The trend is my friend

I know. This girl isn’t really competing with real actresses…yet. But in 10-15 years time, powerful computers, 3D software as easy as textpad and downloadable models with different voices to go will become the must have tools for every Art Director out there who is looking to fulfil his/her new idea for a TV commercial.

Oh, forgot. There won’t be any TV commercials.

So, you’re into communication and you know you have to at least try some social media activities in order to be on track with your competitors. You meet up with your consultants who says Facebook is the shit…ah mean Myspace…eh, LinkedIn…nooo Twitter…maybe…

You get it.

It’s a jungle out there and planning has taken on a more technical shape than ever. Stats, functionality, API’s, RSS and more. You grab your machete and go head on all those buzzwords. But once you come out the other side you might have been ripped of.

Well. Pingdom, a Swedish site who’s focus lies on covering the uptime monitoring needs of 90% of the companies in the world posted a great little survey today about ‘Social network popularity around the world’.

The social networks included the survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.

The Pingdom guys used Google Insights for Search. The G Insights makes this quite easy for you. For a search term (for example “MySpace”), it will highlight the regions where that search term is the most popular. Google calls this “regional interest”. This “regional interest” gives a good indication of which regions (in this case countries) a social network is most popular in. Google also provides a nice heat map of the results (like the one on top of this post)

Some of the key findings were:

• Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
• Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
• LinkedIn is most popular in India.
• Twitter is most popular in Japan.
• LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.
• Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States.
• MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
• MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.

So, head over to Pingdom and get some ammunition until the next time your advisors tell you which social network to use.

ps. Should you use social networks at all? Hell yes!

Right now people all over the world tune into Eurocup 08 in Switzerland/Austria. I live in Sweden, so TV4 and Canal+ are the channels of my choice since they are the ones holding the rights to the show. They paid a shitload of money for it.

This will not be the case in Eurocup 2012 when the event is held in Poland. Then I’ll turn into Socialtelevision.com where the TV is a result of Social Broadcasting edited live online by it’s users for it’s users.

Let me tell you about Social Television

The community

I guess you’ve seen that Apple launched their new 3G iPhone the other day.  The new phone got GPS, Video-camera, 3G connection and a browser that follows web-standards.

  Imagine now that we launch a site called Socialtelevision.com (or YouTube Live) that let’s any signed up user upload video streams, much like the ones we see on YahooLive or Bambuser for that matter. On the site, users can now sign up as plain users, producers, broadcasters, editors or commentators. When an event comes up,  say Eurocup 2012’, basically users express their interest to become part of the broadcasting of the event and take on different roles.

Kick off the game

It’s match day. On the stands 247 SocialTV users turn on their iPhones and connect to socialtelevision.com. On the site, 19 pro editors collaborate by social voting to decide how the broadcasting of the event will be edited. Through the built in GPS, it’s easy to understand which camera can cover what. A free kick is coming up and users positioned behind the goal all get the order “close up on Zlatan Ibrahimovic”.

  By using the dynamic circle tool integrated with Google Map, the editor in lead (by voting) draws a circle around the left corner of the field and sends out the order “focus on corner kicker” This results in another 24 cameras covering the kicker.

  Through the integrated motion sensor the editor automatically get the most stabile shot of the situations (if he doesn’t override it). The cameramen on site get Kudos (rating) depending on how much their specific coverage of the event is used. 

Access to all areas

90 minutes later the whistle blows and the first ever Live SocialTV event is a fact. Aware of his most loyal fans, Zlatan avoids the “paying” media crowd and approaches the side of the field.

  36 SocialTV “cameramen” cover the interview performed by a SocialTV journalist who has received a Titanum Status on socialtelevision.com. The questions asked by millions online and decided upon by social voting are delivered in his right ear. The interview ends after Zlatan draws his autograph on the iPhone, the touch screen senses the pressure and the result is a unique date-stamped autograph with information about Zlatan’s pulse among other things.

Just like ordinary TV but different

At home, me and my family eat up the last snacks on the table. My youngest daughter (almost 5 year old in 2012) is eager to show her friends Zlatans “time-stamped autograph”.

  Next week Disney On Ice turns up in Stockholm, and she is already signed up to cover the story. Her best friend will cover the back stage scene where Poh, Tiger and the rest of the crew hangs out.

The old generation…

In boardrooms of TV networks all over the world, directors asks themselves…what are we gonna make money on now? (or maybe they are the founders of SocialTV…but that would have to call for some innovative digital thinking, something they still lack)

The end

Is there such a thing as Social Television? No. But I truly believe that there will be within the next couple of years and it will change the business of broadcasting rights forever. Social TV will change all kinds of events there are.

Feel free to steal the idea and challenge the dinosaurs.

As fresh as it comes.

Apple already published lot’s of info on the iPhone 3G.

Let me tell you about our latest campaign for Stadium. This fall we were challenged by Stadium (Sweden largest sports retailer) to create an online campaign for the Swedish championships in Football Freestyle. 

This project is extra dear to me as Stadium really listened and we got them to try social media in the way I think it should be used.

The brief was to create an online plattform where kids could view movies from the events around Sweden and then upload their own movie to compete in a web based competition aside from the ones taking place offline.

Our solution was to create a Wordpress based website with all the plugins you should stick in there to gain maximum SEO performance. We then used a YouTube channel to host the videos instead of putting them on Stadium’s servers. Flickr provided us with the gallery functionality. A Facebook group was dynamically updated as the competition went along. Last but not least we set up a Yahoo Live account for Stadium where they could broadcast all the events live online.

The result was a cost effective campaign that was spread far outside the website itself. Stadium didn’t put any money into media but thanks to social media the campaign found it’s way outside their own domains. A cool thing was to see kids commenting the campaign in the online place of their choice…not one single site. The fact that a movie published on the site was shown in 2 more place that ultimately lead to 3-10 times more viewers was a great result.

I look forward to try something like this again with support of external media investments and integration into traditional media would most definitely create a great effect.

Met a guy today that said: “iPhone is kind of overrated, it’s just like another mobile but not as good”

What he and a lot of other people don´t understand that it’s not about the phone, it’s about the open platform, the touchscreen and motion sensor. This is a cool example of both of them. Combined with geolocation it sort of kicks ass. When 3G is a fact - then nothing competes (that we know of today).

Techcrunch pointed me in the right direction.

A couple of weeks back I was invited to give a speech at the European Snowboard Industry Forum in Livigno.

Back in the end of the 80´s and beginning of the 90´s I was a member of the Swedish National Team in snowboarding. In these days snowboarding was still a underground thing that gathered a bunch of surfers, skaters and skiers. There was a sense of being part of something special that was about to get big.
  The cool thing with going to Livigno this year was that a lot of the guys I used to meet in the World Cup had stayed in the business. So, once we all gathered in the bar it felt like I had flown back in time 17 years.

Anyway, the presentation I held was appreciated so I though I’d share it with my blog-followers.

  

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I’m working on a presentation about digital marketing and as I’m gathering information on Barack Obama’s great digital campaign activities I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page about Mr Obama. And DAMN, these PR guys of his has done a great job of filling this page with information.

I used Paparazzi (note, a little software tip here) to take a screenshot of the full page and WOW, it’s a freakin 15,4 meters tall. That must be some kind of record?

Hmm, I didn’t read much of it but I bet Obama turns of here and there in the search engines.

(I’m not taking a political stand here)

A while back I posted an open question asking for an application that could provide me with mixed RSS feeds. Well, now Yahoo has launched an ultra cool tool called Yahoo Pipes.

Pipes is basically a powerful tool that allows you to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from anywhere around the web. What really stands out is the posibility to sort, filter and aggregate whatever you want and feed it wherever you need.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

- Combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
- Geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- Power widgets/badges on your web site.
- Grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

This cool new feature clearly states that in the future the everyday user will be able to create whatever they want without any kind of technical expertise. Ideas will prosper - and technology will be provided by the big guys.

This is the shit (as my good friend Paul the copywriter once told me)

Build your Pipes here.

I’ll start of with me. I’m off on holiday for a week. So don’t expect any posts the next couple of days.

12 things about iPhone.
ReadWriteWeb got a great post on 12 future apps for your iPhone. It’s a great read and certenaly gives you a good idea why iPhone is changing the mobile world faster than any other phone.
Read it!

See you soon.
Johan

ps. Registered an account on FriendFeed.

Apple announched that there will be support for Microsoft Exchange in iPhone anytime soon.

Good news for Apple…and Microsoft!