HC+T Briefing: Cecil the Lion controversy hits airlines' reputations

From: "HC+T Update" <shel@holtz.com>

Subject: HC+T Briefing: Cecil the Lion controversy hits airlines' reputations

Date: August 7th 2015

August 7, 2015
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HC+T Briefing is my weekly collection of news stories, posts, studies, and reports designed to help organizational communicators stay current on the trends and technology that affect their jobs. These may be items that flew under the radar while other stories grabbed big headlines. As always, I collect material from which I select Wrap stories (as well as stories to report on the For Immediate Release podcast) on my link blog, which you're welcome to follow.

News

Airlines look to their reputations in wake of Cecil the Lion outrage -- How do trophy hunters get their prize heads home to mount on their walls? They ship them on airlines, of course. Delta is the latest airline to announce it will no longer accommodate trophy hunters. The global outrage over the killing of Cecil the Lion by an American dentist made it clear that the vast majority of people are appalled by trophy hunting, and airlines were among the first businesses to realize their own reputations were tied up in the practice. Similar announcements were made by Lufthansa, British Airways, and South African Airways. Read more

Facebook turns ads into customer service channels -- Local marketers (not national brands, apparently) can add a "send message" button to ads that let customers contact them directly from the ad. Marketers will also be able to respond privately to public Facebook messages. Read more

Twitter experiments with news curation under a News tab -- Some Twitter users in the US are now seeing a News tab in their mobile Twitter app, an experiment designed to make it easy to immerse users in news and events occurring in real time. According to BuzzFeed, "When you click a headline, you’re taken to a story screen with an image, headline, block of text from the story, and the top tweets discussing it." Read more

Facebook rolls out live events to compete with Twitter, Snapchat -- The ability to find content related to an event happening right now is one of the more popular features on Snapchat (the Our Stories feature), and it's one Twitter plans to introduce (it's testing now as Project Lightning). Now Facebook is planning a similar feature that will be bundled into its new Place Tips tool, designed to help you find things going on near where you are. Read more

Your friends' credit could determine whether you get a loan -- There hasn't been much positive reaction to a Facebook patent filing that would enable financial service institutions to assess the average credit of your friends when deciding whether to give you a loan. There are other uses for the patent -- including filtering spam and improving search results -- but it's the ability of a lender to assess the creditworthiness of your social network when evaluating your loan application. Facebook hasn't confirmed that it plans to ever use this feature, or if it's just included in the patent. Read more

Facebook competes with Periscope and Meerkat, but only for celebrities -- Your Facebook News Feed could include a live streaming video from a celebrity. The feature for VIP users has been launched within its Mentions app, available only to public figures. "Live" lets public figures shoot interactive video; recent visitors to their pages will be notified of the live broadcast in their News Feeds. Read more

Mobile and Wearables

New York Times introduces mobile video native ads -- The New York Times plans to tap the mobile audience with video native ads due to launch in the fall. The videos will be released based on the time of day, with news-focused and text-heavy videos in the morning and photos and video in the late afternoon. Dubbed "Mobile Moments," the videos will be produced either by the advertiser or the Times' T Brand Studio, which has been producing many of the Times' paid posts. Read more

VR shipments will skyrocket -- This year, the number of VR headsets shipped was minuscule. Next year? Topology Research Institute estimates 14 million units will ship. If you're not paying attention to Virtual Reality, now's the time. Read more

Microsoft HoloLens will be available to developers -- Consumers won't be able to get their hands on a Microsoft HoloLens for some time, but within a year developers will be able to get one. The Augmented Reality glasses that have been producing considerable buzz will go to developers first to enable development of AR content, then to businesses for enterprise uses, before they reach consumers, which could take five years. Read more

Tap for News -- Don't like the struggle of deciding which headline to tap when selecting from a long list of news stories? Try the Tap for News app from NowThis. All you get is a red button. Tap it and you'll get a news video that lasts 15-30 seconds. When you're done, tap again for another story. Read more

Trends

People are communicating with animated GIFs -- When a Stanford University student burned out on pictures of food a friend was sending, she sent an animated GIF of entertainer Christina Aguilera rolling her eyes and mouthing the words, "Please stop!" Like Emojis, animated GIFs enable people to convey an emotion far faster than they could with text. The rise of mobile devices is propelling the adoption of animated GIFs. Twenty-three million of them are posted to Tumblr every day. Online searches for animated GIFs have risen by a factor of nine in the last three years. They're also finding their way into professional communication. They haven't made their way into much brand communication yet, but I have no doubt they will. Companies like Fiat have already embraced them. Read more

Shutting down comments is a growing trend -- What was an outlier behavior a year ago has erupted as a full-fledged trend. Publications are shutting down the ability for readers to comment on content. Among those who have jumped on the bandwagon: Popular Science, Bloomberg Business, Reuters, The Verge, re/code, and others. While the difficulty in maintaining a comment section free of filth and garbage is one factor, a bigger consideration is the fact that the conversation about content is taking place somewhere other than on the site of the publication that produced it. Read more

Watch out for fake Twitter embeds -- There's a website called LemmeTweetThatForYou that lets you quickly and easily create a fake tweet that you can then include in a blog post or graphic. Since more and more news coverage from the likes of CNN and ESPN include embedded tweets, a fake one could easily convince a lot of people that someone actually said something that was completely made up. Consider this one more opportunity for critics to prank your brand or leaders, one more landmine to watch out for. Read more

Platforms will continue to dominate content distribution -- There may be increasing calls for the re-decentralization of the web, but Edelman Chief Content Strategist Steve Rubel doesn't see those movements creating much of a ripple in the status quo. The rise of giant platforms like Facebook and Snapchat will continue to drive how content gets distributed and viewed, Rubel said in a Digiday podcast interview. With 60% of media consumption now mobile and only five apps getting regular use by most people, odds are it'll be through Facebook or Twitter that a consumer sees your content. Read more

"Watch time" could be the new metric for video views -- Facebook has been getting a ton of attention for the number of video views it has been racking up, leading some to suggest that the social network is a serious threat to YouTube. In response, YouTube is suggesting that views isn't the best metric to consider. On YouTube, you can bet people are actually watching, not just scrolling past a video that starts autoplaying and registering a view (which requires the video to play for only 3 seconds). YouTube's overall watch time has undergone dramatic growth this year, growing 60% in the second quarter over the same period a year earlier. Read more

Video is altering the role of social media staff -- Employees focused on social media mostly report up through the marketing department, with another sizable chunk housed in PR or Corporate Communications. Some key changes in social media are leading some organizations to rethink where social media staff spend their days. With Facebook working to bring content onto its platform (rather than links that lead people away -- think about autoplay videos and the Instant Articles), social staff need to expand their skillsets, which means spending more time with the people who produce content than those who strategize it. Read more

Research

People aren't engaging with most content -- The goal of content marketing might be to drive engagement, but only between 33% and 50% of content is succeeding. According to BrightEdge's "Content Engagement Report," engagement with content falls to about 26% when it's consumed on a mobile device (because brands aren't creating mobile-responsive websites). The hospitality industry is producing the content that delivers the most engagement; retail is at the bottom end of the scale. Read more

Consumers are torn over whether brands should take stands on social issues -- More and more companies are stepping into social debates around issues like gay marriage. There's plenty of data supporting the idea, with consumers indicating they increasingly make purchase, employment, and investment decisions based on a company's commitment to social justice and sustainability. However, a study from mobile market research firm Field Agent found consumers are pretty evenly divided over whether companies should be taking public stands on these issues. Some 45% of survey respondents say they have stopped buying from a company when they disagree with a position the organization has taken. And while consumers say they are likely to buy from companies that have taken stands they agree with, only three out of 10 have actually done so. Read more

Marketers look beyond marketing agencies -- Marketing agencies haven't adapted quickly enough to changes in the marketplace, so brands are looking to other resources to help them make sense of massive volumes of data, digital migration, channel fragmentation, and a more diverse customer base. A report from the CMO Council and Ebiquity found that increased budgets are going to providers with expertise in these areas outside of the marketing agency world. Read more

Budgets for visuals aren't big enough -- Publications are demanding images, yet most press releases and pitches are free of images. Worse, most companies' online newsrooms don't have image or video galleries. To underscore the need to start offering images (which will improve the odds that a news outlet will take you up on your pitch), marketers are looking to increase the budget available for visuals. The CMO Council study found that 65% of marketers view visuals as core to their brand story, but only 29% said their marketing budgets are allocated appropriately. Read more

This week on the FIR Podcast Network

On episode 819 of The Hobson & Holtz Report, Neville and I talk about the impending ad-blocking revolution and the impact it could have on the availability of free content and apps, the fate of Google+ and whether marketers and communicators should continue to pump resources into it, the 15% of Americans who just won't get online, LinkedIn's new syndicated content network, a tweak to Snapchat that will boost traffic for publishers, and what Millennials expect from employee communications. Dan York's Tech Report covers Cecil the lion and mob rule, the latest WordPress update that broke websites, and Facebook's ownership of 20% of smartphone minutes. Listen
On Inside PR 417, Martin, Gini, and Joe cover three PR must-knows, all involving Google or Facebook, with two of the topics involving video. Listen
The minimum purchase price for apps in the Google Play Store has been reduced in India. That and other headlines are covered in episode 9 of Digital India, along with a discussion of things to keep in mind when visiting India. Listen
In an FIR Interview, I chatted with Rion Martin, marketing director at Infegy, about the company's new free product, News Ninja, which could make it easier for real-time marketers to track trending topics. Listen
On Thought Leader Life 81, the month's guest co-host, Scott Abel, joins host Mitchell Levy to talk about creating amazing customer experiences with guest Andrew Bredenkamp. Listen
Creating customer-centric content is the theme of Thought Leader Life 82, with Mitchell and Scott joined by guest Kevin Nichols. Listen

Also in August, Ann Wylie and I will present our web writing workshop at PRSA Puget Sound.
In September, I travel to the U.K. to teach a two-day social/digital media workshop for the International School of Communication.
I'll speak to IABC's UK chapter while I'm in London.
I'm delivering the opening keynote at a joint session of CorpComm Expo and EduComm Expo in Atlanta in early October.
In October, I'll speak to the Association of Public Relations Professionals of Puerto Rico at their conference in San Juan.

Executive Presentations

Do you need to get your executive leadership team up to speed on any dimension of communicaton, social media, or the digital world? I have done training sessions and special presentations to the C-suite teams of many organizations, and I can do it for yours. Call me; we'll talk.