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Inside The Super Bowl Ads

February 9, 2010 By 6 Comments

Last Sunday was Super Sunday, normally a great day for advertisers to showcase their great ads. However, the ads were sub-par…again. Especially compared to the game, which was great.

But this post isn’t about the game. It’s about how the advertisers fared during the Super Bowl. Mullen and Radian6 collected and analyzed close to 100,000 tweets tagged #brandbowl to determine how brands and their Super Bowl ads were perceived on Twitter. The ranking of ads was based on a combination of volume (number of tweets) and sentiment (positive or negative). You can check out the results on the #brandbowl website.

Doritos won because of sheer volume and they did have a lot of ads! Numbers 2 and 3, Google and Focus on the Family, didn’t have as many ads so their ranking is impressive. Google’s ad was very clever and was one of favorites of the evening. The Focus on the Family one was amusing but mostly to Americans because of the involvement of former college football superstar Tim Tebow.

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Your Private Parts Are Also My Private Parts

February 2, 2010 By 5 Comments

A few weeks back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “sharing is the [new] social norm” these days following changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. This is partly true and—as I alluded to in The Social Impact Of Social Media—social media has allowed people to be more open and connect with the people and topics that matter to them.

However, whatever matters to person A might not matter to person B. Sharing information doesn’t imply sharing relevance. Privacy is a matter of context, something that is judged on a semantic scale. Facebook doesn’t control the social norm. We do.

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RANT: Can All The Wankers Please Get Out Of #Foursquare?

January 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Foursquare is a great service. It’s changed the dynamics of location-based services by adding a gaming element and that’s had an addictive effect on many of its users.

However, I think that some people have taken it too far. I’m not talking about the people who check into plenty of venues. If you’re there, you’re there. I’m not talking about the people who pile up badges. The badges are there for a reason and I congratulate you. I’m not even talking about the people who hold down mayorships at tons of places. I applaud your use of Foursquare but also hope you do get challenged frequently.

No, I’m talking about the wankers, the people who create rubbish venues just to score some quick points and mayorships. I’ve seen wankers add:

  • Bus stops: Not much better than public trash cans or streetlights, are they?
  • Highway junctions: I salute you with the “Road Hazard” badge.
  • Their own houses: Not very competitive, is it?

I’m not against people sharing where they are (with their friends). I’m not against people adding proper establishments to the system, e.g. their office building, train stations or super markets. I just think that there’s no point in polluting the system with non-venues that dilute the gaming element.

/rant

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The Social Impact Of Social Media

January 26, 2010 By 2 Comments

The Fundamentals series continues with a reflection on what the impact of social media has been. In this post, I’ll discuss the social impact of social media, i.e. how social media has changed people’s online experience.

Social media matters because it is about what matters to people.

Whether it’s about being up-to-date with the news, meeting others on a particular topic or staying in touch with friends, social media offers people a way to connect to what matters to them.

There are a number of key drivers that contribute to why social matters (more and more):

  • Access Anyone who has a computer and Web access can take part in the social media and involvement is spurred on by interest in the particular topic. Even if the topic of interest is obscure, it is likely that someone has started something (e.g. a blog, a community or a Facebook page) about it on the social web.
  • Expansion Social media has allowed people to either strengthen existing, offline ties or rekindle old ties with for example former classmates or coworkers.
  • Reach Social media gives people a stage, an audience and an opportunity to become a significant influencer of public opinion and amass a larger following than those who have professional or academic merits.
  • Influence Even though reach doesn’t equal influence, online word-of-mouth has become a significant factor in people’s decision-making process. Whether it concerns an online friend, an expert review or anonymous ratings, studies by Jupiter, Nielsen and Razorfish all point out that there is trust in these online opinions.

The power that social media has given people to create their own online experiences has also affected the overall media landscape. I’ll be looking at this effect next week.

For now, the commenting powers are yours.

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The “New” Media Cycle

January 18, 2010 By 7 Comments

This post is a response to a post by Lauren Fernandez where she argues that there’s no point in having “traditional media” and “new media” square off against each other. I agree, but this would be my shortest blog post ever if I kept it at that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on what the true relation is between various media. First of all, I don’t want to distinguish between “traditional media” and “new media” much–and as Lauren pointed out, they influence each other–but there are some clarifications needed that help set up the framework:

  • Traditional Media Television, radio, newspapers, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly uni-directional, they send, you receive.
  • New Media Blogs, social bookmarking sites, video websites, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly bi-directional or even multi-directional. They send, you reply or you send and they publish.
  • Reach This is not significantly different between either “traditional media” or “new media”. Whether it’s circulation, RSS readers, followers, fans or ratings, media has reach.
  • Distribution This is a similar story to Reach, where the first-degree consumers are able to distribute the content from the media source to second-degree consumers–and second-degree consumers can pass it on to third-degree consumers and so on–regardless of which type of media we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a retweet, an email forward or a mention of “Have you read today’s headline?” or “Did you watch the 8 o’clock news last night?” at the water cooler.

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