Anna Maria Social

Shirt and shoes are optional and drinking at noon is acceptable.

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Illustrations have been part of Abduzeedo since day one and after almost 10 years we can say that we have seen all sorts of styles and techniques.

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The New User Generated Community

Your audience is more than just a bunch of consumers walking around in circles. They're brand advocates waiting for the chance to feel like they make a differe…

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The Last Time Android and iOS Users Fought This Hard, Instagram Won.

For some reason, there has been this ongoing battle between iOS and Android users ever since Google’s platform went from a ridiculous idea to a viable option in the mobile industry. In reality both of these OS offer a specialized experience tailored toward the user which gives us all more choice with a device we check the equivalent of two working days a week. The best part of this “who really gives a crap” battle is how users from each side characterize the others.

The Android User:

You could be walking around with a Nexus 6, LG G4, or a Samsung Galaxy S6 edge and iPhone users will still group you as a Walmart prepaid, white wannabe rapper from the middle of Nebraska. Head on over to the kwik-stop to grab some Boone’s Farm, grape flavored cigar wraps, and scratch offs. You need some time with the boys away from the trailer with your eight cousins and your mom's boyfriend of the week all trying to watch Maury. To top it all off, you're stupid because this study with numbers and percentagessays so.

The iPhone User:

You bunch of sheep. Apple could add a function where licking your screen fires up iChat and you would be overjoyed with all the smeared saliva images of your friends. Just look at that tiny dog purse your boyfriend wearing“clothing designed for men” is holding! Don't worry about customizing or making your phone specific to your needs because you can just keep mashing the same paint-by-number screens with your face every time a “new exclusive, to iPhone,” feature packed update is released. Like killing your friends messaging app.

The first time these two, obviously everything in common, groups clashed over an app that was once ruled by iPhone users was Instagram. It grabbed over one million Android users on the first day and the fur went flying. If you were there, it was painfully obvious how hurt the original Instagram inhabitants felt having all these little green martian invaders. From the comments you would assume Mola Ram himself showed up and was ripping out those apple shaped hearts one by one.

It’s been awhile since an app with this amount of attention and promise has grabbed two entire user bases. Enter Periscope. Having recently released on Android most, but not all, of the original users must be having flashbacks to the days when all these weirdos showed up and just started throwing filters all over crappy pictures. “They’re just going to stream themselves peeing!” As awesome of a novelty account as that sounds, I doubt an Android user was the only person that had it cross their mind.

The battle will ensue and servants of the two kings of mobile OS will throw witty, but not reasonably thought out comments at each other hoping that they are not made of rubber, but glue. When the dust settles and all of us figure out that we're not that different, that we all enjoy this live streaming we can do together to learn more about and from each other, a new king will rise. One that never set foot in the battle.

Periscope will come out the winner in a battle over OS supremacy.

Remember all that fighting over Instagram? Well who’s laughing now.

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Just enjoying the water! #Florida #AnnaMariaIsland #Tampabay #Sarasota #Beach #saltlife #PureFlorida #LoveFL #Sea #BradentonArea #fishing

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Moderne Sans - Free Typeface by Marius Kempken

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Let’s All Stream a Little Stream.

We have a few players in the live streaming game, but what game exactly are they playing?

“Holy crap, I'm making a sandwich! I better stream this out to as many people as possible that have nothing better to do than watch me slather mayonnaise all over this rye bread!”

This might not be the first option that passes through your mind when using a live streaming app, but believe me, it’s going through someone's. The recent surge in mobile streaming has seen these apps utilized during conferences, mellow walks through parks, dinner preparation, and most notably an overpriced hugging match. The one thing that all of this randomness has in common, is getting a brief glimpse of life and the world around us through someone elses eyes.

Lets take a look at what we're getting ourselves into.

Periscope

Available on iTunes

“Periscope lets you broadcast live video to the world. Going live will instantly notify your followers who can join, comment and send you hearts in real time. The more hearts you get, the higher they flutter on the screen.”

Periscope has an aesthetic and UI that creates an ease of use that's also not bad to stare at for awhile. Like what you see streaming? Just keep hitting the hearts and everyone will recognize just how elated you are watching some Dachshunds butt while their owner cruises around the streets of NYC looking for a Starbucks. HavingTwitter in its corner will certainly help in the long run budget wise, but they also appear to be a stealthy team of developers with no plans to open the API to a third party any time soon. It’s been “coming soon to Android” for the past two months but just recently offered an email form after streams to be notified of the release. I personally have very few issues while using periscope although many users have quite the contrary to say about their experience.

Stre.am

Available on iTunes and Google Play

“Life is, and should be, unscripted. Stre.am encourages users to share moments, and not memories. From street soccer in Madrid to local band practices, users from around the world share unique moments every day.”

For being the lesser known of these three, Stre.am quite possibly has the best understanding of what people want instead of telling them what they want. For starters it streams in landscape instead of the self inflicted concussion induced byvertical filmography. While watching streams, you also have the option to choose one or the other based on your comment reading preference. With Stre.am not having the massive user base of a hundred-thousand people trying to get stream famous, it has become more of a community of unlikely friends sharing their personal stories. You could literally take ten streamers and have a cast for Suicide Squad and it would be believable. Finally this is on both major OS and works close to flawless which seems an impossible task for the other two.

Meerkat

Available on iTunes and Google Play

“Meerkat allows you to live stream video from your phone to all of your Twitter followers at once. Press ‘Stream’, and instantly your live video stream shows up in your follower’s Twitter feeds.”

Meerkat was the first of this new batch of streaming apps I started using right after the massive hype of SXSW. It didn't matter if I was on my iPhone or iPad, it just worked seamlessly without all the bells and whistles expected from apps these days. Meerkat had this shiny new social platform on lockdown and they would surely come away on top, until the “Android Beta Debacle”. My daily driver is a LG G3 so I was more than happy to get in on this action. I'm not sure what happened, but it seemed as if they just pushed out a pre-alpha “I’m just going to boil this linguine for two minutes” version.

I couldn't get a stream to last more than four seconds through six versions. That really is the main concept behind the app right? Were they trying to beat Periscope just to say they stuck their flag on Android first? The latest update 1.0.2 has vastly improved on many issues but still leaves the concern of what was behind the team's choice of forcing out a clearly subpar shell of its iOS counterpart.

Social Media, Content, and Marketing Live Streams

At this point it’s anyones guess as to which direction this type of media will take us after throwing advertising, marketing, and promotions in the mix. People are streaming to not only let people live vicariously through them, but also share a bit of themselves with the world. Pubs have iPads set up on the bar as people watching from all over participate in a friendly trivia night just by commenting. The fashion industry is using it to give us a backstage pass to an event we could never imagine attending. Live streaming is hardly a new idea, but it’s quite possibly the next way we communicate and share experiences with each other in this FoMo generation we’re in.

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Running around the tip of Bean Point. Anna Maria Island Florida.

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Stop Taking Pictures Of Food For Your Restaurant Social Media!

Yeah it’s food, we get it!

Food is fantastic! I eat it, you eat it, and mostly everyone else does or they would be dead and aren’t looking at your content anyway. Your customers love coming to your place for a reason, so why not show them why they need to come back. Hopefully they had a great first experience and if they didn't, maybe you should run a pawn shop.

It’s not rocket surgery- get retention.

Customer service may not be the easiest thing to do but it can have big rewards if your strategy is focused on the future instead of right now. I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years and the biggest thing that happens is people want surplus right away. That will never happen especially when you have to prove yourself against 200 people in the same area doing the same thing, keeping people alive in essence. Make your experience something people want. Be special!

Let your customers know everyone before they walk through the door.

I started a campaign called, “Having a drink with” that showcased all of our employees with their favorite drink and a quick Q&A about them. It was amazing to watch our engagement numbers go through the roof and people would come into the restaurant and ask for people by name because they felt they already knew them. They had an idea of where they were from, and of course their favorite drink. This helps the servers right away because they don’t have to initiate the conversation and on top of that, more times than not, they sold their drink.

UGC is incredible!

Unless you have a very reliable name, it’s going to be hard to start a hashtag so why not let people do it for you. Set up a banner near a very prominent point with an Instagram or Twitter logo and let the hashtags come to you. If your customers see the icon, they will use it. Maybe have them create a photo menu for you, make it a contest and throw out a gift card. People love free stuff and you get the content you need!

You can keep 96% of the people happy

I’m not talking about the people that sit at a dirty table and wonder why they don’t have service because I can’t even fathom doing that in general even if I wasn’t in this industry. Your job is to make what was going to be good even better and in this day and age of social, it needs to be in real time. Recently we had someone check in with the untappd app. It usually hits Twitter immediately and thats when you go to work. The person was drinking one of our local Darwin brews and us as the restaurant, and also the brewery, responded in real time. This person sat there and while drinking their beer, heard from the restaurant they were in and the brewery that crafted the beer in their hand. That is something a customer never forgets.

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I have trouble believing this Zoltar machine is really out of order.

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The 10 Commandments of User Interface Design  #infographic

[unionmetrics]

3. Everything is overworked (for now). This always happens when publishers try new formats: It happened on Snapchat Discover, too, where publishers are gradually learning not to OVER-package their videos, because social media abhors conspicuous professionalism. (Conspicuous earnestness is fine, as long as it mimics the network’s local dialect.) This will be fixed when publications just start publishing everything.

Notes on the Surrender at Menlo Park: The media finally signs up for a Facebook account | The Awl 

Part of the hilarious and informative CONTENT WARS series. Recommended reading. 

Emphasis added. 

(via unionmetrics)

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6 UGC Insights All Marketers Should Know

Last week, we partnered with Custora for a webinar on what brands can do to improve the customer journey, with a focus on customer acquisition and retention. Custora’s Tyson Ward provided in-depth analysis about customer lifetime value, while Brendan Lowry, marketing director at Curalate, and Amber Mulle, social media strategist at Sigma Beauty, presented valuable insights about user-generated content. As an ecommerce-driven brand, Sigma Beauty relies heavily on UGC to show consumers how their makeup products look in real life. “It’s useful because our customers can’t go to big-box retailers to try our products on,” Amber said during the webinar. Sigma isn’t the only brand that has discovered the value of UGC. Increasingly, it’s becoming a must for brands that want to effectively engage with today’s highly visual consumer. The full presentation is available at the end of the post, but for a quick recap, here are a few key takeaways marketers should keep in mind.

Keep reading

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Perfect is Boring

by Daniel Patrick Simmons

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Just hanging out #annamariaisland #florida #tampabay #LoveFL #Sarasota #beach

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Morning on Anna Maria Island, Florida