This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Bandize

Quick Pitch: Online DIY organization and management business tools for musicians, bands, band managers and record labels.

Genius Idea: Bandize, which will be unveiled at South By Southwest, is an idea so sharp that you’re likely to wonder why it hasn’t already been done. And to some extent, it has; many of its features have appeared in web or desktop apps before, but not in such a complete and cohesive package.

Managing an independent music act (like, say, a punk rock band) is like owning a small business. Bandize helps managers and band members collaborate on all the critical data related to their work, from merchandise sales to event schedules to important contact information.

If you already know the world of online workplace collaboration tools, think of it as a Basecamp or Backpack for bands. Tasks can be assigned to band members and you can track their productivity to make sure every one is pulling his or her weight. And if someone pitches in a little extra — like if he or she lends the band some money for gas — you can keep track of that and make sure that person is compensated.

The obvious features are all here, of course. You can schedule tour dates and track how much money you’ve made with merchandise sales. But one feature that sets Bandize apart is the ability to track how well each piece of merchandise is selling at each venue. You can see if one T-shirt tends to be more popular than another when your band plays in Austin so you can plan to bring more of that same merch the next time you have a date there.

You can also use Bandize to manage your contacts. If someone is associated with a particular venue, you can tag him or her with that venue, and when you print out day sheets at each venue, his or her contact info will be included. If you already have a lot of contacts, you can import them from various sources like Outlook, Google Contacts or a vcard. There are a bunch of other smaller features like poster printing, file storage, and more accounting and contact management tools.

Bandize is currently in beta testing, and you can get a 30-day trial for your band right now. After the trial, it will cost $15 each month.

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: bandize, bizspark, music, startups

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, and Twitter with others to explore living wisely in our modern age. Mashable readers can use code ‘Mashable‘ for a discount when registering.

In the era of social media, our networks are much larger than they have ever been, and we have more ways to communicate with those in them. Even if you are not very active on Facebook or Twitter, my guess is that your sphere of communication has expanded significantly in recent years. Who you communicate with and how you communicate has changed radically. This new connected era brings both opportunities and challenges.

In the past we had a set of contacts, all of whom generally knew how to reach us — via phone, e-mail, or regular mail. Today, thanks in large part to social media, we have many different levels of communication, each with a specific purpose and etiquette. When we do not understand the role of these levels, they can become huge time wasters. When we do understand them however, they can help us more effectively engage and navigate these new waters.

Just about everyone, including Bill Gates (who if you have not heard, recently joined Twitter), has learned the importance of having both a means to communicate with people, and a channel where people can respond. Though you can do this on Facebook through comments on Fan pages and in groups, this seems most applicable to Twitter, where people use @replies to send and receive short, publicly viewable messages.

The public reply provides an open and transparent channel for people to interact with public figures, brands, and each other, without the pressure of response that comes with e-mail. Public interactions are a great starting point for engagement that never existed before social media, and if done correctly, can often lead to more fruitful direct communication.

Once a relationship is established through public communication, the next step is often a direct message within a social network. A direct message creates a private connection without opening the floodgates of e-mail. In fact, in may even be preferable to e-mail in the long term.

Why? Especially with Twitter, a DM has a character limit, and can only come from people you follow. If you have ten e-mails (of unlimited length and possibly unknown sources) and ten Twitter DMs, which are you likely to open first? For an increasing number of people, the answer is DM.

Once you make a connection through DM and get permission to follow-up via e-mail, the e-mail is often better received. Facebook, where most people allow private messages, can also be a means to take communication to the next level.

E-mail still has its place in this new era. It allows for more in-depth communication, can be easily forwarded, and sent to numerous people at once. When e-mail is used skillfully, it enables deeper communication. When not used effectively, it can become a huge time drain, as people write lengthy messages without much thought of the time and attention they are asking of recipients.

This fine line makes e-mail tough to master in the social media age. If you’re looking to advance to the next communication level with someone, respect this direct and private channel, and be sure to keep your e-mails succinct and meaningful.

Hearing someone’s voice allows people to get a better sense of one another. While communicating via text, a person can take time to carefully craft his or her words, potentially presenting an image that may not be true or is harder to trust. A phone call allows for more immediate back-and-forth, and can be particularly helpful if a subject matter is delicate or people are considering a more in-depth relationship.

Some time back I was communicating with an editor about an issue that we had bounced back and forth several times. Finally she said, “Let’s chat about it on the phone.” This furthered the dialogue significantly and bypassed what may have taken weeks to sort out via e-mail.

I have met numerous people in person that I first communicated with via social networks. All of these meetings were enhanced by the natural progression of our first digital communication. While at one time face-to-face interactions were the entry point, today, in-person meetings often come at later stages.

Particularly if people are considering working on a project together, an in-person meeting allows for the most in-depth connection. For some people Skype or other video chat may be enough to experience this.

Too often people think communication is only through words, but our bodies communicate as well. They communicate how comfortable or uncomfortable we are discussing a matter, our level of passion for a subject, and our hopes and fears. Meeting with someone in person allows for communication to occur on multiple levels, and people often come away with a much better sense of each other.

In this era of social media when we are reaching out and engaging more and more people, the question is not just “Should I communicate with someone?” but “How should I communicate with someone? How can I build engagement one step at a time?” The more we allow for and understand the importance of all the various levels of communication, the more we can skillfully and effectively use each one.

- Zen and the Art of Twitter: 4 Tips for Productive Tweeting
- The Tao of Tweeting
- How Social Media Has Changed Us
- 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
- 4 Steps for Effective Online Networking

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL, PaulPaladin, Kohlerphoto, sandoclr

Tags: communication, e-mail, email, facebook, List, Lists, meeting, social media, social networking, social networks, twitter

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

Tags: facebook, gmail, Google, trending, twitter

The 2010 Technology Entertainment Design conference will be kicking off tomorrow in Long Beach, California, bringing the leading minds of many fields together to talk shop about innovation, change, and what the future holds.

As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.

Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

What are your favorite TED talks about social media? Which did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: future, List, Lists, social media, social networks, technology, TED, TED Talks, twitter, video

by Jennifer Laycock

Ever notice how when someone finds a solution to a problem they're having, it suddenly becomes the solution to everyone else's problem as well? People who love their chiropractor tell you how much seeing one would help your sore back/sinus problem/shin splints/etc. People who have lost and kept weight off with a specific diet suggest how well it will work for you. People who experience success trying a marketing tactic tell you what a difference it will make for your company if you do it too.

This is fine and dandy. It's called word of mouth and it's a very effective way to influence decisions. The problem comes when the love of the solution supersedes the common sense needed to apply it properly. That chiropractor likely isn't going to fix your blocked heart valve and that special diet probably won't heal your broken ankle. In the same way, we need to remember as search engine marketers that just because something can help search results doesn't make it a good mainstream marketing strategy.

Debra Mastaler pinged me this morning to point out a post that's a good demonstration of a strategic search marketing ideas being pushed past the point of common sense. In a post over at SEOMoz, Rand Fishkin encourages marketers to replace the standard "visit us at domain.com" with "search for "company name" on Google" in their offline ads. His reasoning is that personalized search has now become the default option on engines like Google and driving consumers to the engine to search for and click on your listing is a good way to increase your relevancy in Google's eyes so you'll stand a better chance of ranking for other searches later.

Here's how it would work...

1. Superbowl Ad - A big company, let's say Coke runs a Superbowl ad and closes it with "visit www.google.com and search for "Coke," instead of simply giving consumers the company's URL.
   
2. Consumer Action - Joe Soda drinks the kool-aid...er, I mean cola...and heads to Google after the game. He searches for Coke, which will clearly pop up www.coke.com as a top result, clicks it and visits the site.
   
3. Search Engine Action - Google makes note that Joe Soda clicked through to the coke.com domain and increases the relevancy of that domain for Joe Soda's future searches.
   
4. Consumer Action - Joe Soda is thirsty, but he's tired of all those calories. He heads back to Google to find a new alternative and searches for "no calorie cola made with Splenda." The hope here is that the past search will increase the relevancy for Coke.com enough to increase it's chances of ranking well for that related search.

Now that's fine and dandy in theory and I don't doubt at all that there may be some positive impact by getting a bunch of people to search for and click on your domain name.

But Here's the Big Gaping Hole in this Theory

You've just increased the barrier for your consumer and you've done it to benefit your own search rankings.

What I mean by that is you've made the consumer take an extra step to find your site and your product. You could have simply told them to visit you at www.coke.com but no, you got greedy. You knew it would be a benefit to your company's search rankings to make them take that extra step to actually FIND you. It has nothing to do with what's best or easy or convenient for the consumer, it has everything to do with your search engine optimization efforts.

Now let's take a little detour into conversion optimization 101.

Less steps = more success.

It's a very simple equation. Let's look at it again...

Less steps = more success.

That's right folks, the LESS things you ask a customer to do, the more likely they are to do it.

Now clearly we live in an enlightened enough world that most people can guess www.coke.com even if Coke is brazen enough to hide that info and direct users to go run a search instead. But what if you aren't a big brand name like Coke? What if you're a little beauty salon called Curl Up and Dye in Wisconsin? Are you really going to tell your customers to go and search for you in your TV, radio and newspaper ads? Heck no, you're going to give them your URL and phone number to make it as easy as possible for them to find you. Otherwise, they're going to go find someone else.

Optimize Your Own Dang Site

It's not the job of consumers to optimize our web sites. It's not their job to take on MORE work in their daily activities so we stand a better chance of showing up for related searches down the road. Now I'm not saying there aren't innovative ways to impact these things. A great example of this is a comment on the original post saying they've sent out direct mail pieces with specific instructions to search for a discount. This gives the customer something of value in exchange for their extra work and still offers the benefits of the original idea.

The problem I see repeatedly is a severe case of cranial rectal inversion. Our industry spends so much time talking algorithms and social sites and deep links and site wide links and blah blah blah that we forget to see things from the perspective of the everyday consumer. The average American watching the Superbowl doesn't have the Google toolbar installed. They have no idea what Google Chrome or Google Wave are and they don't know personalized search results are even being delivered to them. They just want to get to the information they want and need the fastest way possible. They don't know, nor do they care, about the inner workings or latest and greatest features offered in the world of search.

So whether you're part of the industry or you're a small business owner, I'd ask you to remember to place common sense at the top of your marketing strategy arsenal. Stop thinking about what will benefit you or your rankings and start asking yourself in all honesty if this approach is going to benefit your users. If the answer is no, you need to move on to a new idea.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Last September, Google launched Sidewiki, a web annotation service that makes it easy to annotate any page on the Internet. Sidewiki, however, hasn't attracted a lot of users yet and the public discussion about online content continues to happen in comments and on Twitter.

Sponsor

Sadly, Twitter Reactions doesn't apply any filters to the tweets it displays, so you often end up with long lists of retweeted links. Twitter Reactions uses the BackTweets API to aggregate messages. The extension would be even more useful if it used a service like BackType, which does a good job at filtering out the most boring tweets.

Unlike similar projects like Sidewiki Arc90's TBuzz bookmarklet, the extension doesn't connect to your own Twitter account, so you can't tweet and retweet from within the extension.

While it doesn't offer any advanced features, Twitter Reactions is a quick and easy way to see what the twittersphere is saying about any site. If you are not using Chrome, also give TBuzz a try.

[via Lifehacker]

Location-based service Loopt is going to offer deals at venues and stores near you thanks to a partnership with Mobile Spinach.

Mobile Spinach has already built up a large database of exclusive deals at venues ranging from sushi restaurants to concert halls to clothing stores. Currently, it serves San Francisco by texting users with deal notifications, but the partnership with Loopt will make the process that much more effective.

Loopt and Mobile Spinach plan to offer deals in New York and Los Angeles “during the coming months,” too.

This advertising model is kind of a no-brainer. A neighborhood business can use a service like Loopt to target someone who lives or works nearby and offer him or her incentives to visit an establishment.
These offers can be redeemed by phone or optionally via e-mail or text message.

Foursquare already struck a deal with 8coupons, which does something very similar to what Mobile Spinach does. Yelp offers local deals, too, so this seems to be the model de jour.

We’ll have to wait and see how successful this venture is, but as we noted the other day, there’s untapped potential for using check-in data to learn more about what consumers like and offering them appropriate ads and deals.

Tags: location-based, loopt, MARKETING, mobile spinach, money

RIM's BlackBerry platform is still the most popular mobile smartphone platform in the U.S., but Google's Android was the big winner in the last quarter of 2009. According to comScore, Android's share of the U.S. mobile market more than doubled from 2.5% in September 2009 to 5.2% in December. While the Nexus One might not be a bestseller just yet, it's clear that the Android platform is poised for rapid growth in the next few months, as more and more manufactures continue to release Android-based phones.

Sponsor

Among the top 5 mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google), Palm lost the largest amount of market share in the last few months. Palm, the current number four, now owns 6.1% of the U.S. mobile market (down from 8.3% in September). With Google's Android rapidly growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time before Google will overtake Palm in the United States.

As we reported in January, according to ChangeWave Research, a growing number of U.S. consumers plans to buy an Android device in the next few months. In September, Android was still tied with Palm as the least-preferred mobile platform. Today, Palm remains in last place, with Android now being the second-most preferred platform (right behind Apple).

All right Tweetdeck fans, rev up your engines and prepare to update to Tweetdeck 0.33, which adds a slew of new features, better API management and more in-Tweetdeck media previews.

We could list all the new features in Tweetdeck 0.33, but the company was nice enough to make this little video that shows everything off:

Some of the highlights:

Tweetdeck Can Manage Your Twitter API Usage — This means that the program can delegate how to use your available API calls so that the most important info gets to you as easily as possible. Plus, Tweetdeck now uses OAuth and can request up to 350 API calls an hour, and that is expected to increase soon.

Better Column Management — You can now view Flickr, YouTube and Posterous media within Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is free. Don’t forget to check out the Mashable branded version.

Tags: software, tweetdeck, twitter client, web apps

I just returned from Blissdom and will be recapping the (stellar, in my opinion) take away points from my Striking a Balance panel over at Boston Mamas this week. Meanwhile, I wanted to share some of my favorite personal moments here. It was a remarkable conference in so many ways and in particular, I wanted to call out some of the awesomeness more specifically — Blissdom reminded me of how utterly grateful I am to traverse this space alongside so many talented, funny, and kind people.

In vaguely chronological order:

With the Super Bowl yesterday came the time-honored Super Bowl commercials, each costing $2.5 million for a 30-second spot.  Even Google got in on the game with its first ever spot receiving rave reviews (although the commercial wasn’t new). But which commercials went beyond TV to score on the Web?  Reprise Media released a report that ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence on the web in terms of search and social media. According to Reprise’s scorecard, Boost Mobile, HomeAway, E*Trade and Google were the marketing standouts out of last night’s commercials.

Reprise decreed that Boost Mobile and HomeAway, which were both first-time Super Bowl advertisers, had the best cross-channel promotion from the tube to the web. E*Trade and Google followed with compelling ad spots that encouraged users to look to the web for more information. Who fumbled?  The Pop Secret/Emerald Nuts, Prudential, Dodge Charger and all movie commercials had the least amount of cross-channel integration.

Interestingly, Turbo Tax, Mazda and Pepsi didn’t have ads in the Super Bowl but they attracted traffic online by running paid search ads on keywords related to other Super Bowl advertisers. Unsurprisingly, millions of consumers turned to social networks including Twitter to discuss their favorite ads. According to social media monitoring service Trendrr, the four top gaining Super Bowl ad brands on Twitter within the last 24 hours were Dockers (+307%), Boost Mobile (+161%), Emerald Nuts (+150) and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (+120%). Out of all of the car commercials, Audi’s A3 Green Police advertisement received the most buzz on Trendrr.  But was that because it was humorous (showing people getting arrested for using foam cups and incandescent bulbs) or too smug?

Social media measurement company Radian 6 and ad agency Mullen have released stats on which brand was most effective according to sentiment and volume of Tweets on Twitter. The report says that Doritos was the most effective brand to advertise on the Super Bowl telecast on CBS this year. Budweiser Select55 was the least effective brand. And Google and Focus on the Family followed Doritos is becoming the most discussed commercials on Twitter. Of course, it should be noted that Doritos had several commercials in the Super Bowl, which could have contributed to the volume of tweets. On the other hand, Google had a higher percentage of positive tweets.

Each month, our partner Visible Measures compiles a list of the top ten most popular web video series, and we share those results with you and provide analysis.

In January, the threshold for entry into the list was the highest it’s ever been, but viewership for the top 10 shows dropped 26% as compared to the record-breaking month of December.

If you’ve been keeping track in previous months, you won’t be surprised to see that Fred and Happy Tree Friends have again topped the list. Also notable: CollegeHumor and video game-themed shows collectively took up half the list. There weren’t any new series on the list in January, but a couple that dropped off in the past made a comeback. We also learned that the majority of viewers for the top 10 shows were male.

Here’s the complete chart with video clips included for each series. We provide some deeper analysis below.

Rank	Last Month’s Rank	Title	Studio	Genre	True Reach View Count	% Change in Views	Sample Episode
1 1 Fred n/a Comedy 24,719,556 -28% Play 2 2 Happy Tree Friends MondoMedia Animation 17,697,316 -15% Play 3 4 Smosh Deca TV Comedy, Sketch 13,151,356 13% Play 4 5 The Station The Station Comedy 4,317,575 -24% Play 5 Back On Chart POV CollegeHumor Comedy 4,146,733 Back On Chart Play 6 10 Hardly Working CollegeHumor Comedy 3,562,906 32% Play 7 9 Jake & Amir CollegeHumor Comedy, Sketch 3,275,001 6% Play 8 Back On Chart Red Vs Blue Rooster Teeth Animation, Comedy 3,224,802 Back On Chart Play 9 8 The Guild n/a Comedy, Gaming 3,209,027 -17% Play 10 7 Key Of Awesome Next New Networks Comedy, Music 3,150,905 -39% Play

*The Visible Measures Top 10 Webisodes Chart focuses on digital studio-driven Web series that appear on Internet video-sharing destinations. Each Web series is measured on a True Reach™ basis, which includes viewership of both studio-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million Internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations.

Note: This chart does not include vloggers, interviews, how-to series, news shows, or product review shows. View-count results are incremental by month.

To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming Web series, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign’s overall performance, please contact us directly.

If you’re interested in exploring this data further, go to visiblemeasures.com/mashable.

The teenager with the high-pitched voice has topped the list again, and he managed to do it even though he only put out one new video in January. That new episode garnered 1.7 million views, so the rest of the 24.7 million were all thanks to old content that people are still discovering or re-watching.

You can’t fault Fred completely for dropping from his December high of 34.2 million views; he didn’t have topical holiday content to work with this time. It’s still impressive that a 16-year old actor with a webcam is beating each and every show from web TV networks like Next New Networks and CollegeHumor.

We mentioned earlier that the majority of top 10 show viewers are male; it’s interesting to note that Fred has the highest ratio of female viewers at 45%.

CollegeHumor is straight up mainstream now thanks to two cable TV deals in the works with MTV, and its online performance is as impressive as ever. It’s the only network with three series on the list — POV, Hardly Working, and Jake & Amir. They’ve all appeared on the list before, and together they racked up just shy of 11 million views.

All three of these CollegeHumor series saw growth since last month; POV didn’t appear on the December chart at all, but now it’s back. Hardly Working is actually working hard; it cranked out several new videos in January and grew 32% as compared to last month. Jack & Amir experienced a modest 6% growth.

Video game-themed programming has always been a significant genre in web TV. Because web series are usually cheaper to produce and viewership expectations are lower than would be the case with over-the-air shows, web series find it advantageous to serve a deep and narrow niche. Gamers are a great audience because there are just enough of them, and because they have their own dedicated ecosystem of social media and blogs to spread the word.

The Guild and Red Vs. Blue aren’t performing as well as they used to, but the gamer audience is still obviously alive and well since these gamer shows take up two of the top 10 spots. Red Vs. Blue just started airing new content, so it returned to the list after a hiatus. Conversely, The Guild is off-season so its numbers have declined.

A greater portion of Red Vs. Blue’s audience is male than any other show on the list. That should be no surprise since the series is based on the science fiction action shooter Halo.

Tags: monthly top webisodes, video, visible measures, Web TV, web video

Although all is said and done when it comes to football this season, such is not the case for the Super Bowl advertisers.

We’re now entering the entertaining aftermath of the Super Bowl ad showdown, and thanks to social media tracking services like Alterian and Radian6, we can take an early look at advertisers winning big on the web.

The following results come from two sources. Starting in early December, Alterian SM2 looked at social media conversations across a variety of sites and tracked all discussions relevant to Super Bowl advertising. Its latest report is embedded below. By contrast, Mullen and Radian6 crafted BrandBowl2010 to measure volume and sentiment of Twitter chatter mentioning the advertisers, with analysis beginning the Friday prior to the game. The discrepancies in their results represent different methods of data collection.

When it comes to sheer volume alone, Alterian SM2 ranks Focus on the Family as the advertiser with the most mentions overall from December 1, 2009, to February 8, 2010, at 3:00 a.m. CST.

You might recall that initially the unaired ad stirred up controversy prior to the big game due to its pro-life subject matter. While this viewer thought the buzz was much ado about nothing, the fact of the matter is that the build-up led to a highly anticipated spot with a big payoff on the social web in terms of overall mentions.

By comparison, however, Alterian SM2 found that conversations on game day alone were Google-heavy. According to the company, Google’s late entry into the Super Bowl advertiser foray was a pretty big win for the search giant. On Super Bowl Sunday, Google was the advertiser with the most mentions, highest Social Engagement Index (i.e. farthest reach), and the second-highest sentiment score (second only to Doritos) among all advertisers.

According to Mullen and Radian6’s BrandBowl2010, which looked at just Twitter chatter over a shorter time span, Doritos saw the most volume of tweets, and was its winner for “most effective brand to advertise on the Super Bowl telecast.”

BrandBowl ranked Google and Focus on the Family as second and third in the most-buzzed about competition. Its top 10 most effective brands are as follows:

1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus On Family
4. Snickers:
5. Budweiser
6. Bud Light
7. Hyundai
8. Kia
9. GoDaddy
10. Coca-Cola

Quantity is one thing, but quality is something else entirely. When looking at initial tallies, social media analysis points to the advertisers and ads we loved the most.

Alterian SM2 crowns Anheuser-Busch as its initial post-game victor in the battle for the most-loved brand overall (for the entire duration of the measurement period).

On game day only, however, Doritos took the top spot with the highest sentiment score, followed by Google in a distant second. Due to the flurry of social positive sentiment Doritos garnered on Super Bowl Sunday, the brand was able to skyrocket to become the second most-loved (i.e. highest sentiment score) brand overall as well.

Per BrandBowl, we — the members of the Twittersphere — loved McDonald’s and Dr Pepper. Though neither of these advertisers ever cracked the top 10 list in terms of volume, tweets about them were extremely positive.

Per Alterian SM2’s data, the advertiser with the most negative conversations from December 1, 2009, to December 8, 2010, at 3:00 a.m. CST was Focus on the Family.

Interestingly enough, BrandBowl declared Budweiser Select55 to be its last place-finisher. The kind hearts at Mullen are now offering free creative services for next year’s commercial as a consolation prize. Its 10 least effective brands list is as follows:

30. NBC’s Universal – Universal Orlando
31. Paramount Pictures
32. FloTV
33. Cars.com
34. Motorola
35. Diamond Foods’ – Pop Secret
36. Honda
37. Teleflora
38. Michelob Ultra
39. Budweiser Select55

[img credit: Willard, iStockphoto]

Tags: Anheuser-Busch, doritos, MARKETING, Super Bowl, Super Bowl ads

EA Sports President Peter Moore told Bloomberg that the popular Madden NFL series of football video games will make its way to Facebook.

We haven’t heard a peep about a launch date. Moore says we will definitely see Madden on the Facebook platform, but the social media version will be simpler than its console cousins, because EA wants to “make Madden more accessible.”

Facebook games are a big deal these days. FarmVille and Mafia Wars developer Zynga just raised $180 million in funding. The news that established (but more niche) long-time video game franchise Civilization is coming to Facebook this summer has gotten a lot of press and interest, too.

More presciently, EA just bought a huge Facebook game company called Playfish for $400 million. The quote from Moore about EA’s Madden plans didn’t mention Playfish, but it’s possible that the acquired company’s resources will be used to develop and publish Madden on Facebook.

EA launched Madden NFL 2010 for the video game consoles just in time for the Super Bowl, so hype for the brand is already high right now. This was a good time for the company to let this news slip out.

Tags: ea sports, facebook, football, games, madden, nfl, online games, sports, video games

While many of us were watching Michael Arrington throw a 17-year-old under the bus this weekend, another story spread through the blogosphere worthy of some attention and discussion.  The SageCircle Blog reported that Forrester management had put a ban on personally-branded research blogs, stating that anyone with a personally-branded blog ( think Web Strategy with Jeremiah Owyang during his time at Forrester, for example) must either (a) take down the blog or (b) redirect readers to a Forrester-branded role-based blog. Basically, if you are a Forrester employee and blogging, you just lost your face and voice in favor of a corporate-approved uniform. Sexy!

There’s been a lot of debate over whether this was a good decision, a bad decision or just a paranoid decision. (Not surprisingly) I’m leaning more toward the latter.

If you’re Forrester, the new policy probably sounded like a great idea for a few reasons:

• You’re able to share information from all Forrester analysts in one central place. You’ll even argue this makes things less confusing for clients and people looking to get Forrester opinion.
• The Forrester brand is put center stage, rather than individual personalities.
• When employees leave, Forrester gets to keep their blog and their audience. I imagine Forrester took quite a hit when people like Jeremiah and Charlene Li left the fold.

If I was a paranoid corporate person, I could understand what Forrester was thinking here. However, as a normal person (shut up), I think they missed the point a little. Actually, I think they missed it by a football field or so.

Here’s the deal: You can’t remove the “personal” from blogging because that’s what makes blogging work. People aren’t interested in companies. They’re interested in people and the characters these blogs create.

When Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li offered insight and free information on their personally-branded blogs, yes, they were establishing their own brands. But they were also building satellite Forrester communities on the Web. Communities that were interested in Forrester solely because of these personalities and the individual credibility they had built up.  When you attempt to take these stars and hide their brand inside a corporate marquee, you lose that authenticity and the spark that made them successful. You turn off their established audiences.

Essentially, you create the anti-blog. You also create a host of problems.

You Neuter Existing Talent

Sorry, gentlemen...

When you take an established blogger and move them over to a identity-less blog, you clip their wings and force them to surrender their voice. Even if that’s not your intention and even if the blogger says they are okay with the move.  You still risk losing the magic that made them who they are and their voice as strong as it was.   Because as a blogger, your voice is wrapped up on your identity and your audience. Mess with that and you mess with everything.

I don’t think Forrester wants to do this. I don’t think they’re looking to silence stars. I think they’re looking to better take advantage of their analysts celebrity and its own intellectual property, but this isn’t the way to do it.  Create a social media rule book for the company, but don’t attempt to shuffle blogs around. When you take someone’s name off their blog, you  change the blog and the blogger.  You risk making them less invested in its success. They feel less ownership of their words. They can’t talk to their audience with the same candor.  You may not think I have experience in much, but I have experience in this. The difference is night and day and it affects everything.

You also take away some of their power when you taint their audience’s trust. A super star writing on their own blog is authentic. A super star writing on a corporate blog is marketing.  You’ve just created suspicion because their words are being placed inside a corporate wrapper. [There's a good example of this down below.]

They Alienate Future Talent

This is going to be a big deal. With the new ban on personal blogs, Forrester risks shooting itself in the foot in a couple of different ways.

They deter established talent from joining by making them give up their own blogs and audience. I’d imagine that Forrester uses social media as a way to find strong new voices and talent. It’s going to be a hard sell to find new talent because of their blog and voice, and then promptly ask them to redirect it over to Forrester. It takes time and a heck of a lot of work to build an audience that trusts you and a blog that earns its cred. You’re gonna have a tough time getting new faces to give that up.

Forrester also throws away the power of new talent. Think about it. If you’re hiring someone based on their smarts and their influence, what sense does it make to attempt to rip that influence away from them? Whether they intend to or not, by taking someone off their personal blog and putting them on a corporately-wrapped blog, you diminish the value that they bring to your company.

Imagine if someone hired Rae away from Outspoken and then made her re-direct Sugarrae to a corporate site? [I use Rae in this example because (a) Rae’s the only Outspoken member with a strong personal blog (no offense, Rhea) and (b) the chances of Rae leaving us for a "real job" are as likely as the Colts getting that Super Bowl back.] Think about what the company would be losing out on making Rae to do that. They’d lose Rae’s “rae-ness”, they’d lose the built-in audience that’s followed Rae on that blog for years, and they’d risk tainting her authority.

Not everyone has been vocal against the new policy. Some seem to like it, employees even. For example, Forrester analyst Augie Ray has already shared his thoughts about having to move from Experience: The Blog to a company-branded blog. Shockingly, on the Forrester-branded blog Forrester employee Augie Ray says he’s okay with losing his blog and writing on Forrester. I’m not even trying to sound smart here, just to give a taste of the trust loss that occurs.  Do we really believe Augie is happy with the policy? Maybe we do and maybe we don’t, but either way, if he didn’t like it, would we know?

The new policy by Forrester makes me feel like they missed the point of this whole ‘blog’ thing by attempting to rip the personal from it to ‘protect their IP’. When Robert Scoble blogged for Microsoft no one “got confused” and forget where he worked because he was on a separate domain. Because he was on a different domain, people trusted his opinion more, it allowed him to speak a bit more freely (even if subconsciously) and it created a character for people to follow. That’s what successful blogs are based upon – the creation of characters that people become loyal to.

Trying to change that and create policies that limit the effectiveness of these characters makes you look like a paranoid company  trying to keep its stars and their ideas tied to the company. Its everything blogging is not. Plus, if you think banning personally-branded blogs is going to prevent employees from doing it, well, then you’re just silly. And once you start taking away personally-branded blogs, what’s next down that slippery slope? Twitter accounts? Facebook accounts? Feels it a bit like we’re going backwards trying to close everything up, doesn’t it?

Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses.

It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup’s revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. “All that money came from licensing,” says Roberts. “I think we get $2,000 from Google for advertising.” Since November, the company has been “borderline breakeven.” And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill, who left Google to briefly serve as president of EMI for a year.

“Recommendations—from friends, from newspapers, from colleagues—are the most common way to find new content,” says Merrill. “However, there is more information available than there are people to recommend. The Filter analyzes data to provide measurably better, more relevant recommendations, automatically.” The Filter creates personalized music and movie feeds based on user’s activities (rating. listening, saving, sharing) as well as their preferences in other accounts such as iTunes and Last.fm. Roberts claims that in trials, customers have seen a 20 to 40 percent lift in media consumption (video views, dwell time) than using their own recommendation algorithms. Not counting those two big media deals in the wings, the Filter’s recommendation technology is currently being used by Nokia Music, Sony’s MyPlay, DVDPost (a European Netflix), ThePlatform, and We7 (another music site also backed by Gabriel).

The Filter’s own site is still growing steadily, if slowly, with about 800,000 unique visitors per month. “It was a much slower process than we had wished,” says Maher. People liked the technology, he says, but they wanted it on sites where they already consume content. The Filter’s experience shows how tough it is to build a standalone music or movie property. But if its recommendation algorithms really do provide the kind of improvements Roberts claims, more sites will adopt it. You can try out its relevance engine for yourself on The Filter website.

What’s Palm founder Jeff Hawkins–one of the few so-called tech visionaries who really is visionary–up to these days? For the past several years, he’s been concentrating on a startup called Numenta that’s attempting to bring intelligence modeled on the human brain to computers via something it calls Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Another startup called Vitamin D–also founded by early staffers at Hawkins’ Palm and Handspring–is the first company to commercialize Numenta’s research. And it’s releasing the first official shipping version of its first product, Vitamin D Video, today. The software is available as a free download for both Windows and OS X.

Hierarchical Temporal Memory may sound like hifalutin stuff, but Vitamin D Video aims to serve a totally mundane but useful purpose: providing cheaper, more effective video monitoring for security and other applications than existing software does. It’s designed for small businesses and individuals and works with standard Web cams and with relatively low-cost network cameras (such as those offered by Panasonic). And instead of relying on crude motion detection, it’s smart enough to tell human beings from other objects in motion (such as animals and shadows), to pay attention to specific areas in a scene it’s monitoring, and to help you pinpoint the moments you might actually care about.

Here’s a video from Vitamin D that does a good job of explaining and demonstrating all this:

Vitamin D Video’s Starter Edition works with one camera at QVGA resolution and is free; the $49 Basic Edition handles two cameras at VGA resolution; the Pro Edition costs $199 and works with as many cameras as your computer can manage. Even that last one is budget-priced by the standards of more traditional surveillance software.

To mark the software’s formal launch, Vitamin D is holding a contest to find the most “useful, fun, or strange” moments captured with its software. The winner will get something which I suspect will be a popular contest prize in general for the next few months: an iPad.

A few years ago, I was bedeviled by thieves who broke into garage almost weekly, and I could really have benefited from Vitamin D Video and a networked cam. (Only slightly off-topic note: One of the things they swiped was my…shiny new Palm PDA.) These days, I live in a more peaceable neighborhood. I still plan to experiment with the software, though–even if chances are pretty high that the only intruders who it’ll catch on camera are a kittycat or two.

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