History of the Smiley Is Emoji Marketing Here to StayHistory of the Smiley Is Emoji Marketing Here to Stay

Most people associate smileys with the Internet age, but they actually date back much further. A transcript of an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln contains the following description of an audience response to Lincoln’s dry humor: (applause and laughter ;). Is this the first smiley, or is it a typographical error? Nobody knows for sure. The idea of the emoticon shows up again in an 1887 essay by journalist Ambrose Bierce. In it, Bierce proposes a new punctuation mark he calls the â€Å"snigger point† – a mark that would look like â€Å"as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth.† The snigger point didn’t catch on in Bierce’s day but maybe he was just ahead of his time. While it might have taken awhile for Bierce’s original idea to gain traction, the modern smiley and all of its emoticon variants have been staples of online social culture since the 1980s, when they were used in bulletin board messaging. In fact, the very first digital smiley can be traced to a 1982 post on Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science bulletin board. The rest, as they say, is history. From Emoticons to Emojis Over time, emoticons created by using keyboard characters have taken a backseat to emojis – actual icons and pictures that are rendered on devices. Emojis were invented in 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was looking for a way that users could send each other pictures while using minimal data. His idea was simple: develop a one-character code that could render an icon on another person’s device. Emojis enjoyed massive success in Japan and it became popular in the United States once Apple started making it compatible with its devices. Today, emojis are part of most people’s everyday digital communication, with one poll showing that 87 percent of people use emojis in their personal texting. It’s clear that people really like emojis. And brands have taken notice. The use of emojis in marketing has skyrocketed in recent years. In fact, the number of active messaging campaigns that used emojis jumped by over 600 percent between 2015 and 2016. There are plenty of ways to harness the power of emojis in your own marketing strategy: social channels, SMS, emails, in-app messages, push notifications and more. If you’re just starting to experiment with emoji marketing, be sure not to overdo it like Chevrolet did with their all emoji press release. Rather, limit your emoji messages to just a portion of your overall messaging and see how your customers react. It won’t take long to figure out what type of emoji messaging works best with your target audience and fits your brand identity. A Useful Addition to Your Writing Toolbox Whether you love them or hate them, emoticons and emoji have become a fixture in online content. They can be a great way to capture attention while also effectively conveying certain ideas and emotions to your target audience. Just be careful not to bombard your audience with a flood of emoji-laden messages. Rather, use a moderate approach that you scale and tweak based on your audience’s response.