Pinterest users create a number of pin boards for categories such as interior design, food, fashion and as they discover things they like they can “Pin It” to one or more of their boards. This is nothing special in the social bookmarking field, but Pinterest’s heavy emphasis on imagery has seen it become popular amongst women, who are interested in fashion and other aspects of retail.

Since September Pinterest has seen its user base increase fourfold, resulting in 7.51 million new visitors in December and in a single week (Dec 10-17th) it received 11 million return visits. This obviously resulted in the amount of traffic Pinterest was referring to other sites increased substantially

Brands that were early to use the service, such as Nordstrom, have used Pinterest as an online catalogue where other users can re-pin their favourite clothes items and outfits to share with their friends, while always linking back to their online store. More apparel brands are odopting this strategy help users share their favourite clothes.

This is  a trend that is likely to come across the pond as more and more people become aware of Pinterest in the UK, but unfortunately you will have to wait for an invite. You can add yourself to the waiting list here.

Below is an infographic about Pinterest potentially becoming a social commerce game changer, made by Monetate.

If you’re a Foursquare user you probably already know that the mobile application has regular updates to help the service evolve from simply checking into a location to help people share their experiences, create recommendations and earn rewards. With this latest update to their website Foursquare are hoping to improve the way you discover new and interesting things in your area.

Foursquare updates

Live Map

The most notable change is the addition of a map that shows locations and your friends near to where you last checked in that automatically updates. The locations displayed on the map are also colour coded to show which places are trending (yellow), popular places (blue), places with offers (orange) and if you’ve created any lists then places in them will be shown as green. Users can then drag the map around and zoom in and out in order to see other locations.

Time related suggestions

The new map also features a “Suggestions” box which provides the user with suggestions depending one what their friends have done in the area. This isn’t anything new but now the suggestions box also takes into account the time of day, for example if a location is popular for breakfasts it will be promoted during the early hours compare to restaurants in the evening.

List searching

With the previous website you were able to search for people and places, now though users are able to search for lists, such as “Best restaurants” in order to discover what other people recommend.

Other small changes:

• You can comment and see comments on the homepage.
• Brand pages now have a section on the homepage.
• Improved usability on tablets.

The new website also lays the ground work for Foursquare to launch further updates and features more easily in the future, so we can expect more to come.

Potential further update

The updates Foursquare have made are great at helping users discover more in the local area but I would love to see a feature that would allow you to search for a city then look at what is hot before arriving at that city, say for a holiday. Although this is possible by zooming out of the map and then zooming back in I believe that a search feature would hugely improve this process. It can only be a matter of time before Foursquare develops from discovering cool things around you to discovering cool things to where you’re going.

We look forward to future Foursquare updates.

If you’re a Foursquare fan and are interesting in where we go then you can follow KMP Digitata on Foursquare.

Rhodri Edwards, Client Service Director;

Steve Jobs had an unparalleled talent for creative thinking coupled with a complete focus on the small details which makes Apple’s products stand out from the crowd. This means he was and will continue to be an inspiration to everyone who works in the digital industry.

Gez Daring, Business Development Director;

He revolutionised the world of technology. Not just once but repeatedly. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Steve Jobs changed the way we live.

Sean Barton, Head of Technical;

Simply put, he changed everything and he knew it and more than once. Twice with the mac (classic and iMac), once with the iPhone and once with the iPad. He had his own way of doing things and I like that.

Simon Haven, Client Services Manager;

I never fully bought into apple, I don’t really like the iPhone – too ubiquitous, I don’t get the iPad, too big for my pocket, but, that being said, I can’t but help respect Steve Jobs and be a little saddened by his passing. I’ve never met Steve Jobs, what I know of him is what I have read or seen of him and Apple. He seemed like he just got people, he understood them and fundamentally what they wanted, take the iPod for example, a device that I do feel changed my life and I’m sure I’m not alone in that – he created a thing of beauty that meant I could carry my entire music collection around with me, and the genius of it was Apple could keep making money by creating a means of supplying content – iTunes. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the computer, he didn’t invent the mobile phone, he wasn’t even at the forefront of digital music, he took each of those things and made them beautiful and better by designing them around people – for me what was special about Steve Jobs is that he seemed to have vision, passion and conviction that surpassed anyone else, but that could be the Steve Jobs PR machine.

Steve and his company was summed up form me in a tweet prior to his passing – what other brand do we get excited about when there store is down?

Andy Holt, Lead Developer;

For me, one of Jobs’ best ideas was to completely replace the aging Mac operating system with technology developed during his time NeXT, resulting in OSX. This was a bold move, but it successfully replanted Apple as a viable competitor to Microsoft and raised the bar in terms of what we expect from a modern desktop operating system, both technically and aesthetically.

Stu Preece, freelancer currently in the office;

My thoughts and condolences go to Steve’s family at this time. Thank you for your vision Steve, without that passion, drive and determination our world would have have been a less creative and fun place to be. His was an insanely great contribution to all our lives, one that will hopefully be felt for many years to come.

I felt that Barack Obama summed it up nicely with his statement he released this morning:

There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented

Please feel free to add our own thoughts in the comments below

Control

The main argument for creating your own community is the increased control you will enjoy over the environment. Relying on third party tools that are constantly updating elements of their service can be a tricky business. Facebook is notorious for moving the goalposts without providing a great deal of notice. Just ask those brands who spent considerable time and money in developing Facebook apps when they were first launched only for Facebook to gradually phase out the prominence of these apps both in terms of profile page real estate and the ability to get into the newsfeed. Then there are all the various tweaks, adjustments and relaunches of the developer platforms, which usually happen as we are just about to launch a client Facebook project (paranoid, moi?). Most recently Facebook changed the width of the tabs used to deliver custom content and functionality. If you’re lucky, you can still see the odd brand page that has fallen foul of this change and has a chunk taken out of the right hand side of the tab content.

With your own branded social community you can work without the shackles and build whatever functionality you like. Here are a few key areas that this can be advantageous over, for example, a facebook page.

Moderation

Although it is possible to remove comments from a Facebook page wall, moderation certainly isn’t made easy. Our pals over at Tempero understand this only too well as they manage moderation for large brands on a daily basis.

Imagine that each time you publish a wall comment, within one hour, 600 people post a response and 10 to 15% of those are inappropriate, offensive, spam or downright rude.  Then imagine people are doing the same on your discussion area, your photos, videos — or any other area you’ve allowed them to interact. Clearing the latest content is your best plan of attack, but what happens when an older posts picks up attention for some reason?  You then have the issue of having to hunt around your now frenetic Facebook page for new posts, any one of which could be a reputation or legal nightmare waiting to happen.

There are many tools that aid community moderation by providing functionality such as moderation tools, swearing and spam filters, the option of pre/post/reactive moderation… none of which is possible in facebook.

*Update*

Facebook now provides a simple spam filter on company pages. The filter also picks up on certain swear words although this seems to be only American meaning English slang does not get flagged.

Content Promotion

Who decides which of the content added to your Facebook page gets priority? Certainly not the page owner. Facebook cares not a jot if you would rather push images or video, there is no concept of content tagging or “sticky” posts.

Messages

When on your facebook page, what other messages are your users seeing? You don’t know and never will. It’s quite possible that a competitor is advertising to your community via Facebook ads. On your own platform, you control the real estate giving you more opportunity to offer related services or promote the messages you want to promote.

User Journeys

Facebook and Twitter user journeys are designed around the news feed. Most page visits are prompted by the owner of the page publishing content then that content being shared or commented on by followers and their friends. With a limitation on design there is also a limitation on how well you can guide the user through a journey. There might be a link that leads the user offsite and into a different journey but then you’re taking them away from the community.

Useable Content

Content such as photos and videos uploaded to a Facebook page belongs to the users. As the owner of that page you are no more able to use that content than if you were to have found it on another site – unless you expressly ask the user who uploaded it of course. In your own environment it is possible to get users to agree that you can use uploaded content in a marketing capacity as part of your terms an conditions. You need to be transparent about this and be sensitive to the wishes of your community but if you are running a community with a heavy emphasis on photos, this can be a rich source of images for you.

Containment

One topic that constantly rears its head in regards to social media is metrics. How do you quantify success and track your return on investment and engagement? Most third party tools will have some form of analytics but if everything is in one place it’s much easier to keep track of what’s going on, define your performance indicators and set your targets. All this makes it easier to define and calculate your ROI.

Some considerations

The “build it and they will come” theory does not apply to social media. Building your own community is not easy and there are some things you should consider when doing so.

Freedom of Voice

Don’t stifle your users. If they can’t say it on your official environment, they will go elsewhere to do so. If you have moderation, be clear what the rules are. Don’t delete or ignore posts that you see as negative.

Your business goals

Make sure you’re undertaking this activity for the right reasons. You should only go to the trouble of creating a community if you are going to benefit from it. Does the strategy line up with your overall business goals? It shouldn’t need to be said but you’d be surprised how many brands want to do “something cool and social” for the sake of the zeitgeist without thinking things though.

Ownership and privacy issues

Who owns the content, you or your users? It’s understandable you want to use the content uploaded to your site but be sensitive to your users’ wishes. Are users aware of your T&Cs? Are you aware of their wishes?

Make things easy

Integrate with the APIs of established networks as much as possible. Don’t make your users upload content twice. Allow two way publication of photos, video to existing social tools. If you force users to choose whether to place their efforts in creating and publishing content on your site or on their existing social networks, guess which they will choose (hint: not yours).

Use open authentication to allow users to sign up with existing profiles, no one likes remembering umpteen different usernames and passwords. Likewise, if they create a profile using their Facebook or twitter accounts, pull in profile information from their existing profiles.

A case in point – Trek America Live

KMP Digitata created Trek America Live for TrekAmerica, part of the TUI Travel group. The brief was to provide a platform for past, present and future trekkers to discuss their trips, allow them to make contact with travellers before embarking on their trips and let them share blogs, pictures and videos with friends and family as they travelled. The full case study is available and the community is off to a great start. TrekAmerica are delighted with the platform – especially with the flexibility of content display that allows them to group content around destinations.

Not wanting to build an isolated site, we allow users to publish photos they upload to Trek America live to Facebook and also pull in photos they already have in Facebook. More integration with sites such as Flickr is in the pipeline and TrekAmerica Live will continue to be developed to match the needs of both the community and the brand.

Read more about KMP Digitata and TrekAmerica Live

Download the case study

TravelMole.com is the first online community for the Travel and Tourism Industry, established in 1998 and has developed into one of the largest online travel communities. This year’s UK Tourism Web Awards was TravelMole’s eighth awards ceremony. The purpose of the awards is to reward and promote examples of the best websites in the UK travel industry and to hold them up high as shining examples.

Some big names in the Travel industry attended the ceremony in London on Wednesday, such as Emirates, Jet2 and Eurostar. It was Trek America that won the hotly contested “Best use of Social Media” with Trek America Live because it was recognised that social media sat at the heart of the company’s marketing and that it all stemmed from the Social Media Portal where past, current and future Trekkers are able to share their experience and advice with one another.

It’s great to see Trek America being rewarded for putting their faith into the ambitious Trek America Live project that has generated outstanding ROI and keeps going from strength to strength. We now look forward to working on future award winning projects, so watch this space.

Adrian Graham, a project manager for Questions said;

There are a lot of places you can go on the internet to ask questions of people who you don’t know, but there are very few places you can go to get responses from your friends.We thought that this is where we should focus.

The new Questions feature allows users to create questions with either multiple answers or the ability for receivers to add their own answers, which when publish, gets pushed out to their friends. From a friend to friends point of view this can be used for social recommendations, an example of this could be asking friends what film at the cinema they recommend seeing. Once a friend answers a question their result is shown on their own profile and pushed out to their friends, potentially spreading the questions to millions of people.

Nice feature that Facebook have added is the ability to chose a Facebook page when answering a question. An example of this is when someone creates a open question “Who is the best digital agency in the North West?”, their friends are able to add their own answer and if their choice has a Facebook page they can include that as an answer.

The improved Questions feature is more importantly available to Brand and Businesses who have a Facebook page allowing them to perform market research in an effective manor. A business can publish a question which will be pushed out to all those who are fans on Facebook, allowing them to answer and pass it onto their friends. Facebook questions could be used by a restaurant to find what people’s favourite dish is, a sports team to find the favourite player or a tourist information board to discover what people think is their best location.

It will be interesting to see how companies will use this feature and see whether it will truly develop into a strong market research tool or just a fun gimmick used every now and again to increase customer engagement.

If you want to add Facebook questions to your Facebook profile or page then follow this link.

We spent weeks looking through arty print websites full of movie poster prints, black and white scenery, flowers and even babies, none of which felt right. It seemed like we would never find something that everyone in the studio agreed upon until I discovered a range of Retro game wall stickers that everyone immediately knew were perfect. So now the office walls are the home of 70s games, such as Pong, Asteroids and Space Invaders.

For the full collection of photos of the KMP Digitata office redesign go to the KMP Digitata Facebook page.

KMP Digitata helped Manchester Airport set up their hugely successful Twitter account and aided them with their strategy for the first few months. Here at KMP Digitata we had already had success with TrekAmerica‘s 8 Mates Across the States and VIE at Home Facebook applications and we knew that there was an opportunity for Manchester Airport to take advantage of the popularity of Facebook.

The Task

Manchester Airport came to use with 2 objectives that they wanted to achieve through any means that we saw appropriate. Following on from KMP Digitata’s and Manchester Aiport’s success with Twitter and the Tweeting Departure board we felt that something with Facebook was the next step.
The first objective was to inform people of all the destinations that the public can fly to from Manchester Airport outside of the destination map on the Manchester Airport website.
Secondly Manchester Airport wanted to increase the number of contacts in their CRM database in manor where the contact would be happy to provide their details.

The Solution

Drawing inspiration from a campaign run by Manchester Airport back in spring 2010, featuring a piggy bank, KMP felt there was a game in the concept of an airport making a pig fly. The idea of pig-a-pult was born and to fulfil the objectives given by the airport. The aim of the game is to launch the pig (named Piggles) via a catapult from Manchester

Airport and get him to land at one of their many destinations and in doing so subtly inform the user of where Manchester Airport can catapult them to. By applying a scoring system that rewards those who get nearer to the furthest destinations we can create a leader board and give a top prize to whoever scores the highest then smaller prizes to randomly selected players. To be entered into the competition the player enters their email and so fulfils the 2nd objective.

The Prizes

With Social Games the main pull is getting the bragging over your friends as to who have the highest score. To add extra incentive to play the game, Manchester Airport is giving away an iPad to the person who gets the highest score. In addition to the iPad there is also a lucky draw to win £500 worth of holiday vouchers.

So if you want to win an iPad or £500 give pig-a-pult a go and make some pigs fly.

Concern Worldwide have today released a video of the latest developments of how the Twestival money is being spent in Liberia on building a new school for the local community and how much they appreciate the efforts made by everyone who got involved in this year’s Twestival events.

In 2009 Manchester Twestival raised £4000 for Charity Water and with the 2010 event beating that amount we hope that 2011 will follow the trend and raise even more money for those who truly need it.

Walkers Rainy Days

The adverts of Gary Lineker dancing in the rain to the tune of the Weather Girls have been all over TV recently promoting the fact that if you correctly guess where it will rain in the country on a particular date you will win £10.Sounds easy and unfortunately for Walkers it has been.

The process is simple;

• Buy a packet of Walkers crisps and receive a code
• Enter that code at Walkers.co.uk and receive two predictions
• Select the day, location and time you think it will rain

Walkers have split the United Kingdom up into 21,000 individual squares which the entrant can select 1 square per day and chose a time period they believe it will rain and then that square is claimed and no one else can chose it on that day. So with simple maths if it was to rain all day all over the country Walkers have to payout £210,000. Obviously the entrant would of bought a pack of crisps to enter so for each entry made Walkers have made 40p in the sale, but this still does cover the cost of a rainy day. In the scenario of it raining everywhere all day in the UK, Walkers would have made £8,400 in sales but paid out £210,000 in prizes and this isn’t taking into account that you get two entries per packet of crisps.

Research done by Cambridge University statistics professor, David Spiegelhalter, found out that so far 1 in 8 entries have won £10 during the campaign, which means that Walkers have only made back £3.20 for each £10 prize given out, losing them £6.80 per prize. It doesn’t take a marketing expert to know that the British public like to win money and that it rains quiet a lot in the UK during the autumn months, so it is no surprise that this campaign has been one of Walkers most successful in terms of user participation but it’s a mystery how the campaign got approved by the financial department.

Here at KMP we have been taking part in Walkers Rainy Days because we thought it would be an easy way to get some extra money into our pockets and we were correct. In a period of three weeks 3 members of the KMP staff have won £100 thanks to the wet weather and in part by us simply looking at the next 7-day weather reports on the Met Office. This was up until the Walkers website mysteriously went down and returned with all the future predictions being full despite no one being able to enter.

With a bit of searching around we discovered the figures mentioned earlier and a particularly wet week was coming up. The Walkers website went down just at the point that they could be facing a potential £1,200,000 payout in a single week. Was the site going down at that point just a coincidence or was it Walkers realising that they had not predicted the size of the prize money they would have to payout in the worst case scenario and stopped people from entering?

If the conspiracy theorists believe that it was Walkers avoiding a massive payout then all you need to do is look at another campaign which almost destroyed a famous company and brand.

Hoover Free Flights Promotion

In 1992 it started off as a means to sell the backlog of stock in the Hoover warehouses but soon turned into a battle to keep the company out of administration. The plan was to offer free return flights when the customer bought a Hoover product and then offer paid-for extras such as hotels and car rentals to offset the cost. Where the project fell down was that human beings won’t buy over priced extras when they can book a hotel themselves, for a fraction of the cost.

Hoover didn’t predict the popularity of the campaign and were unable to financially back their incentive Due to customers being passionate about receiving their free flights and following the companies small print to the letter Hoover were facing hundreds of court case on breach of contract. The campaign saw Hoover loose £48m and forced many of the top level management to resign and forever be branded with being part of “Britain’s worst marketing disaster”.

Whether Walkers have budgeted for the popularity of the Rainy Days campaign it is still a strong remind of how a marketing campaign cannot just be a failure but can potentially turn into a disaster and is a strong reminder to Marketeers that doing your research can not just make or break a campaign but also a whole company.