Digital Chameleon Blog

The best approach to delivering superior content is to put together a plan which includes the kind of content you'll be publishing and a schedule that reminds you when you need to upload it. This will make your content reliably fresh and interesting and keep your audience coming back for more.


A rule of thumb is to keep our brand content about two thirds conversational in nature.  Another is to avoid relentless promotions, which will only annoy our influencers, which is not something we want to do.  After all, who wants to talk to someone who only wants to talk about themselves?


Because we're inviting our influencers to talk to us rather than just being talked at, we also have to give them a chance to respond to what we're saying.  We can do this by giving them lots of opportunity to make a comment, rate our efforts or share with their own friends.  We have to respect our influencers and keep the dialogue conversational in tone.

One of the (free) iPad apps that I’m really enjoying is Flipboard.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a “social magazine.” If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, and have an iPad, proceed immediately to the app store and download Flipboard.  

Once downloaded, you can enter your Facebook and/or Twitter details and those streams are turned into “magazines.”   It takes the links from your feeds and puts them into a visually appealing and easy to read format that’s attractive and does look like a magazine. There’s no advertising on Flipboard which begs the question – what’s the business model?

I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to take the Flipboard version of my Digital Chameleon Facebook stream and distribute it as an enewsletter.  I would think other marketers would want to do similar, as it makes a visually (not to mention information-rich) compelling product.  Maybe a business model here?

If you read the reviews from hardcore social media types you’ll see that Flipboard does have limitations, but I love the concept.  It’s an engaging new way to look at our social media, expressly made for the iPad platform.  It’s interesting to see the differences between the look and feel of my personal Facebook feed, versus the Digital Chameleon on Facebook, versus my a Twitter feed.  The content is “clickable,” and can be shared and commented on from the application. It surely makes Twitter easier to read and make sense of.  Flipboard apparently senses “engaged” items with lots of comments or retweets, as well as photos, so that it filters out the “best” content and visuals.

Isn’t it funny how we always approach a new medium/platform with our “old platform” sensibilities?  iPad is an exciting new device but I wonder how long it will take before content developed for the iPad will start to look less like a newspaper or magazine and more like something we can’t yet imagine. 

Apply these simple approaches to generating stories where you think there aren’t any!

Journalists are used to digging up stories and creating engaging content for their readers, but brands and marketers now face that same challenge every day as they feed customer demand for information.

As if just generating regular content wasn’t difficult enough, today’s consumers are digital savvy, drive the conversation via social media and won’t fall for sales-speak or marketing-jargon anymore.

If brands can’t publish content that’s:

1. Authentic
2. Engaging
3. Informative

....the chances are it won’t be read and they’ll be out of the conversation.

That’s why brands and marketers need to look at how traditional publishing and media has been answering the content challenge for hundreds of years....

Check out Digital Chameleon’s SIX TRICKS JOURNALISTS USE TO CREATE GREAT CONTENT miro-graphic to learn how journalists and publishers find an angle on any story.

Our commercial director, Matthew, and his wife, Emily, are thrilled to announce the arrival of their son!   Sebastian Charles Bates was born at 7.29am on 10th May 2012, weighing in at 3.25kgs with a length of 52cms

Congratulations, Matt & Emily!

Social media brings new metrics to online marketing – two primary metrics are influence and sentiment.  It’s crucial for marketers to know who their social media influencers are.  This is a challenge for marketers since the opinions of a relatively unknown individual thought leader can be more powerful than a celebrity in terms of how their comments or actions affect a brand.

Sentiment brings with it even more nuance. We can now “listen in” on a vast number of conversations, and the numbers of conversations and people involved are only one aspect of it.  In order to discern what people are really saying and thinking, we need to be able to understand the “tone” of the conversations.

Common social media metrics include number of comments and shares, along with the number of readers/followers/fans/likes, etc.  These are the numbers that start to determine influence.  But it’s not so simple.  If one tweeter is only followed by a few people, but those followers retweet everything that tweeter says, and their tweets are then seen by thousands of other tweeters, then that aggregation of posts, comments, followers, and retweeters can help marketers determine who the influencers are.

You want to be able to track the impact of your social marketing efforts and refine your activities based on the social data.  Social media measurement is vital for benchmarking and tracking your success over time.  It helps you compare your activity with that of your competitors, analyse the vast numbers of tweets and blog posts and comments, start to understand what all that data means, and then turn your insights into actions.

Facebook supports a multitude of tools and apps, but if it all sounds too hard and time consuming, there are experts who can help you devise your Facebook content strategy and make implementation of apps easy.  

Loopster Media operates in Australia and provides marketers with tools and services to help them achieve their goals on Facebook without having to spend time and money building custom apps.  

Many beauty brands have built a Facebook presence using these content management tools.  For example, Dove ‘s Facebook Page  allows users to select their country and language.  Dove makes use of multiple tabs for Skincare, Deodorant, Hair, Men, etc.  Included within these product tabs are options for people to submit questions, sign up for newsletters, take quizzes, answer polls, take part in discussions (there were 71 discussion topics when I last checked), and to share “where you find real beauty in your life.” Dove has over 1 million Facebook fans and this Page is a great example of a brand giving users the tools to interact and become part of the community.

Stila’s Page is a good example of using a splash page to make it clear to users what you want them to do (“Like Us”!) in no uncertain terms – with the payoff being that you’ll have access to exclusive offers each week.

Covergirl includes free products giveaways, exclusive videos, badges, polls and quizzes for those who join “My Covergirl” on Facebook.

Avon asks people to “Like” them on Facebook in order to watch a video.  They also include functionality for finding or becoming an Avon rep including videos, a Twitter feed, and a photo gallery.

It all starts with what your business is trying to accomplish via social media.  Have a look at what others in your category are doing, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you need to build in tools and functionality that drive the specific actions that are important to your brand and its goals.  

Got one yet?  If you don’t, you definitely know you want one.  And if not, everyone seems to have one but you!  If you’ve been in a corporate marketing meeting of some type recently, you’ll know what “one” I’m referring to.   Tablets are becoming more and more ubiquitous, with the iPad fast breaking out of the tablet pack to becoming THE corporate fashion accessory of 2012.  Has the iPad already won the Tablet War?  Or is there an opening for a new competitor to grab a piece of the growing and lucrative tablet pie?

To answer that question, it is worth considering four factors that are having a big impact on purchasing decisions made about these new digital device darlings.  Following the inevitable rush of the “gotta have it regardless” crowd that prides itself on possessing the latest and greatest gadget, we’re left with the more rationale determinants which I identify as:

Screen Size & Resolution-  iPad’s competitors have the advantage of learning from what the innovator hasn’t offered and what they can.  It isn’t surprising that they are raising the bar in some key spec categories, especially in screen size and resolution.  New tablet offerings from Samsung, Lenovo, Asus, Huawei  and Acer all have comparable, if not superior, high def screen real estate to the iPad.  I’d suggest this isn’t as much as a driver as Apple’s competitors would like it to be however.  We’ve become incredibly spoiled by the ever improving quality of our digital devices so much so that we often fail to make a distinction between an amazing standard and a superb one.  Mark this one as a marginal driver.

Interoperability- When it comes to interoperability, we’re really talking about operating systems, specifically Apple versus Androids.  In most of the rest of the world, Android has the biggest market share BUT in Australia, Apple dominates.   That gives it a natural advantage, especially in terms of interoperability.  The ability to sync Apple family products painlessly is a big draw to consumers increasingly reliant on address books, accumulated apps and other types of content.  A tablet that can pull it all together will trump other considerations, even superior technology.  I’d rate this as a major driver for purchasing by existing Apple device owners but only a marginal driver for non-Apple device owners, who are already used to figuring out how to make different devices talk to one another.

Style- Apple may have had the initial advantage in this category, but the newer tablets coming onto the market also sport sleek, finished styling.  As tablets become less exotic looking and more familiar, consumers will be less willing to pay for the premium of owning a style-maker.  This is less a function of the bar being lowered than the opposite— the price of admission for any tablet market entrant will be world-class design and styling.  A year ago style was arguably THE purchasing driver.  Now, not so much—I rate it a marginal driver for purchasing decisions these days.

Cost- It is a truism—once a new device or technology hits the market, the price begins to drop as more competitors sense the potential and dive in with cheaper, often better, alternative offerings.  This has certainly begun to happen in the tablet market.  iPads have dropped from almost $1,000 over a year ago to somewhere around half that amount today, depending on the configuration.  Competitors are nipping their heels with even lower average prices at around the $400 range.  All that said, this range is still prohibitive for most consumers.  Most younger users will find all the affordable functionality they need in their smartphones.  Most mature users will continue to rely on their laptops or desktops.  This is why cost is, and will remain, the major driver for tablet purchasing decisions.

From a marketing perspective, these four drivers still define the tablet audience as one that is growing at a healthy clip but is still pressing up against a glass price ceiling.  The first phase of the tablet revolution is complete.  I think the next phase will begin as soon as someone can market a tablet that can crack the $200 to $400 price range, which is what we are now used to paying for another accepted member of our digital device family—the gaming console.  It won’t be long—but it isn’t here yet!

Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know by emailing me patty@digitalchameleon.net