Google: The hungry Beast
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: March 9, 2010
This video is both fantastic and really scary. Nothing new though, but still… All the facts the one after the other makes me reconsider my use of Gmail or whatever Google service.
Have a look yourself:
Coke against Pepsi in a Social media race
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: March 2, 2010
It seems like the big soft drink brands aren’t only fighting a battle in sales, but also in the social media sphere… and they are doing it with a different approach.
Vitamin Water (Coca-Cola) let’s you decide
Vitamin Connect
The first brand to kick off the hostilities was Vitamin Water (part of Coca-Cola). They used the social media sphere, or better Facebook, create a new drink. The competition was 3-fold. Competitors had to:
- Define new flavors: users could generate buzz around their favorite flavor (from a list of 10 flavors developed by Vitamin Water)
- Design the packaging: after the selection of the flavor, the users could create their own packaging through a Facebook app and the final winners were selected by a panel of experts
- Invent a name: while creating the packaging, the users could also come up with a name The winner, a certain Sarah from Illinois who won $5,000, came up with a very appropriate name “Connect”
The state of the Internet
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: March 1, 2010
Interesting video with some stats on the state of the internet
Some figures might be out of date already, but it gives you a clear idea of what’s going on!
Super Bowl 2010 and the impact on the web.
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: February 12, 2010
The Super bowl is comparable to the Champions League final here in Europe, except that it’s not about our “soccer” but about their dull and boring “football”. As the game has interruptions about every 30 seconds, they have some space for advertising. 47 minutes, 50 seconds of advertising messages to be exact and there were 41 advertisers that brought 66 different messages (Source: Kantar Media via Adweek). The Dot-coms were the biggest Category of advertisers this year with 5 mins and 43 secs, followed by beer and cars.
This year was a big hit with the biggest ever audience for the event, with 106,5 million viewers in the US (the worldwide audience is estimated at 1 billion). It is also the most expensive place to buy media with an average of 2;5 million $ per 30 sec (less than last year where it was around 3 million $). Of those 106,5 million, 12% was surfing on the web while watching the game (Source: Nielsen). Therefore a lot of brands linked their campaign back to other online activities with websites, digital campaign and social media links. The Super Bowl even created a dedicated Youtube channel where you can vote for the best ads. If you have some time to spend, feel free to browse through the different ads.
The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games go social
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: February 12, 2010
The Vancouver Winter Olympics are starting today in. We won’t see much of it I guess, due to the time difference, unless we don’t sleep. But we will be able to follow the games online with live streaming video and more on every single national channel as well as on the official Vancouver site.
I guess there will be a lot of social activity as well. As it didn’t start yet, it’s hard to find some decent references, but here are the official Vancouver properties on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page is quite interesting with the seamless integration of the Youtube videos.
Biz Stone explains twitter … in 2006
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: February 11, 2010
Very funny video of a nutty professor / mad man named Biz Stone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGnMThF_2Lo
Google tries to buzz the world
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: February 10, 2010
Unlike the whole Google Wave story, Google surprised us with a new, quite impressive, and certainly one of the biggest new features of the last years. Where the Google Wave launch was well prepared and they managed to create a whole fuzz about it with the limited amount of invites they sent out (remember the invites that were sold for big $$$ on eBay) and the noise they generated around it. Unfortunately, Wave was certainly one of the biggest deceptions of the last years. I don’t really see the use of it and many others seem to have the same feeling.
Yesterday, they launched a new thing that is called Google Buzz.
The noise around it before the launch, was quite reduced (or maybe that was because I was on holidays for quite some time) and the announcement came basically as some sort of a surprise. They definitely learned about their Wave mistakes by keeping it down and launching it smoothly into everyone’s Gmail account, which allows them to have a potential audience of around 176 million users from the start. Not quite at the level of facebook with 400 million users, but certainly better than Twitter and Foursquare.
The Muppets educate on social media
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: February 10, 2010
The muppets embrace digital fully. I already mentioned the viral Rhapsody some time ago, since then many other videos were viral hits. They now have their own Facebook fan Page (440K fans, not bad) and a Twitter (20K followers) and a Youtube Channel.
The latest hit (180K views in 2 days) is a movie where they play with / educate the audience on Youtube comments and Digg. Nice product placement from the Diggers and the Google guys!
Bill Gates re-invents Buzz Marketing and gives Twitter some more visibility
Posted by: stijnjacobs on: January 21, 2010
Yesterday’s big news, and not only in cyber space and geeky Social media blogs, but also in national newspapers all over the world, was the fact that Bill gates (re)joined Twitter and facebook. I guess he can enter the Guinness Book of Records straight away for the fastest growing account ever. After only 8 hours, he had over 100 000 followers on his Twitter account!
But a couple of hours later, everybody discovered that he didn’t do this for fun. He played the game to attract the attention to the launch of his blog The Gates Notes. The aim of the blog is to share what he and his wife are doing with their Foundation.
