The US Open Goes Social

The US Open is one of the oldest tennis tournaments in the world. Every late August & early September, it draws the league's top players and thousands upon thousands of fans. This year, the US Open (hosted in New York) will be accompanied by a brand new attraction: a 50-feet-by-8-feet social media wall that will aggregate all social content made by fans and players in real-time. Although the content will be monitored, fans will be able to send tweets, Instagrammed pics and more to better connect themselves to this world-famous event, using the official hashtag #usopen. It will also serve as a meeting spot for the over 700,000 attendees expected to be at the tournament.

We think this is an amazing idea as it encourages tennis fans to engage with the US Open and with the sport of tennis in general. In fact, we love this social media wall so much that perhaps it should be rolled out to more sporting events in the future to help increase awareness for a particular team or brand partnership. Just think: Tens of thousands of fans at a baseball or football event would be able to watch a screen displaying not only the score, but a ticker or 'wall' of the latest social conversations taking place around the game. Fans would be able to view and engage with the current dialogue between team members, fans and even brands, therefore adding a truly personal experience to the event.

And although we've seen this at some basketball and hockey games by way of a social 'ticker' or half-time entertainment on the big screen, such a staple at every game would result in an automatic uptick in engagement numbers throughout a season. With more engagement comes better brand or team awareness, ultimately resulting in a higher interest in the game, more stadium tickets sold and better customers for those sponsored brands involved.

As huge sports and social media fans, we're big supporters of a roll-out of this nature. Are you?

-- Samantha & Mike

Instagram Vs. Vine

Instagram vs. Vine, Facebook vs. Twitter, it has been quite interesting watching the battle between the two social media behemoths for mini-video supremacy.  When Vine was released in Jan of 2013, it was heralded as the Instagram of video. 5 days after being introduced, Vine had more shares-per-day at 2.5 million, while Instagram was only generating 2.2. These are very impressive numbers for a service only 5 days old, it appeared Vine was coming in strong and here to stay.

Fast forward 6 months later to June 20th, the date Instagram added a video service to their app. Vine shares-per-day plummeted from 2.5 million on June 19th, to 1.5 million on June 20th. In the same month, Vine links on twitter also dropped by 70%, not a good sign for Vine.

Personally, when Instagram launched their video service, we at Sike immediately went and deleted our Vine apps. After all, why would we want to try and manage 2 separate video sharing apps? Since we already had an Instagram presence established, it was an easy choice to stick with Instagram, rather than start again from the ground up with Vine. If someone was to tell us that the fate of Vine is a slow death, you would not hear many objections, but maybe, just maybe, we have Vine all wrong.

The first thing we have to realize is the fundamental difference between Instagram and Vine. While Instagram's success was based on the huge number of users uploading and the volume of uploaded content, Vine should not be measured in the same way. This is because of the simple fact that pictures and videos are very different things. The complexities of creating a great video are going to inhibit the casual user from creating and uploading a video to Vine, after all, it is much easier to upload a cool sunset picture than create a 6 second video people will actually want to watch. This will, in turn, skew many of the Vine users into consumers, rather than creators. This is bad for Vine right? Not necessarily.

The best way to see the potential success of Vine is to view it as a mini YouTube. YouTube is a consumer-centric service, much like Vine. Chances are everyone you know has seen a video on YouTube before, but how many of those same people have actually uploaded content? Consumption far exceeds creation on YouTube. It is estimated that 30% of the videos uploaded to YouTube account for 90% of total views. This simply shows that people are consuming YouTube videos MUCH faster than creating them and we feel this is the direction Vine will be going.

We have already seen numerous big brands take advantage of Vine, creating brilliant 6 second advertisements. With the money and resources to create quality videos, we see Vine as a fantastic avenue for brands to get fresh, new content out to their fans.  We all know consumer attention spans are shrinking, and nowhere is this more prevalent than online. It is only natural to see the progression to shorter advertisements, and Vine is a perfect avenue for that content.

We are very interested to see where Vine ultimately goes. It is obvious that Instagram has a huge advantage over user-generated content and it would be a big mistake for Vine to try and go toe-to-toe with them. We would like to see Vine aggressively target advertising partnerships, bringing more creative and quality content to its platform. Give us a reason to re-download that Vine app on to our precious smartphones.

-Mike & Samantha

Instagram Introduces "Photos of You"

Yesterday, Instagram took inspiration from Facebook and introduced a new way of tagging people in images. As easy as adding hashtags, photo tagging will better connect mobile users to the friends they've captured. With the ability to tag any Instagram account in an image, the platform has made it easier to browse photo feeds of people you know and pics that you appear in with a new "Photos of You" section on your profile. When someone tags you in an image, you'll get a notification and the pic will show up in the "Photos of You" area. Worried about privacy? Instagram has that covered with easy to navigate settings to adjust what appears in your profile and what doesn't.

Although Instagram is constantly evolving, there was a large issue of only being able to “discover” photos of yourself by reviewing your "Activity Feed" for a mention of your username in a caption (e.g., “with @samshredder at Fenway!”). Sadly, user/account mentions won't be automatically converted into photo tags, so one will have to go back through every photo to manully tag people.

"Photos of You" will not be visible until May 16th, so everyone has a few weeks to try it out.

Personally, we see this latest improvement as a true positive within the social space and are interested to see how this will further help connect Instagram with Facebook . Not only will it provide a broader connection and engagement between users, but the ability to share personal (and brand) messages will beome easier moving forward as well.

For more info, watch this: http://vimeo.com/65246801

What do you think of the latest addition to Instagram?

xx Samantha