My name is Māris Antons and digital media is what I do for living. I am fascinated by the world of digital & social media and the endless posibilities they offer both to marketers and users.
My work is my hobby and my hobby is my work. Therefore, I love to read and constantly improve my knowledge. Sometimes I form my opinion. From time to time I even want to share it. And this is exactly the place for that.
Keep in mind – your opinion matters too, so if you have something to say – leave a comment or drop me an e-mail at maris@marisantons.com!
I had heard about it, but didn’t give it too much attention until it happened with me – Facebook page notification box has been replaced by reach data of the page’s latest posts. And there’s no option to get back notifications. It looks like this:
This is bad for businesses and their customers. Let me tell you why.
It’s actually pretty simple – if you are an admin of a Facebook page, all you have to do is – start chat with anyone via that small chat box at the bottom of your browser, then open a new tab, navigate to a page you manage, choose the option “Use Facebook as [your page]”, go back to the tab where you have your chat open and send another message – your friend has received a message from your page and it’s in his/her inbox (“Other”).
Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to watch Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin” in Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. To make long story short – it’s about love, false accusations, deceit and betrayal.
The scene which got me thinking was when Count Friedrich accuses (falsely, because his wife has deceived him) Duke’s sister, Elsa, of murdering her brother in order to become the Duchess of Brabant. One thing leads to another and it all comes down to a combat for honour. You can read more about it here (Wikipedia).
The situation can be split in three parts:
- The false accusation
- Silence on the Elsa’s part
- Combat itself
Somehow, watching this made me think about crisis communication. Yeah, I just can’t enjoy myself, I have to think about work. :)
This is a feature that mimics Facebook ad targeting for your page’s everyday posts. It can come in as pretty handy, when you have message which might be interesting for a limited audience or shouldn’t be seen by anyone outside of it) — for example, just people in an exact geographical location (like city or country), or speakers of one or more languages.
And for other things as well.
Usually, when I’m at work, I listen to online radios and streaming services like Pandora & 8tracks. The music stream is endless and what I’ve noticed about myself when a lot of times during the day my listening is being interrupted.
The interesting thing is how I act when I do have to take my headphones out of my ears. When there’s a song I really like, I pause it (otherwise I won’t be able to finish listening to it. But, when I don’t care about the song so much, I let it keep playing.
So, my proposition would be - collect data about which songs users pause. It might show interesting stats which could be used for creating lists of user’s favorite songs.
Not so long ago (in the middle of December) Instagram changed their “Terms of Service” which created a massive uproar between users and media. A lot of users and even brands threatened to leave the service. Some really did leave (National Geographic, for example). This wasn’t the first time Instagram was unable to please everyone.
So, I would like to point out this and some other points, which have made me thinking – how far can Instagram go and how much will its users endure. Here it goes. My list of Instagram’s wrongdoings:
At first it might sound strange. Even ridiculous. But it’s not. Not always the best social media strategy is to be on social media. Of course, it helps to have your own communications channel, to grow your regular audience and to have a place where your customers can speak directly to you. But this post is about other kinds of use of social media.
This post is written with digital products/services in mind, but these thoughts can be applied to other (offline) businesses as well.
Your competitors won’t be afraid to do this for you
It’s nice to have a steady stream of income and to feel safe about the future. The thing is you shouldn’t. This has happened many times before — both recently and more in the past. One of companies that have lost everything because of this is Kodak. One company that has gained because of this is Apple.
Kodak were feeling pretty sure about their business for a while. And why shouldn’t they have?
On the other hand, Apple weren’t afraid to risk and develop iPods, iPhones and more recently — iPads. Before them these were non-existent markets. They just had more aspirations than others who also could’ve pulled this off.
Just lately* more and more of my friends have started to use Facebook more and there is one pretty interesting trend that has got me thinking about bigger things on how social networks operate — my friends are creating one FB group after another and the same happens with FB chats which are created for special occasions.
Yeah, for some time we have struggled to understand, how much space we have on twitter’s background for use of passing on various kind of information. Since the background images have been fixed to the left side of browser’s window, it hasn’t been an easy task. There was no “one size fits all” option.
Now, twitter has updated this and we have new options:
I really don’t know for how long this has been available, since I noticed this just some weeks ago. I think that THE option is “center” - since the width of twitter stream and profile information is fixed, this allows to have some fun blending the various pictures together. Like in this example of @SwedbankLatvia account:
Thank you for reading, leave your opinions on best uses (include links) in comments. Share this, if you think that you know someone who could use this info.
