Weekly Wrap Up #1
As one of our new blog campaigns here at Howard Merrell, we are starting weekly wrap up. Every Friday one of our awesome associates will find the top 5 articles, videos, news stories, etc. that they enjoy and believe you will like too. Many of these get shared internally throughout the week here at the office and we pass these on to you, for your enjoyment.
1. Social Media Crises On The Rise
In a study by the Altimiter Group, there were many interesting findings about not only how often social media crises arose but the ways they are dealt with. Namely, one of the optimal solutions was to follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Owyang stated,
1) Foundation: First, develop a business plan and put governance in place.
2) Safety: Then, get organized by anointing a team and process to deal with crises.
3) Formation: Next, connect business units to increase coordination and reduce duplication.
4) Enablement: Grow by letting them prosper – give business units the support and flexibility to reach goals
5) Enlightenment: Finally, weave real-time market response into business processes and planning.
Read the full report on Social Media Crises Readiness.
2. Crowdbooster Launches the Future of Social Analytics
I don’t think it has launched the whole future, personally, but it is a very, very solid tool. Crowdbooster’s social media analytics give you pretty graphs to look at. Not only that though, but I personally have been using Crowdbooster to optimize my posting times, and I have seen a significant raise in click-through rates when compared to other times. I have yet to try its influential users, but I’m sure it would be interesting to prove how well it works.
3. LinkedIn Top Social Media Site for Journalists
A recent study shows that more journalists are on LinkedIn than any other social network. The study found that 92 percent of journalists are on LinkedIn, with Facebook and Twitter following close behind at 85 and 84 percent, respectively. In 2009, 85 percent of journalists were on LinkedIn, while only 55 percent were on Facebook and 24 percent were using Twitter. via – Meredith Schneider
4. Sweet Boarding Bulldogs!
No cause for this one. Just some sweet bulldogs on different boards on different waves: Concrete, Sand, and Snow.
5. Social Media Decision Tree
If you’ve ever had a problem deciding which social network would be best for you, this decision tree/flow chart can be a helpful tool. Albeit better for a personal decision over a company-wide decision it does give excellent points and choices for the best social network. If you’ve ever needed help deciding what network to use, check this out!
Image Credit - MacKinnon Photography
How's this for a homepage?
I love this. Who else would have the courage to strip out all their products, all their everything from their home page for an announcement? Of course, who else has the Beatles representing their brand as an announcement? Makes me happy.
Virgin Mobile Rights Music Wrongs
A digital manifesto to reclaim the authenticity of music. View website »
Honky Tonk Rock-A-Thon For Haiti
This Saturday at the Pourhouse. Open your hearts and wallets for Angel Mission medical clinic in Haiti. All proceeds will go directly to Angel Mission. 5 bands, one low cover….a chance to do good while having a blast. Hope to see you and your friends there. Doors at 7, bands start promptly at 8.
My dentist Dr. Randall Bennefield and David Burney (whom some of you may know) are in the Johnny Folsom 4, a Johnny Cash tribute band. They play frequently in Raleigh. Check them out and support a good cause!
Music Festival Coming to Raleigh
The Independent Weekly proudly announces the Hopscotch Music Festival, the Triangle’s biggest music festival yet and a strong addition to the country’s festival circuit. Scheduled for Sept. 9-11, 2010, in downtown Raleigh, with 120 bands in 10 venues over three days, Hopscotch offers fans high-quality local, national and international options in just about every genre imaginable — rock, hip-hop, alt-country, heavy metal, dance, punk, classical, noise, drone, folk and more.
Media choice and emotions
One question we hear from clients is, which media are most effective to achieve the maximum impact on the emotions, and on the brand. On judgment, it seems likely that a medium like television, where you can impact both auditory and visual senses, is likely to be more impactful than a one-dimensional medium, like print, or radio. Finding science to support that isn’t so easy, though. For that you need evidence that, for example, the emotions evoked by a piece of music are similar to, and can influence, other emotional experiences. So far the proof for that has been elusive.
But a new study, which has just been published in Neuroscience Letters, reported here, provides both behavioural and physiological evidence that the emotions evoked by music can be transferred to the sense of vision, and can influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived.
Two experiments were performed.
“In the first, 30 participants were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts, each lasting 15 seconds. After each piece of music, the participants were shown a photograph of a face, expressing either a happy, sad, or neutral expression. The photographs were flashed on a screen for 1 second, after which the participants were asked to rate the emotion on a 7-piont scale, where 1 denotes extremely sad and 7 extremely happy.
Thus, the visual emotional stimuli – the photos of faces – were “primed” by an emotional state conveyed by a piece of music. All the participants correctly identified the emotions expressed by the faces in the photographs presented to them. However, happy faces primed by a happy piece of music were rated as happier than when primed by sad music. Conversely, sad faces primed by a piece of sad music were rated as sadder than those primed with a happy piece of music. Finally, neutral faces were rated higher when primed by a happy piece of music and lower when primed by a sad piece.
The size of the priming effect for neutral faces was found to be almost twice that of the effect for happy and sad faces. [Emphasis mine]This may be because neutral faces contain less information than those expressing one emotion or the other, and hence are somewhat ambiguous. We know that the brain integrates information from different senses to construct representations of the external and internal worlds; thus, in the absence of relevant visual information, it may therefore become more reliant on information from other senses when generating these representations.”
If we think of the brand as a (relatively) emotion-neutral element, at least compared to the faces in this experiment, it seems obvious that the ability to prime the emotions with music makes an audiovisual medium more flexible, and potentially powerful, than a visual medium alone.
It was already known that music can influence the perception of emotions in visual stimuli when presented simultaneously, but this new study is the first to show the emotions evoked by music can affect the perception of emotional content in visual stimuli presented afterwards.
According to this study, these new findings also suggest that emotional processing takes place outside of conscious awareness, rather than being based on judgments and decisions.
