The Battle for the Camera

April 25, 2017 by Taylor Wiegert in Facebook, Content Marketing, Snapchat

All eyes are on the camera. Last week Facebook took the stage at F8 to launch the Camera Effects platform in an effort to get developers to help it dominate Snapchat.

Camera Effects is an augmented reality platform that lets developers add augmented reality overlays to people, table tops and anything else that can be viewed through the lens of a camera. The potential is huge with the ability to play AR games (think Pokemon Go to the next level), tag AR pieces in the world for friends to find, leverage object recognition, do 3D mapping and so on. Facebook is giving developers tools turn Facebook Camera into the the best way to create and share with friends.

Why would Facebook do this? Well, the camera is Snapchat’s game. It does after all call itself a camera company, and not to be outdone, it launched World Lenses that allow users to add virtual, augmented reality objects to landscapes and the world around them. What Snapchat did for the selfie, it aims to do for the world.

Evergreen Content is Over

March 18, 2016 by Taylor Wiegert in Content Marketing

Social media opened marketers up to a world of regular, ongoing communication with consumers. It was the ultimate form of CRM. All marketers needed to do was post content and feed it to their fans and followers. The benefits of doing so have eroded, and it appears the days of evergreen communication with consumers have nearly come to an end.

Share, Adapt, Customize

March 15, 2016 by Taylor Wiegert in Content Marketing

The best campaigns out there are multi-faceted experiences that reach consumers where they are across multiple touch points, and developing an effort like that requires the production of multiple pieces of content that engage users wherever they may be.

Content Has No Home

November 12, 2015 by Taylor Wiegert in Content Marketing

Marketers’ considerations around content shouldn’t only focus on the creation of it. Marketers, more and more, need to seriously consider where that content lives, especially now because the choices are numerous.

This has been the case for some time with video, for example. We have Facebook Video, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and others. Marketers seem to get that and understand that they need to tailor their content to those platforms, but content that was traditionally meant for a brand website, such as blog posts and other long-form multimedia storytelling, may not be most effective on brand websites anymore.

When a brand talks about itself in long-form, that content typically finds itself living on a blog or business information page, but now brands have the option to let that content live natively on platforms with built-in audiences. And that option may be the best one.

Content. Everyone Wants It. No One Gets It.

August 11, 2015 by Taylor Wiegert in Content Marketing, Strategy

Content: Everyone wants it, and everyone has a different definition for it. Yet, it seems that no one is really happy with the content they’re creating for a number of reasons: there isn’t enough of it, the content isn’t of high enough quality, it isn’t converting or something else. Content is a challenge everyone is after, but it seems most are not really succeeding. That’s not stopping them from trying.

Facebook Giving Users “Kind-of-Control” Over News Feeds

July 14, 2015 by Taylor Wiegert in Content Marketing, Facebook

Social feeds are a bit of a mess, and Facebook is no exception. We often log into Facebook and see stories and posts from friends that leave us scratching our heads. We ask ourselves why Facebook’s News Feed algorithm chose to show us this over something else. And, for those of us who are unaware that our News Feed content is algorithmically served, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen the recent posts from one of our good friends.

Facebook is not alone. Twitter, Instagram and all platforms that serve content in a feed are faced with one of two challenges: 1.) If there’s an algorithm, how do we serve the right content to users that keeps them coming back or 2.) If there is no algorithm, how do we help users manage the deluge of content that’s coming their way?