Jaime Hoerbelt

5 Things You Need to Know About the New Twitter Changes – And What You Can Do Right Now to Take Advantage of Them

Jaime — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:27:13 +0000

As many of you have heard, Twitter announced some major changes to its platform last week. Whether you’re a brand or an agency here are the things you need to know about how these changes will affect your business.

1. Brand Pages

Like Facebook, Foursquare and Google+, Twitter now gives brands the option to customize their own pages. Brands can add a header image and a featured tweet. Currently the feature is only available to a handful of brands and Twitter plans to make it more widely available in the coming weeks and months.

Considering the information on brand pages is housed in the Promoted Products section of the Twitter for Business website, it doesn’t look like brand pages will be a free feature.

How are they different from Facebook pages?

3 Brands Using Google Plus in Interesting Ways

Jaime — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:35:18 +0000

Google Plus opened its doors to brands only a few weeks ago on November 7th and already people are talking about which brands are doing it well. I think it's too early to tell which social media strategies are doing well but here are three brands that I think are doing interesting things with the platform.

Infographic Friday – The Economics of Social Gaming

Jaime — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:19:50 +0000

Some Useful Insights into Social Gaming:

Facebook is the most popular destination for online games.
In 2013, it is predicted that $6 billion will be spent on virtual goods.
83% of gamers (in the US and the UK) have purchased a virtual good.

See the infographic from Mashable to learn more:

How big brands are jumping into pinterest

Jaime — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:08:14 +0000

What is Pinterest?
According to Pinterest,
“Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard.”
“Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.”
“Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.”
I use Pinterest to discover and collect new recipes, crafts, decorating ideas, trends in interior design and style, plan my dream wedding and more.
A six month US audience trend by Quantcast shows that Pinterest is getting more popular by the day.

How can Marketers use Pinterest?
There are only a handful of brands using Pinterest as a distribution channel. Like Twitter and Facebook, gaining followers creates an audience to share content with. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the audience using Pinterest is very distinct.
The Pinterest audience is definitely female and drawn to aesthetics. Anything girly, handmade, delicious, well-designed or stylish will be found here.
Again, Quantcast confirms the obvious – Pinterest users are interested in the following categories:

Marketers looking for a unique, highly targeted, likely influential audience should dive head first into Pinterest while it is relatively devoid of commercial profiles. Pinterest is a new platform and its user base is made up of innovators and perhaps some early adopters who are likely influencers in social media, art, design, and a host of other categories.
Who are the early birds?
DIY network and Pepperidge Farm* are two brands using Pinterest as a content distribution platform. The customer bases of these two brands probably have a lot in common with Pinterest users.

What is likely to work well.
If you keep the audience in mind, it is clear what kinds of content will work well on Pinterest. Photos reign over links, status updates, blog posts and other text-based content. (Videos work well also.) Anything related to the predefined categories on the site is bound to fit in: art, design, crafts, wedding, geek, and more.
Are you using Pinterest personally or professionally? Share why you like it in the comments.
*Full Disclosure: Pepperidge Farm is a client of Tenthwave, my employer. I am not directly involved in Pepperidge Farm’s Social Media Strategy nor was I asked to write this post about them.

Whoever you want to be

Jaime — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 14:30:45 +0000

Social media recently became the number one activity on the Internet. One of the often explored topics surrounding social media is why it is so addicting. Why do people spend an ever-increasing amount of time sharing details of their lives on Facebook or Twitter? What fundamental human desire does social media fulfill? One answer to these questions is that these platforms let you carefully craft your ideal self image. Social media is driven by idea that you can actively and precisely define how people see you.

Ever since cavemen drew on walls it has been a human desire to express oneself. Every thing from the clothes you wear to the car you drive to what you share on Facebook fulfills this need to tell the world who you are. Self expression is something social media does very well in a way that is never finished and costs only time. It is also easier than ever to lie. Creating a fake self is just as simple as defining a true self.
On Facebook self-expression takes an obvious form. You create a profile that showcases exactly what you want it to. You can show the world a you that doesn’t even exist. You can fabricate your tastes, your qualifications, your hobbies, everything except for your name and your photo. Although you can create fake accounts it is prohibited by Facebook in an effort to curb anonymity. For the most part people stick to this rule unless they need more friends to expand their gardens. However Staying true to their name or picture doesn’t stop people from fabricating public images of themselves. People create an elaborate personality map out of pictures, “likes,” sharing links, listening to music and more to share with their audience of Facebook friends. There isn’t one person who hasn’t used Facebook to, at the very least, stretch the truth and portray his or her self in a way to make someone else believe something. Think about the last time you or a friend had a less than amicable breakup. I bet their were more pictures of the two newly single people having a great time in the first month after the breakup than any other month previously. Even though both parties were likely miserable the instinct is to prove to the other person that everything is just fine without them.
On Twitter anonymity is much more common. People are identified by usernames which often do not resemble their real name. There is very little room to describe yourself and only one profile picture. People are less forced and have less of an opportunity to create themselves here than on Facebook. Therefore creating a self, real or imagined, is more easily accomplished. It comes in the form of fake “celebrity” accounts, an account that impersonates a brand or a personality. These accounts come in all forms from someone pretending to be their cat to someone impersonating a politician who recently embarrassed himself. It also comes in the form of “expert” accounts, an account that portrays the person as an expert in something. These people may very well be experts in what they claim to be but the proclivity of experts out there begs to differ. Accurate or not, portraying oneself as an expert is still an expression of one’s ideal or public self. Either you are an expert and you want to make sure people know it or you would like to be an expert do you fake it ’till you make it.
There are plenty of exceptions to this practice but I think that by looking you will start to notice more and more the tendency of people to spend a lot of time carefully crafting themselves. The ideal or imagined self shows up in every social network. The feasibility of creating a self is such that it is too tempting not to stretch the truth somewhere when defining your personality. The question that remains is how does the feasibility and public nature of these profiles affect society as a whole?