Things With Wings

Similar to the definition the Urban Dictionary gives; a “Thingywingy” for us is one of those bits of the Internet that you just have to share. It might be a new meme, an incredible video or an unbelievable news article that’s made it around the world.

So for the first time, here are this week’s “Thingywingys”.

You’re welcome.

1 – The Internet LOVES Tina Fey (who doesn’t?)

When Tina Fey photobombed Amy Poehler during the Golden Globes, the Internet went wild seeing one of its favourite celebrities being part of a meme that consists of people ruining each other’s photos.

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/tina-feys-golden-globes-p_n_1216818.html)

This week the internet has united Tina with another famous meme – Shit Girls Say – by making this great compilation of – Shit Liz Lemon Says

 You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btjWF2VU62E

 Unfortunately embedding has been disabled :(

2 – NASA has just published a 8000 x 8000 pixels photo of the Earth. Yes. Three zeroes behind those eights. (via Buzzfeed.com)

You can find the original 8000 x 8000 here 

(Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6760135001/in/photostream)

3 – The time-sucking device that is the Cheezburger network has just posted this insightful look into the difference between the life of a dog and the life of a cat.

It is one of the most shared LOL Catz this week.

(Source: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2012/01/26/funny-pictures-dogs-life-vs-cats-life/)

On Friday 9^th September 2011 Tumblr catapulted itself to a major milestone – its 10 billionth post. Impressive, yes - but when you consider that it was only rolling past 5 billion posts in May, to double its growth in just 4 months, is incredible!

Although Tumblr and Twitter broke out into the social media scene at around the same time – Tumblr suffered a monstrous amount of down time and so hasn’t grown at the same rate as its feathery competitor.

Roll forwards to the present day however and the distance between them is much less vast. Tumblr is now adding more than 40 million posts a day and according to Quantcast, is attracting 72 millions visitors a month.

What really demands attention though, is the number of page views Tumblr is racking up… More than Wikipedia and also more than its feathery competitor (well kind of)! According to ComScore, Twitter generates 3.4 billions page views and Tumblr generates 6.5 billion a month. Although we have to remember, many Tweets are viewed via an app, meaning these stats are not exactly like for like.

So, where’s this momentum come from?

It’s good to share and the world knows this - every gadget and every piece of social media allows you to share, be it your location, your opinion, the photo of your friend falling down drunk at a party or one of coolest pieces of design you’ve ever encountered. Tumblr neatly fills the gap between short and sweet twitter and a full-blown blog - and as the pace of life continues to quicken, Tumblr allows you to share anything, as easily and as quickly as possible.

“Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog.”

(http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tumblr)

Tumblr allows you to share: text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from your browser, phone, desktop and email. Posts can also be liked, you can follow other Tumblrs and you can completely customise the design and domain of your Tumblr profile - You own the copyright to your own work too. The key point of difference though, is this blogging platform allows you to reblog – much like the beloved retweet.

Historically, Tumblr has been associated with a younger demographic, however Quantcast has just presented findings that 44% of Tumblr’s US users are actually over 35. Interestingly the male/female split is surprisingly even as well - 51/49 % respectively. (http://www.quantcast.com/tumblr.com)

With $85 million of funding in the post to Mr Tumble from the likes of Richard Branson, Greylock and Sequoia Capital, and with a current valuation of $800 million, we’re really excited to see where Tumblr will be in 12 months time.

It’s a fair assumption to make that pretty much everyone has worked in a bar or restaurant at some point in their younger, most probably student days. I worked in plenty, from Belgian to Japanese and from Italian to Spanish and no matter how the cuisine and tipples differed, the customer service message always remained the same – ‘Give a customer exceptional service and they may tell one friend, disappoint one customer with poor service and they will tell 10.’

More often than not, customers who receive bad customer service will not complain in person and cause a fuss, they will simply never return again. Additionally, if the business is not aware of such ill feeling, they have no way of being able to contact them or make amends.

In the social media universe, if an unhappy customer were to post a bad experience to their 500 Twitter followers or were to voice their grievance on a review site, the potential spread could explode – almost instantly. But there is an opportunity…

According to a survey conduced by Harris Interactive 68% of consumers who posted a negative review on a social network, forum or review site, received a response back from the retailer. The survey also found, that of the customers who received the response, 33% turned around and posted a positive review and 34% deleted their initial negative review. This is particularly important when you consider that nearly a third of customers research what other customers have said in the social media universe when purchasing online.

It is more apparent than ever, in a landscape where customers are numbers and are identified only by their age, sex, job and location, that retailers who treat them as humans and present themselves as humans by opening the way for a two way dialogue, are better respected and more likely to benefit from repeat business and recommendations.

Two thirds of 8 – 24 year olds access a social network at least once a day. You can watch movies on Facebook and even buy products. So to ensure you get more than the leftovers, address those negative comments and win over unhappy customers.