iStrategyBlabs

March Madness Final Four Basketball: Twitter Mentions Over Time

Date

April 8, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

0
Categories

Social Media, Strategy

The NCAA Championship game is upon us tonight, and believe it or not, 3 of us ISLers have Louisville winning it all in our own brackets. Not too shabby for a bunch of nerds!

Although none of us could craft the perfect bracket, we were able to find some interesting Twitter data around mentions of Final Four teams from the past 3 years.

Although Cinderella story Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) couldn’t muscle up enough prowess to beat Butler and move on to the championship game, it surely won on Twitter. Mentions of #vcu peaked at a whopping 124,187 tweets during the tournament – an 8,000% increase from its typical monthly showing.

Not surprisingly, the month of April saw UConn, the inevitable champion, and Butler, the runner-up, as the tweet leaders.

Kentucky stayed on top on and off the court during the 2012 March Madness. Led by Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Kentucky won its six tourney games by nearly 12 points per contest. Nothing could stop them and the mentions just poured in, garnering almost 150k mentions by championship time – more mentions than all of last year’s Twitter activity combined.

If Twitter mentions is any indication of future success, as it has been for years past, it looks like the Wolverines may take the cake this year. They rocked almost 400k mentions during the month of March, which is twice what Louisville pulled in.

Some lessons learned:

Hail to the victors: Winners get more mentions than losers. Since 2011, winners of their Final Four game as well as the championship games scored the most mentions. One exception: VCU, an #11-seed Cinderella story who won the hearts, and tweets, of Americans across the country.
Football schools get a little bit more love throughout the year. Look at Ohio State. Look at Michigan. Where other Final Four team spikes come March from an otherwise non-existent fan base, schools with prominent football programs see a steady level of activity 6 months out of the year.
Twitter is still gaining popularity [#duh]. In 2011, we were seeing 230 million tweets per day. Last year, it went up to 400 million tweets per day. So although it looks like March Madness keeps getting more popular – especially with more than 2 million #marchmadness tweets seen over the past 30 days – it’s really Twitter in general that is the popular one.

Data collected with Topsy Pro <3

Ben’s Chili Bowl: A Whole New Website For Half-Smoke Heaven

Date

April 1, 2013
Posted By

brycerudow
Comments

0
Categories

Creative, Development, Our Work, Strategy

Screen Shot 2013-04-01 at 11.27.19 AM When I first heard that I was going to manage Ben’s Chili Bowl’s website redesign, I was ecstatic. As one of the rare D.C. natives in this city, I’ve known about, and loved, Ben’s since I was a young kid. As I got older, I began to learn about Ben’s historical legacy and the cultural impact it had on the U Street neighborhood and DC as a whole. Whether it be as a pre-jazz club dining spot during the “Black Broadway” days, a safe-haven during the 1968 riots, or a stalwart cornerstone that helped keep a neighborhood alive during the early 80′s, Ben’s is, as Mayor Adrian Fenty once said, “one of the greatest treasures in the District of Columbia…[it's] the soul of a neighborhood and the pride of our city.”

When we were tasked with modernizing Ben’s website, that legacy was in the forefront of our minds, and during an exploratory trip to the Bowl (that included a few half-smokes and chili fries, for research purposes), we remarked at how visually stimulating the Ben’s Chili Bowl experience is, whether it be the famous mural, the charisma of the building itself, or the overwhelming amount of photographs of famous patrons tacked to the wall, Ben’s is just as much a feast for the eyes as it is the stomach.

ISL was fantastic in that they created a site for us that perfectly captures the classic look and feel of Ben’s, but in a clean, up-to-date and fully functional package. We can now display pictures of each menu item, tell our story in a visual timeline, blog about the latest happenings at Ben’s, and sell our products to everyone in the U.S. in a visually stunning way. Thank you ISL!

Nizam Ali

When designing the site, ISL designer, Scott Simpson, wanted to “give it a vintage, 50′s diner theme, but incorporate more modern aspects as well. There is a deli-paper style, vintage americana in terms of the signage.” Our goal, in essence, was to capture the character of Ben’s while giving it a 2013 facelift. Scott relates, “It’s such a unique place. I wanted to use a lot of large, full-screen images to get across the feel of being at Ben’s because the only way you can really get that feeling across is to see it and experience it.” Our wireframes reflected that kind of concept well.

For those perfect large, full-screen images, we reached out to Joshua Cogan, an award winning photographer whose work has been featured in the New Yorker, Washington Post, GQ, Travel Channel, and Discovery Channel and whose Masters in Anthropology showed us he understood the importance of capturing the nuances of a culture.

The color choices and typography reflected Ben’s existing scheme and were influenced by old-school vintage diner menus and signage. However, as a nod to modernity, the navigation icons were hand-drawn by iSL designer Mike O’Brien in order to highlight the kitschiness of the restaurant as well. That modernity is also shown in the layout of the page. Scott admits, “The blog and the timeline are my favorite pages because the content floats on top of everything, and it’s an interesting way of laying things out.”

What truly helped modernize the site, though, was the work of our Dev team. ISL developer Megan Zlock describes, “We wanted to make the homepage responsive so that people trying to get to Ben’s (even if they weren’t exactly coherent) could get the information they want, especially the location and hours (even on mobile) without any difficulty.”

The true test for the Antimatter team, though, was the incorporation of the Ben’s Chili Bowl store, one of the most popular features of the site, and a huge source of income for Ben’s. For this part of the project, we worked with UltraCart, and made sure to focus strongly on the user experience, specifically how things would transition from WordPress to UltraCart and back again seamlessly.

The final product is a website that we are incredibly proud of. It was unbelievably exciting to work with such an established piece of DC culture, and we consider it an honor to collaborate with the Alis and the rest of the Ben’s Chili Bowl team.

#SMWWDC 2013: A Success!

Date

March 29, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

0
Categories

Uncategorized

AND, that’s a wrap.

From February 18-22, 2013, iStrategyLabs produced the second annual Social Media Week DC, creating a week-long festival giving thousands of Washingtonians a platform to express their interest and love for social media.

We had a fantastic turnout:

115+ entirely community-organized events
6000+ registered attendees
10,700+ #SMWWDC tweets
43,000+ SMWWDC Facebook post views
2400+ SMWWDC Facebook page likes
70+ trend and event re-cap blog posts from the SMWWDC Editorial Team
60+ local and national media mentions

Approaching SMWWDC 2013, our planning team decided that it was most important to put the power in the hands of the people. We thus encouraged members of the community to curate discussions, host panels, throw events, and engage with social media in its established and emerging forms. To make this happen, we:

Recruited an advisory board of amazingly talented social media and tech people to curate their own events, in addition to promoting others;
Anchored the week with events such as our opening party and closing party, while putting together an awesome keynote line-up featuring Steve Case, Linda Abraham, and Aneesh Chopra;
Actively monitored and mentored our community organizers, assembling DC’s events in one cohesive SMWWDC package;
Constructed a 30+ member editorial team to produce fresh, engaging content during the build-up to and throughout SMWWDC;
Constantly pushed for more engagement with our social audiences through SMWWDC’s Facebook & Twitter accounts;
Sourced multiple community venues to provide space for event organizers in need of a place to host;
And partnered with multiple sponsors to provide an official SMWWDC hub for the week in its entirety, opening its doors to many an community event organizer to use as a canvas for their respective events.

In sum, SMWWDC was truly a social media phenomenon for our Nation’s capital.

Our Presidential Trivia-themed opening party was the place to be on Monday night. Sponsored by Twitter and moderated by iSL’s very own Katie Lancos, this event was full of surprises.

Thanks to a partnership with Onomonomedia at our SMWWDC hub provided by Popularise & Fundrise, we captured some of the quirkier moments in-between sessions.

Some of the members of our advisory board even jumped in on the action.

And with Onomonomedia’s innovative .GIF feature, there was no shortage of fun to be had.

The Closing Party thrown at Malmaison by iSL and No Kings Collective attracted hundreds of people to a sold-out party, where DC’s best and brightest mingled, celebrated the events of SMWWDC, and danced the night away.

Couple our exciting venue and partiers with a live band, and you had one night to remember in our Nation’s capital. #SMWWDC #2013

Lessons Learned from Promoted Tweets: Tips To Maximize Engagement

Date

March 28, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

0
Categories

Our Work, Social Media, Strategy

We recently executed a promoted tweets campaign to enhance visibility around select videos and infographics we produced. Through the combination of using a dozen individually targeted campaigns and up to 20 different tweets in each of them, we collected engagement data from over 100 instances of tweets.

In order to understand what methods were most successful over the course of our campaign, we looked at the most common characteristics found among the top 20% most engaging tweets. Below is a summary of the most engaging attributes of our promoted tweets.

Most Effective Targeting Type: Search (and/or Handles)

Target Type	Impressions	Engagement
Search	3,281	2.32%
Handles	19,089	1.38%
Interests	3,533	1.31%

Targeting search proved to be the most engaging targeting method, as we targeted hashtags around specific events that already had an active conversation occurring. This produced 68% and 77% more engagement than targeting handles and interests.

However, opportunities for search-targeted tweets to show were far less than targeting handles because of its smaller potential audience size, causing it to earn almost 6x less impressions than handles and lowering its overall effectiveness.

Overall, tweets targeting the followers of other relevant handles were 5% more engaging than those targeting general interest groups.

Most Effective Call to Action: “Check Out”

Call to Action	Impressions	Engagement
“Check out”	173,995	2.15%
“Watch”	5,307	1.81%
With Call to Action	89,651	1.98%
Without Call to Action	4,271	1.34%

A significant attribute of the varying engagement level of a tweet was whether there was a call to action present. Tweets with any call to action had 48% more engagement than those without a call to action.

Between the tweets using a call to action, “Check out” preformed 18% better than tweets using ‘Watch.”

Most Effective Mention of Media: Video

Media Type	Impressions	Engagement
Video	4,429	2.18%
Infographic	23,057	1.43%
Mention of any media	13,743	1.80%
No mention of any media	3,657	1.14%

Our analysis shows it’s critical to share with your audience what exactly they are looking at. Tweets that revealed the type of media they were linking to produced 58% more engagement that those that didn’t.

Among the top 20% most engaging tweets, we found that promoting a video was 52% more engaging than promoting an infographic. (However, among the top 50% of tweets, videos only produced 10% more engagement.)

The Name of the Game is…

Title of the Campaign	Impressions	Engagement
Tweet includes title of the campaign	13,265	1.72%
Tweet does not include title of the campaign	8,716	1.34%

A big insight is that mentioning the title of what you’re promoting proved to be 28% more engaging than saving those precious characters for something else. Overall, being as specific as possible in promoted tweets is proving to yield higher engagement levels.

The Making of @EmbassySuites’ Vine #firstpost

Date

March 22, 2013
Posted By

Katie Lancos
Comments

1
Categories

Creative, Our Work, Social Media, Strategy

On March 7, iStrategyLabs produced and launched Embassy Suites’ first Vine video:

— Embassy Suites (@EmbassySuites) March 7, 2013

Although Vines are only 6 seconds long, these things don’t just happen with the snap of a finger; it actually takes a lot of time, planning, and resources. Let’s take a look at how we made it happen:

1. The Concept

We knew for our first Vine we wanted to highlight one of Embassy Suites’ three brand pillars: two-room suites, complimentary made-to-order breakfast, and a daily manager’s happy hour. After several rounds of concepting, we decided to focus on the free breakfast, a staple for which their brand is very well known.

Narrowing down our ideas, we had to figure out a way to highlight this brand pillar and the brand itself, all in just 6 seconds. We also knew we wanted to shoot on-site to showcase the actual breakfast that Embassy Suites serves.

2. Practice makes perfect

If you have ever tried to create a Vine before, you KNOW that there is no room for error. There is no editing, no splicing, and certainly no command + z. If on second 5.5 you mess up – tough luck, you’re starting over. So we set up a scene on-site the week prior to the actual filming and launch to practice our composition, lighting, and timing. That helped us to answer a lot of questions, identify specific materials we were going to need, and work out any kinks that would prevent us from getting a perfect final cut.

3. Setting up the scene

Come gameday, we had to be ready. We had the chef make up several colorful, perfect omelets to use – one in filming and others for backup.

We collected plates of breakfast items and began to build our scene mimicking what we decided on in the test round. The plate we used as a base was a custom plate we had made with the Embassy Suites logo, Twitter handle, and hashtag #firstpost.

Et voila! A plate of delicious complimentary cooked-to-order breakfast perfection.

4. Filming the Vine

This was a 3-man operation: one person held the camera (I mean, iPhone), one person pressed the screen to initiate recording, and one person pulled away food after each take and cleaned the plate. With everyone in place, we began creating the Vine, recording for a little less than a second, pulling away food, and repeating until the plate was clear (about 4 or 5 times).

Once the plate was clear, we replaced the first plate with a second plate we designed – identical, except for the addition of a “yum” thought bubble – which closed out the Vine.

Once you start filming, there’s no turning back. I would love to say we got it on the first try. But we didn’t. Luckily we allowed for enough time and resources to retake until it was perfect and ready for posting.

Disclaimer: Free breakfast not included in all instances of Vine video-making.