I'm a hockey fan, have been going back to my days when i played in the street outside my parents house.  And I particularly enjoy NHL Playoff hockey as the sudden death nature of the games keeps viewers and fans on the edge of their seats.   But this year on top of all that, there is an ever increasing digital component to the NHL Playoffs. I'm really enjoying the NHL giving me a look at the fan reaction for their teams with the #MyPlayoffsMoment campaign.  The idea behind the campaign is that fans can tweet, post and share their photos and videos and then the NHL mashes them up to show the true emotion of the fan experience.   Continue reading

What is branding? From strategy, to concept and messaging, it is a question whose answer is sought.  But now, there is a short 2 minute video to try and answer the question "Entrepreneurs, innovators, disruptors, CEOs and CMOs have enough landmines to sidestep when tackling the branding beast," says the video's creator, David Brier of DBD International. "Written plainly with equally minimalistic motion graphics, this video unveils the magic, the spark and the simplicity that is branding in its most fundamental form." You can see the video below the fold.   Continue reading

It's long been held that one of the best ways to reach your followers and create engagement was with visual content like photos, but now the best visual content is a video: Looking at more than 670,000 posts by 4,445 brand pages (not including celebrity, entertainment or media pages) between October 2014 and February 2015, Socialbakers found that video posts had organic reach of 8.71%, meaning an average of nearly nine fans out of 100 see such posts. The reach was only 3.73% for photo posts, well below the results for text-only statuses (5.77%) and link posts (5.29%). The video number reach is less surprising than the fact that text only and link posts surpassed the reach of photo posts. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues.  Continue reading

As we approach the big game this Sunday, it is often said that the brand bowl is as big if not bigger than the Super Bowl game itself.  Adweek has a story looking at what companies could get in social media for the 4.5 million they will be spending on their 30 second spot during the game: "With [a $4.5 million] budget, you can run a YouTube masthead, Snapchat sponsored story, sponsored Instagram ad, promoted Twitter trend and a Yahoo homepage takeover and still have money to spare," said Adam Shlachter, chief investment officer at DigitasLBi, told AdWeek. By the numbers, $4.5 million will buy 10 days of premium advertising on Twitter, four days on Facebook, five "masthead" ads on YouTube, and six-days worth of Snapchat's high-priced disappearing ads.  Continue reading

President Obama will deliver his State of The Union speech tonight and the NY Times has a piece out looking at how the White House is looking to widen the audience using social media and digital tools.  In that story, they have this quote from Dan Pfeiffer, a senior advisor to the President “To not have an aggressive social media strategy in 2015 would be the equivalent of not having an aggressive TV strategy in the 1950s,”    Continue reading