On Monday, SocialFresh held a conference in Tampa at the Doubletree Hotel. There were about 250 attendees or the day-long event. The usual social media-related topics were covered but, more importantly, we all gathered to watch the Super Bowl together Sunday night before the conference began.
Once the conference did begin, keynote speaker Maggie Fox from Social Media Group touched on how her company handles social media and uttered an all-important notion we've said over and over again here: Viral is a thing that happens. Not a strategy. Indeed. While you can certainly plan and make every conceivable effort to enable something to go viral, until it goes viral, it ain't viral.
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In a different kind of Movement, Chevrolet will send eight teams on a road trip to Austin for SXSW. Departing from San Diego, Detroit, Lansing, Chicago, Atlanta, South Florida, North Carolina and New York in early March, the teams will be given a series of clues to various destinations along the way and be asked to participate in several challenges (50 per team in all some of which will be "crowd sourced") such as using OnStar to assist someone along the way, stop at an animal shelter and give a dog a walk, grab a pen from a Chevrolet dealership, stuff the trunk of the vehicle full of balloons, meet up with a Twitter follower and give them a ride in the vehicle, sing in a public place and more.
Drivers and their teams will blog their adventures on a Posterous blog. GM is clear to point out speed to Austin is not part of the challenge. Winners will be determined challenge performance and the level of audience engagement they engender along the way.
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Once again it's the battle of the Twitter Super Bowl hashtags. Last year, there were about four that played prominently. In fact, we had one of our own. Can't even remember what it was. And we don't care. This year, we're letting someone else do all the work. An agency with, unlike us, an army of talented creative and technical people who can put stuff like Brand Bowl 2010 together.
So make sure you leave a tab handy in your browser for Brand Bowl. You can see how the ads rank based on tweets and other metrics. You can log in right from the Brand Bowl page and barf your Super Bowl commercial opinion for all to see. Oh, and there's a sweet link to Hulu where all the ads will be house once they air.
So for this year's Super Bowl Twitter hashtag, we're putting our money on #brandbowl. Sorry #sb44, #sbad, #sbads, #sbads10, #superbowlads, #admeter, #superbowl and all the rest of you.
- Check out Whose Voice is That? It's all about celebrity voiceovers and they've just posted a Super Bowl commercial roundup that looks at ten classic Super Bowl spots making great use of the narrator and/or voiceover.
- "The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue," an exhibit that celebrates the contributions made to American business and to popular culture by the real stars of Madison Avenue, is coming to San Francisco for its first public showing outside of New York City at the Academy of Art University's 79 Gallery on New Montgomery Street February 24, 2010 for a one-week showing.
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In a friendly little tit for tat (tweet for twat?) exchange between Amber, Mike and iJustine, Heinz is getting the word out about its new individual serving packaging.
For the first time in 40 years, the ketchup king has redesigned its packets. The new packets, which won't replace but be sold alongside existing packets, are shaped in a way that makes them usable for both dipping and squirting on food.
We're not claiming this is necessarily anything more than organic word of mouth. But if you know anything about Justine, she does love a good burger.
Here are some pre Super Bowl social media stats from Collective Intellect:
- Doritos leads CPG advertisers with 51% share of voice, Mars second place with 16%
- Denny's leads restaurant advertisers with 50% share of voice, Papa John's and Taco Bell second with 25% each
- Coca Cola leads beverages advertisers with 58% share of voice, Bud Light second with 22%
- Overall, Super Bowl conversations are mainly positive in nature
- The controversial Focus on the Family commercial causes the most pre Super Bowl buzz this year online
- Four out of the six automakers with an ad airing this year make it into the top 10 for early buzz
- Dodge and Honda have the most polarized posts compared to other commercials receiving early mentions
So if you're a brand that makes navigation products but no one thinks of you when it comes to navigation, what do you do? You erect the world's largest signpost and make it social. To hype it's navigation products and to "make navigation into something social," they built a huge sign next to London's Tower Bridge. People could text their favorite destinations all over the globe and a few minutes later, the sign would mention the location and point to the location.
The whole thing was streamed live to Nokia's site and a data base of everyone's location was built for anyone to peruse. Farfar Stockholm did the work.
The famed SUXORZ panel is happening Feb. 3 in New York as part of Social Media Week. It's been a hit at SXSW two years running and now it's making a stop in the middle of advertising's mecca. Well, OK, what used to be advertising's mecca but still.
Join Ian Schafer, Steve Hall, BL Ochman, Caroline McCarthy and moderator Henry Copeland as they review and skewer your nominees for the worst social media campaigns of '09. As always, the audience will have the final say, voting for the SUXORZ losers.
There's an open bar to lubricate our deliberations.
There are a few half-off tickets available to longtime Facebook SUXORZ members, so pogo over to http://suxorz10.eventbrite.com/ and enter offer code SUX55 ... and if you can't make it, be sure to submit your nominees to the SUXORZ Facebook wall.
Realizing the proliferation of cup holders in cars and the apparent fact they're not all occupied with a beverage, Dentyne decided to package their gum in a container that would fit in a cup holder. To promote this packaging, Dentyne wants people to Twitpic their empty cup holders with the hashtag #emptycupholderto get a free bottle of gum. Bottle of gum. That just doesn't sound quite right.
Wants some free gum? Hurry up. The promotion ends at noon today.
We can't tell you who was behind this work. Well, we could but they asked us not to. We're going to honor that request but, wow, for some reason, we feel like going out and buying some wine right now.
Stranger things have happened but with just 32 followers, BuyYouTweet, a "viral experiment" that sells tweets to advertisers on eBay, seems like a non-starter.
So far the auction, placed by Ben Cooper, sold its first tweet for $3,24. That's not exactly a business model but, as we said, stranger things have happened like, oh, say, cartoon bubbles being labeled rapists.
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