Peach Fuzz is Pantone’s Color of the Year 2024 – here’s how to use it in Canva

Each year, Pantone’s Color of the Year is revealed to the design and creator community —a single hue that, in the eyes of the global color authority, encapsulates the spirit and trends of the time. For 2024, the choice fell upon Peach Fuzz, a gentle peach tone that is both warm and carries a modern elegance, according to Pantone.

The color was chosen as a counterweight to a time of turmoil, a warm and welcoming color that “conveys a message of compassion and empathy”.

Peach Fuzz

So if you want to adjust your content according to the proposed color trend, here’s an easy way to get started.

Finding templates in Canva by color

If you are using the content creation tool Canva, it is very easy to create content with that fuzzy peach feel. By dragging the image above into an empty image in Canva, the color picker tells us that Peach Fuzz has the hex code #FEBE98. Now you can start adding elements to your images with the same color.

There are of course already a number of templates in Canva that you can use and you can search for templates by color. Just add the code #FEBE98 into the color picker and you will get several suggestions for templates with the same mood.

Color Palettes

Next step may be to create a palette based on the Color of the Year 2024. Go to Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Upload the image from Pantone and Canva suggests a number of palettes based upon the peachy original. If you find the one below a bit dull, there are others to choose from.

Another tool for creating palettes is Adobe Color Wheel. Here’s an example of a palette that was generated with Peach Fuzz as a reference.

Now you can start to incorporate (if your brand guidelines allow) these colors into your content production for 2024.

Oh, and there’s even a $30 color of the year coffee mug for the real enthusiasts…

How to use micro influencers to drive engagement

micro influencersBrands have been using social media influencers in marketing campaigns for a long time. As the practice has grown over the years, many individuals have become celebrities with millions of followers and they can charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a social media campaign or even a single Instagram post.

As influencer marketing has become more expensive and sometimes less effective, many brands look at micro influencers as partners in online campaigns.

So how can brands use micro influencers to increase engagement online? In this webinar, digital marketing consultant Shane Barker goes through the process of finding, contacting and using micro influencers to drive engagement.

His definition of micro influencers is that they are:

  • Social media users with 1,000 to 100,000 followers
  • Specializing in a certain niche
  • Could be everyday consumers (they are very genuine, more down to earth, more like ourselves)

Some of the advantages of using micro influencers is their ability to engage, since their engagement rate normally is higher than for an influencer with a larger following:

  • Average engagement rate for influencers with fewer than 2,000 followers is 10.7% (source: influence.co)
  • Average engagement rate for influencers with 100k to 150k followers is 2.5%
  • Average engagement rate for influencers with more than 1 million followers is 1.5%

Watch the video above to learn more about how to use micro influencers in your digital marketing campaigns.

Sweden beats Nordic rivals in social media Olympics

The Olympic games in Rio 2016 are engaging large audiences in social media. However, some reports suggest that the volume of interactions in social channels are lower than expected. A survey of US viewers shows that fewer people are following the Olympic Games via social networks than had said they expected to.

But many people are commenting and sharing views on Twitter for example. According to statistics from Socialbakers, the US and Brazil are the countries that most people are tweeting about, followed by India.

Most interactions about Sweden
If we look at Twitter conversations about the Nordic countries, Sweden is clearly in the lead before Denmark (Aug 5 – Aug 16). Almost 100,000 tweets about Sweden and 57,000 about Denmark. There are significantly fewer comments about Norway and Finland. The peak for Sweden came after the women’s football team beat USA in the quarter finals on penalties.

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(click for larger image)

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More statistics on social media at the Olympics can be found here.

KLM and social media – how to become a social business

This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Engage 2013 conference in London, courtesy of Socialbakers. Among the top speakers, we got to listen to Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM who talked about KLM’s journey to transform social users into customers.

KLM has been working actively with social media for quite some time, and the airline’s presence in social media jump started with the crisis management during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010. It was not until then that the company really started to take advantage of social networks in communicating with customers.

“The ash cloud changed everything”, said Lassalle.

According to Lassalle, one of the key factors in becoming a social business is to be able to break down the silos and start to co-operate between different parts of the organisation. Also, for KLM, customer service is the backbone of the organisation in social media. The airline has the ambition to answer questions in social media within 1 hour and to solve customer service issues within 24 hours. Currently, KLM answers within 15 minutes (on average) and solves issues within 9 hours. Impressive.

The experience from the ash cloud crisis management led to the establishment of three principles that guide KLM in social networks.

KLM’s three leading social pricinciples:

  1. Service is sales
  2. Be cool to hang out with
  3. Don’t push, create stuff worth sharing

Social media can drive sales
One of the main take aways for me during the day was that we saw several examples where social media can actually drive sales. One project for KLM in the Netherlands increased sales with 30%. Also, Bruce Daisley of Twitter UK told us how sponsored campaigns on Twitter had shown that there can be a strong correlation between Twitter ads and sales. Some campaigns had been more than four times as effective as spending that additional amount on traditional advertising.

Becoming a social business
KLM has the ambition to be a social business and by relying less on stand-alone campaigns and working more with long term solutions, the airline has come a long way towards that goal. Here are a few more quotes about their social media strategy, from Lionel Lassalle’s presentation.

“We are connecting social media to our core business, which is flying.”

“We are heading to become a social business.”

“Social media is no longer a platform, it is integrated throughout the whole organisation.”

“From one side it makes our customer’s life easier, but it also constantly helps us to improve the quality of our service.”

And finally, about return on investment: “Is it worth the money? Hell, yeah!”

Below you can watch the entire presentation from Engage 2013.

NHL boss dismisses tweets about lockout as “uninformed ramblings”

NHL lockout 2012Maybe you’ve heard about the NHL lockout, an ongoing labour dispute in the North American hockey league NHL? As with any dispute between two or more parties, there is always a risk that much of the battle will be fought in public, traditionally in news media but nowadays also in social media. The public perception of your arguments may help you win the battle, so a good PR strategy is vital in cases like these.

In the NHL lockout however, social media doesn’t seem to be a central part of the league’s PR strategy. At least not if this quote by NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly is representative of the strategy. Asked about the criticism on social media over NHL labour tactics, Daly said negotiating a new collective agreement (CBA) is still Job 1.

“We do not intend to abdicate that responsibility in reaction to uninformed ramblings on Twitter,” he said in an e-mail.

The NHL doesn’t seem to be able to get much sympathy for its case in social media and according to the article in the Globe and Mail, the NHL is losing the social media battle. It is not unlikely that it will effect the outcome of the dispute in the end.

Are young Australians getting bored with Facebook?

The recent IPO of social network giant Facebook is as most of you know, not going too well. The stock has dropped considerably during its first days of trading, which is also negatively affecting other listed social media brands such as Zynga. To add insult to injury, a new report from Australia reveals that young people who are on social networks are spending less time on them in 2012 than they did a year before. Average time spent on Facebook is lower this year than it was in 2011. Furthermore, more social network users predict they will decrease time spent on social media in the near future.

The report called The 2012 Yellow Social Media Report has surveyed Australian consumers and business to understand how they use social media. The figures below indicate that the two age groups that are the most frequent users of social networks (14-19 and 20-29), have already decreased their usage and feel they need to decrease even more.

australia-social-networks-graph

The overall numbers also show that average time spent on social networks by Austalians is far less in 2012 than in 2011.

australia-social-networks-time-spent

This is of course not a good sign for Facebook. Of course, total time spent on Facebook could still increase, but as markets mature and penetration levels out, it is vital that the average time spent on the site is not decreasing. It would be interesting to see if the pattern from Australia can be observed also in other countries. If you know of any more surveys, please post it in the comments.

Another interesting statistic from the survey is that among users age 20-29 in Australia, the smart phone is now the number one device for accessing the social networks.

australia-social-networks device used access internet

Full report here in pdf. Bonus stat: 5% of social media users access social media on the toilet.