Periodic Table of Social Media Elements Reminds You to Optimze Your Social Media Plan

Rick Liebling has created a Period Table of Social Elements on eyecube that made me get thinking on brands use of social media. I included the image below, and the key can be found in the original post on eyecube.


In his words: Social Media really is a lot like chemistry. There is a huge pool of elements you can choose from and an infinite variety of combinations you can create. Twitter + sharing + commenting will give you a different result than blogging + LinkedIn + Flickr. Then of course there are the active ingredients - the people. A dash of Chris Brogan plus a big helping of David Armano and the whole thing changes again.

Often we are approached by brands and clients saying "I want a Twitter strategy" or "I want to be on Facebook." But not every brand that succeeds on Twitter will succeed on Facebook. @Comcastcares uses Twitter as a tool, but can you find a successful Comcast effort anywhere on MySpace?

As agencies, we need to find the right mix of social elements, and when appropriate, the right hyper-connected people to work with or learn from, to deliver the best possible Social Media Mix to our clients.

This gives a great image of all the different options in a quick-get way of understanding the mixing and matching capabilities of all-things social. You blow up a balloon with CO2 and it sits on the floor. Inflate it with helium and it floats.

Politics 2.0: Sex Ads in Denver Up During DNC

Timeless behavior, perhaps, but now enabled and amplified by social media - CNet says: Sex Ads in Denver Up During DNC

"Ads seeking casual sexual encounters through the Denver Craigslist site increased an average of roughly 70 percent to 80 percent over the same days of the week earlier in August."

The general content is what you might expect. Posts suggested "Here 4 DNC? Come get sexual with me"; "Does the DNC make you hot?"; and "Looking to service a young Democrat."


And CNet offers this fair disclaimer: "mere correlation does not imply causation - other factors could explain this rise in advertisements." True, indeed. And I would also add to this disclaimer that increased ad spending doesn't necessarily mean increased sales resulted, either. Advertisers could, perhaps, have been pitching to an indifferent target base who were far too busy to care. If anyone has ROI research data on this feel free to post your charts. Will keep eyes peeled for RNC comparisons.

via Adlab

Community 2.0: Hurricane Gustav Information Center

A collective assembly of Gustav Information. Using Ning platform, the site aggregates content from a variety of social media resources, including; Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz, Technorati, etc.- all you have to do is tag the item gustav.



*Hopefully, this will be a merely academic exercise in pre-caution.

via Social Media Club

Leave Twitter ALONE!!!

Imagine that title in the voice of the weird dude from the Brittany video...

YouTube choose your own adventure

Online video has quickly become the most popular and mainstream form of social media participation. But as it becomes more mainstream, what ideas have surfaced to make video more interesting? Sure, sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, etc continue to spring up, but the videos themselves have remained rather one-side broadcastish.

Until now.



Choose your own adventure (nostalgic of the book series popular when I was in elementary school) utilizes the video response system in YouTube to make online video into a game of sorts. You have to go to the actual site to be able to use it, but the embed will give you an idea.

This particular adventure is about some guy trying to find his cat. I spent awhile searching and thought i had exhausted all of my options in order to find the feline. Apparently I was wrong and never found kitty. Maybe you will be more successful.

What the F**K is social media?

Found this great slide show on Blog de Nuit today. It's a very simple presentation about what social media is and what it means for brands.

For those social network connoisseurs out there, it probably won't say anything new. But I appreciate the simplicity and clarity. Reminds me a bit of the CommonCraft vids about Twitter and LinkedIN


My favorite quote from the presentation:


"Relinquish control: The goal is not to control the conversation."

| View | Upload your own

via Blog de Nuit

Social Wars

Current TV's amusing commentary on the state of social networks.

Fallon Brainfood: The Social 10 Redux

10 Things Marketers Should Know About Social Networking.

On March 26th, 2008, Aki Spicer, strategic planner at Fallon Worldwide, conducted a presentation about social media, using social media, live, across a mashup of social web touchpoints including Fallon Planning Blog on Blogger, Yahoo! Live, NetVibes, Plannersphere on Ning, and Facebook. View the accompanying slides at Slideshare or download the pdf directly to your desktop at Dropio.

Below is the recorded videos (1,2,and 3) and slideshow links of the presentation in case you missed it live on the web:

| View | Upload your own

What is Brainfood?
Brainfood is a monthly all-agency lunch conducted by Fallon Planners. Wide-ranging topics explore trends, business issues, and actionable opportunities for our brands. Moreover, Brainfood offers us a chance to come together, share a beer and some pizza, and engage in a stimulating discussion on a variety of interesting topics that affect our business. Previous topics have included Virtuality, China Rising, Design For All with more stimulating editions still to come.

Fallon Brainfood: The Social 10

10 Things Marketers Should Know About Social Networking.

This will be a live event/webcast presentation about social media, using social media!

You're invited to a one hour presentation that will explore ten trends affecting marketers who are considering entering the burgeoning social networking space - what's now, what's next, and what other brands like yours are already doing.

Join Fallon strategic planner Aki Spicer on Wednesday March 26, 12pm CST/1pm EST/10am PST, in person (for Fallon employees) or on the social web (for everyone else) for this worldwide first, and the latest in an ongoing series of monthly Brainfood presentations to the agency.




How do you attend this social?
For Fallon employees, come on down to 27Rotunda and you can see the presentation live (lunch provided).

For everyone else, it's an open social on the web (lunch not provided)! Attend Aki's presentation (slideshow, live sound and video) on your choice of a range of social web touchpoints including Fallon Planning Blog on Blogger, Yahoo! Live (sound and video only), NetVibes, Plannersphere on Ning, Slideshare (slides only), and Facebook.


*Don't worry, specific links will be forthcoming on day of the event, you will not have to download or learn any new or complicated technology to participate, I promise.

**Social web attendees will be able to talk/text questions via Yahoo! Live and AIM.


What is Brainfood?
Brainfood is a monthly all-agency lunch conducted by Fallon Planners. Wide-ranging topics explore trends, business issues, and actionable opportunities for our brands. Moreover, Brainfood offers us a chance to come together, share a beer and some pizza, and engage in a stimulating discussion on a variety of interesting topics that affect our business. Previous topics have included Virtuality, China Rising, Design For All with more stimulating editions still to come.

Twitter in plain english

Another smart clip from the guys at Common Craft.

Check here and here for some other great examples.

Guilty Pleasure: Tay Zonday Crashes Into Weird

The latest from our favorite internet celebrity.

This is a little nuts...even for him. Hard to decide whether he intentionally dialed up the craziness/oddness factor or this is just genuine Tay. Either way, good for some renewed water cooler chat and more hype for the everyday celebrity- brought to you by YouTube.

Politics 2.0: John McCain- Kinda Like Hope...

...but not

Politics 2.0: Barely Political Takes On Ann Coulter

Want to be perfected? Look to Ann Coulter.



The funniest part is how little the peeps at BP actually have to try in order to portray Coulter as quite the extremist. But frightening to me is how many people in this country listen to and actually approve of what she has to say. One of her more recent books has nearly a thousand customer reviews on Amazon, with close to 600 giving her 4 stars or more...wow.

The Whopper Freakout

This is genius.

(and in response to Seth's comments, I guess I'm doing my best to respect the Media Snacker).

Social Marketing: Tay Zonday and Dr Pepper

Looks like Dr. Pepper has tapped the star power of Tay Zonday to help promote it's Diet Cherry Chocolate soda...

The appeal of Tay continues to amaze me. When Chocolate Rain first came out I thought most people would tire out on him pretty quickly. But I find myself checking his YouTube channel weekly waiting for the latest video to drop, and continue to be entertained every time. This latest clip- posted yesterday- has already racked up +206,000 hits, so guess I'm not alone.

I particularly love this line in his intro: "The is the Web, and its gonna murder your TV"

Get some of that Cherry Chocolate Rain.

Imitation is the Highest Form of Flattery

Our boys over at Fallon London must be enjoying this. The much talked about Cadbury's Gorilla spot latest spoof comes from Wonderbra. Peep both below, judge for your self.

Cadbury original:



Wonderbra spoof:

Brave New Media: How Facebook Users Spend Their Time

Compete.com blog discusses "how Facebook users spend their time".

Not unsurprisingly, people spend most of their time browsing profiles, but using applications is getting up there in terms of number of users, and the time spent is almost as long.

And speaking of Facebook Apps...Compete data show that Facebook activity grew 32% from May to August, 2007, with more than a third of the growth coming from the new applications.


And furthermore...O'Reilly released a report The Facebook Application Platform and it has good and bad news. Good: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. Bad news: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. "This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head."

Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep:


Doh! Tim O'Reilly says: "This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism."

via O'Reilly Radar and Compete.com Blog

Virtuality: Social Media in 3D

Caught a post over on adverblog about the launch of a new social networking site for your virtual self, Koinup. The site allows you to connect all of your virtual world experiences in one network- your activities from Second Life, World of Warcraft, The Sims all in one location, where you can post content of your adventures (video of a recent SL trip for example) and browse through the virtual lives of the sites other members.

This brings an interesting new layer to all of the talk around virtual worlds. KoinUp elevates the discussion above "worlds" and highlights the trend that our online activity is increasingly becoming virtual, so much so that we now need a social web to bring together all of the virtual identities that define us in the digital space.

I just came across this (thanks Aki) and while interested, still haven't quite decided where I see this going and how "big" it may be. Any readers out there more familiar and care to weigh in? For those of you in virtual worlds, do you see yourself social networking your virtual identities? Are you so dedicated that, in addition to maintaining Facebook, MySpace, and your other real world social webs that you would start a virtual side?

Politics 2.0: Barack 2.0, Again

Sen. Barack Obama is now on LinkedIn. And not with lame banner ads. Obama has been making the most of Web 2.0, launching his own social network, gaining a larger-than-life presence on MySpace, YouTube, and even Twitter.

Social Media: This One Time, When I Googled Myself...

On a random curious tangent during an otherwise productive (hm...for the most part) day, decided to Google my name and see what popped up. Before I started at Fallon, I remember doing this same search and, while I expected the result, was disappointed that it returned nothing. While I'm no Aki Spicer (my paltry 52 web hits is childs' play), I'm doing a bit better than I once was.


Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace...whatever. All of this social media comes up in conversations all the time, and I for one often take for granted the impact all of it has because it's such a natural part of my everyday life. I check Facebook multiple times a day, and barely think twice about how amazing it is that I'm able to stay tapped into friends lives who otherwise I would've lost all connections to.

But as I scrolled through my Google search results, I quickly realized that without social networks, my name would fall into the category of "having no documents matched this search." And while this may be due to my age and level of experience, I wonder what a similar search reveals for the rest of you.

And I don't think it's really a bad thing. For one, I know that all of the superficial Google results on me were, in some way, influenced by me, so there's no surprises. That's not to say that someday, I wouldn't like to have some quotes from big shot sources to my credit (AdAge, still waiting for that phone call).

In the interim though, just happy that I'm Google worthy.