For anyone who still has doubts about the power of social media, I recommend reading the story of James Karl Buck.
Twitter, the micro blogging platform, turned out to be his ‘get out of jail free’ card after he was arrested by Egyptian policemen.
On April 10th James Karl Buck, a UC Berkely graduate, was arrested in Egypt for taking photographs at a demonstration, Techcrunch reports. The first thing he did was utilise his Twitter network by texting the word ‘arrested’. Whether or not he was expecting Twitter to come to the rescue or it was just him telling the world what he was ‘doing’, it did prove to be the reason why he was a free man the very next day. (more…)
If you have what it takes to be part of the Playboy Family… Show it now at the YouTube Playboy Channel.
See the video message of Playmate Editor Holly Madison below, send in your 2 minute video and you might become the 55th Playboy Anniversary Playmate.
The best contestants will be invited to Los Angeles to get a fashion shoot, take the playmate test and get a tour through Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.
Playboy has struck a sponsored deal with YouTube, to run its 55th Anniversary Playmate Search. I feel that Playboy has already embraced mobile and social media in a smart way.
When making purchase decisions, affluent online consumers are using social media channels to share their own customer-service experiences and learn about those of others, according to a new study from the Society for New Communications Research, MarketingCharts reports.
Some 59% of respondents to a survey said they use social media to ‘vent’ about a customer-care experience.
More than 300 consumers who are active internet users participated in the survey, sponsored by Nuance Communications, focusing on how customer care influences brand reputation in light of the quickly growing adoption of social media.
Other key findings from the report, “Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media,” include the following:
In The Netherlands ABN AMRO has introduced Flametree, an online social network for entrepreneurs and SME’s.
Customers of ABN AMRO asked: please open up your network for us, so we can share it too. ABN AMRO listened to it’s customers and launched Flametree as a facilitating engagement platform.
Flametree e.g. offers solutions to share knowledge and information and will launch several new services coming year. Flametree is free, and also ‘open’ to non ABN AMRO entrepreneurs. That also might be a great acquisition opportunity to ABN AMRO. I think it’s great that ABN AMRO has listened to it’s customers and is willing to facilitate and help them.
In my opinion more brands should take the next steps from shouting to listening. Loudly shouting brands scare people away. But brands that listen will create loyal customers and mutual beneficial relationships.
Earlier we reported that EA and Hasbro teamed up to battle Facebook application Scrabulous. Apparently we only scratched the surface of the issue at the time as the whole situation is turning into a situation which would make the script writers of the ‘Bold & The Beautiful’ blush. It’s the company version of a Jerry Springer episode.
The game was created by two software developing brothers, Rajat and Jayant Aganwalla, from Calcutta. However, they created the game without consent form the copyright owners. Which belongs to Hasbro. Or is it Mattel? Actually, Hasbro owns the rights in North America, Mattel in the rest of the world.
As former CMO, former IAB CEO and last 4 years as digital agency MD, I have really experienced the power of Google. Google has disrupted marketing strategies, neutralized monopolies of large brands with huge marketing budgets and has offered small brands opportunities to compete and win.
Then why do I call Google the Cafeteria of the internet? Simply because people visit Google for a quick snack! They enter the cafeteria, drop their coin, grab the snack and leave again. It all happens in just 15 seconds!
Let me explain why I call Google the cafeteria of the internet and Facebook the new and trendy restaurant.
Are social networks, blogs, forums, communities and video portals (together called: social media) the next step after the search decade? No, I think Google will stay powerful for brands. But not for branding!
In this item you’ll be able to learn all about the power of viral widgets, what brands are using widgets and what do widgets cost?
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument of the Indigenous Australians. Didgeridoo is sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or “drone pipe”. Musicologists classify the didgeridoo as an aerophone.
I would classify widgets as: online tools, applications or instruments that can be created, embedded and spread easily by internet users. As social media specialist, I see widgets as a great opportunity for brands to play a whole new ’sound of music’ in the social media space. That’s why I would like to introduce the term: “Widgeridoo”.
The Nissan Live Traffic Widget is a smart way of building brand identity using a software application that can be embedded in e.g. a Facebook page or downloaded to a computer desktop. Also facilitating and smart: the Kraft Foods Recipe Widget.
Universal Records has been on the look out for “monks, men of the cloth and sacred singers” for quite a while and now they found them- thanks to YouTube!. They placed adverts in religious publications hoping to find Gregarian singers, who they could offer a record deal.
They were sent hundreds of demo tapes, but the Youtube video they got from the monks from the Monestary the Holy Cross impressed them most. Tom Lewis, an Universal A&R executive told the BBC Website the following of his latest addition:
“These guys found about the competition through a friend of theirs in London and they sent a link of their monastery and of them singing on YouTube,” he said.
“It was beautiful, beautiful music and they’re using the very latest in terms of communication devices available to them to get their music heard.
The recording will start in April, with the launch of the album scheduled for the end of this year. All profits will be used to train new monks. Presumably to teach them how to leverage social media for the benefit of his monestary.
Viral and Digital agency TAMBA from the UK have recently launched the first of a series of Facebook widgets for mydeco, a customisable interior design website that lets users plan their own room designs using 3D models, created by the founders of lastminute.com.
Mydeco sells more than one million products from over 500 retailers, while 3D room-planning tools help users see how the products will look their own room.
In the first Facebook widget, Facebook users can create their dream dinner party, using a mix of famous and fictional characters as well as their own Facebook friends. They can then invite friends to the party and those friends can change the seating arrangements or invite their own preferred guests. You can even get your mates to rate your dinner party.
Try mydeco’s My Dinner Party widget at Facebook here. I’ve tried the widget and it was fun! You can even upload photos of your friends into the widget and send it to Facebook friends easily, to invite them to be part of your VIP dinner.
At Virgin Money they’ve launched a new campaign to promote the Virgin Climate Change Fund. This is an investment fund which invests into high performing shares, and filters out those with a poor carbon footprint. So people that invest money, can do a bit for the environment too.
Investment funds aren’t really the most exciting thing in the world, so Virgin asked digital agency Glue London to produce a campaign that would stand out amongst the dull crowd, and get across the message of high performance with a green edge.
The result was stop frame animation origami models of money turning into animals. They’re currently playing out on finance sites and Yahoo in the UK, and they have created a YouTube channel to host the ads, a making of video to show how the ads were produced, and some rough edits and a page at Flickr.
