Last week on ViralBlog among others “40 Smart Uses Of Social Video Metrics”, “IKEA: The Facebook Fan Sleepover” and “Apple & Google Bid For UK Football TV Rights?”.

Stop Pushing Pop-up Ads In My Face!

Remember those annoying pop-up ads when you visit a website? Most websites got rid of them in the last decade. Well in China it’s still being used on a widespread scale. In China online marketing is still mostly pushing banners in people’s faces. It’s so annoying that sometimes users cannot even click it away.

40 Smart Uses Of Social Video Metrics

Brands can still buy media, but attention can only be earned. That’s why CMOs will massively embrace social videos and video metrics in 2012, says eMarketer. So see below video and our list: 40 smart uses of social video metrics…

Anarchy – A Social Game By Axe Is Coming

A graphic novel from AXE? Yes and no. Axe will provide the sketches and users take active part in the story. At least that’s the plan.

IKEA: The Facebook Fan Sleepover

After a few years of just focussing on gaining as many likes, friends and followers, brands slowly start to realize that real fan engagement is far more important than just showing a big number. IKEA is such a brand that goes beyond ‘the Facebook Like’.

Viral Friday: Golden Loves Guitar !!

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.

Apple & Google Bid For UK Football TV Rights?

Insiders say that Apple and Google are likely to enter the auction for the Premier League football TV rights in the UK. Both tech companies could easily afford the amount. What are the odds? And what could be the impact…

Can You Copy Rebecca Black?

Seeing that virality is such a sought after prize among marketers, is it worth marketing your brand in a way that gets you a lot of criticism but attention at the same time, much like Rebecca Black?

The incumbent holders of the live football rights, BSkyB and ESPN, will bid again, with the Disney-owned global sports broadcaster likely to want to improve on its existing position if having one contract for 23 live matches per season.

Under the most recent deal, which runs until the end of next season, Sky paid around £1.6bn for its 115 live matches per season.

Both BSkyB and ESPN are likely to face competition from Al-Jazeera, which recently secured the French rights to live Champions League football from next season.

The income from the Premier League overseas rights has continued to grow and some analysts believe that it could outstrip domestic revenue for the first time under the next auction.

In all the current deal is worth £3.5bn over three years, with £2.1bn coming from domestic broadcasters and £1.4bn from overseas.

Why would Apple and Google want the Premier League TV rights?

The Apple scenario?

Personally I doubt that Apple will be the bidder or buyer. But certain is that Apple will heavily attack the TV “device” market with its Apple TV.

So to catch up with i.e. Samsung and LG in this market, Apple would certainly consider pulling a stunt like this.
And let’s not forget, a male football loving audience in the UK, also includes millions of Techno Toms and Techno Petes, willing to buy another Apple device!

And live football, could also fuel the iPad sales for Apple.

But Apple’s model has relied on taking a cut of the revenue from existing content producers, by retailing its content through its AppStore or iTunes service.

And Sky already shows its live matches on Apple devices through its SkyGo application, and the Premier League has a deal to sell packages of archive content through iTunes.

So in my opinion, Apple would stay not participate in the auction. If they would, Apple TV must have high targets…

The Google scenario?

Personally I consider Google, which owns YouTube, a more likely bidder. The live rights would not be a major investment for Google.

Certainly not if you know that Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility.

Google is also expected to announce an internet television platform over the next 12 months. And Google has already done live events at YouTube.

And we all know that Google and YouTube want to grab a large chunk of the TV budgets as well.

If you are interested in Google’s greed and TV needs, you might want to read this blog post: About YouTube, The Indian & The Dead Horse

Any Google bid for the football TV rights could be complicated, because of its YouTube ownership, which is embroiled in a long running legal stand-off with the Premier League and other rights owners over copyright issues.

This recent article: Addressable TV: Re-evolution Of The Medium TV includes a relevant presentation.

And shows that nothing is impossible in the new world of television…
Follow me on twitter if you’d like to stay tuned on similar topics.

And I would love to hear your opinion, please share them in the comments below.

Sources: Huffpost, theguardian and Pocket-lint

Last week on ViralBlog among others “The Perfect Storm: Retail And Social”, “Addressable TV: Re-evolution Of The Medium TV” and “What Channels Influence The Social Consumer?”.

How To Boost Holiday Sales? Free Shipping Day

Q4 is the most hectic, stressful and at the end the most profitable quarter of a year for most of the marketing industry, retail and other businesses. There are several different ways how to approach this season of the year to boost sales and get as much as possible – by strategic planning, special promotions or with a simple Free Shipping Day.

Samsung Galaxy Note: Who is Notasso?

In order to show the immense diversity of creative possibilities of the new Samsung Galaxy Note, Spanish street artist Notasso was asked to participate in a new campaign from Samsung, named after the artist himself, Who is Notasso.

What Channels Influence The Social Consumer?

Nowadays practically everybody consults the web in any kind of way when it comes to purchase decisions. So for CMOs out there it’s vert important to understand that some aspects of digital marketing deserve more attention than others…

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth?

As CSO I love disruptive ideas that can break through conventions. I love commercial ideas that leads creatives into new directions. And I do not like the lame excuses I so often hear: “but that’s our current business model”. Change it, losers have excuses! That’s why I love this video…

Corporate Social Media Summit – Part III

ViralBlog were kindly invited to join the Corporate Social Media Summit hosted in London on the 28^th and 29^th of November. This is the final part of our full coverage of both days.

Addressable TV: Re-evolution Of The Medium TV

One-way communication and Television ran the show for about 60 years. We now welcome CMOs to the re-evolution of the medium Television. Will Addressable TV finally make TV the efficient and accountable marketing medium…

Viral Friday: FedEx Guy Throwing My Monitor

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.

The Perfect Storm: Retail And Social

Boutiques are dying off, big multi and mono brand retailers are taking over the show. Online shops are increasing, e-commerce is being perfected and social commerce is on the rise. Does this mean our physical shopping experience is about to whither away?

The Changing Costs Of Christmas

Christmas, the time we all come together with families and friends to celebrate this special holiday. As 2011 is almost coming to an end let’s take a look at how UK consumers spend their hard earned cash for Christmas.

This week’s Viral Friday #1 position goes to the ultimate delivery champion, FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor. On the second place is Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review, check what happened this year as it’s about to expire in a week and a day . And #3 is for awesome Battlefield 3 – FreddieW.

Do you want to see this week’s list from 1 to 5? Go on then, and have a look! We’d like to hear your opinion about the virals. Have fun!

Get our ViralBlog asset: the Viral Friday Widget! By default the widget shows you the latest Viral Friday, but it’ll also show you the seven most recent postings on ViralBlog.

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1. FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor

Click here to view the embedded video.

Usually viral movies promote companies. However the opposite may happen and a single video can injure company’s reputation. A security camera captured a FedEx delivery guy tossing a computer monitor rudely over a fence of the recipient. The irony is that the owner was at home, with the front door wide open. And also that the display probably traveled thousands of miles safely, just to be destroyed at the doorstep. The video spread like a wildfire on the Internet with over 5,5 million views in a week. Even the apology from FedEx’s Senior Vice President went viral. Wondering when UPS will use this in their ad.

2. Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that the end of the year is drawing near what was the most talked about in 2011? Google reveals what were the most searched news, events and people. They wrapped the data in a beautiful video and it really hits the emotional spot. It was uploaded on December 14 and has over 3.2 million views. Want to go more in depth into Zeitgeist? Visit the official page and for another year collection of data check the 2010 Zeitgeist version.

3. Battlefield 3 – FreddieW

Click here to view the embedded video.

Freddiew is really one of the true masters of YouTube. In a simple math terms: his YouTube channel has 121 videos with a stunning 490 million (yes, millions!) views in total. That makes it more than 4 million views per video on average. Of course this did not remain unnoticed and Freddiew was asked to create a commercial for one of the best FPS games of this year, Battlefield 3. Is it a blast? Definitively, with 3,2 million views in 5 days. And this is just a beginning as it’s not an average video.

4. Apple – iPhone 4S – Santa

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technology makes many things in life a lot easier, and also Santa can take advantage of them. Check the local weather, directions, appointments or “Naughty or Nice List”. An easy job for a brand new iPhone 4S. Through Siri is now possible to talk to your phone and ask for almost anything. The success of Apple is still continuing due to this very popular smartphone. This can be also clearly seen in the more than 2 million views in just five days.

5. Singing Christmas Hedgehogs

Click here to view the embedded video.

To get you in the mood for Christmas we will close the list with the Singing Christmas Hedgehogs. This interactive viral is consists of multiple animations, the concept is really cool and funny and shows another creative use of YouTube which brands can consider in their video’s. Birdbox made short animations and linked them together to an interactive story, can you get the hedgehogs to sing for you for Christmas? For more video’s from Birdbox check their YouTube channel. The pity is that each hedgehog sings on his own, but a rumor is that Chuck Norris saw them singing all together!

To use one thing is sure. TV will transform to more channels, more platforms (cable, ip, connected), more screens (pc, tablet smartphone), open distribution and VOD.

We also see non-linear players like Hulu, Netflix, Google, Apple and Disney entering the TV arena. And we’ll see Web TV, Social TV and Addressable TV…

Our study also includes Interactive Broadcasting, the revenue opportunities with T-Commerce and other disruptive forces that ROI driven CMOs should embrace…

So is TV R.I.P? Definitely not. TV is still the global king in terms of media spend. However, Internet is the emperor in several markets already.

Digital already disrupted many industries. And digital will certainly shake-up the linear thinkers and wake-up the medium television that has been sleeping for over 60 years.

CMOs and Media Buying firms will certainly embrace targeted audience buying.

We fear for Broadcasters and Media Owners. It will take them years to change their nonlinear DNA. And they will not embrace the accountability that will disrupt their existing business models.

Leading but linear trained Format and Production companies will encounter many difficulties to manage the new nonlinear ideation. That is simply not part of their DNA and without an extreme sense of urgency, their learning processes will take many years.

Will that time be offered by the powerful and extremely profitable internet companies that will enter this arena? Guess again!

Larry, Mark and the rest of the SF gang are known for their hunger for TV Dollars.

They have already passed the tipping point of world domination and they will not be shy to demolish TV and Media companies bottom-up…

We would like to read your opinion in the comments below. And please share this study with your peers and followers.

Most of Gowalla’s employees, including founder Josh Williams, would move to Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto.

There the team will work on Facebook’s Timeline feature, which launched at this year’s F8 conference and is gradually rolling out to Facebook’s 800 million members.

Gowalla is an Austin-based company that launched as a location-sharing service back in 2009. But it never got the same sort of traction that New York-based rival Foursquare saw.

On 22 August 2011 we wrote this article: Will Facebook kill eBuddy and Foursquare?

Well both eBuddy and Foursquare are still alive, but with the Gowalla acquisition Facebook definitely seems to want to claim its location-based future.

Today, we can see that the Gowalla app has 10,000 daily active users connected to Facebook against Foursquare’s 560,000 daily actives.

Facebook also has its location product Places, which it changed a few months ago to scrap the check-in feed from its mobile platform.

Instead, Facebook users must add a city location or tag a specific Place in their Wall or Timeline posts.

Gowalla pivoted earlier this year too, changing its check in-centric app to one that is like a crowdsourced local and travel guide.

The company has raised around $10.4 million in two rounds of funding with investors including Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Shervin Pishevar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ron Conway along with venture firms like Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Founders Fund and Floodgate.

Given the amount of money the company raised, Facebook would have had to pay somewhere around $30 million or so for investors to have made their money back.

On 14 December 2009, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington already wrote this article: GoWalla Worth Nearly $30 Million After Financing – Time to make your move Facebook.

It seems that Facebook has listened to Mike, but a bit late if you ask me.

Given Gowalla’s lack of traction plus how aggressively Facebook’s valuation is priced in within private secondary markets, it’s unclear whether this deal would make investors whole.

If this was a pure talent acquisition, we would expect to see Facebook shutdown the standalone Gowalla app too.

Rounding-up:
Facebook did (not yet) buy location based company Foursquare. They bought Gowalla instead, but deny the acquisition for now.

Facebook scrapped its product called Places and might now use Gowalla for check-ins and to fuel its product Timeline.

So the bigger picture could be: expect to have your local check-ins back in your Facebook Timeline soon.

And since Google bought Zagat this year, Google is also working on GEO locations and trying to finally fuel its social search product.

My conclusion? Facebook is heavily investing in its SoLoMo proposition: Social + Local + Mobile. And so is Google.

Interesting to see who will win the domain Local Search in the near future.

Peer learning’s:
We would love to learn from discussions with our peers. So please tell us in the comments below where you see Facebook or Google go in the domain SoLoMo…

Sources: Inside Facebook, CNNMoney, Tech Crunch and ViralBlog.

Last week on ViralBlog among others “Avoiding Viral Marketing Regrets”, “How To Analyze Your Social Media Efforts” and “How To Create Your Social Media Strategy”

Why The Future Of Online Is Catvertising?

The advertising industry is changing all the time and over and over again. And the agencies will keep coining new buzz words and trends. Here is one of them -  world’s first Catvertising agency…

Google’s Answer On iTunes Real?

Interesting news from a Venezuelan blog, some rumors and gossips around new Google’s music service. What could this mean for other music services like Apple’s iTunes, Spotify or Grooveshark?

For CMOs & Agencies: Creativity vs. Deadlines

We believe that sharing is caring and hope that this article and especially the video is shared among many CMOs and agencies. A better understanding for creativity vs. deadlines might even fuel mutual beneficial relationships between brands and agencies.

Should Brands Create Google+ Pages Yet?

Google officially launched their Google+ Brand Pages, making the platform a playground for brands and businesses. Some brands reacted to this swiftly but some of the questions of many CMOs – should my brand be there as well? What are the pros and cons?

How To Create Your Social Media Strategy

In order to successfully use social media and to reach brand and business objectives, a social media strategy is a must. Without a strategy it’s most likely that only mediocre results will be accomplished.

7 Ways To A Memorable Consumer Experience

The simple truth is that social media is a big part of how consumers interact with and discuss brands, whether or not those brands are active in social media themselves.

Avoiding Viral Marketing Regrets

Viral marketing is one of the most sought-after phenomena in all of Internet marketing. For business people and CMOs, there are few things sweeter than the idea of their product or message spreading across the Internet with almost preternatural speed and profound impact.

How To Analyze Your Social Media Efforts

Everything is about results and social media is not an exception. With many monitoring tools on the market, both free and paid, it’s much easier to measure the outcome of campaigns and listen to the consumers.

Coca Cola’s Encourage-Meter For Football Fans

Coca Cola boosted the sponsorship of Copa America with a remarkable concept: El Alentómetro; a big screen where fans could watch the next game of the Argentinean football team only if they make enough noise to keep the image on the screen!

Viral Friday: John Lewis Christmas Advert 2011

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.

The Corporate Social Media Summit Europe

Brands are increasingly starting to realise the importance of social media. But at the moment, many are still chasing the channels and focusing too much on cool concepts, rather than starting to build a long term relationship with prospects, customers and loyal fans.

The long awaited feature provides brands the opportunity to connect with their audience. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said ”Google is creating their own little version of Facebook”. Is Google really simply doing a copy paste job? Moreover, do CMO’s need to take this opportunity to monetize Google+ and connect with their audience?

Participating on a channel requires well thought out strategies and objectives. This is exactly the reason to join the party or stay out of it. So why should companies care about Google+ Brand Pages?

The first thing to take notice of Google+ Brand Pages are different from Facebook’s. So if you were thinking of doing the same thing on Google+ as on Facebook, think again!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Circles

On Google+ it’s possible to add people to defined Circles. This concept is also implemented in the brand pages and through the circles brands can actually segment their audience.

The added value for brands is they can communicate to certain segments (circles), instead of sending out a message to all fans, like it’s on Facebook.

Think about reaching out to the highly influential audience. Brands can directly engage and get feedback from these selected users.

Hangouts

Another feature that was already introduced when Google+ was launched were Hangouts. Brands can now use Hangouts and reach to their audience through video chats, this makes it personal and gives the brand a ‘real face’.

And also like circles, brands can segment their audience.

Drive search

Google’s social network changes search on Google, they are making it a social search engine by adding Google+ in the organic search results. Google is taking advantage of their monopoly position within search.

How exactly? By introducing Direct Connect, with this feature users can add the “+” symbol and go directly to a Google+ page in search. For example +Gmail refers to the Google+ page. And  there’s more: Google’s +1 system, equivalent of Facebook’s like system, provides recommendations by showing +1′s from your peers in the search results.

Downsides

Of course Google+ isn’t all sunshine, the social network has its limitations. So far the number of users per circle is limited to 5.000 users and this will definitely be a hassle for brands with a huge number of users.

Then there’s the single administrator account which is tied to a Gmail account. Again, not very user friendly for brands wanting to manage their page through multiple admins.

Moreover, as for now, Google doesn’t allow contests and promotions on Google+ Pages. This includes contests, sweepstakes, offers, coupons and others. However brands can display a link that redirects to a site where promotion activities are hosted.

A strange move by Google, as this drives fans away from the Google+ page.

Another pain point in Google’s social network is how many people use Google+. CEO Larry Page stated the social network has 40 million registered users.

That’s a whopping number for a social network that recently launched on the 28^th of June, but it’s still a far cry from Facebook’s 800 million active users. As for active users,  Google isn’t publicly releasing those figures.

An interesting remark is that users can only sign up on Google+ if they’re 18 years and older.

It’s clear Google is taking their social network on a different route than Facebook. For brands it’s necessary to know how to interact with their users and not simply copy pasting their Facebook pages.

Google is providing a way to reach out and engage. Brands should only create Google+ pages when they know what will be the added value for their audience.

We’d love to hear your take on this. Should brands invest time into Google+ now or wait?

Sources: Searchengineland.com, Huffingtonpost.com, Mashable.com, Techvibes.com, Econsultancy.com

Without speculating  too much on these rumors, the blog also uploaded some very interesting screens from the interface. Which make these more plausible as well.

The authors of the story, found on TechnoDroidVe, claimed that while using a HTC Inspire during their visit at the Android Market, they were able to get access to this unreleased version. With realizing that these images where probably not mend to be seen, they made screens of it and spread it on the web.

Interesting details

It seems that with this new service, Google has found another battlefield to compete against Apple. Prices are quite similar as with iTunes, as the songs are rated between $ 0.99 and $ 1.29. For albums users must show a fair price between $ 8.49 and $ 9.99.

One of the nice features which coul generate some real new addicts of the service, is the free song of the day. We have seen that earlier with mobile app TapTap Revenge from Tapulous, a Disney Interactive Media Group. It really paid off in terms of locked-in clients.

With this setup, Google’s new service will be more competing with iTunes rather than Spotify. But having the giant Google on this field as well, might bite off some of the convenience the other services have.

Unfortunately, despite the nice rumors, there is one problem: It’s unconfirmed. We all have to wait till this Wednesday at the earliest, the hear from Camp Google.

Are you waiting for this new service? After Google Buzz, Google +1, could this be the service from Google which could bring a succes-story again? Let us know!

New available Top-Level Domains will bring opportunities for brand owners, firms and organizations. Some examples? Category TLDs: .bank .jewellers .sport .film .gay and .shop

Place TLDs: .nyc .london .barcelona and Brand TLDs: .nike .redbull .canon

Why do I think that CMOs should be relaxed about new TLDs, and why they certainly should ignore some of the hysteric goeroes that have called the new TLDs “one of the biggest changes on the Internet in a decade”.

A brand TLD will have very little value, unless it is used heavily in marketing campaigns – it’s the marketing that creates the value — not the domain name itself.

Next, Google is also favoring large brands in its organic search results, so it’s already discounting other TLDs that belong to squatters or small businesses. That means that brand TLDs will offer very little SEO value.

Last but not least, more and more brands are not longer using their .com domain in their messaging, they advertise their Facebook domain in TVCs like: facebook.com/adidas, facebook.com/nike etc.

So stressing CMOs and giving them a headache about new TLDs? Aggegrated and hysterical nonsense if you ask me. I do hope that CMOs will worry more about their Internet, CRM and Social strategies.

Some CMOs still have not invested in building mutual beneficial relationships with their consumers yet. Those brands will drop tremedously the coming years.

They will see their clients leave which will entitle them to run even more ad campaigns. Wow, entitled to advertising, pretty old fashioned. Invest in your owned media channels, would be my advice.

And to some of the online goeroes I would like to say: Keep your head cool. New TLDs are certainly not one of the biggest changes on the internet. Blogs are. Online video is. Social Media is.

Please share our readers your thoughts on new TLDs…

Want to know more about TLDs? Read 9 Things You Need to Know About ICANN’s New Top Level Domains at Mashable.