To keep the momentum going into the weekend, we put together our favorite stories of the week to share with you in this week’s social media roundup:

Super Bowl Breaks Social TV and Broadcast Records
It was another record breaking Super Bowl Sunday this past weekend. With more viewers tuning into NBC, another two million streaming it on their phone or tablet, and more social media mentions tracked than ever before, the game was one to remember for many reasons.

Along with actual contest, the Super Bowl commercials made some noise leading up to the big game. In a less dramatic fashion than normal, there were no surprises, as many advertisers opted to release their commercials to the public days in advance. Whether you watched them all before, during, or after the game, here is a list of The 10 Super Bowl Commercials That Blew up the Biggest in Social Media.

Facebook Set To Introduce Mobile Advertising Within Weeks
Bound to make headlines for the next few months, the anticipation of Facebook’s IPO has everyone talking about how much Facebook is really worth and generating absurd stories of people who are cashing in. One of the more circulated stories was a list of risk factors that could trouble Facebook in the long run. Already less than a week after submitting their papers to go public, Facebook seems to be addressing one of these major risk factors head on. While nothing has been completely confirmed, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing ads on Facebook’s mobile version in the not so distant future. In the mean time, companies like Coors Light are finding other creative ways to insert ads, running their own Facebook mobile campaigns.

 
How Pinterest is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business
Riding off last week’s news of Pinterest’s rise to being  a top traffic driver for major retailers, it was hard to open up our inbox or look through our newsfeed and avoid news and talk about the burgeoning site. Whether it was about their current business model and how they’re making money, the way it’s changing website design forever, or the countless number of sites that have already implemented Pinterest-similar features, declaring Pinterest as “the next big thing in social media” isn’t crazy. When a site hits 10 million U.S. Monthly uniques faster than any standalone site ever, it’s time to pay attention.

Youths Are Watching, but Less Often on TV
We all knew it was a matter of time. With improvements made to broadband internet, the growth of smartphones, and the rise of tablets, it’s no surprise that people are consuming “television” on something other than their TV sets. So when we see apps like the one that Grammy Awards, along with CBS, has developed, we get excited about the future of streaming video incorporating social media.

Television studios and networks aren’t building these applications just for special events anymore – TBS just announced that they’ll be releasing a Social TV tablet app to be accessed during Conan shows. While television networks are findings ways to reward viewers for watching shows and incorporate hashtags and other social branding efforts into their programs, we should expect to see the gap closing between television and social media.

YouTube CEO: The Future of Content is Niche Channels
YouTube is ready to change the way we watch videos online again. In an effort to help visitors watch videos more passively, YouTube has invested $100 million into Premium Content Channels that will focus on generating content for a specific niche. By hosting streams solely dedicated to a number of different interests, YouTube feels this will give users a better way of finding and watching what they want.

LinkedIn Hits 150 Million Members
In a press release announcing their four quarter earnings, which were higher than expected, LinkedIn revealed that it hit the 150 million member mark. To put it in perspective, Facebook has 845 million active users and Twitter is en route to 500 million total users by the end of March, according to Mediabistro. Admittedly, these social networks are all different and hard to compare. While LinkedIn hasn’t released their active member total, it is adding around 10 new members every 5 seconds. All of these reports are good signs for the company and it’s investors.

Did we miss a bit o’buzz? Let us know here and join in on the conversation! 

Twitter is defining itself
Twitter is an incredible platform for real-time conversation and information sharing, but what will ultimately become of Twitter remains to be seen. Last year’s Twitter predictions ran the gamut from an acquisition, to copying Facebook with a Like button equivalent, to not innovating at all.

Twitter did innovate to be sure, the latest redesign shows that, by continuing to define its position as an information sharing and discovery platform.

This may lead to more people ‘getting’ Twitter and improving active user % thus giving brands broader access to customers.  And as Facebook and Google turn their gazes at one another, Twitter seems positioned to have a very good run in 2012.

Facebook will get even more user-focused
Facebook was going to hit 1 billion users and go public, nail ecommerce, become a search engine, launch a distributed ad network and more.

Facebook will get to a billion users soon for sure, and it seems Mark Zuckerberg is focused on making that happen. As Google+ continues to gain traction and lure brands with its SEO promises, expect Facebook to respond with innovative opportunities for brands to engage with customers.  Though this won’t be ecommerce, at least not until Facebook Credits goes mainstream.

Foursquare is fantastic, but location usage isn’t
2011 industry predictions were not all that rosy for location-based services (LBS), predicting many would consolidate or get acquired, and for the most part were right on this (Gowalla met this fate).

Foursquare  recently hit 15 million users and have innovated continuously with updates, features, and new partnerships. However, Forrester just released a sobering report stating only 5% of online adults use location apps at least once a month.  It seems the space just hasn’t yet hit its stride as a scalable marketing channel.  LBS apps will continue to evolve and expand their features leveraging sales and recommendations as key drivers in an attempt to increase utility and draw more users.  With smartphone adoption on the rise and reaching nearly 50% in the US by next year, 2012 will be the year location does or doesn’t hit the big time.

Very few thought Google would get it right
There was little confidence in Google’s social media efforts, having been disappointed by Buzz, Wave, and rumblings of in-fighting causing launch delays about its much talked about social product.

Google+ did finally launch, and while some people immediately dubbed it a failure, the social network’s outcome remains to be seen. Google+ is latching on to Gmail, YouTube, and likely other Google products soon to integrate its features into Google culture, which few if any of us are immune to. If it succeeds, Google+ becomes a utility vs simply a Facebook alternative, and that’s going to help give it legs in the race to capture the ‘Interest Graph’.

Were you wise or lucky enough to nail a 2011 prediction?  What’s got you excited about 2012?

Solution Type – Digital Promotions, Social Marketing for nutritional supplement brand MuscleTech

Objective:
Counter declining brand sentiment and support the launch of a new line of products by developing and activating the MuscleTech audience in social media, engaging with targeted communities and influencers to educate and deliver key product and brand messaging where it would be heard.

Services Provided:                                      
Contests and Sweepstakes
Blogger/Influencer  Outreach
Facebook Advertising
Social Media Monitoring
Social Media Audit
Internal Policies and Education
Profile Management
Facebook Applications
Product Sampling/Fulfillment

Activation:
Formalized the social media program for Iovate prior to the program’s launch including conducting a social media audit, developing the communication workflow, engagement guidelines, and more.  Utilized a cross-platform content strategy (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Knowledge Base) to consistently deliver interesting and relevant content and brand messaging with MuscleTech’s audience.  Improved customer interaction across major social networks by engaging with people talking about MuscleTech, its products, and the sport of bodybuilding. Earned new customers and brand followers by applying audience development tactics across platforms, developing sweepstakes, exclusive offers and content supported by targeted Facebook advertising. Educated customers about new products through interactive Facebook tabs and a Support Center with answers to commonly asked questions, and empowered them to share and recommend content and products through targeted trial sampling programs.

Solution Type: Digital Promotion

Technology: Affinitive’s Facebook Sweepstakes Application

Summary

Your Shape Fitness Evolved (YSFE) sought to target gamers who are passionate about health and enjoy getting fit with video games.  As one of the first games to use Microsoft Kinect, YSFE had the challenge of conveying the efficacy and fun of the game as well as the Kinect device on a limited budget. The campaign goal was to create buzz and excitement for the game within social media channels in advance of the game’s release in November 2010.

The ‘Boot Camp’ Facebook Contest campaign launched in October asking influential gamers to submit audition videos to explain why they needed a fitness makeover. Five winners were flown to San Francisco to play the game before the public and give their opinions and feedback.

Ubisoft uploaded images, video and blog entries in real time during the 2 day “Boot Camp’ event, adding excitement and intrigue for fans. Influencers uploaded their own content after the event and inspired hundreds of gamers to create their own diaries.

Results

• 17X Increase in Facebook Likes in 8 Weeks
• 5,000,000+ Impressions (Xbox, Facebook, Twitter)
• 130 photos & videos submitted
• 50,000+ YouTube Views

Winner 2011 MI6 Game Marketing Awards – Most Effective Viral Marketing

Video Entries By ‘Boot Camp’ Contestants

Hamza Aziz (Destructoid.com)

Rande Gabriel

Rachel Davis

Jeremy Yarbrough

I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the “social web”. Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn’t pull in “real-time” data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Although not “real-time”, the chart still provides some interesting visual cues – for example, note that iPhone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts are being posted!)

If anyone has come across any similar types of charts, please let me know in the comments area below. Thanks!

Recently, Chris Brogan’s article “Attention as Currency and Noise” briefly delves in to the concept of attention budgeting, as he explores the value of attention.  As social marketing “pros”,  we are attempting to catch the attention of our target audience in a manner that conveys trust and reaffirms our clients’ brand reputation.  For a busy social media professional it can sometimes be difficult to decide how to effectively manage all of the  “one-to-many” conversations you are having online, which Brogan describes as “where the real value of social media kicks in.”

As with most marketing functions, the first question to ask yourself is “what are my goals?”  Are you trying to grow fans, trying to influence key tastemakers, or trying to drive traffic to your brand’s website? Once you know your goals, you can begin to plan a strategy.  Every brand and every industry will have a different set of problems and solutions.  Since social media affects different industry verticals in different ways, you need to determine an overall social media strategy that works best for each client.

Within that framework you then must decide on a client-by-client basis how much time you should spend on audience development, and on which social platforms to focus your efforts.  Mark Tosczak offers some great ideas on how to determine this for your clients, including focusing on how much content you have, how much time you have to create content, and the importance of taking time to listen, read and interact.  He offers that you should concentrate most of your attention on the “20 percent of tools/sites/strategies that are going to yield 80 percent of your results.”

Once this has been done for each brand I recommend plotting out all your brands and categorizing them by: category/vertical (retail/brick and mortar, CPG, celebrity), goals (brand awareness, fan acquisition, generate UGC), social network (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and then assign the amount of time per week associated with accomplishing each goal.  By placing everything in one place you can determine how much of your day and week you allow yourself to be sucked in to the world of social (which for some of us can border on addiction).

Of course, this is just one method of determining how to budget your attention.  I’d love to hear what’s worked for you? Let me know in the comments below.

Security has long been an issue for IE6 that Microsoft has continually patched up over the years. The “Operation Aurora” attack on Google and other companies back in January used yet another unknown security hole in IE6, and seemed to lead much of the internet community to say “enough is enough” and expedite efforts to stop supporting the use of the old browser.

It has been long known that Microsoft will stop supporting IE6 in 2014. Not surprisingly, Google and Apple are among the leaders in making people upgrade as soon as possible. Apple’s MobileMe has not supported it for a few years. Google Docs will no longer work in IE6 next week on March 1. YouTube will follow on March 13 and Gmail later in the year.

Security issues aside, the main problem is that IE6 is the product of the 90′s and Web 1.0 methodologies. This was before there were many established standards for the web and when having features that only worked on your browser was a good idea. Check out the great “Life, Times (and Death?) of Internet Explorer 6” comic strip by Brad Colbow to brush up on your history.

So when new standards were introduced and Web2.0 came around, “hacks” had to be used to get these new great parts of the Web to work on IE6. Creating these hacks is quite costly in terms of developer time and often make the site slower. Web2.0 makes heavy use of javascript to make everything speedy and interactive, but even IE7 (the successor to IE6) is much slower at running javascript than other web browsers. So even though you spent tons of money to create the greatest web site, it’s not going to seem so great to all the people that are still using IE6.

[via Facebook with language set to Pirate]

So rather than continue to create these hacks and make people think they don’t need to upgrade, the best tactic is to serve up a simple alternate version of your site with a message informing users how to upgrade to something better for free. Spend your money implementing better new features than wasting your time making everything work in IE6.

Last week, we had our first official ok from a client to not support IE6. It made our day. IE6 is finally going away, you can feel it in the air, and I’m happy to join with thousands of web programmers and designers around the world in a collective “Huzzah!”

[IE6 Cartoon image taken from RobotJohnny.com]

[EDIT 2/28/2008: we found a site with code you can simply plop just inside the body tag of your html to encourage users to upgrade: ie6nomore.com]

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I don’t claim to have any of the answers to the many major issues that are currently plaguing the music industry. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting at this desk. I’d be in world domination mode somewhere up on Broadway where Bad Boy holds court convincing Diddy to let me revolutionize his label.

However, I can tell you that there isn’t a week that goes by when as a music lover and marketer I don’t get extremely frustrated by the current state of affairs. As a marketer, I can understand that there are multiple clients if you are sitting at the top of a music hierarchy – the musicians, the music lovers, and the shareholders, who keep you in your throne. The latter in that list want restrictions – they want content to be controlled by the label – they don’t want fan videos or content sharing – they aren’t convinced in the power of WOM, because as we all know the ROI is not always so black and white. They want every view or play to count for at least one red cent.

As a music lover and a blogger, I just want to be able to share music I love. Whether it is posting an MP3 of my favorite new Buble song or embedding a video from one of my favorite bands to run to - Ok Go. I still believe in my heart that if you love the music, you’ll pay for it, even if you can find it on a million torrent sites for free. Naive? Perhaps.  But I also believe that if someone wants to steal music – they can find it, no matter how many hurdles and hoola-hoops the labels throw their way. And it doesn’t take a PhD in hacking to figure it out.

I find it hard to make an argument that allowing a video to be embeddable really hurts the bottom line. Sure, YouTube (in an attempt to pacify the label gods and stop the endless stream of infringement suits)  pays labels for video views – as long as they are within network – embeds don’t count for obvious, scalable reasons. But, doesn’t the ROI of a new potential consumer discovering the video on their favorite music blog and then buying the song because of that outweigh any penny per view? Or is the ambiguity and hypothetical nature of this ROI deduction make things like embeds the new martyr of the industry?

Perhaps it is a small victory that now, on some label controlled official YouTube channels – the videos can exist. As a fan, I can now at least see the video – most of the time, which is  quite a feat in a world where MTV is filled with Jersey Shore reruns and no real music at all. However, as a marketer who specializes in Social Marketing & WOM – this is infuriating. Cutting out the ability to share via embed is hurtful – to PR, to the artist, to the virality of the content that is created. It’s cutting off the legs of something that could be easily buzzworthy via the social actions of share/rate/review that foster a bevy of C to C interaction.

Quite simply – Socializing content is a proven tactic to generate awareness leading to consumer loyalty and retention. This is a fact.

In a land where many musicians become famous (and get record deals) through social media platforms (Colbie Caillat + MySpace = one example) it truly comes full circle when on their new big prestigious label – they are no longer allowed to share their creations on the platform that the label discovered them through – primarily through content embeds which generate a bulk of the views, which increase awareness / buzz, etc.  It’s almost mind blowing.

One of such examples sprouted up this week with Ok Go, whose member Damian posted on their forum a message about how their label is insisting on prohibiting embedded playback of their new video. [Full disclosure, way back in the day, we created their fan community for the label]:

“Four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared.”

It is hard to ignore the irony that this all seems to bleed. What is OK Go’s solution to this situation? Syndicate the video on sites like Vimeo where labels like EMI can’t stop them from sharing it. The irony layered upon the irony is that if the label had any digital strategy whatsoever – the video syndicate would be part of the launch of any new artist material already.

Quite an interesting question indeed. With Social Media being a super hyped little pair of buzz words, every agency, self-promoting fameball, or major brand who follows trendy little buzz words has jumped on the tweeting, wall-posting, super-poking bandwagon.

While they are most definitely right to be on the wagon, the deployment of a Social Media initiative is not something one embarks upon without any planning or experience. It is one thing to be a celebrity building your own online brand, but even then you have to be wary. The room for interpretation on the context of your tweets, blog posts, or status updates is a pretty big room and the elephant in it is that whether you are a brand or Demi Moore, the online world of snark just wants to see you stumble.  Just like that photograph of you on Page Six in your unflattering sweats or that consumer complaint about an experience with your brand or one of your employees that now has 50,000 views on Consumerist, dipping your toes into Social Media has to be done clearly and with purpose.

Even without the fear or risk of negative backlash, in order to make a lasting impression that positively supports your brand and that has a trajectory for growth and “viral” legs, one must have a firm foundation based on knowledge and experience, on what works and what doesn’t.

Which is why, as with every other marketing tactic or medium, having a strategy is important.  Your Social Media initiatives should be integrated with your overall brand strategy, whether you are trying to peddle a product, fameball, celebrity, or brand.  There should be goals, objectives, benchmarks, and a thought out approach that makes sense for what it is that you want to communicate and how you wish to communicate it.

In this Marketing Sherpa study, they concluded that ” Two-thirds of marketers who work for organizations that have not used any form of social media marketing or PR consider themselves “very knowledgeable” or “somewhat knowledgeable” about this emerging strategy. Their overconfidence in unproven ability can doom social media initiatives to failure.”

It is a mistake to believe that if you build it, they will come.

To believe that you can set up a YouTube channel, upload a few videos, and boom, there you have viral video is about as logical as believing that people with a video camera can create a Super Bowl commercial. Although in some cases, the former does happen, more often than not  it doesn’t and won’t.

In the same manner, it is foolish to believe that just because you create a Facebook or iPhone application and put it out in the universe, people will use it. The application directory on Facebook is flooded with applications, most of which (the most recent stat I heard was 99%) are basically inactive. Even the top Facebook applications that were previously deemed “successful” have seen a decrease in usage that averages between 15-24% with the new Facebook redesign.

While I do believe that it is possible for some brands to embark upon a Social Media plan “in house”, it is increasingly important to do so with someone taking the reigns who has Social Media experience and expertise. If you want to cut through the clutter, ward off any potential viral embarrassment, and most importantly, have a successful initiative having someone on board who knows the space – not as a user, but as a marketer, is key.

As an employee of an agency that dipped its own toes into Social Media before it was so totally trendy and part of a majority of Fortune 1000 marketing budgets, I can say that the overzealous nature of marketers to believe they fully understand Social Media is partially exciting. It is nice to have these mediums & tactics that we believe (and have for quite some time) to be viable be recognized and appreciated by the more traditional marketers.

I just urge you to remember that just like other traditional and existing non-traditional tactics, strategy is key. While a rogue effort by someone with no experience could prove to be successful, lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice.

It is best to consult with, hire, or bring to the team, someone(s) with a true passion for and expertise and experience in Social Media.

These two buzz words are best buzzed about by someone who knows how to properly buzz them.