The week in social: Olympic standards, feature fights, and social sports

Olympic Brands, a complete shut out

Last week saw the opening of the Rio Olympics, and the advertising descended full force on to the world. Every two years, the athletic tradition is closely accompanied by a marketing competition. This particular competition features categories like, Most Humble-but-Superior Supporter, Greatest Grass-Roots Success, and the medal for Damn That’s Patriotic.

Unfortunately, if you did not pay to be an official Olympic sponsor, the USOC has sent a clear warning to stay out of the games. AdWeek provides a good insight into the don’ts (there are no do’s) for brands, which includes prohibiting use of official phrases & titles, using names of athletes, and even trying Heavyweight Portmanteau entries such as “Overreachingregulympics”

Twitter, Vine, & Periscope’s Olympic efforts

If you’re not a brand, and you’re ready to get your Olympics on, Twitter’s got you covered. From using a three-letter country code as a hashtag, to 50 new sports emojis, to producing a full-time Moments story for Rio 2016, all the message tools and content you could want awaits you. Meanwhile in Rio, Twitter will be live-projecting athlete tweets on the stadium; and is driving a live-tweeting, Wi-Fi projecting bus around the city.

Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook in the feature brawl

T.S. Elliot penned, “Good writers borrow, great writer’s steal.” If we consider that to be true, Facebook and Instagram did some great writing this week. In the same week, we’ve seen Instagram launch Stories, and also noticed that Facebook is working on live video filters – both of which are key creative offerings in Snapchat.

A megalithic company taking up features from its competitors is nothing new. In the case for Instagram, Kevin Systrom openly gives credit to Snapchat. The move points toward what we can expect to see in the feature marketplace as varying channels provide new features that vie for the attention of younger generations and brand dollars.

Twitter ups its Customer Service game

If you’ve ever run a CS program over Twitter, you know the pain of the process. Scan for comments about your brand, publicly tweet dissatisfied users to follow your @MyBrandSupport handle, hope that they do (and stop flaming your company), then DM them from the support handle with hashtags to track the support case. While interesting, this approach is a leftover from when Twitter was a wild, unrefined communication tool.

As it continues to grow with updates like algorithmic feeds and brand pages, Twitter is embracing its role as CS portal. Brands are starting to see two new page features: a dedicated button to contact support, and a line on brand profile that lists when they are most active for support messages. This will be a feature to watch, as it makes things easier for brands who already support users over social, and casts a spotlight on brands that do not.

Tweets first, content second

What does the audience gain in exchange for discussing your brand on Twitter? What if they could only get at your content by mentioning you first? As the platform works to rekindle user growth and platform adoption, a new feature called, “Instant Unlock Cards” is a clean concept that provides brand audiences exclusive, hidden content in exchange for tweeting about the brand. For sharp companies, this will be a way to use premier content like film previews and limited-time offers to gather more passionate followers.

The NFL on Snapchat

Not to be outdone, Snapchat has its own games coming – provided by the National Football League. The recently announced agreement is an extension of the NFL Live Stories content that Snapchat provided last year, and begins to more aggressively address the demand for timely, relevant video content. With the extension, brands will be given the chance to advertise inside of the Live Stories and on the NFL’s new Discover channel each weekend.

Snapchat launches GeoStickers

The imitation game is not slowing down Snapchat’s push to enable users to produce unique content. Following the integration of bitmoji a few weeks ago, the ephemeral messaging platform has now added “GeoStickers”, with which users can decorate their content with exclusive city-oriented decals. Users in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris, and Riyadh can go live with their local city spirit right now.

Instagram building anti-harassment tools

Harassment is a tough issue on social. Any platform seeking to solve the problem of eliminating hate speech much also straddle the delicacy in not providing channel sponsored censorship. To answer the challenge, Instagram is experimenting with anti-harassment features, such as turning comments off on posts, and letting users create their own banned phrases. “High volume” Twitter users can expect to see the features first.

Brands are betting on Social Video Ads

70.8% of respondents polled by Animoto said they intend to increase spending on Social Video in the next 12 months. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have all been fighting hard to provide advertisers with easy access to a relevant audience using video. In this poll, it seems Facebook has moved YouTube to the #2 spot. That Facebook seems to be the top choice for brand’s intending to spend ad dollars is not a huge surprise, but agencies and brands alike should expect to see prices and competition for targets to increase in the next year.