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Scott Monty - Strategic Communications & Leadership Advisor

Scott Monty - Strategic Communications & Leadership Advisor
 


A roundup of relevant links affecting our industry.

Each week at Ford, I compose a newsletter that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, communications and marketing in order to keep the wider team up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs. These are those links.

If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below or tag me in Google+. And if you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links in my new This Week in Social Media Magazine.


Monday was April Fools Day, during which seemingly every brand got in on it and pranked the internet with a gag or two, poking fun at themselves or their products. One particular favorite was YouTube, which announced that as of this month, they had received the maximum number of submissions and would be shutting down for a decade, after which time they would reopen and announce the best video on YouTube. Take a look at the star-studded (okay, Internet stars) video they produced to announce it:


Industry


Platforms


Big Data / Measurement


Legal


Bookmarks/Read-Watch-Listen Later

  • Facebook and IDC have released How Smartphones and Social Keep Us Engaged that includes a good deal of data about usage habits. One nugget: from Friday to Sunday, users spend twice as much time on Facebook daily as they do during the rest of the week.

Commentary

It's not always easy to get your brand loved on some sites like Reddit. In recent months, we saw an Applebee's employee get fired over a photo of a receipt went viral. This week a redditor posted an image showing an Olive Garden receipt in which his family was comped for their entire meal after his 3 year-old told the waiter that her grandpa's house burned down. The image has received over 1.5 million views and Olive Garden has been complimented on the actions of its waitstaff. But some commenters claim that it was an elaborate hoax by Olive Garden or one of its agencies to elicit positive support.

One redditor even claimed he knew it was fake because, "I work in advertising and have spoken to the people who plan these campaigns." Reddit's general manager says that the platform is always on guard against brandjacking and that it's usually fairly easy to tell when brands are trying to do something like this.
He also said that "I've seen something similar before" is not conclusive proof.

But what's important to understand is not that Reddit has the tools to ferret out any kind of fake effort by brands, but that in communities like this, brands have to overcome attitudes of cynicism and skepticism. Is it that individuals are becoming too savvy for this, that brands don't have a place on such platforms, or that sloppy work by some has ruined it for all of us?


Photo Credit: Ludwig Gatzke
 
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