When we decide to book a break away to a new destination we look to friends, family and most importantly online reviews to help make our decision. The Canadian Tourism Commission has made full use of this behaviour to help create a new campaign to encourage American citizens to consider Canada as a holiday destination.
Those visiting Canada love to share their experiences in Twitter by uploading videos, photos, comments etc. All this great content has been used to launch live interactive street murals, that inspire Americans on their daily travels to book a Canadian trip. These murals cleverly pull content from Twitter to display real-time updates from and about Canada. Passers by can interact with the content on the screens by flicking through live tweets and be inspired by all the great things there is to do in Canada. I love how digital and Twitter have been cleverly combined to take what’s happening online into the real world to transform an American city landscape.
I’ve never been to Canada, and never really thought about visiting. I feel the main reason for this is that I’ve not heard of anything interesting to do there. However, if I walked down a street and passed a giant interactive Twitter mural containing hits and tips I would definitely be inspired into booking a trip.
Following the buzz generated by Apple’s iPhone 4 Antennagate scandal, we were tasked by Samsung to quickly respond and get people talking about the Galaxy S.
Watch our Case Study below to find out what we did.
So, you’re a Facebook savvy individual and you know your ReTweets from your @replies. You’ve checked into Google HQ on Foursquare via your 3G enabled company-expensed iPad. Because of this important business acumen you’ve been tasked with defining a social media strategy for your company. Great!
But like many of us surrounded with so many dizzying social media opportunities and our unfathomably large brains looming above our shoulders, perhaps you still unsure of where to start?
Never fear, things are simple really. Just apply the age old rules of courtship and you’ll be well on your way.
Look smart – first impressions make a big difference in the dating world, but they also apply to your web profile. Keep it clean, keep it smart and keep it relevant.
Don’t boast – yes, we know you have lots of great products/deals/opinions and you want to share them with your fans, but don’t appear too needy. Users nor lovers want to hear about how wonderful you are every update so give them a break. Let them talk about themselves too.
Ask permission – be chivalrous to your date and you should do the same to your fans and followers. Use their data wisely; don’t give their vital statistics out to all and sundry.
Be yourself – you can’t hide behind your Facebook profile, be yourself, be honest. If someone wants to slag you off, deal with it calmly.
Be faithful – they have ‘fanned’ you, you have their commitment, don’t neglect your early adopters when you are off in search of new and more attractive friends. Be generous and offer value in return.
What did we miss? Comment below with your tips on going-steady with social media
Clever folks from Harvard have tracked 300 million tweets over a 3 year period to find out the mood of the USA during various hours throughout the day. Excluding the various disparities between the mornings and evening of different states (and all the other various inferences they must have made), this is an interesting study into the data driven world we now live in.
Don’t be put off by one of their conclusions – people are happier on weekends (space pen vs. pencil, anyone?).
The more we can record about our daily lives, the more we can find out about ourselves. And the better decisions we can make. The website Daytum is another visual example of how we could capture this information.
Have a look at this interesting article from the NY Times for more about the data driven life here
Have you ever pondered, upon a wistful summer’s afternoon, how London would look if its geographic landscape was directly linked to the volume of tweets produced? No..? Neither had I to be honest but now that DigitalUrban have gone and done it I’m beginning to wonder how it ever slipped my mind.
Having already gained exposure in the Metro, no doubt sandwiched between lurid celebrity gossip and dubious reportage, this cartographic marvel is comprised of tweets from a 30km radius of London. It was created using Tweet-O-Meter, an app which showcases the amount of ‘tweets per minute’ from twelve major cities.
Undoubtedly my favourite element of the map is the kitsch names given to the peaks and deserts. The summit of the map occurs at ‘Soho Mountain’ whereas my hometown of ‘Sunbury-on-Thames Dunes’ is lagging far behind. Looks very much like I need to purchase a firm pair of hiking boots and get tweeting.
As a social media planner, I log into Facebook every day to research, plan, manage and moderate on behalf of clients.
As a person living in London in 2010, I use Facebook every evening to easily keep in touch with a core group of my friends, and passively keep up to speed with a few hundred other people-who-I-no-longer-physically-see. In return for these stalking rights I reciprocally allow this outer group access to my updates.
Being a social media practitioner and a web savvy individual, I know how to tweak the Facebook security settings to prevent Google and the 400m+ other Facebook users from seeing my holiday snaps and inane status updates.
I definitely know about the settings on Twitter. There is only one. ‘Protect my tweets’.
Well, I thought I knew all about the Facebook security settings – until I saw this infographic on the New York Times. It shows how ludicrously complex Facebook settings actually are.
While 50 settings and over 170 options does give precise control over security, it does increase the chance for error – particularly when you consider that 4.6m of its users are 55+. I guess increased complexity comes hand in hand with managing such a large and open web platform.
It does however, do exactly what it sets out to do: explain social media in plain English.
It also makes me think of ice cream which is never a bad thing.
As all you Gmail users probably are aware, this morning Google launched a new leap into the Social Media space. They call it Google Buzz, and it works very similarly to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” sharing functionality:
You are able to share thoughts, links, photos, videos, RSS feeds etc. What sets it apart from Facebook, aside from one obvious thing, is that you are able to pull in content from your social networks or utilities such as Picasa, flickr, Google Reader and Twitter. This is a great functionality that facebook is lacking, and will probably do so due to equal lack of collaboration partners. All this is done straight through your Gmail account and is shared to your Gmail contacts. You are able to follow peoples’ Buzz feeds, or bring in random content from all your contacts.
Of course this has taken Twitter by storm (around 3,189 tweets over the last 6 minutes on ‘Google Buzz”) , and is the second highest ranking topic at the moment. However, even though it holds high share of buzz, it is not really received well:
According to me the biggest difference between Buzz and Facebook is also why I don’t think it will revolutionise the Social Media world: Gmail is not the forum where you want to share thoughts, party pictures or funny videos to everyone. My contacts in Gmail differ quite a lot from my friends in Facebook. Even Twitter gets around this problem due to a level of anonymity within the micro blog. As I have used my Gmail account for professional correspondence, I run the risk of sharing my content to unintended recipients.
Even though it could be considered a nice effort by Google to try to break into even another space, I don’t think they will succeed. I use my Gmail account for sending emails, for which it is great, but that’s what I will continue to do, nothing more. I’m not saying that Google hasn’t succeeded before in branching out, but this time they are moving in the wrong direction.
But an even more important question, what happened to Google Wave? I haven’t heard anything about it over the last months. This email system that was going to revolutionise the email world, did it flop?
Being Friday and the end of a somewhat busy week I was delighted to come across this video. I feel that such machines should exist in every work place.
Coca Cola invites college students in the U.S to experience the happiness factory via “the happiness machine”. When visiting their vending machine they get a little more than expected.
So far it has racked up 1,223,441 views on YouTube. The only distribution sources for the video were a tweet from the Coke Twitter account and their Facebook fan page. Interactive YouTube feature have been used to great effect as the video finishes with a call to action “Share the Happiness” alongside the question “Where will the happiness strike next?”.
YouTube has recently asked their customers what they are missing from their favourite video host. The result was a large outcry for something that goes well in line with Twitter’s genius: Simplicity. Most YouTube users want to watch videos with minimum hustle. However, there is one smaller group of people, that is very important for YouTube’s revenue stream, that wants the complete opposite: the uploaders. The latter user group wishes to enhance communication with the audience and asks further ways to increase audience volume, and both would need further added features to the interface.
So, who did YouTube listen to? Today it was announced that the video site will be launching a new version of the site, quite similar to Facebook Lite. It is not officially made yet when YouTube Feather will go live but, we the Beta version is ready for testing now. It will provide viewers with the benefit of watching video with the minimum latency possible. The downside? It achieves minimum latency through limiting many of the features available to the user lowering the amount of bytes that needs downloading by the browser. This will definitely make it more difficult to feature sponsored content, but could however contribute to an enriched brand experience for the viewer.
