A few short months ago, Instagram was the staple social media app of dedicated hipsters and people with really cute puppies, but was relatively unknown to most members of the general population. Today, Instagram has a staggering 100m registered users, and more than 11m daily active users – so it’s unsurprising that brands are jumping on the bandwagon too.

New research from social analytics experts Simply Measured has shown that brand adoption of Instagram has grown by 35% in the last three months, and almost half of the Interbrand 500 (some of the world’s biggest and best retail brands) are now actively using the platform.

The April-borne connection between Instagram and social media giant Facebook is certainly a contributory factor to the service’s growing popularity – Simply Measured notes that “more than 90% of Instagram photos posted by brands were also posted to Facebook.” However, there could also be a link to the ever increasing trend for visual content in marketing strategies, evidenced by the simultaneous growth of video advertising on sites like YouTube, and the fashion for image based sites like Pinterest (which, incidentally, has experienced a 24% gain in brand adoption since August).

Whilst well established sites like Facebook and Twitter still rule the roost, social media sites that are based around images seem to be the next big thing for brands. Will your business be making use of them?

We all know that we should “Remember, remember, the 5th of November,” but this year Guy Fawkes Night could be memorable for a very different reason. It’s time to back up your photos and save your statuses, because ‘hactivist’ group Anonymous have threatened to take down Facebook and associated games company Zynga next Monday, in a move which could see thousands of personal and business pages compromised.

Anonymous announced their intentions in a recent Youtube video, which declared that the expected attack comes as a result of Zynga’s plans to lay off 5 per cent of their workforce. “Anonymous have threatened to take down Facebook and release Zynga’s games for free download…if the latter does not backtrack on alleged plans to lay off 1,000 employees and outsource work,” Liat Clark of Wired explained.

Anonymous summed up their reasoning: “With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behaviour of corporations like Zynga must change.”

Whilst the advance warning and widespread coverage of the hack has caused many industry experts to doubt the authenticity of Anonymous’ threat, it would be advisable for any business or personal user to back up any important photos or documents that they have stored on the social media platform, just in case!

A new survey of 650 marketing professionals has revealed that almost 70% of companies agree that social media is integral to their marketing mix, with 66% saying that social is integral to their overall business strategy.

The research, conducted by digital marketing forum Econsultancy and software company Adobe, was part of The Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Managing and Measuring Social report, which “examines the trends for managing and measuring the business value of social media.”

An infographic was released along with the report, highlighting a number of other key statistics from the survey. For instance, a breakdown of the use of social media showed that content marketing, brand awareness, marketing campaigns, and customer services are the most common methods of interaction. 86% of brands are using Twitter and Facebook to implement these techniques, with 59% also using Youtube, and 37% using relative newcomer Pinterest – the latter platforms demonstrating the increase in demand for visual content for social.

However, companies confessed that social media marketing is not without its difficulties – particularly when it comes to measuring return on investment (ROI). Only 23% of businesses are measuring whether use of social has lead to conversion, and 67% believe that social marketing needs to be more rooted in data.

It seems that social may well be the future of the digital realm, but better systems are needed to accurately measure and confirm its effectiveness, and quell the existing doubts.

Social media is a great tool for digital marketing, and one which every business should use to its full advantage. Here is our pick of the top three platforms that your company should have a presence on:

1.    Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant Facebook is a must join for any business. Create a page and encourage people to ‘like’ your company, and then use the profile to share what the business is doing and market the brand. Your Facebook profiles can even be made into a customer service tool, as people can post comments on your wall which you can respond to quickly and efficiently.

2.    Twitter
Twitter is great for brief but effective communication, both with customers and other businesses. You can follow people in the industry who may be interested in your services to build relationships, or search for people who are tweeting about your brand and read what they say to gauge public opinion. However, you are limited to 140 characters, so this isn’t the place for lengthy statements or long promotional messages.

3.    YouTube
Video marketing is becoming an increasingly popular and effective tool – and one that your company can take advantage of. Making short, informative videos explaining what your company can bring to clients is a great way to engage with a prospect that may not have the time or inclination to read a bulk of text. Video case studies are also a great way of marketing your offering to new prospects.

Who doesn’t spend time on YouTube? In January, YouTube surpassed 4 billion views a day: a statistic that underlines the potential of using video as part of a corporate online content strategy.

Many different types of companies can use video as a medium for getting their message across. Their clips can be broadcast both on YouTube and on the company’s own website.

In general, videos are used for marketing in three different ways:

•    Informative video – this can be used either to introduce your company or to feature individual products and services that you offer. Video testimonials from your customers can also be a powerful way to promote the benefits of your product or service.

•    How-to video – this is very useful for businesses that sell products. Instructional videos can give your customers real added value to your products and make you stand out over your competition.

•     Entertainment video – Not suitable for every video, but entertaining videos have the real potential to go viral and can introduce a company to a much bigger market than they could normally reach. The T-Mobile flash mob campaign  is just one outstanding example with over 33 million views for a single video!

Video does take more effort to produce than a quickly-written news article, but it can generate substantially more impact and does not have to be outrageously expensive. Many people have good quality camcorders that can be used to produce perfectly acceptable quality; in the right circumstances even phone-produced video can be effective. At the very least, it is certainly worth considering whether your business can use video to give you a competitive edge.

Hey y’all it’s Thea here again with my third, and dare I say “final”, Cannes Diary from my first visit to MIPCOM earlier this month (Incidentally here are blogs # 1 and # 2 – if you missed them…)

Today I thought I’d talk to you about the YouTube presentation at MIPCOM – called “The Next Generation”.

Most of us, particularly those who are on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, watch at least one video on a daily basis. Well if the stats (below) in Patrick Walker’s talk are anything to go by anyway…

Since we at NSDesign love our “stats” – both reading them and sharing them, I thought this would be a good time and place to share some staggering ones with you:

ON YOUTUBE THERE ARE:

• 3 billion views per day. (a 50% increase from the year before). BTW That constitutes to about half of the world’s population watching a video a day.
• 600 million unique world wide views per month (from 31 countries and 40+languages)
• 400 million youtube views daily on mobile (doubled in the past year)
• 350 million devices that youtube is enabled for (smart phones, smart televisions, game consoles – “that’s increasing dramatically”)
• 100 million times a week – “youtube is social” – getting shared (an example is…)
• 300 years worth of embedded video is consumed on Facebook every day
• 600 tweets per minute contain a youtube video link
• 20,000 partners, specifically revenue-generating partners on youtube
• 48 hours of video is uploaded every single minute of every single day

 Youtube’s aim at MIPCOM seemed to be to align themselves with more revenue-generating partners, and possibly to promote their True View (skip-able) advertising and Playbook (which I’ve had for months and months, but like so many e-books I download, still sits on my desktop gathering the proverbial cyber dust).

Video is where it’s at and anyone who is a content creator of any type should be utilising YouTube. Businesses, musicians, video/tv/film makers – to name but a few – should all have a presence on there and be adding content to it regularly. But like everything in life, it’s a matter of finding the time to go from idea, to filming, to editing, to uploading, and only then promoting it.

Do you have a video channel? How often do you update it? How many subscribers do you have? If you subscribe to our channel, we’ll subscribe to yours! [Well if it's original content you're creating. I'm not gonna subscribe to people who only post babies singing or dancing, or cats being cute...]

Hey everyone it’s Thea here again. Did you know the name Silicon Valley was first used exactly forty years ago by Don C Hoefler** who was writing a series of articles Silicon Valley USA? Rather surprisingly I didn’t until I heard it at the recent, rather inspirational Innovation Journalism (InJo) conference at Stanford.

Here in “the Valley”, like anywhere really, people love to talk about what excites them – music, movies, television shows and especially technology. So I thought I’d pass on to you what’s excited me this past week – just on the off-chance you’ve not heard about them already. (You may have heard of some of these already, but hopefully one or two will be new to you too!)

CitizenTube.com

This one gets mentioned because of an enjoyable panel talk by the main man Steve Grove at CitizenTube – which is YouTube’s News and Politics channel. “How many of you knew we had a news and politics channel?” he asked and few of us raised our hands.

The idea is that citizens of the world are becoming the news curators by being in the right place at the right time (depending on how you look at it) with their camera phones or video recorders. Incidentally, this was a common theme at the Stanford InJo conference, as on a later talk from CNN’s Marisa Gallagher explained their use of iReporters on Open Story.

None of this is dissimilar to what Sky News and the BBC are doing – what’s interesting to me is the trend of this “citizen journalism”.

TuneIn Radio

TuneIn Radio is a website and has a variety of apps for different platforms. It was recommended to me by a fellow music-loving friend Teri. (NOTE: Teri has around 150 apps on her iPhone and sees more concerts than anyone I’ve ever met, so she was the perfect person to recommend this app to me.)

As we sat outside a little coffee shop in downtown Campbell, I download TuneIn radio onto my iPad and, just for kicks, loaded up BBC Radio Scotland’s Morning Briefing with my NSDesign colleague Colin Kelly and we sat and, well, tuned in.

A rather surreal moment that.

Once Magazine

Now this one is a little different, as it’s not yet launched, but am excited to check it out once it goes live. From the website of the young SF-based firm, Once Magazine is a simple concept based around how great photographs look on the iPad. Not only that, it’s apparently a “viable publishing platform in the digital age calls for a new business model”. While it’s subscription based, they’ll be sharing revenue with the photographers. That’s only part of their business model. So Once is one to watch, I think, especially if you’re keen on “long-form narrative photography”. (Don’t you just love all these new buzz terms for everything?)

Awedeitorium – Aural Happiness

At Stanford, after an interesting panel I got chatting to one the panelists @ Justin Ferrel from the Washington Post’s Director of Digital when the gentleman to my right chimed in about an app he loves called Aweditorium. This little app is engaging for music lovers.

FlipBoard

This particular app is getting more raves than anything I’ve heard in ages! As it was released last summer, you may have heard of of this personalised social magazine already, but it was “news” to me. It’s perfect for all you social media lovers who like reading newspapers and magazines. A truly visual app, it looks amazing on the iPad.

Well that’s just a few of what caught my ear and eye this past week.

Next time, on my Silicon Valley Diary Part 3 – I’ll fill you in on a fun, recent trip to Google’s HQ for a “free lunch” with a friend.

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** The term Silicon Valley is credited to Ralph Vaerst a Central California entrepreneur, but was first used by his friend, a journalist, Don C Hoefler in his column for Electronic News.

An interesting social media campaign launched last week, aiming to raise awareness and funds for the Keep a Child Alive Campaign, which hopes to fight the spread of HIV and Aids in Africa. The campaign aims to raise $1 million for the cause by ‘killing’ celebrities’ digital lives.

Those taking part include Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake, all of whom quit their Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other digital portals which connect them to their fans. The campaign is accompanied by disturbing, but effective visuals of the participating celebrities lying in open caskets.

This doesn’t appear to have moved the digital generation to participate though. The campaign was expected to be one of the biggest, most successful fundraisers of the year, reaching its target within a couple of days. Unfortunately, uptake has been slow and at the rate the coffers are filling, it could be up to two weeks before the celebrities find themselves resurrected.

Many critics point to the $10 minimum donation as off-putting to many; it’s quite a lot of money to demand as a donation at an expensive time of year, with a doubtful economy.

It may also be the campaign was flawed from the beginning, as it hoped to succeed by removing social media’s main weapon – mass publicity.
Between them, the participating celebrities have thousands of followers on Twitter, but they can’t publicise the campaign to them. Every so often a Tweet pops up telling subscribers where to donate, but it has the appearance of an automated tweet, bereft of any personality or appeal. Consequently, thousands of potential contributors are unaware of the campaign!

What do you think? Bold, forward-thinking social media campaign or PR misfire?