Last week on ViralBlog among others “KLM’s Meet & Seat Social Seating Is Live”, “Why CMOs Will Focus On Social Media Metrics?” and “Top 10 Social Media Blogs: The 2012 Winners!”.

Mexican Football Team Managed By Its Fans

Recently we mentioned the very first article on ViralBlog written by our founder Igor Beuker, who announced, after his subscription to MyFootballclub.co.uk, that he proudly became, along with 50,000 other fans, the club owner of Ebbsfleet United. But guess what Igor! Mexico Second division club Murcielagos takes it even further! The club has no coach; instead…. the team is fully managed by its fans!

Top 10 Social Media Blogs: The 2012 Winners!

In December 2011 we found out that ViralBlog was nominated to Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2012 at Social Media Examiner. Earlier this month we were among the Top 20 Finalists and waited impatiently for the results. On the 30th of January the winners were announced, and guess what?! Thanks to you we made it!

Why CMOs Will Focus On Social Media Metrics?

In 2012 CMOs will focus more on social media metrics, says eMarketer. We do believe that content is king, distribution is queen but metrics is the emperor… The eMarketer study shows that CMOs were focusing on soft metrics in 2011, and feel they can’t gauge ROI.

Sign Of The Times: Zeitgeist By Slideshare

SlideShare is an active and engaging community where people post their thoughts on marketing, business, best practice or anything the community wants. In the above SlideShare presentation they give an overview of 2011 and analyse and share their summary. Below a short recap of this presentation and insights that struck me the most.

The Next Social Wave Of 2012: Pinterest

Pinterest, a social visual network that was launched back in March 2010. While the site is still invite-only it’s been very popular among their 4 million users logging 421 million page views, according to The Next Web. Of course Pinterest isn’t on par with smashing numbers like 800 million Facebook users or 465 million Twitter users. The invite-only system is keeping the Pinterest eco-system small for the time being, but is it ready to fully open their doors to the public in 2012?

Viral Friday: Matthew’s Day Off

A weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials, games or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

Mobile Gaming: State Of The European Market

The Mobile Gaming is still growing, not only in the USA but also on the “Old” continent, Europe. This comes hand in hand with the increasing penetration of smart-phones and Mobile Media. These are the findings from comScore‘s report Mobile Gaming: State of the European Market, having a deep look on the details how Europeans use their smart-phones.

KLM’s Meet & Seat Social Seating Is Live

Last year we told you that KLM would launch its social seating service in 2012. Well, Meet & Seat is live now. Facebook and LinkedIn users can now meet interesting passengers on their flight. Check the video below… What is Meet & Seat? Our industry tends to call it social seating. As seen at i.e. TicketMaster before.

In the above SlideShare presentation they give an overview of 2011 and analyse and share their summary. Below a short recap of this presentation and insights that struck me the most.

To start off with what struck me the most is that even though women are the most active in communities and on social channels; on slideshare the men seem to be posting the majority of content.  Probably due to the reason that men use it work related and this is endorsed by the most popular keywords: business, marketing, design, research, internet etcetera.

My thought on this is that this will change over time; I really believe that woman will dominate the marketing industry eventually. Men used to have the buying power, so advertising was aimed at men… but think about it: who has the most spending power and which group has the highest engagement levels…?

When we take a look at the globe, people do not really think the Dutch as a force necessarily to be reckoned with: however the Dutch rank the highest (I mean a global #1 position) on Twitter and within SlideShare they have the 3^rd place in the highest usage of slides (US is nowhere to be found). These Dutchies have always been known for their innovation, knowledge, mercantilism and their…horticulture

Thanks to SlideShare and their active community we can gain insights into marketing, development, learn how to do stuff and get a grasp of the vision people have on the world.

Here the most popular business presentation on slideshare:

 
SlideShare increases traffic to your site, offers you a possibility to include a clear call to action that provides you with HOT leads and just as important; gives you the opportunity to position yourself as an authority in your field.

Inspiring, informing and activating business professionals over the world.

Are you sharing your slides?

There are many different social media channels nowadays and it’s impossible to keep them all up to date. So what will social media users do? They choose the channels with the best and most options to share their pictures, updates and other information to.

Especially Facebook and microblog Tumblr (the last one had more than 9 million users in November) have taken a lot of territory from Flickr. Daily Facebook users upload pictures on their profiles to share them in their network. Automatically, we see a lot of them not posting that often on Flickr anymore. Besides this, Tumblr, a microblog launched in 2007, got more popular also. Tumblr is a mix with pictures and blogs and has easy sharing and reblogging options.

What also pulled people away from Flickr is the rise of smartphones and its popular photo applications with easy sharable and edit options. It’s so popular a new term called “Iphoneography” is created for photographing with your iPhone. This trend has a huge community with its own blogs and different photo apps are launched to provide the need for the mobile photography addicts. In January a “Hipstamatics Exhibition”  hit London. People from all over the world could send in shots made with this very popular iPhone photo app and Apple itself organized its own “Iphoneography Exhibition”  in Zürich on the 13th of May this year.

In the beginning of last year’s October, photo app Instagram was launched. Within only one week more than 100.000 people downloaded it and in May there seems to be already 3.6 million accounts but this number is not officially confirmed yet. With Instagram users can easily make pictures and edit them with beautiful vintage filters. The pictures are sharable in Instagram, or through other social networks like Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare. Instagram is not only a photo app, it’s a community itself. People can easily follow each other and when a picture receives a certain amount of likes in a short time, it can enter the popular page where every IG-er wants to be. Instagram is so popular because it’s simplicity: it’s like Twitter with pictures instead or words. Another popular photo app is Leme Camera, which used to be named LomoLomo.

So what’s in this mobile photography trend for brands? To answer this question we take a look at what Starbucks does with its Instagram account (see picture above). Starbucks has more than 16.000 followers which is quite a lot. They show behind-the-scenes pictures to their Instagram community first. It makes their followers feel part of the Starbucks life and family. Next, Starbucks has entrance to a huge collection with user generated content. There are thousands of pictures from Instagramers with hashtag Instagram (#Instagram). Every day fans show the love they have for Starbucks by uploading a picture of Starbucks coffee they just bought.

In short, it’s like every other social media channel, the difference is the content being placed, the rules are still the same. Another brand on Instragram is Levis Brasil, showing inspiration visuals and collections to its followers.

Instagram or other mobile photo apps are not suitable for every brand or company. As a brand you have to be able to show content in pictures or come up with a plan to do this. But there are nice opportunities for many brands here!

What’s in it for the candidates? A complete buy-out for the rest of the contract. If you are living in the Netherlands, that is. With this new “Ben Verlost” (Am Liberated) campaign, Ben is making nifty use of social media and of course is pinpointing the real pain in the neck for probably  a lot of cell phone users.

What’s the deal. The Dutch can now share their agony on Ben’s YouTube channel. The most awfull, sad or painful stories will be transformed in a movie, and you know what? Ben will buy-out the rest of the contract, leaving you as free as a bird.

It’s unclear if this creative campaign will be succesfull. For now the company has been seen on Youtube’s frontpage and further advertising efforts doesn’t seem to be there. So what’s the fruit of the lawings after the launch on 02-25-2011 till now (02-28-2011)?

• 1 uploaded user video
• 1 demo video with 242 views
• 10 subscribers on their YouTube channel
• 9 comments

Unfortunately Ben’s solution works only for Dutch citizens with an one-year contract. Folks with a longer subscription and/or with having a foreign mobilephone contract need to sit the ride out. The campaign will run till March 27 of this year. 

Ben

The brand name Ben has a connotation in it. Next to the noun form, is “ben” also the Dutch verb for Am or Be. So the trick with the “Ben Verlost” campaign is the dual meaning like,(I) Am liberated. The company was quite successful between her launch in 1999 till 2003 to the point where T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) bought it.

The company targeted her services to consumers who didn’t want to use big (foreign) providers and were perhaps a bit chauvinistic or were using their cell-phone primarily for phone calls instead of (heavy) data transmissions. Additionally the pricing and product strategy (low costs and no nonsense servicing) appealed to quite a large group of Dutch citizens, as they are known for their price consciences.

As in the old days Ben positions herself as a personal brand with an own identity. She communicates towards her target group from first-person perspective. Through this way the brand emphasizes on a strong company-client relationship.  To stimulate this Ben always portraits ordinary ‘just like us’ people in their commercials.

What about the “Ben Verlost” campaign?  Will this work? Share your opinion with us!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bridgestone has made a great effort closing the loop on social. Let me how you how by some examples…

It is not all about campaigning and creating the funniest story, its about building relationships with your clients and facilitating a place where they are inspired to watch, share and engage. Communication from a platform is great; however make sure that there is an interconnectivity within your platforms.

Personally, I think Bridgestone is doing a good job. The facilitate platforms for their fans. These platforms are connected, they continuously communicate and Bridgestone makes sure that they do it in the right context i.e. SuperBowl Ad. They make sure the audience is inspired to watch, share, comment by delivering quality content.
Basically Bridgestone is ticking all four boxes of Community!

Bridgestone Facebook
Here you can connect with the Bridgestone Fanpage for engaging information, special promotions and exclusive contests, such as; winning a trip to the Super Bowl XLV.
Bridgestone is smart by not giving everyone access to the platform; you’ll have to become a fan first to unlock all the features, this enables Bridgestone to build their Digital Database!

Bridgestone Twitter
Bridgestone tweets updates about their products, brands, teammates and initiatives. They personify this by naming the operators: Angela and Chris. A missed opportunity is the links to Angela and Chris, plus there is no connectivity to their other owned media.

Bridgestone YouTube
Bridgestone has a decent Bridgestone Channel, but they have also invested in a context driven SuperBowl channel. Here you can view al their commercials and it has a great connectivity with their other platforms.

Bridgestone Community Portal
Connect with other Bridgestone fans, share the latest car photos, watch Bridgestone TV ads and see what are the most popular Bridgestone products as rated by their fans! Bridgestone wants to give you a space to show the world how Bridgestone helps you “get the most out of your car”.

Seeing all four efforts I feel that Bridgestone could of empowered their mission more effective:
“serving society with superior quality” by picking that theme throughout their Business and Branding Efforts.
Also for me a miss is the interlinkage between some of their Social Platforms their Facebook page and Twitter Page and the rest of the platforms.
When you pick a 365 days a year theme and fully close the loop you can give your audience the full experience and build a valuable community where everyone delivers their value.

I am curious to hear your opinion on the Bridgestone Social efforts and perhaps you have some great examples to share?  Please feel free!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 20 year old from Nebraska is no stranger to the internet: he is been videoblogging for three years and has gathered a following of a quarter million. The young YouTube star even found a way to turn video blogging into a living and, Dan says, he’s owes a lot to his community and this is his way of giving something back. But what does that mean?

Well, basically he is letting his community decide what he will be doing the next 365 days, one whole year. People can insert ideas into a so-called ‘Decision Engine’, vote and whatever makes it to the top, Dan will do. Unless it’s illegal of course and in case Dan thinks it’s getting too extreme, he has VETO right. Which he hopes not to have to use and he says:

“Internet is a game changer in the way people interact with each other and Internet communities can be really powerful (…) Dan 3.0 is a show, project and social experiment”

Dan 3.0 airs on Revision3, the Internet Television Network and that’s also where the viewers can sign up ideas to the ‘Decision Engine’. And on his blog Dan3point0, he will update everyone daily on his missions. As he started yesterday, you can already watch his first mission.

I am intrigued by this project, not so much because it there is someone willing to give away control on his own life, but even more so because I am interested to find out how powerful Internet communities really can be. And to what lengths they might go to actually take the control on ones life: experiments in the past have shown that giving people power they have never had before, can actually make them do things they never imagined they would. Just look at the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. And that’s what intrigues me about this project, or social experiment really, is what the community will do with the power they’ve been given. I am definitely going to keep a close look.

Source: Mashable

The game was created by Konami and 4mm Games. The cool thing about this game is that it makes great use of social media, making it easy for players with musical ambitions to put themselves out there.

The essence of the game is like Rock Band or Singstar. You can pick a song and rap the lyrics, on your own or together with friends, and the more accurate you are, the higher your score will be. But the social aspect is what makes it interesting. You can enter de Rapstar online community, upload your performances and battle against other players. You can also put a crew together or join an existing one. Even if you’re not into rapping but love to manage a crew, you can join the community and dive into the marketing and PR aspect of musician management. This all takes place online for everyone to see, even people who don’t own the game. This gives talent scouts the opportunity to check out what rap talent is out there. Of course, everything you do is shareable through Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. The game creators also pick the most popular rappers who get to create content for the community.

I think it’s great that social media and gaming can be bound together like this to serve more than just the need to play a computer game. Gaming and social media have taken each other a step further. It’s one thing to make a YouTube movie of your performance talents and quite another to convince others and stand out of the rest of the (more or less) talented YouTube crowd. But by keeping these talents all together in a branded community where they can battle to be the best, Def Jam Rapstar is definitely on to something. Do you think the next Snoop Dogg will emerge from this community?

Source: Mashable

After 23 years of advertising on Superbowl Sunday, Pepsi has decided to invest the money in a $ 20 million dollar social programme.

On January 13, Pepsi will launch their programme called ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project‘. People can contribute by naming a project in their community that needs help. The projects that get the most votes will receive help from Pepsi. With this project Pepsi hopes they will create a wave of do-gooding on a smaller scale with people funding community projects themselves.

ABC says the step Pepsi has taken is a risky one, opening up a Superbowl spot for Coca-Cola (who haven’t decided on advertising on Superbowl Sunday yet). Also, a brand that spends most of its money on television ads has to be certain this will work out, having lost quite some revenue in the past year.

In my opinion Pepsi is not a do-gooder brand at all, even though they produce their goods in a climate-neutral way and donate to charity. To me that’s not part of their image so I can’t imagine asking them to fund a project in my community. And even if this project does get off the ground, Pepsi still has to make an enormous leap to get even close to Coca-Cola’s social domination. Do you think leaving Superbowl for social will do Pepsi good? Or will they just dig themselves a deeper hole in regards to trailing behind in the social scene?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The great thing about  Quirky is that it takes the idea of community websites and applies it to product development. The community, which is free to join, suggests new ideas for products, inputs design ideas and the audience can vote on them. The most popular ideas can even make it into pre-production.

The site owners work out a minimum quantity needed for a manufacturing run and people commit to buying – once the required number number of pre-orders has been taken the product is produced. Finally, as an incentive to get involved the top collaborators on each product receive a cut of the sales.

Quirky is a perfect example for brands that really want to engage their audience by evolving them into product development and help them to create new products or make existing products better.

Check their product page to see which products the community has in production right now. One of the latest products is the Powercurl,  a clip on cord wrap for your Apple Power adaptor.

A very unique campaign created for this cool sports brand.

In order to demonstrate the uniqueness of each one of the 480 pairs in the limited edition series, which are constructed entirely out of leftover clips of material from the NB 993 and 996 designs, the creative agency Mother created their own series of “clips” — exclusive vignettes shot in cities across the U.S. documenting the experience of every pair before they reached consumers.

The shorts are featured on the 574 Clips website. Buyers are invited to search for their shoes’ special short and once they find it, they can “claim” their NBs by entering a special code. Their names will then be featured at the end of the film.

To further emphasize the collectors aspect, the agency also created photo “trading cards” and shot Polaroids of each pair to be enclosed in every box. Written on the back of each photograph is the corresponding pair’s limited edition number, size, color and retail location.

More: Creative Online