At Flow we enjoy sharing interesting, amusing and thought-provoking reading matter with our colleagues. From the latest batch of shared content comes a simple online booking process for airline travellers, a medley of online comments that totally shred the English language, a fascinating visual representation of code required to programme gizmos like the Hadron Collider, and why Instagram is fast becoming the most powerful platform in the world. Here’s a brief summary of these and other things we read online:
The online airline booking procedure has been turned on its head with the creation Virgin America’s simplistic test e-commerce website designed to make purchasing a ticket super-quick and super-easy. It’s a classic example of the “less-is-more” principle in action.
There’s no shortage of Chinglish online, an embarrassing anomaly the Chinese are constantly trying to remedy, especially in the tourism sector. While theirs is a result of literal translation, which often results in signage that is more amusing than helpful, there is no excuse for the mother-tongue strangulation of these 19 people who took on the English language and lost. From “lack toast and tolerant” children to “sex without an organism”, there’s something in there for the “whole human bean race”.
It’s not that often that we share online content relating to programming, mainly because HTML-speak is a domain understood and enjoyed by a talented minority. However, when the opportunity arises to enjoy a visual representation of coding, there’s more mass appeal.
This is an interesting graphic representation of how many millions of lines of code it took to power various modern-day inventions, from iPhone game apps to the Space Shuttle, a pacemaker, the Mars Rover, an F-35 fighter jet, the large Hadron Collider, and largest-of-all, the USA healthcare.gov website.
An estimated 350-million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily, while 60-million are uploaded to Instagram. However, Instagram’s engagement rate is 15 times higher than Facebook and 25 times higher than Twitter. Instagram enjoys 1.6-billion likes per day, 20-billion images shared and 200-million active users.
According to Scott Galloway, marketing professor at NYU Stern, within 24 months, Instagram will be the most powerful platform in the world based on its growth trajectory and it’s engagement rate compared to the other platforms.
Growth is also the catchword of marketers wanting to get their brands into the right consumer hands to nurture brand loyalty.
While most South African communication agencies follow the owned approach, they need to take cognisance of digital considerations for influencer marketing and digital PR (earned media), as well as content remarketing and social network bought media (paid media).
Owned content is hosted on your own websites, microsites or social media pages/profiles. Paid content is sponsored to drive traffic to your owned spaces, and earned content is the conversion that takes place online from a reputable source that convinces the customer to engage with your brand.