Friday Social: Real Life Instagram, Tweet-A-Coffee And Queen of the Cartoons
- Social Media
Our weekly Friday social media round-up is coming to you two days early this week – today is exactly 1,000 days since we launched our first social media round up.
It was Friday 4th February 2011 when we kicked off our first social media round-up of the week. You can see that first post here which features the likes of Yorkshire Tea crowdsourcing a route for Little Urn and the launch of a new social network for business travellers.
Back to the present and here’s this week’s round-up of the key social media news from the previous seven days.
1. Her Royal Likeness
In a possible case of life imitating art imitating life, the Twitter parody account of HRH The Queen, @Queen_UK, is being made into a satirical cartoon series to be screened online.
Yahoo! Has commissioned an animated, six-part web series to be called ‘Yes Ma’am’, which is being created and written by the anonymous person behind the account.
The parody account is followed by more than 1 million people which Yahoo! will be hoping tune into the series. The first of the three-minute episodes airs on Friday 15 November here.
Dan Watt-Smith, Head of Video for Yahoo, said: “Usually we see characters from TV shows beating a path to Twitter, but we’re trying an alternative approach, creating an online video series for the Queen’s dedicated followers and subjects. Each episode will not only give us a topical angle to promote, but will have long-term appeal, much like her Majesty.”
The company is capitalising on the real Queen’s annual televised Christmas Day address to the nation with an 
alternative Christmas speech scheduled to go live on 25 December. Read the Yahoo! announcement here.
In other news on the commercialisation of the parody account, the @Queen_UK has started to run Promoted Tweets, such as this recent example.
2. Tweet-A-Coffee
Starbucks has teamed up with twitter to launch a promotion that allows Twitter users to tweet a gift certificate to friends. The recipient can cash in the tweet with a free coffee.
Once the sender has connected their Starbucks account with their Twitter account, they can send a tweet to @tweetacoffee then adding “to”, followed by the @[name of the account they want to gift].
The recipient receives a $5 voucher (it’s only available in the US initially) via a tweet which can be redeemed by printing out the certificate or loading it to a Starbucks digital card.
Until the tweet can be scanned at the cashier till, it all seems a bit clunky. But fair play to Starbucks for being first into the space.
3. Real Life Instagram
Clever campaign of the week goes to Bruno Ribero and his Real Life Instagram.
Bruno uses physical filters set within Instagram post-shaped cardboard cut-outs. The cut-outs are placed in outdoor locations allowing the public to take their own Instagram pictures of Instagram filters. What’s that about life imitating art imitating life?
We contacted Bruno yesterday and asked him a few questions:
Umpf: Why did you create Real Life Instagram?
Bruno: It’s a personal project. As an advertising creative, you often get frustrated when your idea isn’t allowed to go further, or when it does, after a lot of interference, it becomes something else. That’s my personal reason for doing it.
Regarding the idea, I don’t want to sound presumptuous and say that I was trying to find a deeper meaning, but the insight is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the digital from the analog world. But I really enjoy reading other people’s points of view, and to be honest, all of them are right. I love them all.
Umpf: Are you hoping it might lead to something else?
Bruno: No. It is what it is. ?
Umpf: When did you have the idea and when did you put your first one up?
Bruno: It was mid-June
Umpf: Where was the first one located?
Bruno: Manchester, where I used to live.
Umpf: Have you got plans for more?
Bruno: Of course. I’m just warning up! ?
Umpf: How long do the boards stay up ie do they get stolen quickly?
Bruno: It’s hard to say how long they stayed up. The fact that it’s on the street in the UK doesn’t help. It rains almost everyday. Once I was tagged on Instagram @nitchows with two people holding one up with their faces in the frame. Maybe they stole it, but I really don’t mind. I really hope that people are having fun with it. It doesn’t matter if it’s visiting the blog and sharing it, or taking pictures of the ones that are stuck somewhere else, or even stealing and making one of these a collector piece (that would be not a smart idea, only because it isn’t worth any money) ?
Umpf: Finally, what are the frames made of?
Bruno: Cardboard and coloured cellophane. But I’m still trying out different materials, something that would last longer here in the UK. ?
You can follow Bruno on Twitter and Instagram.
4. Interest in Pinterest still growing
Statistics in a White Paper issued by Adobe this week shows that Pinterest refers more traffic to the websites of retailers than Twitter, YouTube and Reddit combined.
In fact, Pinterest is the second-biggest referrer of retail web traffic of all the social channels. Although Facebook still dwarfs the rest – taking almost 70% of the overall referral share – year-on-year, it dropped 20%. In the same period, Pinterest grew by 84%.
The Social Intelligence Report, ADOBE DIGITAL INDEX (Q3 2013) is based on consumer data between 2012 and 2013. It is comprised of aggregated and anonymous data from retail, media and entertainment, and travel websites. Data analysed included: 131 billion Facebook ad impressions, 400 million unique visitors to social sites, 1.04 billion Facebook posts, and 4.3 billion Facebook comments, shares, and likes.
I wrote 18 months ago that I thought Pinterest will eventually be bigger than Twitter and I still see that.
5. Facebook knows how your marriage will pan out
Research out this week shows that Facebook knows whether your marriage will survive.
Hold your ‘tuts’, this is no piece of 72 Point PR poll of 1,000 adults. The paper is co-written by Lars Backstrom, a senior engineer at Facebook and Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University.
In the paper, the pair ask the question: given all the Facebook connections among a person’s friends, can you recognise his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone?
The answer is yes. Well, predominantly yes. They analysed a large data set: 1.3 million Facebook users selected randomly from people who were at least 20 years old and who had between 50 and 2,000 friends.
The results showed that in 60 per cent of cases their ‘dispersion algorithm’ was able to correctly identify a user’s spouse 60 per cent of the time.
More intriguing though is that when the algorithm produces a low dispersion score, it’s a pointer that the relationship is in trouble – so couples with a low score are 50 per cent more likely to break up over the next two months than couples with a high score.
Or maybe the reason for the likely breakup is that one of them is spending more time looking at Facebook than they do looking at their partner.