Thoughts on public relations, social media and trendspotting from the M Booth Digisquad

word. daily. (may 21, 2013)

Beardvertising: Would you walk around with a  tiny billboard that clips on to your beard?

Flight Novels: Australian airline Qantas has created a special selection of books, each of which is just long enough to last your entire flight.

Tea Calendar: Make for their business partners, tea company Halseen & Lyon made a tea calendar – each page is made up of wafer-thin pressed tea leaves that can we placed directly into a cup of hot water.

— Lauren M.

word. daily. (friday fun).

Silicon Valley’s Martha Stewart: Former employee of Google and YouTube and dubbed “Silicon Valley’s Martha Stewart,” Brit Morin creates a home living site with a mission of uses technology to find and create the most innovation hacks for making think in and around your home beautiful (via @rachelpancoe)

Color Palettes: From movie stills.

A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet: ESPECIALLY IT THEY ARE MADE OF ICE CREAM

— Lauren M. 

word. daily. (my classmates edition).

As some of you may know, for the last several months I’ve been pursuing my Master’s Degree in Branding at the School of Visual Arts. For one of our classes we have a “100 Days Project” – do X once a day for 100 days and post in on a blog.

In this edition of “word. daily.” you’ll find three of my favorite projects from my classmates – things that should be in “word. daily.” regardless!

 DAY: 25/100
Frank Gehry’s: “You Can Architecture Too!”

100 BOOKS THAT SHOULD BE WRITTEN: The title is pretty self-explanatory – but this is a Tumblr devoted to books that should be written. (Just to be transparent: a lot of these are over my head, but all my professors think they’re hilarious).  

100 PERSONAL BRANDS: On-the-street style portraits asking strangers to define their personal brand (I’m trying to make a guest appearance on this one though!)

100 WHAT IFS: What would be the weirdest product for a brand? Or the strangest partnership? This one is devoted to those oddities.

 And I’d show you mine…but I’m a few days behind…..

— Lauren M. 

word. may.

image

Hello Friends! —

For your mid-week reading pleasure, we bring you our next installment of “word.”

Find it here: mbooth.com/word

Andrew & Lauren

word. daily. (may 14, 2013)

QuipImaage

America’s Funniest…Brand: The founders of America’s Funniest Home Videos are launching a home-video licensing division that will open up the entire library, 23 seasons worth, of homemade videos to advertisers and brands.  

Say The Same Thing: I think we can agree, that over the years OK GO has become more than just a band, a band-creative collective hybrid, if you will. The foursome just release this app, Say The Same Thing, a game that challenges people to say the same word at the same time. It sounds simple but… it’s hard to explain… check out their intro video here.

Low Res Victorian: Love love this “low resolution” Victorian photo frame made up of little wood cubes. 

— Lauren M. 

word. daily. (may 13, 2013)

This Is Water: Without permission, Glossary, a small video production created a video to pay homage to David Foster Wallace and his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. It has almost 4 million views in four days.

I Want to Copy Your Instagram!: Now, when you see a picture of street art on Insta you can turn to app, 1AM Mobile to find out where it was taken so you can go see it yourself.

Fresh 2 Death: To highlight how fresh its food is, McDoanld’s in Warsaw, Poland is hand-drawing their menu, twice a day, on a chalk billboard. 

- Lauren M.

word. daily. (friday FUN edition)

Hey Girl: Be still my heart, Ryan Gosling does it again. A series of vines where Ry is refusing to eat cereal. You win, internet.

Face GIFs: Buzzfeed has introduced a “reaction cam” button at the bottom of posts to capture and share three-second animated GIFs of vistiors’ faces as they react to posts.

Jacket Snacks: Who needs a stylish lunch bag when you get stash your lunch in your jacket?

How To of The Week: How to fold a shirt in two seconds (via Eric). 

— Lauren M. 

30 Minute Social Media Strategy

There is no way around it; if you run a business, you must have a social strategy in place.

That does not mean simply setting up a Facebook page and posting when the mood feels right. In order to optimize business and customer satisfaction, brands must be active on a variety of social platforms, where their fans are present. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram just to name a few.

With busy schedules, it may seem daunting to attend to the social needs of a business. Luckily, an article in Social Media Today outlines how to manage your business’ social channels in only 30 minutes a day! 

Twitter - Here is where you will spend most of your time. Set aside 10 minutes to respond to any mentions, complaints (or hopefully compliments) and retweets. Also take this time to schedule new tweets and share curated content from industry influencers.

Facebook minutes is all you need to post content (visuals please!) and respond to customer inquiries on your page.

LinkedIn - Take another 6 minutes to promote your business on this professional platform and also chime in on any industry related groups.

Pinterest - You only need 4 minutes to pin and repin.

Google+ - Show Google some love with 2 minutes a day to post company content and ask your followers questions.

Instagram - Use your remaining 2 minutes to share a few behind-the-scene photos of you company.

While the vast majority of companies will need to spend more than 30 minutes a day, these are great tips for small companies with tight budgets who are looking to scrape the surface of the social world.

Media managed.

- Sasha

word. daily. (may 7, 2013)

Map Your Future: Does anyone use this Ribbon app? I saw it last night in the app store and it piqued my interest. You enter your upcoming trips and events so you can plan ahead with friends who live in or who will also be visiting the city you’re visiting.

Color Charts: We love these color charts made based on the number of times a color is mentioned in a novel. “50 Shades of Grey” looks just like you think it would.

Because Photos Are Boring Without Filters…: Developers are trying to get ahead of the game by designing apps for Google Glass – the latest to hit the scene – Glassagram, as the title would suggest, it’s Instagram for Google Glass.

This Just In From YouTube: YouTube unveiled a new feature today – that maps out which videos are trending in which U.S. city. You can filter the results by gender and age as well.

Lauren’s Past Job Experience:  As a former hot dog vendor, I give this my seal of approval. 

— Lauren M. 

word. daily. (slow day on the internet edition).

Date & Time Search: ProPublica, is an open-source tool that allows users to search Instagram by place and time – made for reporters looking to source photos from the scene.

Every Noise at Once: Check out this algorithmically-generated non-analytical map of the musical genre-space, whatever that means. You can click all over this map to hear different kinds of music from dirty south rap to protopunk to uk garage to new jack swing. Yes, I could go on.

One of My Fav TED Talks: Brene Brown on the power of vulnerability.

— Lauren M.