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Top tips for engaging an audience on social media before, during and after an event

Whether you’re holding a music festival, business conference or educational event, the power of social media before, during and after an event can really help to drive ticket sales, engage an audience and encourage feedback.

We were lucky enough to join a masterclass at Social Media Week 2014, hosted by successful online ticketing service Eventbrite, who shared their unique insights and tips on how to truly engage an audience before, during and after an event.

Before

According to Eventbrite, 50% of people engage with hosts and fellow attendees before an an event takes place. This is a clear opportunity for you to drive interactions and generate leads prior to the event.

Build anticipation and excitement leading up to an event by gradually revealing key information about the event days, weeks or months prior to the event.

Use various digital channels to support social media efforts including online media, social advertising and email marketing.

Relive previous or similar events to grab attention of those who have yet to experience it and really promote what makes your event unmissable. Be inspiring.

Work in harmony with event sponsors, special guests or speakers to further spread the word of the event with the potential to acquire members of their audience who may not have known about the event before.

Eventbrite shared their experience of pre-event promotion on social media and stated that a social share can generate up to £6.13 of additional ticket sale revenue with £3.00 of that revenue being generated via Twitter. A key indication that investment in social media can really make a difference to the overall success of the event.

During

Almost 75% of an audience at an event can be fearful of speaking in public! It’s therefore essential that you are able to provide your audience with the means of communicating with you without any added pressure. for example, via social networks.

Nowadays, we have access to platforms such as Sli.do and Tint which will provide you with the tools to let your audience engage and participate with you through social media. Social media walls allow for content coming through various different social channels to be displayed at your event and give speakers or hosts the opportunity to read and answer questions.

Encourage your audience to engage with your event by setting a carefully considered hashtag that will allow users to tag their posts, making event-specific conversations easy to follow. The mentions, comments and data shared with event organisers can be carefully monitored by the event organiser themselves and can later be reused to emphasise the success of an event.

Developing an app is also a great way to engage an audience during an event and can also help improve the overall experience. Digital tickets or passes can be made available within the app as well as an event schedule, event location details and links to social channels can be integrated into one easy to use platform.

From our own experience at Dog, we’re well aware of how successful implementing platforms such as a live social media wall can be. Dog's own digital festival which took place in Glasgow in June, achieved excellent levels of engagement. We used social aggregation service Tint to create a live social media feed that was projected onto walls at the event. The social wall aggregated content from Twitter and Instagram that used a dedicated event hashtag (#DFest2014) and was used to display our guests' experiences, questions, photos and feedback throughout the night. The high engagement levels caused the event hashtag trended locally during the evening.

After

While the nature of a live event is something to be cherished, the power of social media allows our audience to relive the best moments and gives those who missed out the opportunity to experience some of what they never got to see.

Firstly ensure that during the event, audiences both at the event and following the event online are clearly directed or informed on how they can reflect on the event after - many missed opportunities for social interaction are due to a lack of direction to the content which will be available after the event takes place.

Short video content that highlights the key points of the event will be well received and easy to consume in a digital space.

There’s further opportunity to connect with missed consumers. Those who chose not to buy tickets could reconsider for your next event with strategic and well-thought out social content which highlights why the event was so worthwhile and what attendees got from it. Positive attendee feedback is beneficial for this.

There are many opportunities and ways in which you can drive the success of an event before, during and after but the important thing to remember is that it needs to be relevant to your audience, the content is there to inspire and encourage your audience and that it is reflective of your brand.

For more information on making your event socially integrated, get in touch with our social media team today!

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9 tips for storytelling on social media

Your social media audience follows, on average, 6 brands via social channels, making it difficult to get your brand into the chosen group.

Whether you’re a big brand or start-up business, there are ways to get your brand noticed and stand out above the rest. Sometimes all it really takes is a good story!

Here are some simple steps to successful story telling on social:

Establish what your overall goals are for your business and how they can be translated online. Is your aim to gain brand awareness or generate leads?

Think about how you want to make your audience feel.  Connecting to the emotive side of your audience can be very powerful and could help them relate to your brand on a deeper level.

Who are you as a brand?  Failures in brand storytelling are often down to a lack of established personality and tone of voice. People need something that they can take away from your brand - an understanding of what your brand is trying to achieve and who they want to connect to.

Discover who and where your audience are. Maybe you think you’re appealing to an age group of 25-35 year old working mothers but have you really done the research and pinpointed the real data? And if so, are you connecting with them on the right channel? Yes, everyone uses Facebook but perhaps your audience are most engaged and inspired on Pinterest.

Find the plot of your story. Storytelling is about having that emotional connection and being able to inspire - go outside the norm and don’t focus your research on the obvious i.e. Facebook Insights. Look towards other mediums that could make your social story unique.

What outcomes do you want from your story? Think about the type of return you would want to see from telling your story. Is it to draw in new consumers? Or to collate feedback from your existing consumers?

Keep it emotional, sociable and shareable. The rise of sites like Buzzfeed made us realise that people relate to content that they can recognise themselves in. They might look at an article called “29 awkward moments that can only happen at work” and think “oh that happened to me recently, I'll share it on Facebook".

The power of delight. Recognition of your consumers and their needs is something that you should be talking about. It can be something as little as acknowledging their interaction with you on Twitter with a personable reply or actually taking physical action with something and making a statement, like surprising a customer with a gesture. Only recently, a British comedian tweeted that he would love a bit of pizza while on a train journey. Domino's Pizza heard his call and managed to deliver it to him at the next station. This became a viral hit and is proof that making a statement like that can have a profound effect on your company’s social story.

And finally, measure and improve. Take a step back and look at your activity on social on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and determine what stories are working for you. Highlight the impact of what you’re doing and consider ways that you can take it further.

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What is Native Advertising and how can you use it to your advantage?

Let’s start with a basic definition of Native Advertising:

"A form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed".

Take a read at our blog piece on Buzzfeed for an example of native advertising.

Native ads are intended to match the visual design of the experience they live within and look and feel to the average online user as natural content.

They can come in many shape or size including in-feed native ads, search and promotional listings, content recommendation widgets, and can be developed into customised content.

We live in a generation where the media consumption is changing to meet our digital lives. A common image see across our daily lives is that of a face buried deep into a phone. Mobile is quickly becoming a lead in delivering information to us on a day to day basis so we, as advertisers need to consider ways in which our content can be consumed to reflect a digital world.

Something which is becoming more common on both desktop and mobile platforms is the implementation of ‘the feed’. It’s a scroll of information more commonly seen on the likes of our social feeds and on media sites such as The Guardian.

Content is now being presented to these consumers of information through a simple headline and thumbnail format, reducing the depth of the content but delivering the crucial points through short and snappy titles.

Interestingly, content consumption has actually increased since the introduction of feeds with headlines being more influential than the article itself. A study by Sharethrough showed that although people may have been retweeting headlines on Twitter, there was no correlation between the number of retweets and the clicks on links. This is obviously indicating to us that people are wanting more and more of their content in short-form.

This leads us to think whether it's more beneficial to deliver native ads which have strong headlines that tell the story that could have a stronger impact on your audience. This could potentially become the new normal for brands - spreading meaningful stories through headlines.

From this we can develop new content strategies:

Embrace the placement

Develop a new content palette - reconsider where your content will be seen, reaching out to audience who revolve around social media and feeds.

Create a more modern marketing mix

Understand the variables related to it

For more information on native advertising, get in touch with our online media team today!

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How to build lasting & meaning relationships through social media management

Social media management tools are are essential for any business with an active social media presence nowadays. As social media marketers, we’re well aware that they're necessary for developing and maintaining good relationships with your consumers as well as obtaining key insights about your social media audience.

There are hundreds of tools available to us such as Sprout Social, Simply Measured, Engagor and many more. They all have their own unique features and ways of delivering essential data to help inform and improve your social strategy. Often, these tools include social listening functions where you are able to input keywords into a system that are reflective of your brand and pull in the data that highlights what consumers around the globe could potentially be saying about your brand.

Some include competitor analysis features and deep listening functions that allow you to determine where and when your consumers are talking about you.

These are crucial elements that we would recommend any business takes into consideration when developing or progressing their social strategy. Knowing what time your audience is most active could help you improve engagement; knowing where they are posting from could help you tailor your content to key target audiences and finding customers who are talking about your brand or products (but not necessarily talking to you directly) could help you increase customer acquisition by showing them that you're listening and care.

Another benefit that social management tools provide is the ability to fully monitor who is talking to you across the breadth of your social media presence. Being aware of customer interaction, however big or small, is an opportunity for your brand to further engage with that consumer and show your appreciation for their attention.

Customers want to have real human conversations on social networks, so listen to what they are saying about your brand, product or service and tailor your response accordingly. Automation is not the answer here, keep it personable.

It’s also important to remember that whoever is in the driving seat of your social media response team needs a strategy to answer the variation of comments, requests or complaints coming through to your channel. They have the tricky job of providing timely responses that are accurate and appropriate, often with minimal approval or oversight. Developing and continually evolving a social customer service and escalation strategy will help your brand to achieve consistency and give the consumer a real expectation of what to expect from you in any given situation.

For more information on social media management tools or customer service on social media, get in touch with our social media team today!

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Everything we do in social is really about experience

As the world changes around us, we need to do everything we can to keep up to date with it and that’s something we’re well aware of in a digital environment.

We attended a #SMW14 discussion today where the co-founder of Poke London quoted Darwin, stating “survival of the fitted”. It’s a quote often misinterpreted as “survival of the fittest”, taking away what Darwin had intended - to be about things that adapt to the current environment and can take shape and adapt to their surroundings.

He used this quote to emphasise how crucial it is for a business within a digital environment to take hold of things that our shaping the way in which we live.

For now “social is everything” - is there part of our world that isn't somewhat connected to our online communities, whether they’re 3rd party reviews, news stories or product information? Almost everyone and everything has a digital presence in some shape or form. Businesses must aim to use this to their advantage.

Nicolas from Poke went on to discuss his own product innovation that developed its story and success through the world of social media. He designs energy efficient bulbs that have no other purpose that that of an ordinary bulb but are more aesthetically pleasing and would be considered as more creative than your day-to-day bulb.

He was driven by the fact that something which is so commonly associated with ideas and inspiration is so unappealing, bland and simple. It was there he decided to make his bulbs something a little more inspiring to look at.

This product began as an idea on crowd-funding community Kickstarter and by using creative shareable photography like the examples above, the project grew a large audience. The lightbulb was to be understood as an object that would help shape more beautiful and exciting fixtures around it and the company themselves were keen to see what others would do with them.

Over time, the bulb's fan-base grew, with help from from visual communities and social networks such as Instagram. Owners of the bulb were encouraged to share how they've incorporated the bulbs, which in turn helped drive new customers.

The key learnings from the Plumen bulb is that it’s vitality on social media has been key to its success and helped push the growth of the product. It It's the simple stories like this that we can live by - the simplicity of blending in to an environment and using it to your best advantage which has helped drive its success.

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Social Advertising and the Opportunities

Something I was particularly keen to get involved in at #SMW14 was social advertising.

To a digital marketer and more to the point a social media marketer, social advertising is something that is vital to help drive success in a competitive online environment. It helps to push a brand to the right people socially, it improves your reach and can drive stronger engagement from your audience.

Microsoft were in attendance and shared some insight into some of their most successful social advertising campaigns (as well as some of their worst) but what stuck out to me was their confidence, which allowed them to be bold with their advertising.

Not too long ago, Microsoft used Twitter to promote their Nokia Lumia smartphone, using the hashtag #LoveMyLumia with the goal of encouraging customers to share and engage with the brand. This campaign was supported by a ‘promoted trend’ on Twitter.

What made this campaign so brave was the fact that they chose to promote their hashtag on Twitter and encourage brand interaction the very same day Apple announced it’s latest products at their keynote speech.

While they admit that some people thought it was the worst idea they’d come up with, I thought that it was actually pretty smart. On a day where their product and campaign messaging would have normally gone unnoticed, they pushed it to the forefront and let it tower above the rest. So whether the sentiment was negative or positive on that day, there could be no denial that they pulled in the attention they needed and weren't going to go unheard.

Microsoft saw an opportunity to challenge a major competitor and fully raised their game using social advertising.

During their talk, they shared some of their top tips and gave an insight into what drives them to make such big choices with their advertising strategy:

Trust your intuition - if you think it’s a good idea then stick with it, but keep in mind wider goals and objectives and don’t be disheartened by negative opinions. You can’t win them all.

Be reactive and community ready - stay on top of what’s happening within your community and beyond and be ready to act on something if you believe your audience will engage or relate to it.

Have an 'always on' budget with your agency that will allow you to be reactive and push your brand, product or campaign message out as quickly as possible.

Today, we realised that taking risks and leaps of faith when it comes to social advertising could draw more attention than you might expect and could potentially drive your efforts further.

It’s important to remember that you don’t always have to be the brand who gets the ball rolling. Instead you can be given the opportunity to make the most of the situation and take on your competitors creatively.

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Have you considered Buzzfeed as an advertising outlet?

You might have noticed sponsored posts on Buzzfeed in the past few months but have you seriously considered using the site to promote your own brand?

Buzzfeed is known to most of us as that funny site you see cropping up on your newsfeed that has funny lists about what cats do or 61 things you didn't know about the Friends TV show... but actually there’s a lot more to it than that!

Buzzfeed has over 150 million unique visitors, much of which is driven by social media and over 75% of its content is shared via social networks. To quote Buzzfeed: “we take units of funny and people share it” - that’s pretty impressive, right?

Well there’s more. What is actually pretty clever is that Buzzfeed are so good at creating shareable content that they believe there are more ways for you as a business to share your brand message without shoving it down people’s necks. You should be able to give your consumers what they want by hiding your advertising strategies within engaging and interesting editorials.

Some examples include well-known Australian beer brand Fosters, who cleverly encouraged social sharing of their brand with a promoted editorial that listed 11 summer food hacks for men. It wasn't overly focused on the product itself but it was something their target audience could relate to and that’s what made it effective.

Buzzfeed believe that we are “in a new era of advertising”, it’s not all about your brand any more. We shouldn't be forcing our products on to consumers but rather entertaining, engaging and educating them in more subtle ways.

They believe that “it’s great content that wins everything”. Do you agree?

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What's the difference between a Social Media Manager and a Community Manager?

This week, Dog Digital are in attendance at Social Media Week in London. We kick-started #SMW14 with a fantastic Google Hangout with social media management company Hootsuite, where they discussed the difference between a Community Manager and a Social Media Manager.

It’s easy to group both these roles together but interestingly, there are some very key differences that makes them different:

The role of the Social Media Manager is essentially to develop and curate content, build networks and be the activator of social communities. This is a role that has become more common in recent years and is only set to grow. Year on year there has already been a 50% growth in the acquisition of social media managers across a spectrum of different businesses.

However, the Community Manager has been ever-present in both the online and offline environments. Community Managers are your brand ambassadors, whether that’s on the shop floor or on social media. They are the people who are there to develop and maintain lasting customer relationships.

So what do these roles entail in the longer-term?

The Social Media Manager

Social Media Managers are responsible for helping your business meet wider goals that aren't restricted to a social environment but will have an impact on the business as a whole.

They are listeners and can spot opportunities as well as disasters before they strike. A good Social Media Manager is in tune with their audience and is able to react effectively and efficiently.

They create and curate content that will essentially lead to some sort of value for your business, such as new follower acquisition, strong engagement or conversions.

The Community Manager

Community Managers are there to add value - while your Social Media Manager is responsible for creation of content, the Community Manager can help inspire, educate and entertain through continued and nurtured conversations with your audience.

They are the moderators of your community who are there to ensure guidelines are upheld and to help facilitate topics but also to help steer conversations towards a topic.

They are also there to gain insight into a community, gaining valuable customer insight, sentiment and feedback.

It’s clear that both of these roles are important to an overall social strategy but what are your thoughts? Do you agree there’s a need for both roles or should both they be integrated into one?

Share your thoughts with us!

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Facebook Ad Scheduler

Facebook has recently added an exciting new feature to Power Editor that further enables advertisers to target the right customers, at the right time. Similar to that of Google Adwords dayparting function, the ad scheduler allows advertisers to pinpoint times of day and days of the week that will be most effective for a particular ad campaign.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Facebook advertising; previously, when setting up a Facebook advertising campaign there was only the option to schedule a start and end date. In order to have ads run at particular times of the day, advertisers would be required to manually turn them on and off. Therefore, campaigns typically run 24x7 and ultimately waste impressions for times when conversions are extremely low.

The introduction of ad scheduling allows advertisers to choose what hours and days of the week their ads will be displayed and eliminate undesirable times. The new feature also allows advertisers to compare and contrast how a campaign’s ads perform at different times of the day, ensuring they reach the target audience during peak conversion times, potentially saving on costs, gaining more clicks and limiting waste.

The Facebook ad scheduler is really simple to use, however it is not available on the Ad Creation tool that most people work with and can only be accessed through Power Editor for the time being. The feature is also only enabled for campaigns using lifetime budgets and not daily budgets, which is not a major problem but may be an issue for some advertisers.

Nevertheless, ad scheduling brings a whole host of new targeting opportunities and is a welcome addition to Facebook’s ad tools.

For a step-by-step guide on how to use the new ad scheduler, E-Consultancy has posted a useful article here.

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Why do we use CSS Grid Frameworks?

In the world of web development, particularly front end, you need a consistent structure across the face of your site and while everyone has their own methods there’s never been a box standard grid system.

At Dog we have seen structures that would help enhance the build implementation process a lot faster but there are grids out there are also very complex and harder to implement. In this article I will briefly explain what the purpose of Grids is, what the best methods are and give my thoughts on whether having more columns is a good or a bad thing.

In simple terms a grid system enables you to build shape and form around your designs. A grid system is used to help organise and maintain a consistent look and feel that arranges your content without it looking out of place.

Without site structure, you would run into problems such as time constraints, design issues and you have to take more time to adapt and build more bespoke components which adds towards the overall cost of a project.

With structure using CSS / Grid Frameworks, you have good solid foundation that provides consistency, symmetric harmony, less stress about browser capability issues and highly improves the development evolution of your project.

A lot of grid frameworks work to as low as 10 / 12 column layouts which tend to be the most popular choice. As poet Robert Browning once said “Less is more…” and in this case the less columns the more innovative you can be within your timescale / budget. There’s also is less code which means more speed and overall better performance, however, the more columns you add to the grid the more difficult it becomes to manage, taking more time to design, build and implement.

The BBC GEL Grid is a good example and does work when fully implemented to your site but you will require more time to build around using that frame work.

The image on the below shows that the BBC Gel grid is made up of 61 columns of 16px wide - a lot more than that 12 grid version by 960gs.

You can make modules / components with more desirable grid widths than a 12 grid system but in the long run will require more maintenance and new components / plugins which can take its toll on other parts of the website and might not fit to specifications.

For the 12 grid system (960gs) I have used one of Dog’s award winning website “Scottish Fire & Rescue” which won the Public Sector Communications Awards 2013 for Best Website.

The black faded stripes represent the columns of the 12 grid and you can see how it structures the content with your content blocks, side navigation, article content and carousel all structured using this framework. As this website is fully responsive, this would have been easier to maintain and easier to rectify if there were any issues regarding the site. 

Having worked on both systems, I can pinpoint both their advantages and disadvantages. However, it entirely depends on the content and how it’s going to be presented. For responsive frameworks, the 12 column grid is the best and most effective solution because you have better flexibility with the less number of grid columns. In terms of the GEL grid, even though it gives more flexibility in terms of layouts and design, it can affect the overall cost in development and design. We do also  research into other frameworks such as Foundation CSS, 16 Column Grids by 960gs and many others to help us come up with better techniques to implementing our code better, robust, faster to process and easier to maintain giving us a better product to give to the client.

Overall we need CSS frameworks / grid systems not just for development, but to help design and development gain a better understanding how a website can be a more effective solution for our clients. Adding more complexity to the layouts will require more time to the process and more time to modify and resolve in both design and in development.

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Xamarin – Smarter Application Development

For the past few years Dog has been searching for the perfect solution to produce cross platform Apps. An answer that did not involve coding an application multiple times to necessitate iOS,(Objective C/Swift), Android (Java) and Windows (C#). A few App's have come and gone now – most of these being coded using HTML5, wrapped up in a PhoneGap application and deployed to the various App stores.

This has been all well and good however it is becoming increasingly obvious that the advantages gained from using HTML5 are minimal, yes we code our entire website in HTML5 so this means that it is a pretty simple process to get an App up and running. However there are drawbacks, performance especially for graphically heavy applications can be somewhat sluggish. There is also the lack of core UI widgets that come as standard on native Apps that users expect, for example swiping back between views. These can be implemented but at more expense, time and effort. Yes we could create a core library in Javascript but this would need maintaining and updated a lot. Surely there must be something out there that can save us?

In step Xamarin, Xamarin is a tool that allows developers to produce native Apps using C# that will run on iOS, Android and Windows phones and also Mac. As the Xamarin website says “Xamarin apps look and feel native because they are native.”

The key points of Xamarin are

Native User Interfaces

Xamarin Apps are built using native interface controls; users will know instantly how to operate an Xamarin application.

Native API Access

Xamarin Apps allow access to all the functionally that is exposed on the device, contacts, camera, accelerometer the list goes on. All of these can be accessed and harnessed in a Xamarin application.

Shared Code Base

Xamarin Apps also allow code to be shared between projects, enabling the essential core code of your application to be written once and used across each device. After all sharing is caring!

 By developing Apps using Xamarin we believe the end user will get the very best experience in the shortest development time. Although you may be thinking, that's another language I need to learn its better than learning three new languages.

For more information on Xamarin and the platform debate - see below

https://xamarin.com/

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2014-2-HTML5_vs_PhoneGap_vs__Xamarin_vs_Native.aspx

http://www.eastbanctech.com/10-reasons-for-choosing-xamarin-cross-platform-mobile-development/

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Has Facebook dropped the 20% text limit for promoted posts?

Anyone who has done any sort of advertising on Facebook will understand the frustration you get when that notification pops up telling you that your ad has been disapproved due to a violation of the text limit.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across an article on Econsultancy that hinted that this restriction may well be a thing of the past!

To offer a little background, as far as we were aware, all ads used for advertising purposes on Facebook were not allowed to contain more than 20% text. When creating ads, we were able to test out the text volume of our ads using the Facebook grid tool, which places a grid (funnily enough) over the image, checks the boxes that contain text, and lets us know the % of the image that the text takes up.

To hear that this may a thing of the past is interesting and having seen a few violations of the rule already we carried out some tests of our own:

We uploaded an advert to the Facebook grid tool: 

And to my surprise, the advert was approved and our post was sponsored successfully! Despite  having 36% text….

This is great news for advertisers who have been tied to the 20% rule in the past, offering more freedom when creating their adverts.

So what now? Carry out some tests yourself and let us know the results!

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Get more from your tweets using Twitter Cards!

It sounds a little more like trading card game than a form of website metadata, but Twitter Cards help your tweets look better and can increase clicks on links within tweets.

So what are Twitter Cards? A ‘Card’ is a set of metadata designed for a specific purpose. There are several different types, including some designed for news stories, some for displaying images and others specifically for products, apps and generating leads. When someone tweets a link to a webpage that contains valid Twitter Card metadata, extra information is displayed within the tweet, making the link more attractive, more trustworthy (you know what you’re clicking – not some anonymous shortened URL) and ultimately, more clicks are achieved. Try it for yourself – tweet with a link to: a story on the New York Times or Mashable, an image on Flickr or a product from Etsy and you’ll see that when you expand the tweet, extra information is displayed.

So what’s does this extra information look like? Here’s an example of a link to a web page with Twitter Card metadata vs a web page without.

Tweeting a link to a webpage using the ‘Summary Card’:

As you can see, the first tweet shows ‘extra’ information, beyond the 140 character limit, including the name of the site from the URL shared, the title of the article, an article description and a related image.

What types of Twitter Cards are available?

There are several types of Twitter card that can be used in websites. The above example is the ‘Summary Card’ – the most standard form of Twitter Card used by many news websites and blogs. In addition to the Summary Card, there is a ‘Summary Card with Large image’ which does as described, offers additional information with a larger image above the title, rather than a small one to the right. Here’s an example of the large image variety.

Image and Gallery Cards are more suited to photo galleries or websites that feature many images. Flickr, the well-known image-sharing social network has used the Twitter Image Card in its pages to ensure images and relevant information is displayed within tweets linking to its website.

A Gallery Card performs the same function as the Image Card, except that up to 4 images are displayed instead of just one.

A Product Card is designed to display extra product-specific information in a tweet and is most useful for e-commerce websites. As well as the standard description, photo and call-to-action button, developers can add two custom fields. This could be used to show colour, size, price, flavour, theme or any sort of descriptive information for the product shared.

In the example below, the price and rating are used as the custom fields.

Implementing Twitter Cards

Although the metadata is fairly straightforward, manually adding code to every page on a large website is going to take a long time! They key to success is integrating Twitter Cards with your content management system so that content authors enter meaningful information as they create and publish pages. Many open-source CMS’s have plugins that make it easy to add Twitter and OpenGraph metadata, but for others, some custom development may be required.

Once code has been added – manually or programmatically as part of a CMS – you can check that it’s valid and working by using Twitter’s Card Validator.

Got a question about Twitter Cards or optimising your site for social media in general? Tweet us at @dogdigital or drop us an email!

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The iBeacons are coming!

You'll be hearing a lot about iBeacons in the near future — but what are they? Essentially an iBeacon is just a tiny Bluetooth transmitter that announces it's presence. That's it. Doesn't sound very exciting does it? But it's what you can do with them that makes them very interesting.

iBeacons are used as micro-location devices and are great indoors where GPS and WiFi geo-location doesn't work especially well. They trigger functionality on your mobile device when you're in-range. A classic example is when passing your favourite coffee shop their app could alert you to special offers in-store. Mmmm. Latte anyone?

But what else can they be used for?

Apple, who pushed the technology mainstream, recently implemented a rollout of iBeacons across all its 250+ retail stores in the US. Currently it uses the devices to assist customers, who have the Apple Store app, in browsing their products. The iBeacons trigger relevant information in the app relating to what the customer is looking at.

Here are some of our favourite uses...

Paypal wants to streamline your purchases with iBeacon.

Nivea wants to protect your children with iBeacons.

Major League Baseball wants to enhance your visit to the ball park.

The Brixton Pound app (who knew Brixton had their own currency?) automatically opens the payment app upon entering a business using the system.

Cool indie-developers Panic Software in Portland, Oregon use iBeacons to track who's in the office.

Virgin Atlantic installed iBeacons in its Upper Class section of London's Heathrow Airport. The beacon triggers the Virgin app to automatically display a boarding pass as passengers approach the gate.

iBeacons being used at the Recording Britain Exhibition to enhance your visit.

Turn your own phone into mobile advert! And earn money doing so...

The benefits.

Does adding iBeacon support to your app help with customer engagement? Why yes it does. Hugely so...

What about privacy?

Matthew Gast from O'Reilly discusses iBeacons and Privacy

I'm sold! Where can I buy an iBeacon?

Estimote and kontakt.io currently sell them. The Estimote ones being particularly aesthetically pleasing.

iBeacons and you

We at Dog think iBeacons are going to feature heavily in the future. Come and chat to us about how we can put iBeacons to work for you.

[doglabs]

5 Trends in Web Design for 2014

As we cross through the half way mark of 2014 we are starting to see lots of similarities in current web design. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular trends of this year so far.

1. Flat Design

Apple being a long time trendsetter presented this in its iOS7 and from then on we have seen a massive amount of flat design in the digital landscape.

With flat design comes come a clean, easy to navigate page with a more modern feel.  It helps focus content and get rid of the clutter. So if you haven’t embraced flat yet you should as this trend won’t be ending anytime soon. Examples:

http://builtbybuffalo.com/

2. Video Content and Video Backgrounds

Video content has become easier to produce and easier to share hence the increased volume we are seeing on the web. Video content provides a richer experience for the user and a more effective way to communicate. 

Along with video content we are seeing a lot of sites using ambient video as backgrounds on home pages and navigation items, this creating a more vibrant page. 

http://chernoffnewman.com/

3. Less Text

As we are spending more time scanning pages, having less text on a page is allowing the user to digest a page faster and easier.  Using animation, video, graphics and boxes allows for a clean look and feel as well as a unique experience.  However, you need to include enough text so that a user knows what the website offers and wants them to do next. http://www.degordian.com/site/services/ 

4. Card Based Design

Continuing with the theme of less content, another trend we are seeing a lot of is card based design.

Cards present an overview of information with an action to do more. The big players Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all doing it which has paved the landscape for social media design. Cards grab attention, are sharable, digestible and responsive. Limited space is a good thing. http://www.silktricky.com/

5. Fixed Navigation

Fixed navigation or ‘sticky’ navigation is when the user scrolls down the page and the navigation stays on the page, usually at the top. It will sometimes reduce the height of the navigation  into a narrower bar or an icon will appear to symbolize the navigation, most commonly the ‘hamburger’ icon.

http://www.bigspaceship.com/

       As we adapt current trends into our work it is important to remember that these trends may not always provide the best user experience. We should always try to incorporate best practices alongside and try not to follow trends for the sake of it.  

[doglabs]

Rapid Multi-Device Testing

With 2014 tipped to be the year mobile internet browsing overtakes desktop, it’s more important than ever for web developers to ensure sites look and behave correctly across the huge variety of phones and tablets on the market.

What we need is an efficient way to test across a broad range of devices, or in other words “Rapid Multi-Device Testing”. 

There are different approaches to this, but I have one piece of advice. Test on real devices.

Emulators and cloud testing are ok for checking basic things like layout, but clicking around on a touch device with a mouse is not a true representation of the user experience. And you’re also in the dark about performance issues.

To begin rapid multi-device testing all you need is a big pile of mobile devices and software which lets you synchronise web browsing across them all. 

Software

Ghostlab is a superb piece of software which lets you browse a website on your desktop machine while all your other devices mirror every page load and click. It also works for filling out form fields.

As alternatives there’s also:

Adobe Edge Inspect Part of Adobe CC.

Browser Sync Free. Runs on Node JS.

So one rapid sweep through your site and you can quickly identify any layout or performance issues across all your devices. Importantly, you’ve also got the ability to pick a device up at any point and test a particular piece of functionality by touching the screen, exactly how a user would use it.

Another neat feature with Ghost Lab and Browser Sync is their ability to watch files in your web directory and auto reload the page on every mobile device each time you make a code edit.

This means you can be incrementally testing your site on all devices while building, rather than waiting til the end and fixing the nasty little layout surprises. Bugs are usually easier to rectify if you catch them as soon as they are introduced. 

Device Stand

You could have all your devices on a big pile on your desk, but that would look pretty untidy. And just think of the neck strain.

What you want is all your devices mounted on some sort of board so it can stand next to your monitors as if your mobile devices were like an extra computer screen.

Here at Dog we fashioned one of these ourselves and it wasn’t expensive. 

Here’s how to make one.

1. Metal Frame Stand

            £1 - poundland

            Also available here

  2. Black Cable trunking

            £9.99 - Amazon

  3. Magnetic Noticeboard

            £5 - Asda

            Also available on Amazon

A small amount of magnetic tape is attached to the back of each of your devices. Don’t worry, the magnets don’t cause them any harm.

Now your devices stick to the noticeboard with an amazingly secure hold.

Continually having to wake your devices up from hibernation when testing is a pain so it’s normal to turn this functionality off. This in turn mean the battery drains faster, which means we need to keep our devices powered.

That’s where the cable trunking comes in. We use it to run charger cables to each of the devices while keeping things neat and tidy.

You need to first cut the trunking to size, then cut out some small grooves on the back, so that you have gaps to feed the connectors up to each of the devices. This is done using a sharp stanley knife and a first aid kit on standby.

It may be possible to get cheaper trunking, but the type I bought has a slick curved edge and also pops open easily to allow you to change your cable arrangements. 

A long strip of magnetic tape gets attached to the back of each length of trunking which clamps them solidly to the noticeboard. This also means they can be easily moved around or removed if you want to experiment with different device arrangements.

The 5 port USB multi-device charger can sit behind the stand and means all your devices charge from a single plug socket. 

Devices

The more devices you can test on the better. But getting hold of devices can be costly. The second hand market is a sensible option, but what’s better is catching people on the end of a contract who are about to trade in their old device. You can offer to buy it off them for the trade-in price. This will often be around half of what it will be resold for.

The main part is knowing which main devices you should be testing on.

For this, a look in Google Analytics for your clients sites will reveal a wealth of information.

At the time of writing (09/07/2014) there were some fairly unanimous trends across all our sites.

Apple iPhone and iPad are the still the most popular non-desktop devices by a massive margin. These are mostly running the latest iOS 7.1.

Next up is Android. The most popular devices are the Samsung Galaxy S3, followed by the S4. Other manufacturers seem to be getting left in the dust.

The most popular Android tablet is the Kindle Fire, which runs the Silk Browser.

Jelly Bean (4.3) is still the dominant Android version, although KitKat is growing.

Blackberry represents a small but declining percentage of users.

Windows phone represents a small but growing percentage of users. 

Of course, these are just my observations. Analytics for different type of sites in other areas of the world will likely show different.  

The thing about device testing is the speed of change. So remember, a device lab needs love and nurturing. Old devices need traded in and replaced with newer models.

Keep on top of your analytics and adapt to what’s popular. It often isn’t necessary to have the latest expensive cutting edge testing devices as it takes a while for them to adopt a sizeable market share.

That’s it from me. Happy device testing.

[doglabs]

How to ensure your website is social-share friendly

There are many benefits to creating content on a regular basis; increasing brand awareness, positioning your organisation as thought leaders, encouraging conversation, driving word of mouth and increasing website traffic, assisting with website SEO performance and improving brand sentiment, to name a few.

Most content strategies revolve around content on a website – often focussing on sharing blog posts and/or news stories via social networks to encourage conversation and to drive traffic back to the site.

Sharing interesting, entertaining or useful content is obviously key to success, but if posts aren’t ‘attractive’, they’re not going to stand out when competing with other posts in busy Facebook timelines, Twitter news feeds or LinkedIn home pages.

Give your posts a fighting chance

By adding a few lines of metadata to all of your ‘sharable’ content – news and blog posts, product pages, events, etc. – you can make sure your content looks great when shared on social networks.

If you’re using a content management system (CMS), it might already have fields that allow you to enter relevant metadata or some the functionality could be added with some CSM customisation.

Having the right metadata in place is the difference between your posts looking like the example on the top (attractive) versus the example on the bottom (forgettable).

And on Twitter, you can use Twitter Cards metadata to add contextual content to links - very useful when 140 characters isn’t enough to convey a message. By adding context to links, people are more likely to trust the link (rather than blindly clicking on a shortened URL) and therefore greater click-through rates are achieved. I’m sure you’ll agree that the tweet on the top is more visually appealing and arguably more trustworthy than the one on the bottom.

Take the plunge!

We’ll explain how to implement metadata in the next blog, but we’d encourage you to do a little research, give it a go and measure the results.

Although a little development time may be required at the onset, including social metadata to your website can increase the engagement and reach of website content on social networks.

Not sure where to start? Get in touch and we can help you ‘socially optimise’ your website