Stuzo Social Landscape Review: Q3 2013

We’re rolling right into holiday season, meaning lots of dollars at stake for consumer electronics, retailers, big box, travel, and others this quarter, but before we break out the Cyber Monday deals, let’s take a look back at July, August, and September in the social and mobile landscape. Which platforms, marketers, and savvy brands have made it into our quarterly highlights? Read, share, tweet, and let us know what we missed.

July

•  6 Successful Brand Campaigns on Foursquare (7/13): Back in July, Mashable put out a list of the top brands engaging users on Foursquare. With 20 million users and more than 500,000 businesses on the social platform, Foursquare still shows outsized potential for both small and large businesses because of it’s deep location data, despite some industry insiders’ rather negative outlook. Here, History, Starwood, and Pepsi are all highlighted as top of the class.
•  Google Unveils Chromecast (7/24): A brilliant move by Google – a new piece of hardware was rolled out in Q3 called the Chromecast. In an effort to make Google’s Chrome web browser the defacto glassnostic way to explore the web, Chromecast enables the user to cast out their media, be it from YouTube, Netflix, or Google Play, out to their TV, which becomes a connected device with the little HDMI stick. Your smartphone becomes the remote and your media experience becomes a little more seamless.
•  Facebook Launches Embeddable Posts (7/31): Facebook rolled out Embeddable Posts in July, enabling brands and businesses to embed page posts into their site via social plugin. This makes it even easier to socialize a static brand or commerce site, and it can be a way to easily keep content on those destination properties fresh, contextual, timely, and relevant.

August

•  Vogue and Google Glass (8/21): “Fashion Bible” Vogue dedicated a 12 page spread to the future, featuring Google Glass. While seemingly gimmicky now, wearables are quickly taking the technology world by storm (as far as the mainstream; we know that wearables and their influencers have been around for decades), and with things like Jawbone, Pebble, Nike Fuel Band, and Galaxy Gear weaving themselves deeper into the fabric of our everyday lives, 2014 promises to be a year of explosive growth in this industry.
•  Google Retires Latitude (8/9): After a huge acquisition of Waze in Q2, Google moves to retire its Latitude service, opting for native location sharing within the Google+ app. Look for more of the same from Google in 2014, is it tries to consolidate all relevant services into Google+ integrations, like its replacement of Talk with Hangouts and the YouTube commenting system update.

September

•  Kit Kat Sponsors New Android Version (9/3): In a flash of brilliance in the world of product placement, Kit Kat (Hershey’s) decided to sponsor the latest version of the Android OS, and they released a humorous Apple-esque launch video to commemorate the occasion. Watch The Future of Confectionery here. We’re not sure if this will trigger a wave of bizarre, unrelated sponsorships, but it certainly worked if Hershey’s was targeting Stuzo employees.
•  Google Launches New Company, Calico (9/18): In the most under-the-radar news of the year, Google launched a new company, called Calico, to “focus on health and wellbeing, in particular, the challenge of aging and associated diseases.” What do you get when you combine some of the leading minds of biotech, Google, Apple, and futurist Ray Kurzweil? Now that the human genome has been coded, and the biggest tech giants have decided to dig in, there is surely magic waiting in the wings from this new company.
•  Twitter + NFL Partnership (9/26): The NFL announced at the end of September that they would be partnering with Twitter for sponsored content distribution during the season, throughout the playoffs, and for Super Bowl XLVIII. As Brian Rolapp, Chief Operating Officer for NFL Media, said, “With consumption habits shifting to mobile devices and companion experiences alongside broadcasts of our games, this partnership will provide us an additional channel to reach those users which is completely complementary to our flagship mobile product, NFL Mobile from Verizon.”
•  Leading Brands on Instagram (9/30): In September, Clickz and Track Maven released a report on the top brands across industries leveraging Instagram to engage consumers, employees, partners, and other constituents across the social web. Among the leaders were engagement trailblazers Nike, Starbucks, and Foot Locker. Mashable also gave brands some ideas when it comes to building custom solutions that leverage the Instagram APIs. We would also be remiss if we didn’t mention that the Stuzo creative technology platform has several Instagram Reusable Components that brands and agencies can use to visualize user data and create innovative custom solutions to engage consumers.
•  Pinning More Than Cupcakes + Promoted Pins (9/24): Pinterest is out to show brands and publishers that it’s about more than just pinning pictures of hairstyles and cupcakes. Users are consuming content at an enormous clip on the visual social network, and Pinterest is trying to make it more intuitive to pin articles and other types of content and to create an environment that fosters engagement around these new content types. In September, Mashable also covered the launch of Promoted Pins, Pinterest’s foray into the native ad space. Much more to come here in terms of data and success benchmarks, but we are very bullish on Promoted Pins for relevant brands in the space, be they retail, entertainment, travel, etc.

Did we miss any updates that you thought were notable from the second quarter of 2013? Tweet us @Stuzo with a link and you could be featured in an update. For all the 2013 updates, check out the Stuzo Q1 Social Landscape Review and the Stuzo Q2 Social Landscape Review, then stay tuned for the grand finale in December. For more on how these landscape shifts will impact your brand or clients, reach out to set up a 1:1 conversation with a Solutions Architect at Stuzo.