Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Last week, Facebook’s Timeline feature – first announced at fMC in March – rolled out to all Pages. Tapping into insights from the 120 million people 360i speaks to on the platform every day, we worked with our clients to recreate more than 80 community pages within the new Timeline format.

Whether you were ready for it or not, your Facebook brand page has made the switch to Timeline, too. Some of the biggest changes: landing tabs have gone away; a rich, historic timeline is ready to be populated; real-time insights are visible via an admin panel; and a private messaging feature is now live.

But let’s not forget the flood of creativity that has exploded across the platform. A massive creative canvas is now front and center on the page, serving as the literal cover. Dig deeper and you’ll see that thousands of years of history have been unlocked and are available for you to tell a richer and more immersive story about your brand.

Here are four ways to make the most of the new cover photo and timeline features:

1. Put fans at the center of your brand’s narrative. Start telling better stories – or better yet, start story-pulling by sharing content that pulls fans into your brand’s story and immerses them in a special experience.
2. Use Timeline to share your rich history. Surface the amazing nuggets, facts or products that give your brand its place in history.
3. Place your fans’ passion points front and center. First impressions mean a lot. Identify what your fans care about most, then utilize the cover photo to show them that you understand their interests and passions with respect to your brand.
4. Showcase a multidimensional or dynamic side of your brand. As Timeline helps brands tell a deeper story about the history of the brand or industry, the cover photo is a great way to refresh your page based on new product installments (i.e. lines within a retailers offering or a new twist on a long-running show).

Research recently reported by AllFacebook makes the claim that a small percentage of Facebook users actually revisit the Page of brand they’ve liked, but to ignore the new features is miss out on the creative storytelling opportunities now available. Below is a summary of some of the creative and intelligent ways our clients are using Timeline in alignment with their marketing objectives.

All this is just the beginning. Over the next few months, creative story-pulling will truly emerge. Facebook Timeline presents an amazing opportunity for brands to celebrate their own stories, history and heritage; to highlight the beauty of their product, the creativity of their brand or the allure of their stars. For brands on Facebook, the time is now to showcase what makes you special.

If there’s anything bigger than Zynga’s most recent purchase, it’s the price tag that accompanied it. Just last week, the social gaming giant swallowed OMGPOP for $180 million. But why the splurge? Two words: Draw Something.

OMGPOP’s social illustration game (like Pictionary with Facebook!) for iOS and Android has earned its fair share of handheld face time over the past few weeks for its skyrocketing number of downloads. The recent success can be attributed to WOM and the existing OMGPOP community, as the CEO cites no press coverage for the launch.

The staggering stats are hard to believe: 20MM daily active users in just seven weeks alone and 37MM app downloads – making it the #1 app in 85 countries worldwide. And its users are beyond prolific, producing 3 billion drawings so far, with 1 billion produced in the last week alone at a rate of 2,000 drawings per second.

As with any ripple on the interactive trend watch, a marketer must ask whether or not a platform like this is appropriate for their brand and pursue only those opportunities which align with brand strategy. However, if you have an established, recognizable brand and/or a broad audience, you may want to consider the following creative opportunities Draw Something has to offer:

1. Drawing integration: At the start of every round, players have the option to illustrate one of three drawing choices. In this sense, the current brand integration on Draw Something is reasonably seamless and relevant, whether paid for or not.

Read the full article »

Last week, Oreo launched a special promotion on Twitter – #OreoPinata – as part of the brand’s 100th birthday celebration. Each tweet with the #OreoPinata hashtag counted as a ‘hit’ on the piñata, and when the piñata broke, the person who swung last would win a free pack of Oreo cookies. Oreo gave away 30 packs a day for an entire week.

Thousands of people entered the sweeps – but what’s far more compelling is how they did it. When it comes to Oreo, people weren’t just trying to win the contest. They instead used the promotion to demonstrate their personal connection to the brand – without even being asked to do so.

A 360i analysis of #OreoPinata tweets found that 87% of people tried to break the piñata by sharing something personal vs. mentioning something about the sweepstakes itself. Of these types of entries (below not mutually exclusive):

• 43% played along – ex. “@Oreo WWWWHAACCCKKK! Sounds like a good hit! Congrats on your 1st 100 years! Here’s to your 2nd! #OreoPinata”
• 39% shared their love of the cookie – ex. “#OreoPinata oreos are the no.1 cookie ever!!!! Oreos are the only cookies i eat!”
• 21% shared their way to eat an Oreo – ex. “Nothing is sweeter than a tall glass of milk an a big stack of double-stuffed Oreos! *sigh* # Oreopinata”
• 9% shared an Oreo Story – ex. “Hope I break the #OreoPinata. Oreos and milk always bring me back to my childhood and those memories are oh so sweet ”

Read the full article »

Today, we released 360iTIGER, a powerful cloud-based technology that automatically gathers website data, such as titles, meta tags, tweets, Facebook likes and more, directly into a cloud-based document with the click of a button. You can download a free limited version of 360i’s enterprise technology offering at tiger.360i.com.

360iTIGER addresses a core pain point that arises when conducting website audits as part of a brand’s search engine optimization or social analytics efforts. Marketers have traditionally gathered this data manually, by deploying heavyweight analytics platforms or by purchasing software of limited functionality. 360iTIGER automates the audit by instantaneously organizing data within a web-based spreadsheet, expediting a previously laborious process into something that can be completed in seconds with the click of a mouse. View a demo below.

360iTIGER was concepted and developed by a team of SEO strategists and technologists at 360i, led by Mike Levin, Director of SEO Strategy. In the Q&A below, Mike explains how the idea was born and how it evolved to where it is today.

What excites you most about working at 360i, and within the search industry in general?
Mike Levin: I joined 360i as a full-time SEO Director focused on client service. Previously I was creator of HitTail,a  keyword suggestion tool for SEO. One of the first things I started to do at 360i was program, given the necessity to do so in solving technical puzzles in this field. The fact that I was allowed to experiment and build things as part of my job speaks volumes about both 360i and the natural search industry. Pursuing alternative approaches to common problems is critical to driving innovation. 360i gets that.

At what point did you discover the need for a tool like 360iTIGER?
ML: There is a constant need in SEO and other fields to quickly gather data and start to work with it, but so many products are usually necessary to gather data across different realms. I went looking for a better solution to expedite a process we use in SEO. People like to organize their data in spreadsheets and this insight, combined with the fact that spreadsheets today are web-based, collaborative, real-time, and programmable through web-APIs. Sprinkle in the power of bookmarklet tools and a whole series of dots suddenly connected in my head. I started wondering why spreadsheets didn’t readily auto-populate themselves with data. It just seemed so wrong that they didn’t, and so natural that they should. In the spirit of the Cloud, this shifts so much power from IT folks to average users.

Read the full article »

At the 2012 Shorty Awards, Dentyne and 360i took home top honors for Best Use of Social Media for a Consumer Product or Service. The Shorty Awards, now in its fourth year, has been named the “Oscars” of social media by the New York Times. In 2011, Dentyne launched a faux-PSA campaign around the message of “Practicing Safe Breath” and enlisted 360i to bring the program to life in social spaces. The campaign yielded a 1,000% increase in Facebook fans in less than a year and more than 820K interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.). Dentyne’s Facebook posts generated 2X as many comments as other brands with the same fan base.

Clients USA Network and Coca-Cola were also named finalists in their respective categories:
* Best Viral Campaign – USA Network & 360i for ‘The Fall of Sam Axe’ (USA Network also took home top honors in the Best Social Media for TV category for its Psych ”Hashtag Killer” campaign)
* Best Facebook Brand Presence – The Coca-Cola Company & 360i

We’re also delighted to announce that the agency has picked up two IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) Awards. Kraft Foods’ ‘Make Something Amazing’ website won an Outstanding Website Award in the Consumer Goods category. The site launched earlier this year with the aim of inspiring online conversations to build emotional connections and increase loyalty to the brand. Make Something Amazing represented the first unified digital presence for Kraft’s roster of cheese brands. Creatively, the effort brought to life a new way to market recipes online that will change the way people consume recipe content in digital.

      
360i’s internal creative & technology team also took home an Outstanding Website Award for the 360i Careers site.

Congratulations to our clients and to the 360i teams that worked on these programs.

For the second year running, Ad Age has named 360i to its “Best Places to Work” roster, which ranks the top employers in advertising and media based on employee engagement and corporate culture. 360i made the list at #7, up 11 spots from last year.

360i is the only agency to be featured in Ad Age’s Agency A-List AND Best Places to Work issues for two years running. We see these two accolades as very closely related and a testament to our culture of innovation that is at the heart of all we do. This agency was built to help clients ‘Navigate Where There Are No Roads’ and we take that some approach to employee development. When you foster an environment of entrepreneurialism, creativity and passionate curiosity, you can accomplish just about anything. That’s compelling to today’s marketing talent and leads not only to higher engagement and retention levels overall, but the ability to produce some of the best work for our clients.

Congratulations to our entire team and all the other agencies on the Best Place To Work List.

Eric Bacolas is Chief Talent Officer at 360i.

After a whirlwind week in Austin, the SXSW BrandLand team has compiled their top ten themes from the conference — trends that rose above the noise and will continue to be important topics for brands in the coming months. Flip through the recap below, and visit sxsw.360i.com for our complete coverage of SXSW 2012.

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