something that celebrities did. We didn't look into the future and think how we'd be manipulating our public image on a social networking site 15 years later. Over the last few years however, a generation of digital savvy upstarts realised that the web offered them the tools to create and promote their own 'me' brand.
Jesse Draper, host of web show The Valley Girl Show, and Daisy Whitney, who produces the video blog New Media Minute, are a couple of young female journalists who did just this. By keeping their focus within the industry, they gleaned tips from their guests and become internet stars in their own right.
But it's not all about keeping it digital – young entrepreneurs have been successful in other fields too. Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal call themselves internetainers, rather than comedians. When Their Facebook song went viral, they got a mainstream TV deal for their online web series I Love Local Commericals. They now travel around the States making local ads with local people for their cable show Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings.
YouTube has been the key to many of these success stories: 15-year-old Megan Parken dropped out of school due to the success of her YouTube channel meganheartsmakeup which attracted sponsorship from big name brands.
In fact a whole industry has sprung up around YouTube. Entrepreneurs like Tay Zonday who had viral success with music video Chocolate Rain are making a fortune out of ads which are placed on their branded YouTube channels. These internet stars post shows regularly and often work together, guesting on each other's channels. Maker Studios in Culver City has opened in response to YouTube's success and is expanding rapidly. Maker takes a cut of partners' ad revenue and in exchange provides them with studio space, freelance staff and technical support.
Maker is an example of how these digital stars aren't just making a brand of themselves but are actually becoming media owners. Jesse Draper, for instance, runs her own media production company and her show is distributed on the web by partners including AOL.
It's not just an American phenomena, in the UK we have homegrown stars too. Poppy Dinsey started a blog called What I Wore Today which has grown into a an online fashion magazine called wiwt.com. She has the support of major fashion brands like H&M and TopShop, and was named in The Evening Standard's 1000 most influential people in digital.
Meanwhile Hermione Way (pictured) used her student loan to buy a camera for newspepper.com and runs an online video news site called techfluff.tv which gives student news hounds and editors the opportunity to work at high profile events and get paid.
Interestingly many of these new stars are women. The old boys' network has no place in this rapidly expanding new field. Anyone can become successful if they have a good idea and execute it well. These digital entrepreneurs work damn hard to create the me brand by regularly posting great content and maximise it by owning their own media channel. Something definitely worth thinking about when you're tackling the Facebook Timeline.
How We Created Loyal-Tea From Tetley's FB Community
Rather than easing ourselves gently into the New Year, Go Crowd started 2012 with the launch of a big bespoke Facebook application for the Tetley Tea Folk.
Happy 2012!
Belated Happy New Year to you! One of the partners has just got back from spending the festive season in the jungle (see picture) full of plans for the next 12 months. Yes, he took his iPad with him.
Back in London, we started 2012 by launching a bespoke Facebook app, which - in one week - earned a corking 20,000 new likes for the brand's page. We'll be continuing to build communities by producing innovative content for brands across social media platforms.
We've always liked to hang out with movers and shakers, so we're delighted to be involved in the pre-production of a British feature film which shares our passion for music and dance. We're using our new media nous to help them find investors and build an audience before the cameras start rolling this spring.
We're also helping a leading music community with their content strategy for 2012 as well as polishing off a number of exciting pitches.
As always, feel free to contact us if you want to get involved.
BRANDS AND SOCIAL MEDIA
2011 has seen brands spend millions on social media, hopeful of hooking Facebook's 800 million active users and Twitter's 200 million tweeters. But are they wasting their money? Recently, Media Guardian said 61% of Britons aren't clicking 'Like' to brands' pages. Not everyone, it seems, wants to engage with brands online; they'd rather banter with their mates and tag cute photos.
And social media can damage a brand. Imagine you stumbled upon a Facebook page for a famous snack and the last status update was made in July. 'They've gone bust!' you'd think. Meanwhile, tweeters love the opportunity to moan at brands. And a brand can get in serious trouble if the complaints go unanswered.
But rather than deleting the Facebook app, there are enormous reasons why brands need to have an online presence and manage it carefully. Get Satisfaction's recent research shows that 97.9% of people said that their online experience influenced whether they bought the product or service.
The same research asked the question: Why do people follow brands on Twitter or Facebook? Free stuff, of course! One third of people on Facebook and MySpace 'Like' brands for the special offers and deals which will become theirs for the taking as a fan, and it's even higher on Twitter – 43.5%.
However most of us are pretty choosy, with 53% only following two to five brands. Brilliant content, then, is a crucial factor determining whether someone will 'Like' you or your competitor. And once you've snaffled fans, they're active: a whopping 70% will participate in contests or sweepstakes. So you need to keep them interested with new content.
In our experience at Go Crowd, people are keen to engage with brands like Redbull, Tetley and River Island. But like with your best mate, you need to chat to them, be useful and be entertaining. Oh yeah, and dishing out the odd present every now and then never did a friendship any harm either.
QR CODES
They're not exactly new, but it feels like we’re seeing more and more QR codes now – in print and as part of out-of-home comms. They keep cropping up in conversation in meetings with clients, too, as more in media and marketing experiment with how to deploy them. It therefore felt like a good time to head out and to explore if the public is getting to grips with them...
There’s a general feeling that QR codes are 'the future'. Being able to scan an image that links you to more content, in theory, is what people want. However, there is a great deal of scepticism regarding their effectiveness - most are under the impression that it is as simple as a link to a website or see it as 'just another way of selling'. Not enough are informed of other options such as 'scan to buy' and seem genuinely interested when presented with it. Convenience is also an issue - most are put off by how exclusive it remains to those with smartphones and even smartphone users are put off by the lengths needed to go through to get to the content.
Brands need to push the idea that a QR code is worth more than a link, that it can lead to exclusive content, useful buyer information and easier options to purchase - this may sway the sceptics into trying it out.
If you’d like to learn more about hyper-scan technology, and how we can help you research it, get in touch: mark@go-crowd.com
WELCOME TO GO CROWD
Hello there. We are Go Crowd and, after six months of plotting and planning, we are open for business. Take a look around our website to get an idea of exactly what kind of business it is that we're open for. Pretty quickly, you should get a good feel for our work and our viewpoint. Think insight-driven content and community and you'll certainly be on the right track.
And as much as we're open for business, the door's definitely open for a chat as well – with prospective clients (obviously!), fellow industry experts, creatives, media/social media specialists, potential partner agencies, anyone who wants to talk about innovation in communication really. We also have a few extracurricular projects up our sleeve - new ventures that, before long, we will be looking for funding, support, sponsors and collaborators on. We'll keep you posted on that front.
Right, time to get things rolling…