Control The Communication Bubble.

How Google Wave Will Change Social Media…

How Google Wave Will Change Social Media…

Google Wave is a new web 2.0 platform that was developed around the question, “If e-mail were to be created today (and not decades ago!) what would it look like?” As we know, the Internet has changed from static to dynamic and it now focuses on communities and user-generated content than the archaic one-way communication model – but, e-mail really hasn’t evolved over the years to adjust with these changes. Google Wave is going to change all of that!

Put simply, Google Wave is a communication platform that allows collaboration on the web. It’s equal parts conversation and document. It includes chat, real time social network management, real-time conversation editing – heck, you can even go back in time. But, most importantly, Google Wave can be used as a tool to keep track of every conversation you are a part of online, allowing you to interact on multiple platforms all from one single interface (I posted a link to the Google Wave informational video below 1:20:00 long at the end of this post if you’re interested to see how else Google Wave can be used).

How many times have you left a comment on a blog or forum and kept having to go back to check to see if someone commented back? If you, like many of us, are highly active on blogs and forums, it can seem like an impossible mission. Now, imagine that you leave a comment on a blog or forum using your Google Wave account. Anytime that someone comments back, it will show up in your inbox, and you can reply back within your email platform and it will show up on the blog in real-time.

Another useful feature of Google Wave is its ability to control and manage your blog in real-time. Let’s say that your friend John sends you photographs of an event that you attended with him to your wave account. You can drag and drop those pictures into a new wave, add text and a description and select “Publish” … and, guess what? You just made a blog post. This can be really helpful to generate blog posts if a friend sends you an interesting article or information about an upcoming event that you are going to attend, or if you and your friend have had a funny real-time conversation in Google Wave that you want to share with your community. You can edit the conversation just as you would a general word document – adding or removing whatever content you want. You can even edit your blog posts in real-time within Google Wave. And, the great news is that the cycle continues when using Google Wave. Because it is a communication platform you can take the same blog post that you just made, email it to friends, text it to your bff, or upload it to Twitter or Facebook and comment back to respondents in real-time within the same platform.    

This is an extremely powerful tool that, in my highest opinion, will take the already social web and make it hyper-social. I look at this and I think that Google Wave will help us to control the conversations that we have online and will help to bring cohesion to a fragmented social world. In turn, this will initiate more people to become even more active in the ever-increasing social web. I would not say this about Google Wave if it were being done by any other company other than Google. Currently, there are 146 million monthly Gmail users, who have been already semi-prepped to transition to Google Wave with its “conversation view” thread model. And, with an open API for programmers to create more useful tools using Google Wave, they’ll bring more functionality than I think even Google anticipates.

As the popular saying goes: the future belongs to those who make it – and, Google is doing one heck of a job!

To learn more about social media marketing, please visit SocialSurge Interactive.

“Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” film marketing

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince film marketing

New York, NY – July 14, 2009 – Have you seen the front page of Youtube? Did you hear about the MySpace black curtain, free screening of “Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince” film in Australia yesterday? No, well, check out the main page of Myspace tomorrow and you won’t be able to miss the “In Theaters Today” advertisement splashed across the page! Have you looked at the home channel at YouTube? How about a glimpse at the advertisements to the right of your Facebook account?

That’s right, folks, it’s that time of year again: Harry Potter mania; and, it comes about every year or so with as much marketing power behind it as Christmas! And, while I could go through every nook and cranny of the “Harry Potter a the Half-Blood Prince” marketing cycle, for the sake of time and my fingertips, this is limited to social media marketing, particularly Twitter and Youtube, and how they are leveraging these social media spaces to push the new film release to draw in another worldwide record.

The past five “Harry Potter” films have grossed almost $4.5 billion in world-wide box-office revenue, making the franchise one of the biggest in history – and, with over a year and a half marketing run for the “Harry Potter and the Half-blood Price” film release, they are sure to have one of their greatest successes yet.

For Youtube

Aside from usual movie trailer releases, teasers, behind-the-scenes footage, and cast and crew interviews, they have created an “Advanced Potion Making Experience” contest, which allows anyone to become a Hogwarts potion maker and compete for the best video.

The contest asks viewers to create their own unique potion-making video, and fans have two options to make it happen. They can 1) use the 3D Experience to integrate a provided augmented reality element—a specially designed reproduction—that will magically create a 3D cauldron to instantly appear on their computer screens, or; 2) they can use a pot that they have at home (for those who have trouble with technology).

For Twitter

Starting Tuesday, July 14 at 9:45 am (yes, that’s right, today!) and going until Wednesday July 15 at 9:45 pm, Harry Potter fans are going on a thirty-six hour stretch of getting #dumbledore tweeted as much as possible by people across the world. The goal: to take over Twitter for a day.

The site for the Harry Potter Alliance is asking fans:

“Before you go into the movie or at any point on Tuesday before you go into the movie EVERYONE Tweet: About to see Harry Potter – in honor of #dumbledore we’re taking over Twitter http://whatwoulddumbledoredo.org”

And, right after they walk out of the film they’re suppose to tweet:

“Just saw Harry Potter – in honor of #dumbledore we’re taking over Twitter http:// whatwoulddumbledoredo.org”

Beyond that, any time that a Harry Potter fan tweets about anything, they ask that they to include #Dumbledore and to try to mention the words “Harry Potter” in there, too.

Check out their success at #dumbledore on Twitter.

New feature on Tumblr

Tumblr new feature: Community-powered blogging

New York, NY – July 13, 2009 — Tumblr launched a new feature earlier this week, community blogging, that allows publishers to enable submissions from readers.

With this new feature, you can set-up a photo blog about your favorite celebrity, a recipe blog for authentic Italian food, or for funny Youtube videos, and enable submissions on the Customize page – and soon you’ll have content pouring in from the good ol’ WWW. Now that’s community-powered blogging!

This development is an interesting turn in the blogosphere… Tumblr is not the first to do this, but it is the largest. If Tumblr has a lot of success with their community-driven blogging tool, blogging in the future may very well become an actual collaborative event without borders… Talk about content generation!

Related Article: Learn about how other companies have utilized social media marketing to increase traffic and brand awareness, or visit SocialSurge Interactive to learn more.

Top Social Media Campaigns

1. Skittles- Skittles is the first brand to redirect their homepage to Twitter’s search page for the term “Skittles. There are several other navigational features that Skittles has added to point users to other social media outlets such as YouTube and Facebook.

2. Ford Fiesta- Ford gave away 100 cars to top internet bloggers and vloggers for a 6 month social media campaign.  The lucky agents will go on monthly missions and upload their videos to fiestamovement.com

3. Burger King- The site, at subservientchicken.com, features a chicken-suit-garbed human embodying the classic BK tagline, “Have it your way.” In a nod to adult “cam” sites, users type in commands and the bird obeys. Visitors are eating it up — and, Burger King hopes, consuming large quantities of its TenderCrisp chicken sandwich as well. The site is part of an integrated campaign for the new product.

4. Tweet to Save Dollhouse Petition – Fox may be canceling Dollhouse.  Buddytv.com put together an online campaign to try and save the show.  They asked the internet world to tweet the following: Support Joss: Save Dollhouse. Fans get their voices heard @BuddyTV http://tinyurl.com/SaveDollhouse Please ReTweet and join the cause.