This is an interesting example of how you can leverage a location based service like foursquare to make your billboard ads more engaging: every time you check in at the billboard location, a dispenser – part of the „interactive“ billboard – releases some GranataPet dogfood.
Of course, you could have chosen SMS or Bluetooth as a way to interact with the billboard. But in that case, there wouldn’t have been any connection with the social network of the target audience. Using foursquare, the dog owners could inform not only their foursquare friends, but also their facebook friends and their twitter followers of the new way to access GranataPet dogfood…
A simple idea that stirs up tweet volume for Mercedes Benz:
There is a page on facebook showing the current status quo of the contestants, as well as a google map for showing where the contestants are at the moment, including their supporting tweetvolume:
It’s time to take a look at the best memes of 2010. Rocketboom shows 6 Minutes worth of Memes and on MySpace someone published the following infographic:
Check out more awesome videos on Myspace
I definitely missed some of these, but I guess they are very much focused on memes from the US. I would not want to leave out the #blumenkübel meme we had running on twitter here in Germany, which made it to the international trending topics. It was so popular, that people from the US asked on twitter, what the hell #blumenkübel means…
There is an interesting series of three parts over at Techcrunch about Social Networks – past, present and future.
The article about the past of social networks mainly summarises how „social networking“ has always been present starting with chat sites like „the well“ and later compuserve, etc.
The article about the present gives an overview of the last 8 to 10 years, from Plaxo and Friendster to Facebook. Here are some snippets:
Enter Facebook. It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was. Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t. It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified. MySpace was: scantily dressed, teenaged, middle-America, design chaos and on ad steroids.
What was the major difference between MySpace and Facebook?
But the critical distinction in the direction of both companies was that while MySpace was putting up moats to keep outside companies from innovating and making money off their backs, Facebook took the opposite approach. It launched open API’s and created a platform whereby third-party developers could come build any app they wanted and Facebook didn’t even want (yet) to take any money from them to do so.
He also writes about Twitter:
But what is magic about Twitter is that it is real time. In most instances news is now breaking on Twitter and then being picked up by news organizations.
At the end of this part, he mentions mobile social networking becoming the next big thing.
I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won—the war is over” and I know that it feels that way right now. Facebook is so dominant it is astounding. In a complete return to where we all began with AOL—the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden. When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet
Here are the 8 trends as an overview:
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks
3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems
4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive
5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites
6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers
7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities
8. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player
Wo ich sonst so bin...