BeAloud Digital Media News » Social Network

All Good Virals Are ‘Made to Entertain’

Richard — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:21:33 +0000

Yesterday, I was checking out one on my favourite blogs, Digital Buzz, when I came across a brilliant piece of work done for Heineken. It was inspiring and it has been amazing to see how positively people are reacting to it online. But first off, please take five minutes to view the masterpiece that is Heineken’s guerrilla marketing campaign in Italy.

Agreed. It is simply brilliant. What it does for me is show the importance and endless opportunities of multi-channelled, well synergized ad campaigns. Not to mention the massive viral impact. This integrated approach saw 200 accomplices convince over 1000 unsuspecting Italian football fans to attend a fake opera and poetry event on the night of the AC Milan vs Real Madrid match. The event was also televised on SkySport. It turned out to be a private viewing of the match, but its delivery saw a shift in mood from guys on the verge of revolt, to a feeling of sheer relief and joy, making Heineken an absolute legend. That alone is masterful execution of planning, guerrilla and TV marketing efforts. But what followed is the real genius of this approach.

To sum up the video, 1136 people were coaxed into this stunt, 1.5 million viewers saw them on SkySport and 10 million people heard about it on the news the next day. That’s already a huge amount of free publicity. But the real impact came on the web, with a staggering 5 million unique visitors to the website over the next 2 weeks and an inestimable amount of coverage on blogs, forums, and social networks. Since I have come across the video, I have seen it pop up in several places. A search for Heineken Viral on Twitter will demonstrate what I mean. With each blog comment, re-Tweet, or Facebook ‘like’, Heineken is getting some great free publicity. It will be interesting to see how many views the YouTube video will receive (currently 49,508), but I’m sure this chunk of advertising gold will continue to spread.

The bottom line is that it is one giant notch on the belt for JWT/Italy and another addition to a history of great Heineken ads. This campaign hit its target perfectly and highlighted the notion that men are losing the ability to relax and watch the game with friends. With a clear respect for the ability of social media and the internet in general to gain mass exposure, it appears this campaign is actually the same as Heineken in one respect: ‘Made to Entertain’.

Social Media Marketing 2010 San Francisco
By Daniel Peiser - 24 Jun 10 - Events
The Facebook Smothering Strategy on Twitter: Wi...
By Guillaume Foutry - 17 Sep 09 - Social Media
Mobile Localization: One Use that Is Really Use...
By Guillaume Foutry - 15 Sep 09 - Mobile

A Family Social Network: MyHeritage

Guillaume — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:01:08 +0000

Even if Facebook gathers today more than 300 million users it might not be the favourite spot of everyone for family communication as you might want you relatives not to have access to some compromising documents. Moreover Facebook does not offer feature that really makes it family friendly. Some social networks have occupied this niche, among them MyHeritage. Mario Ruckh, Marketing Director of this company, gives us more insight on what you can do with MyHeritage.

Guillaume Foutry: Could you explain the concept of MyHeritage?

Mario Ruckh: MyHeritage is your private family social network that helps you stay in touch with your loved ones, share family photos, get birthday reminders and discover your family history. It’s super easy to use and all the basic features are free. Besides, there are strong genealogy features on the site, like a powerful genealogy search, and we also offer Family Tree Builder for download, the world’s most popular free genealogy software.

Earlier this year we released a new version of our photo service and you can now upload family photos via email or mobile devices, use our face recognition technology to find and tag the people in your photos and show a set of photos to relatives in impressive slideshows.

Our most recent innovation was a full integration of maps into our software, so you can chart location data of your ancestors, follow their migration paths or simply get an overview of where your relatives are currently living. It was launched together with our family toolbar that features the world’s first Family Chat, direct access to your family sites, immediate birthday reminders and an improved genealogy search.

G.F: How many people do you have on the website? What is the geographical reach of the platform? This question is to give people a view of your operations, so feel free to add any figures you deem relevant.

M.R: MyHeritage has more than 34 million users worldwide and is available in 34 languages, so families around the world are using it. We have a nice map, where you can see how many users there are from each country and also look at the profiles of the people who are currently registering (and if they agreed to appear in our community center). By the way, the company headquarters are in Bnei Atarot, a small village near Tel Aviv, Israel, but we also have an office in London and colleagues working from the U.S. and Australia.

G.F: Which directions are you going to take: staying a social network or going to the Find my Past directions (genealogy)? Could you imagine becoming a crowdsourcing genealogy engine (like people building a database of ancestors)?

M.R: Well, I guess we are a huge crowdsourcing genealogy engine already. The MyHeritage database consists of 370 million names, all uploaded by our users to help each other in their research. 370 million is about 7 times the number of people living in England at the moment, so it is massive. The names are from all around the world though and most of them are deceased people; names of living people in family trees are not public for privacy reasons.

We have developed a technology called Smart Matches that will tell you automatically, if some of your – maybe unknown – relatives also researched by someone else and on average there is a 20% chance that we’ll find a match for any one of the names you put in. You can read some of the very touching stories on our blog about users who have found some long lost relatives with the help of Smart Matches.

G.F: Facebook has been pushing recently for Groups for families as you can implement some restrictions on it and limit them to your inner circles. Do you consider this network as your most direct competitors?

M.R: Facebook is currently the most popular social network, is defining the category and constantly innovating its products. There are families, who are using it, but generally it is focussed on being a friends network, such as LinkedIn or XING is focussed on business contacts, and you don’t necessarily want to mix your family with any of those two groups.

The concept of having your own family site, collaboratively build your family tree and research your family history together are all areas where – for families – MyHeritage is superior to general social networks.

G.F: Where do you see the My Heritage going, what is the next step of your evolution?

M.R: Our support and product teams are constantly listening to what our users need and we will continue to build innovative technology that helps families to stay better connected, find out more about themselves and where they are coming from. Now and in the future we see ourselves as a provider of a lot of free tools for families and family historians, with some more sophisticated and professional ones available for small fees. Accessibility of data, while at the same time keeping highest standards for security and privacy of the users, continues to be our promise to remain a safe and reliable home for families online.

Other Related Articles

MyHeritage Releases New Version of Family Tree Builder

Israel 2.0

Building My Own Web Presence – Epsiode 03: So...
By Lorena Sparenberg - 23 Sep 09 - Social Media
Foursquare, the new Darling of Social Media?
By Guillaume Foutry - 3 Sep 09 - Social Media
The Social Graph
By Guillaume Foutry - 3 Sep 09 - Social Media

Google’s Social Search Experiment

Richard — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:35:22 +0000

Searching for things just got more social. Google Social Search is now being rolled out in ‘experimental’ mode and can be accessed and used via Google Labs Experimental. It is a new addition for its web search, that encapsulates our ever expanding online networks or ‘Social Circles’, and allows us to easily find material written by them. It also pulls together the connections of your immediate network, effectively expanding your ‘public social graph’. As Matt Cutts explains in the introduction video, “With Google Social Search, we’ve managed to pull different pieces of your public social circle together in a single place.” What it is not, is a simple real time search feature that draws up Twitter and Facebook status updates as they are being published.

Social Results Imbedded

Once you have opted to join the Google Social search experiment, and edited your Google Profile to include links to various networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or blogs, the social search results will appear at the bottom of Google’s search results page.

As you can see two results are displayed linking to items created by people in your social circle. However, you are not limited to these two results and can click on the ‘Results from people…’ link to see many more. Google has obviously come to realise that people value the opinions as well as advice of their friends and acquaintances. While searching for something, a user may value a friend’s blog result as much if not more than the highly ranked, authoritative sites that currently dominate SERPs.

Expanding Your Social Circle

Where Google has made this experiment about making search even more relevant, they have also very cleverly made it about harnessing and expanding your social network. Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead and Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager state on the Google blog that, “The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed.” But what they also do is include the connections of your friends, effectively expanding your network. As you can see in the screenshot above, the second social result is from the connection of a friend on Flickr.

A New, More Personal Search

Search is all about discovery. Sometimes this is in relation something you already know about and other times it can mean discovering new things all together. Google Social Search has translated this discovery into finding new connections and more from your current contacts. The title of the Google blog post was, “Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend’s New York blog!” So it ties various social networks into search, delivering content from your social circle that you may not have known about as well as new connections that may be relevant.

All of the information sharing is highly transparent and user controlled via your Google Profile. The user chooses which links to add to their profile and in turn, which public information to display in Social Search results. The only existing problem is that not too many people actually have (or use) Google Profiles, limiting the current social search data pool. However, if this Google Experiment catches on, and I think it will, that will change very quickly and give Google even more information and influence.

Building My Own Web Presence – Epsiode 03: So...
By Lorena Sparenberg - 23 Sep 09 - Social Media
The Social Graph
By Guillaume Foutry - 3 Sep 09 - Social Media
Bing Wave 2: A Move to Social Search
By Richard Bramer - 23 Oct 09 - Social Media

Mobile Localization: One Use that Is Really Useful and not Scary

Guillaume — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:02:26 +0000

The first time I heard about mobile social networks and the localization of the people in your network in real time, I found that a bit scary and quite intrusive. Of course you can use filters and decides who can see what, but still I feel quite unease about it. But as I went to Notting Hill Carnival and had friends going to similar events as well, we all complained about the difficulty of finding people in the crowd: it is truly a hassle that can break your day.

So the solution might be to use one of the services that offer location sharing, such as Brighkite, Google Latitude, Loopt or even ZYB. As you share with your network your position in real time, people can find you quite easily and vice versa. Do not worry if you do not want to join any of this service as it seems likely that Facebook will offer this kind of feature in the future. With this, you can say goodbye to the unhelpful explanations like “I am on the main road” (with dozens of thousand people stupid!).

Other Related Articles

Mobile Social Networking Services Booming in Japan

Mobile Key to Continued Growth

Location-Based Mobile Social Network Centrl Integrates Web App, Adds First Real-Time Location-Based Messaging System

Video: What’s Next For Mobile, A Discussion on Augmented Reality, Custom Content, and Video Games

The economics of mobile social networking in Japan

Emerging Media with a Focus on Mobile
By Daniel Peiser - 30 Mar 10 - Mobile
Mobile Social Communications 2010
By Daniel Peiser - 30 Aug 10 - Events
Mobile Visionary Roundtable: Mobile and Youth C...
By Daniel Peiser - 13 Jan 10 - Events