Friday, February 27, 2009

Very nice commercial with cute+fluffy animals



Nice video by Samsung :) It reminds me of the Conan O'Brien iPhone commercial spoof...

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Facebook's "25 random things" is a "virus"

Having seen a number of 25 random things being written by my Facebook friends, reading this article was very relevant to me. Its main point is that the behavior of the 25 random things simulates that of a virus' growth, in fact it "was strikingly similar to a virus outbreak, including mutation and epidemic progression."

From the same article, Lauren Ancel, a biology professor at the U of Texas explains that "'25 Things' authors can be seen as 'contagious' under what’s known as a 'susceptible-infected-recovered' model for the spread of disease." and that "on average, each '25 Things' writer inspired 1.27 new notes."

I've actually thought about writing my own version of 25 random things as well. But I find no use for it, so I won't succumb to the virus.

If it employed a marketing message, then this is truly viral marketing.

Jabbawockeez

It's pretty hard to imagine, but I only got to know about the Jabbawockeez this week. They are an amazing dance group, check this out:


So now I have a favorite masked dance group (the Jabbawockeez), a favorite masked band (Hollywood Undead), and a favorite masked wrestler (Super Dragon). I should get a mask myself. Haha.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

"I'm a PC, and I'm a 4-1/2 year old."

The latest Microsoft ad features a cute 4-1/2 year old girl showing how easy it is to use Windows.

What do you think about it? It is definitely cute - a departure from the previous commercials.

The CNET article is here:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery">Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery</a>

Can we predict user-submitted content popularity?

According to a paper published by the HP Social Computing Lab, it seems that there is.

The paper points to the possibility that the popularity of user contributed content can be predicted very soon after the submission has been made, by measuring the popularity at an early time. Three models for predicting popularity were shared in the report.

Disclaimer: The Labs' data sources were Youtube and Digg. Also, the paper didn't touch on the semantics of why user-generated content becomes popular.

The paper is available here. This is very math-heavy, so be warned :)

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

On Twitter snowstorm maps and creating unique digital experiences

For me, effective digital marketing is all about creating a service (a site, an application, whatever you want to call it) that addresses a unique need for a set of users. It has to be unique so that it stands out among many other competing brands' efforts. And it has to offer a unique service so that consumers will like the utility and aid brand recall.

One particular example that showcases a unique service - although it's not done in a digital marketing sense - is #uksnow at http://benmarsh.co.uk/snow/

We all know that the UK has been suffering severe snowstorms this year. In fact, it is the worst in 18 years. Twitter users in the UK have been tweeting about this weather so Ben thought of combining Google Maps with Twitter posts to create a Twittermap of the UK snowstorms!

It's a simple idea: Ask people to hashtag their Tweets with #uksnow, put in their geo information, and add a twitpic if possible. Voila! Those tweets feed into the Google map. These realtime tweets allow users to see how the weather is at several parts in the UK. Even a million-dollar telescope can't do that because of severe cloud conditions. That's a unique service :)

Here're the exact instructions on the site:

Tweet the first half of your postcode, and rate the amount of snow that is falling out of ten (0/10 for nothing, 5/10 for steady snow and 10/10 for arctic blizzard conditions) >> "#uksnow [FIRST-HALF-OF-POSTCODE] [SNOW-SCORE]/10", ie: "#uksnow NG9 3/10".

Add your twitpic url to the end of your tweet to show it on the map >> "#uksnow [FIRST-HALF-OF-POSTCODE] [SNOW-SCORE]/10 [TWITPIC-URL]", ie: "#uksnow NG9 3/10 http://twitpic.com/aaaaa".