It’s 4:47 p.m. on Friday, and I’m on vacation all of next week. I thought I’d fill your computer screens with some eye candy before I go!
I’ve been tracking the social media efforts of the Ugly Christmas Sweater Partybenefit my friends and I are planning. I’ll do an entire postmortem after the party in mid-December, but for now…
Take a look at this quick Virtualization to see how our buzz has grown since October (while I watch the clock tick to 5:30!)
We started with just one or two Web sites at the beginning of November. In the past week it’s shot up to 52 separate pages mentioning the benefit!
Spark shows you the sentiment behind online conversations.
Stepping outside the comfortable corporate bubble to see the real-world conversations being had about your brand is tough. Accepting that you can’t control those conversations is tougher. Relinquishing message control to consumers is scary.
There are ways to help generate positive buzz, though. A new study shows that audiences like participating in brand-initiated user-generated content:
Twenty percent of young broadband users worldwide have already engaged in some form of it and another 30 percent say they plan to in the future.
The biggest draw for those willing to create content is free stuff. Duh. Swag can range from free dinner to more luxurious perks. AMC gave local bloggers a free movie and Current offers $2,500 for ads that air on their channel.
Positive influence comes with a price - a “what’s in it for me?” attitude - but the benefits could be priceless:
The technique is best used to enhance brand perception, the study reports. Indeed, brands can benefit from just asking consumers to participate in some form of UGC.
At Spiral16 we recognize the importance of online sentiment. That’s why one of the best features we offer is a sentiment monitoring tool. You can navigate directly to the good and bad in a matter of seconds. Perfect for monitoring the effects of UGC.
For the past few months, my friends and I have been planning a fundraiser for Operation Breakthrough - an organization that helps children living in poverty in the Kansas city area.
If you can’t attend, you can contribute a donation to Operation Breakthrough, too. As the holidays approach, I encourage you - wherever you are - to give back to your communities.
Yesterday I got a cool opportunity to be in a national commercial for Coke Zero put together by our good friends at Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
Obviously I was a lowly extra, but it was fun to observe how these Hollywoodesque things work.
About 90 people spent all day in Allen Fieldhouse in magical Lawrence, home to the University of Kansas(a.k.a. 2008 NCAA Basketball and Orange Bowl champs). I wore the first t-shirt I bought after Bill Self became KU’s coach my sophomore year. It’s blue and says “Self Respect” with a Jayhawk on the front. After six years, it’s showing it’s age, but it’s still my favorite.
The costume lady asked me to wear some red, sparkly sunglasses… so I wore those, too.
They placed me just behind the “principles,” so hopefully I won’t end up on the cutting room floor!
I got to scream the Rock Chalk chant and perform a few other KU basketball traditions for the camera. When the commercial starts airing nationwide around the time of conference play (Jan/Feb), I’ll be sure to track it’s impact and show you the results!
Having read a blog post speculating that a discontinuation of the current Mac mini line overseas may be indicative of the product’s ultimate demise, one advocate of the tiny desktops fired off an email with his concerns to Apple’s newly-crowned Mac hardware engineering chief Bob Mansfield.
Although Mansfield didn’t issue a personal reply, a colleague in Apple’s executive care division did almost immediately, offering no timetable for a Mac mini update but assuring that the company was well aware of system’s market value, and suggesting the customer continue to exercise patience.
[said the customer], “”I certainly appreciated the contact, and I think it was a nice way of letting me know that rather than bug their head guys.”
Of course, Apple could have been monitoring the rumor mills in the first place and addressed the issue at the source, but Bob Mansfield gets a solid B+!
I have been using LinkedIn and Plaxo for a long time. It’s nice to see both sites start to understand the power of connections and external content.
LinkedIn added a new applications platform, so now - with the new WordPress feature - my network is able to see my updates as they’re posted. I can also add a presentation to my connections’ profiles using Google Docs Beta. I also recommend the CompanyBuzz application.
Maybe one day you will see a Spark app so you can do data analytics and virtualization of your own profile to see how it connects internally to LinkedIn and beyond.
Our blog won't bore you. It's not something we have to make us look better than our competitors. It's about sharing who we are as a company... and behind every great company, there are stories to tell.
We know it's the talented people who make up Spiral 16 that make our company special.
So this is where you'll read about us, our product and some of the insane things we do that help us achieve excellence by the end of the work day.
We are in the process of doing a series for demo videos to explain how Spark software works - and how you will benefit from various updates.
