Tumblr: Or That Thing You Need To Think About

 As of last year, Tumblr had 8.5 times more page views per month than WordPress.com. Let that sink in. The scrappy little purveyor of humorous gif’s has 8.5 times more traffic than one of the most established hosted-blogging platforms in the world. I guess this means we should be paying attention, eh?

What is Tumblr? It’s a blogging platform at heart, but with a twist. This isn’t meant to be a traditional blog for writing that people visit or subscribe to with an RSS reader. Tumblr is designed for short, media-driven content: pictures, songs, movies, quotes, links. On top of that, Tumblr has a social angle (because honestly, who doesn’t these days). If you have a Tumblr account, you can follow other Tumblr blogs by clicking a follow button. All the content from blogs you follow show up in a feed on your Dashboard, similar to Twitter’s timeline.

It might seem overwhelming to add another social to your repertoire, but it’ll be worth it if your audience is age 12–34. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

1. Keep posts short and, if possible, visual. People scroll through their Tumblr feed quickly, similar to scrolling through their Twitter timeline. If your post is too long or too wordy, users will likely scroll right past it. I love those epic 4,000-word New Yorker cover stories and I still find myself scrolling past things in my Tumblr feed that are wordy. It’s just not the place for it.
2. Post quickly and frequently. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the rule on how often to post is a bit more lax. Tumblr blogs may post 10 times in the same day, but Tumblr’s focus on visuals makes scrolling through lots of posts easy. Also, don’t take time stressing over every single thing you post. Tumblr’s vibe is quick, easy-going and off the cuff. Cut loose!
3. Show your personality. The thing about Tumblr is that, unlike Twitter and Facebook, there aren’t many hard and fast best practices. As long as you’re having fun, you’re probably doing it at least half right. One great use for Tumblr is to show the personality of your brand. Posting pictures of antics around the office or of the things your employees enjoy. What pop song is on repeat at the office? You could even use it as a way to show off your awesome customers.

Here are some brand examples.

Nike uses their Made by Nike Tumblr to profile young athletes and creators wearing Nike work out clothing.

Coke’s Happiness is.. Tumblr is a visual stream of what Coke thinks happiness looks like.

Popstar Carly Rae Jepsen’s Tumblr shows off fan-made covers of her new single.

Popular Mac/iPhone e-mail client, Sparrow, uses Tumblr to post tips and tricks on using their application.

MSNBC uses Tumblr to post news articles, but always with a prominent photography accompanying a quick story.

Are you already on Tumblr? What tips and tricks do you use?

The Revolution is Over. Now the Fun Begins.

Last year, Apple built Twitter sharing directly into the operating system of the iPhone and iPad. In the iPhone’s Settings app you can directly log in to your Twitter accounts. Once that’s done, you can tweet pictures and links without having a stand-alone Twitter app installed on your phone. Apple just announced that the newest update to their desktop operating system, OSX, will also be getting built-in Twitter support. Microsoft has built Twitter and Facebook into their new mobile OS and it will be coming to the desktop with Windows 8.

The interesting part isn’t that tech manufacturers are building these services into their products. It’s what this shows. Twitter and Facebook used to be small parts of our lives. Fun distractions. That’s not the case anymore. With the ubiquity of cellphones and wireless internet, social networks are becoming completely integrated into our day-to-day. Having a Facebook is no long weird or cool. Not having one is weird and makes you the friend who never knows what’s going on. Every commercial has a suggested Twitter hashtag. Every news anchor has their Twitter handle on screen. What I’m saying is, the social media revolution is over.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that social media is on its way out. Far from it. What I’m saying is that the days of social media being an early adopter phenomenon are over. Social media is a thing of the masses and this is when the real fun begins. The time is better than ever to be a marketer using these tools. Just look at all the changes that have been happening with the platforms.

Facebook just rolled out Pages Timeline and Twitter overhauled their whole website to make it more ad friendly. Both are getting ready to jump head first into mobile advertising and both of them are in great positions to do that. And the best part? They aren’t just focusing on traditional ads, but are putting an emphasis on storytelling (They’ve been reading our blog). Facebook is launching Sponsored Stories and Twitter added their Discover tab.

Get excited everyone. Social media may be starting to mature, but that’s not a sign of things slowing down. The tools are being improved, the strategies are being refined and the audience is bigger than ever.

The App Fridge

I walked into my friends house this week and noticed that she had gotten a new refrigerator. Cool story, right? The thing that attracted me me to this refrigerator was an 8in LCD screen located directly over the ice dispenser. The screen showed a display of the current weather conditions and along the bottom was a row of apps. Yes, refrigerators have apps now. Many were familiar, Epicurious, Pandora, Associated Press and Twitter. I punched the Twitter button, plugged my credentials and boom I was checking my Twitter stream. From a refrigerator.

If you’d told me 10 years ago that options for accessing the internet would include my phone, my refrigerator and my car dashboard, I would have laughed at you. And now ten years later it’s all true (and I’m wondering how the hell you knew it was going to happen). You have to ask do we need our fridge to check Twitter for us? Or our car? I’m a millennial, so I’m used to be plugged-in and reachable for a good portion of the day. However even I think that the fridge might be too much. How long before we are literally always plugged-in? I like Twitter as much as the next guy, but when my toilet starts automatically reading my Twitter stream to me when I sit down, I’m out.

New New Twitter

Some of you may have noticed that all of Twitter’s apps are getting a facelift less than a year after the last big redesign. Twitter is calling this redesign Fly, but the nerds are referring to it as New New Twitter. They have a whole webpage dedicated to the new update. Check it out for more details. I’m going to quickly summate what they changed and then talk about why this matters. A lot.

Twitter consolidated everything into four tabs: Home, Connect, Discover, Me. Home is your timeline, promoted tweets, pictures, videos. Connect is everything that happens to you on Twitter such as @replies, favorites or people following you. Discover is a totally new feature to Twitter. It looks at who you follow, what you post, where you live and then delivers content they think you will find interesting. The last tab is called Me and it essentially a catch all for everything else: lists, profile, direct messages. This new layout is being rolled out to all of their apps on all platforms.

Twitter writes on the Fly website, “The new tab menu is the same across all devices. So you get the same experience on mobile and desktop—anywhere, anytime.” Twitter wants to make their service easier for new users. I’m sure most of you have tried explaining Twitter to a newbie and had trouble telling them were to start. Twitter wants to streamline the whole user experience (UX). They have also added brand pages, à la Facebook and are starting to place promoted tweets into users’ timelines. The service is now set up perfectly to insert tweets, trends, stories and brands seamlessly into the UX. It’s cleverly done.

I’ve talked before about how Twitter was struggling between its growing relevance and its quirky, simple roots. Fly is Twitter growing up. Brand pages, native photo sharing, streamlined UI/UX, an integrated revenue network… Twitter is now poised to become a full fledged platform. Facebook has taken some shots at Twitter’s market recently (the ticker anyone?), but now Twitter is stepping up to announce that it’s more than just a place for people to talk about what they ate for lunch. This could get very interesting.

The Baristas and the Tip Jars.

Are you ready for a fun example of creative marketing? No, it’s not from a big national agency, nor is from a young, spry two person shop either. It’s from a group of baristas at my local Starbucks.

I walked in for my usual iced grande cinnamon dolce latte (because it’s only the manliest drinks for me) and noticed that the baristas had their tip jars arranged next to each other in an unusual way. As you can see from the above picture, both jars were sporting Post-it notes. One read, “Batman vs.” and the other read “Ironman”. The tip jars, which are likely to be near invisible to the every day customer, were visually and mentally catching. Putting money in either jar was a way to not only tip your barista, but a way to voice your opinion (this is my vote of course). And who doesn’t love a little superhero humor? I think this is brilliant.

But being the marketer than I am, it got my wheels turning. The baristas had taken a tip plea and created a benefit for themselves AND their customers. It heightened the Starbucks experience for the coffee purchaser and was a way to get more tips than usual for people behind the counter. Each day there was a new matchup and the previous day’s winner was posted. It just shows how a little thinking and creativity can create lasting impressions and experiences for your customers, AND benefit your company in a real way.

Twitter’s Stories

It’s no longer a secret that Twitter is more than a fun experiment. It’s changing the landscape of communication. It’s played a part in national uprisings. It’s spread the news of an earthquake faster than the earthquake itself. It’s got the media is such a frenzy that they’re plastering recommended hashtags all over advertisements, stadiums and broadcasts. I wrote a few months ago about how Twitter is struggling with shedding it’s old quirky identity and embracing it’s growing importance. Their first commercial was a misstep. This new site they just launched is spot on.

The site is called Stories and has a series of beautifully designed stories about how Twitter was used to make a difference, big or small. The stories are fun, inspiring and show how powerful these new tools are. And did I mention they look beautiful?

Relationships Accept No Formulas

I saw an interesting tweet pass through my feed the other day. It was from Patrick Rhone of Minimal Mac fame and said:

Weird thought: Nuance is the numbers between 0 and 1 (i.e. the reason that social relationships are difficult to program).

It got me thinking about this is whole how-to-do-social-media thing. There is a lot of information out there about social media. In fact, according to Google Keyword Tool, “how to social media” gets 2,240,000 monthly searches. I believe that talking and learning about how to do social media well is important, why else would we have this blog?

However, sometimes we start to look at word of mouth as a science that we can program, as Patrick puts it. If we tweet the right amount about the right things on the right days, voilà you have quality engagement with your consumers. Whaaaaat are we thinking? There are no formulas for relationships! No logic, no cheats, only chaos! I jest slightly, but we need keep in mind that on the other end of these social networks are actually real people. Instead of consulting a How-to guide, we should spend time listening to what our users are saying.

Spotify Goes Facebook

A few days ago, many people were surprised when their news feeds became inundated with what their friends were listening to on Spotify, a streaming music service. Spotify changed their login system to use Facebook and added the ability to have your music piped to your Facebook wall. Now unless you already had a Spotify account, you can only sign up for Spotify with your Facebook credentials. Meaning, no Facebook account, no Spotify. I find this interesting.

Facebook has become so ubiquitous that 3rd party businesses see requiring a FB account to log into their service. They’re gambling that almost anyone they’d want to have probably uses Facebook. If Spotify required a Pinterest account to login, people would be confused (especially Spotify’s male audience). Pinterest is still a niche platform. However, it’s just assumed that everyone has a Facebook account. It shows that our lives really are moving to Facebook. Spotify said, on the topic of switching to Facebook’s login,

To us, this integration is all about creating an amazing new world of music discovery. As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins. We already use Facebook as part of our backend to power our social features and by adopting Facebook’s login, we’ve created a simple and seamless social experience.

It seems that all the services we use are headed the way of a “social experience”. Everything wants to be part of our life stream, piped to all our friends and family. Facebook has become the ultimate keeper of this stream, so anyone who wants to be a part of it needs to go through them. What else is going to plug into our Facebook account? What if the GPS in your car let you sign in with your FB account and share where you are? Or if restaurants had little computers at the table that let you share what you ordered? Or how about a toilet that… ok let’s not think about that one. For better or worse, Facebook is here to stay and businesses are going to find some interesting (and creepy) ways to leverage that.

Asking for Stories

This post is based off the Digital Campfires talk that the ever insightful Frank Chimero gave at Webstock 2011. I’ve taken some of his main ideas and put them in the context of social media because, well, this is a social media blog.

Tell me a story

I wrote last month about how brands should frame the content they share as a story to make it warmer and more relatable. This is only one half of the battle though. To get interaction online, you can’t just tell stories yourself, you gotta get your users to tells stories as well. How do you get them to do that? Ask them to.

Frank Chimero argues that every form on the internet is a question asking for some kind of response. As in much of life, a good question begets a good response. A bad question begets a bad response. As brands and marketers looking to get our users talking, we need to learn how to ask good questions.

Bad Questions

Bad questions are questions that don’t give the user a direction. One example is also one of the most common questions we see in social media: Tell me about yourself. This is also known as the “Bio” question. How do you even begin to answer that question? It’s not easy to boil your entire existence into a paragraph. To overcome this people usually fill the box with a list. “I’m a father, husband, photographer, shark wrestler and all around imaginary person.” That is a good list of what the person does, but it doesn’t really tell you about who the person is. Bad questions are vague and open-ended, making it hard to get people to tell their stories.

Good Questions

Most of our stories are based on our experiences, so we want people to tell us about their experiences. Good questions encourage that by being specific or capturing someone’s immediate thoughts. “Tell me a story about something that happened to you,” is an overwhelming question, it’s too vague. “Tell me about that delicious cheese burger you’re eating,” is a question that is going to capture that persons immediate experience. This is how we want to approach questions for the brands we work with. Remember the Facebook status from Ford that I talked about last time, about Mandy and how her three dogs love to go for a ride? They followed that with this questions:

Ford fans, how often do you bring your pet along for the ride? Which seats do they like the best?

This is a great question. It’s specific and brings to mind memories of man’s best friend and his floppy-eared antics. The status has 65 responses of people telling stories about their dogs… and their Fords. Ford asked a good question and got good responses and engagement.

The Skinny

Getting your followers engaging is what social media is all about. Telling stories is how we relate to one another, how we share our lives and how we describe who we are. Stories are the key to successful social media. As marketers we need to frame our content as a story to make it relatable. If not, we sound like robots spewing updates like we’re solving math problems. That’s only the first step though. Once we get people interested in what we’re saying we need to get them talking. Asking specific and personal questions will prompt users to share their experiences. Stories are how we relate and now your users are relating to your brand.

We just talk ourselves out of it.

During Baltimore AdWeek this year, I got the pleasure of listening to Justin Kownacki speak on creating web content people will actually enjoy and share. I won’t divulge too much of what he said because, well, you snooze you lose! I will tell you one thing he said that got me thinking, “It’s not that hard to create media people relate to, we just talk ourselves out of it.”

How true is that? There seems to be this belief that creating engaging, relatable content is hard to the point of being some kind of black magic. Creatives try to decipher what the “secret” is, like there is some formula we can crack while clients ask for the world and then settle with the safe bet. I think we’ve all psyched ourselves out a bit on this one.

Not to say that creating engaging content is easy, it definitely isn’t. However we’ve made it into a terrifying monster that eats web denizens like us for breakfast. We still valiantly charge into work each morning with our swords held high, but I know for me, after eight hours of trying to brainstorm interesting ideas I can get discouraged. Whether it’s a blog post, or a client campaign or a giveaway that I need to get a Facebook audience to participate in, I can convince myself that it’s never going to take off. And you know what? It might not. I’m not going to lose my job though. I’m going to try again and at the end of the day, the biggest obstacle to creating good content is often my own insecurities and doubts. Mr. Kownacki shared a plethora of good advice on creating content, but the best thing he said was that we just need to stop talking ourselves out of it.