Sarah here! It’s been six months since I wrote my last article on ‘Podcasts to get you through the day’, and since then I’ve had numerous friends, colleagues and clients tell me they loved the recommendations (you’re welcome!), plus quite a few who shared their own podcast faves. So in the lead up to the Christmas holidays, also known as a week of prime listening time, it feels like a good opportunity to update you with a few new listens below – and don’t forget to read the original list here. Ologies- It’s fun to learn and science is cool. Fact. A ‘comedic science’ podcast from Alie Ward, and the perfect listen if you’ve got an hour to waste and want to learn something new. Pro tip: listen to ‘Osteology’ aka the science of skeletons – fascinating. Startup – in a startup or want to know the inner workings of what goes on when you’re setting up a business? Go for a pint/wine with Alex or Katie. Not got the time or appetite for that? Listen to startup and follow Alex Blumberg as he sets up his podcast empire, Gimlet media (those who read my last blog post will know I listen to almost all of their podcasts). DTR – the show all about dating. Great for smug couples who want to date vicariously through single people, DTR is not only full of great stories, but is a prime example of how brands can do branded podcasts in a way that doesn’t feel like marketing overload. This one’s a hookup (see what I did there) between Gimlet media and Tinder – alas it’s a couple of years old and they don’t seem to have another series en route, but it’s good for a laugh (and the marketing research, obviously). Read what the Guardian has to say about it here. Tailenders – a recommendation from Alex and Olivia in the office. A load of indie lads chat cricket. V English. The High Low – if you’re a woman on the internet between 20 and 40, you probably listen to this one already, so I apologise if I’m preaching to the converted – The High Low is full of news, drama and general chit chattering from authors Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes. I actually don’t listen to this one any more, but everyone I ever meet seems to, so give it a go. The Horror of Dolores Roach – listen, I never said this list was going to be all smart stuff. This one blurs the boundaries between audiobook and podcast, a gruesome fictional tale told over 30 minute minisodes. It’s got empanadas, cannibalism and gritty New York horror. What more could you want!? On that note… I think a new list of audiobook recommendations is up next… Sarah #podcast #podcasts

Being digitally inclined can lead you to a plethora of opportunities in today’s digitalised era. Hike up your employability—in any field—by hiking up your know-how with the best digital skills to learn today. Learn which of the 5 types of digital skills can help you get a leg-up in your career, as well as how you can start your digital skills training in this quick and easy read. Coding With an increasing amount of businesses (in or out of the tech sector) who rely on computer coding, it’s safe to say that code is the language of the future. According to a report from a job market analytics firm, Burning Glass, there are about 7 million job openings in 2015 which require coding skills. Candidates vetting for a position as data analysts, artists, designers, and engineering need to learn how to code—even just the basics. That said, coding has become a valuable digital skill that can open more job opportunities for you. To get started,  you can opt for free digital skills training courses in coding from online platforms like Coursera and Github. Digital Advertising Social media is one of the most powerful platforms businesses use to interact with and attract their target audience. Although just about anyone can have a social media account, it’s not as easy as it looks. According to Left Bank, marketing hiring trends in 2018 state that 69 per cent of companies plan to hire more digital marketers. Among the most in-demand digital marketing skills include digital advertising (45 per cent), followed by content creation (42 per cent), and content strategy (39 per cent). To effectively utilise social media as a marketing platform, learning skills in digital advertising is a must. Having one of the top digital skills under your arsenal gives you an edge in the workforce. If you want to start your digital skills training, Udemy teaches digital skills online, including digital advertising. Analytics The future belongs to people that can adapt quickly. In this case, at least possessing the basic digital skills to have an edge above the rest. Data analytics is one of the examples of digital skills that give anyone an immediate edge. Having the right and timely information (and acting on them) can spell the difference between survival or extinction in today’s dog-eat-dog world of fast-changing markets. In recent years, data analytics has risen as one of the top digital skills as the demand spiked in proportion to companies make the move from solely selling products to crafting personalised customer experiences. According to a recent McKinsey report, the United States alone already face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 analytical professionals. That said, it has become a minimum requirement for decision-heavy and managerial-level positions. Give yourself a career edge, and learn this top digital skills through Coursera. Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also known as paid search, is one of the digital skills examples that help sway a customer’s buying decision—meaning increased sales if applied correctly and effectively. SEM is simply one of the most influential and highly competitive disciplines today. Its role for digital retailers is so important. To put things in perspective, most of a business’ eCommerce traffic starts with the search engine with 67% of the traffic goes immediately to the first five of the search engine results page (SERP). Over the years, the landscape for SEM became increasingly more cutthroat and complex that both learning and teaching digital skills in Search Engine Marketing have a high demand. Stay above the competition and start now, learn SEM courses that Udemy offers. Cloud Computing Over the years, the cloud computing market has risen into popularity around the globe, becoming a top business solution. This fast-growing industry has attracted many global investments. Particularly,  the UK plans to spend $10B on cloud computing this year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) predictions. With so much promise for cloud computing, it is a great industry to get into for IT professionals. In fact, a report from a Forbes article states, the worldwide public IT cloud service revenue will rise from $127 billion back in 2018 to $167 billion by next year (2020). Start now, google digital skills training to get started. Learn digital skills from the aforementioned sites like Udemy, Coursera, and Github.Ready for your next tech project? Assemble your team from a pool of the best tech talents at cost-effective rates with Cloud Employee.

If you follow us regularly, you know that we at OneFifty do thing differently. We don’t do dress-down Fridays (every day is a day where we dress like the people we are) and we don’t need the pub at 4 (because WeWork is providing free beer every day – yes you read correctly). Instead, we are big Friday Hooray-ers! Friday Hooray a 15-20 minutes session that Sarah introduced back in October last year. The purpose is to share our highlights and learnings with each other, each week. A lot of projects we do are advanced data analysis and brand sensitive, so we can’t always shout about them in public, but every Friday afternoon we take the time to learn and celebrate what we have achieved together. It does a lot for us as a team, some things are obvious and some are surprising. Let’s have a look at what the data says about our Friday Hoorays: Below’s a word cloud with all our weekly highlights. You’re looking at 219 anonymised data lines – or all the things that the team mentioned as being their winner each week. The three obvious ones are standing out: We’re a positive bunch of people – half of our top 10 most mentioned words are positive: happy, good, enjoyed, and great. I know this word cloud is biased and only showing the weekly highlights, but nonetheless is it showing very strong emotive words We’re passionate about our client work – clients are frequently mentioned as a highlight each week. But what we equally love is our team lunch on Thursdays;) We enjoy doing what we’re best at: social, content, campaigns, influencers, data and reports (wait, who said that??) And this wouldn’t be a OneFifty blog post if we weren’t looking at what the data actually tells us about human behaviour (or what it doesn’t)… Feedback – a thing that we strongly believe in at OneFifty is instant feedback. Looks like people are actually valuing this, to make their work the best they can Best/ satisfying – our work is excellent because that’s the standard we set for ourselves. Seems like this isn’t something we are just preaching, but what makes people actually feel proud Different/ feeling – as I said earlier, there’s a OneFifty way to do things. Being different isn’t something you can learn, it is something that we live and feel So, try putting the yay into Friday yourself, and see what it tells you… Anne-Catherine

We’re feeling hot, hot hot. And it’s not the fact it’s currently 27 degrees outside (although that is contributing). You might remember that last year we featured on the Startups 100 list – an annual ranking of the UK’s newest and most exciting businesses. Well, we’ve made it for a second year running! It’s the one award that we said would mean the most to us when we set up OneFifty because it’s not just confined to the marketing and comms industry but all startups. So the fact we’ve been named on it twice is a huge achievement. We’re now in our third year of using data understanding and human behaviours to have more effective brand and commercial interactions with the people who actually matter. We’ve stayed true to our word from the very beginning: Opinions don’t matter, facts do. Being genuinely effective means looking at the evidence of how people live today – and challenge ourselves and others to prove it. We want to say a very big and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has worked with and for us – the Architect’s of Next who have joined us on our journey. Now, we are all about the data, so here’s our journey so far in numbers: 46 brands worked with 21 members of the OneFifty team (and 1 dog for a little while) 5 offices because we keep growing out of them 460,200 messages sent on Slack 11 WeWork cards misplaced We’ve got so much more we want to achieve, and more people to bring on our journey, so if you have 2 minutes and you know someone who we should be chatting to, we’re right here! Or just give us a shout out on social, we always love that. #winning #startups100 #award #growing #awards #Business #startups

There we said it. It’s a dirty concept. Verboten, ‘other’, naive. But, for all the challenges it presents, social media is about progress. About emancipation from control of information, about empowerment of individuals, about the irrecoverable movement toward meritocracies. Call me (us) idealistic? Fair. Call us negative, quitters, cynical? NEVER. Social media, for all the challenges, retains the transformative power to empower individuals, concepts and economic efficiency. That’s worth standing up for. Headlines about “social media fatigue” are just that – usage has never been higher. People aren’t quitting in droves, they’re refocusing on their usage. We are a population in control and cognisant. That’s to be celebrated not critiqued. Vested interests aren’t going to tell you that. This is the opening act. And we’re clapping loudly.

Advance Together was set up in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, with the aim of creating a political party for people, not politicians. It wanted to address the issues facing the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea by having local people represented by local people, with a new form of politics. This is how we worked with them in the run-up to the May local elections. THE BACKGROUND Kensington and Chelsea has some of the biggest disparities between rich and poor in the country; It has the highest gap between the median and mean salaries in the country, with a £90,000 difference between the two In Notting Dale, 34% of children live in poverty, compared to <10% in most other wards This, combined with Grenfell, proved that something had to be done. People were fed up with the status-quo; Recent events at the 2016 General Elections saw Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour on the march, with a 10% swing in votes from Tory to Labour and the first Labour MP sitting in the seat since its creation Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea became a battleground at Local Elections; Labour and opposition parties looked to exploit Tory weaknesses, whilst the Tories desperately sought to maintain influence OUR OBJECTIVES Starting from scratch, Advance had three clear objectives to measure success by: Change the discussion around local politics: Instead of being driven purely by national issues, it wanted to bring the conversation back to local issues Get local people engaged in the discussion and issues in the borough: Grenfell had highlighted just how out of touch the Council had become from many of the ordinary voters. Advance wanted to increase engagement with the political system especially in the poorest boroughs where turnout was under 30% in 2014 Get candidates elected into office: the initial aim was to win between 1-3 seats across the borough WHAT WE DID IN SOCIAL The diverse nature of Kensington and Chelsea’s different wards, combined with a limited social budget, meant that a blanket paid-for social approach wasn’t going to be possible. To make sure the right creatives were being delivered to the right wards, we: Tested the response rate across every ward in the borough, narrowing down the wards we then tested variables with from fifteen, down to three Tested party messages vs. topic-led posts with the three wards, to understand what resonated best, discovering that topic-led content performed 40% better on a CPM basis Having discovered that topic-led content performed best, we set out to find which of the campaign topics, out of Schooling, Housing, Governance, Accountability and Air Quality, would resonate best. We found that there was little variance between topics Tested which formats (video vs. image) performed best. As we wanted to get the party message ‘out there’, we prioritised CPM over CPE for these tests, discovering that video-based content was more effective than image-based posts RESULTS & LEARNINGS Campaign Results Across the campaign, we reached 184,900 individuals, within the targeted area. Given that the 2011 census put the populations the borough at 160,000, we are confident that nearly everyone in the borough would have seen an Advance Together post in the run-up to the elections People watched our content for a cumulative time of 117 hours 1,000 click-throughs to the Advance Together website Voter turnout increased by an average of 9% across the ward On election day, Advance took 9% of the vote across the wards that they ran in. An impressive result but unfortunately not enough to break the two-party dominance of the current council Provable effect on votes cast In the aftermath of the election, we wanted to know if we could see any relationships between vote share and seeing one of our adverts online. Because the vote tallies for each ward were published we had a great data set to look into the effectiveness of our campaign on driving vote share We ran a linear regression model to see if views, engagements, or reach helped drive votes We found that there was a significant relationship between vote share and reach (significant at the 0.01 level) – essentially a statistically provable relationship between social media outcome and electoral outcome Shaping the debate: what did we learn about who took part in the conversation? We explored whether Advance was a significant part of election debate by tracking the conversation throughout April and May and found that: The official Advance account was second-most influential within this conversation Three of the top 12 accounts were Advance candidates The appearance of several personal accounts within the top 12 reiterated the need for candidates to push the party message, demonstrating that they are the most likely to get cut through within this conversation We were also mentioned by some prominent celebrity Labour supporters, the most notable being Lily Allen, who had a significant network effect. This Tweet was one of the most discussed and most influential and shows how well Advance did in gaining cut through Below is a graph of the most influential accounts within this conversation, measured by a variety of factors such as: how many times an account mentions a key term, follower interaction with tweets, and the number of followers of that account. What are the learnings which other progressive political organisations could deploy? We found that there were a variety of learnings that could be applied to other progressive political campaigns wishing to use social to help mobilise support: Campaign messages need to resonate: Our most successful messages were edgy, with this type of content outperforming on a CPM and CPE basis by some margin (+70%) Online buzz does not necessarily result in votes: 477 people talking about the election had Labour in their bio, compared to six for Tory or Conservative. This means people were 53x more likely to identify as a Labour supporter than a Tory. This was not reflected in final results, where the Tories made gains People respond to people: content needs to be authentic, with the candidates and issues concerned being key, not production values CONCLUSION What was so fascinating about this project was that it demonstrated statistically, there was a clear relationship between being seen online and the amount of votes cast for particular candidates. However, in order to be seen, brands must understand not only who their audience is, but also how and why they consume, share and act on online content, in order to maximise effectiveness. We have been able to prove a clear model for alternative political movements to drive political change.

We’ve just had our 10,000th applicant for our internship. Based on data from the main graduate jobs platforms, this was 2017’s most popular job listing (relatively). This is how to do it. Except we aren’t really sure how it has happened, to be honest. I mean it’s a great job. Six months, paid London living wage. Great benefits. Great opportunities (you do real work, from day one. We aren’t really sure where the photocopier is, and we have a barista to do coffee). It’s in digital, data, social media, all of which are growth areas and of particular appeal to ‘millennials’ (this is a joke, we don’t actually believe millennial is a meaningful term). It’s also in a startup (actually one of the UK’s hottest, since you ask), which is of growing interest to people starting their career. There’s lots we don’t know. Not least why one person only stayed 2 days, without explanation. That was odd. Yet four are permanent members of the team now forging exceptional careers. So we think that’s a better indicator. No-one’s sent us a shoe (“to get a foot in the door”) disappointingly. One person told us it was “terrifyingly cool”. We remain unsure if that was a compliment or not, as they actually seemed terrified. 10,000 applications 9 hired 6,000 applications without typos (estimate). We’ve covered top tips before but above all else: a passion for the internet. We’ve got it. You need it. #hiring #intern #internship #jobs

Winning! We’ve had just over two years of using data and models of human behaviour to drive purposeful digital interactions with the people who matter. Also known as working seriously hard to build something new, something we can be proud of, and something which can help everyone create what comes next. Today we heard we’d been included in the Startups 100: an annual ranking of the UK’s hottest start ups. We’ve spent our time doing great stuff with partners, brands and creators, rather than shouting about it, and what means most here is that we’re alongside businesses doing everything from property tech to non-dairy milks. i.e. this isn’t just a ranking of digital and marketing businesses, but of startups generally. This was something we set our sights on when we were first dreaming up OneFifty, so it feels a bit surreal typing this. To state the obvious, we couldn’t have done it with you. From clients to partners, to cheerleaders to creators, to friends and more: thanks. We sincerely mean it. So, cheesy as it is, this recognition is as much for you as us. Albeit we’re the ones eating the amazing emoji cake… Here’s some data points about the journey so far, in true OneFifty fashion… 31 brands we have worked with 15 members of the OneFifty team 2 office moves 500 million combined audience of the brands and creators we’ve worked with Over 200,000 slack messages sent as we work our daily magic 11,000+ applicants to join the team (Seriously, blog post coming soon on this) 1 new partner business launched 1 passport, 1 laptop and 6 credit cards lost We don’t know how many beers or coffees. It feels an area best left unquantified Want to help us do even more? Well, you could: Keep reading and sharing –  encourage people to sign up for our regular newsletters, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram Introduce us to brands, creators, partners who would benefit from our approach Say well done (it makes us feel good) on social media Thanks for your friendship over the first 2 years. This is just the beginning. Let’s build what comes next, together. (Also, isn’t it great the way our first photos we used were really bad, so it means despite all the hours, we don’t look any worse – now that’s strategic…). Thanks, and here’s to what comes next… #awards #startups100 #winning

One of our core beliefs is we should share how we do things. Our aim is to influence how things are done for the better, to create what comes next. Something we are asked about a lot is how we run tasks and projects. We ignore many of the conventional ways it’s done across marketing and consulting, in favour of a single app, used continuously. Seriously. It’s called Todoist. You might have tried it, you might use one of the competitors. Why Todoist specifically, vs others? Well, when Katie and I were first planning the business, we looked at several, but most are good just for individuals, or others are good for businesses, but are aimed at software development. Todoist had the seriousness yet flexibility we wanted. So, when the two of us were planning things in what we termed our ‘provincial office’ (my Kitchen table) we were using Todoist. It tracked everything we needed to do, from coming up with a name, to buying a laptop. We knew if we started with it, every team member who joined would just adopt it. You can’t install it later. But… Why do we do it? Project management: We have 10-15 live clients/projects at any one time. Each of those will have 10-30 tasks at any one time. There are 14 people. Keeping that joined up needs process. Fluidity: We don’t want to do meetings for people to discuss what they are doing/need to do. We want it to be live. It’s the pace ‘next’ requires. Personal accountability and self-direction: We don’t believe traditional hierarchies work for the sort of people we have (and want) in the team. We want people who put their hands up for responsibility and set their own paths to achieve the goals. This gives a shared framework for those sort of people. What are the benefits? Efficiency: We’re more efficient than conventional industry benchmarks. This is one reason. Ownership: People have their initial against their action. That changes the dynamic around a task and the standard it is delivered to. Transparency: Everyone can see everyone else’s stack. You can’t hide, nor do you want to. You can learn from seeing what others do, and how they do it. How do we use it in practice? Continuously: Every piece of work / all of the time. It is constantly reviewed, referred to, and is the tool we use when discussing a project. Individual review sessions focus around it. Review programmes: We show it to clients and partners. We collaborate outside our business using it. Individual effectiveness: You can get a lot of stats. I know that Thursdays and Sundays are the days I do the most tasks. I know I have got continuously more effective in the last 2 years. I can tell you how many tasks the typically junior or experienced team member does of a specific type, which projects are the most efficient, which the least. I can quantify every aspect of our output. This drives decision making. Collective effectiveness: We discuss overall output with the team, and compare results. It drives a performance culture. So, this hopefully shines a light on literally the way we run the business, right now. It’s different. Try it. We know it’ll help you. And if you’re not a “list person”… become one.

Twitter Promote launched into beta recently. Whilst we don’t usually review social ad products, this caught our eye. It will also rarely get used by people who are experienced at Twitter ad buying, so we decided to trial it for your delectation and edification. What is it? Twitter Promote is, in Twitter’s own words , their first subscription ads product. It is aimed at both SMBs and individuals who want simplicity and continuous results. Why is it significant? It’s rare one sees innovation in social advertising products (formats are different). Targeting SMBS and individuals, and offering it as a subscription really is new Simplicity – you can set up in 5 clicks by my estimate Individuals not just SMBs – no-one’s offered a consumer-grade social ad product before (although you’ve long been able to buy ads as an individual. To some extent, Snapchat introduced this with filters, but that’s a special occasion product, as opposed to a core ad offering What we did? We trialled it on both an individual and a business account. The results across the month follow. This cost £79 per account for the month. As you can see, results are broadly consistent, and outperform Twitter’s expectation management of 30,000 impressions and 30 followers. One of the accounts trialled sits neatly within their 2000 follower size range recommendation, the other above it. How does this compare to if we buy ads through the more traditional targeting options offered in the ad dashboard? Well, content, time and audience targeting notwithstanding, the follower growth is fine but not exceptional, whilst the impressions are lower, but not awfully so. Essentially it’s tolerable value. Pros? Simplicity – this really wouldn’t take you long Palatable on a straight CPM basis (impressions) CPE (engagements) would be very poor (note you’d rarely be able to optimise for both these outcomes) Cons? Less granular targeting not esp suitable for lots of businesses / people If you’re not familiar with online ad trolls you’ll be exposed – boosting tweets will always mean the bottom feeders of the internet share their views with you, and that will come as a shock to some (I encountered some lovely young men from Scotland with a forceful but limited command of the English language, for example) Followers were not good quality – based on our trial this would increase vanity metrics around follower count, not provide meaningful audience growth. That’s generally true of follower targeted advertising, however. No ReTweets or Quote Tweets can be promoted. Whilst not disastrous, for many they’re a key part of their content. Overall: It’s good to see some innovation with products for individuals and subscription pricing., it’s a great way to get started  if you’re not confident or don’t have the time. However, we’d raise question marks over whether it would provide good business outcomes for SMBs due to lack of targeting, and does it offer more than vanity options to individuals? You can definitely generate effectiveness through Twitter ads, but it might require more granularity and time investment using the existing ad products.

Getting that perfect Christmas present for the right person is a big deal and one which most of us spend a lot of time musing (or stressing!) over. Well, what if we told you that you need muse (or stress!) no more? Let us reveal to you some of last year’s most talked about gifts on social media, and see if we can predict what will be big this year… Hygge We’ve all heard of it, we’ve learned how to pronounce it (‘hoo-gah’, but of course we knew that already…), and we’ve been buying into it massively over the last twelve months. Referring to the art of keeping oneself snug, Hygge was a huge trend for Christmas 2016. It was mentioned 2,166 times on Twitter between 1st Nov and the 31st Dec. Conversation was predominantly female-driven (65.4%) and focused on the London area (38.2%). What’s more, Google searches for hygge were up 4,200% during the Christmas period in comparison to six months previously. Sentiment around the hygge conversation was overwhelmingly positive, with people enjoying any excuse to put on their thickest socks and delve under the duvet. Importantly, early social buzz seems to have correlated in eventual commercial success; The Little Book of Hygge, for example, hit the top of the bestseller lists, and sheepskin rugs reached a five year high for Google searches. Fantastiske! Virtual reality VR came into its own in 2016 and received a huge amount of social attention in the build up to Christmas. Coming from a predominantly male audience (74.2%), the conversation around VR generated 1,055 blog posts in November and December alone as well as 2,474 mentions on Twitter. Daily tweets in the UK reached a peak on Christmas Day, proving that it was a popular and much talked about present. However, the hype doesn’t appear to have been long lasting; Sony announced that it had only sold 915,000 units of its Playstation VR set in the first four months since its release, whilst other companies have yet to disclose their sales figures. A case in point for the power of passing trends, VR won’t be top of our wish list this year. Fitness tech “New year, new me”, said the whole of the country, and off to the shops we went to purchase the latest fitness tech. The range of gadgets able to track fitness activity is truly astounding, and now ranges from ‘smart shoes’ with inbuilt fitness trackers and Bluetooth connectivity, to bike helmets kitted out with headphones and GPS. We tracked 4,111 blog posts related to the topic between November and December. On Christmas Day, social media mentions were 1,011% higher than they had been on average each day since 1st Nov. Whilst conversation was fairly positive, there was also considerable backlash from people who believed the hype around fitness tech contributes to a negative, unhelpful attitude towards our bodies. In addition, the top emoji within the conversation (😂, 9.5%) suggested users weren’t taking fitness tech as seriously as the hype suggested. Gift subscriptions Over the years, many consumers have turned to purchasing subscriptions as Christmas gifts, whether it be food, books, magazines, makeup or even flowers. In 2016, Google searches for gift subscriptions were up 336% during the Christmas period in comparison to the previous six months, whilst London dominated Twitter – conversation in London was 620% higher than the next most chatty city, Manchester. The gender split was fairly even (52.7% men, 47.3% women), which is unsurprising given the huge variety in gift subscriptions available. Activewear, coffee, sketchbooks, shaving kits; if you like it, you can probably subscribe to it. So, what are a couple of our predictions for popular Christmas gifts this year? It might be a little bit early to say for certain, but we can use indicators to give us a pretty good idea… Smart speakers “Alexa, what’s the weather going to be like today?” “Okay Google, what meetings do I have this week?” Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, we predict it will do soon. There have already been 14.4m mentions of smart speakers so far this year, and on the 1st Nov there had been a 160% increase in mentions since the 1st Jan. Google searches for smart speakers, in general, have risen on average by 288% each year for the last four years. If these figures are anything to go by, we think Alexa will be sitting under plenty of Christmas trees this year. Gift experiences In a similar vein to gift subscriptions, gift experiences (whether it be flying, afternoon tea, driving, spa days or Segways) could be making their way to the top of plenty of Christmas wish lists this year. 2017 has seen a 72% increase in conversation surrounding these experiences, reaching an impressive peak of 14.4k mentions on Valentine’s Day, proving they’re a popular present to give on gift-giving occasions. We just suggest being careful about what you say around your friends and family – that joke about always wanting to try skydiving may be taken more seriously than you realise…

It should come as no surprise that we’ve identified yet another social trend to live this month – after almost a full year of them (from marble to life automation ), there’s not much we haven’t tried! If, like me, you already knew that there are only 62 days, 12 hours and 43 minutes until Christmas (and even less by the time you’re reading this!), this month’s trend may not come as a surprise: Christmas gifting. November is the month where conversation around gifts begins to gather momentum. Over the past five years, there has been a 44% average increase in people in the UK googling ‘Christmas gifts’ throughout the month – or 11% each year. In November last year, the conversation around gifting received 130,000 mentions in the UK. This is for organic conversation alone: when including users retweeting Christmas present competition entries, the volume increases by 25%. What’s more, we seem to prefer talking about giving gifts as opposed to receiving them: much of the conversation is dominated by people either recommending gift ideas or sharing what they have bought for others. What a nice bunch we all are! On top of this, it’s worth noting that Christmas gifting in November receives far more attention than other seasonal occasions where gifts are given, such as Valentine’s Day. The number of Google searches for ‘Christmas gifts’ in November last year was 921% higher than the number of searches for ‘Valentine’s gifts’ in February. But who is predominantly driving this conversation about gifting? You might have thought it was mainly companies using social to advertise their ‘perfect for Christmas’ products as early as possible. Certainly, magazine brands were some of the top sources for gift-related conversation in November, with British Vogue posting about Christmas gifts 23 times in one month! But of the top 20 most authoritative accounts on Twitter*, only 3 were brands (Cineworld, Soap & Glory and Lipsy). Women led the gifting conversation by 57.3%, with this month’s 3 most popular emojis being Christmas themed (🎁 🎄 🎅). Interestingly, the majority of the conversation originated in the north: London aside (dominating the conversation by 29.9%), the next most gifting-focused cities were Manchester (5.2%), Glasgow (2.7%) and Leeds (2.6%). How are we living the trend? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this is pretty obvious! Any excuse to celebrate Christmas early…