Snickers Social Media Strategy

This one is easy.

Snickers has their "You're Not You When You're Angry" motto, but they don't convert this slogan to the real world.

The most obvious cast of figures who get (understandably) emotional are sports figures.

More specifically, coaches.

But really, anyone who has an emotional outburst on a televised event has room for Snickers' social media promotion strategy. Here's how it goes:

1. Set up some type of catchy hashtag catchphrase that resonates well with social media users. This way, your eyes and ears will be your social media users which eliminates a major hurdle in finding good "You're Not You When You're Hungry" content. These users will also tweet in real time, which gives you the ability to take full advantage of the opportunity.
2. Sit back and wait until users find good content. The idea is to ultimately be associated with any and all televised outbursts, and people immediately recognize the situation as a "Snickers moment".*
3. Think of some way in which this can be translated into sales. Going off the basketball coach examples, imagine having the crowd being "prepared" with a Snickers in hand, and if a coach has an outburst, the floor gets flooded with Snickers bars.

*Being associated with a "negative moment" is not a bad thing. I'd rather form a connection with say Twitter users, who generally enjoy outburst moments. 

Why Doesn't Facebook Allow Polling?

This Status by Senator Ted Cruz (~600k page likes) currently has over 56,000 comments.

Facebook is the perfect platform for polls. Users want to engage with current events but there is no medium, such as a poll, to easily compile opinions. Why is this? Polls not only foster engagement, but also provide quality real-time content that users find interesting (and can lead to reading time if implemented correctly).

My idea for polls:

Using the picture above as an example, Senator Ted Cruz offers a poll for the question: "Are you better off with Obamacare?" with options of:

- Yes
- No

• Obviously, once someone votes, the percentage and number of votes for each option will show. 
• Comments should be separated into two categories: those who are better off with Obamacare, and those who aren't better off with Obamacare. This way, viewers can see both sides of an argument. Of course, "Yes"users can respond to "no" comments and vice versa for discussion/argument purposes.
• Anyone who votes will have their answer included so it is easily known what side they are on. In the above picture for example, all users will have their opinion answer in the right corner of their individual chat box.

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There are a lot of benefits that I won't get into because I think they are pretty obvious. Maybe most importantly, polls offer another form of engagement; one where an individual doesn't feel inclined to "share" something (read: an endorsement) or "like" something (read: doesn't provide context). 

Why Can't Anybody Get Conversation Layout Right?

It's pretty amazing to me that no social network or publication can get a (seemingly) simple thing such as conversation layout right. Ignoring this problem degrades the user experience and perhaps more importantly hinders discussion. Lots of publications think of publishing a story as a one way street, where the story is published and that is it. In other words, publishing a story is seen as the end of a story, but it rather should be thought of as a start to a conversation. Those who want to gain a loyal following will consider this and start being serious about facilitating discussion.

I'll be explaining exactly what these platforms are doing incorrectly and what they can do to improve the user experience.

Twitter:

Twitter is by far the worst and hopefully they are working on it because I would argue that their current layout actually hinders discussion, which is pathetic. The picture above more or less exemplifies the entire spectrum of what is wrong with the conversation layout. 

1. Too much spacing between users. 

There is so much blank space; not only between users, but also in each individual tweet. It can/should be condensed.

2. The @ symbol. 

I don't understand the reasoning behind including the OPs (Original Poster's) Twitter handle in commenting tweets. It gives the person less characters for replying. It is also obvious that Jeffrey Carter's 1st tweet is replying to Cuban's tweet so what is the point?

3. Not knowing who is talking to who.

Andy responds to Jeff's 1st tweet but it is hard to follow since:

- Cuban's handle is included. Why? He is talking to Jeff, not Mr. Cuban.

- There is no left-to-right spacing. If I'm responding to Jeff, it would make sense that my tweet isn't included in the "first line", but rather is spaced to the right, under Jeff's tweet, to show I'm replying to him. But that makes too much sense. Facebook does this (correctly). Actually, most others do this as I'll show you, but not Twitter!

4. Quoting/Retweeting

Stephanie I believe "quotes" Mark's tweet, and for some reason Mark's entire tweet is copied again. I presume that it is mainly for her own timeline so readers can see the OP and her response. Even if that's the case, it makes no sense to show a reply FIRST before the OP. The layout needs to be different.

As far as retweets go, there's no reason why someone retweeting should be included in the comments section. It adds to the noise and confuses readers.

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This all ignores that "1st" replies are always at the top. This is a mistake and should be reevaluated. There are a lot of directions this could go (such as sorting by followers or by favorites) but I'll leave that to the guys who made the current layout. I'd at least like to see maybe different colors for each individual in a conversation. That way you can figure out who's who relatively easy.

For a better example, please try to follow this conversation between multiple users who are all trying to talk to each other: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/448526165889015808

Instagram:

- Like Twitter, Instagram doesn't do the left-to-right spacing (response to a response) AND responses aren't directly under the response (if that doesn't make sense; crevm's response to cole1world should be directly under it, and a bit to the right to show he is responding directly to him). 

- This may be a bit nitty but spacing between users I think is a little too much.

- The OP and all his responses should be "highlighted" or whatever is appropriate to know that the OPs responses stick out to let viewers know the OP is responding. Maybe make his username a different color? 

- All comments that the OP responds to should automatically go to the top of the conversation.

- Say the OP tagged jusroman in his post. If jusroman responds, that comment will be bumped to the top. This is important, especially for the more popular Instagram accounts, so the person OP is tagging/talking to and their reply is not lost in the noise. It adds a lot of value to the user experience and encourages those being tagged to converse (if they know their response will be the 1st thing seen in conversation) more.

Disquis:

Note: not copied to scale. Two different pictures.

- Disquis does the left-to-right spacing, but they overdo it. Look at the real estate GeorgeWire gets compared the other responders. I would put CashMcCall's response icon directly under the halfway point of FlashCrashNoMore's icon. That way, you know he is responding, but it leaves plenty more room down the road if people keep responding.

- No avatars. 

This may seem trivial, but it is important for discussion to associate faces/avatars with words, especially on topical stories. It adds to the experience. Also, it is much easier than trying to match usernames to responses. 

Now, I am not saying for Disquis to start connecting FB/Twitter accounts for avatar purposes, especially since some/most of these users want to remain anonymous, but there needs to be some type of encouragement to put a picture up.

- Order of comments. 

Disquis allows you to sort by Newest/Oldest/Popular, which is great, but it is still lacking. Insightful comments that are late to the party may never see the day of light. I don't know how to fix this, but there is definitely room for improvement.

BuzzFeed/FiveThirtyEight

 

- Requiring FB login.

Just lol at this. I don't see any real reason why people have to sign in to verified FB accounts to comment on these articles. I guess they think it adds to the "realness" of the discussion. I'd argue that it causes people to not speak their mind & act cordially, but I can see the arguments for not letting "anonymous" trolls into discussions. If you have good content I don't think it would be much of a problem to let anonymous users comment. 

- Left-to-Right spacing.

Again, maybe nitty, but this is too much. Once people keep replying to a replier, after the 4th or 5th, reply, it looks ridiculous. As I said with Disquis, space a repliers icon to start under the midpoint of the users icon above them.

Slate:

I don't know wtf discussion software Slate uses, and I know I've seen it on other publications, but this one is god awful. Anonymous profiles, weird usernames, left-to-right spacing bad, no avatars, people "listening" sounds good in theory but doesn't really do anything, sign in too complicated. 

Quartz:

The thing I like about Quartz and which most other publications don't do is that you can comment on individual paragraphs. So a large discussion is possible before getting halfway into the story if, say, someone disagrees with a certain statement. Still, I'd like to see it go one step further with the ability to comment on a single sentence.

I don't think Quartz does an end-of-story commenting system, or maybe I missed it. But if that is the case, that is weird and dumb.

Facebook:

Facebook at least does it better than most. Simple is best and Facebook understands this. Unfortunately most comments get drowned out by the sheer volume. One thing that I'd like to see on FB & other publications: separating comments by positive/negative (like/dislike), but that would never happen on a platform as big as Facebook.

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To Summarize:

• Left-To-Right Spacing: don't overdo it, but don't not do it
• If someone is tagged in a post, give them top priority in the sorting algorithms
• Color schemes to separate users?
• Don't make signing up too hard/annoying
• Give OP and his/her responses higher importance in algorithms
• Give me the ability to comment on lone paragraphs/sentences
• Give users more options than just FB/Twitter login. Some people don't want their profiles attached
• Don't do what Twitter (currently) does.