It’s been 17 years since a little search page on a desktop PC launched and over the years it’s evolved into the Google we know and love today. To mark this evolution, Google has debuted a new colourful G logo to replace the little blue ‘g’ icon that previously appeared in various of its products.
Ever seen a photo on Instagram and wished for an easier way to share it with your friends privately? Well, Instagram has just made it a whole lot easier to send Direct Messages by placing a little arrow beneath all pictures in your feed so your always just a few taps away from private sharing. They’ve also added threaded messages making it easier to follow conversations on the platform as well as larger than life emojis (their words) to jazz up your chats.
Siri and Cortana better watch out, as Facebook has announced it’s acquiring the skills of MI6’s head, ‘M’ to help out with users’ day to day tasks. A bit of a down-step for the first lady of espionage but it can’t all be go go go, right? Only joking of course, but ‘M’ is the name of Facebook’s new personal assistant service, which will be a hybrid of human and computer assistance. ‘M’ is predicted to be able to help with gift buying, holiday booking and much much more. This news is exciting for brands (less so for other Chat Apps), but our own Marketing Director, Tom Ollerton has a reservation, telling Marketing Week: “I imagine there will be sponsorship opportunities for certain categories or locations, but Facebook will need to be careful not to lose the authenticity of any recommendations,”. Now when do we get our exploding pen?
Facebook add ‘Donate Now’ buttons for nonprofits
In a move to benefit charities and nonprofit organisations, Facebook has made a ‘Donate Now’ button available for pages and link ads. It is well known that Facebook is often now used for online giving, the new addition also furthers Facebook’s case to marketers that its pages can drive conversions. Charity win, Facebook WIN.
Instagram stops being so square
Did you know, one in five Instagram photos is currently uploaded with… I’m not sure I can even bear to type it… white space around it?! Luckily Instagram has taken steps to fix this terrible plague that has gripped the planet by now allowing photos and videos to be uploaded which AREN’T square. You have read correctly, non-square images and videos are now allowed on Instagram. Great news for giraffes! This brings pros and cons with it as brands will now more easily be able to incorporate Instagram into their campaigns but with horizontal space also brings fear of banner ads clogging up users feeds. Brands such as Victoria’s Secret and NBC’s Saturday Night Live have already tested the feature which enables more cinematic widescreen content.
Make music videos with your photos using Facebook Moments
Facebook Moments, an app designed to ease photo sharing among friends, has released a new update which lets you create montages of your favourite pictures from Facebook set to music, and share the video back to Facebook again. Now if only you could pick ‘We’re On The Road To Nowhere’ by Talking Heads, I think it would go well with my recent birthday snaps. Moments is an app created by Facebook’s Creative Labs initiative and the new music video addition should hopefully entice uninitiated users to try it out.
Twitter is up to something and Taylor knows the secret
It looks like Twitter is about to up its photo and video editing offering after Taylor Swift, Pharrell and Big Sean all posted some new ‘funky’ (look at me, talking like a mum!) images and videos up during the recent MTV VMAs. It seems that users should soon be able to add a little more creativity to their Twitter images, yes that’s right, even YOU could be able to overlay zebras AND giraffes onto your posts (second giraffe mention of the day).
SlideShare rebranded as LinkedIn SlideShare, new clipping functionality
Three years after acquisition, SlideShare has made it official and changed its name to LinkedIn SlideShare. Along with this, it has a new ‘clipping’ option which means you can save your favourite slides from presentations and also group the slides together a la Pinterest for later perusal and inspiration.
LinkedIn revamps its messages by adding gif and emoji capabilities
In a bid to encourage people to use LinkedIn more for messaging, it has introduced what all people want when contacting potential future employees, gifs and emojis. LinkedIn has hinted that there may be further messaging updates coming, including voice and video features or perhaps debriefings post meetings but this is as of yet unconfirmed.
Snapchat creates ‘Back To School’ channel, helping marketers target 13-24s
Snapchat’s Back To School channel has been created for users to upload their experiences of returning to school and college. It also tackles a previous advertiser gripe which is that despite its famously high advertising costs, Snapchat offers little in way of guaranteed user targeting, similar to television. This makes the Back To School feed a brand sweet spot for those wishing to target the 13-24 year old audience and it has subsequently seen Pink, Coca-Cola and the movie “The Visit” all taking this rare opportunity.
Snapchat is charging brands for video ads viewed for less than a second
Not all brands are loving Snapchat it seems, as it has been revealed that it is charging advertisers 2 cents per video view, even when the views are zero seconds long. Snapchat has purported advertising benefits such as vertical video content only (which means users don’t have to rotate their phones to view) and also the fact that the videos take up the entire screen, meaning users can’t look at anything else simultaneously. I would also like to argue that zero seconds of video can stay with you *coughs* lemon party *coughs*.
Target encourages fans to Share The Force
In a partnership with Lucasfilm, Target is encouraging Star Wars fans to upload their favourite memories, be it light sabre fights, Chewbacca impression or good old-fashion Princess Leia sex fantasy (joke – DEFINITELY DON’T DO THAT). Users can upload their photos and videos from Facebook and Instagram to receive galactic coordinates as to where their memories will then be housed. This is all leading towards the hotly-anticipated December release.
Reynolds rides #FoodPorn hashtag with interactive cookbook
If you imagine Nigella’s Instagram feed as a food porn image hub, then Reynolds’ new Instagram cookbook is a multi-screened XXX back-street food porn cinema. The brand has created whole tables of interactive food on Instagram which lead to sub accounts with instructions on how to make the lovely-jubbly grub.
What you need to know about the VMAs and also totally useless fun stuff
If the world thought they could get away with not see Miley’s nipple or Kanye announcing a presidential campaign in 2020 during MTV’s VMAs, they were wrong. With 26% of the 16.5 million tweets being positive, it seemed that the public even… liked it? But maybe that was just them enjoying Bieber crying. MTV also inserted a Moonman emoji into every tweet using the hashtag #VMAs or #VMA which people seemed to enjoy.
M-Twerk-V Awards
Vine was crowned the winning content platform during the ceremony with the most social interactions of all social networks, and with content such as Kanye pretending to be asleep, we’re not surprised (read: we are very surprised as to how this has happened).
Finally, 24 advertisers also signed up to sponsor what MTV called, the ‘Millennial Super Bowl’, feeding their content to users where the most conversations around the event were taking place, Twitter and Snapchat. This was mainly via real-time tweets, ads and, for the first time, branded Periscopes.
38 new emoji submitted for consideration
Exciting news for emoji fans as the Unicode Consortium has released 38 new emoji that it’s considering for next summer’s Unicode 9 release. Highlights among them are an avocado, bacon, a selfie and a dancing man for the long-suffering singleton, dancing woman. Let’s hope there’s a giraffe also included!
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Facebook introduces personal assistant ‘M’
