Bennett’s Curse and Pixe Team up for 2015!

It’s that time of year where summer dwindles down, the nights get cooler and we start to see more autumn themed colors. This also means that we see more Halloween candy, pumpkins and scary monsters displayed everywhere. This is no different from Bennett’s Curse, a haunted house attraction that has won Popsugar’s Scariest Haunted Houses in America’s list and featured on the Travel Channel. Bennett’s Curse, a Baltimore, Maryland based company has teamed up with Pixe Social again this year to show you the screams and fright in real time. Visitors arrive, tour the haunted house and afterwards get a photo with featuring a custom banner. The user receives a copy of their photo that is hosted on the social media sites of Bennett’s Curse. At the end of the activation, the top 3 photos with the most likes will win an array of tickets to their Krampus Haunted Christmas attraction.

1^st Place – 6 Tickets

2^nd Place – 4 Tickets

3^rd Place – 2 Tickets

Top Event Technology Trends for 2015

After providing the official social photo sharing solution for CES 2015 last month, we began to think about what trends in the consumer technology market will transfer over to the events industry for the New Year. Technology has drastically transformed the way event managers and attendees
communicate over the past few years, so what do they have to look forward to? Read on to find out.

Digital Experiences. Event attendees, especially millennials, crave well-rounded experiences at trade shows. Uninteresting educational sessions and irrelevant speakers won’t hold their attention for long, so why not leverage the number one distractor? Digital devices such as smart phones and tablets provide another outlet for event organizers to connect with their attendees. Online polling platforms, live social media chats, and interactive photo contests are all powerful activities that will contribute to a memorable show experience.

Integrated Platforms. As of 2013, custom apps are almost a requirement for any show trying to compete on a global level, but how can your event stand out? Show apps should be the sole resource for attendees to ask questions, look up booth information, schedule meetings & sessions, and network. Attendees should not have to download multiple apps or open more than one webpage to answer every question they have throughout your event. Integration is the answer to the modern attendee’s desire for simplification and convenience when attending an event.

365 Event Connection. With social networking apps like Facebook and Twitter connecting us to our friends, brands, and celebrities 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why shouldn’t event organizers reach out to their potential attendees all year-long as well? Event organizers can now leverage one app that becomes an umbrella for all of your association’s or industry’s needs. Also attendees can have access to year-round updates via newsletters, blogs, social media posts, press releases, and more.

Staying Relevant to Your Audience in These Changing Times

When it comes to social media marketing on Facebook, content has always been king, until now that is. Over the past few weeks, digital marketers have witnessed a consistent decline in the viral reach of organic posts promoting brands. According to Facebook, “beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content [promotional page posts] in their News Feeds,” meaning much of a brand’s unpaid promotional content may be less visible to potential fans.

While the reasons for this change in policy are varied and complex, brand marketers are already looking ahead and considering how to continue to grow their audiences on leading social media. The trick here is to encourage engagement (tagging, liking, sharing and commenting) from existing customers and fans to reach people in their networks and thus grow your presence. Here are three tips on how to engage with online fans and remain relevant on social media: 

1. Produce high quality content – Bottom line, if your brand’s content is authentic and meaningful, then there should be no problem with engaging users on Facebook. Position your brand as a resource for quality industry news and updates. Post about issues and concerns that are of concern to your audience. Pixe Social partners, ad:tech, provide the advertising and technology industries with valuable, and more importantly shareable, content through Facebook and Twitter. ad:tech has quickly become a respected resource for up-to-date information without spamming its fans’ newsfeeds.
    
2. Encourage your current fans to engage - Most importantly, it’s all about the emotional connection with existing customers. If you have an established relationship with your fans, then that’s something to continue to nurture and grow. Become proactive online by replying to and appreciating all comments in a timely manner. Encourage your cheerleaders to post about your brand and commit to becoming your brand’s advocate. Contests and fun games can play a big role in facilitating this.
   
   During the month of October, Bennett’s Curse Haunted Attractions engaged with fans before and after visiting their award-winning haunted house with the “Monster Photo Contest.” Visitors snapped pictures with the creepy characters and shared them on Facebook with friends and family. By encouraging fans to share their photos to enter to win prizes, Bennett’s was able leverage the power of social media word-of-mouth marketing and reach out to new fans.
    
3. Mix it up – Facebook is a powerful tool to reach and engaged users but keep in mind that it’s not the only way. There are many more social media outlets that can engage your audience the same way, if not more directly. Diversification of media platforms is a key factor in remaining relevant. The emerging millennial generation—the generation that is constantly sharing and commenting—will adapt to the newest trends in technology and social media.

The Age of the Connected Consumer

Something we marketers need to continuously remind ourselves of: We are living in the ‘Age of the Consumer’. Consumers are constantly connected through smartphones and tablets noting their every move and every purchase. And what happens before and after every purchase? The customer review. Online testimonials can make or break a brand’s reputation overnight. This means that companies need to engage customers and build long term relationships so that their brands become a part of the consumers’ daily lives. It's not just about technology and information anymore, consumers’ opinion of a brand’s performance is what drives growth in revenue now.

One way for marketers to do that is by becoming an integral part of your customers' narratives, and building a solid presence on the channels where their fans are active. We recently heard of a great example of a brand who got it right. This fall, iHeartRadio, a free digital radio service, launched a nationwide marketing campaign to engage with college coeds at 10 university campuses by swapping Instagram photos for free merchandise. As for the outcome of the campaign, iHeartRadio gathered 5.7 million impressions of likes, shares, and views on Instagram within the first week. By leveraging a social media app that their target audience was already actively engaged with, iHeartRadio was able to effortlessly become a part of their potential consumers’ daily lives.

If your brand audience comprises Gen Y, then Instagram is one channel where your brand needs to shine. Did you know that Pixe Encore and Pixe Snap enable you to do just that – and with almost no effort needed from your marketing team. Users can post branded photos directly to Instagram with your brand hashtag and logo using both Pixe Encore and Pixe Snap.

Pixe Social partners New York Comic Con and BizBash are two popular brands that have seen considerable outreach with fans’ Pixe photos and their custom hashtags on Instagram recently. The #NYCC hashtag was tagged in over 240,000 posts and BizBash attendees shared the custom event hashtags over 7,700 times. Attendees at recent NYCC and BizBash events were eager to share their photos on Instagram to become a part of the shows themselves.

Make sure to check out the Pixe Social Instagram page to see photos from many of our clients’ recent social campaigns.

NRA Show 2014 Wrap Up

There I was, fresh off a plane, in an unfamiliar city, and entering the nation’s largest convention space, McCormick Place, measuring an impressive combined total of 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space. Welcome to a Five Star event, I said to myself, I hope you’re ready! Having already attended a couple of smaller events with the Pixe team, I was really looking forward to the 2014 National Restaurant Association Show and it more than lived up to my expectations.

When the show opened, the Grand Concourse photo booth attracted people like magnets as they entered the main halls staged with seven feet tall NRA and Pixe branded backdrops, several prop trees decorated with boas, hats, and aprons, and selfie-stands placed in the front. Over the next four days, the NRA Pixe photo booth clicked an impressive 2100 photos from excited attendees.

The first day concluded with team dinner at Giordano’s that allowed us to rest our aching feet, discuss the highlights of the day, and plan for day two. Over delicious Chicago-style pizza, we learned about an exciting partnership opportunity SpellBrite Signs, who provided trendy LED signs with the words “NRA 2014,” “Spicy” and “I’m Gluten Free” for users to wear while taking pictures. It’s always gratifying to work with other exhibitors to spread the love at face to face events.

Surrounded by power brands such as Samsung, OpenTable, and Groupon, Pixe was able to stand out in booth 6679 not only with our fashionable red carpet, but also with our live photo walls displaying a slideshow of all the photo booth shots. Thousands of attendees made their way to our booth to check out Pixe for their brands, and of course to get their hands on the “coolest giveaway of the show,” our ubiquitous blinky glasses. We showcased both Pixe Social, the leading tablet-based social photo booth solution, and our newest offering, Pixe Snap. The latter is a user-managed app that enables individuals to find their beloved brands by geo-locations and express their emotional connections with them.

All in all, the NRA Show turned out to be an amazing experience, giving me a new perspective on how much work goes into tradeshows. Although there may not have been blood, sweat, and tears, a lot of preparation before, during, and after the show was contributed by the Pixe team. As for my number one piece of advice for the next show? Comfortable shoes!

Contributed by Katherine Kozelski, Digital Media Marketing Coordinator, Pixe LLC

Breaking Down Digital Media Acronyms Part 2

Since the start of the Internet, companies have been discovering new ways to build their brand and reach out to new customers. This platform has spurred the start of Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing is the process of using digital formats to advertise a message for a brand. In order to understand this new industry a little better, take a look at some of the most commonly used terms and phrases.

Content Marketing: Content Marketing is a brand’s process of producing original, valuable, and thought-provoking content and sharing that content with interested consumers. For instance, trade magazine, company blogs, and even many brand social media sites aim to share interesting articles, trends, and new products that relate to their specific industry. Here is a short history of content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute.

Social Media: Social Media is a combination of the websites, and now applications, used for social networking. Social networking is creating relationships, either personal or professional, through a login-based social media website. The most popular social media sites include, but are not limited, to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.

Organic Marketing: Organic Marketing is the process of marketing a brand or product without paying for advertising. It is important to note that organic marketing does contain intent, but it is a more unexpected option.Organic marketing is focused on creating a natural relationship with your potential customers, especially through word-of-mouth and social media outlets.

Responsive Design: Responsive Design is probably one of the hottest trends in marketing now, responsive web design is a website’s ability to react to the user’s screen size. Web designers are now standardizing flexible content on the sites that can automatically adjust to whatever type of device is used. Along with changed appearances, responsive websites will transform the user experience to work with a device, such as the finger zoom feature on iPads, a drop down “hamburger” menu for mobile, and landscape/portrait views on tablets.

Tribal Marketing:Tribal Marketing is a marketing strategy to create a community-centered feeling for those interested in a certain product or brand. Marketers attempt to target certain individuals that all have a common interest or need and solve that need with the use of their product. In essence, marketers want to encourage a bonded tribe in support of their product or services

Digital Dashboard: Generally speaking, a digital dashboard is a central location that draws content from multiple resources into a manageable and readable format. Many dashboard systems support a standard selection of applications, but are usually customizable to improve user experience.

Viral: Going ‘viral’ is a term used for when a person, topic, video, article, or photo hits the popularity level as to where it reaches the Internet engagement level of the hundreds of millions of views. When one Youtube video suddenly goes from about 100 likes from the poster’s family and friends to a shocking 2 million views, this video has reached Internet celebrity status as a viral sensation. 

Need some more? Read Breaking Down Digital Media Acronyms Part 1

Breaking Down Digital Media Acronyms Part 1

Digital Media is an expansive industry that picks up traits from the worlds of web design, traditional marketing, social media, graphic design, and even business development. This glossary will touch on the most commonly used acronyms, providing a mini cheat sheet to help manage all of the

abbreviations.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization is the process of achieving a higher, unpaid, and organically placed position in the results on a search engine. Search engines such as Google or Bing take many background features like key words, relevance, and new content into account when calculating the placement of a website.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing is very similar to SEO, but SEM is the form of marketing that utilizes SEO. Marketers tap into SEO through researching industry trends, following industry discussion leaders, and working with search engines to send more traffic to websites.

ROI: Return on Investment is the amount of return, be it financial, web traffic, or user engagement, a company receives from devoting resources to a specific project. For example, when a company begins to build a social media interface, the amount of time it takes for their marketing team to create accounts, develop a following, and connect with potential customers is the initial investment. The return on that investment is securing new customers, making sales, and yielding a profit.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication is a condensed and centralized feed containing all relative information to the topic of interest. For instance, if one were looking for the top news stories of the day, a news website would input an RSS feed into their site that is constantly updating the
trending headlines. Many website have imbedded an RSS feed into their sites to track trending industry topics or their social media feeds. Yahoo.com provides an RSS on their homepage that can be personalized to your interests.

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language is the language used to create web pages. Every web page you view is supported  by a design that is written in HTML. Digital Marketers use HTML on their company websites, content pages, and even designing emails.

PDF: Portable Document Format file is a document that can be easily viewed or printed on any computer software without compromising the original document design. A PDF’s text and images will appearexactly as intended, no matter the receiving device, making file sharing much simpler for digital marketers.

GIF: Graphic Interchange Formats are image files that are compressed, meaning shortened, to reduce the time for downloading by the user. Pronounced with a “J,” you have probably seen countless GIFs on social media sites. GIFs are images that are commonly animated by combining multiple images and typically have a comical caption to accompany the picture. Here are some example of the most popular Internet GIFs of 2013.

CPC & PPC: Cost per click and paid per click are terms used for brands advertising on websites. In developing an online marketing campaign, many companies choose to pay for advertisement on sites that are seen by potential customers. The websites that host the advertisements will charge the company either for a predetermined cost for each time the ad is click or the company can pay for a certain amount of clicks ahead of time.

URL: Uniform Resources Locator is the web address that is specific to each page on the World Wide Web. Every single internet page has a personalized address containing a combination or letters, numbers, and symbols.