Short-form Video’s Time To Shine

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Short video is taking over the online world. It’s both beautiful and grim.

Everyday, online video is getting easier to access, and even easier to create. Because of apps like Vine and Instagram, videos are becoming one of the main reasons people even log onto the Internet. According to AdAge, over 40 million people are on Vine, while 150 million plus are on Instagram. That’s a lot of users.

Twitter and Facebook own Vine and Instagram respectively, and people are leaving the text-based social media for their quicker video counterparts. Pop culture has even seen these apps’ relevance. Trends, memes, slang, and even social groups have appeared from this medium. It’s truly marking its place in history, but why?

It’s because short video is both the fastest and the most alluring way to convey a message. If you manage to entertain your audience while telling them about your service or product, you’ve got a memorable and potentially viral advertisement on your hands. Major brands have been doing this for months now, be it the stop-motion animation of Dunkin Donuts’ paper flower or Trident Gum’s chewing-face close-ups!

That is where the beauty of accessibility to online video lies. Any person can make any video about anything. In fact, it is so easy that you could accidentally hit the record button while pulling your phone out of your pocket and make a short viral hit. It makes video accessible.

On the flip side though—it’s ruining our attention spans and giving us an unhealthy addiction to Internet’s speed. We’re becoming so accustomed to this short format, that anything over 30 seconds almost seems too long. People are clicking out of longer videos on YouTube, closing web pages that take too long to load, and going insane over buffering streaming content.
It’s hard to decide whether Vine and Instagram are helpful ways to communicate, or detrimental to our already short attention spans. Time will tell, as the number of users of these appsare predicted to grow even more in 2014.

Visual Data Infographics

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What does your business do? Why does the customer need it? Do they know that yet? Most importantly: Does your product/service need a simple, sharable, and visually awesome explanation? That’s where we come in, with infographics!

 

Infographics are used frequently all over the net. You’ve seen at least one. You can’t log into the internet without stepping across one. Maybe it was the awesome Batman one that was passed around twitter and Facebook for a couple of years now. That’s because it’s a great way to show data. It presents information in a beautiful, but purposeful and simple way. It serves two purposes—looks good and tricks you into learning. Those kind of go hand-in-hand.

 

Here’s an example of one of the many infographics we’ve produced for our clients.

There are four ingredients that make up any successful infographic. These are Data, Design, Why, and Shareability. If it’s missing one of these elements, it won’t reach much of any audience. Think of it as a table… a table of info. If you remove a leg, you’re not gonna have an amazing table. Each aspect is essential. So don’t go without these four things:

 

Data:

It’s he backbone of the infographic. The entire reason you need one created is so you can display your data in an easy and simple way. You want everyone to understand. Data without the rest of the elements is boring, and flat out invisible to everyone. Gather your findings and be ready to have them represented in a beautiful fashion!

 

Why:

Well, you’ve got your data all ready to be shared, but what for? Say you’re looking to educate people on your product or service. You’d state a problem, and the purpose of the infographic is to explain how and why your business is the solution. Here’s where you make yourself important; here’s where you deliver your message.

 

Design:

Here’s where you take your what and why from above and make sense of it. Design puts everything in order and educates the viewer. Several points are to be touched upon: the information must be displayed clean and simple, it must look great so as to encourage reading, and there must be purpose to it. Meaning, you display your info in a fun, simple and creative manner that shows you know what you’re talking about. Bring eyes to your data.

 

Shareability:

Okay, your infographic is almost complete! What’s left to do is load it up with links to you and your social media outlets. You must let the viewer know where this image is coming from. Which brings us to a big decision: where do you put it? Of course you’re going to put it on your twitter and facebook, but where else? SEO will help, and as long as this is floating around the internet, it’ll grab eyes and bring attention to your business. So proper placement is key. Besides creating the infographic for you, we here at MOS are also able to put it in the right places.

 

Get a hold of us, and let’s visualize your data together!

-The MOS Creative Team

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Reviews Matter

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While you may feel your company/brand/service/product’s awesomeness speaks for itself, you’re only half right. Good work only goes so far. Online reviews, yeah those matter.

You’ve used Yelp once or twice before, right? You saw how useful of a tool it was and you found that sushi restaurant in record time! That was a good dinner too. Maybe you ought to review the place. A higher rating pushes them up on the list, bringing them more business and ensuring the chances that you’ll get that California roll again. After all, good ratings and reviews brought you there in the first place.

So you’ve seen firsthand how beneficial positive feedback can be. Why not for your business? Over 90% of people who’ve researched a business on Yelp agree that positive reviews lead to purchases. Check out this infographic from Mashable.

Being the 30th most visited site on the web, small businesses are the ones that benefit the most from Yelp’s exposure.  Increased customer awareness directly affects sales. Additionally, it’s a great way to get feedback from clients, with the ability to respond back to them! Create a dialogue! Seem like a business run by real people.

Though there is a bit of cautionary wisdom we’d like to bestow upon you: what’s worse than negative reviews are none at all. Don’t just start an account/claim your business on rating sites and let it sit stagnant. Actively encourage customers to leave reviews – there’s no downside to it. Perhaps you could get some inserts or packaging designed and printed to go along with your product, asking customers to write you a short review. In addition to Yelp maintenance, MOS Creative could design you up some snazzy printwork on top of it ;)

Get a hold of us at MOS Creative, and we’ll help YOU stand OUT!

 

-The MOS Creative team

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Throwback Thursday: Bumblejunk!

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We work on many projects here at MOS Creative. Do you have too much clutter? Need it removed? Well, we know just the guys who will help you out with that. This week, we want to highlight one of our favorites: Bumblejunk Junk Removal!

We’ve created many things for these guys. Here, we’ve got businesscards, yard signs, postcards, a vehicle wrap, and even an animation that ran on television!

We did all the work in-house, utilizing one of our designers, John as the voice. Tony then animated it all together. This was super fun.

The businesscards were a fun project as well. Here’s the front:image

And here’s the back:
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We love how well the light blue and the bright, vibrant yellow play off of each other. 

While the Bumblejunk guys are out at a house, removing junk as they do, they place a nice sign in the lawn.

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Bright, happy, and hard to miss!

The residential postcards were also a treat to make:

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As we see in this postcard, there’s a Bumblejunk vehicle driving around. Here’s our vehicle wrap design!

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We had a ton of fun creating this. Give Bumblejunk a call today!

-The MOS Creative Team

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Things I’ve Learned During My Internship

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Why hello there!

I started my communications internship here at MOS Creative at the beginning of January. When I started, I wasn’t familiar with the term SEO, I had never interviewed a client, my writing skills needed to improve, and I never truly felt like I was a part of a team at any workplace – until I started here.

Even though I have only been here for a couple of months, I’ve learned so much! Here are just a few key tips I’ve acquired so far:

- SEO: Google it, learn about it, embrace it! It is very important to know about certain key terms that can affect the visibility of your site. I believe any traffic is important.

- Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to bother your supervisors when you are given a task you may not understand 100%. Remember: it’s part of their job to help you learn and grow!

- Admit when you’re wrong. Mistakes happen. They’re a part of life, and they’re especially a part of the workplace. If you’ve made a mistake, don’t point fingers or play the blame game. Taking responsibility for your actions in the workplace takes a great amount of courage and bravery.

- Do your research. If you have spare time at work, look up websites that are related to your field of interest. Devour as much information as you can.

Lastly, go with your gut. I know this is something you may here often, but there are going to be many occurrences in which you’ll have to make a big decision on something that is work-related.

These short (but useful!) tips should take you far in the workplace – it has for me!

Laura

5 Mobile Fails You Should Learn From

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As smartphone sales continue to grow like crazy, especially as we enter the jolly holiday season, it’s no surprise that mobile is the new dot.com bubble. And many companies are paving highly effective ways to engage. Actually we’re all just now figuring it out and grasping the question – how do consumers interact with their mobile devices, what roles do they play in their lives, and how can we tap into that?

So as the learning curve goes, and marketing trial and error takes its course, there are bound to be some fails and missteps. Let’s take a look at five of the mobile fails we can all take a lesson from as we plan our strategies for 2012.

  1. The dying trend, check-in apps. Daily deal offering sites like Groupon and Living Social met the same fate earlier this year. It was enticing at first, and then consumers get bored with it. Oldest story in the book. Gowalla and Foursquare were cool a year ago, but as retailers started to catch on to the trend and created their own shopping apps with check-in incentives, the enthusiasm began to ween.
  2. Forgetting that mobile is a whole different animal. In case anyone out there still questions it, you CANNOT just take your web stuff and throw it on a mobile site. No no no. Mobile is a whole new opportunity to interact. There are benefits, challenges and strategies completely separate from your PC web tools. If you avoid the copy and paste trap in re-purposing the web, you can take advantage new capabilities, such as HTML5.
  3. If you’re doing mobile, do it right. A lot of you are experimenting with mobile tools, such as QR codes and social media, without creating a mobile-optimized destination for visitors. So just when you get them right where you want them, your mobile visitors land on your PC site. Ew! I can promise most of these visitors are not coming back. That’s a lot of lost conversions and sales.
  4. Agencies aren’t focusing on the big picture. Mobile web and mobile strategies can’t just be an afterthought in your bigger plan. But for this fail we blame your marketing agency. We can’t emphasize enough the significance of the mobile experience in the focus of your brand, and in driving further mobile growth. A lot of brands are still just missing the boat on this one.
  5. Manufacturers are still playing catch up. RIP feature phones. I can still remember the simple days, when my phone’s buzz alert could only mean a text message. Now it could be an email, Facebook message, tweet, status update, check-in or any of the thousands of other connections. It was a sudden and unexpectedly rapid death that manufacturers were not ready to capitalize on.

(Thanks to our friends at Mobile Marketer, see their original article.)