December 14, 2015
At IF we pride ourselves on leading innovation and helping to shape the next industry standard. Our recent award win evidences we’ve checked that box for another year. To many, our blog is their source of digital insight into what is about to happen within industry. With this in mind, I took a look back at 2015’s blog posts. Here are the headlines of what you may have missed:
LinkedIn’s Publisher platform was made available to all. The service previously only available to the most influential people – the likes of Obama and Branson – was opened to the public. We told you how to maximise the channel.
Bing Translate was returned to Twitter-owned monitoring suite Tweetdeck. Having mysteriously disappeared in late 2015, it returned with new-and-improved functionality.
Artificial Intelligence took a huge leap in early 2015 with the news that new software can predict personality traits with a higher accuracy rate than our friends, family and spouse. Our post discussing ‘what does your Facebook profile say about you?’ was a first-quarter smash hit.
Infographics continued to prove popular content, evidenced with the volume of visits to ‘Social Posting Guide: Infographic’. This little gem of a visual showed us how to make the most of our channels.
Cyber attacks were reoccurring narrative as a result of what happened to Sony and Microsoft. Gamers will recall how their live play was suspended for days at a time. Social lit up as a result. This post delved into six brand-damaging social media profile hacking incidents.
Crisis has been the mission for many brands in 2015, which is why we published ‘If the social s#@t hits the fan, don’t be an ostrich!’ Thankfully many of you took the (right) decision to remove your head from the sand.
We showed you how to get greater engagement, with 40 top words that generate more shares. Happy tweeting!
Our blog post on The British Army’s 77th ‘Social Media’ Brigade divided opinion. Many saw it for the informative piece it was, but some wrongly read it as a slight against the great history of the 77th Brigade. For the sake of clarity, it wasn’t, and we couldn’t be prouder of our military personnel. You’re all heroes.
In 2015 we finally said it: ‘Enough with the vanity social media metrics!’ What we’re able to do with data and tracking is pretty darn impressive, even if we do say so ourselves. Tracking through the entire journey to sale and proving success is an everyday task to us. It still surprises us how many people and brands don’t realise this can happen.
Q2 was dominated by the run toward General Election. With each platform and listening tool evidencing its capabilities by telling the UK what was happening and what could happen. Would the electorate be influenced by social? Our blog posts on digital influence and social nudging voters, summarised what was happening.
Moving pictures, specifically cinemagraphs, became better known this year. We showed you how to design, build and publish them.
Social Commerce has been a phrase coined since 2005 thanks to Yahoo, but 2015 was the year many brands finally woke up to the concept. We’ve been showing brands how to do it for years, but we vocalised in better in 2015.
Real-time took centre stage in industry this year. Again, it has been our mantra for a few years now. Social is about owning the moments that matter to your brand. Events like #BRITs2015 (when Madonna took a tumble) evidenced the power and potency of real-time. Our approach to real-time is why we’ve thrived with the likes of Interflora and Southbank Centre this year. In fact, the latter was another award win. *smug face*
Infographics won again with our ‘Six things NOT to do on social’. The reach of this post was stellar, with engagement in every continent.
Meerkat launched with much acclaim, but was pipped by Periscope. Again, we told you what was coming, what was happening, and what we thought the future held. And again, we got it right. Long live Periscope.
We helped to improve your blog writing, advised on mitigating against anti-social abuse and opened your eyes to important social regulations you must know.
We ran (well Max did) a social marathon. The genius (or lunatic, depending on your point of view) ran the London Marathon whilst live tweeting the experience – giving a runners view of the endurance race. This blog post offered insight to one of the most engaged events of 2015.
We published ’27 free digital tools to get you started (on digital transformation)’ unsurprisingly it was a really popular post.
Facebook shut down its data API. We announced that before the mainstream media did. Check out the date of our post, then check out the date of the coverage received from The Telegraph. Ahead of the curve again!
We highlighted the wins and pitfalls of social customer services. The pitfalls being that some brands don’t recognise the need for social customer service. Our work with Interflora, and the ensuing blog posts, showed you how to win.
We helped you to ace your brand storytelling. This gem of a post garnered applause from peers at other agencies.
Digital Strategy Director, Tom Ball, showed us how to own an industry event. We took over #SMWF this year, with exceptional social activity. Tom also won a selfie bet which resulted in me having to wear a penguin outfit, walk to an ice cream store and buy the entire office ice cream. Photos on our Twitter feed for anyone who’s interested.
2015 has definitely been the year of the emoji. There are a number of blog posts charting the effective form of communication. Ancient Egyptians led the charge, social just took a few years to catch up.
Context, not content is king. A must read blog post.
First we wrote about how Paid is cannibalising ATL advertising, and then we proved our hypothesis by lifting The Best Use of Social Media Advertising at The Drum Social Buzz Awards. And we kicked the asses of the so called elite media buyers. Go us!
We showed you how to measure Snapchat marketing, reaffirmed the importance of Facebook Relevance Score and narrated on Amazon’s Prime Day.
Our work in China led us to share insight into ‘Navigating the Chinese Social Media Landscape’.
Like most, we wrote about the social media storm triggered by the tragic slaughtering of Cecil the Lion.
We’ve helped you to better understand how to manage content during silly season, and even shown you how to avoid a Tinder-style meltdown.
We’ve waxed lyrical about marketing jargon, Twitter ads, driving B2B event attendance and Facebook optimised pages for Christmas.
We proved personas and shopper missions are not dead. In fact, they hold the key to social excellence. Again, we proved this with another award winning campaign.
The role of Community Manager was demystified in our blog post.
We debated who should own social with our ‘Should social be owned by PR or marketing (and how important is sponsored content)?
We’ve discussed infographics, GIFs and even announced the next big thing to be the GIFographic – it will catch on!
You saw a Spectre infiltration: A Bond guide to social media. Bond fans will love this one.
Influencer marketing is NOT dead. Read the blog post!
Chiming with the season, we discussed ‘How John Lewis pulled a Christmas cracker’ with their ad and social engagement.
In both blogs and national press, we’ve discussed the Paris terrorism and the role social played in its wake.
And finally, we’ve even published open letters to industry lobbying for greater governance, training and nurturing of young talent. This really is a must read blog.
So there you have it. A years’ worth of blog posts. 2015 has good one. We’ll make 2016 even better!