Mobile Marketing• Social Media

What’s Buzzing: Facebook’s Slingshot, Emojis Galore & More

June 20, 2014

This week, World Cup Fever continued to take hold on social media as well as the 360i offices. The office was also a buzz with the news of the new Amazon Fire phone to be released July 25. This new smartphone boasts features such as cloud-based storage, a 24-hour live support system, and Firefly – a tool that can identify millions of items by sight and sound and guide users to where to purchase them on Amazon. This built-in shopping feature has the potential to cause a seismic shift in mobile and ecommerce. Read our blog post to learn more.

Also this week, 360i was the recipient of two Cannes Lions Awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for Oscar Mayer’s “Wake Up & Smell the Bacon” and our grassroots social good project, #Mamming. Read on for more updates from this week.

Facebook Announces New App, Slingshot
Facebook launched a new app this week that allows users to share images, messages and videos that disappear after being viewed. While this may sound like the well-known message app Snapchat, Slingshot differentiates itself by not just encouraging engagement, but by requiring it. With Slingshot, users are presented with a pixelated version of their incoming message until they send a message back to the original sender. Facebook is hoping that this new approach will encourage users to share their everyday moments and be creators, not spectators.

Post by Slingshot.

 

Domino’s Adds Voice Control to Pizza Ordering App
Domino’s recently announced a new update to their pizza ordering iOS and Android app that will now allow users to order via voice control. Guided by a Siri-like virtual assistant referred to as “Dom,” users can search the menu and put products in their cart for checkout simply by talking to Dom. This development stems from a partnership with Nuance, the intelligence systems builder, who worked to make Dom’s voice as humanlike as possible. Domino’s is hopeful that the inclusion of “Dom” will make the smartphone ordering experience feel more like a one-on-one, in-store ordering experience.

Photo via Mashable

250 New Emoji coming to a Phone near You
For those who feel that a picture is worth a thousand words, communicating is about to get that much easier. Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that regulates the coding standards for written computer text, has announced that 250 new emoji will be added to the original keyboard sometime in July. Highlights include a slew of throwback office equipment such as the floppy disk, a golfer and an expressive “reversed hand with middle finger extended” a.k.a “flipping the bird.”

Photo via The Huffington Post

Twitter Launches GIFs
Earlier this week, Twitter announced that GIFs are now optimized for their platform. Users can upload one GIF per tweet that will play in the tweet after the push of a play button. This is big news as it allows brands a new way to interact with fans on the page and encourage engagement. Twitter will also be rolling out GIFs to ad units in the future. Multiple brands have begun testing this new feature including 360i clients USA Network and Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Read our blog post to learn more.

 

 

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Cover photo via Slashgear

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