#RoundUpYourMates – Did Guinness’s Ad Experiment Backfire?

Guinness, one of the world’s most well-known brands, just carried out a fairly interesting ad campaign. One that looks to have sprung forth from concepts like ‘integrating online & offline’, ‘content marketing’, ‘earned media’, and lots of other buzzphrases.

Here’s what they did:

  1. Bought up all of the ad space during one of the UK’s most popular TV talk shows.
  2. Paid the talk show host himself to front their ads. (Jonathan Ross – ‘@wossy’ on Twitter – a very well known man, with almost 3.5 million followers).
  3. They made the ads themselves advertorial – ie. the breaks from the TV ‘content’ were branded ‘content’ themselves.
  4. They hauled in a fairly well known comedian and an Oxford Professor to play talk show guests, cutting away to some scientific research they’d put together on the value of men meeting up with other men in real life. (note: they’ve also published this as a ‘paper‘ – pdf format there).
  5. They ended all of this with a twitter hashtag as the primary call to action, and the spoken call to action “Search for ‘Round Up Your Mates'”.

roundem

Here’s how Guinness themselves trailed it. (note the ‘#RoundUpYourMates’ hashtag):

rounduptrail

This was part of a £34 million push by Guinness’ parent company to boost the brand’s association with “quality”. All sounds like a fairly workable idea, doesn’t it?

Here’s the ad, in case you’d like to watch it:

Stuff they got right

Guinness has a huge amount of very successful advertising experience. They also have a long, long history of ‘content marketing’ (think Guinness World Records).

Here are some of the ‘necessaries’ they’d put in place to ensure this ‘Round Up Your Mates’ campaign had the best chance:

  1. They rank first in Google for the phrase ’round up your mates’. (they’ve run some previous ads around this phrase in the past)
  2. They had a few tweets scheduled to coincide with the ad, ,and had trailed it beforehand.
  3. think they had some promoted tweets around it to, although I didn’t screengrab anything.
  4. One of the celebs involved was chatting about it on Twitter too. (albeit somewhat sheepishly)
  5. They had everything loaded up on Youtube ready to support the TV slot.

But let’s take a look at whether it worked or not:

Here were the results:

The @GuinnessGB account, which fronted the campaign on Twitter had just under 3,500 followers before it went out, and had just dropped over the 4,000-follower mark 18 hours later.

And here were just a few of the comments on Twitter:

 

Fair enough – not everyone’s going to like it are they?

Oh dear…

Oops!

But surely they weren’t all negative?

And it was true – virtually every mention of the campaign was absolutely negative:

Almost everyone who took the bait of their #RoundUpYourMates hashtag absolutely hated it. I trawled through 1,991 tweets about it and there was only a handful of ‘neutrals’, and those that could be considered positive were essentially saying it had been misunderstood.

Summary: Not only was the response to the ad bad, the primary call to action was to search for the hashtag, which was utterly full of negative commentary.

What went wrong?

There were a few tactical things that went wrong – for example, the site they had ranking for this on Google was not mobile friendly at all – a big mistake when running stuff on TV. And there were some big things they got subjectively wrong – for example this was a 100% male-centric ad, run during a program with a fairly broad, mixed audience.

But let’s focus on the real thing they got wrong – at least according to the majority of the negative tweets: The Creative itself.

5 Reasons The Creative Didn’t Work:

1. Authenticity vs Astroturfing.

The ad was designed to appear ‘authentic’, but it simply did not feel authentic. It felt a bit like an author writing their own Amazon reviews: It was intended to feel authentic, and came off feeling anything but. It was plain to see that Guinness were behind it, nevertheless, it still felt like astroturf.

Alongside that – the ad centred around a group of 5 guys playing a football game, and the same 5 guys playing a game of 5-a-side on a roof somewhere. These are ultra-stereotypical scenes (not always a problem), but they were talked about out by an Oxford professor, and 2 comedians who we do not associate with football in the slightest, all of whom did not seem particularly genuinely interested.

They may have got away with all of this had it appeared more knowingly cheesy.

2. Context sync.

The first context mismatch was between the TV show and the ad slot: They ran the slot during a program that has a live studio audience. The ad itself used canned laughter, and was quite obviously scripted. The result was fairly jarring. Far more jarring than it would be with conventional ads.

The second context mismatch was between the ‘science’ findings (that ‘offline’ events are better for building friendships than ‘online’ events). Telling people ‘online is worse’ simply doesn’t make sense when you’re asking people to use the hashtag on Twitter, or visit your Youtube channel.

The third context mismatch was between the ad format & normal ad formats. Normal ads last less than 30 seconds. You have to be very, very good to get away with something much longer than that. As a result – as a few said on Twitter – 3 minutes 30 felt very, very long.

3. Brand sync.

The level of expectation is really high around Guinness ads. ‘Guinness advert’ is one of their top 10 Google suggestions for their brand, and if you asked someone to name 3 or 4 Guinness ads there’s a very strong chance they could do so – something that’s true of only a handful of brands. As a result, people expect their stuff to be very impressive. When it is underwhelming it feels massively so.

Their ads are also usually epic. This was anything but epic.

4. Sub-Pseudo-Science.

The ‘science’ presented via the ad itself was pretty poor. They used a ‘sample’ of 1 essentially: A team of 5 guys who played a computer game and then played a real life game of 5-a-side, with the aim of proving real life experience is better than online experience for improving relational ties. We had no emotional connection to these guys at all, other than knowing the stereotype. They were purely used to illustrate ‘the science’.

This felt even poorer as the ‘science’ part was framed as if watching 5 guys play 2 games of football (one virtual, one real) was enough to actually prove anything. If they’d run this across 100 teams, or 1,000 perhaps it would have worked a little better.

I feel a bit sorry for Robin Dunbar, the Oxford Professor they’d hauled in. He had obviously been convinced by someone that it would be sensible to present something very dumbed down, when really they’d have been better going the opposite way.

5. Lack of Value & Lack of Objects.

The 5th reason the creative simply did not work was there was zero value in it:

  • “Offline activity” builds relationships better than “Online activity” is self evident. Very few would disagree and. They would not be surprised by a tiny study finding it to be true.
  • Interrupting a TV show with a worse version of the same TV show also – according to many Twitter hecklers – simply devalued the TV show itself, rather than adding value to their lives.
  • And – on Twitter itself, if you followed their call to action to search for ‘#RoundUpYourMates’, you did not find anything valuable: A link to videos of more of the same, some pre-scheduled tweets from @GuinnessGB, lots of people talking about how bad the ad was.

Alongside this, there were no ‘objects’. When people talk about Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor on Twitter, they are talking about particular acts, or particular occurrences. With this, we had a vague finding that “Offline is better than Online”. No interesting stats. Nothing unexpected. Nothing unresolved. No spectacle. There was no ‘object’ to talk about. And, as a result of that void, they essentially sent thousands of people off to Twitter to complain about their ad.

Redeeming Features?

Were there any redeeming features of the ad? If I’m honest I’m not sure. It certainly cost a lot, and didn’t quite work. If any, I’d suggest the following may be redeeming features:

  1. Complaints about the ad itself do not necessarily mean it did not achieve its objective. Guinness’ objective is to increase the perception of “quality”. They may well have achieved that, even if people hated the ad. (to measure that, you’d have to survey a sample of people before/after seeing the ad, or a large sample of people who had seen it and a large sample who had not, and ask them questions about ‘quality’ & guinness, rather than specifically about the ad itself).
  2.  It proves you can nudge people to talk about you via advertising – even if they’re saying negative stuff. Admittedly, plenty have already proved that. And Guinness themselves – whose last ad has more than 4 million views on Youtube – have proved it themselves too.
  3. In the main: People dislike advertising (or say they dislike it). It’s difficult to get away with telling people to talk about your ad and not have them talk about it in negative terms.
  4. It’s pretty clear from the many, many Twitter comments that the failure here was down to execution. That’s something that’s very, very testable, and thus they can avoid similar failures in future by better testing. Slightly ironic, as the advertorial itself was based around testing hypotheses.

Thanks to Guinness for trying this out – it’s always good to see people trying out different things.

And, if you have any comments or thoughts, do leave a comment.

Daily Mail Comment UX Update

The Daily Mail are testing an update to their Comment UX.

It’s easy to ignore comments, and their usefulness, but take a look at a few of the Daily Mail’s articles, count up the number of comments & the number or ratings on those comments, make an estimate as to what percentage of people bother to rate comments, and it very quickly dawns on you that they make hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Daily Mail every year.

Here’s an example 24 hour snapshot of their comment ratings:

ratings

ie. They regularly get 2.5 million comment ratings in a day. Another way of looking at that: they’re close to a billion comment ratings per year. Therefore, whereas a change to comments style on most sites would be a trivial tweak, for the Daily Mail it can have a big effect.

Old vs New

Here’s the same set of comments in their old style & their new style (click for larger images if you like):

Old Style:

dmold

New Style:

dmnew

The main differences here are:

  1. Inclusion of headshots where available.
  2. They now split out ‘positive’ & ‘negative’ comments, rather than just showing the aggregate.
  3. The text is much larger.
  4. Username leads now, and is clickable through to user’s profile.
  5. Times are relative to the current time, rather than being timestamps.

The more prominent profile info, and the headshot are quite telling. I wonder if at some point they will do a bit more with profile pages themselves? There’s a big opportunity for newspaper sites to get ‘user generated’ news commentary right.

Extra Social Prompts:

Move the mouse over the comments & you get two new extras.

  1. Top right is a small down arrow that allows you to report abusive comments.
  2. Below the comment a block of prominent ‘share’ icons appear.

replique rolex enlightened through latter nineteenth century eu good sized train location in your space of this cheese dome. the tasks are the functions involving rolex https://luxuryreplicawatch.to. fake audemars piguet royal oak offshore price list. vape reddit is literally popular by using greatest anyone. cheap vapesstores.ru delivers the heart and soul of the discovery. luxury and fashion come with omegawatch.to gently. cheap vape under $60 enthusiastic by a very late 25th century euro larger railway trail station inside of the corridor of a ribs dome. rolex swiss https://www.golden-state-warriors.ru/ is designed for efficiency together with pleasure. http://www.stellamccartneyreplica.ru is one of the premier watchmakers in the world. best swiss https://www.sevenfriday.to/ artists hold amazing perspective and also abundant creativeness.

The Daily Mail have an interesting issue in that their articles are hugely commented on, but surprisingly ‘undershared’. This may help address that a little.

威而鋼
-full wp-image-361″ src=”http://p.barker.dj/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/overroll.gif” alt=”overroll” width=”582″ height=”123″>

The’ve also tacked a little call to action to visit their ‘stats’ page onto the end of comments:

whois

 If you’ve never visited their stats page before, it’s very much worth a look: http://dailymail.co.uk/stats. If you were a sensible competitor, you’d have been following their stats for the last few months and would be able to see whether this UX update has increased/decreased the likelihood of users leaving and rating comments.

Not Provided Kit

Download the free ‘Not Provided’ kit.

Since October 2011, Google has gradually hidden away data about the keywords used by people to find your site.

The “Not Provided” Kit is a set of simple add-ons for Google Analytics (put together by me – @danbarker) to help you understand what’s happening now that data is absent. It won’t fix the problem, but it may bring other insight around ‘not provided’ visits.

Kit Contents:

  1. Your Current Percentage: A single-chart dashboard showing your current ‘not provided’ percentage (ie. how much open data remains).
  2. Full Dashboard: A full dashboard of trends for ‘not provided’, including graphs, metrics, and breakdowns by browser, device, etc.
  3. Detailed Report: A more detailed custom report showing full landing page info for not provided traffic.
  4. ‘Not Provided’ Segment: An advanced segment allowing you to see any Google Analytics reports for just‘not provided’ traffic.
  5. ‘Keyword Known’ Segment: An advanced segment showing any report only where Google organic keyword data was known.
  6. A ‘Not Google’ Segment: This ‘Non-Google’ organic search segment shows you data only where you dohave perfect keyword data from other search engines that you can act on.

» Install the Google Analytics ‘Not Provided’ Kit Now.

(Click the above link to add all/some of the 6 addons to any Google Analytics account)

Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter (@danbarker) with any questions, feedback, or requests for additions.

Extras:

  1. ‘Not Provided Other Search Terms’ Segment: This only works if your account has ‘visitors segments’ enabled. If users visit your site via ‘Not Provided’, but have also visited the site at another time using known keywords, this shows those. Install this.
  2. Not Provided Other Channels’ Segment: again, this only works for accounts with ‘visitor segments’ enabled. This shows data where users have visited yo樂威壯
    ur site through other channels where they have also visited via ‘Not Provided’ at some point. Install this.

Even More Extras:

The Hypocrisy of Big News Sites on State Surveillance in Seven Images

Every large news site is preaching about the NSA PRISM programme, and Obama’s apparent hypocrisy in monitoring his citizens.

What none of them mention explicitly is that they themselves use hundreds of technologies to track their readers both on their own sites, and as their readers move around the web.

Here are 6 images showing some of the tracking tecknologies on big news sites, plus 1 comparison chart of 68 technologies used across 10 large news sites. Note the ironic headlines on a few of these articles.

The Wall Street Journal

The WSJ says ‘US Collects Vast Data Trove’. Take a look at the 44 tracking technologies used on that page alone:

wsj

 Washington Post

The Washington Post talks about ‘sweeping surveillance’ on a page with 19 tracking technologies.

washpost

Cnet

Admittedly this is an old Cnet article, but take a look at their 20+ tracking technologies:

cnet

The Atlantic

The Atlantic often publish articles on privacy. Virtually their entire front page is devoted to the NSA PRISM programme at present. They themselves use a whole host of tracking tools, both directly & via their many social plugins.

theatlantic

GigaOm

No hypocrisy between the headline & the tracking technologies used by Om Malik, but interesting nonetheless.

gigaom

The New York Times

And double-irony from the NYT here. Take a look at the ad that’s automatically displayed. ‘2 friends are spying on you’, while the page itself has 17 tracking tools recording data about you.

nyt

Comparison of 68 Technologies Used by UK News Sites:

Finally, here’s a comparison I put together for an Econsultancy article (who use 13 technologies themselves) covering this:

News Sites Combined

The tools used for most of this were the excellent Ghostery, and Google Chrome’s Developer Tools.

Do share this with others if you have the chance. Outside of tech circles, I’m not sure many peopl犀利士
e realise quite how much of this is going on.

Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and Data Literacy

The biggest finance/data story of the month is that “Bloomberg snooped on Goldman Sachs”. Here is one of the dozens (thousands) of articles covering it: http://theweek.com/article/index/244050/is-bloomberg-news-spying-on-goldman-sachs

What’s the fuss about?

This is the summary of the story:

  1. Most banks & financial institutions use Bloomberg systems to gather information about financial markets.
  2. Bloomberg record data on who accesses those systems, when they do it, and what they do.
  3. Bloomberg’s journalists were using that information, and analysis of how their terminals were being used, as the basis of news articles.
  4. Goldman figured this out, and confronted Bloomberg accusing them of snooping.

Gawker (very foolishly in my opinion) say this about it:

“The whole thing sounds like the News of the World scandal, except if the targets were paying Rupert Murdoch $20,000 for the privilege.”

Here’s the irony:

What is Goldman Sachs’ advice on how companies should use data?

In October of last year, Goldman Sachs themselves were crowing that ‘data’ was the biggest opportunity for companies.

Their co-head of Internet Investment Banking at the time put out a series of videos covering this. Here was his (paraphrased by venturebeat) advice on what companies needed in order to harness this opportunity:

  1. Access to proprietary data,
  2. Wherewithal/knowledge of what to do with it/how to process it, and
  3. The right relationship with the consumer in order to apply the data.

Think through the 3 of those, and compare that to what Bloomberg did.

Of course, there are enormous marketing & trust implications with using & exposing customer data in the way Bloomberg did, but it’s madness (verging on ‘data illiterate’) that Goldman Sachs would simply assume that zero analysis was taking place on how their staff were using Bloomberg terminals, especially so as both Goldman & Bloomberg are in the business of data and analysis. And even more so again because Bloomberg’s contractual terms allowed them to capture and analyse the data.

6 Free Realtime Google Analytics Dashboards

Here is a collection of 6 free ‘Realtime‘ Google Analytics Dashboards that you can use for any website. The 6 Dashboards are as follows:

  1. Realtime Overview
  2. Realtime Channels
  3. Realtime Geographic Info
  4. Realtime Organic Search
  5. Realtime Content
  6. Realtime Social Media

Each of the dashboards is designed to be functional in the real world, and each is designed to be useful for any type of site from Ecommerce, to Magazine, to Lead Generation, etc.

There’s a full description of each below, along with a link to the individual dashboards. At the end of the post there’s a link allowing you to add all the dashboards at once to any Google Analytics account.

1. Realtime Overview Dashboard

dashboard---overview

This ‘Realtime Overview’ dashboard covers:

  • Total Active Visitors (with % breakdown by medium)
  • New vs Returning Visitors (broken down by medium)
  • Top Active Pages (by URL)
  • Top Active Pages (by Title)
  • Pageviews (Last 30 Minutes)
  • Pageviews (Last 60 Seconds)

Add it to any Google Analytics profile with this link: http://bit.ly/rtoverview

2. Realtime Channel Dashboard

dashboard---channels

 The ‘Channel’ dashboard covers:

  • Organic Search Visitors
  • Paid Search Visitors
  • Direct Visitors
  • Referral Visitors
  • Social Visitors
  • ‘Other’ Visitors (ie. the remainder outside of the above, which may include email traffic, and any other tagged campaigns)
  • Medium Breakdown (top 10)
  • Social Source Breakdown

Add the ‘Channel’ dashboard to any Google Analytics profile with this link: http://bit.ly/rtchannels

3. Realtime Geographic Dashboard

dashboard---geographic

 The ‘Geographic’ dashboard covers:

  • Returning visitors currently on the site
  • New visitors currently on the site
  • Visual breakdown by country
  • Trendline of activity on the site over the last 30 minutes
  • Top 10 Countries with current active visitors
  • Top 10 Cities with current active visitors

Add the ‘Geographic’ dashboard to any Google Analytics profile using this link: http://bit.ly/rtgeographic

4.Realtime Organic Search Dashboard

dashboard---organic-search

 The ‘Organic Search’ dashboard contains the following:

  • Active Visitors (By Search Engine)
  • Search Visitor Trend (Last 30 Minutes)
  • Top 10 Keywords (All)
  • Top 10 Keywords (Non-Brand) – click the ‘pencil’ and replace ‘YOURBRANDHERE’ with your brand name then hit ‘save’.
  • Top 10 Keywords (Brand) – again, click the pencil icon & replace ‘YOURBRANDHERE’ with your brand name then hit ‘save’.

As you can see from the graphic, I’ve added ‘(EDIT THIS)’ into the title of a couple of the widgets there. Those are on the ‘Brand’ and ‘Non-Brand’ specific widgets. To edit those, move the mouse over each and a small pencil will appear at the top right of the widget. Click that, and then you’ll see  I’ve placed ‘YOURBRANDHERE’ in one of the filters. By changing that to your most used brand name(s), it will then filter based on your own brand terms.

To add this to any Google Analytics profile, use this link: http://bit.ly/rtorganic

(note: I haven’t included a PPC dashboard, as I thought it would be fairly easy for you to copy the ‘organic’ dashboard and make your own. Do drop a comment if you’d like me to add one though).

5. Realtime Content Dashboard

dashboard---top-content

This is a slightly different dashboard – as you can see from the above. It simply lists the top 10 currently viewed pages on the site, segmented by various different means. From that you can answer the questions ‘what are visitors looking at on my site right now?’, ‘what are visitors from social media looking at right now?’, etc. You may wish to add others for your key channels.

It was tempting to add lots of other widgets here for the sake of it, but I thought this the most useful format.

To add this to any Google Analytics profile, use this link: http://bit.ly/rtcontent

6. Realtime Social Dashboard

dashboard---social

The realtime ‘Social’ dashboard contains:

  • Number of active visitors from social media (with a % bar showing split by social network)
  • Number of returning vs new visitors from social media.
  • Social visitor trend over the last 60 seconds.
  • Social visitor trend over the last 30 minutes
  • Top pages currently being viewed by visitors who arrived via social media
  • Top social sources. (eg. Twitter, Facebook)
  • Top cities where visitors are currently active on the site via social media

To add the social dashboard to any Google Analytics profile, use this link: http://bit.ly/rtsocial

Add All the Dashboards at Once

You can add all of these dashboards at once to any Google Analytics profile you choose, simply by logging in to Google Analytics & then hitting this link: http://bit.ly/6realtimedashboards . (note: there’s a small bug in Google Analytics meaning it will give you an error message the first time you do this. Submit it again & you should be fine.)

Any requests or questions?

Do drop me a note if you’d like me to add any others, or if you have any questions. I send out an occasional email containing info like this. Enter your email address below if you’d like me to include you on the list.

Job Ads for Amazon’s First Retail Store

Amazon seem to be preparing to open their first retail store according to recruitment ads starting to appear on the web. If the ads are genuine, the store will apparently be in East London, in Westfield Stratford (the same site as the London Olympics).

There has been no official announcement from Amazon, and this hasn’t been covered on any news sites or blogs as far as I can see. But the ads seem genuine, and recruiters are apparently proactively approaching people via email.

The benefits listed in the job ads are fairly generous compared to similar jobs:

  • Up to £35,000 a year (around $53k)
  • 6 weeks paid holiday.
  • 25% employee discount.

Jeff Bezos talked about opening retail stores late last year, saying “We want to do something that is uniquely Amazon, but we haven’t found the idea yet.” The ads talk of the store as a ‘showroom’, and say applicants will be ‘actively enticing’ into the store. The job description also leans heavily on helping users with website info (selling, order info, using search functions), so it sounds like the store will be as much a ‘helper store’ for the online business as it will be a shop in its own right.

Here is a screengrab of one of the job ads. Judge for yourself whether it’s genuine:

amazonado

(you can view a cached version of the ad here)

Amazon opened a London ‘development centre’ last year, saying they did so because “the capital is brimming with world-class tech talent.” Apple previously opened their first European store in London (Regent Street), and Google opened their first ever retail outlet on London’s Tottenham Court Road in late 2011.

Do get in touch with me or leave a comment if you have any further info.

The Guardian’s Terms & Conditions: Worse than Instagram?

The Guardian have launched a new ‘user content’ site in collaboration with EE called “Guardian Witness”, they are now urging users to post their content to the site at https://witness.guardian.co.uk. The site itself is nice and slick, as you’d expect if EE’s tech team has been involved.

The official announcement is full of comments criticising The Guardian for asking for free content, accusing them of trying to build up a free picture library, etc.

But something else seemed strange to me: throughout the launch article they keep saying that you ‘still own the copyright’ of any content you post. I have read The Guardian’s Ts & Cs before, and that didn’t seem quite right to me, so I did a little more digging.

Here are some notes, plus the key ‘Instagramesque’ part of their terms & conditions:

“You still own the copyright”

As part of the terms and conditions for using the site, they say this:

“You or the owner of the content still own the copyright in the content sent to us”

They’ve also put together a fairly friendly set of frequently asked questions which explain: “You (or whoever created the content) own the copyright to the content which means that you control what others can do with it.”

In their article promoting the site, they also point out in the comments that “the copyright is, and remains with, the creator of content added to GuardianWitness…” and later on in the comments they again say “The creator of the submission always holds the copyright.”

But what do the Terms & Conditions actually say?

Reading the above quotes, you may expect that it means that you, when submitting content, still control exactly who has the ‘right to copy’ any content you post there. What they don’t say in the launch article itself is that, in one of the clauses in the terms and conditions, there is this 50 word snippet:

“…by submitting content to us, you are granting us an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully transferable, perpetual worldwide licence to use, publish and/or transmit, and to authorise third-parties to use, publish and/or transmit your content in any format and on any platform, either now known or hereinafter invented.”

 

Going back again through a few of the key points there:

  • Unconditional – there are zero conditions on how they can use your content.
  • Irrevocable – once you’ve posted content, you cannot ever stop them from using it.
  • Royalty-Free – they won’t pay you anything.
  • Fully transferable – they can in turn pass the right to use your content on to whoever they choose.
  • Perpetual – the right lasts forever.
  • Worldwide – there are no geographical restrictions.
  • Any format and on any platform – your content can be used for anything. They also “reserve the right to cut, crop, edit” your content elsewhere in the terms.

In other words, they may be promoting this by saying you still ‘own’ the copyright, and the FAQs may say they will endeavour to assist in various areas, but according to the terms & conditions The Guardian can do anything they like with your content once you have uploaded it.

They could sell your content, use it alongside ads (in fact the Guardian Witness site is in collaboration with an advertiser, so the content is by default being used as part of a third-party marketing campaign), they could allow anyone they choose to use your photos, videos, text, or any other ‘content’ you submit in any way they choose, and even if it is used commercially they never have to pay you.

How does this compare to Instagram?

This may all sound a vaguely similar to one of the complaints around the big Instagram Ts & Cs issue that blew up late last year. Oddly, one of the differences seems to be that The Guardian’s terms are slightly heavier than Instagram’s.

Here’s what The Guardian said about the Instagram issue in one of several articles about it:

“Instagram photos could be used in advertising, without reference to the owner, with all the payments going to Instagram. There is no opt-out from that use except to stop using the service and to delete your photos.”

The situation here is roughly similar, except that in The Guardian’s case you cannot opt out at all (even if you stop using the service). From the moment you post any content to Guardian Witness, you have granted them an “irrevocable, perpetual worldwide license”.

Keep that in mind when you read this advice, written by the excellent Jo Farmer in another Guardian article about user generated content following the Instagram fallout:

“Brands might be thinking that they can then use that content in future marketing, which might lead to a temptation to write something in the user terms and conditions to the effect that, “any content submitted by users may be used by the brand for any purpose without any payment to the user”.

The lessons we are learning from Instagram and other social media channels is to avoid any ham-fisted attempt to acquire such wide licence rights from your users in relation to their UGC.”

 

You can read the full terms here: https://witness.guardian.co.uk/terms.

Feedback very welcome on this, or do share this post if you think it would be of interest to others.

100 Digital Publishing Influencers

Here’s a list of ‘100 digital publishing influencers’, put together by:

1. Archiving tweets from the #digiconf13 hashtag.
2. Compiling a set of twitter stats for everyone using the hashtag.
3. Running that through peerindex’s (somewhat arbitrary) ‘influence’ ranking tools.

Drop me a note at @danbarker with any questions.

It’s not perfect, but it shows it’s fairly easy to go from nothing, to a rough picture of a group of influencers within a particular area without much trouble.

If you’d like to be added to the list, or have suggestions for some who should, do drop me a note at @danbarker

Google Analytics Realtime: 3 New Features

Google Analytics have updated their ‘Realtime’ features. There are 3 main updates:

  1. Realtime Dashboard Widgets.
  2. Realtime Event Reports.
  3. Realtime Segmentation by Desktop / Mobile / Tablet.

Here are some screengrabs & notes on each of the changes:

New Feature 1. Realtime Dashboard Widgets:

Google have added ‘realtime’ widgets to dashboards. The tool to add those looks like this:

realtimedash

Here’s  how they look within the dashboard:

sharpie

(minor note: ‘dimensions’ aren’t yet working for me there. I presume they’re fixing this)

New Feature 2. Realtime Events Reports

The second update that’s happened is ‘realtime events’ reports. If you have not used ‘events’ before, they allow you to track a犀利士
nything you like. As opposed to tracking pageviews or transactions, you may track ‘brochure downloads’ or ‘carousel interactions’, or ‘product added to bag’, or ‘checkout error’ or anything other activity that occurs on your website that you’d like to track.

Adding ‘realtime’ event reports is a very nice tweak, Here’s where it features in the menus:

rtes

And here’s how the report looks:

rtes

Below that is a table of all of the events that have triggered in the last 30 minutes, filterable by keyword. Those are broken down by ‘event category’ & ‘event action’.

I like this change for a few reasons:

  1. It’s really useful for sites that use events for key actions like goals. Rather than getting less meaningful realtime ‘pageview’ data, you can see the events that are important to your business in real time.
  2. An extension of that – you can now add events specifically to view their realtime numbers if that’s useful for you. For example, I’m launching ticket sales for a client. I only want to see ‘ticket sales’ in realtime. Under the regular realtime tracking that’s not really possible. If I fire a ‘ticket bought’ event, I can now monitor that in real time.
  3. It’s fantastic for testing event tracking. Any changes you make to your event tracking code, you can now check them instantly.

New Feature 3: Segmentation by Desktop / Mobile / Tablet

I’d missed this at first, until @thedanfries kindly pointed me to this Google+ post from Aaron Bradley. Realtime ‘Content’ reports now allow you to segment by Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet:

desktoptablet

Clicking on ‘Desktop’, ‘Mobile’ or ‘Tablet’ in the above example then drills down to show you only the content viewed by those device types, and updates the table of pageviews to reflect that.

 

These are 3 fairly subtle feature changes, but each really useful. I’ve already used ‘Event Tracking’ in particular to solve a couple of problems.