Ello May Prompt End of Social Network Advertising

Ello screenshot courtesy of StarTribune.com

Social media platforms haven't grossed over a billion global users by chance. The leverage of these networks lies in their reliance on full self-disclosure, an activity that a recent study suggests may mimic the same kind of pleasure we get from eating, making money and having sex. Social media is addictive.

Advertisers all over are tooting their party horns and tossing confetti at the fact that 2014 has been branded the "year of social media advertising." Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are taking full advantage of their addicted audiences by monetizing from implemented advertisements. These partnerships, especially those made with Facebook, the world's leading social media platform, have been met with oodles of user scrutiny.

As a millennial and up-and-coming advertising grad, I recognize social media for both its Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde attributes. I must admit, though, I teeter more toward viewing it as n invaluable marketing tool rather than a pop-up whirlpool privy to the abolition of personal privacy. Maybe I'm an optimist. Or maybe I know, though most people don't, that advertisers aren't out to eat souls. They just want to make money.

The Average Janes and Joes disagree, and now they're fighting back. A new social platform called Ello prides itself on being the "anti-Facebook," mainly in the manner that it will devoid of advertisements. It also boasts exclusivity, a concept Mark Zuckerberg employed when he first created Facebook as an online hub for Harvard students.

Screenshot of Ello feed. Photo courtesy Sharon Profis/CNET

Maybe the allure of exclusivity and promise of ad-free interaction are the inspiration behind the more than 35,000 membership requests Ello has received every hour since its debut in mid-August. Is the dawn of ad-free social media rising?

Mashable opinion columnist Lance Ulanoff says amateur design and poor usability makes the startup "no Facebook killer." It's also worth noting that Ello's lure of unadulterated content holds up poorly next to social networks that are already ad-free, like Google+. So then, what's to blame for all the hype? Is there a stronger undercurrent brewing over at Ello that's responsible for the wash up of eager users on its shore?

Persuasion in advertising steals from three categories: pathos (emotional appeal), logos (message content) and ethos (credibility of the source). The message motivating the creation of Ello is clear: an ad-free experience molded by approved membership. The platform's credibility is too weak to generate substantial usership, as Ulanoff points out. What Ello really has going for it is its play on pathos. Upon entering the site's "About" page, users are greeted with an eery explanation of the network's anti-ad origins:

"Your social network is owned by advertisers. Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold."

This message makes up what Ello is calling its "manifesto." Photo courtesy Vox.com.

It seems Ello may be exploiting the widespread paranoia of privacy invasion on the web. "It's a pretty dark and dystopian view of the social nets," Ulanoff says. Ello's choice of copy is based on the successful tactics of decades of advertising. As Don Draper once said in an episode of Mad Men, "Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? It's freedom from fear." What's probably driving users like mad dogs to the Ello website isn't its savvy set-up or innovative features but its appeal to a human need for salvation from evil. In this case, the evil-doers wear white-collars along with their crimson horns and prey on the meaty flesh of browser analytics (Daunting!).

Only time will tell if Ello's scare tactics will be enough to keep users hooked or if marketing enlightenment will empower them to turn back to the ad-ridden networks they love.

Do you think an age of ad-free social networking is upon us? Will Ello crash and burn before ever taking off? Share your story below!

Do's & Don'ts of Business Card Design

Another Friday is upon us, creative cats! It's been a tough week for me, balancing school work, upkeeping my apartment, taking care of my fur munchkin and finding time to relax. 

When I feel like I've been grinding my gears too hard, I find peace of mind by experimenting with graphic design. It provides a creative outlet for me when I feel overwhelmed by the pressure of "do this, not that" in my day-to-day life. I get really stressed out when I feel like I'm being forced to live a linear life with only one "right" direction. Being creative grants me the freedom to do whatever I want to do. Also, it gives me the chance to make something awesome to share with other writers, designers and entrepreneurs! 

This week's freebie focuses on personal branding through business cards. Whether your brand is new on the market or well established, it's crucial to have a business card handy at all times for a few different reasons:

1. It's your pocket-sized resume. A business card, whether for your business or just for you as a person, represents a short-and-sweet version of your professional skills. 
2. It's a great branding tool. A business card is a priceless medium for marketing yourself to potential employers or clients. Great business cards not only describe the person or business but also project the brand identity by using typography, logos and color theory.
3. It's a great networking tool. Exchanging business cards with someone is an easy, quick and cheap way to make an impression. I keep nearly every business card I get. Usually the next day, I look up that person's website or social media account they provided on their card.

While business cards are an invaluable asset to your personal brand, it's not always so easy to design one. Lucky for you, The LC Studio is here to help. Without further ado, I present to you my nifty little guide to the do's and don'ts of business card design.

You can save the image directly from this post, or you can download the PDF instead. Happy designing and have a great weekend, friends!

Click the beautiful blue link below to start designing an award-winning business card:

Do's & Don'ts of Business Card Design PDF

Durex Uses Same-Sex Couple in New Ad

Durex photo courtesy of TruthRevolt.org

In the spring, Durex released an ad for "Earth Hour," a campaign to conserve electricity and "take to the bedroom instead," which received a moderate amount of scrutiny for its use of only opposite-sex couples. Durex claimed the exclusion of same-sex couples was unintentional, and soon after launched the "Love Same Sex" campaign to assure consumers of its acceptance of all kinds of relationships.

This week the company took the marketing tactic a step further with a new Facebook ad for its "Massage & Play" gel featuring a lesbian couple in an intimate embrace and the tagline "it all starts with touch."

This is definitely a bold move for Durex, especially in light of recent news that national support for same-sex marriage may be dropping. It could be that Durex is hoping this new promo ad reverses that trend by way of exposure, a founding concept of advertising based in social psychology. Maybe, though, the brand just trying to compete with its number one nemesis, Trojan, which undoubtedly holds a tight grip on its target market through its partnership with MTV.

Whatever the reasoning, this ad is sure to cause a stir among Durex users and nonusers alike. I respect the risk-taking from a marketing standpoint and am eager to see if similar brands will follow suit.

What do you think about Durex developing on this campaign? Share your story below!

Can Introverts Succeed in Communications?

When I was nine years old, I started a cat club based in a blanket fort built from Scotch tape and push pins in the 4 by 6 foot space in my closet. I was the only member.

I wrote rules on a piece of paper torn from a journal, and I displayed it as a grand degree on one interior wall. With push pins. Rule number one: Do not talk about cat club. Rule number two: Cats only. I spent hours at a time lounged in my makeshift closet fort with Barbie pillows and my CD player, enjoying the stress-free privacy before I even fully understood what stress was. Looking back, I recognize this kind of behavior as true introversion. Only an introverted child would create a social organization designed for complete antisocial activities. Growing up, I considered my tendencies to crave solitude just part of who I was. It wasn't until I became an "adult" that I noticed how people use introversion in a derogative way.

In my experience, the average person responds one of two ways when I tell them I'm studying communications: complete misunderstanding (I once told a fellow student I was studying Mass Communication and he asked me how many languages I knew) or stigmatized surprise (“So you must be, like, really bubbly and stuff, huh?”). While I find the prior taxing, I've been most upset to discover the prevalence of this stereotype that communication majors are all cookie cutter copies of one extraverted personality. That idea doesn't seem to plague other industries, like business, health or technology. Why communications?

Forbes reporter Nick Morgan touched on this idea in his article about introverts and public speaking jobs. “We are so fixated in this tumultuous era on the differences among cultures” he writes, “that we have a hard time accepting the similarities.” Indeed, we do, as confirmed by tons of social psychological research; Humans are biologically programmed to categorize each other based on certain traits like gender, race, age or appearance. In ancestral times, this was essential to survival because it helped humans distinguish between friendly and hostile tribes, but today it seems to do more harm than good. Grouping people based on similar traits, though an innate behavior, leads us to such hot-button issues as sexism and racism.

The categorization of introverts and extraverts is rampant in the communications industry, probably due to the fact that it's been widely perpetuated as a quantitative measure of talkativeness ("On a scale of 1-10" kind of thing). However, introversion and extraversion are more so descriptions of how people absorb and expend energy, or how much value a person places on social time versus alone time. Come to find out, these traits are actually based in biology and extend into a larger multi-spectrum concept developed by British psychologist Hans Eysenck (see above) that even further dispels the idea that introversion-extraversion is a one way street. It uses quadrants to categorize people based on levels of stability and introversion/extraversion.

People who pursue the communications field do so for generally the same reasons: They love and are skilled at communicating with other people, whether it be orally, verbally or visually. It's this array of abilities that makes mass media possible. It takes all kinds of communicators to make the world go round, so don't allow anyone to make you feel inferior about your particular set of strengths and weaknesses.

Personally, I hate public speaking. I even hate talking to people over the phone. I know I'm not very good at it. But I know I'm a great writer, I have a pretty strong vocabulary and I'm a good at teaching others how to be good communicators. I choose to love myself for those skills I have and try to be the very best I can be in those areas. Plus, I work on my weak areas. I took a Speech Communication class last spring in which I had to give a presentation as part of my grade. It was hard, but I learned some really useful public speaking tips that help me feel more confident doing something I've never felt good at. I accept myself as a introvert. It makes me a better writer. It makes me the person I am, and the same goes for all you reading this. Whether you identify as an extrovert, introvert or neither, your place in the communications field is entirely dependent on your creative abilities, not whether you prefer a Netflix marathon to a night on the town.

If you need any more reason to embrace your skillset, check out this quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook that he gave during an interview with Charlie Rose in Sep 2014:

"I think each person, if you’re a CEO, the most important thing is to have, to me, is to pick people around you that aren’t like you, that complement you. Because you want to build a puzzle, you don’t want to stack chiclets up and have everyone be the same.believe in diversity with a capital D. And that’s diversity in thought and diversity any way you want to measure it. And so the people that surround me are not like me. They have skills that I don’t have. I may have some that they don’t have. What we do as a team collectively are able to do some incredible things."
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple

Innovative Marketing IRL with Google Chromebook

In an age defined by digital media, I think we forget the importance of face-to-face interaction. A retweet from a company you admire isn’t the same as a pat on the back. A “like” on your birthday picture from your favorite aunt on Facebook can’t replace her presence as you cut the cake. Spending half the night uploading photos of your date night dinner on Instagram just isn’t the same as basking in the candlelight and staring deeply into the eyes of… that slice of red velvet cake.

Human beings are social creatures, and while the introduction of social media has allowed us to embrace it, it will never replace the interactions we have IRL (that’s “In Real Life”). In fact, studies on social psychology purport numerous benefits from face-to-face interaction. IRL contact also has the advantage of allowing nonverbal communication, which is based off of things like facial expression, posture and tone of voice and surprisingly makes up more than 50% of all communication. It’s simply an undeniable fact that face-to-face contact makes us the species that we are.

The Chromebook Lending Library lends out Chromebooks for free to students at Texas State University

In the realm of marketing, it’s important to cover the IRL grounds in addition to the digital ones. Businesses, big and small, can use IRL marketing to engage with consumers in ways that just can't be done online. That doesn’t equate, though, to simply passing out flyers on the corner or giving away free t-shirts at a sporting event. It’s about the user experience, the UX, if you will (digital media meets reality, see what I did there?). And not many companies are prioritizing that.

Google is one such brilliant company that is. On September 8, the company’s education team announced a new campaign to promote the Chromebook, a compact notebook running Google’s own Chrome OS, across 12 colleges from various states. My own beautiful Texas State University was chosen as one of the lucky few. 

The Acer Chromebook C720 is light and compact, weighing just 2.76 lbs with an 11.6" screen

The Chromebook Lending Library, proudly touting the hashtag #ChromebookForCollege, is a one stop shop for any student interested in Chromebook 101. The cherry on top of this nifty kiosk is a sweet one: students get full access to a Chromebook for up to three days for free. Top it off with a promo t-shirt and a $10 Google Play gift card and Christmas comes early this year for college kids across the U.S.

Everyone loves free stuff and cool vibes, but that isn’t the only reason the Lending Library is such a great idea. The main reason this tactic works is because it uses target marketing: bringing the product directly to the consumer. Google knows the Chromebook is suited for students due to its reasonable price, compactness and simplicity. Even more than that, Google knows how to persuade its target market into buying its products without the market’s awareness. < Playing popular music

and employing relatable student volunteers both contribute to the unconscious attitude building that leads to buying behavior.  

We see target marketing a lot in the digital world, especially with cookies and digital advertisements. However, it takes much more skill to plan and execute a marketing strategy in the physical world. With the Chromebook for College Lending Library, Google has done just this (and in a flawless manner, I might add. But are you surprised?).

 (Note: I am no way affiliated with Google, nor was I compensated at all for the creation of this post.)