Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Many stories are told via emojis, but Twitter and London’s Royal Opera House are taking it to the next level on Monday, July 17, in honor of World Emoji Day, using them to tell the story of an entire opera.

This isn’t the first collaboration between these unlikely partners: They first joined forces to tweet an opera in August 2009.

On Monday, the Royal Opera House will be tweeting all day long using emojis—and only emojis—to share the story of famous operas and ballets. There will be a new tweet every 30 minutes....

There's a lot of study about how the prevalence of emojis are changing the way we communicate. Linguists debate what we gain versus what we lose when we express sadness by texting a crying face rather than saying, "I'll miss you." But emojis aren't just about communication—they can be art, too.

That's the premise of a fun little campaign from Cantor Fine Art gallery in Hollywood, anyway, which for the past couple of weeks has been using its Instagram account to share emoji-fied versions of the world's greatest artists and their work—from Magritte's Son of Man to Vincent van Gogh to Georgia O'Keeffe's skulls to Keith Haring to Jackson Pollack. The breadth of the project is a big part of the fun (Damien Hirst works surprisingly well as an emoji!), but the campaign's faithfulness to both the artists and the emojis is what really elevates the project.

Emojis are a part of our culture and how we communicate now, for better or for worse, and while seeing a cute lil' Andy Warhol in sunglasses sipping from his can of Campbell's Soup is a fun gag, it does also raise the question of what a pop culture-obsessed figure like Warhol would make of this contemporary visual language. That's a fair bit of heavy lifting for a quirky campaign intended to draw attention to a fine art gallery in Los Angeles whose current show is called "Please Touch the Art," and it's the least pretentious way possible to get us thinking in those terms....

Social media has completely changed the way businesses communicate with customers. Instead of the same dry, text-filled marketing messages, businesses are finding new and interesting ways to get their messages across. One such technique is the use of Twitter emojis.

In fact, Twitter recently released some ideas for ways brands can work emojis into their Tweets. Here are some ways you can use emojis to enhance your Twitter marketing....

There is a lot of misinformation about these topics online, a fact made painfully clear to me as I was writing this article. Chances are you’ve encountered more than a little of it yourself. The recent release of Unicode 9 and the enormous popularity of emoji make now as good a time as any to take a moment to appreciate just how important this topic is, to look at it afresh and to fill in any gaps in our knowledge, large or small.

By the end of this article, you will know everything you need to know about emoji, regardless of the platform or application you’re using, including the distributed web. What’s more, you’ll know where to find the authoritative details to answer any emoji-related question you may have now or in the future....

Of course, most prominent among this shift to pictorial communication is the emoji. 

We detailed its rise to prominence last year, but in short, the emoji as we know it started in 2011 and reached near-ubiquity in the past year or so. Now, in 2016, seemingly every millennial peppers their texts or tweets or Facebook messages or Instagram posts or college essays with yellow faces of varying temperaments.

And because millennials are such an important demographic to reach, brands have been trying to capitalize on the emoji craze. It has gotten so pervasive that an entire industry has cropped up dedicated to measuring the ROI of these type of visual images on campaigns.

However, we’re taking a decidedly less scientific approach to judging brands' emoji usage. Below we’ve recounted our picks based on such subjective criteria like cleverness or memorability.

But before we begin our countdown, we must include a quick disclosure. These below examples are of brands using the standard emojis found on most smartphones, not instances of companies such as Coca-Cola or Disney creating and using their own custom emojis. That’s too easy....