The pre-election period means there's a lull in blog posts at work so I thought tonight that I could blog for my own pleasure and share some of the things that are interesting me in the land of social media and marketing right now.

 

  • Live broadcasting is massive right now! Twitter are to stream NFL games live via their Periscope app and Facebook are in the process of expanded their Facebook Live trail out to all users. A few high profile content creators have been paid by Facebook to use their platform (including the Game of Thrones red carpet evening) and it seems to work well. From a viewer’s point of view the incessant notifications and awful map of who is live right now (without any filtering) are both in serious need of some user experience work but the overall UI for a viewer is pretty good. A few tools are already popping up - I can’t wait to check out BumeBox live prompter - it looks like a great way to keep things organised when doing a live cast. Remember to read the best practice tips! Bonus: here’s what it’s like when the Zuck turns up in your office.
  • Encryption is a hot topic right now and WhatsApp have just announced end-to-end encryption on their messaging app. There’s a huge debate as to whether or not law enforcement agencies should have access to messages (and how that should be managed locally, nationally or internationally) and I think that this will continue to be a newsworthy topic for some time to come.
  • Campaigns for use of Plain English have been going since the 1970s but as the internet grows and its demographic expands to include a greater number of non-English speakers the need for using simple language grows. Although it’s an arbitrary and somewhat silly limit, the EasyWrite text editor limits you to only the 1,000 most commonly used English words... fun as an experiment but it proves an interesting point.
  • In-app video ads are growing in popularity... and research shows that users actually like using video ads as a way to pay for in-game content. I agree that this has the potential to benefit marketers (who see higher engagement from video ads), users (who pay for content with time/eyeballs rather than cash) and game developers (who have the potential for more ad revenue) but I also think that it could be massively detrimental to the game experience if not handled correctly. There still needs to be an improvement in how the user interaction of ads in games and advertisers need to appreciate that they aren’t necessarily going to target someone on the right medium at the right time but that person may still be warm to them. Ad networks need to work on offering a “I’m playing a game right now, but hit me again in an hour” button! (Read the report/summary)