rattanasamy

Twitter Icons Go Green For Iran

2009-06-22T15:02:00.006-05:00

The terror that has taken over Iran the past several days following the June 12 Presidential election has the entire world watching and weeping. Last week, Iran's Guardian Council declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of the election with 62.63% of the vote, surprising many experts and supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi, who many expected to win.

Despite stern warnings from IGC, hundreds of demonstrators angry over election results have been protesting, most recently in a public square Monday in Tehran. According to hospital sources, at least 19 people were killed in clashes in Tehran on Saturday alone, but unconfirmed reports put the total number killed at over 150.

It's painful to sit by and watch as thousands of innocent people are being injured and killed, knowing that there is very little we can do to help. But the Twitterverse is showing it's support by turning their icons green. You can do this by visiting helpiranelection.com.

Read the story here.

2009 WWDC Apple Hyperwall

2009-06-12T01:08:00.008-05:00

At the WWDC (world wide developers conference) on Monday, Apple had a "hyperwall" on display which consisted of twenty 30-inch Apple displays. The screens were loaded with 20,000 of the most popular iPhone apps which would pulsate each time the app was download from the iTunes store via a live feed. The hyperwall was built using Apples latest technology. It's powered by 20 Mac Pro towers each running the new Mac OS X Snow Lepoard.

A pretty cool idea and crowd getter, kudos to Apple for innovative thinking once again.

Firms Find Tweet Avenue For Better Public Relations

2009-05-27T18:38:00.003-05:00

Sarah Molinari, a public relations manager at Home Depot, (HD) was perusing comments about her company on microblogging site Twitter recently when she came across a discomforting post — or "tweet" in Twitter lingo.

A customer in Canada was building a deck. The home-improvement chain had not delivered items he needed. He concluded the Twitter message: "Home Depot order is being canceled. We are going to (rival) Lowes (LOW) because (of Home Depot's) epic fail."

Molinari used Twitter to write back: "Saw your tweets — can I help?"

Home Depot is one of a growing number of companies using Twitter to promote sales, serve customers and conduct public relations — one customer at a time. In Molinari's case, a Home Depot manager called the riled customer to fix the problem.

"We get a lot of feedback from customers on Twitter," Molinari said. "And we'd be remiss if we did not pay attention to this community and learn from it."

Home Depot created its Twitter account one year ago and has more than 7,800 "followers," Twitter's term for users who subscribe to other users' updates. Molinari responds to customer complaints or requests and occasionally sends tweets about promotions and articles she thinks might be helpful.

A Public Bullhorn

Twitter launched in July 2006 as a way for friends to let each other know what they are thinking and doing — in 140 characters or less. Users create a profile, sign onto the site and can then send to and receive messages from other users.Unlike e-mail, most Twitter messages are public, so it can serve as a high-tech bullhorn for customers.

The potential public-relations impact — both good and bad — is enormous. According to Web traffic research firm comScore, about 17 million people logged onto Twitter's site in April, up from 9.3 million in March.

And millions more use the service through their cell phones, third-party Web sites and dozens of software applications for computers and smart phones.

In addition to Home Depot, companies such as Dell (DELL), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), JetBlue (JBLU) and Comcast (CMCSA) have Twitter accounts. Dell, which jumped on the Twitter bandwagon more than a year ago, says it has generated more than $1 million in sales by alerting customers about deals on inventory it wants to clear.

"Companies are using Twitter to energize their brand, provide support, offer promotions and drive sales, but we're still in the very early days of this," said Diane Clarkson, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Read the story here.

Will Social Media & Craigslist Kill Newspapers?

2009-05-27T17:48:00.007-05:00

Craigslist has been successful for long enough now that we can easily recognize some of its benefits over the printed newspaper industry. But a recent Pew Internet study really drives the point home, noting the debilitating affect web-based classifieds has on the classifieds revenue for newspapers.

Pew points out that 49% of Internet users use online classifieds, which is more than twice as many as noted in 2005.

Several aspects of web-based communication has overrun printed media, especially newspapers. And with other advances on the mobile front, from cell phones to the Kindle, it’s easier than ever to spread information across a mass of people. The ability for newspapers to take advantage of web-based trends has been dismal overall, and the revenue structure for printed media is suffering a great deal as a result.

So what happens when sites like Craigslist become even more social? The Pew study really draws on the fact that printed media is becoming less and less relevant in the grand scheme of things, and the power of the Internet is prevailing. As Internet users become more comfortable with social networks, and social networking platforms find better ways of effectively delivering information within a given social graph, the ability to provide additional value around something as simple as classifieds will become an actuality.

Interestingly enough, some of this value will inherently come from deeper integration with traditional media and mainstream forms of communication. This integration actually increases the credibility of certain systems, even a web-based classifieds site.

Finding better ways to further simplify the process of posting and searching classifieds, along with the eventual physical interaction between the two parties involved, are all things that can be enhanced by integration with social media. Whether it’s a mobile alert for proximity purposes or recommendations based on actual purchase history from within a given product category, the marriage of social media, classifieds and traditional media will be an interesting and powerful aspect of our future.

Read the story here.

Land Rover Taps Twitter as Campaign Cornerstone

2009-04-23T01:09:00.004-05:00

Land Rover last week became the first national brand to execute a national Twitter campaign in a bid to promote its newest models' debuts at the New York Auto Show.

While brands as diverse as Southwest Airlines and Smirnoff vodka have been tweeting and accumulating followers for months, Land Rover attempted to use the burgeoning social-media platform in a more ambitious way, seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding.

While it's too early to know what sort of return Land Rover will receive for its efforts, "it cost us virtually nothing," said Keith Rhodes, VP and account director at WPP-owned direct-marketing firm Wunderman, which orchestrated the effort.
Mr. Rhodes said he was particularly encouraged by the Twitter-fueled traffic to a blog post he wrote about Land Rover's initiative. Posts on his site typically draw about 30 views; this one grabbed more than 200,000 views.

Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based "social-media affinity network" Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover's launch.

Mr. Eliason said the next national effort using Twittad's roster of 4,500 Tweeters, whom it pays to post on topics and brand their profile pages, with nearly 5 million followers, will be for Elations, a glucosamine-enhanced beverage from the makers of Sunny Delight targeted at women over 40.

Twitter machine
All told, the Land Rover effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers, Mr. Eliason said. Twittad used 15 different Tweeters with at least 5,000 followers, although the majority had between 2,000 and 4,000 followers.

Most won't get rich doing this anytime soon. One paid Tweeter, willconley777, wrote on his blog that he was paid $2.50 for letting Land Rover sponsor his profile page for seven days. Mr. Conley has 1,160 followers. Still, for those few Twitter users with huge reach, real money might one day be possible. The most-followed Land Rover campaign participant, queenoftheclick, boasts nearly 25,000 followers and was paid an amount "in the hundreds" for her participation, Mr. Eliason said.

Other larger-scale marketers are also eyeing Twittad, which is in talks with Sears.

The appeal to marketers is obvious: It's a cheap way to reach people through their trusted contacts. And Twittad's technology is able to sort its users by geography, demographics and interests, which can both lead to more targeted appeals and, perhaps, prevent Twitter users from feeling under siege by advertisers, a major concern.

"We were worried it would be considered spam, but we didn't get a single complaint [about Land Rover]," Mr. Eliason said. "What that tells me is that our connectors have influence."

Less clear is whether the model is sustainable. Mr. Eliason, who launched Twittad eight months ago, said he expects it to break even by the end of its first year. He said he has contacted Twitter about a revenue-sharing agreement but has yet to hear back.

Read the story here.

Pizza Hut Wants a Student to Spend Their Summer Twittering

2009-04-23T00:32:00.008-05:00

In an interesting light, Pizza Hut is hunting for a college student to spend the summer months as a member of the PR team in charge of tweeting about new developments at the restaurant chain. I wish when I was in college looking for an internship something like this existed.

The company is advertising for students to apply for the 10-12 week long "twinternship," based in its headquarters in Dallas.

Duties include:

Collect and share insights and experiences while working for Pizza Hut through social and interactive media: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, New and emerging media
Twintern will be given unprecedented access to marketing meetings, brainstorm sessions, ad shoots and special events
Monitor social media for pop culture news, off-the-wall stories or anything else quirky and fun that he or she thinks would be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fans.
Chronicle experience through video; edit and post to selected media
Conduct media outreach for PR programs
Assist with execution of national PR programs

With Twitter-use growing exponentially in 2009, brands are trying to work out how to best use the service to promote themselves, and monitor what is being said about them online.

Earlier this month Amazon experienced the power of the Twittersphere when rumours spread far and wide that it had adopted an anti-gay policy by removing thousands of books from its main search and best-seller rankings.

It emerged that there was no such policy and that the problem had been caused by a classification error, but not before hundreds of thousands of mentions of the term "amazonfail" had spread across the World Wide Web.

To apply for the twinternship

Twitter Traffic Explodes...And Not Being Driven by the Usual Suspects!

2009-04-07T20:47:00.001-05:00

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon - from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

Keep an eye out for the March U.S. Twitter data, which should be available later this week. An early peek at the data suggests it’s going to be another HUGE month for the increasingly popular site. Follow comScore on Twitter and be the first to find out how the site did! You can also follow comScore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni on Twitter to hear his thoughts and insights on the digital media industry at large.

Read the story here.

5 Tips for Marketing on Facebook's New Pages

2009-03-12T22:01:00.002-05:00

Facebook’s recent move to make Facebook pages similar to user profiles (in-terms of interactivity) is drawing attention from mainstream publishers and marketers at top brands. New publishing features on Facebook are being used by brands like Coca-Cola, and publishers such as Fortune Magazine and The New York Times, in an effort to become part of the new Facebook stream. The pages will also serve as landing pages for brands on Facebook, which they can promote and measure traffic to using Facebook Advertising.

Here's 5 Tips for marketers utilizing these new pages.

#1 Post updates frequently: Twitter rules now apply, and frequency of status updates must be high in order to stand out with your fans in the Facebook stream. In fact, given the scale of Facebook, it’s likely that we will see the best Twitter brands: Jet Blue, Ford, Comcast, Home Depot, Zappos and their handlers making a strong play for Facebook mind-share. In order to compete, posts must be frequent and interesting.

#2 Take advantage of Facebook's Advertising: Now that you can interact with current and prospective customers on Facebook, bring people to your page. Team your page effort on Facebook with a small Facebook advertising campaign. While the Twitter community shuns ads, Facebook users are used to them. If they can add value and interest them in comming over to the new Facebook page - you win.

#3 Watch Coca-Cola: While brands like Jet Blue and Ford have mastered Twitter, Coca-Cola has mastered Facebook. Watch how they improve their brand page with the new features. They'll give you a good idea where you should take your page and what you should be doing to grow its following.

#4 Use Video: You can't use video with Twitter (Outside of posting a link to it). Use Facebook as a new portal for videos. Nielsen’s recent report on social networks noted that Facebook users spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on the site per-month; the highest average time per-person amongst the 75 most popular brands online. Utilize the time they are engaging with the site to get branded content in front of them.

#5 Get your employees involved in word-of-mouth marketing of the page: Before you start promoting the page, make sure you have your employees as fans. Encourage them to dive into the conversations and add to the thriving community.

Read the story.

10 Features That Will Make Twitter Better

2009-03-03T14:03:00.008-06:00

Twitter’s popularity has skyrocketed in the recent months. Usage statistics states that most people who use Twitter interact with the application via the web rather than a third-party client such as TweetDeck or twitterfeed.

Twitter’s web interface is simple and intuitive but lacks a few features that can make it much better. In this article, you’ll read about 10 excellent user interface features that can enhance the Twitter web experience.

1. Enable grouping of friends and followers

Figure 1 shows tabs that you can use to quickly see tweets in a particular group.

Twitter’s increasing popularity has gotten many people on board and using the web application. With the growing number of active users comes the need for following more people.

The ability to create groups (or categories) of Twitter users that you follow can reduce the noise in your Twitter feed and can help you immediately see updates from particular groups of users.

For example, having a group for "co-workers" or "local tweeters" can help you quickly see what your co-workers are saying or find up-to-the-minute information on local events such as traffic accidents.

2. Auto Complete in Tweets

Figure 2 shows an auto complete dialog box appears when you type the @ symbol.

Auto complete is an interaction design pattern that involves displaying a list of suggestions as the user types in text. Auto complete can speed up the process of sending a tweet directed to a particular user using the @username format.

It will also help in times where you’re having trouble spelling someone’s username.

Another application of the auto complete feature is for suggesting #hashtags (keywords associated with a tweet) to make keyword-tagging of tweets easier.

3. Text links in tweets

With a 140 character limit, it’s often difficult to have links in a tweet without robbing yourself out of precious characters. By allowing users to tweet hyperlinked text, not only will it give them a little bit more room for including additional characters, but will also make Twitter feeds look cleaner.

4. Tweets-threading

Twitter is a great source of information and is a wonderful forum for discussing various topics. Unfortunately, the current user interface doesn’t allow you to easily view a conversation between two or more people.

Figure 3 show how threaded comments could look.

Coupled with the "reply to" feature in the current user interface, threaded tweets can give users the chance to participate in (or follow along with) conversations taking place in several Twitter feeds.

Threaded tweets can also serve as a means for people to find other Twitter users that are interested in similar subjects of conversation.

5. Allow Tweets directed to a group of people ("group tweet")

Figure 4 shows a possible syntax for tweets directed to a group of users using a double @ synax.

With companies and communities joining in on the fun, the ability to tweet to a group of Twitter users offers a convenient way of specifically targeting a set of people. For example, if you wanted to tweet to your co-workers, the syntax could be:

@@friends I'll be a little late for our lunch date, start ordering without me.

The double @ serves to differentiate a tweet directed to a single user from one that’s directed to a group of users.

6. Display meta data through hover tooltips

A tooltip is an effective graphical user interface element that allows users to view more information when they hover or click on a text or object of interest without having to leave the current web page. They enable information-gathering with fewer clicks and fewer pages to visit.

One way tooltips can be helpful is in seeing the bio information of a Twitter user when you hover over their username on your Twitter feed. If you see a username mentioned in an interesting Twitter update, simply hover over the name to see more information about the user that was mentioned.

7. Use the sidebar more effectively to display information

Figure 5 shows a "Recent @Replies" and "Popular #hashtags" section on the side bar.

Twitter can utilize the right sidebar more effectively by showing relevant information and statistics. For example, a "Most Recent Replies" section or a "Most Used #hashtags" section can be very helpful in showcasing the latest activities and the hottest topics.

8. Add a page that displays tweets mentioning your username

Twitter users (me included) like seeing their names mentioned. Currently, only @replies (tweets that begin with @username) can be seen in the @Replies page. A nice optional feature would be to have a page that lists tweets where your username is mentioned or where a particular tweet of yours is re-tweeted (example: "RT @username").

A less self-centered benefit for this feature is the opportunity to find people who are interested in what you have to say, enough that they update their own Twitter feed with a tweet of yours, or to see what types of your tweets are popular amongst people who follow you.

9. Highlight specific users, deemphasize others in feed

Figure 6 shows the first tweet as being highlighted, and the second tweet being deemphasized. The third tweet is how tweets normally look like in the current interface.

Users who follow many people run into the trouble of Twitter feed overload where there’s just too much going on and too many tweets to read. The ability to mark favorite Twitter users, as well as deemphasize users that you don’t care much about (but still want to follow for some reason), can give users better visual queues on what to pay attention to first when perusing one’s Twitter feed.

10. Add a Built-in URL shortener

With Twitter’s current user interface, hyperlinks are counted towards your 140 character count limit even if it gets reduced in length by a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.com after you hit the "Update" button.

One way to allow users to enter more text - without having to go to another website just to shorten URL’s - is to have a built-in URL-shortening feature. This would not only save user’s some time, but also eliminates the need to rely on other websites to perform an action that should really be handled within the system.

Read the story here.

Flirting 2.0

2009-02-26T16:31:00.025-06:00

As technology advances, we have found ourselves to adapt our flirting accordingly to our online lives. I remember when Facebook enabled poking and it was the next big thing. I would poke people for the hell of it not thinking it was "flirting." Luckily, The Frisky has come to the rescue and has compiled the steps to flirting online successfully. I've also included a hilarious video of a Facebook parody of ehamony.com. Now go on and get your mac on!

High Life's One-Second Spots Yield 8.6% Sales Boost After Super Bowl

2009-02-23T14:00:00.002-06:00

Miller High Life's one-second Super Bowl ads that weren't created a sales bump that definitely was.

Sales of High Life popped 8.6% during the week after the Super Bowl vs. the same period a year earlier, and they were up nearly 5% during the week before the game, according to ACNielsen.

The contrast between those numbers and the generally incremental gains the brand has been posting in recent months makes it clear that the hubbub surrounding the brewer's one-second Super Bowl ads drove the surge. Not bad, considering the ads didn't even run in many large markets -- including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles -- because NBC directed its owned and operated stations not to run them.
"One of the big things for us [in making the ads] was that we thought we could sell more beer," said High Life Brand Manager Kevin Oglesby. "We definitely sold more beer."

Miller announced plans to air the ads -- and placed a bunch of them online -- on Jan. 20. The spots' inherent critique of spending so lavishly on advertising in a recession -- "Paying $3 million for a 30-second commercial makes as much sense as putting sauerkraut on a donut," a promotional website said -- drew national notice, including coverage in USA Today and other major media outlets.

Not a jab?
Many observers naturally assumed that barb was aimed at Miller's traditional foil, Anheuser-Busch, which boasted 4 minutes and 30 seconds of ad time during the game. But Miller executives insist the ads were merely an attempt to broadcast the brand's value-oriented sensibility and not a shot at A-B or anyone else.

NBC, however, wasn't buying it. The Super Bowl network apparently viewed the ads as disparaging to advertisers willing to pay up for the game during a year when fewer were and directed its owned and operated affiliates not to run the commercials, which were set to run via spot buys all over the country. (A-B is the official malt-beverage sponsor of the Super Bowl broadcast and, as such, is the only beer advertiser allowed to make national buys during the game.)

As a result, millions of fans in major markets missed seeing the ads they'd read about beforehand. But that development doesn't seem to have hurt sales, considering the 8.6% gain in the week following the Super Bowl was among the highest the brand has registered in two years, according to Nielsen.

The one-second ad still managed to run in more than 100 markets nationwide. Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad featured the populist beer-truck driver played by actor Windell Middlebrooks quickly shouting the words "High Life."

Mr. Middlebrooks' character first appeared in 2007 spots created by High Life's former agency, Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. In those, he was seen confiscating the brand from French bistros and gourmet grocers. Crispin lost the account when it resigned the Miller business later that year, but Saatchi kept Mr. Middlebrooks and evolved the character further. In one recent spot, he barges into a ballpark luxury suite, demands to know what the score is and confiscates the beer after none of the clueless suits in the suite can tell him.

High Life sales, which fell four straight years until the introduction of the campaign, have been generally stronger since. "Clearly the campaign is a cornerstone in this turnaround," Mr. Oglesby said. "Our positioning rings even more true right now in consumers' minds."

Read the story here.

One Olympic Swimmer's Mistake is One Company's Opportunity

2009-02-23T01:05:00.014-06:00

A local hemp store in Calgary, Alberta located in Canada called Grass Roots plastered their city with these stickers. As you can see, Grass Roots is clearly taking advantage to promote their company during Michael Phelp's marijuana controversy. I personally think it's quite ingenious, current and relevant, even though some could see this as taboo.

Seven Lies We Tell Ourselves About Facebook

2009-02-21T16:42:00.005-06:00

Facebook has exploded and you're out of the loop if you don't know what it is. I have friends who check it multiple times a day and it's their only outlet to keep track of what other friends are up to. Call it stalker net, an outlet to reach your target audience or just an online version of high school, but no one can deny that it's an integral part of our lives. According to Newsweek, here are seven lies that we tell ourselves about Facebook.

1. I Only Friend People I Really Know: Stop pretending you have standards; you will friend anyone. You would accept Bernie Madoff if he asked. You want your friend count to be sky-high. That's why I accept all sorts of people I haven't seen in 20 years and couldn't pick out of a line-up. I refuse to have one less friend than my arch nemesis from college. I will not tolerate a lower count than my annoying colleague who sucks her teeth in meetings whenever I say anything. Admit it, you're no better than I am—how many of your "friends" would you invite to your house?

2. Facebook Made Me Do It: Facebook didn't make you tell all 1,384 of your friends that you once had chlamydia. Facebook didn't hold your hand onto the mouse and force you to type: "Josh is in favor of slapping geese and women," as one of your "25 random things" and it certainly didn't waterboard you into asking everyone what their slave name is. Psychiatrists call this "externalizing blame." It's a way to lay-off shame and self-loathing onto somebody (or something) else so you can feel better about yourself. I once wrote, "Raina is feeling like the cat's meow," and hated Facebook for days because of it. I know now that it was nobody else's fault but my own.

3. Wall-to-Wall Flirting Isn't Cheating: Just because it's called "social networking" with "friends" doesn't make hard-core online flirting OK. Do not try and tell me that you were surprised when your boyfriend left you after he read your pornographic wall-to-wall with his cousin. Also: stop sending your assistant cute virtual gifts. Virtual gifting counts. In fact, it's probably not appropriate for you to be "friending" her or the cute summer intern in the first place. Same thing goes for wall-to-wall stalking the love of your 7th grade life. Online harassment is just as bad as the bricks and mortar kind.

4. I Use Facebook to Keep in Touch With People: No, the truth is you're nosy. Admit it. You scour the profiles of other people for the same reason I do. You want to know their business. Facebook isn't addictive—your desire to know what other people are up to is addictive. The over-sharing thrills you. I know I'm hooked. Don't you hunt through your friends' walls looking for any scrap of information that will produce that warm tingly schadenfreude feeling?

Facebook is our own personal reality show and our friends are the stars. What else besides "American Idol" or "Project Runway" allows you to be so judgmental while wearing pajamas? If people stopped revealing ridiculous stuff about themselves in their status updates, "Rock of Love" would be your "guilty pleasure" instead. You know you're dying to discover your college roommate lives in a trailer in his mom's backyard. I literally cried from joy when I saw that an ex-boyfriend was sporting a comb-over.

5. I'm Soooo Over Facebook: Come on. You love Facebook for exactly the reasons you pretend to hate it ... it's the Big Thing. And we're not falling for that ironic distancing pose you've been adopting lately. We know you spend hours looking for former girlfriends or that guy who you loved from freshman psych but didn't have the courage to talk to. I tried to act all Margaret Meadish when I first joined Facebook ("It's a classic example of mass hysteria inspired by our collective need to be famous. Blah, blah, blah.") But everybody knew I wasn't on there doing social anthropology. I was on there because I wanted to snicker at that girl I went to elementary school with who reports every single one of the eight pomegranate martinis she drinks every night.

6. And I am Soooo Not Competitive: We don't just want more friends than everybody else; we also want the highest score in Word Twist and the most virtual Easter Eggs. I recently spent nearly 24 hours playing Scramble on Facebook until I had a higher score than my friend Dough Dough. Why? Because I knew Facebook would send him a note that said; "Raina has beaten your personal high score on Scramble." When he commented on his complete and total defeat, I just said; "I didn't know Facebook would tell you that. OMG! LOL!" We love Facebook because it allows you to gloat to your heart's content and hide that self-satisfied smirk on your face behind the wall of the Internet. By the way, if you have a Scramble score higher than 147, don't even think about friending me.

7. Facebook is My Friend: No, it's a business (albeit one that has yet to make money). Everyone knows casinos hide the exits and pump oxygen into the air to keep you gambling and get all your money. Facebook is doing the same thing but with avatars and Food Flings. They want to trap you behind their dotcom walls so they can attract advertisers. Think about it. If Facebook really loved you, they wouldn't run those "5 Friends HATE you!" banners on the top of Scramble. And have you ever had a friend try to take ownership of all the posts and baby pictures you sent them for who knows what reason? Nor has a "friend" ever taunted me with ads that implied Obama owed me $12,000 in personal-stimulus money.

'Breathtaking' Is One Word for Purported Arnell Pepsi Doc

2009-02-12T11:39:00.002-06:00

Over the past 24 hours, adland has been abuzz about "Breathtaking," a 27-page document purported to be the thinking behind Arnell Group's recent revamping of Pepsi-Cola's logo. Littered as it is with marketing jargon, images of yin-yangs, mobius strips and Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, you'll maybe wonder whether Michael Phelps wasn't the only one hitting that bong.

"Breathtaking" theorizes consumers will feel a gravitational pull elicited by the new logo, one that will lead consumers to fill its shopping carts with Pepsi. At its most extreme, the presentation compares the reimagined Pepsi globe logo to the Earth's magnetic fields and the sun's radiation. "Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity," it muses.

Um, ok.

Some have suggested the document an internet hoax, or even a viral-marketing campaign from Arnell Group, the Omnicom Group agency that's led by Peter Arnell, the design guru who has had his hands all over brands from Chrysler to Home Depot and, recently, Tropicana.

But there is no shortage of ego for Mr. Arnell. Consider this is the same person who just last month compared a 3-D Super Bowl spot created by his agency to as historic a moment as Thomas Edison's invention of motion pictures. Of course, then there's this:

"When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it," Mr. Arnell said earlier to Ad Age. "There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points ... and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing."

So what does such a "breathtaking" redesign cost, anyway? Ad Age earlier reported that experts estimate the cost for a top firm to work five months at north of $1 million. But that's just the beginning. The real cost, said an expert, is in removing the old logo everywhere it appears and putting new material up. When you add up all the trucks, vending machines, stadium signage, point-of-sale materials and more around the world, it could easily tally several hundred million dollars, the expert said.

Merely months old, Pepsi's new logo is no stranger to ridicule. It has already taken knocks for it's striking resemblance to President Barack Obama's campaign logo. Parent PepsiCo, meanwhile, is standing by its agency. Nicole Bradley, a spokeswoman for the beverage giant, declined to comment on the authenticity of the documents or on the online ridicule they've inspired. But she did voice continued support for Arnell Group's creation.

"We're very happy with the look of the logo," she said in a statement. "The new design and our packaging have a clean, contemporary look that has been very well received by our consumers."

Mr. Arnell didn't immediately respond to calls for comment.

The marketing world is, of course, more than used to attempts to associate things like sugary water to higher concepts. Some say this goes too far, but perhaps it had to.

"It goes way beyond reasonable. ... It's preposterous and extreme, and kinda layered with bullshit," said Charles Rosen, founding partner of New York ad agency Amalgamated. "But I understand the reason they went as far as they did with it.

"If you're talking to a company like Pepsi about the redo of their logo, which is one of the most powerful icons in America, I can only imagine the layers of bureaucracy that you'd have to get through to sell in a new logo," Mr. Rosen said. "Getting an ad through a company like Pepsi is next to impossible, this was probably a 100 times that. ... Anyone who has ever spent any time in the halls of Pepsi would sympathize with Peter."

Read the 27 page .pdf here.
Read the story here.

The Snuggie Threatens To Take Over The World One Cold Arm At A Time

2009-01-29T19:29:00.009-06:00

We have another classic case of something so absurd that there's no other word to describe it, but deliciously fantastic. I'm sure you all have seen the late night hit infomercial plenty of times. The Snuggie, described as a handy solution freeing your arms from the evils of the armless slots of a blanket is basically an oversized robe worn backwards. Snuggies went on sale in August, began TV advertising in October and started shipping to retailers in December. Already, 4 million have been sold.

So why is it such a hit? I think it's because the infomercials are so corny you can't help but love them. That along with their attractive pricing point (two for $19.95, plus free book light online and on TV, about $14.99 for one in stores) it makes it hard to resist, plus, what college kid wouldn't love to brag and sport his Snuggie around campus during this Texas cold front. He would be the big man on campus with all the girls fawning over him and thanks to the Snuggie he can now easily hug them all.

Indeed, Snuggies seem to be everywhere. See them on Facebook — nearly 250 groups, pro and con; one fan club lists 5,999 members. Watch them on YouTube — nearly 300 parody videos posted, including one titled "The Cult of the Snuggie," with 146,000 views as of Tuesday.

There are also snarky Snuggie-love sites on the Internet, such as SnuggieSightings.com, where fans post photos, videos and "news." Did you know that Snuggie drinking games are sweeping colleges? Students take a swig every time a Snuggie ad airs after midnight. How brilliant and ingenious is that, it makes me miss college.

As a disclaimer, I will not judge you if you are part of the 4 million who bought one. Actually, my arms are freezing as I type this entry and I know the perfect solution to my problem!

10 Tools to Make Your Blog Smarter, Faster, Better

2009-01-29T17:24:00.004-06:00

Blog From Firefox
ScribeFire is an add-on for Firefox that lets you seamlessly blog from any page you happen to be on. Easily drag and drop images from a web page into ScribeFire to republish; saves time switching to an external image editor and FTP client.

Blog From Your Desktop
Ecto is a full-featured blogging desktop client for both Mac and Windows. It makes posting to multiple blogs incredibly easy. It's compatible with Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Drupal, and more. A great way to compose blog posts while offline for easy upload later. Ecto also integrates with NetNewsWire so you can easily create a draft post from an item in your newsreader.

Easily Convert Text to HTML
Markdown is a text-to-html conversion tool that works similarly to TextExpander and Texter (and can be used in conjunction with these tools). It allows you to write more naturally and later convert your text to properly-formatted HTML. You can even use Markdown as a script within BBEdit or Textwrangler (Mac) to easily convert text to HTML, and Markdown filters are also available in the compose window of Wordpress and Movable Type.

Quickly Copy Web Links as HTML
CoLT adds two menu items to the browser's context menu when you right click a hyperlink. Right click a hyperlink on a Web page, and the menu adds "Copy Link Text and Location As" to the menu enabling users to copy the text and its link in either HTML, plain text, BB Code, FuseTalk, or Wikipedia formats. Options can also be customized.

Automagically Create Roundup Posts
Lifehacker created this roundup maker to be used in conjunction with CoLT. Simply enter link and text from CoLT and add a description on the same line for each entry, then click "Generate Roundup," and you have a perfectly HTML-generated post.

Resize Images on the Fly
Photoshop, well CS3, too expensive? Gimp too complicated? If all you really need to do is resize and rotate your images, then ResizR is the tool for you. Browse. Upload. Convert.

Share Images Effortlessly
Using Skitch is super easy for quickly manipulating screenshots and found images to publish them elsewhere without resorting to using multiple applications. It also offers features like resizing and annotating.

Turn del.icio.us Bookmarks Into Daily Posts
Sign in to your del.icio.us account and select settings. In the section titled "Blogging," select "Blog Posting." Click, "Add a new job posting blog." Give it a "job name," like "Daily Link Blog," and then add your credentials for your del.icio.us account and your blog. Then set a time for your saved del.icio.us links to post to your blog every day.

Submit Your Posts to 20 Social Sites, All at Once
Onlywire is a tool that lets you easily submit any of your posts to about 20 social bookmarking sites for easy "social promotion." The plus, you can submit to all the sites simultaneously, which makes Onlywire different from other blog post sharing tools.

Add Super Search to Your Blog
Lijit is a tool that allows you to put a search widget on your blog that will search an aggregate of your created content from your blogs, Flickr, digg, del.icio.us, etc. It also gives you some nice result statistics about what your users are searching for.

Read the story here.

Facebook Now Nearly Twice The Size Of MySpace Worldwide

2009-01-28T01:36:00.028-06:00

In November 2008, Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.

Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic - Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size.

Facebook, still a private company, is the world’s default social network. MySpace is still the king in the U.S., but trends suggest that 2009 is its last year on top. By January 2010, at current relative growth rates, Facebook will overtake MySpace as the largest U.S. social network as well.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

2009-01-27T03:20:00.005-06:00

Pictured above is Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama) took some time out to offer 10 insightful tips to increase followers to your account.

Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
Start a contest. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.

Miller High Life Will Have 1-Second Super Bowl Ad

2009-01-26T18:15:00.010-06:00

If Anheuser-Busch parent InBev is looking to save money, rival MillerCoors has a suggestion: Skip the Super Bowl. Miller High Life's series of one-second ads mocks A-B for owning the big game.

The brewer's Miller High Life brand is using a series of one-second ads airing during the pre-game festivities on 25 local NBC stations to mock A-B for owning the big game.

"Miller High Life is all about high quality and great value, so it wouldn't make sense for this brand to pay $3 million for a 30-second ad," High Life Senior Brand Manager Kevin Oglesby said in a statement. "Just like our consumers, High Life strives to make smart choices. One second should be plenty of time to remind viewers that Miller High Life is common sense in a bottle."

Or, as the intro on Miller's website featuring the spots puts it: "Paying $3 million for a 30-second commercial makes as much sense as putting sauerkraut on a donut. Actually, even that makes more sense."

High Life still lagging
That not-at-all veiled barb at A-B, which boasts four minutes and 30 seconds of ad time during a game that commands about $3 million per 30-second spot (although A-B pays less than that due to its long-term deal), comes at a time when consumers are trading down from pricier beers such as Heineken and Corona to cheaper ones such as Busch and Keystone.

High Life, which is priced below "premium" beers such as Budweiser and Miller Lite but above the sub-premiums, has yet to fully benefit from that trend. Its sales as of late have lagged many of its bottom-shelf colleagues.

The spots from High Life agency of record Saatchi & Saatchi, available on 1SecondAd.com, feature the brand's delivery-driver mascot, played by actor Windell Middlebrooks, making brief one-second exclamations, such as "bean dip" and "Miller Time." Some have an outtake feel, showing him getting makeup or asking for help with his lines.

Read the story here.

Best URL Shortening Services

2009-01-22T12:03:00.009-06:00

With the expanding space of social media tools, websites and the Internet, URLs can become a mouthful with an array of odd numerical and letter combinations. To the rescue we have URL shortening services, which were initially popular because web addresses started to get long and links would break when sent in an email. However, as microblogging services like Twitter have become popular, an increasing number of services and applications, including tracking & metrics, have been added to the basic URL shortening features. There are a few dozen services out there, of course, but I narrowed it down and picked the top three that I liked.

Zi.ma offers bulk URL shortening, customizable URLs and tracking. Also, registration is not required to view statistics of Zi.ma links.

Cligs also offers tracking, which are real time and very detailed, however unlike Zi.ma you have to register to utilize those tools. They also offer geotarget URLs based on the country of visitor.

Tiny URL is utilized by Twitter and the links you create never expire. You can customize your URL, however they don't offer tracking. They also offer a toolbar button that can be integrated into your browser. It was created by Kevin Gilbertson who launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

40 of the Best Brands on Twitter

2009-01-21T12:18:00.009-06:00

We all know brands are using Twitter — whether or not you want them around. Some of them don’t quite get the medium and just tweet self-serving links or marketing speak, but you won’t find any of those brands on this list. Mashable has handpicked 40 of the best brands experimenting with the micro-blogging platform, and asked them a few short questions about how they’re using Twitter.

If some of their responses seem short, well that’s because they are. They asked each brand correspondent to answer their queries in 140 characters or less. Most of them got the point, a few rambled on a bit too long, and only asked if “u” was acceptable in lieu of “you.” All in all, they have found some amazing people, doing some pretty powerful things at big companies, and all via Twitter.

Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quite like Twitter.

In no order, the list follows:

Chevrolet
Ford
General Motors
Honda
Jet Blue
Southwest Airlines
Luxor Las Vegas
Marriott International Hotels and Resorts
Carnival Cruise Lines
Hertz
Chicago Bulls
Detroit Pistons
Portland Trail Blazers
San Diego Chargers
92Y
The Travel Channel
Comcast
Marvel Entertainment
DIRECTV
PopCap
TV Guide
Wachovia
H&R Block
Intuit
Best Buy
The Home Depot
American Apparel
Rubbermaid
Whole Foods
Zappos.com
Starbucks
Burger King
Dunkin’ Donuts
Popeyes Chicken
Tasti D-Lite
Dell
EMC
Kodak
Hoovers
Red Cross

Read the story here.

Redesign Up And Running

2009-01-21T03:16:00.009-06:00

It took about half my day, but I'm finally done with the redesign of my blog. I forgot how long creating images and programming took. I wanted to keep it simple with a visual interest, but still having friendly usability as the main focus. I think I accomplished that. As for the header, it was something quick and dirty and will probably be redone after I figure out what image/typography I want to represent this blog.

Facebook Numbers During Inauguration

2009-01-20T13:15:00.007-06:00

Facebook and CNN have released numbers for their live streaming partnership today, which allowed Facebook users to provide live commentary on the CNN feed.

The stats released, as of noon ET:

There were 200,000+ status updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
at that time, 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
Obama’s Facebook Fan Page has more than 4 million fans and in excess of 500,000 wall posts

As of 11.45am, CNN:

had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6am
had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams.

Afternoon Numbers: Facebook sent fresh numbers for the period up until 1.15pm ET. These totals include the morning figures:

600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
“Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

Time To Go Skiing

2009-01-18T14:44:00.004-06:00

The team at Mammoth Mountain have some creative people doing their billboard ads. It sparked my interest enough to share it. Enjoy.

Hunger Ate My Friendships

2009-01-10T21:39:00.014-06:00

After my entry about what the marketing team at Burger King was doing on Facebook I decided to give it a go and see how it actually worked.
The landing is a nifty interactive page where you can pick the friends you want to sacrifice and they'll animate their profile picture going up in flames. The text that follows the burning is, "You liked xxx. You love the WHOPPER."
As you can see, the "friends" that you decide to sacrifice will show up on your newsfeed and those unfortunate enough to be sacrificed will also receive a message saying they have gone to the way of flames. However, unlike how the marketing team at BK intended, to un-friend people you hardly talked to, I actually sacrificed close friends because I thought that would be funnier since they would receive a message saying I did so. Of course I only did this for research and will re-friend them right away...maybe.
After you complete all 10 sacrifices, you will land on a submission page where they ask for some personal information. After you fill in the goods, they state you'll receive a coupon for a free WHOPPER in the mail in about 2-4 weeks time.
I think this was a success for BK overall. It was fun and light hearted unlike the controversy they had with their WHOPPER Virgins campaign. I'll post up the coupon once I get it in the mail alongside a picture of me enjoying my free WHOOPER. Happy eating.

How To Ace The Perfect Interview

2009-01-10T17:28:00.002-06:00

13 Skills of the PR Pro of the Future

2009-01-10T13:07:00.008-06:00

When Ron Culp started out in PR, the profession had a simple 2-prong focus–media relations and internal communications, mostly the former. Although both remain important, the PR mind today should be divided into at least 10 sectors as depicted here by John Bell, head of the 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR.

John says the next generation of PR pros will need to be strong in the following 13 skills, and he provides additional insights on six of the points through expanded “how to” posts. Just click on the underlined skills. Check back with his blog or here since he intends to eventually expand on all 13.

13 Skills of the PR Pro of the Future

Create integrated marketing and communications strategy
Deploy live ‘listening posts’ online and offline
Design and deploy an advanced search engine optimization program
Plan and run a new media relations program inclusive of head-of-the-tail and long tail “media”
Identify & engage with influencers online and offline
Manage communities
Integrate new technologies into their own lives
Model measurement and performance metrics including new “engagement” metrics
Run quick pilot programs and evaluate on-the-fly
Train staff and clients continuously
Participate in conversations, not just ‘messaging’
Create and execute content strategy including video programming (hifi and lowfi)
Use digital crisis management

Read the story here.

The Power Of An Upset PR Person

2009-01-09T21:56:00.006-06:00

It's the dream of every angry customer — sending a bill to the company that wasted your time. Well, it's finally happened.

Howard Schaffer, a PR professional by trade and the owner of Howard Schaffer Media Marketing, was having such an awful time with his phone company that he alerted the local media — who ran a column about the debacle. That happens all the time, but what makes this case interesting is that Howard was keeping a record of the time he spent dealing with the phone company (One Communications of Rochester, NY) as well as the expenses that he was racking up while the phone company apologized over and over, but didn't fix the problem.

“I’ve received nine apologies,” Schaffer, whose phone bill is usually around $500 a month, told the Times-Union. As time dragged on, he was forced to have employees use cellphones and to borrow a phone from his landlord. The phone company promised at least $2,000 in credits, but no phone service.

After the column ran and his problem was resolved — Howard tallied up the expenses and sent One Communications a bill. For $5,481.16. And the company agreed to pay it.

You can learn a few things from Mr. Shaffer. Follow his example by taking detailed notes of all the time and money you spend dealing with an issue. You might not be able to get a check for your expenses, (unless, perhaps, your story gets published in the newspaper like Mr. Shaffer's did) but it certainly can't hurt.

Read the story here.

Is Your Friendship Stronger Than A Free Whooper?

2009-01-09T11:56:00.007-06:00

Burger King has once again jumped into marketing on Facebook. They have created an application that allows users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free WHOPPER and those unfortunate to enough to be sacrificed will receive a message that their friendship was anything but stronger than a free burger.

Taking Klondike's "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" motif to the next level, Burger King invites Facebook users to sacrifice 10 of their friends on the social networking site for a coupon for a free sandwich:

"What would you do for a free WHOPPPER? Now is the time to put your fair-weather web friendships to the test. Install WHOPPER Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled WHOPPER when you sacrifice 10 of your friends."

The effort crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky came about after agency creative staffers confronted the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook.

"We thought there could be some fun there, removing some of these people who are friends [but] not necessarily] best friends," said Jeff Benjamin, executive interactive creative director at Crispin, and friend to 736 on Facebook. "It's asking the question of which love is bigger, your love for your friends or your love for the Whopper," he said.

The app also adds a box to user profile pages charting their progress toward the free burger with the line, "Who will be the next to go?"

The application is available on Facebook and at WhopperSacrifice.com.

Brand applications have a spotty record on Facebook, with few enjoying more than a temporary jolt in popularity before quickly fizzling. Some brands have begun rewarding consumers for installing their apps. One example is Kraft's current campaign that includes donations of meals to needy families when users get their friends to add the Kraft Facebook app.

"We always look at these social networks and think of what tool or thing we wish was here," Benjamin said. "A lot of times, brands force a feature or an application that I don't think people ever want. That's when you can waste some money."

Read the story here.

6 Social Media Tools To Track Brand Reputation

2009-01-08T00:22:00.006-06:00

By now, most PR pros know about blog monitoring tools and search engines and likely use them to understand some conversations in social media. There are a host of other ways besides a general blog search, however, to turn up some interesting data points and information about brand reputation, who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. Here are just a few tools worth a look.

Summize - Rapidly growing in popularity, the easiest way to describe Summize is as a search engine for Twitter. The simple fact of Twitter is that there are millions of conversations taking place every day and many involve mentions of brands. For a real time snapshot of brand discussions from individuals on social media, Twitter is the place to be and Summize has the best interface to help you track it.
AllTop - If you haven’t been watching the rapid growth of Alltop, you need to start. It is essentially an aggregation of blogs by various categories, but there are a few things that set Alltop apart. The first is that the simple interface means you can really skim headlines for many blogs in a particular category quite easily. The second is that you no longer have to rely on relatively useless Technorati Authority figures to find top tier blogs. Alltop doesn’t have all the answers, but to see a quick view of what top bloggers are talking about in a particular category, it’s a great place to start.
TinEye - Though still in beta mode, this site is getting lots of attention because of the pioneering way that they are focusing on the next evolution of image search. Put frankly, image search is notoriously bad because it seldom reads an actual image and only reads elements like the file title and description around the image. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like your brand logo, for example). Then the site goes to work, finding all instances of use for that particular image, giving you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the web.
BrandTags - A brilliantly simple site from Noah Brier, this is a game-like site that asks visitors to share the first word that comes into their minds when faced with a brand logo. The resulting words are then shown in a tag cloud format with the most common words appearing largest. It offers an interesting visual snapshot of what people think about your brand, though it is still somewhat limited to only larger brands. If your brand logo is not in there, you can always submit a note to Noah to ask to be included.
YackTrack - One of the big problems with keeping up with Social Media is that people can comment on content that you upload in so many different ways on so many different sites that it becomes nearly impossible to track and respond to all of it. YackTrack offers a useful tool where you can enter a URL and see a list of comments made on various sites about it (including the closed wall of Facebook). It’s a great way to track comments on a particular piece of content across multiple channels.
TimeTube - This mashup site offers a way of plotting all YouTube videos that match a particular keyword against a timeline to see when they occurred. If your brand inspires a lot of videos discussing it, this tool will give you a great overview of when these videos are typically posted and offers an engaging way to bring them together in a chronological format that few others can offer.

10 Items or Less, Brought To You Commercial Free

2009-01-06T22:31:00.017-06:00

Tonight was the premiere of season 3 of 10 Items or Less on TBS. I've never seen any of the other episodes, so I thought I would give it a try. The commercials for the premiere looked funny. The show is a partly scripted and partly improvised comedy series. The series is about Lehr, who is a less than successful businessman, who returns home to run Greens & Grains, the family-owned supermarket, upon the death of his father.

Tonight's episode revolved around a game of turkey bowling in the supermarket. As amazing and fun as that sounds, what really caught my attention was the blatant and absurd product placement throughout the episode, which was so ridiculous that you couldn't help but find funny. Oh, I forgot to mention that the premiere was "commercial free."

For the season premiere, Unilever is presenting the 30-minute sitcom commercial-free and hawking its Vaseline Man and Hellman’s Light products. Star and co-creator John Lehr, who plays grocery-store owner Leslie Pool, is seen extolling the virtues of both products during key moments of the show with a self-aware, over-the-top delivery reminiscent of clueless boss Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, on NBC’s The Office.

The common thread for all these real-life products is Unilever, the package-goods company that has partnered with Turner Entertainment’s sales and marketing group through the years on a series of commercial-busting branded-entertainment projects, including 10 Items or Less integrations and short-form series such as 2006’s Love Bites for Sunsilk hair products.

Since the premiere is also being presented commercial-free, Lehr appeared in a pair of network promos on TBS and TNT. In one ad, he’s seen with bottles of Hellmann’s and Vaseline Man strapped to his shoulders, exclaiming, “It’s such a relief to be able to do TV without commercials!”

Steps To Success

2009-01-03T12:03:00.004-06:00

You need to deeply desire the goal or resolution. Napoleon Hill, in his landmark book, Think and Grow Rich, had it right. "The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat." So, your first step in goal setting and achieving your dreams is that you've got to really, really want to achieve the goal.

Visualize yourself achieving the goal. Lee Iacocca said, "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." What will your achievement feel like? How will your life unfold differently as a result? If the goal is a thing, some gurus of goal setting recommend that you keep a picture of the item where you see and are reminded of it every day. If you can’t picture yourself achieving the goal, chances are – you won’t.

Make a plan for the path you need to follow to accomplish the goal. Create action steps to follow. Identify a critical path. The critical path defines the key accomplish-ments along the way, the most important steps that must happen for the goal to become a reality. Stephen Covey said, "All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind." He's right.

Commit to achieving the goal by writing down the goal. Lee Iacocca said, "The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen." I agree completely. Write down the plan, the action steps and the critical path. Somehow, writing down the goal, the plan and a timeline sets events in motion that may not have happened otherwise. In my own life, it is as if I am making a deeper commitment to goal accomplishment. I can’t fool myself later. The written objective really was the goal.

Establish times for checking your progress in your calendar system, whatever it is: a day planner, a PDA, a PDA phone or a hand written list. If you’re not making progress or feel stymied, don't let your optimism keep you from accomplishing your goals. No matter how positively you are thinking, you need to assess your lack of progress. Adopt a pessimist’s viewpoint; something will and probably is, going to go wrong. Take a look at all of the factors that are keeping you from accomplishing your goal and develop a plan to overcome them. Add these plan steps to your calendar system as part of your goal achievement plan.

Review your overall progress regularly. Make sure you are making progress. If you are not making progress, hire a coach, tap into the support of loved ones, analyze why the goal is not being met. Don’t allow the goal to just fade away. Figure out what you need to do to accomplish it. Check the prior five steps starting with an assessment of how deeply you actually want to achieve the goal.

This six step goal setting and achieving system seems simple, but it is the most powerful system you will ever find for achieving your goals and living your resolutions. You just need to do it. Best wishes and good luck.

2009 New Years Resolutions

2009-01-03T00:28:00.008-06:00

As each new year rings in comes the traditional new years resolutions we create for ourselves. For me, this year will be different than the rest because I'm not in college anymore. With that, new goals will be set as I have different objectives in life now, although some will remain inline with previous years.

Some Goals For 2009

Triple the amount of competitive races I participate in, where two have to be marathons
Join a tennis league and get back into the game
Read more pr/adv/marketing books
Get my personal website online
Dive deeper into social media and discover more ways it can be integrated into pr
Become my firm's social media champion
Create new relationships in top-tier publications
Connect and establish strong relationships with other pr professionals
Land my dream job in a new city, although staying in Dallas isn't bad at all

It'll be interesting to see how much I can accomplish by the year's end. For now, it shall be my bench mark and motivator.

Using Twitter As A Focus Group

2008-12-30T12:21:00.007-06:00

Lee Mikes ran a series of banner campaigns supporting new products being launched by one of his CPG clients. While the client was launching multiple products, not all of them were being promoted through advertising.

Shortly after launch of the campaign for his client, he began monitoring Twitter for buzz on the products and online campaign. Almost immediately, the tweets started raving about one of the new products that they didn't promote.

Armed with this information, they met with the client and got the green light to run advertising for this new product. The Twitter research worked: The campaign for the new product generated a click-through rate 55% higher than the rest of the campaign. The number of people actually tweeting about the new product was small -- maybe a few hundred. But the number of additional people who followed the new banners was an order of magnitude more.

Twitter has a been a great tool for them to monitor buzz about products or campaigns for their clients. Simply searching a few key terms will expose you to a wealth of tweets that can quickly let you know what the public is thinking. Not scientific, but very helpful.

It's an example of how, more broadly, social networking has taken conversations that previously happened around water coolers and put them online, making them searchable by marketers. What marketers do with that information is up to them.

Read the story here.

Volkswagon Turns To Art For Inspiration

2008-12-23T12:01:00.005-06:00

German agency DDB looked to the art world, specifically to acclaimed surrealists Magritte and Dali, as the inspiration for the new Volkswagen Polo Blue Motion ads.

The campaign slogan: "Absurdly low consumption."

Actions That Get You Noticed

2008-12-22T22:30:00.003-06:00

I've been working on my resume lately and wanted to share a list of action verbs that make your skills shine, now you too can sparkle.

A
accelerated, acclimated, accompanied, accomplished, achieved, acquired, acted, activated, actuated, adapted, added, addressed, adhered, adjusted, administered, admitted, adopted, advanced, advertised, advised, advocated, aided, aired, affected, allocated, altered, amended, amplified, analyzed, answered, anticipated, appointed, appraised, approached, approved, arbitrated, arranged, ascertained, asked, assembled, assigned, assumed, assessed, assisted, attained, attracted, audited, augmented, authored, authorized, automated, awarded, avail

B
balanced, bargained, borrowed, bought, broadened, budgeted, built

C
calculated, canvassed, capitalized, captured, carried, out, cast, cataloged, centralized, challenged, chaired, changed, channeled, charted, checked, chose, circulated, clarified, classified, cleared, closed, co-authored, cold, called, collaborated, collected, combined, commissioned, committed, communicated, compared, compiled, complied, completed, composed, computed, conceived, conceptualized, concluded, condensed, conducted, conferred, consolidated, constructed, consulted, contracted, contrasted, contributed, contrived, controlled, converted, convinced, coordinated, corrected, corresponded, counseled, counted, created, critiqued, cultivated

D
debugged, decided, decentralized, decreased, deferred, defined, delegated, delivered, demonstrated, depreciated, described, designated, designed, determined, developed, devised, devoted, diagrammed, directed, disclosed, discounted, discovered, dispatched, displayed, dissembled, distinguished, distributed, diversified, divested, documented, doubled, drafted

E
earned, eased, edited, effected, elected, eliminated, employed, enabled, encouraged, endorsed, enforced, engaged, engineered, enhanced, enlarged, enriched, entered, entertained, established, estimated, evaluated, examined, exceeded, exchanged, executed, exempted, exercised, expanded, expedited, explained, exposed, extended, extracted, extrapolated

F
facilitated, familiarized, fashioned, fielded, figured, financed, fit, focused, forecasted, formalized, formed, formulated, fortified, found, founded, framed, fulfilled, functioned, furnished,

G
gained, gathered, gauged, gave, generated, governed, graded, granted, greeted, grouped, guided

H
handled, headed, hired, hosted

I
identified, illustrated, illuminated, implemented, improved, improvised, inaugurated, indoctrinated, increased, incurred, induced, influenced, informed, initiated, innovated, inquired, inspected, inspired, installed, instigated, instilled, instituted, instructed, insured, interfaced, interpreted, interviewed, introduced, invented, inventoried, invested, investigated, invited, involved, isolated, issued

J
joined, judged,

L
launched, lectured, led, lightened, liquidated, litigated, lobbied, localized, located

M
maintained, managed, mapped, marketed, maximized, measured, mediated, merchandised, merged, met, minimized, modeled, moderated, modernized, modified, monitored, motivated, moved, multiplied

N
named, narrated, negotiated, noticed, nurtured

O
observed, obtained, offered, offset, opened, operated, orchestrated, ordered, organized, oriented, originated, overhauled, oversaw

P
paid, participated, passed, patterned, penalized, perceived, performed, permitted, persuaded, phased, out, pinpointed, pioneered, placed, planned, polled, prepared, presented, preserved, presided, prevented, priced, printed, prioritized, probed, processed, procured, produced, profiled, programmed, projected, promoted, prompted, proposed, proved, provided, publicized, published, purchased, pursued

Q
quantified, quoted

R
raised, ranked, rated, reacted, read, received, recommended, reconciled, recorded, recovered, recruited, rectified, redesigned, reduced, referred, refined, regained, regulated, rehabilitated, reinforced, reinstated, rejected, related, remedied, remodeled, renegotiated, reorganized, replaced, repaired, reported, represented, requested, researched, resolved, responded, restored, restructured, resulted, retained, retrieved, revamped, revealed, reversed, reviewed, revised, revitalized, rewarded, routed

S
safeguarded, salvaged, saved, scheduled, screened, secured, segmented, selected, sent, separated, served, serviced, settled, shaped, shortened, showed, shrank, signed, simplified, sold, solved, spearheaded, specified, speculated, spoke, spread, stabilized, staffed, staged, standardized, steered, stimulated, strategized, streamlined, strengthened, stressed, structured, studied, submitted, substantiated, substituted, suggested, summarized, superseded, supervised, supplied, supported, surpassed, surveyed, synchronized, synthesized, systematized

T
tabulated, tailored, targeted, taught, terminated, tested, testified, tightened, took, traced, traded, trained, transacted, transferred, transformed, translated, transported, traveled, treated, tripled

U
uncovered, undertook, unified, united, updated, upgraded, used, utilized

V
validated, valued, verified, viewed, visited

W
weighed, welcomed, widened, witnessed, won, worked, wrote

Even Giants Must Fall

2008-12-18T22:28:00.001-06:00

The industry's largest holding company, Omnicom Group, is preparing a massive layoff of nearly 5% of its global work force of 70,000, according to executives close to the situation.

The executives would not confirm which divisions or agencies would be affected by the estimated 3,500 job loss, but it is believed that BBDO, the agency for ailing Chrysler, which lost its flagship U.S. brand Pepsi business this year, would particularly feel the ax. Earlier today, Ad Age reported that Omnicom media agency PHD was laying off 30 people and closing its Atlanta office.

The executives said not all Omnicom units will be touched. "Wherever adjustments had to be made, agencies that needed to make the adjustments made them," said an executive with knowledge of the situation. "That does not mean all companies made adjustments." And the current layoffs, to be concluded by year's end, may not be the end of it: Additional cuts could come in January across the holding company, executives said.

The depth of the layoffs is striking considering Omnicom already took measures to reduce its head count earlier this year. Just last month BBDO slashed 22% of its staff in Detroit as the office's embattled Chrysler client indicated it plans to reduce its marketing activity. Earlier this month, Ad Age reported that Chrysler, now in the midst of trying to win a government bridge loan to stay alive, is believed to owe the holding company some $80 million.

Omnicom, the parent company of agency brands such as DDB Worldwide, TBWA Worldwide and Goodby Silverstein & Partners, employed roughly 70,000 people worldwide by the end of 2007, up 6.1% from the end of 2006.

Omnicom Group in October posted $213 million in net income for the third quarter of 2008, up slightly from $202 million in the same period last year. But signs of trouble for the holding company were beginning to show in its third-quarter earnings statement: Its public-relations practice, which is made up of Fleishman Hillard, Ketchum and Porter Novelli, among others, showed negative growth for the quarter.

Read the article here.

The Twittering Gang at BusinessWeek

2008-12-16T10:21:00.009-06:00

If you haven't heard about Twitter lately you've been living under a rock. It's basically a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I must say it’s a new nifty tool to the arsenal of the PR person, especially if the media is Twittering. Now that BusinessWeek editors are on it we can easily build relationships by keeping up and interacting with their updates – that’s if you are vying for their attention. It helps with cutting the clutter and allows us to know what they’re interested in, which ultimately helps our job with pitching.

Now go on and follow them!

Adam Aston, Energy & Environment Editor, BusinessWeek, @adamanyc
Amy Feldman, Associate Editor for Personal Business, BusinessWeek, @amyfeldman
Arik Hesseldahl, Senior Technology Writer, BusinessWeek, @ahess247
Ben Levisohn, Staff Editor, Finance, BusinessWeek, @ben_levisohn
Burt Helm, Marketing Editor, BusinessWeek, @burthelm
Charles Dubow, Lifestyle Channel Editor, BusinessWeek.com, @charlesdubow
Chi-Chu Tschang, Bejing Correspondent, BusinessWeek, @tschang
David Sleight, Deputy Creative Director, BusinessWeek.com, @stuntbox
Doug MacMillan, Technology Writer, BusinessWeek.com, @dmac1
Francesca DiMeglio, Community Manager, Business Schools, BW.com, @francescaBW
Heather Green, Associate Editor & Technology Writer, BusinessWeek, @Heatherlgreen
Helen Walters, Innovation & Design Editor, BusinessWeek.com, @helenwalters
John A. Byrne, Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of BW.com, @johnabyrne
Jon Fine, Media Columnist, BusinessWeek, @jonfine
Lou Lavelle, Associate Editor, Business Schools, BusinessWeek, @louislavelle
Matt Vella, Staff Writer, Innovation & Design, BusinessWeek, @mattvella
Peter Carbonara, Senior Writer, Finance, BusinessWeek, @petercarbonara
Peter Coy, Economics Editor, BusinessWeek, @petercoy
Peter Elstrom, Assistant Managing Editor for technology, BusinessWeek, @pelstrom
Phil Mintz, Business Schools Editor, BusinessWeek.com, @pmintz
Rachael King, Technology Writer, BusinessWeek.com, @sfwriter
Rebecca Reisner, Debate Room editor, BusinessWeek.com, @rebeccareisner
Reena Jana, Innovation Editor, BusinessWeek, @rjmac
Rob Hof, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, BusinessWeek, @robhof
Roben Farzad, Senior Writer for finance, BusinessWeek, @robenfarzad
Sarah Lacy, Technology Columnist, BusinessWeek.com, @sarahcuda
Shirley Brady, Community Editor, BusinessWeek.com, @shirleybrady
Spencer Ante, Technology Editor, BusinessWeek, @spencerante
Stephen Baker, Senior Technology Writer, BusinessWeek, @stevebaker
Steve Hamm, Senior Technology Writer, BusinessWeek, @stevehamm31
Steve Wildstrom, Personal Technology Writer, BusinessWeek, @swildstrom
Suzanne Woolley, Senior Editor, Personal Business, BusinessWeek, @SuzWoolley

And from their Business Exchange, you can find:
Ron Casalotti, who oversees user participation on BX: @roncasalotti
Michelle Lockett, BX’s topic maven & co-tweeter: @michellelockett

Share Some Holiday Cheers With Xerox

2008-12-15T10:08:00.007-06:00

Xerox has taken it upon themselves to help spread the "thanks" to U.S. military personnel this holiday season by offering free postcards that you pick and personalize. Each postcard was designed by a child across the United States, and offer a child's eye view of the many faces of freedom. Simply choose the postcard of your choice, enter your message or pick one of the pre-written ones they have and hit send. Xerox will take all the cards, print and ship them out to the troops. It'll only take you a few seconds to do and I'm sure it'll mean a lot to the troops who receive them. I think Xerox got this right. It resonates with the spirit of the holidays and correlates back to the brand perfectly - way to go Xerox.

Send a card.

Drunk Emails Are A Thing Of The Past Thanks To Google

2008-12-08T20:39:00.008-06:00

I wanted to share something I stubbled upon that I thought was a bit funny, which surprisingly hasn't existed till now. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending emails you might later regret, but recently they launched a new Labs feature called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend - as that is the time you're most likely to need it, genius. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings.

Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't cause we know we all had them. Now to solve the problem of sending drunken text messages.

Batman Oscar Nomination Poster

2008-12-07T17:36:00.008-06:00

The creatives and marketing people working on the Batman film are pretty awesome.

The copy reads, "You wanna know how I get these scars?"

Pepsi Controversy With New Suicide-Themed Ads

2008-12-06T14:56:00.026-06:00

There's but one calorie in PepsiMax and, as we know, one is the loneliest number. So it only makes sense that a new flight of print ads from BBDO Dusseldorf show a cute, but sad little personification of a calorie committing suicide in a few ultraviolent ways, including a gunshot, a hanging, self-immolation and even slitting his little blue wrist with a razor blade.

Needless to say, message boards today have been popping with much anti-Pepsi sentiment, most of it centered on the claim that these kinds of ads are insensitive to the issue of suicide. Suicide ads have generally landed agencies and marketers in hot water. In 2007, General Motors got bogged down in a similar issue, when a Super Bowl ad depicting a robot considering suicide caused an uproar. Likewise, Volkswagen pulled an ad in which a man tried to jump off a roof.

Conversations are circulating that the posters look like a PR stunt to get the brand and its one-calorie theme mentioned on talk shows and blogs. It had better work out that way. BBDO’s position on Pepsi is increasingly shaky. It just lost the main Pepsi account in the U.S. to TBWA/Chiat/Day.

Note To Self, Never Hire A Hit Man VIA Text Message

2008-11-23T18:40:00.007-06:00

Oklahoma native and rebellious speller Tonia Mullins, in a spectacular act of self-incrimination, used text messages to contact a hit man to "take care" of her lover's wife. Mullins conspired with her beau, Army soldier Michael Andrew Crawford, to have the poor Mrs. Crawford killed and her insurance money used to buy Mullins and her beau a nice house. Thankfully, Mullins was far too stupid to actually hurt anybody, and the text messages are absolutely priceless.

The texts are written in a hybrid of English, texting shorthand, and whatever English-like language they speak in Oklahoma, so I can't 100% translate all of them. I can say that they are way less subtle than you'd expect from somebody trying to hire an assassin. This exchange I particularly don't understand:

Co-conspirator Robin Berry: "Well maybe I can het friend n trade something he owes me big favors anyway"
Tonia Mullins: "If I can do ne thang let me know. Robin I swear I will give the $ when it comes n ... that is n no way a problem ... as long as accident I."

Mullins had asked her friend, Robin Berry, to help her contact a hit man, and the two got no further than discussing price between themselves before the police were tipped off and the whole silly enterprise ended. An undercover agent with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation arrested Mullins and her co-conspirators easily, and the deliciously inept plotters plead guilty earlier this month.

Read the story here.

Social Media By The Numbers

2008-11-18T09:10:00.008-06:00

Here is a break down of some random facts I researched about different social media outlets. Some pretty interesting numbers.

Twitter

The top followed Twitter user is Barak Obama with 119,662 followers.
CNN Breaking News is the 4th most followed account on Twitter with 51,463 followers.
40% of Twitter traffic is in the United States
60% of Twitter traffic is Internationally
23.4% of Twitter traffic is from Japan
6.6% of Twitter traffic is from Spain
6% of Twitter traffic is from the UK
4.2% of Twitter traffic is from Brazil
4.2% of Twitter traffic is from Canada
3.6% of Twitter traffic is from France
3.6% of Twitter traffic is from Germany
3% of Twitter traffic is from Italy
3% of Twitter traffic is from The Netherlands
1.8% of Twitter traffic is from Taiwan
As of October 2008, Twitter claims to have over 3,200,000 accounts registered
Twitter was started in July 13, 2006
In 2007, Twitter experienced approximately 98% uptime, or about 3 full days of downtime

Facebook

Facebook currently has more than 120 million active users worldwide (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days)
Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world
Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world
More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities
Number 1 photo sharing application on the Web
More than 10 billion photos uploaded to the site
More than 30 million photos uploaded daily
More than 6 million active user groups on the site
More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs
Over 24,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
140 new applications added per day
More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform
Facebook has over 600 employees
The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000
According to Facebook, it has received more than $40 million in funding since it launched in 2004

Myspace

MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe
85% of MySpace users are 18 or older
1 in 4 Americans is on MySpace, in the UK it’s as common to have a MySpace as it is to own a dog
On average 300,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day
60,000 new videos being upload to MySpaceTV each day
More than 8 million artists and bands on MySpace Music Acts
MySpace was purchased in 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch creator of a media empire that includes 20th Century Fox and the Fox television stations
Google paid $900 million to be MySpace's search provider

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 30 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries
95% of LinkedIn members are college educated
37% are post graduates
24% have a portfolio value of $250k+
The average age of a LinkedIn professional is 41 years old
The household income is $110k
64% of LinkedIn professionals are male

Second Life

Second Life was launched June 23, 2003
At the beginning of September, 2008, just over 15 million accounts were registered
In January 2008, residents spent 28,274,505 hours "inworld", so on average about 38,000 residents were logged on at any particular moment
In 2006 former Governor of Virginia Mark Warner became the first politician to appear in a MMO when he gave a speech in Second Life
There are a total of 15,736,434 residents in Second Life
In October 2008, 127,417,424square meters of land was sold by residents

Flickr

As of November 2008, Flickr claims to host more than 3 billion images
Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver based company that launched Flickr in February 2004
In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr
Despite having only a 2 megapixel camera, the iPhone continues to be the most popular cameraphone used on Flickr

YouTube

YouTube user base is in age range of 18-55, evenly divided between males and females, and spanning all geographies
51% of users go to YouTube weekly or more often
52% of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues.
YouTube has 71 million unique users each month
YouTube is the 6th largest audience on the Internet
YouTube was the number one video site on the Internet as of January - with 67.5 million unique users in the U.S., according to Nielsen NetRatings
Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube
Of the 9.5 billion online videos watched in the U.S. in November last year, 2.9 billion of those were watched on YouTube, according to Comscore
In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for 1.65 billion in Google stock
In the first month on YouTube, 70% of videos get at least 20 views
In the first month on YouTube, 50% of videos get at least 100 views
In the first month on YouTube, fewer than 20% of videos get more than 500 views
In the first month on YouTube, fewer than 10% of videos get more than 1, 500 views
In the first month on YouTube, 3% of videos get more than 25, 000 views
In the first month on YouTube, around 1% of videos get more than 500, 000 views

Technorati

Since 2002, Over 70 million weblogs are tracked by Technorati.
76,000 blogs with Technorati Authroity of 50+
57% of U.S. bloggers are male
42% of U.S. bloggers are between the ages of 18-34
26% of U.S. bloggers are single
56% of U.S. bloggers have full-time jobs
74% of U.S. bloggers are college graduates
52% of U.S. blogs have advertising
73% of European bloggers are male
48% of European bloggers are between the ages of 18-34
31% of European bloggers are single
53% of European bloggers have full-time jobs
67% of European bloggers are college graduates
50% of European blogs have advertising
73% of Asian bloggers are male
73% of Asian bloggers are between the ages of 18-34
57% of Asian bloggers are single
45% of Asian bloggers have full-time jobs
69% of Asian bloggers are college graduates
60% of Asian blogs have advertising
More than 120k blogs are added to blogosphere each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.
Technorati has been tracking 3000-7000 spam blogs each day
On an average, Technorati tracks 1.4 million posts per day, that’s around 15 posts per second
Out of the top 100 sites, only 22 are tracked by Technorati
In terms of blog posts by language, Japanese is at the top spot with 37% followed closely by English at 36%

Cheers To Whiskey

2008-11-09T23:38:00.005-06:00

Last Thursday, I was invited to attend the Macallen whiskey tasting in downtown Dallas. Pictured above is the swag bag I got after the event. I RSVPed and invited along three fellow longhorns to indulge in a night of alcohol. Upon arriving, the event was hosted in a museum and quite decadent to say the least. I was expecting a yuppie crowd, but there were some veteran whiskey drinkers at the event. My assumption was Macallen was trying to target the newly young professional who had not had an affinity for a certain whiskey brand and they wanted to be that choice.

We started the night with a tasting of a two year old whiskey. The "brand ambassador" aka the night's presenter started the night with a presentation that encompassed a slew of topics from luxury cars, Scotland, Macallen distribution and anything related to whiskey. About every 10 minutes into the presentation they would serve another tasting of whiskey, a total of four throughout the night. Each tasting progressively was aged longer and was supposed to taste better, but to me all whiskey taste the same. The final tasting was aged 18 years old.

During the presentation it made wonder how much it cost for the whole event to be thrown and who was behind it, if they partnered with an agency or if it was all in house. It was fun, I wouldn't mind doing something like this.

Let's Get A Little High

2008-11-08T19:46:00.006-06:00

How novel is the team at Weeds? Their team sent out bouquets of hemp plants wrapped up to look like a marijuana joint to the press and media agencies to promote the premiere of the series. Personally, I've never seen the show, but if I were to receive this I would definitely give it a watch. The clever tie-in between the show with something deliverable and visual is definitely worth mentioning.

Ringing In Change

2008-11-05T20:17:00.005-06:00

History has been made and Obama is now the 44th elected president of the United States. Surprisingly, the election wasn't as close as people predicted. Way to go!

Free Coffee For All Who Vote

2008-11-02T11:27:00.012-06:00

Looks like Starbucks is giving out free coffee to anyone who says they voted on Tuesday. Pretty smart marketing to me. It shows they're supporting a cause and it drives traffic and exposure to their business. Let's talk about the actually video - I think it's genius. It's simple and straight forward. The background music has a sense of urgency and reminds me of another cause video, but I can't remember it right now, maybe it'll come to me later. It contains text that moves dynamically throughout the screen with content that has one goal in mind: to get you thinking.

I'm definitely grabbing a free coffee on Tuesday.

**update** I remember what the music reminded me of, the real beauty videos from Dove! Thoughts?

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T08:45:00.005-05:00

It's that lovely time of October where everyone dawns a costume and becomes someone or in most cases something else for a day. I'm still uncertain on my plans for tonight, but I have to do something - it's a Friday night! Hope everyone has a fun and safe evening!

This Is Only The Beginning

2008-10-29T22:54:00.009-05:00

A newly pr graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, I was able to land a sweet position at GolinHarris in Dallas. Now as I dwindle my days away at my new schedule from 9 to 5, I wonder to myself, "what more could I do to build myself professional?" Yea, I keep up with blogs and new social media, such as social networking sites and twitter, but there has to be more that I can do. An obvious idea, which has eluded me all this time, was I should keep up with my own blog on my personal opinions of pr, articles I've read and anything in between that I think is worth sharing. It'll be a mix of the information I aggregate from other pr ranters, noise from the media and my own chime on it all.

I decided I wanted to use this new forum to:

work on and improve my writing
share my thoughts and opinions on pr and
have some fun!

I know there are a ton of other pr blogs out there, and moreover, from people who are more experienced than I and you may ask, "what makes this blog any different, why should I care?" Easy! I'm going to bring my own unique insight...yea, I know everyone has heard that before, but I want to bring my own quirky twist to this seemingly stereotypical subject.

Nearly every single pr blog that I keep up with or have run into has a strong focus on social media, marketing and writing, which being a pr professional it should be. However, I like to think of myself as a creative and visual person. From that, I want to bring my own aesthetic and creative insights to the typical drab pr world and make it a little more colorful and fun. So, what does that actually mean? Well, I have always been a strong believer that advertising and pr go hand in hand and have been a huge stickler for the slightest design work (i.e. color and placement of things). I want to bring more of branding into the conversation, along with things that are/can be visual aids to pr professionals, such as collateral, logo work, micro-sites, presentations, pitches, etc. Of course, social media and anything that I find funny and interesting!

Also, I want to use this blog to gauge my evolution from when I began in the pr industry, with all my opinions and thoughts, and see how they've changed in a few years when I'm a hotshot regional manager! One day, one day.