This week saw so many cool things! Manly in the internet. For one, Facebook decided that it’s cool for ALL your friends to know where you are ALL THE TIME (?!?!?!?!). That’s right!! With Facebook Places, you can now tag your location and even your friends can tag you. So if you lied to your friends and told them you can’t go out, just because you secretly wanted to go to the Ice Capades, well now your little 14 year-old cousin can be all like “I was sooo happy to see my cousin at the Ice Capades!! He looked especially cute when he cryed ” on her wall.
And yes, she can tag you all through that! Awesome!! So now, not only people can tag our pictures and our profiles and pages, they can also let everyone know where you are. I won’t weight-in into the subject (although, it does seem like I have) but there have been many articles for and against this feature. I’ll let all of you be the judge.
Also, you can now (finally) see the entire version of the Star Wars Uncut Movie! It’s particularly exciting to us, as one of our own participates in the feature!
It’s also really exciting to now that it’s now been nominated to an Emmy! Nice going, Davis! You’ll be a super “Star” (Wars?)!
Well, that’s our week! Now, go out and get some sun or something. You’re getting to pale from all the staying inside and watching a computer screen all day.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with the FunnyorDie.com exclusive: “Pranah 3D: For Your Consideration”.
Since Tuesday I (and the rest of the world pretty much) have been attentively following the brilliance of the Old Spice’s video responses with awe. This campaign’s growth is undeniably impressive. More than 180 videos have been made in response to everyone from celebrities to the Average Joe. The videos have gotten close to six million views, and over 22,000 comments. Since Tuesday.
I could go on and on, but Mashable (of course) beat me to it. I think this blog post sums up the campaign’s success best. The key point (take notes):
“Old Spice first created a character that people — shock, shock, horror, horror — liked, and then created an immersive experience that people wanted to be a part of.
Congrats, Old Spice. You’ve set the precedent. Now ready yourself for the deluge of less successful copycats.”
This Saturday, we hit five of the top chicken wing restaurants in NYC as voted on Kluckr.com for the first ever NYC Kluckr Krawl. Drink and wing specials from each of the unique locations kept everyone going, and after sampling hot wings from Blue Smoke, Blind Tiger Ale House, 1849, Croxley Ales and The Village Pourhouse, anyone in attendance became a veritable wing expert by the end of the day.
As we moved from restaurant to restaurant, we kept anyone who was following along with us up-to-date via Twitter, making this an on- and off-line event. The guys from BroBible.com met up with the Krawl, and Melinda’s Hot Sauce supplied sauces for a taste test that left everyone reaching for the nearest drink. The next Kluckr Krawl is already in the works, and thanks to everybody who came out!
We work a lot in the music space and as such, with many music editorial websites – AOL, Rollingstone.com, etc, etc. This space is fairly unique because there is so much content. There is way more content than anybody ever cares to check out or listen to. In the grand scale of exciting editorial content, music is not the top of the food chain. The new iPad is way more interesting and whatever TechCrunch is posting is way more interesting than anything Coldplay or some artist you’ve never heard of is doing.
As such, there are two ways to bring in organic traffic. In the first, a website picks an audience to cater to and posts content relevant to that audience. They build the audience overtime by giving them content that their readers are genuinely interested in and share with their buddies thus bringing in more traffic. In this scenario, the individual post isn’t as important. The average user reads more posts and subscribes to the lifestyle the website is selling. Pitchfork followed this model. This is why they’re able to break bands. Their readership is generally interested in what Pitchfork posts and trusts the site to filter content on the web to post content relevant to them.
I won’t get into too many details as everybody else is writing it and they’re much better than I am at it (they even get paid for it!). Quick summary, Facebook has unveiled a series of new tools and opportunities to tie websites into Facebook on a much deeper level – Check it out at TechCrunch or over here at Mashable.There are some great opportunities in here for marketers.
Top of the list, more seamless integration between websites and Facebook. Whatever makes our content easier to share is a huge win. Not only do companies and marketing departments need to capitalize on the primary impressions generated by campaigns but need to capitalize on these social graphs.
First, word of mouth is still the most trusted form of advertising, period. Creating beautiful and pretty content is great but the goal needs to be to evangelize the core audience and let them spread the tools and the content to their friends. This is how one impacts brand image and drives efficacy.
Secondly, impressions become cheaper. You already paid for the advertising campaign. You’re already paying for the eyeballs and the traffic back to your website. By integrating tools that exploit visitor’s social graphs and measure the results, one can very clearly see how a visitor saw an ad, headed to a website and shared that content with friends. By incorporating these new impressions into one’s cost analysis, one can easily see effective CPMs drop. Better, more engaging content equals lower and lower CPMs.
I don’t know who the hell you guys work with but my clients love it when I throw around lower costs for more quality impressions.
90,000 entries later, Dunkin Donuts has narrowed down the top 12 fan created donuts. Voting now runs until May 3rd after which, Dunkin Donuts will announce the top fan created donut. This will then be added into stores.This is an awesome example of a company successfully using the internet for what it was meant for – conversation.
Dunkin Donuts realizes they don’t need to spend a fortune on R&D to explore flavor combinations, marketing meetings to come up with catchy donut names, focus groups and panels to even see if these are good ideas. Everything can be done in one swoop utilizing a competition like this. 90,000 entries & thousands of votes represent huge R&D, marketing and testing potential with significantly less risk. The end product, to some extent, has already been tested.
J-Stache, the talking, semi-coherent mustache of John Oates, just leaked an internal HR video for J-Stache Industries, the masterminds behind his brand new iPhone game Run, J-Stache Run. Watch as Dr. Grayson Bouschvil details what it takes to make a great videogame.
Apparently, it takes a fair amount of science. Vegetables help, too.
Apex is proud to announce that “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Know Your Meme episode was just announced as a nominee for the 2010 Streamy Award for “Best Guest Star in a Web Series”!
In promotion of The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic, we looked for some of the best ways to get Al in front of an audience that loves him, and Rocketboom’s Know Your Meme was exactly that. We approached them about having Al as a guest star (something they’d never done before), and they loved the idea. The episode quickly went viral, gaining over 1.3 MILLION views in one week!
Obviously, huge amounts of thanks to KYM’s Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Dubs and Elspeth Jane for making this into such an amazing promotion (as well as highly informative!). The 2010 Streamy Awards will be held April 11th.
As we’re starting up a new year and a new decade (okay, technically the new decade starts next year, but who’s counting?), we’d like to say thanks to all of our great clients and partner sites we’ve worked with in the past year. We couldn’t do what we do without you guys.
We’ve put together a few highlights from 2009 in the video below, and we look forward to an even better 2010.
Vevo, the Hulu of music videos is launching on Tuesday. From what I hear, it’s a great site, very easy to use and a very intuitive user interface. As popular as music videos are across major video platforms, I certainly expect this to do well.
The one thing that could really bring this down are the labels themselves. With Hulu talking about subscription fees, I’m sure the record labels are already thinking about the same thing here. What everybody needs to remember is that music videos serve in a promotional capacity. They can certainly be a source of revenue but but music videos still need to serve their primary purpose – to act as an advertisement for an artist and their music. We’ll see what happens.
” on her wall.
