According to a study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium, published on eConsultancy’s blog recently, when consumers follow your brand on social media what they’re expecting to see are incentives and rewards.

67% expected to be eligible for exclusive offers
65% expected to gain access to games or contests

Apparently though, this isn’t what a lot of CMO’s expected, but we’ve definitely seen strong evidence of this. Offers and promotions run on Facebook and Twitter using our Share tools have led to massive increases in fans and followers for the brands involved, even when using very simple mechanisms like fan-gating (showing different content, like a discount code, to followers).

In fact, using competitions on social media can be a very cost-effective way to build a fan base,  far more so than using Facebook advertising for example, even when offering a high value contest prize.

Interestingly, 60% of consumers also expected to be able to interact with other brand fans – not just the brand itself. It’s therefore well worth looking at promotions and competitions which can leverage this element as well and also keeping this in mind generally when posting – get a conversation going amongst fans, not just between your brand and the fans.

What do you think? Have you found particular success with social offers and contests?

Following on from my post last week looking at what’s happened in 2011, it felt only right to think forward and look at what we might expect to see in the next 12 months. As always with posts like this, there are a massive number of topics that could be covered. However to keep things manageable here are the main things that have come to our minds.

Gadgets and gizmos

The iPad 3 is expected to launch in the early part of 2012 and I’m sure this will be welcome news for Apple fans globally. Looking at the tablet market as a whole Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, has this week announced the ‘Nexus’ tablet which is set to be released in the next six months. Along with Amazon’s Kindle Fire offering coming to the UK soon, the tablet market could develop substantially in the new year. What about you gamers out there? Well, there’s the Nintendo’s Wii U arriving and also Playstation Vita - which one are you more excited about?

Events in London and beyond

In June the UK will be celebrating the Queen’s Diamond jubilee and in August, The Olympics are taking place in London. In November Nokia announced a free wi-fi trial taking place in London giving the public free Internet access in parts of the city, and it’s thought that this is in preparation for The Olympics. In addition to these events there is also the US Presidential election taking place and it’ll be interesting to see how the candidates use the Internet, and social media specifically, for their campaigns. In October Barack Obama joined Tumblr to kick start his campaign and as Tumblr is a personal favourite of mine, I will be especially interested to see how his team use this newer social platform.

Digital marketing in 2012

In 2011 Facebook grew to 800 million users, Twitter to over 100 million active users and Google + arrived, so social media is likely to continue to grow and become a prominent marketing channel for businesses in 2012. Google+ have confirmed they’ll be adding more features for business pages too, and brand pages on Twitter have already arrived for a select few. Email marketing will most certainly have its place in 2012 and, in actual fact the DMA have predicted that more emails will be sent than ever before. However next year the focus, more than ever before, has to be on combining marketing activities across the board – email, social media and SMS. We can’t ignore the fact that the economy isn’t as strong as it could be and businesses of all sizes need to think smart about how they market their offering online to get the best ROI. In lighter news, Emailblog.eu reported last week that spam emails have fallen to their lowest volume since 2008, let’s hope that trend continues into 2012 and beyond!

Other things to look out for

The usage of HTML 5 is likely to become more prevalent in 2012 and we wonder how much it’ll impact email and website design in the coming year. We’ve already seen Chrome pass Firefox as the most popular browser of choice so it’ll be interesting to see how Chrome continues to grow – especially with the launch of IE10 to keep an eye out for. Netflix is also set to arrive in the UK next year which could change how we view our TV shows and favourite films. Finally, are you looking for a new design/colour scheme in 2012? Pantone have announced Tangerine Tango as their colour of the year for 2012. Are you ready to go orange?

Are there any social or technological changes you’re looking forward to seeing in 2012? Share your thoughts in the comments box below or drop me an email!

As Christmas draws ever closer and our thoughts turn to the new year, we’d like to take a nostalgic moment to think about the year gone by, as it’s been quite a big one really. Here’s our round-up of significant social and technological events from 2011.

All things social

Where do I begin? Social media platforms have again had a triumphant year; from the launch of Google+ at the end of June to the growth of Tumblr, the way we communicate continues to evolve with the growth of the key social players.

Twitter reported that the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy hit a new record of tweets per second in August, but for me the biggest news story was the Japanese earthquake in March. It really demonstrated that social media is the first place that I (and a lot of people) hear of those big news stories.

As well as hitting new records Twitter redesigned their platform at the beginning of December and launched promoted tweets in the UK. Let’s not forget Facebook either; in September Mark Zuckerburg announced both the launch of Timeline and that the platform now has 800 million users. There is also talk that Facebook will float on the stock market in 2012, so the next 12 months could be interesting. LinkedIn also hit an important milestone this year, 100 million users.

The growth of the smartphone

The war between Android and iOS continues, with Gartner reporting that 52.5% of smartphones sold worldwide in the third part of the year were Android. Second was the Nokia Symbian at 16.9% followed by the iOS at 15%. While Apple may have sadly lost Steve Jobs in October this year, they also launched the iPad 2,  iPhone 4S (Siri in hand) and iOS 5. The iPhone 4 is also the most popular device for taking photos - beating all other smartphones and cameras, quite a statistic! Android launched their latest operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich and Google purchased Motorola Mobility for £7.7 billion in August. Apple also listed Instagram as the best iOS app of the year, no surprise really when you consider they have grown to 50 million users this year and plan to launch an Android version very soon.

Security breaches galore

This year we saw an unprecedented amount of security breaches – from the outage of the Sony PlayStation Network, to the phishing attack on Xbox users and security breach at Steam – to name but a few. There was also talk of a Facebook hack taking place in November but this never materialised. Security can never be taken for granted, and the Sign-Up.to team certainly shuddered when we saw the ‘worst passwords of 2011′ list.

Things to come…

In my next post I’ll talk more about what’s to come in 2012 but let’s not forget that Windows 8 was announced this year, as was Amazon’s Kindle Fire – a potential rival for Apple in the tablet market. There’s also the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics coming to London, so it’ll be interesting to see how the world of technology responds to those events.

What stories were important to you this year? I am certain that there are plenty more stories I could have covered here, but I hope this post has given you a nice little summary of the year gone by in technology. As always, please do get in touch with me via email or just leave a comment in the box below.

Last night (Thursday 8th December) Twitter announced and began rolling out a brand new design for web, iPhone and Android applications, as well as Tweetdeck. Here’s a shot of how our Sign-Up.to Twitter page looks this morning on the web, compared with the old style.

So what do we think? Well, on first glance it appears that they’ve just flipped the design round – trending topics used to sit on the right, they now sit on the left etc. On closer inspection it feels a lot tidier though; we no longer see profile pictures of our followers, just a link to view them. Images are still present (though smaller) and photos posted alongside a tweet now sit quite nicely on the feed. As well as this, the ‘similar to you’ section is smaller and sits lower in the page. Our tweets, following and follower information still remains, but sits at the very top of the page.

Overall it feels that they’ve tried to make the design more concise and slick, and I think this is where they’ve succeeded. The design is smart, allows me to see everything I want to see, and explore further if I need to. There are just three links at the very top of the page now – home, connect and discover. ‘Home’ is where we see the usual timeline of follower tweets, ‘Connect’ is where ‘the conversation begins‘ and ‘Discover’ is the newest tab to arrive. ‘Discover’ not only displays the trending topics we’re all so used to seeing, but also displays a story section – taking the most popular topics that one step further. The stories give a brief summary as to why a topic might be trending, links to a news article and gives users the chance to view tweets about that topic. This is where Twitter have excelled themselves, they recognise that social media is fast becoming the place that people see news first. The ‘Discover’ page takes advantage of this and makes those topics even more prominent than before.

The new designs we’re seeing on web, mobile applications and desktop are consistent –  the Tweetdeck update is particularly prominent and the blue colour scheme already seen on mobile has come into play. Econsultancy reported that Twitter want the user experience to be consistent no matter where or how the message is being sent, and I think this demonstrates how their brand has evolved. They recognise that their platform has become global and have responded.

While the rollout has begun, some of the Sign-Up.to team are yet to see the new look in their personal accounts. Over to you all, what do you think of the new look? Are you impressed with the mobile and Tweetdeck updates? We’d love to hear what you think and how you think this redesign will aid Twitter’s growth in the new year. Get in touch with us in the comments box below.

You may have heard about Shippam’s Paste, a Twitter story unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time. @Shippamspaste has been on my radar for a few weeks now, and while I had other social stories in the pipeline, today their story has escalated into something quite interesting indeed. In fact as I write this #paste is the second highest trending topic in London, and that’s not bad for a company that started in the 18th Century!

How did it all begin?

On Thursday 13th October my colleagues and I came across the delightfully funny @shippamspaste and unsure if it was a joke or not, we quickly followed.  The page told the story of ‘Ben’, an intern at Princes Group/Shippam’s Paste, who was keen to help followers engage with their brand. He told us of his boss Paul, how you could enjoy paste and how he spent his weekends. Real or not you couldn’t help but laugh at the tweets, the appalling grammar and the lack of understanding about how social media works (oh, the irony).

#Paste goes viral

As time went on it was very obviously a fake account but it didn’t matter, the page continued to grow and attract attention. We couldn’t help but laugh at tweets such as “why not try beef spread on toast as a delicious start to your day”.

We were impressed enough to see it at 2,000 followers before it quickly jumped to 8,000 – this account had captured the imagination of some users on Twitter. It cleverly added some humour to, let’s face it, a pretty dull brand. It even encouraged one of my colleagues to look for and purchase it in our local supermarket. Talk about increasing brand awareness!

What went wrong?

This morning (4th November 2011) @shippamspaste was no more. I was their 6th follower and three weeks later at over 8,000 the account was suspended. A search of Twitter highlighted how popular this account had become, and people were obviously saddened to see it go (including some of the Sign-Up.to team). While there’s no official word, it would appear that the account was pulled for being an impersonation on a trademarked name.

What happened next was an interesting twist, Princes Group created (what we believe to be) an official Shippam’s Paste Twitter account (@Shippamsofficia. No, really). They painfully demonstrated a clear misunderstanding of the situation, filling their page with some awfully impersonal and corporate tweets before deleting the account all together. The #paste bubble had officially burst.

What can we learn from Princes Group?

While I can understand the need to protect a brand, Princes Group have perhaps mishandled the situation; their social media presence was covered and loveable, even if it was unconventional. My colleagues and I didn’t start following @shippamspaste because we like crab paste, we followed it because it was funny and painted a picture of a young intern in an old fashioned company trying to spark a bit of life into their brand. Twitter doesn’t always have to be serious (for any company), it can be funny and it can show personality about the people behind the brand. Yes the account was fake but wouldn’t it have been nice if it was real? If the young intern really was stuck in this improbable situation and spent his days coming up with ideas about how to enjoy different pastes on toast? I for one am sad to see it go, and amazed to see the reaction it’s generated. All publicity is good publicity, right?

Were you a @shippamspaste follower? Are you as sad as us to see it go? Get in touch in the comments box below, we’d love to hear from you! #paste

Within Sign-Up.to we have five key sections; Collect, Create, Send, Share and Analyse. All of them hold some excellent tools to help you get the best from your online marketing. In this post I’ll be looking at our newly developed Share section and some of the tools available.

1. Send your email campaigns straight to Facebook and Twitter. That’s right, share your emails on the two most popular social media sites on the planet. A great way of allowing your subscribers to promote your brand and message with their friends and followers.

2. Post comments and photos to both social media sites, simultaneously. Posting an important update online? With Share you can write your update and post it to both your Facebook and Twitter page at the same time, making life just that little bit easier.

3. See your Facebook and Twitter feed all on one page. No more flicking between tabs on your Internet browser, view both feeds on one page.

4. Create a data capture form to catch new subscribers. In Share you can quickly add a data capture form to your page, making it really easy for your Facebook fans to sign up to receive your latest newsletter, enter a competition, offer etc.

5. Mark comments and mentions as positive or negative. Seen a negative comment you’re unhappy with? Well, firstly don’t delete it and secondly mark it as negative. You can do the same with positive comments and it’ll quickly help you assess your customers’ opinion of you online.

Along with Facebook and Twitter, you may recall that Sign-Up.to recently got on board with social media/blog platform Tumblr. I personally love Tumblr; it’s a growing platform that’s massively versatile. I find it a great place to discover and share visual inspiration and though slightly different from our traditional social media approach, this is the exactly the way we use it for Sign-Up.to. Mainly we focus on great design, but we like to dabble in many different mediums, including photography, illustration and typography. We also rate general geekery pretty highly; so whether it’s technology, comic books, sci-fi or video games, there’s a high chance you’ll see some of that too.

Leanne and I take great joy in compiling posts for the Sign-Up.to page, and the Tumblr interface makes it really easy to reblog other people’s posts and to be reblogged yourself. Similarly to other social media platforms, you can follow blogs and posts from those you follow are displayed in feed form so you can easily keep tabs on what people are publishing.

We follow a real variety of blogs through Tumblr and many of the posts on our page have originated from or been discovered through them. Leanne and I wanted to showcase some of the Tumblrs we take particular inspiration from, so here are some of our favourites.

My top picks:

We love illustrationDoes exactly what it says on the tin really. Many fabulous illustrations to be enjoyed here.	Design a emporterA mixed bag from these guys. Whether it be paintings, illustrations or photography, it’s always top class.	Oliver PhillipsA great blog to follow for design, branding and general interesting, quirky content.
Gaks designs Some architecture and sculpture here, as well as some interesting and unusual visual art.	The awkward gamerThis blog indulges both my love of art and design, and my love of video games. It provides humour, art and geekiness, so it gets my vote.	Wildcard! - Hotties from history This is my wildcard choice, as the concept is pretty bizarre. They post about significant people from history, that also happen to be good-looking. Educational and entertaining.

Over to Leanne!

1000 drawings  One of my favourites, this is perfect if you love illustrations. Their theme is varied but most of the time I end up going ‘awww’ to their posts. Very sweet.	Things organized neatlyIf you like being organised, this is the place for you. Honestly.	Awesome people hanging out togetherI love my celebrities and this page provides some rare (I’d like to think) photos of famous people together – some you’d expect to see together, some that take you by surprise.
Minimal movie postersThis arty page is a favourite amongst the Sign-Up.to team. They find original artworks representing films and TV shows – old and new – and make them something special. You can even buy some of the images.	Dear photographTake an old photo and place it in today’s setting. Original, different and a little heart warming. I’d love to do this with some of my old childhood photos.	Wildcard! - Kitties and cakesThis is my wildcard choice. I love cakes and I love cats and this page is the perfect combination of the two. Even if you don’t like cats (or cakes), some of the photos/creations are impressive!

We hope that you’ve enjoyed browsing our selection of favourites as much as we enjoyed compiling them for you! Are you on Tumblr or do you have any Tumblr recommendations for us? Leave us a comment below with details, as we’d love to check them out.

At the F8 conference on the 22nd September 2011 Facebook announced the launch of Timeline, a new design for user profiles. It’s due to go live for all accounts at the end of September (though you can get it now if you prefer!). I love a good social media announcement and this one didn’t disappoint; so without further ado I give you my thoughts on Timeline.

Firstly, for all the skeptics out there it would be easy to say “hey, what do these changes matter? Facebook are always making them”. It’s a fair point but ultimately any changes they make go live to over 800 million people so it’s big business. The difference with this news is that the latest offering is aimed to encourage people to start telling their life story, all from one place. Interestingly the reaction of a friend of mine to this news was “Wow, so Facebook really are here for the long run?”, perhaps quashing any of those “it’ll end up like Friends Reunited and Myspace” rumours? Maybe.

Let’s look at Timeline and what it has to offer:

Visually beautiful

We’ve already seen photo albums appearing bigger on the News Feed of accounts but Timeline goes that one step further, and one aspect of this new design that grabbed my attention is the cover image. As well as having a profile picture Facebook have introduced a cover image which prominently sits at the top of the page. Suddenly users can individualise their profile – not just being one of those 800 million users that blends into the crowd. I like this; I can customise my page to reflect me, or put bluntly I can proudly display an image I like – be it one I’ve taken or otherwise. It’s my page and I can take ownership of it.

As well as cover images Timeline introduces a two-columned profile. Your feed is still organised chronologically but by essentially splitting the feed into two it allows you to see more as you scroll further down. As well as this, the places where you’re tagged now appear in a map. I geekily enjoyed browsing it; it gave me a visual reminder of some of the places I’d visited and enjoyable times I’d had with friends and family in times gone by. This might just encourage me to tag myself in places more often.

Now, and then

In the announcement post Facebook’s thought process behind Timeline was that stories quickly slip down the page, disappearing forever. Suddenly with Timeline that’s not the case and to the right of the page you can go back to your feed a month ago, 3 months ago, 3 years ago, all the way back to the day you were born. It’s not just about going back, you can also start adding significant events to that time – so for example I can now add a picture of me on the day I was born, or add a story about when my little sister was born. Facebook could now become the place where you document your whole life story.

Is that a good thing? I think it’s easy to raise the privacy question here as you can now reveal so much more, but ultimately it’s always your call as to how much you document online. I do have reservations about adding details about my life, but I don’t have to – users have the choice. I can think of lots of my Facebook friends who will embrace this and add photos from the past and I think that’s where Timeline is going to add an interesting dimension to Facebook, and social media as a whole.

Express who you are

Facebook have developed their apps to allow users to really express who they are; from documenting the music you are listening to, to the book you are reading and even to the food you are cooking. Apps are being integrated into the concept of telling your story. I like this idea, using Spotify I can now tell my friends what music I’m listening to and if a friend then listens to the same song it’ll pop up on their page – sharing in a whole new dimension. There are the concerns that now my feed will be full of the songs people listen to, but I’m certain there will be ways of controlling how frequently updates are posting. Interestingly since the launch of Timeline, Spotify have announced that users must have a Facebook account to register with them and this suggests an exclusivity deal with Facebook that perhaps hasn’t publicly been seen before?

To conclude

I’m writing this in anticipation of the full roll out and expecting there to be some complaints when it goes live. However, the bottom line is that Facebook will always change and develop, it’s part of evolving and staying ahead of the game. Timeline is smart, adds something new to social media not seen before, integrates itself with some big players like Spotify and makes user profiles enjoyable to view. Well done Facebook, Timeline might have just cemented your future.

Have you tried out Timeline yet? What are your thoughts on it? I’d love to hear your opinion on it so drop me an email or leave a comment below.

This week there have been some rather big (and small) updates to our favourite social media sites. To keep on top of everything we thought we’d sum up some of the top stories from the week.

Twitter

This week we saw Twitter begin to roll out promoted tweets in the UK. I spotted this yesterday (22nd September) in my feed with a tweet about the new series of Glee starting on Sky 1. Now I’m not a fan of Glee and in all honesty I wasn’t too impressed to see this in my feed amongst tweets I am interested in reading. However what I am curious about is how this will develop and how are they going to tailor tweets to the individual user? A British colleague of mine saw a promoted tweet for BBC America on that same day which didn’t seem very targeted either, but I think time will tell here. So far Twitter have teamed up with the likes of BT, Eurostar and Electronic Arts so watch out for promoted tweets coming your way.

Google+

On the 21st September Google announced that Google+ had been fully opened to the public, scrapping the invite only concept. The newest social networking site now has over 25 million users and while most of us at Sign-Up.to joined the site back in July this year, has it fully caught our attention yet? No, not really. The site has great potential, as other Google ventures have had, but looking at how Facebook appears to be going from strength to strength we’re still a little undecided on how much Google’s social network is really going to develop.

Facebook

Well, where to start? The team at Facebook have certainly been busy recently! Along with the cosmetic changes to home pages going live (and meeting some criticism), there was also the F8 conference and the announcement of Timeline, as well as reaching two important milestones:

- 800 million users. This means they’ve gained 50 million new users in the last 2 months – impressive.
- Last week there were half a billion people using Facebook in a single day.

What does it all mean for businesses?

Promoted tweets on Twitter understandably opens up a new social media advertising channel, and now that it’s arrived in the UK the ball can start rolling for businesses closer to home. In terms of Google+ the site still isn’t open to businesses but perhaps the fact that the service is now public means we’re one step closer to seeing businesses popping up there. Facebook have obviously rolled out some huge user profile changes, so the key point to mention is that they’re ‘smartening up’ the homepage field and letting users decide what appears. It’s now more crucial than ever for businesses to ensure they’re posting interesting updates that keep their fans engaged.