Episode 14 – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Instagram Features, Casey Neistat’s Beme, and Crowd Funding

This week, our hosts Matt, Josh, and Anna return from a Thanksgiving weekend full of food, fun, and big events in in marketing and technology. Join our cast as they explore subjects like large tech companies, new social media features, and the Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday [3:00]
New Instagram Features [11:55]
Casey Neistat’s Beme [18:15]
Crowd Funding [25:00]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are some of the biggest days for advertising and shopping every year and last weekend was no exception. Our hosts join together to discuss some of the changes, trends, and standout ads from this year’s holiday weekend.

“I used to love Black Friday but they made it so that the stores are open 24/7 and that kind of killed it for me because I loved to just experience the madness.” -Josh
“If I could be watching TV then I’m more than likely on my computer instead.” -Matt
“I think a lot of people are getting lazy with Black Friday, this was the first year that I didn’t go because I can get everything from my computer on Monday.” -Anna
“I’ve seen some small businesses really take advantage of Black Friday and Small Business Saturday by doing annual events.” -Josh
“If you want to start doing Facebook ads, look at the insight tab of your page and see what kind of people are liking your page and then target your ad to that demographic instead of the default target.” -Matt
“Facebook makes it easy to copy and paste an ad so make three similar ones and run your own little A/B test, sometimes it’s just changing the button or image that gives you results.” -Josh

New Instagram Features

Instagram has been Facebook’s main method for combating the growth of Snapchat. Historically, they’ve implemented features exactly like those found on Snapchat. This is starting to happen once again and Anna leads the group through a discussion of some of the positives and negatives that it’s bringing to the platform.

“It seems like Instagram is trying to shove so many things into one platform that they’re starting to overlook certain things.” -Josh
“Facebook owns Instagram and Facebook is scared of Snapchat so they’re trying to make Instagram like Snapchat to continue to dominate the market.” -Matt
“This weekend I went to screenshot a friends picture on Instagram to send it to her and this thing came up that asked if I wanted to send that to someone and that was a total game changer.” -Anna

Casey Neistat’s Beme

Professional YouTuber and Vlogger Casey Neistat opened up a Snapchat competitor, Beme, a while back. Recently, it was acquired by CNN and Casey announced that he would quit vlogging to continue the project as a spinoff media company. Josh takes a look at what this might mean for the future of news and freelance journalism.

“Casey and his team were acquired by CNN and allowed to create a spinoff company that’s meant to allow people to put out videos that are timely and topical to create conversations about current events.” -Josh
“I feel like as millennials we don’t consume the news in the same way. We love news that’s quick and efficient and because of that I think I’ll really like Casey Neistat’s new project” -Anna
“We are a visual generation, everything has to look good and it needs to be something you can see, not necessarily written anymore, it’s all visual.” -Matt
“There’s been a huge rise in freelance journalism and this is just the next step.” -Matt

Crowd Funding

Crowd Funding has gained a lot of momentum in past years through multiple sites that allow you raise money for nearly any cause. Matt takes a look at super successful crowd funded projects and gauges the groups opinion on crowd funding in general.

“I think the best crowd funding group I’ve seen is the Cards Against Humanity group. This year, they crowd funded them digging a hole and raised over $100,000.” -Matt
“It’s a really great tactic if you understand your audience really well or need to get to know you audience because it puts the power in the hands of people like us.” -Josh
“The major downfall with crowd sourcing or funding is buying into something and then having the company just quite making it.” -Matt
“Essentially, crowd funding is very, very basic investing because you’ll usually get some kind of compensation back for it in the future.” -Josh

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