Ten Things You Need to Know—16/02/18

• Adobe Intro­duces Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er 6.4: The big news here at Adobe is that the lat­est ver­sion of Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er has now dropped (we’re just like Supreme, but, well, dif­fer­ent). This update to AEM main­tains the fea­tures suite which mil­lions depend upon, and intro­duces sev­er­al key updates which lever­age our advances in machine learn­ing to bring a greater degree of intel­li­gence, insight and smart automa­tion to the mar­ket­ing stack than ever before. For those of you who are inter­est­ed in get­ting a full run­down of the new fea­ture sets includ­ed, there is a webi­nar on Feb­ru­ary 20th designed specif­i­cal­ly to take you through the update in full. The update boasts improved secu­ri­ty fea­tures, bet­ter and more flex­i­ble omnichan­nel cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment, smart con­tent deliv­ery across all points in the fun­nel, smoother inte­gra­tion between IT func­tions and oth­er busi­ness units and LOADS of oth­er things besides. You can watch this short video to get an intro­duc­tion, but for the full run­down we hearti­ly rec­om­mend you join us on Feb­ru­ary 20th.
• You Can Now Sched­ule Insta­gram Posts: Offi­cial­ly! Through the API! You’ll need to use one of Facebook’s Mar­ket­ing Part­ner ser­vices, such as Hoot­suite to do so, but I imag­ine you all most­ly do, so it’s ALL GREAT. Fun game—see how long you can hide this fact from your com­mu­ni­ty man­agers, pure­ly from a sense of schadenfreude.
• You Can Now Add Carousel Ads To Insta­gram Sto­ries: I know, I’m excit­ed too! Not just ONE piece of video or imagery as an inter­sti­tial between Sto­ry ele­ments, but up to THREE! Tru­ly, we live in a gold­en age in which every­thing hap­pens for the best in the best of all pos­si­ble worlds (oh Cuné­gonde!).
• Twit­ter Now Offer­ing ‘Spon­sored Moments’ Ad Prod­uct: This is quite inter­est­ing; it’s a lim­it­ed offer, but brands can now bid to spon­sor Twit­ter Moments pro­duced by any of 200 of Twitter’s ‘pre­mi­um pub­lish­ers, such as Bloomberg. The exam­ple giv­en in the linked piece is Bank of Amer­i­ca spon­sor­ing a Twit­ter Moment by Bloomberg from Davos, to give you an idea of how it works. It makes a lot of sense. Why pay to make your own less-good con­tent when you can pig­gy­back on an exist­ing publisher’s which is like­ly to get more eye­balls than yours. I found it quite an inter­est­ing approach.
• Twit­ter Offers ENTIRE HISTORY OF TWEETS To Devel­op­ers: I’m going to need to caveat this— there are restric­tions, in the sense that it’s free up to 50 API requests per month, and then priced on a slid­ing scale beyond that. But over­all it is A Good Thing and has lots of inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions. If noth­ing else, you can make some LOVELY and prob­a­bly quite weird ‘On This Day’-type stuff using this and still sit well below the 50-request threshold.

• Snap Opens Face Lens­es To All: Yep, you can make your own riffs on the dog ears! Pri­or to this the Lens­es Stu­dio only allowed for the AR-ish super­im­po­si­tion onto a shot with­out all the fan­cy face-track­ing gub­bins. It will be inter­est­ing to see how flex­i­ble this is, but the fact that they are time-lim­it­ed means they could be use­ful for events and the like. There’s a min­i­mum cost of around £7 to make one, which ris­es based on the length of time you want to make them avail­able and the geo­graph­i­cal range with­in which they’ll be usable, but in the­o­ry at least this is worth a look for all your loca­tion-spe­cif­ic Snapchat engage­ment needs. Oh, and here’s anoth­er site col­lect­ing exam­ples of Snap lens­es made by the com­mu­ni­ty, should you want one.
• Hype Audi­tor: How long, do we think, until the bot­tom absolute­ly falls out of the ‘influ­encer mar­ket­ing busi­ness, or at least the top end of it? If you ARE going to do the influ­encer thing on Insta—which, let’s face it, you prob­a­bly are—then you might find Hype Audi­tor use­ful; it basi­cal­ly does the same job as sim­i­lar ser­vices on Twit­ter, trawl­ing an account’s fol­low­ers and deter­min­ing what per­cent­age of them are like­ly to be ‘real peo­ple’. Obvi­ous­ly take all of this with a pinch of salt, but it’s not a bad way of run­ning some basic due dili­gence on your lat­est cam­paign tar­get­ing the leg­endary millennial.

• Wikipedia Pageviews Analy­sis: This is, poten­tial­ly, huge­ly use­ful, espe­cial­ly if you do the sort of work which involves keep­ing peo­ple out of the papers as much as keep­ing them in it. This tool lets you plug in any Page(s) you like from Wik­pe­dia and tells you how many views they’ve been get­ting over a set date range. You can run com­par­isons against oth­er Pages, see where the traffic’s been com­ing from, and gen­er­al­ly get an idea as to how inter­est­ed peo­ple are in any giv­en thing. Seri­ous­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, even just to play around with.
• Chaingers: This is superb, and absolute­ly the best cam­paigny thing I have seen all year. Chaingers is an appalling­ly-named but super-smart cam­paign from Unicef, tar­get­ing the pro-gamer and sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties and ask­ing them to donate the pro­cess­ing pow­er of their high-end graph­ics cards to mine bit­coin in aid of the organisation’s efforts to help chil­dren and moth­ers in devel­op­ing nations. It’s very much OF THE NOW, turns a scare sto­ry (the hijack­ing of proces­sor pow­er by unscrupu­lous min­ers) on its head, and the whole pre­sen­ta­tion of the thing_the aes­thet­ic, the lan­guage, the targeting—is just spot on. Huge­ly impres­sive by French agency BETC.
• Dig­i­tal In 2018 WORLDWIDE: The nice peo­ple at We Are Social have, as they do every year, com­piled a moth­er­lode of all of the glob­al social media and dig­i­tal and mobile usage stats you are like­ly to need, at least for the first few months of the year. Par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful if you need some graph­ics to point at while say­ing “2018, you see, real­ly IS the year of mobile!”. As ever, the sec­tion on Asia is sort of mind-boggling.