On the heels of the wildly successful Old Spice commercials and video responses to comments left on Old Spice’s various social networking outlets, Wheat Thins manufacturer Kraft Foods/Nabisco rolled out their own socially driven ad campaign this week.
The ads, which began running Monday, feature tweets mentioning Wheat Thins crackers in a positive light. Every tweet featured results in a surprise visit to the tweeter to deliver a gift that fits into the theme of their tweet. The tweet is clearly displayed along with the tweeter’s Twitter username at the beginning of the ad.
It’s the latest in a growing trend of involving social networking in advertising campaigns, and it’s proving effective. According to Marketing Daily, the combined efforts of Wheat Thins YouTube channel and Facebook page have drawn over 600,000 video views in the past three weeks.
The first ad begins with a tweet from user Tabitha who wrote, “AAAHHHH … I’m outta Wheat Thins … Mi life is officially over!”. “The Crunch is Calling” Wheat Thins team then arrives to meet Tabitha and presents her with her gift. In her case, it’s a warehouse pallet of Wheat Thins left in her driveway.
Since Tabitha’s ad only began airing on Monday it’s too early to determine the long-term effectiveness of this social strategy on Wheat Thins sales. However, the early figures from the YouTube channel and Facebook page are very promising. As is the fact that Kraft Foods/Nabisco has jumped on the bandwagon of embracing the social in social networking. Score one for social media buffs!
Facebook wants to be the default log-in for publishers of news. As with most things internet, old style news media are slow to adopt what other sites consider to be the best way to improve interaction with online readers and improve traffic.
Facebook wants publishers to use their social media tools and benefit from their expertise.
Facebook dominates third-party logins and but more users choose Twitter to connect, comment and log-in on news media sites than the social network, according to a study by social media metrics startup Gigya earlier this month.
A select group of Facebook of engineers and marketing manager have been charged with the task of reaching out to media. The team is lead by Justin Osofsky, formerly of Facebook Connect.
“We’re on a listening tour. We’re trying to figure out what dream products we could build with publishers,”
Osofsky said in an interview earlier this month.
The challenge the Osofsky lead team faces is getting publishers to realize the benefit of “like” button, Facebook’s analytics, and new features being developed.
Publishers would do well to take notice of Facebook’s power to move traffic. Social publishing site Scribd, for example, now gets about 23,000 likes per day, up from 1,200 back in April, when the “like” button was originally launched.
Referral traffic, was up 190 percent for ABC News and by 200 percent for TypePad. The National Hockey League (NHL) said video views and user registrations both went up by 50 percent when they implemented sharing tools, according to Osofsky.
Jason Keath has culled highlights from the recent Edison Research “Twitter Usage in America 2010”, which examines the reach of the massively popular microblogging and social networking site, and analyzes the behavior of the site’s users. Here’s a synopsis.
While the widely reported number of Twitter users is over 100 million, only 17 million Americans actively use Twitter. The reason for the discrepancy is the prevalence of spam accounts or multiple accounts created by one person.
Most Twitter users don’t actively update their accounts; they observe the time lines of the users they follow without posting to their own.
The percentage of Twitter users who are African Americans in the United States is approximately 25%.
The percentage of Americans who know what Twitter is has jumped from a mere 5% in 2008 to an astounding 87% in 2010. It’s safe to say Twitter is a household name!
Compared to other social networking sites, three times more Twitter users than users of other services follow brands.
Compared to other social networking sites, a higher percentage of Twitter updates come from mobile phones or mobile devices.
Despite this, only 7% of Americans are familiar with location-based social networking.
What do these figures tell us? Most importantly, they tell us that while Twitter is nearly off the charts in name recognition, it’s actual usage pulls in much more conservative numbers. There are fewer genuine Twitter accounts than first meets the eye because of dupe accounts used for spamming. And those that do use their accounts for real, use them mostly to hear, rather than be heard.
As a marketer, the most intriguing fact is the attention Twitter users pay to brands that are represented on the site. This report backs up any social media expert who encourages businesses to get tweeting in a hurry, because the Twitter buzz – despite fail whales, bugs, and the ongoing war with rival social network Facebook – is at an all-time high.
This is a first in automotive marketing: Ford will reveal the design of the 2011 Ford Explorer on Facebook.
It may be the biggest bomb since the Edsel or the biggest success since the Mustang. History will tell. But the Ford Explorer Facebook page will show the world the new truck in what Ford is calling an “all day event.”
Gone are the days when introducing the new models was a highly anticipated event. Ford hopes to recapture some of that old glory and Barnum and Bailey hype.
Scott Monty, Ford’s social media leader, called this a
“comprehensive online play”
which probably means something to those around him.
“This is a really really different Explorer, and we wanted to reveal it in a really really different way.”
Monty really really added.
He tweeted:
@snowkitten We’re not doing this at dealerships. Some cities are media-only events. Facebook reveal will be for all.
Normally, new vehicle design concepts are leaked to the press, then spy photos are published, the PR machine cranks up to reach out to automotive reporters – and then (ta-da) the car/truck/ is officially revealed at a major auto show. Instead, the 2011 Ford Explorer will be shown via videos.
Some details are already being released about the Ford Explorer for 2011:
Using social media to show off the new 2011 Ford Explorer isn’t much of a risk, and the down-side is minimal. Time will tell if there was an upside to the Facebook reveal.
The past has come back to haunt Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, making it appear that he might have given up his ownership stake via a contract signed seven years ago back when Facebook was still a web project in the works, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The contract is between Mark Zuckerberg and New York businessman Paul Ceglia who hired the former back in 2003 to work on two separate business ventures.
According to a copy of the contract, the first venture was to develop and maintain a Web database for “the StreetFax Database.” The second was “continued development” of an already-in-progress project ” “designed to offer the students of Harvard university access to a website [sic] similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of ‘The Face Book.’”
Facebook lawyer Lisa Simpson has acknowledged Zuckerberg and Ceglia did work together under contract back then but they have questioned the authenticity of the contract and the timing of the lawsuit.
The contract is real — as is plaintiff’s entitlement to at least a 50% ownership interest in Facebook.
Wrote Ceglia’s attorneys in a court filing submitted Friday as they maintained that their case was strong.
“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,” or so goes the famous quote by journalist Michael Kinsley. But what about when a politician makes up words, seemingly out of thin air? Sarah Palin’s latest made up word, “refudiate,” is an apparent mistake when she actually meant to say repudiate. The word has her political opponents laughing at her, but Palin’s defending herself, claiming a “Shakespearean” right to make up words as she pleases, according to the laws of “living language.”
Along with her political abilities, Palin’s basically added lexicographer of new words and expressions to her skill set. Ultimately she may become more famous for the latter, as a neologist, a “maker upper” of words.
A neologism is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but hasn’t yet been fully accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event. Shakespeare, who Palin cites, is credited with making up over 3,000 words such as “unhair,” although not all of them caught on.
No doubt language is living, but is Palin truly an intentional neologist? Or is she more of an accidental neologist? If so, wouldn’t it be more straightforward to simply say, “I made a mistake?” When you send out thousands of Tweets and Facebook postings and make hundreds of speeches, it’s obvious you’re going to screw up some words here and there. Of course, it’s easy to pick out the made up words, making good fodder for late night talk shows, never-ending surface chatter and humor, without dealing with the underlying political, social and economic issues. Just proves its usually better to debate issues than personalities.
In addition to all the gaffes by politicians like Sarah Palin, Joe Biden and George W. Bush, and made up words by famous writers like Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, here’s some other modern-day famous neologisms and their origins. Some of these words may be particularly useful for Palin, who may want to consider adding them to her repertoire of “refudiations.”
“Truthiness.” Stephen Colbert in his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” coined this word, which jokingly means, a “truth” that a person claims to know intuitively “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Colbert reportedly first used the word in a 2005 episode called “The Word.”
“Quone.” Kramer made up the word, “Quone,” on the popular 90’s show, “Seinfeld,” in an episode called, “The Stakeout.” Kramer is playing a word game with Jerry and Helen. After using the word, “quone,” Jerry challenges him. But Kramer insists the word is real, saying, “Nah, we need a medical dictionary! If a patient gets difficult, you ‘quone’ him…”
“Pompatus.” This word springs from Steve Miller’s legendary 1973 song, “The Joker.” Anyone who loves 70’s rock knows the lyrics, “Some people call me the space cowboy. Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love. Some people call me Maurice, ‘Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.” Miller reportedly lifted the word from an old rhythm and blues song called “The Letter” written in 1954 by Vernon Green for his vocal group The Medallions. The word is so odd its meaning is often disputed. But that didn’t stop it from snaking its way into a 1996 movie called “The Pompatus of Love,” in which four guys try to figure out a number of things, including what the heck “pompatus” means.
“Heebie-jeebies” and “Google.” American cartoonist Billy De Beck is credited with inventing this word around 1923. It first appeared in one of his Barney Google cartoons in the New York American. De Beck is also known for other slang that didn’t quite catch on long term such as “hotsy-totsy” and “horsefeathers.” “Heebie-jeebies,” however, is still with us, as well as the signature part of De Beck’s cartoon’s name, “Google.”
“D’oh!” Homer Simpson’s famous word used as a kind of swear to express extreme annoyance or stupidity. “The Simpsons,” a long running cartoon comedy created by Matt Groening, is also credited with a number of other neologisms, many of which haven’t fully caught on, but have been made famous by the show. “Simpsons” neologisms include, “adultivity,” “avoision” and “be-musement park.”
Photo by Bob Weinstein via Wikimedia Commons. Sarah Palin holding a T-shirt related to the Gravina Island Bridge. Note: 99901 is a postal zip code for Ketchikan, Alaska where the bridge was to be built. Palin supported the Bridge Project until the project became universally unpopular, and was canceled by Congress.
Social networking giant Facebook is on track to reach 500 million users this week, the company projects. Facebook plans to celebrate with a new feature called “Facebook Stories”, a site within the network that highlights user anecdotes in 420 characters or less (the maximum length for Facebook status updates) about how Facebook has affected their lives. The company is currently accepting submissions for their Stories feature; stories that receive the most Likes could be included in the final product.
Last summer Facebook reached the 200 million user milestone, indicating they have more than doubled their reach in the space of a year. However, there is much speculation in social media circles about the validity of the user count. Many experts assert that Facebook’s numbers are artificially inflated by single users creating more than one account. Reasons for this include having multiple accounts for personal and business use; owning multiple accounts in order to get ahead in certain Facebook games; and “starting over” with a new account if an old one gets out of hand.
Thus the argument is whether Facebook will reach 500 million users or 500 million accounts; the company seems to take in good faith that it’s 500 million unique people using their site. Either way, it’s a milestone worth celebrating.
“Ghosts” haunt Facebook, much like the film, “The Sixth Sense,” in which a troubled boy talks to those who’ve passed away, while saying, “I see dead people.” A number of Facebook users have gotten prompts from the social networking service encouraging them to re-connect with friends and family members who have died. Facebook may be powerful, but is it powerful enough to reach beyond the grave? Apparently the profiles of the deceased people are still up on Facebook. The company has so far been unable to come up with a full solution to the problem, which is very disturbing to a number of people, The New York Times reports.
Much of the problem is because more old people are joining Facebook than ever before. The service saturated itself early on with young people, but now the numbers of users age 65 and older is growing as grandmas and grandpas want to keep tabs on their children and grandchildren.
Facebook’s changed its approach to handling deceased people a number of times, according to The New York Times. In the past, it automatically erased the profiles of dead people as soon people informed the site they’d died. But now Facebook is considering how to preserve those profiles as a way to memorialize the deceased and give their families a place to mourn or pay tribute. Memorialized member pages are stripped of some personal information and no longer appear in searches, but friends and family can still post messages.
But a number of privacy advocates and other people have been growing ever more suspicious of Facebook’s motives because the company often changes the privacy settings, mostly in the direction of making your information more public than ever before. A new film out titled “The Social Network,” also isn’t too flattering of a fictional portrayal of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The film’s poster says, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Facebook became successful because people believed they had some bit of privacy, which of course isn’t true on anything involving digital media or the Internet. Facebook’s grown larger and stretched its reach throughout the entire Web, with “like” buttons on thousands of websites, so any time you click “like” on a news article or blog, or share it, everyone knows about it. Moreover, changing the so-called privacy settings is not so simple as Facebook claims, even if you can keep track of all the changes, and the truth is, a person doesn’t really have full privacy control on Facebook.
So the question arises, is Facebook looking to get some kind of financial gain by keeping “alive” the profiles of dead people? Doesn’t it seem more than a little creepy? And where will this lead to, ultimately? Will people lose the right to “die” privately the way they did in the past, but instead be kept “alive” somehow via the World Wide Web? This is a far cry from a very real spiritual belief that some Native American and Aboriginal tribes have that if someone takes your photo, your soul will also be taken. Somehow it seems like Facebook wants even more than your soul.
A full trailer for the movie, The Social Network, has just been released.It doesn’t reveal all that much about the movie, and it’s actually a little bit creepy.
The Social Network trailer starts with a montage of Facebook walls and posts, while a gospel version of Radiohead’s Creep plays in the background. It isn’t until a minute into the trailer that you see Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg.)
Times reports that the Social Network portrays the founding of Facebook, and the legal troubles and internal struggles that Zuckerberg and company went through to form the social networking site, Facebook.
The tag line for the movie is “You don’t make 500 million friends, without making a few enemies.”
Unbeknownst to the majority of Facebook users, Facebook plans to remove all application-generated profile boxes in the not-too-distant future.
In fact, profile boxes had already been removed yesterday, but for reasons we can only speculate Facebook restored them today. It’s unclear if the decision was due to the public outcry against the decision, but Facebook have made one thing clear: profile boxes are doomed. They will be permanently removed soon.
Another confusing aspect of this development is precisely why Facebook is removing profile boxes, which many people use to customize the look of their Facebook profile or to display things like horoscopes, charitable causes, and games. With the change applications will be restricted to publishing on their respective tabs.
Facebook users seem most upset that the removal of their profile boxes yesterday came with no forewarning, making it a nasty surprise for those who rely on their profile boxes daily for regularly updated content.
Facebook has bowed to pressure and provided a new application which allows young users to report suspicious behaviour, according to Yahoo News.
Beginning Monday, the application allows youngsters to report suspicious behaviour to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) in the UK and Facebook.
The launch of the service marks a turnaround for Facebook which initially resisted calls for a so-called panic button after the murder of a teenage girl in 2009 was linked to the site.
At the time, Facebook said its own protection mechanisms were sufficient.
Following the murder of Ashleigh Hall by serial rapist Peter Chapman, CEOP was putting pressure on the social networking site to install a panic button feature. Initially, Facebook resisted instead it added a 24-hour police hotline to pass UK reports to the CEOP Centre and spent £5 million (about $7.6 million USD) on education and awareness programs.
Users of the social networking site will from Monday be able to bookmark the ClickCEOP service or add it as an application by going to http://www.facebook.com/clickceop.
An automatic advert for ClickCEOP will also appear on the homepage of every Facebook user listed as between 13 and 18 years old.
Despite serious privacy issues, the word’s fascination if not addiction with Facebook shows no signs of abating. While the social networking site can accomplish good things, the pages created by some users seems to be a form of extreme narcissism. In our celebrity driven culture, Facebook is also an effective platform for self-promotion in the world of entertainment.
IndyPosted has already reported that Lady Gaga has surpassed Obama in terms of Facebook fans (apparently they are no longer referred to as “friends”), although she still falls short of the number one position. Here, courtesy of ABC News, is the entire top 10 list of Facebook luminaries in terms of their total official followers:
Michael Jackson– 15 million people have had no trouble finding the deceased “King of Pop” on Facebook
Lady Gaga–10.9 million fans
Vin Diesel–despite his mixed movie success, the actor has 10.3 million fans
Barack Obama–formerly number two, he has 9.5 million fans
Megan Fox–for obvious reasons, the sultry actress has 8.6 million fans
Christiano Ronaldo–the soccer star and new dad has 7 million followers
Lil Wayne–the currently incarcerated rapper has 5 million fans
Justin Bieber–6.6 million fans follow the 16-year-old singer
Taylor Swift–the country singer has 6.3 followers
Will Smith–the “A-List” movie star rounds out the list with 5.8 million fans
Lady Gaga has officially surpassed the President of the United States in fan outreach on Facebook, with the offbeat princess of pop coming in at 9,940,462 Facebook fans. Obama has fallen firmly behind with 9,444,942.
But the trend also spans social media platforms and continues on Twitter, where Gaga’s accumulated 4,762,938 followers and Obama, despite actually tweeting at least one message on the account himself, has only 4,422,923.
Fame Count, which tracks social networking statistics, says Gaga is set to be the first living person to ever reach 10 million Facebook fans. This would not only place her well ahead of President Obama, but ahead of young pop sensation Justin Bieber and the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson.
Gaga acknowledged the outpouring of online support with a video thanking her fans for “sticking by me through the fame and the fame monster”. She also added, “Become my friend on Facebook. I’ll never forget you.” [via Sify]
As Facebook marches toward a billion users, for Google to think they can launch Google Me as a Facebook killer may be a reach – even for Google.
Some of the best connected minds in the world of social media are leaking details of Google Me.
Kevin Rose, of Digg.com, tweeted over the weekend that “Google Me” suddenly has a high priority.
Now another leader in the industry is confirming what Rose hinted at: Google is full steam ahead on social network.
Facebook’s first chief technology officer and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo said on the question-and answer service last night that Google is building out a “full, first-class social network” in order to keep Facebook at bay.
“They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop and now they are scared,”
D’Angelo told Venturebeat.
Even if Google is successful in mashing up Buzz and Reader and Orkut and Gmail, there is serious doubt that Facebook users will adopt the new social network.
But attitudes at Google have changed and Facebook is squarely in the sites of developers.
Social Media