Looking to run a RFP for UGC? We're often approached by large multi-nationals that have assembed an Innovation Team to find a tech partner to launch a UGC aggregation services that allow business users to use earned content for publication purposes. In this post, we're going to share some of these common...
Image & Video Recognition APIs To Automate Your Visual Marketing
Bleeding edge "neural network" learning is no longer something that only the largest players like Facebook and Apple can access to improve their products and amaze their customers, it's also a thriving "pay as you go" offering with three of the big five (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) investing to drive...
The Super Obsessive and Paranoid Guide to Keeping Your Instagram Account Safe From Hacking
We've seen a number of hacking attempts on high profile brand and celebrity Instagram accounts over the years, including regular attempts on our own @candid handle. Many of these episodes were pre-2017, before Instagram rolled out 2-factor authentication, and all were evenutally resolved but it's never...
5 Key Influencer Marketing Challenges, Opportunities in 2017
Hailed as the holy grail of content marketing, influencer marketing continues be the subject of pursuit for many marketers with only a few who can claim to have mastered the craft. Here at Candid, we have been helping our clients separate true influencers from the noise since 2012. Our approach and methodology...
UGC-Powered Dynamic Product Ads for Travel, E‑commerce
Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) are potent, often misunderstood and almost always underutilized. Fortunately the fix is actually pretty easy. What do DPAs have to do with Candid? Candid is all about helping brands get better content and do more with it, this has always been our core focus. Simply put, community...
Scott Galloway's Powerful Podcast on Amazon, Future of Retail, E-commerce & Tech Disruption
A lot of people are claiming victory for having succesfully predicted Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods but few were as clear about this scenario and the underlying drivers (in advance of the announcement) as the L2 founder and New York University professor Scott Galloway. His interview on how how...
Driving Sales Using Dynamic UGC for Email
Marketers have been using rights-approved community content across a variety of channels for years. The field of visual marketing platforms have solved the problem of getting UGC in to emails, but how do you refresh content after you hit send? Email plugin provides you with a URL to embed, which means...
Candid + Slack: Better Together
Competition in the last few years has placed extreme pressure on brands to increase the frequency and quality of their visual storytelling across social channels... keeping this river flowing has become a significant challenge for most teams. Rights management of community content certainly helps with...
Conversion Marketing: The Business Case for Incremental Revenue
Have you wondered why Visual Commerce has exploded in popularity over the last 4 years and why there are now hundreds of platforms vying to help marketers inject community and authenticity into static e-commerce experiences? The simple answer lies in conversion rates, a metric that marketers obsess over...
Should you build or buy a CMS for UGC?
When we first started in this space in 2012, there was hardly a Visual Commerce or Visual Marketing cateogry to speak of. There were certainly dozens of plugins and widgets for rendering social feeds within the e-comm experience, but very little in terms of true content management and merchandizing capabilities....
Instagram's Best Hidden Feature For Community Managers
Many marketers have approached us in the last year with suggestions on how to improve discovery and support for finding content where a branded hashtag wasn't used. It's quite common for users to simply tag the brand's account or mention them in the caption and such posts have been traditionally difficult...
Monitoring Account Mentions Using the Instagram API
We've learned a lot in the nearly 4 years of speaking with brands about their social media monitoring needs but one of the questions we continue to see on a daily basis, even in 2017, is whether Candid can monitor account mentions. Whether it's simply pulling media into your moderation queue when someone...
How Shangri-La Uses Candid to Manage 100+ Global Guest Galleries
We don't always pause to celebrate client successes with our community but the effort behind this one truly warrants the attention. In the spring of 2015, close to a year ago, we were approached by the Digital Marketing team of Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts to consult on the build out of a guest gallery...
The Business of Instagram
As we prepare to usher in 2016, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on our journey and where we can have the biggest impact in the new year. Our story started in the trenches of Toronto’s tech community in 2012, close to a year after Kevin welcomed the first batch of developers looking to build...
Twitter Video support in REST and Streaming API
Twitter is finally rolling out long-awaited features for its core apps designed to boost the time people spend on the service. As of yesterday morning, you can now post 30-second video clips to Twitter from the iOS and Android apps. In typical Twitter fashion, videos taken within the app or uploaded...
All Display Plugins Now Support HTTPS
Hot on the heels of Instagram's announcement of new Embed post capabilities, we are happy to announce that all Candid display plugins now support HTTPS and can be safely used on secure sites without triggering certificate warnings. Best of all, no code changes are required to enable this on active deployments....
Case Study: GLAMGLOW & Candid Team Up for Stunning Engagement
Last week we finally had a chance to sit down with Jennifer Karasik, eCommerce Manager at GLAMGLOW® to review the results of one of our most most successful campaigns to date. Campaign Objectives GLAMGLOW® wanted to celebrate their biggest fans and showcase their product in use on the homepage...
Candid Now an Instagram Preferred Platform Developer
Today is a big day for a team of passionate Toronto Instagrammers who set out to build new generation of services on the most important social network of our time. We are absolutely ecstatic to be included on Instagram's preferred Platform Developers list which features pioneering teams that are pushing...
Are Online Customer Reviews Enough?
Word-of-mouth is a retailer’s most powerful selling tool. Depending on your sources, 70% to 90% of us trust word-of-mouth recommendations, even from people we don’t know. While only 10% to 20% of us trust a company’s advertising and sales messages. Word-of-mouth is the elusive payoff...
3 Reasons Why You Should Harness UGC Now
Have you ever been to the food court in a mall, and, not knowing what you want, looked around at your options, only to find the one you want has the longest line-up? Why does that happen? Chances are you didn’t really pick the place with the longest line-up. The line-up chose you. No one shops...
