Ten Things You Need to Know

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.

Ten Things You Need to Know—16/02/18