Last week on ViralBlog among others “Facebook #1 Social Network In 127 Countries”, “Check-in With Air China At Selected Restaurants” and “3 Reasons Why CMOs Should Care About Chinese New Year”.

3 Reasons Why CMOs Should Care About Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year, a big festivities in China. What’s the big fuss about? Well, it’s one of the biggest holidays for Chinese people. And why is this important again? Because you’re an early bird and are eager understand a market that will most likely change the world economy. Chinese New Year is a very interesting holiday marketers should pay close attention to.

Check-in With Air China At Selected Restaurants

To promote Air China in Sweden, and highlight the fact that it flies not only to China but to destinations throughout Asia, Air China have been using restaurant check-ins on Facebook in a cool concept. The airline created partnerships with a number of popular Asian restaurants in Sweden, to act as ambassadors for Air China. At each restaurant guests were encouraged to check-in with Air China on Facebook as they sat down to eat.

Facebook #1 Social Network In 127 Countries

Strategic social media planning is about Owned, Earned and Paid media. And many global CMO’s are breaking their brains on global, glocal and local social media strategies. This new world map of social networks will make your life much easier… The map, created by Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian digital strategist, shows the global popularity of various social networks.

Viral Friday: Samsunged

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.

Why Social Games Are So Popular On Facebook

Social gaming has become quite popular these days. The combination of Facebook and Zynga surely were a helping hand in this trend. A market expanding so quickly this is one to look out for. So how many people are actually playing social games? In the US alone over 100 million people play on social networks. And this is a 600 million dollar market of virtual goods!

The map, created by Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian digital strategist, shows the global popularity of various social networks.

Unsurprisingly, the blue monster called Facebook tops the list in 127 countries out of the total 136 countries in the list…

Facebook has over 800 million active users. And its userbase will hit 1 billion, since more and more brands are promoting their Facebook URL in their TV commercials. Even the laggards are now turning towards blue.

Facebook is killing local social networks like flies on the wall. In June 2011, Facebook surpassed Hyves, Holland’s former most popular network.

Impossible is nothing, since Facebook also pushed Orkut (Google) out of it’s dominant #1 position in Brazil.

Facebook also overtook Japan’s popular mobile social networks; Gree, Mobage and Mixi.

To all social and strategic planners at WPP, GroupM, Omnicom etc, just take a look at below transformation, and see how the world is turning blue.

And I do hope that you remember that social goes beyond reach and engagement; buying friends is nice, throwing a great party (WOW Facebook content and community marketing) is even more important to get organic growth and brand advocates.

Europe is dominating the Facebook numbers with 223 million users, followed by North America at 219 million, and Asia and 202 million users.

History repeats itself, since Russia has not yet capitulated to the blue force; the two Russian local networks, V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki seem to be holding Mark Napoleon Zuckerberg at the borders of their country.

The number two and three spots in the social networking world vary from country to country.

In Australia, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, Twitter and LinkedIn are playing catch up with Facebook.

In Spain, the before so popular Tuenti has been overtaken by Facebook as well.

Badoo is a popular choice in several European countries including Italy, Austria, Belgium and Spain. Orkut is now the number two choice in both Brazil and India.

You can see the details per country here:

I will try to create a similar overview of the video sharing portals around the globe soon, so follow me on Twitter to be the first to know.

Source: TheNextWeb and grazie mille Vincenzo.

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

“On my way to Crystal Palace training ground Selhurst,” Davids Tweeted on Friday morning. The 37-year-old veteran, who has been out of the game for two seasons, may return to London after talks with Eagles manager George Burley.

Former Spurs midfielder Davids is said to be keen to settle in the English capital with his family, with Palace the only club capable of offering him acceptable terms while willing to take a risk on his fitness.

Davids is expected to train with the south Londoners first with a view to working his way towards first-team football by September.

The combative midfielder has not played competitive football since returning to Holland two years ago – although he played for LA Galaxy in a friendly and had a week’s trial with Leicester City.

Davids has also begun to make in-roads into his career as a TV pundit – as part of ITV’s World Cup team – although he believes he can still play at a high level before retiring.

I will certainly visit London pretty soon, to be able to see our former Ajax superstar and pitbull ‘Edje’ play one more time…

You can follow Edgar’s tweet’s here.

Thanks sniper Jappy for the tip!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The new burger is called the 3-Cheese Angus and besides this commercial, the campaign attempts to gain more attention online.

On a new dedicated website, Burger King lets visitors create their own T-shirts. Users can create a phrase starting with ‘Burger King’ in which ‘burger’ is not portrayed as an actual word but – you’ve guessed it- an image of a burger. Of course in front of the word King you can put anything you like in your head Regarding colours and layout the shirts don’t leave much to the imagination, in the sense that all shirts are black and the only variety one can add is the type of burger and the font.

Next to the website Burger King also created a Facebook page where visitors can opt-in to the Burger King database and advocate their designs to get votes. Because that is how this competition works: after dropping off your design, Burger King chooses the six best ones to display on the site and for others to vote on. The creator of the most popular shirt earns it, together with all the voters that also get one.

Besides the limited methods of creation for the T-shirts (Threadless uses more or less the same voting system and there you can create anything you want) I think the campaign will be successful in creating a fan base. Not only can you become a fan of the Facebook page, you can also create shirts through the Facebook app and of course through the dedicated website. In short, there is almost no chance of you leaving without creating or voting for a  shirt. And because Burger King keeps asking for your e-mail address, they can hold onto you for future King reference.

In this report Universal reveals some great insights in the differences between several countries and the overall growth of social media usage.

For this research Universal questioned 22,729 active internet users in 38 countries between November 2008 and March 2009 for Wave 4, making it the largest global analysis of social media usage. The overall growth is significant, showing in the image below.

Active internet users create a profile on my social network

A great insight from the report is that consumers aren’t really cutting back on blogging or sharing images, it’s just that they are increasingly opting to do ittheir social network page via rather than the likes of Flickr and Blogger.

Growth over years, click to enlarge

Other key statistics from the report are:

• The total estimated global active internet audience is now 625 million.
• Mobile internet usage has now reached nearly a fifth of all active internet users. Seventeen percent now access internet on the move as well as at home, work or college.
• Widgets continue to thrive with 34% of social network users installing them for their own use and 24% installing them to impress visitors to their profile page

Internet usage per country, click to enlarge

Universal McCann has included its own 10-step program for successful social media:

1. Listen to/observe what the target audience is doing in social media
2. Create a “social object” that is relevant to the brand and of genuine interest
3. Segment the target into tribes. Give them something they can join.
4. Allow them to engage via their preferred platform of choice—create multiple interfaces to your community
5. Make the experience better when shared
6. Optimize your content for sharing—particularly via newsfeeds and Twitter
7. Use paid-for media to get the ball rolling
8. Take advantage of extreme targeting offered by social networks
9. Make sure you have the resources to manage your community management and refresh the content.
10. Track the results and optimize where necessary

The decision is the latest in a series of legal tussles between the two firms as luxury goods groups seek to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods.

L’Oreal, which owns brands Lancôme and Yves Saint Laurent, lost a similar case in France last week, and is appealing against a defeat in Belgium.

However, it won two cases in Germany that involved fake perfumes and products without wrapping.

“This is an important judgment because it ensures that consumers can continue to buy genuine products at competitive prices on eBay,” said Richard Ambrose, eBay’s head of trust and safety.

“Following legal victories for eBay in the UK, US, France and Belgium, we reiterate again that cooperation and dialogue is what is needed, not litigation. Only by working together can we collectively address the issues that concern eBay, rights owners and consumers.”

L’Oreal noted in a statement that the court had “agreed with the view held from the outset by L’Oreal, that eBay could do more to prevent trademark infringement.”

It said the judge had referred other issues of law raised by the case to the European Court of Justice for further guidance, and that it “remains confident of a positive outcome.”

It’s strange: most fashion and luxurious brands are driven by innovation and trends, but so far about 90% of them have not embraced one of the largest trends called: the Internet yet.

However, finally some of them seem to have developed the guts to lower their Magazine and GRP budgets with 1-2%, in order to try some stuff online. Congratulations, you have just caught Noah’s last ark. Your target audience might have not forgotten about you, so you might still be able to refresh your brand…

Back to eBay, let our audience know why you feel eBay should be allowed or stopped to sell genuine branded products?

Or do you have an idea why fashion and luxurious brands are still so shy online?

Source: Reuters

To see more crazy and outrageous future LG ideas or to submit and share your own ideas, check out the LGenius Community.

SocialMedia8 started the natural seeding and social media optimization of the LG video on 26 March 2009 in the UK and Germany. At 30 March the ViralTracker dashboard showed already +100.000 clip views.

The social space again proves that brands can earn attention with free viral dynamics. We like to call it Earned Media, WOM or Buzz.

If you enjoyed this post or want to share your opinion: please leave your comment below or subscribe to our rss feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader. If you prefer daily updates connect to Twitter or for e-mail updates sign-up to receive our monthly newsletter.

The ad was done by Süperfad for Durex USA. The ad is originally based on a shoot by photographer Arian Camilleri, whose excellent characters were ported into the durex short above , which were probably inspired by the earlier Durex Play ads.

Perhaps it would be best to call this an anti-viral, if only for the disease stopping potential? The new film for Durex, synonymous with the word condom in the UK, takes a decidedly comedic twist (um…position?) on encouraging the use of its products in the US.

To create the animated frolic, agency, Fitzgerald+CO turned to the talent of Süperfad who eagerly embraced the opportunity.

Here you can find a some visuals. I think the shoot must have been fun…

The meeting

In Action

Share us your thoughts about this viral campaign.

Source: Condomunity