Top five digital stories this week, incl. Steve Jobs & Facebook Insights

* Featured, Brass digital roundup — By Brass Team on October 7, 2011 1:45 pm

Celebrate the end of the working week with a roundup of some of the digital stories that have got us talking at Brass this week. You can find out more by clicking on each story’s title, and get involved by sharing your thoughts in the comments box at the bottom.

Facebook rolls out new Insights

Sally Barr, Online PR & Social Media Manager

Facebook has rolled out its new page insights, providing page managers with a more comprehensive and accurate view of content reach.

What does this mean for brands?

Number of unique people reached with updates no longer has to be an informed estimate, and the ‘virality’ measurement shows us a percentage of unique people who have interacted with each post. While ‘engagement rate’ in old insights gave you a percentage per post it was based on impressions, not uniques.

The ‘people talking about this’ metric shows publicly how many people have interacted with a brand page’s content  over the last seven days. This metric counts the number of times someone posts to a page’s wall; likes, comments or shares a pages status update, photos, videos or other content; answers a page’s question, tags a page in a status update or photo; and checking in at a place. So it doesn’t do what it says on the tin; measure how many people are talking about the brand across Facebook (which would be pretty cool).

As this metric is shown publicly below the number of page likes, brands can benchmark against others in a more meaningful way than looking at fan base size which can be dependent on ad budget.

Something I think is very valuable is the ‘friends of fans’ number which shows you the collective size of your fans’ friend count. It’s showing the size of the opportunity to strive to reach, by making content more engaging and very shareable.

These changes have eradicated some of the limitations of Facebook Insights and I think they’re just what was needed to take some of the frustration out of using Insights for reporting

Steve Jobs dies

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

As we all know by now, Apple creator Steve Jobs passed away this week aged just 56 after battling for several years with pancreatic cancer.

The online world has, unsurprisingly, been buzzing with the news, including his best loved quotes and a constant stream of tweets dedicated to the technology visionary, with trending hashtags such as #ripstevejobs.

Among the multitude of those paying tribute was Barack Obama and one of Jobs’ biggest rivals, and his friend, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Prolific blogger Robert Scoble paid his respects online with A front row seat to Steve Jobs’ career.

A bittersweet irony that many pointed out is how a great number of people first heard the news on Apple devices; an iPhone, an iPad… things that would never have existed if it weren’t for Steve Jobs. And many used these very devices in rememberance, holding up images of candles on their iPads watching the tweets unfold on iPhones, and viewing videos on MacBook Pros.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.

Steve Jobs, Wall Street Journal 1993

Adventures in motion

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

Onedotzero_adventures in motion returns this year to London’s BFI Southbank from 23-27 November 2011, presenting the world’s most innovative audio-visual festival!

Onedotzero has been around for 15 years now and has been at the forefront of digital culture. They tour globally with a variety of different shows, showcasing young, upcoming talent, promoting collaboration and convergence with these young creatives and highly respected cultural and creative industries including architecture, interiors, moving image, graphic design, interactive design and illustration.

This five day festival of all things digital and interactive is well worth a look if you can make it, with so many different creative industries catered for it’s a great place to meet talent new and old and just has lots of cool stuff to check out. From feature films to live audio-visual performances, educational projects, interactive arts and club nights.

Innovation is the core of this digital festival. Have a look at their showreel and a browse around the onedotzro site to get a feel for what its all about.

The Next Web tweets

Mark Kelly, Digital Solutions Director

I picked up on some tweets from The Next Web this week for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they’ve recently been detailing a lot of their channels – giving you the choice of how / what to read from them. YouTube, Facebook and the new (to me anyway, hence I picked up on it) 5 minute updates. There’s nothing revolutionary in having a lot of content across different channels but reminding people of that and making it easy for them to hook into with you is great. If you don’t know The Next Web , it’s a great source of updates and added value updates about all things digital, UK, USA (where it started) and International.

And the second reason I was attending more to their tweets was that human connection thing – in that I sat next to the European Editor, UK (Manchester actually) based Martin Bryant (@MartinSFP) at an event last week. The event was the Advisory Panel briefing for the National Media Museum’s forthcoming Life Online Gallery.

I’m on the panel, along with Ally from Brass. Put simply the Life Online Gallery will be a world first, a permanent space to look at all the technological and cultural effects that the web / internet has had on all of us. Loads of brilliant content and exhibits are planned and we’ve been working with the Media Museum on the online visibility strategy for the gallery as well as helping shape the creative collaboration spaces that will grow around the gallery in the months and years to come. More of that soon. In the meantime, The Next Web – a brilliant resource and if  you don’t use it as marketer, please go and have a look.

Squaring up to payment technology

Tim Downs, Head of PR

A lot is being made of mobile payment technology replacing the wallet in your pocket with the likes of Google Wallet, Isis and PayPal mobile. Technology that allows consumers to swipe and go and not worry about having to carry that oh-so-annoying and unwieldy cash.

One of the problems with this is the investment in kit that businesses have to make in order to accept this new form of payment – after all it’s not been all that long since we went chip and pin.  So what if someone came up with a way that your phone could accept payments as well as make them? Step up Square Up, a handy little box that plugs into your iPhone,  allowing you to turn it into a secure card swipe machine.

No need to invest in separate card handsets and base units, it’s completely portable and ultimately more affordable for small businesses. When it seems that everyone is starting up some sort of cottage industry flogging a homemade something-or-other, could this help people actually turn a profit?

And that’s just one of the possible applications… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRH_HfDyx7g *

*This is not real

Tags: apple, digital design, digital marketing agency, facebook, facebook insights, mobile payment technology, onedotzero, Social Media, square up, Steve Jobs