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GoPro understands social rewards, POTUS rocks and this week’s bits and bytes

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Sainsbury’s: Remember when you could slap Jamie Oliver via Youtube? Well, we’ve come up with our own version of that interactive Youtube clip to accompany our Kitchen Heroes campaign. Check it out to see what you can do with a carton of by Sainsbury’s chopped tomatoes (needs some work in the juggling department though…).

Also, make sure you watch the über-tasty food pornography that is the new by Sainsbury’s ads. Probably the greatest sausage sandwich you’ll ever see.

And yup, another month has passed which makes it time for a look back at our favourite tweets from April. Highlights were the new Gok for Tu collection, the Cake and Bake Show and of course the news that Sainsbury’s is sponsoring the British Athletics Summer Series.

Twitter safety: After high profile Twitter accounts from news organisations were compromised – most recently that of AP which caused a dip in the DOW – Twitter has sent a memo directly to the newsdesks with some tips on how to keep their accounts safe. Key points to remember are to use secure passwords and change them regularly, keep your email secure and keep an eye out for suspicious activity from any apps you may have authorised to have access to your account.

So far, so sensible. But then they go on to say that you should designate one computer to use for Twitter exclusively. So no email or browsing the Web. Bizarre. Here’s hoping this is all just a temporary stop gap before Twitter rolls out two-factor-authentication.

Reward & inspire: A customer that has bought your product and created something beautiful will most likely be a fan of your product. Should they chose to share this beautiful thing they’ve created, all you need to do is share that with your community. Your customer’s creation will serve to inspire other people to do the same or inspire their own ideas.

Much like Lego, the people at GoPro are brilliant at using the things their customers create and share them through their own social media channels. GoPro sells tiny HD cameras that can be mounted on pretty much anything, from tripods/helmets/skis/skateboards, to guitars, dogs and mouthpieces. The videos that they chose to share are some of the most incredible, inspiring, awesome clips you’ll see on the web. Sure, it helps if these videos feature a host of beautiful (often scantily clad) people doing awesome things, gratuitous use of slow motion and time-lapse photography as well as a pounding electro soundtrack, but you get what I mean.

Case in point – a video of a dude solving a Rubik cube. Not interested? How about if it’s three cubes at the same time. Still nothing? OK then. How about a video of a dude solving three Rubik cubes simultaneously WHILE JUGGLING THEM (are you listening @AlexCole71?). Thought so.

Facebook fatigue: There has been much talk about Facebook fatigue and the latest numbers from SocialBakers don’t show any turnaround in fortunes for the big blue social network, especially not in developed markets such as Europe, the US and Australia. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK. Why is this? The Guardian asked readers why: it’s superficial, boring, gimmicky and there’s too much fighting. An interesting point from a reader: It’s no longer a place where you can keep up with what’s going on with your friends and family – it’s a place where business can farm your information from.

Facebook’s demise seems somewhat exaggerated though. Its first quarter figures show that monthly and daily active users are up to 751 million and 665 million respectively. Even though net income was less than what analysts expected, mobile revenues is what seems to have saved Zuck for now: they’ve doubled this in six months. Still, as Nikhil Kumar notes in his excellent analysis for the Evening Standard notes, there is room for caution.

SMS is dead? Well, perhaps not dead, but definitely green around gills. Turns out that in 2012, more people sent messages using chat apps such as BBM, What’s App, Skype, iMessage than using good old fashioned SMS. A study by Informa found that almost 19 billion instant messages were sent using chat apps in 2012, compared to 17.6 billion SMS texts. All of that of course means a massive whole in revenues for mobile phone carriers. Suppose we can all expect data tariffs to become more expensive!

POTUS standup: President Obama spoke at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week. Not only was he funnier than Conan (not hard), his 20 minute routine just shows how charming the man really is and how important it is to count Steven Spielberg as one of your friends. For fans of the US version of House of Cards, please make sure you check out Kevin Spacey and a host of democrats and republicans come together for an excellent “Prom of the Nerds” spoof.

Still on POTUS – the White House this week joined Tumblr and in its first post, outlined exactly what people can expect from the blog with a nifty, hand-drawn pie chart. The administration will tumble quotes from Potus, videos, behind the scenes stuff and updates from Vpotus and Flotus. So far, so good. A sign that Obama’s social media bods are very much plugged into to the Internet Zetigeist comes in the form of a stand on how to pronounce the word “gif”. Rather than go with the soft G as in ‘gist’ (which, mind you, is the way that the inventors of the gif format intended it to be pronounced), the president has decided to go with the hard G as in gift. Let the battle of the geeks begin.

Source: White House

No. 10 Twitter first: Not wanting to be left out, Downing Street plans to use Twitter to give preferred journalists a heads up on announcements before they are made in parliament. I have a feeling we’ll be getting many more The Thick Of It moments as a result.

Can you tell a story in 6 words? Hemingway allegedly penned: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. But what about a story in 6 seconds of stop/start footage via Twitter’s Vine? Here are the award winning 6 second vines from the Tribeca film festival.

Anticipatory computing: Imagine you’re talking to a friend about planning your weekend, talking about potential restaurants, destinations and activities. You’re using an iPad app called MindMeld that listens to what the two of you have to say, conducts Internet searches on some of the keywords you use, and displays them in real time. As someone who has been in a long distance relationship and dependent on technology like Skype and FaceTime, I cannot imagine anything worse. But make up your own mind with this video

Videos of the week: every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera – a fact that Apple have gone and used as the idea for their new ad (and going by Flickr data, it’s actually true!).

Apple fan boys (why hello there!) and Samsung owners fight all the time on who has made the better tech choice. Have a look at this for a clever bit of advertising.

Budweiser’s ‘Buddy Cups‘ makes toasting friends instant friends on Facebook.

Ecotricity comes up with an excellent clip to promote alternative power sources.

And finally: Ed Balls breaks the Internet.

#Twitter4brands, breaking news and this week’s bits & bytes

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#Twitter4Brands: Twitter’s annual update on what’s what with brands and advertising took place yesterday. Some thoughts about it below, although it is by no means an exhaustive summary. Here’s another view from Matt Chapman on Brand Republic.

The fact that Twitter is the second screen shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it should influence how brands use Twitter to talk to their followers. 80% of Twitter activity in the UK is from mobile phones and people are tweeting about what’s happening in the real world.

I’ve talked before about this trend, so I won’t go into much more except to say that the Twitter TV book has been updated with new data.

The big news was about keyword targeting in timelines. And this one is going to be HUGE. Imagine you’re in a foreign country, your flight has been cancelled, you’re stuck and you need a place to crash. You don’t know anyone. You take to Twitter and voice your anger and frustration. You might tweet something along the lines of ‘Flight cancelled. Stuck with nowhere to go and no place to sleep. I need a hotel’. Perhaps throw in a bit of colourful language to round it off. What if there’s a hotel just down the road from you that has bought a keyword targeted tweet (say to the words ‘need’ and ‘hotel’ and that their message will pop up in anybody’s Twitter stream, provided they are within 5km of their hotel and they’ve used those two words in a public message).

Serendipity as Head of Twitter UK @TonyW called it.

Tone of voice was the big topic for the second half of the conference. The key point being that people expect brands to speak in normal language on Twitter, not in some sort of stilted, formal tone. There were many excellent examples, culminating in O2 winning the first ever Flock award for the most outstanding use of Twitter – interestingly, not for how O2 used the various promotional mechanics that Twitter showcased in the first half of the day, but for how they enter into real conversations with their followers. The most famous example of which was how they dealt with enraged customers during a network outage last year. Other excellent examples came from @The_Dolphin_Pub and @Mangal2.

Still not convinced? It’s not just Twitter who are saying that brands should be human on social media.

Finally, Gary Lineker showed up and talked about England going out to Germany at Italia90 on penalties (which I enjoyed very much) as well as the infamous Poogate (which I may actually have enjoyed more)…

… but he was mainly there to talk about how he uses Twitter to promote brand Lineker, Match of the Day as well as how he deals with trolls (Piers Morgan and Joey Barton received a special mention here).

I’ll leave it to @TonyW’s to sum up #Twitter4Brands – in just 5 tweets.

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Breaking news: There was a lot of it this week. From the Lion Air flight that skidded off the runway in Bali into the sea, to the Boston Marathon bombing, to the exploding fertiliser factory in Texas. The Boston bombing in particular horrified many. Much has been said about how news travels on social media – and that is how I found out about all of the above: from Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly though, in all three occasions my immediate reaction was to turn on the TV. An almost knee-jerk reaction to confirm these things had actually happened. The fact that the 24 hour news channels in each instance were already on the story was weirdly reassuring, yet the longer I watched them, the more facts were replaced by wild speculation and leading questions about all of our safety. It’s nothing new really, just in a week with some much bad stuff happening, I felt very increasingly angry at the media’s fear mongering.

Interesting then to read that news actually bad for you. Rolf Dobelli argues that news causes disruption, anxiety, shallow thinking – basically that it’s a waste of time. And as I’d like to join his movement of not consuming news, that would make my job pretty darn difficult to do. Dobelli doesn’t think that all journalism is useless: he does concede a special place for investigative journalism, reporting that goes deep and uncovers truth.

Now given my chosen profession, it’ll be difficult for me to just abstain from the news, but it should act as a reminder to turn off the incessant news stream every once in a while before we all lose our minds.

Or – you could immerse yourself entirely and join Guardian Witness. Similar to CNN’s iReport, The Guardian is inviting its readers to register, pick their assignment and provide images, video and copy to cover news events. As I write this, The Guardian is calling for stories about Syrian refugees, photos of sleeping pets and how budget cuts have affected you. A simple – and free – way for the paper to augment its eyes and ears and tap into a willing network of eager freelancers.

The news lifecycle: An interesting look at how mobile has not only influenced how people consume the news, but when they consume it. FT data shows quite clearly how people get up in the morning and read the FT on their phone or tablet first thing and on their commute in to work. As soon as they get to the office, desktop readers of the FT website spike and then slowly drop off during the day. Finally, mobile devices spike for a second time as people start their commute home again. On the weekends, desktop use is low, with spikes coming early in the day from mobile devices.

Why do you see the things you see in your Facebook newsfeed? It’s not as easy as just following somebody or a brand. It depends on four factors: previous engagement, the type of content your interacting with, how popular it is within your network and increasingly, how much negative feedback its received. Here’s a clever little infographic that explains what Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm is and how it works.

Facebook Home: It launched, they made an ad, then another one with Zuck in it (bad idea), and now most people are giving it a 1 out of 5 star rating. Ouch.

Geekgasm: HMV have come out of administration and are under new ownership. To celebrate, they’ve hidden Nipper in the source code of their revamped website. Kudos to HMV for this extremely nerdy Easter egg, although I cannot for the life of me understand why you’d check out the source code of a website (HT @TomParker81)?

Videos of the week: Check out this brilliant ad from K-Mart to advertise their new direct shipping service. Ship the bed!

The dove real beauty campaign continues with real sketches

and with an even better parody.

There is much Lego awesomeness in the world and this folding Buddhist temple blew my mind (HT @gin_lane).

Bringing Instagram and CSR together: FoodShareFilter is an Instagram-esque photo filter with a purpose. Download it, and the proceeds go to an agricultural program in El Salvador run by Manos Unidas, a major charity. What better way for Hipsters to Instagram the food they eat and make it worth their while?

Viral cake: If you’ve not seen the best viral cake resignation letter ever, you’ve clearly been living under some sort of rock.

And finally: Every Facebook birthday wall, ever.

#NowThatchersDead, monetising spam and this week’s bits and bytes

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Twitter and the death of Baroness Thatcher: Wall to wall coverage, equal parts mourning and vitriol, and many, many tweets. The hashtag #nowthatchersdead started trending shortly after the news was announced – some people misread that as ‘now that Cher is dead’. An Oddbins manager tweeted that Taittinger was on offer for £10, down from the usual £29 – the message was quickly condemned as ‘shameless’ and ‘sick’ and the manager suspended. The Met Seargeant who tweeted that he hoped Thatcher’s death was ‘painful and degrading’ resigned a few days later. And then there’s Ding Dong, the With is Dead. There’s more and the Beeb has a great post on how the news was reported online.

Was it really such a surprise though? Nope.

Is the vitriol a neat summary of everything that’s wrong with Twitter? Absolutely not.

People have their opinions – with or without Twitter. The fact that any comments you make on the Internet without first activating your brain can (and will) come back to bite you is something that should be a part of media literacy courses in school. Perhaps that would have saved Paris Brown’s job as Yout Crime Commissioner?

Is the scoop dead? That is the question @Marcousleroux and @Steve_Hawkes discussed after a comment from Kevin Ryan, co-founder of Business Insider:

Marcous argues that market forces are driving people away from news gathering, while Steve believes Twitter and scoops, more than ever, are a must. Here’s the full thread (HT to @antsilverman).

Retail geekery: A bakery in Tokyo has implemented a new scanning system that scans food by recognising the shape and colour of each item, no need for a barcode or human assistance, while New Balance launches Its Own 3D-Printed Shoes. Still on 3D-Printing, our very own Rob Fraser recently spoke about 3D printing saying that we have to prepare for the fact that consumers may soon not want to buy pre-packaged iPhone cases, but build and design their own. This lovely little animated clip from GrafixTV shows how 3D printing is changing retail:

Facebook looking to monetise spam: Would you pay $15 to direct message Justin Bieber on Facebook? I wouldn’t, but that’s what Facebook are looking to do in the UK. The prices are staggered at $1, $10 and $15 (depending on how popular the person that you’re looking to message is) and Facebook say that it is an attempt to cut down on spam. Looks like a brilliant way to monetise millions of terabytes worth of Belieber spam. I wonder how long until artist management bods demand their cut.

Facebook Home: Facebook are serious about their new immersive mobile experience. They moved quickly to address the privacy concerns about having your entire private life display on your home screen on their newsroom blog (if you don’t want Home to appear as your lock screen, you have the option to turn that off) and they’ve launched their first ever TV ad. But is it going to be enough to get kids excited about Facebook again?

Social media investor relations: a great post from Edelman on what the SEC rule on disclosure in social media means for IR.

Crowdsourcing products: Nissan is using its social channels to allow fans to help customise and name a one-off version of the Juke Nismo. At Saino’s, we’ve crowdsourced feedback on our 20×20 sustainability plan with Green Mondays and our 20×20 event last year. We’ve also asked our fans what cookie flavour they’d like to see in store and put the results to a vote.

Source: Sainsbury’s Facebook page

Econsultancy looks at what other brands are crowdsourcing.

InstaAds are here: The Internet was up in arms when Facebook bought Instagram for $1bn because it though all photos would now be used in and as ads against their will. It’s been six months and the InstaAds haven’t materialised. Obviously, things aren’t moving fast enough for brands because they are advertising on Instagram – and neither Instagram nor Facebook are seeing a single dollar for it. Unilever and Pepsi have teamed up with celebs such as Beyonce and Nicole Richie (OK, ‘celebs’ might be stretching it a bit) for sponsored posts.

Video of the week: Dove hair care for men

and Samsung test their new washing machine in the extreme of conditions – with unexpected results.

And finally: Vinetune.com

Facebook Home, pizza box art and this week’s bits and bytes

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It’s that time of the month where I compile some of our favourite tweets of the month. This edition contains a hilarious dose of Comic Relief goodness from our colleagues around the country, featuring everything from a gorilla in a mankini to a life-size T-Rex chomping its way through the South of England.

Facebook Home: Facebook is doing exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, launch a phone. Well kind of. Only not. It’s called Facebook Home and changes your phone into one giant Facebook app (I’m most freaked out by your phone’s lock screen becomes a direct link to your Facebook profile, messages and notifications. Privacy?). Facebook Home will come pre-installed on the ‘HTC First’ or you can convert your existing Android handset into a “Facebook Phone” by downloading the new software on 12 April. Unsurprisingly, the people at Twitter weren’t impressed.

Source: Mashable

Classy Brits: Class was the big story this week (isn’t it always?) with the BBC publishing the The Great British Class Calculator. No longer are there just three classes (upper, middle and lower), we now have seven; ranging from ‘elite’ to ‘precariat’. My favourite though has to be ‘emergent service workers’, possibly the best euphemism for ‘hipster’ I have ever heard.

Now that’s one pissed off journalist: There is something poetic about beautifully phrased foul language. The Indie’s Tom Peck has provided a cracker.

Social media investor relations: The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week unveiled new rules that allow companies to to make key announcements via Facebook and Twitter – only if shareholders have been alerted beforehand about which social-media outlet they should turn to (as to how shareholders are alerted, the SEC doesn’t say – suppose I wouldn’t be surprised to see @CompanyNameIR accounts popping up soon).

Blogs more influential than Twitter: An interesting post from The Wall Blog (who I suppose would agree) that blogs drive sales more than other forms of social media. Confirmation comes in the Technocrati 2013 digital influence report, that sees blogs come out ahead of Facebook, Youtube, Google+ and Twitter.

Facebook get’s in line: Great news if you provide customer service through Facebook. The big blue social network is launching in line replies on posts, allowing community managers to respond directly to questions. This will of course also make any type of topical interaction such as live Q&A much easier to manage on Facebook, so customer service and social media managers around the world should welcome this with open arms.

Sketchy customer service: Fast food deliveries that come in a cardboard box provide a great canvas and opportunity for fulfilling the demands of your customers. A splendid gallery of pizza box art at the behest of customers from around the world in this gallery.

Source: takeaway.com

Twitter for business: Twitter launched a page chock full of case studies from companies on how they use the micro-blogging service to meet their business objectives – hoping (I suppose) that you’ll end up using their services and tools and spend more money.

Faking it on Twitter: Faking a tweet isn’t the most difficult thing to do. Take a screenshot of an existing tweet from an account you’d like to spoof, modify it in your image editing software of choice, post it to t’interwebs as ‘check out what so-and-so said’ as a screenshot, adding that they’ve since removed the tweet (t’interwebs loves a cover-up!). However, this requires a basic level of image manipulation skills and a bit of effort – until now, with a new web-based software that allows you to fake tweets in a few clicks. Brian Solis looks at why this is a dangerous situation, one that I imagine Twitter can’t be too happy with!

Video of the week: Arthur C. Clarke completely predicts the Internet. In 1974.

Some of my favourite April Fool’s stories from this past week: with its Guardian Goggles video, the Guardian showed that they not only know exactly who their readers are, but that they also have enough of a sense of humour to poke fun at themselves.Meanwhile, Google went slightly OTT with their pranks – here are just three of them: Youtube announced that after eight years, they were shutting down the site to give the 30,000 strong jury until 2023 to announce the best video ever. Google Maps got a treasure hunt upgrade to find Captain Kidd’s treasure. Finally – a way to plug in your olfactory senses into Google search and find that smell you were always looking for. Or, to put it simply: Smell-o-vision! I’d argue though, that The Metro did the best with their made up April Fool round-up. Very meta.

Workplace etiquette in poster form: a beautifully designed set of posters for today’s office population. My favourite: “Respect headphones as a sign of intentional isolation”.

Mad Men Season 6: The penultimate season starts with a double episode in the US on Sunday, coming to Sky Atlantic in the UK on April 10th. To get in the mood I am rewatching season 5 and enjoying this post on Business Insider about how SCDP’s ads compared with the actual ads that ran in the 1960s. And yes. I am hyperventilating.

And finally: three new memes popping up over the last few weeks that are looking to take on the mantle of ‘the new planking’. First, we have Pottering. The trend looks to have kicked off in Oz and there’s a Pottering Facebook page with some quality efforts. I have to admit though, I’m quite fond of Vadering – something that has already made it into The Sun and The Metro. My favourite though has got to be Hadouken. Anyone with a mispent youth playing ‘Street Fighter’ will know the move and the precise flick of the wrist required to generate that devastating fireball will recognise these poses.

Source: The Tech Journal

Flipboard 2.0, collaborative marketing and this week’s bits and bytes

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Back from hiking the Grand Canyon – more on the actual hikes in the next few days when I’ve digested the Garmin data. What I found out since coming back: Google has mapped the Canyon and you can enjoy the views from the comfort of your couch. I’d rather enjoy them first hand, but here’s how they did it.

Sainsbury’s on Flipboard: this week, the super-slick content aggregator Flipboard announced their 2.0 version. The big news being that you can now curate your own magazine. Excited to try it out, I quickly put together a Flipboard Magazine about Sainsbury’s. Let me know what you think and if you’re on Flipboard – subscribe! You can find out what’s else is new with Flipboard 2.0 in this video.

Budget screw up: The following is from @tomparker81: During last week’s budget announcement, the Evening Standard tweeted its front page about 20 minutes before the Chancellor had even stood up, thus giving away all of the detail in the Budget. Bit of a screw up really and someone at The Standard has been suspended for it.

Damian McBride, former chief spinner to Gordon Brown, has written a really interesting blog post about it which should be of interest to anyone doing our job. It describes how you brief a paper like the Standard to get them in just about the right place but without enough detail to give too much away.

Paywalls vs. free: The Telegraph and then The Sun announced they’d be moving to a metered model where readers would be able to read 20 articles a month for free before having to pay for access to the online paper. Meanwhile, the DMG Media, presented their latest financials: the MailOnline is set to make £45 million in 2013 and that that figure will reach £100 million in the next three to five years.

Brands can learn from newsrooms: How can a brand keep up conversations that are fresh, relevant and interesting? Our friends at Dare thinks we should learn from the Newsrooms, think like journalists and keep asking those important W-questions.

Bots artificially inflate site stats: brands such as McDonalds and Disney paid millions of dollars a month to show their online ads to websites that had their traffic numbers artifically inflated by automated networks of computers (aka bots). Spider, a London based analytics firm, found that sites such as toothbrushing.net, sodabottle.com and techrockstar.com were showing 20 to 20 million ads in a month – and that these sites were all linked to a network of botscalled Chameleon. Can’t imagine the marketing teams were very happy…

Tracking Facebook: Still on metrics, a quick and sensible guide to what you should be tracking on Facebook.

Remember the Harlem Shake? Only a few weeks ago, the Harlem Shake seemed to be everywhere. It exploded out of nowhere, annoyed the crap out of the Internet for a good two weeks and has since disappeared (if nothing else, please read the ‘What has changed‘ paragraph)

Social chocolate: A case study of how Cadbury does social.

Fashion rules Instagram: a quantitative look at the top 25 brands on Instagram shows quite clearly that fashion brands have embraced the hipsters’ image sharing network of choice. Victoria ‘s Secret (unsurprisingly?) tops the list with over 1.3 million followers. Other fashion staples in the top 25 include Nike, Forever21, Burberry, Top Shop, asos, H&M, Adidas and Gucci. Playboy (surprisingly?) comes in at no.20.

Collaborative marketing: social media, digital, web 2.0 – call it what you want, it is changing the way brands communicate. Simply put, customers want a meaningful conversation and the stage is set for social tech to begin creating real value for companies through deep collaboration with consumers. Fast Company has listed 5 trends driving the shift.

Videos of the week: Remember the flick ‘Catch me if you can’? Spielberg based the film on the true story of Frank Abagnale and in a speech at Adweek, Abagnale talks about how, as a runaway 16-year-old he spent two years defrauding Airlines of 1.3 million dollars, constantly shifting his identity. Without glorifying his actions, he talks about how he did it and how he was caught. After serving time in France, Sweden and the US, the FBI offered him a role in their fraud division. In the Q&A at the end, he provides some fascinating insight into how you can protect your privacy, from when you’re on Facebook to when you’re paying for petrol. Absolute must watch (HT @JoTomlin).

‘Grumpy Cat’ stars in Friskies Youtube campaign.

And finally: a headline and story so chock full of WTF? you just know that it has to be true http://avc.lu/1097xcB (HT @tomparker81).

Happy Easter everyone!

4SQ is back, we have a new Pope and this week’s bits and bytes

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Digital UK: We are Social have pulled together a very useful state of the digital nation from the 2013 UK Digital Future in Focus report published by comScore. Loved the tweetable highlights:

  • As of December 2012, we’re at over 50% mobile penetration in all EU countries
  • We spend 37 hours a month online in the UK – more than any other country
  • Online shopping reaches 9 out of 10 UK Internet users
  • 1 in 5 of us use their mobile to shop

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Foursquare is about maps and data – not badges and mayorships: I’ve not been the biggest fan of the location based social network Foursquare – seems like I’ve missed the point! Founder Dennis Crowley was at SXSW this week to talk about the future of location and the shift from social network to utility. I’ve only been able to read the @JeremyWaite‘s Storify of the talk, but that has provided some fascinating insight. For example, using Foursquare data, you could see what people in New York were up to during Hurricane Sandy or you can map all the checkins on Foursquare across the entire globe over the last three months - there’s 500 million of them, so you have a pretty robust dataset. Go on, zoom in to London. You can clearly identify roads, even Hyde Park and Heathrow are easily identifiable. As for data, think about it like this: Foursquare can tell you who the most influential customers (on social media) are that visit your stores.

The thing I’m taking away from the talk though is this pithy summary of what Foursquare is: Foursquare is a local search engine. It was about the merit system – something I don’t think really ever caught on – In 2009. Today they’re are phasing out the gamification and focusing on local data, maps and recommendations.

Just to finish on SXSW, the guys at Edelman Digital published a handful of their SXSW observations from the annual gathering. A good, quick overview.

Habemus Papam Franciscum: Gotta hand it to the Catholics, they sure know how to run a press event. For three days the world’s media watched a chimney and compared many old men who they knew little about. Meanwhile, millions of people had the their fingers and pope puns ready to tweet. Finally, when white smoke did billow from the chimney, seven million tweets welcomed Pope Francis and his first tweet has already been retweeted over 80,000 times – my particular favourite tweet was from a guy wasn’t too chuffed with the announcement.

While we’re on the topic, a cheeky look at what PR folks can learn from the Vatican and the 10 social media business commandments. As cheesy as it sounds, these are actually quite good!

Facebook is no longer cool: Last week I talked about Facebook, their new Newsfeed design and what will chance. This week Buzzfeed added to a growing list of articles from a variety of publications that talk about how Facebook is slowly losing it’s cool. Essentially, Buzzfeed argues that Facebook has been so focused on creating an environment conducive to apps, it has left users and their personal needs by the wayside.

You are what you like: Facebook users are unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs – using only public “like” updates, according to a study of online privacy by Cambridge University.

‘Liked’ hospitals have a lower mortality rate: A new study published in The American Journal of Medical Quality points analyzed the 30-day mortality rates across 40 New York hospitals and cross-referenced their Facebook page like. They found that the more ‘likes’ a hospital had, the lower its mortality rates.

Booze brands on social: Trade mag The Drinks Business has a great summary of the top 10 alcohol brands that are ruling social media, how they rank and what they’re up to (HT @a_little_wine).

Videos of the week: During this year’s London Fashion Week, Topshop partnered with Google+ to provide an immersive experience for fans. More about how they did it on Diffusion.

A phone call in the middle of the night: your best friend is in trouble. Would you go out and help him? Carlsberg tests some friendships.

And finally: Instagramed art on plates (don’t worry, no hipsters in sight).

Day 13: Banksy on my plate! Made from nori and apple. What does this Banksy piece of the maid mean to you? #creativemarch

How things go viral, Bieber fury, your new Facebook and this week’s bits and bytes

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Horse meat on social: The guys over at Digimind have pulled together a great little infographic of how the horse meat story has developed on social since it broke in mid January. As a Sainsbury’s colleague, I am of course proud to see that our name has rarely been connected to the issue.

Gorkana really doesn’t like AVEs: they’ve published 16 reasons why AVEs don’t measure PR. Solid stuff.

How does stuff go viral? A marvellous feature by Al Jazeera’s The Stream about how videos like Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake go viral. It’s a half hour clip, so sort out a cuppa and get comfy before you get started (as an aside: just check out how the 30 minutes brings together broadcast, Google+ and Google Hangout, Twitter, Skype… very cool).

Misogynistic algorithm screws Amazon: Last weekend, Amazon got itself in a spot of bother when it was found to be selling thoseoh-so-hip ’Keep Calm and…’ t-shirts. Not only are they entirely naff, these particular ones were emblazoned with charming sentiments such as ‘Keep Calm and Knife Her’ or ‘Keep Calm and Rape a lot’. The shirts were being sold through Amazon by a third party company called Solid Gold Bomb and were quickly removed after the online retailer received a barrage of tweets and complaints. Solid Gold Bomb quickly apologised. How could this happen? Well, turns computer algorithms rather than people that generate different versions of the ‘Keep calm…” slogan automatically and prints them onto shirts when somebody clicks on buy on Amazon. I suspect they will be coding a misogyny filter very soon…

Belieber fury: so, like, OMG, Justin totally showed up late to his gig because he thought he’d, like, be all rock and roll and stuff. While I’m working on how I can get a refund on my TV license fee after the BBC spent two days reporting on the total non-story of Bieber pissing off little girls (and their parents), have a look at this brilliant piece of opportunistic advertising by GetTaxi who sent a cab to Bieber’s hotel to make sure he’d at least be on time for his remaining three O2 gigs (HT ‏@GoodandBadPR).

Also, the best ever photo of a dad at a Justin Bieber concert (HT @Pandamoanimum)

Murdoch blogging: well, technically, his chief of staff Natalie Ravitz, who posts updates of the media mogul’s activities. From shooting clay pigeons, to checking out CES, to shearing a sheep – running an empire is hard work.

How Search Works: Google has launched a new interactive website giving you a look at what goes on behind the scenes everytime you Google something: how it crawls the web and indexes over 30 TRILLION pages, its alogrithms and ranking strategy, and how it fights and removes spam.

New Facebook Newsfeed: Facebook have announced a new design for their newsfeed. It will be met with millions of people complaining about how crap the new design is and how much they want the old layout back. Petitions will be created. #iwantmyfacebookback will start trending. Fast forward 12 months and it will all happen all over again. But what’s new?

  • the new design will look exactly the same no matter which device they use to access their feed
  • videos and images will now be offered more space and prominence
  • the new newsfeed will allow many more options to filter content; including, just stuff from friends, close friends, or according to different media types (photos, music), and also – finally – ALL posts, regardless of their Edgerank (for those that like to believe they are in control of their feed).

Why do this? Friendly Facebook people tell you why in this video.

Videos of the week: the best celebrity interview the world has ever seen features the wonderful Mila Kunis and a star struck and underprepared yet entirely charming interviewer from BBC1;

The Onion questions if you’re dynamic enough to work in a marketing firm; and then there’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube interactive video where not only can you smack Jimbo, you can even make him shove a chilli down his pants (HT @susieod).

And finally: Go to www.gizoogle.com. Enter your Twitter handle, the URL of your favourite website, or just do a web search. I searched for Sainsbury’s. I’ve not stopped giggling (HT @TomParker81).

Twitter is for PR, giftastic Jennifer Lawrence and this week’s bits and bytes

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Sainsbury’s Twitter faves: Here are my favourite tweets about Sainsbury’s from February 2013. You’ll see some amazing Red Nose Day cookie creations, Goktastic reviews for collection 6 and lots of love for Lulu Guinness’ Red Nose Day totes. And, of course, a few customers declaring their undying love for our cookies. 

Twitter for PR, Facebook for branding: Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP Group chief executive, spoke to the Harvard Business Review about everything from where we are with the advertising business, to social media and emerging technology like Google Glass. He also said some interesting things about Twitter and why it’s a PR medium and Facebook and how that is a branding medium.

I get myself in deep doo-doo when I say this, but Facebook to my mind is not an advertising medium. It is a branding medium. So if I can get you to say something nice about WPP or me or one of our companies on Facebook to your wife, your friends, or whoever, that’s good. But it’s a long-term mechanism. Compare that with Google. Say you’re searching for a car: We know that up to 90% of car purchases in the U.S. are search-influenced. Depending on where you are in the purchase cycle, that number one ranking on Google seems more important than a Facebook “like.” This doesn’t deny the potency of Facebook. But it has to be seen in the context of a long continuum of brand building.

I’m going to get myself shot again. I think it’s a PR medium. Again, it’s very effective word of mouth. If you look at the Olympics in London, the big winner was Twitter. It wasn’t Facebook. It wasn’t even Google. We did analyses of the Twitter feeds every day, and it’s very, very potent. But—and this is the old fart speaking—I think because it’s limited in terms of number of characters, it reduces communication to superficialities and lacks depth.

The fail trail: This great infographic from social media monitoring firm SDL illustrates really well some recent case studies of how Nestle, Dominos and United dealt with their respective social media crises.

Social media magic: Two things you need to fulfil to have a chance at creating a successful social media campaign are the need to be loved and the need to be heard.

Oscars! The Internet fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence for being so darned down-to-earth and genuinely lovely – and heck, if you can recover from falling up the stairs of the stage to collect your award for best actress that gracefully, then you deserve all the adulation you can get. My theory though: Jennifer Lawrence is just animated-gif fodder.

Source: justnormalfangirl.tumblr.com

AAANYWAY. In terms of predicting winners, turns out that social media beat Google. Looking at the top categories (film, director, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress) Google got 4/6 and social media got 5/6 right.

Pope wiped: So the Pope finally said his goodbyes this week and the holy social media quickly changed the name on the Papal Twitter account to ‘Vacant Seat’, and wiped Benedict’s tweets. No chance for Ratzi to walk away and do the disgruntled former employee thing with the 1.6 million followers. But what about all those (well, 39) tweets Pope Benedict? Worry not digital Catholics, all of his have been archived on the Vatican’s news site and you can read all of them in nine different languages.

Source: @Pontifex

I want to be a cop: When looking for inspiration for clever web design that puts people and their stories at the foreground I immediately think of Coca Cola and their new(ish) site. Seriously. Google ‘corporate website story telling’ and whole first page is nothing but links to articles about Coke’s page. So when @davidjstocks emailed me a link to the Milwaukee Police’s website, I was a bit surprised. But within about 5 minutes I was looking for how to become a US citizen and sign up to join the men and women in blue. The site uses some of the slickest combination of parallax scrolling and floating navigation I have ever seen alongside gripping photography and a fantastic arrangement of infographic type visuals to convey the PDs story. Well worth a visit.

Source: Milwaukee Police

On Twitter? Don’t break the law: An overview of some court cases that suggest that ordinary social media users need to have a grasp of media law to make sure they stay out of trouble (HT @a_little_wine)

Videos of the week: Samsung are working with Tim Burton on a new flick about the ‘Unicorn Apocalypse’;

Nike combined GPS data, maps and Facebook to drive their ‘Run Like Me’ campaign (it’s from Nike Japan, so it’s especially mental);

and Heineken conduct probably the best intern interview process I have ever seen!

And finally: Ever been to Starbucks and they totally mess up your name when they write it on your cup? You’ll love this (HT @stangreenan).

Hacking Burger King, social content and this week’s bits and bytes

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It’s finally happened. The awesome colleagues in Sainsbury’s Washington have pulled off a great version of the current Harlem Shake craze. Even better: it’s for Red Nose Day so watch it and donate!

The advertising campaign is dead – A must read article in the Harvard Business Review about how the campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction. The Oreo moment at this year’s Superbowl is seen as just another reason why advertisers should act more like newsrooms, reacting to current events not only in real-time but with useful and appealing content. What to do? Create just the right piece of content at the right moment by bringing the day’s zeitgeist together with your brand ethos and your audience’s expectations.

Memories and brands – A fantastic and inspiring report by Franck Sarrazit, Global Director of TNS’s Brand & Communications practice about how we make memories and what that means for brands.

Bang with Friends – Remember the scene in ‘The Social Network’ where Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg hot-flipflops it back to his dorm to add the ‘Relationship status’ field to Facebook profile pages after realising that in real life, there’s no easy way to see if someone is available or not? Well, I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but there’s a new Facebook app called ‘Bang with Friends’ that takes things one step further. Boasting to have already generated 100,000 ‘hook ups’, the app allows you go through your friends and mark the ones you’d like to, well, bang. Unlike other Facebook apps, this one works in private, matching friends that have expressed a mutual interest in, you know, banging each other. Once matched, the two prospective friends with benefits are notified by email and go about their business…

Source: Bang with Friends

Meanwhile, people on Facebook are hiring fake girlfriends so that they can change their relationship status to ‘In a relationship’ and make their lives seem romantically complete – even if it’s just virtual. WTF.

Social content that works – An excellent presentation by @JeremyWaite from Adobe about the social media purpose pyramid – or why social media does six things really well: emotional messages (entertain, challenge, inspire) and rational messages (inform, solve, educate). Jeremy notes that understanding what motivates people to share is at the heart of every successful social marketing campaign.

You could argue though that there should be one more element to the social media purpose pyramid, one that LinkedIn capitalised on these last few weeks. Social media provide you the perfect platform to brag about how great you are. A simple enough email then from LinkedIn to their users congratulating them that they are one of the most viewed profiles on the network. That ego boost was gratefully accepted and shared by many LinkedIn users, resulting in over 80,000 tweets mentioning individual greatness. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the LinkedIn email campaign (HT @tomparker81).

The King is hacked – Another week, another Twitter disaster. This week it was Burger King’s account that got hacked (apparently their password was ‘Whopper123’) and while it did get them 30,000 new followers in one day, it probably wasn’t worth the hassle/brand damage. Of all the many articles, Gizmodo probably has the best summary, including the wonderfully smug tweet from McDonald’s saying they had nothing to do with the hack. The lesson is clear: use a strong password, change it regularly and don’t use the same password for all your accounts.

How to create a strong password? XKCD has the answer.

Source: xkcd

A quick side note on hacking – this interview on the BBC with Jeff Jarvis was supposed to feed into the usual media panic of ‘oh my God, we’re all getting hacked’. It doesn’t quite go to plan. You can almost hear the Facebook PR team cheering in the background…

Also: is the Beeb really that precious that it feels it needs to cut an interview short because the interviewee has used such vitriolic insults as “crap” and “BS”?

Creative CVs – Could you get your whole CV across in 6 seconds? Aspiring journalist Dawn Siff has published her CV on Vine. Other recent advances in CV formatting have brought us Philippe Dubost’s Amazon page and Sonya William’s eBay page. Meanwhile, Enterasys – a wireless network provider – is considering applicants for a six-figure senior social media position, but no paper résumés will be accepted. Instead, the company has decided to recruit solely via Twitter.

And finally: You had one job.

Facebook’s Graph Search and this week’s bits and bytes

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Using the example of the horrific helicopter crash in London this week, the Guardian looks at how traditional news outlets and broadcasters now use social media and photos posted to Twitter to cover the news – and what implications that has for image copyright: In the past, such material was called user-generated content, or citizen journalism. Now it’s just Twitter and everyone should be aware of the rules of engagement.

The National Retail Federation conference took place in New York this week and Reuters has been very taken by ‘smart screens’ that (a la Minority Report) know who is looking at them and display targeted information from ads to deals or their online shopping basket. Forbes focused on what eight retail CEOs have planned for 2013. Good news: Omni-channel and mobile are here to stay.

With their Track My Macca’s app, McDonalds really hit the nail on the head this week. The app tracks the ingredients in the food you just bought through some nifty use of augmented reality, geo-location and time information – basically allowing you to plug in directly to McDonald’s supply chain data. Social media integration allows you to share the burger you just ate and tracked on Facebook. You can download it from the app store here although I doubt it works outside of Oz (HT to @TaraSThompson).

Twitter released a report this week showcasing the tweeting habits of people while they watch television in the U.K. Why is Twitter important for TV? Well, if you’ve been reading my weekly bits and bytes, you’ll have read about ‘second screening’. Here are some stats to help you understand why the two go together like fish and chips: 60% percent of the U.K.’s 10 million active users tweet while watching a television program and 40% percent of all tweets mention TV in some form. Download TV Twitter Book ‘Tune in with Twitter’. It’s free.

It was all about Facebook this week: they launched their version of Skype/Face-Time but the big news was all about the launch of the ever so creepy ‘Graph Search’ to take on Google. At first, it will allow you to search people, places, photos and interests – before spreading to every bit of information on the network. So for example, rather than search for a Chinese restaurant in London, you could now search for a Chinese restaurant in London that your Chinese friends who live in London like. Mashable has used the Graph Search and learnt, for example, that Google employees like Pink Floyd, while – slightly more seriously, USA today looked at how businesses can use Graph Search to their advantage. Me personally? I think this is yet another reason to make sure you regularly spend time learning the new Facebook privacy settings, think twice about what information you share and remember that on any free platform such as Facebook, you are the product.

Oh yeah. MySpace finally relaunched. With a little help from Justin Timberlake and his new single. Which is horrible and why I don’t have more to say about the new MySpace.

Don’t call an iPad a mobile device. Stats from comScore show that 90% of iPad use happens in your own home, 40% in public locations (most likely café’s and on trains and around 30% at work. Or as Business Insider puts it: they’re home PCs that are a little easier to carry around.

A great spot from @a_little_wine: Helen McGinn, a former Tesco wine buyer quit London to live in the New Forest and turned a weekly email to friends on wine suggestions into an award-winning blog Knackered Mothers Wine Club. Red Online spoke to her about how it happened and Helen’s tips for blogging.

An impressive/mind-boggling look back at 2012 by Pingdom: How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? Find out on their blog.

And finally: The White House responds to a petition on its website to build the Death Star (HT @tomparker81 and all of the world’s Star Wars geeks).

Weather permitting, I will be in Philly next week. I might or might not pull together these here bits and bytes. I do however, plan to eat many Cheese Steaks.