The recent ‘ideas boom’ in marketing and communications in Australia highlights the need to revolutionize communications, moving beyond traditional channels to more fluid ones to suit the intended audience.

National Public Sector Marketing Communications SummitAugust 23, 2016. Canberra.

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Presentation outline Social Media

The platforms change quickly and often but audiences use social media more than any other communication tool.

GamingPartnerships between big brands and big games and the gamification of marketing

The future of digitalAugmented reality and virtual reality have moved beyond a niche product to a mainstream media.

Social media - where the audience lives

Social media’s dominance Growth remains steady. Social media usage is increasing in people of all ages.

Social media growth

The spread of social media is unabating. Teenagers and young people continue to lead the way, but statistics show increasing usage across all age groups, including adults and seniors, where usage has increased tenfold in the past decade.

Usage is increasing across all age groups, including adults and seniors, where usage has increased tenfold in the past • 65% of adults used social

media in 2015, up from 7% in 2005.

• Seniors are also joining: 35% of all those 65 and older report using social media, compared with just 2% in 2005. Source: PEW Social Media Usage: 2005-2015

Usage across platforms

Instagram and Snapchat have both seen strong growth, but Facebook is still the social media platform that dominates the web.

• Facebook has on average 1.13 billion daily active users• 100 million users spend 30 minutes on Snapchat every day. Over 10

billion videos are viewed daily, which is more than a 350% increase in the last year alone.

• Instagram has 400 million active users, 300 million are active daily us-ers. More than 95 million photos or videos are shared on the platform every day

• For all platforms, usage is greatest in the 18-34 age group. Facebook eclipses Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumble, Vine, LinkedIn and Pintrest in terms of reach and time spent on the platform

Think mobile Engaging with your audience online increasingly means engaging via smartphone

The average smartphone user spends 4 hours on her device every day.• She has 33 apps, 12 of which she uses daily.• 3 of those apps account for 80% of her usage time:

Facebook, Whatsapp and Chrome.

The Asia-Pacific region accounts for the majority of global smartphone users

Social media best practice Increase audience engagement by following basic principles: be visual and engage.

Be visual• Images• Videos• Gifs• Infographics

Engage• Join conversations• Repost content• Ask questions• Reward and incentivise• Be funny

The power of pictures

Engaging visuals

People’s connection with images is instant and emotional. The human brain can process entire images in as little as 13 milliseconds, according to MIT researchers. Using pictures well is fundamental to successful social media. • Images on social media

increase user engagement by up to 94%

• Images are 40 times more likely to get shared

• Tweets with images earned 150% more retweets and 18% more clicks in a study by Buffer

Images on social media increase user engagement by up to 94%

The evolution of video consumption

1 2 3Live (traditional)TELEVISION

• Tune in or miss out• Mass concurrent audience• Free and paid options

On DemandDIGITAL VIDEO RECORDER/STREAMING

• Watch on your own terms• Disparate audience• Pay for convenience

‘Real’ LiveFACEBOOK LIVE/PERISCOPE

• Tune-in/watch on your own terms• Mass audience but also personal• Free to broadcast and watch

The rise of videoAs with images, the connection with video is instant and emotional, but for video, this response is prolonged Billions of videos are viewed on social

media every day. YouTube has lost its supremacy as the video platform, video is now integral to social media networks.• The average video post generates 135% greater

organic reach compared to photo posts • Facebook alone generates 8 billion video views

per day. Snapchat eclipsed this in 2016, reaching 10 billion

• The number of video posts per person on Face-book increased 75% in 2015

• Video is predicted to account for 82% of global internet traffic by 2020, according to Cisco

The advent of live streaming video is the latest development in the dominance of video.• Live stream videos are raw, authentic

and accessible to both creators and consumers

• Facebook live videos are prioritised in the feed and watched on average

Chewbacca MomLive stream videos are raw, authentic and accessible to both creators and consumers

• May 19, 2016: 37-year-old Texas mother Candace Payne posted a live video showing her delight with a Star Wars Chewbacca mask she purchased for her son

• The video quickly went viral, propelling Payne into viral stardom and prompting the mask to sell out across America

• The video has been viewed more than 160 million times and shared 3.3 million times

Link: https://www.facebook.com/candaceSpayne/videos/10209653193067040/

GIFsStrange but remarkably popular

What is a GIFA GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a widely supported and portable file that appears as a very shot video (usually three seconds or less). It could be described as a cross between a picture and a video.

• The format was first invented in 1987 but its popularity has skyrocketed in recent years due to its shareability on social media

• The creators of the format pronounced GIF with a soft g - “jif ”- but pronunci-ation with a hard G is widespread

Link: http://gph.is/24GRaaP

GIFs make content stand out by making it appear as if it is almost jumping off the page. GIFs are an important feature of trending conversations on Twitter and brands insert their profile into these conversations if they can use GIFs well. See this example from GoPro and this example from American pancake restaurant IHOP, who took part in the buzz around #GIFparty as well as this from the NT News in response to #CensusFail

Link: https://twitter.com/TheNTNews/status/763133836871905281

Where to start

Use GIFS to

• tell a story • animate data • show personality• explain a process• show off a product• thank someone publicly• play an ad (and it’s free) • create a tiny presentation• offer a sneak peek or preview• highlight your company culture

InfographicsPresent numerical data and increase engagement

Numerical data is best presented in an infographic. Several free, easy to use online tools are available to create infographics:

• Pikochart• Info.gram• Easel.ly• Visme

Go beyond broadcasting on social mediaEngage with your specific audience on social mediasupport, intelligence

Engage

Join conversations, don’t just start your own. Look at what is happening in the world and be a part of the conversation about it on social media.

Watch trending hashtags and think about if and how your brand is relevant or simply showcase your brand’s humour and culture to an audience of millions.

• For example, Antarctic Ocean Alliance made the most of #Rio2016 with this post showing orcas bobbing in and out of the water, comparing them to syn-chronised swimming.

• Greenpeace Brazil responded when the internet went crazy over #Pokemon-Go with several tweets using Pokemon Go characters to illustrate the need to protect endangered animals in the Am-azon

• Amazon.com capitalised on #Pokemon-Go to sell battery packs

Link: https://www.facebook.com/AntarcticOceanAlliance/posts/1192226690834583

Engage

Make your audience part of the story by reposting their content. This adds variety to your feed, puts your audience in the spotlight and improves trust.• Around one-third of the photos posted on the @Starbucks

Instagram account are “regrams”. This showcases Star-bucks global reach and motivates customers to upload shots of their orders to Instagram, in the hopes they’ll be shared.

• Regramming is especially effective for small organisations who are likely to have repeated interactions with a small-er follower base.

Run competitions (with good prizes) • MySwitzerland.com asked people to post their favour-

ite shots of Switzerland to Instagram with the hashtag #LoveSwitzerlandContest. The winner received a 10-day National Geographic Expedition to Switzerland.

• The competition generated 9,400 posts. 70% of the visitors to the contest hub page clicked the CTA for more trip ideas.

Online surveys • Find out more about your audience by asking them

✚ Stay on top of updates in social media and be early adopters e.g. Instagram stories, Snapchat memories

✚ Think creatively, be brave, take risks and learn from your mistakes

✚ Experiment: if you fail, the web has a short memory

Gaming - no longer just for geeks

GamingGamification of communications Deloitte estimates

about 1.75 billion smartphones and tablets will be used to play games frequently as of end-2016, out of a total base of 2.7 billion smartphones and 750 million tablets.

The interaction of gaming and marketing/communications has at least two forms:

• Partnership between big brands and big games: e.g. MacDonald’s big win with Pokemon Go – there are now 3000 MacDonald’s restaurants within the most popular mobile game ever. The CEO of Pokemon Go is looking to move to a spon-sorship model and this is likely to be mimicked by other major players in the game.

• The gamification of marketing Think of loyalty programs as a very basic kind of gami-fication and consider the possibilities to improve o this when paired with technology.

Case StudyGamification of marketing Coca Cola Chok Chok, Hong Kong

• Chok is a slang word in Cantonese meaning rapid motion.

• Coca cola built an app that worked interactively with a television commercial. Users shook their phone at the screen while the commercial was playing in order to catch coke bottle caps for prizes. The commercial was also played in cine-mas and on outdoor screens.

• The app reached the top of the local app down-loads for iOS in a single day, reached 380,000 downloads in one month, and the television com-mercial received over 9 million total views.

• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pED-sERv-rFA

Magnum Pleasure Hunt• A campaign for the launch of their new icecream

bar, Magnum Temptation.• Magnum created a online platform game in

the style of Super Mario in which an avatar ran through pages of the internet collecting bonbons. Magnum teamed up with several major brands to create interactivity with their sites. The bonbons could be redeemed for a virtual temptation ice-cream bar at the main Magnum website.

• Social media integration allowed players to chal-lenge friends and share their results in the game.

• The game was the most tweeted URL on the day of its launched. 7 million players spent an aver-age of five minutes each on the game

• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD4uiqejOLg

Case Study

Case Study

The future of digital

Augmented RealityDigital communications in real life.

The success of Pokemon Go has proved that people are ready for Augmented Reality. AR offers a new way to engage with an audience within their own frame of reference

• Norwegian People’s Aid used augmented reality to create a virtual minefield inside a shopping centre to illustrate the dangerous threat of stepping on a landmine at any time.

• Museum of London created the ‘StreetMuseum’ app using their extensive photo, painting and illustration collections. The app would identify a user’s location and overlay images so they could see what the place used to look like.

• They were aiming for 5000 downloads, they exceeded 125,000 downloads. Visitors to the museum tripled.

Virtual RealityMore specialised and more expensive than AR but an offers intensive form of engagement if done well VR technology offers fully immersive

experience that transports a viewer to another reality. While it is still realitively niche, it is a powerful way to tell a story

• The New York Times distributed more than 1 million Google Cardboard viewers to home delivery subscrib-ers in 2015.

• Over 600,000 downloaded the accompanying app making it the company’s most successful app launch

• They appointed a VR editor, Jenna Pirog, who oversees the NYTVR team which produces films that are de-signed not as one-offs but evergreen content to drive engagement.

• Projects include a virtual tour of the surface of Pluto, VR coverage of the Rio Olympics, a VR experience of the fighting in Falluja and the pilgrimage to Mecca

• They have also experimented with a series of medita-tive “single cut” calming nature scenes.

Case Study

Customer Intelligence

Digital technologies and communications will continue to improve our audience insight

• The more you know about your customer or clients, the better you can communicate with them and service their needs

• Improvements in communications technology, data storage, connectivity and analytics will continue to de-velop the relationship between an organisation and its audience