Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

Presidential Candidature, part deux

Published
by
Rick
on February 5, 2008
in Social Media and digital strategy
.

Back in February 2006 I wrote a post on the launch of the US Presidential candidates and how important digital would be in deciding the outcome of the next president of the United States.

Today, Super Tuesday will bring to an end to what started in February 2006. And it’s astonishing to me what difference digital has made to the experience.

Back then micro-blogging was barely a whisper. Twitter launched at SWMX in March of that year and John Edwards was the first to use it followed in quick succession by the other candidates.

At the time, I was very impressed with Barack’s choice of Brightcove to virally spread his ‘message’ and a little dumbstruck by Hilary’s choice of high quality Quicktime interviews (focusing primarily on news broadcasters and not bloggers picking up her sound bites). One truely seemed to understand the difference between digital and broadcast media whilst the other was pretending at the time that it didn’t matter. How times have changed.

All candidates not only twitter, but Google has teamed with Twitter to provide a Twitter/ Google mashup for Super Tuesday.

The very nature of how the candidates have been monitored has had to change.

Politics has moved on from sound-bites and newspaper spin. Discussion and debate online has fueled the need for openness, transparency and a new dialogue between the next president of the US and its people.

I wish them all a great deal of luck…and I hope brands have been paying attention :)

Insight into a Social Media campaign

Published
by
Rick
on February 3, 2008
in Social Media
.

How soccerticketsonline.com has generated traffic to its site. A nice case study.

Off the back of that post there’s another Soccer blog illustrating how soft the competition is in this area.

Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin Americans’

Published
by
Rick
on October 11, 2007
in Social Media and Social Networking
.

Virgin Airlines have turned some of the most well-known and subscribed to bloggers into cartoon characters for a series of cartoons entitled ‘Virgin Americans’.

Cartoon illustrating the features of flying Virgin Airlines.
Virgin Americans Flickr gallery

A blog review from David Winer.
Another blog review.
BoingBoing review

All 3 are powerful word-of-mouth recommendations.

BoingBoing have signed an exclusive deal to supply Virgin Airlines with their BoingBoing.tv content. Nice fit.

All good stuff and does what it set out to. Domestic air travel in the US is now in a huge fare war as a result.

This has been a really well executed digital PR strategy from Virgin America.

Also similar in strategy is O2 Cocoon’s blog – Very interesting to see where O2 chose to install the blog – within O2 Blueroom and on its own domain – rather than on the o2.co.uk domain. This way I guess they enable the bloggers and guest writers the ability to write opinionated reviews and comments which spark conversation rather than just decimating other news in a bland way. Talk radio DJs are opinionated on purpose in order to get people to pick up the phone, the same is true online.

What will be interesting to see will be the way in which O2 Cocoon’s blog sows ‘seeds of conversation’ that dovetail in with other campaign activity over the coming months. It’s also a little surprising that there’s no Facebook group, sponsored or otherwise, which would drive people to the blog.

Update: O2 now have a Facebook group, either I missed it (very likely given the numbers it’s generated!) or it’s one of the fastest growing groups on Facebook! Love the scoreboard.

MSNBC buy Newsvine

Published
by
Rick
on October 8, 2007
in Social Media
.

MSNBC has bought Newsvine, the citizen journalist site, bringing Social Media to the news channel.

Intel release a digg for software

Published
by
Rick
on October 8, 2007
in Social Media
.

This is a great idea launched by Intel and shows how Social Media is taking hold - It’s techy, but that’ll change.

France Telecom 1st major Telco to support OpenID

Published
by
Rick
on September 25, 2007
in R&D, Social Media and Social Networking
.

What’s OpenID?
1st major Telcom to support OpenID
Reaction on Techcrunch.

What France Telecom (and Orange) needs more than anything is a consumer-focused marketing strategy as to why OpenID is useful/beneficial. Right now it just yells ‘so what’, but with its customer base of 40million users, all of whom can be verified as real people, France Telecom is going to have quality OpenIDs, with billing addresses, likes and dislikes and spending patterns.

niche social networks : Etsy.com

Published
by
Rick
on September 23, 2007
in Social Media and Social Networking
.

Ning will cross a sizeable milestone this weekend: 100,000 user created social networks
on the platform. That’s up from just 30,000 in February when they launched a new version of the service. The company is also saying that page views have been growing 40% month over month over the summer.

One of their featured communities is We Love Etsy, a social network for people who love Etsy.com.

Etsy.com is “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade.”

What I find really inspiring about what’s happening within the WeLoveEtsy community is the experimentation.

Ning is a free service. Anyone can create a network using Ning. What’s really difficult is creating a community.

Etsy have managed to create a community of 1,300+ by listening, reacting and experimenting.

Etsy is in the business of buying and selling handmade products. There’s a natural desire by the people involved to come together and discuss improving the marketplace in which they make their money. Having a community site set up in which to do this makes complete sense. But it doesn’t make Etsy unique. All forward thinking brands should be doing the same and experimenting.

On WeLoveEtsy there is a news section, they’ve got a blog which aggregates every users own blog (just like the news feed feature on Facebook, but with steriods), over 90 groups have been formed within the WeLoveEtsy network and they have an incredibly active forum. Over 10,000 pictures and 36 videos have been uploaded by members.

When you create a profile on Ning you get a very basic profile page and you can view your messages and friend requests.

What’s cool about Ning is that each network you join offers you a unique profile for that network. On WeLoveEtsy’s community profile page each member gets:

  • A unique profile image for that community
  • The opportunity to edit your page’s theme
  • To add a blog post
  • The ability to invite friends
  • Your own comment wall

Sellers are encouraged to enhance their profile with their products. Kenneth Rougeau is one of the most active members of WeLoveEtsy, but there are many other active participants.

Etsy haven’t limited themselves to just Ning either. It has 51 groups, 18 events and 2 apps on Facebook, but nowhere else does it have anything like the presence it has on Ning.

For what it’s worth, the Etsy Facebook apps are a great way to show your handmade goods to a wider audience:

Esty shop which lets sellers show their most recently listed items on their profile page and MyEtsy - a great way to show off handmade goods from Etsy to the Facebook community. These can either be your shop or your personal favourites.

Etsy have also created a widget, EtsyMini, enabling sellers to place their items on their own blogs and sites, outside of any social networks.

It’s clear that Etsy is a very forward thinking company and is using social networking the way it should be used, as a laboratory and platform to offer improved services and functionality to its core community of users.

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armchairGM

Published
by
Rick
on September 14, 2007
in R&D, Social Media and Social Networking
.

armchairgm logo
“ArmchairGM is a community for passionate sports fans. Read, write, and talk about sports. Meet other fans of your favorite teams. Rate players, teams, and sporting events. Earn points and receive gifts.”

ArmchairGM is a company that has been bought by Wikia, a for profit wiki site created by the founder of Wikipedia. It combines the best parts of open source wiki software with social networking features such as adding friends, building a profile, creating groups and meeting people. It also offers users the ability to add ‘foes’ in addition to friends, since so much sport centres on rivalries.

airchairGM

This is something that sports brands should pay attention to and start to take part in. These are the fans, the die hards.

Here’s a screen grab of Didier Drogba’s page:

Didier Drogba

There’s some serious potential for sports brands and manufacturers to begin cross selling their own promotions, features and competitions on sites like these which will be seen by advocates (and rivals) of that athlete, team or sport.

I can see huge potential here…

General motors gets social

Published
by
Rick
on September 11, 2007
in Social Media and automotive
.

General Motors Europe has launched an innovative “social media newsroom.” Each press release on its new Web site has “links for easy sharing and tagging with popular social media sites such as Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us and Facebook, and each includes a comments area to encourage commentary and opinion from readers.”

The comprehensive Web site includes photography for reuse online that can be downloaded from Flickr — and a link to GM Europe’s video collection on YouTube.

The social media landscape is littered with companies like Walmart whose attempt at social media marketing has gone up in flames.

I have to compliment GM on this approach. By beginning with existing assets (press releases, pictures and videos of their cars) they can test the social media water. The tactics they are using have little chance of blowing up in their face, so the organization will be able to gain confidence in this new marketing approach. As Julie Hamp, GM Europe’s vice president of communications puts it:

“Everyone is learning about the value of the social media environments which allow open dialogue, sharing select information with other users and posting photos or information to share with friends of select users. Today, there is much more of an opportunity to create a dialogue with the consumer, and we are providing our news in a form that makes it easy to republish, comment on and pass along.”

Facebook applications: google’s social search widget

Published
by
Rick
on August 31, 2007
in Google, Social Media, Social Networking and facebook
.

Google has launched a search widget for Facebook that lets you search the web and share the results with your friends. Sadly, it has errors on the first page on launch. Expect more mainstream features to be ported to Facebook and for it to sit on top of the social engine.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang