360DigitalInfluence

This week, we turned our weekly DI staff meeting into a digital show and tell. Our DC team of designers, developers, strategists, art directors and producers shared some of the videos, websites, digital experiences and apps outside of our own work that we think are cool, cutting-edge, inspiring or just fun to watch. So, take a break from online holiday shopping working and enjoy our Best of the Web picks.

Israeli rocker Yoni Bloch’s “choose-your-own-adventure” music video is a must-watch. Viewers can interact with the video, seamlessly changing the course of events as the song continues. Yoni’s  a rock star off the stage too. He’s the founder of Interlude, the interactive video technology company behind this video and may others.

For a little more music to your ears, Philips partnered with the Metropole Orchestra on an interactive campaign to showcase their audio products. Viewers can single out individual musicians, hearing each note in a track played by the entire orchestra.

Cute kids, pets, people that take awkward to a new level… We love a good montage of the year’s best viral videos.  79 all wrapped into one great restrospective.

If you’re in the mood for a more serious look back at 2011, watch this Google Zeitgeist year in review video. From natural disasters to political uprisings, see the events and people that shaped our year. (You might need a tissue. Just sayin…)

Indie band Arcade Fire wowed us last year with The Wilderness Downtown, a personalized music video experience that used HTML5 and Google Maps. This year, they have us dancing at our desks with Sprawl II. We enjoyed the sweet moves of one of our creative directors, as he demoed how the computer camera detects movement and incorporates it into the video.

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The Google+ Hangout is one of the most notable differences between Google+ and Facebook. Hangouts offer brands an entirely new communication tool and make brands more accessible than ever before. Finding what works best for brands and their audiences is an important part of designing a Hangout session and a handful of brands have already started experimenting with this feature. With a concrete strategy and direction, Hangouts can be leveraged in a variety of fun, interactive and informative ways.

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Don’t forget. The internet era has caused the average attention span to dwindle down to 9 seconds, (from what may have been as long as 20 minutes in pre-industrial times). 9 seconds is the estimated time it takes for an individual to decide if he wants to keep reading, watching or playing, or if he would rather scroll, click or tap on to the “next thing.”

How does this affect your approach to content creation?

…oh look, some interesting sources for this post.

Do You Think Like a Goldfish? by Sally Hogshead

What the Heck Happened to our Attention Spans? by Josh Catone

TIME Magazine’s person of the year in 2006 was “you,” paying tribute to the hundred millions of social media users who framed the information age with user-generated content. Conceived in 2006, Twitter, along with other “emerging platforms,” was evolving and looking for better ways to enable users to share content. Five years later, Twitter includes brand pages in efforts to expand its 100 million user base.

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While the majority of the social media world was getting excited a few weeks ago about the launch of brand pages on Google+ and the timeline feature rolling out on Facebook, last Thursday that other platform of the “Big Three,” aka Twitter, decided it would not be upstaged by the whales in the social ocean. In what’s being seen as a play to fend off Facebook and Google+, Twitter has given itself some new bells and whistles in a major reboot.

Twitter’s revamp comes at a time when they want to prevent their current user base at 100 million from eroding. The reboot consists of a major user experience overhaul of Twitter.com, updates to their mobile application (Twitter has had an explosive increase of 25% in new registrants in 2011 based solely on mobile usage) and an unveiling of two very large new features to help marketers. These include the debut of brand pages and embeddable tweets.

Some of the key takeaways on this revision are the following: continue reading

The beginning of any good social media strategy is rooted in research. Before any brand or organization decides to embark online or move forward with a new idea, it’s essential to understand what’s already out there. Who is the audience and how and where are they already talking?

Looking at the stats, the “where” will almost always include Facebook. Though it may not be the primary platform to meet every organization’s objectives, the truth is that Facebook is the behemoth. It’s the largest social network in the world, with 155 million users in the United States alone, an audience that spans all ages and demographics, visits the site multiple times a day and shares billions of pieces of content . That’s not to be ignored.

Too easily though, Facebook, the giant, can be overlooked. The majority of Facebook’s content is private, which means listening tools, such as Radian6, cannot access all of the information. Since these tools can only pull in public status updates from Facebook users who keep their privacy settings open to the web, results frequently show little conversation from the major platform. The findings skew more towards platforms such as Twitter, where more users keep a public account. continue reading