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Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’

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How “Fifty Shades of Grey” Has Penetrated Pop Culture So Deeply

In Culture Marketing on 07/14/2012 at 12:39 pm

Originally written for sparks & honey; reblogged from their Tumblr. Learn more about us at sparksandhoney.com.  

Unless you’ve been living in a dungeon…you’re well aware of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a romance trilogy dubbed as mommy porn that has shackled female America. Toted through airports, subways and bus stations, discussed at morning chat shows, around the office water cooler and at cocktail parties, “Fifty Shades of Grey” has tickled the fancies of women around the world.  The naughty novel has set the record as the fastest-selling paperback of all time surpassing the Harry Potter series.   It has stimulated the economy, deeply penetrating the mainstream culture, and leading to a burst of business ventures, everything from lingerie to makeup.

Here are five of our favorite Fifty Shades of Grey-inspired products that can give us all some sexual healing:

  1. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Movie – Social networks have been buzzing with speculation around who will be cast in the main roles of Christian and Ana. The movie will be produced by the same producers, Mike De Luca and Dana Brunetti, who’ve produced award-winning The Social Network film.
  2. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Audio Book -  It was uncomfortable enough hearing Ellen DeGeneres read from the racy novel on one of her recent shows. Imagine listening to the audiobook while sitting in a tight airplane seat without much room to exert your excitement.  Fifty Shades of Grey joins the mile high club and will be offered on Virgin Atlantic flights as part of the airline’s JAM in-flight entertainment.  
  3. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ YouTube Musical – Whether you are a housewife, a feminist who thinks ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ has spanked feminism in the butt, or a guy who hates that he loves the book, you will enjoy this fan-created musical that addresses the three reader archetypes and is quickly climbing the YouTube charts. 
  4. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Sex Workshop – A NYC-based sex toy boutique recently offered a ‘Fifty Shades of Hot Sex’ workshop that teaches women how to turn their fantasies into reality.  And to award early arrival, Babeland, the women-friendly sex shop that organized the workshop,  offered to their attendees some spank-me gifts.
  5.  ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Weekend Getaway -  Readers can unleash their inner goddess in the Seattle and Portland landmarks served as backdrops in the book. Portland’s Heathman Hotel, where Christian and Ana exchanged plenty of steamy moments, is offering two add-on packages including a fine bottle of chilled white wine (Christian’s favorite) and an extravagant helicopter ride over Portland. Don’t forget to have your billionaire boy toy pick up the tab.

Thanks to all the novel-inspired online and offline creations, E.L. James is earning around $1 million per week in royalties.  She also has licenses for lingerie/sleepwear, makeup line, fragrances, apparel, jewelry, furniture, bedding, and of course, sex toys!

So how can your brand capitalize on the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ craze similarly to Virgin Atlantic’s integration of the audio book version of the erotic novel?

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Twitter Wins the Super Bowl Game Again!

In Social Media on 02/13/2011 at 4:34 pm

For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl with 162.9 million people watching has set a record for American television viewing.  Not only was this year’s game the most-watched television event in history, but it also broke a Twitter record with 4,064 tweets per second during the final moments of the game.  That’s a whopping 243,840 tweets per minute!

Twitter is the new online water cooler that plays a huge role in promoting events and television premieres as well as keeping people tuned in.  Advertisers now have a real opportunity to engage their viewers during live TV and retain them for future television events as they turn to the second screen to express their likes or frustrations.  Super Bowl advertiser, CareerBuilder, leveraged organically trending topics by incorporating popular hashtag #brandbowl into their promoted tweets in order to increase visibility and buzz around their commercial.

Last month, eMarketer released a study that predicted 14% of Internet users (32,466,000) in the US would post updates and/or photos about the game on social networks, including Twitter, this year.  Those who consume online media rather than create it, spent Super Bowl Sunday monitoring stats or news related to the game, watching the ads, visiting Websites of Super Bowl advertisers, researching past Super Bowl games, and buying game memorabilia.

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Social Media Experienced Strong Growth in 2010

In Social Media on 01/16/2011 at 2:02 pm

When consumers need to find solutions, they actively seek content to find answers to their problems. It’s content that supplies those answers, in the form of text, video, audio, and social media – and consumers have almost unlimited ways to get that content. The difference today is that consumers are finding those answers coming from their peers, favorite brands and the media.

Everyone is a media company. Everyone is a publisher. If you publish online content to a blog, a microblog (Twitter), a social network, or a photo- or video-sharing site like YouTube and Flickr, you are a publisher. Today there are billion pieces of content all over the Internet. A recently released Royal Pingdom “Internet in 2010 in numbers” report demonstrates social content publishing continues to grow at a fast pace. Here are the latest social media growth numbers:

  • 152 million – the number of blogs on the Internet
  • 25 billion – the number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
  • 175 million – people on Twitter as of September 2010
  • 600 million – people on Facebook at the end of 2010
  • 30 billion – pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month
  • 2 billion – the number of videos watched per day on YouTube
  • 35 – hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
  • 186 – the number of online videos the average U.S. Internet user watches per month
  • 5 billion – photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010)

Read the complete report.

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iPhone Helps “Atomic Tom” Transform NYC Subway Into a Rock Concert

In Digital Media on 10/16/2010 at 2:26 pm

New York, a city that never sleeps, is a continuous cycle of haste, clamor, and laughter or melancholy. It resembles a rushing train with an inconsistent daily schedule and destination.  Occasionally, the trains may be delayed and are forced to change their route. Carrying hundreds of passengers, all with different backgrounds, cultures and interests, they all have their own way to keep themselves occupied. Some either sleep, read, play video games, listen to music or gaze around. Others make a living in the trains by either dancing, singing, selling electronics or simply flipping over their Yankee hats and begging for money.

After New York based rockers ”Atomic Tom” supposedly became victims of theft that left the band without instruments, they turned to using musical instrument iPhone applications. Last week, the Brooklyn-based band performed in the NYC Subway using the Pocket Guitar, Drum Meister and the Virtuoso Piano apps to transform the B train into a rock concert.

This was caught on camera and the video clip is already number one on today’s top 20 viral video chart.  Of course this is not the first video showcasing musicians leveraging the iPhone apps to play songs.  We all remember the viral video that had garnered almost four million views on YouTube of a young girl who played Lady Gaga’s “Pocker Face” using the musical instrument iPhone Apps.  But the video clip of the rock band, “Atomic Tom” is the first one to take it to the subways of the Big Apple.

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Beyond Facebook and Twitter: 5 Ways to Leverage Tweetups To Drive Business

In How-to's, Social Media on 04/24/2010 at 5:27 am

Social media can be leveraged to build deep connections with existing and potential customers. When people think of social media, they think of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. However, social media extends beyond these popular social networks with millions of active members across the globe. Tweetups, in-person, impromptu meeting organized by Twitter users across different geographic locations, can be just as important in helping business owners connect with their potential consumers.

Extending conversations initiated in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to offline can strengthen these relationships and convert fans and followers into brand advocates. Tweetups are especially beneficial to local businesses or national businesses that wish to advertise in specific region. For example. NASA is hosting a special Tweetup in May, where they will randomly select 150 of their Twitter followers to view a shuttle launch in person at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At Kennedy, NASA Twitter followers will take a tour of the center, view the shuttle launch and speak with shuttle technicians, managers, engineers, and astronauts. Another great use of Tweetups is by the Grammy Award-winning British singer, Imogen Heap, who leveraged Tweetups in New York and Los Angeles to turn online interactions into real-life connections, providing her Twitter followers with exclusive first listen of her album, “Ellipse.” In addition, one of the most-popular Tweetup events is the National Hockey League’s (NHL) first Tweetup (now taking place in over 20 cities across the U.S.) kicking off the Stanley Cup Playoffs in the league’s NYC store back in April 2009.

How can Tweetups help your business?

  1. Meet with existing or potential customers. Invite people who are interested in what your business has to offer. For example, Tommy Hilfiger and Lucky Magazine are hosting a Tweetup today, April 24, in NYC to draw customers into the Fifth Avenue store to shop their Spring collection.
  2. Connect you with people in your local community who are passionate about your industry. By bringing people together around a common interest, you help them to get to know each other better.
  3. Activate offline and inspire online actions. Another benefit to these Twitter-based gatherings is the amount of messages your attendees will spread before, during and after the event. Twitter users will tweet their experiences, photos and possibly blog about the event.
  4. Introduce and help fuel demand for new products or services. Invite an expert to speak about the products and issues that the brand and customers both care about in order to establish or increase your business’ credibility.
  5. Build your content inventory that can be repurposed across the interwebs. If you are struggling for content on your Facebook, YouTube or Twitter page(s), hosting events and capturing content at those events, including videos of experts, how-tos, photos of guests or captured by guests can all make engaging, diverse UGC posts across these platforms.

Hosting a tweetup is simple. All you need to do is suggest a date, location, and time on Twitter. Your followers chime in if they want to join you, and you instantly have a gathering!

Visit twivite.com for a list of all upcoming Tweetups in your area!

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Google plunges knee-deep into social media with a UGC search stories video creator

In Digital Media, Social Media on 04/13/2010 at 9:42 pm

Internet search can give a lot of insight into someone’s life. It can reveal our personality, desires, needs, behaviors, and passions. Remember the Google television spot that aired during the Saints-Colts Super Bowl game this year? “Parisian Love,” Google’s very first Super Bowl commercial, and one of the most-talked-about 2010 Super Bowl ads, shows how the internet and search engines are integrated into everyday life. As part of its search stories campaign that launched in November 2009, “Parisian Love” tells a story of a young man who studies abroad in France and along the way uses Google to find the girl of his dreams. Now, Google is inviting users to create their own version of the “Parisian Love” search story with their new Google Search Stories Video Creator tool located at youtube.com/searchstories.

In today’s consumer-focused world, every successful brand is shifting towards consumer-centric advertising that combines more granular targeting and measurement with cross-platform integration in order to satisfy the digital demands of today’s digitally savvy customers. After dipping its toes in the Super Bowl television advertising, and testing the social media waters with Google Buzz in recent months, the internet search giant is embracing user-generated content, allowing anyone, regardless of their video production skills, to create their own Google search stories and share the videos through their extended social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, just to name a few.

Three simple steps in creating a search story:

  1. Enter a sequence of 7 search queries (words or phrases) into the Google Search Stories Video Creator Tool. The new UGC functionality tells a story when the search results are revealed and automatically formatted into a Search Story video
  2. Select the music that is most-appropriate to the topic of your search story from the soundtrack library and add it to your video
  3. Preview your video. Here you will have one more chance to edit your search queries or simply change the music. If you are satisfied with the story created, you will write in the title and description of your search story as well as select the genre of your story, which can match the genre of the soundtrack music. Once your video is complete, you can upload it to YouTube (assuming you have a YouTube or Gmail account) and share it across the interwebs.

Google will post some of the most creative and fun user-created stories to the official YouTube Search Stories Channel.

Here is a sample search story. Now, go make your own and share it with the world!

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How Is Social Media Helping Haiti After the Earthquake

In Digital Media, Human Rights, Social Media on 01/14/2010 at 7:38 pm

By Irina Skaya

In the early 1900s, we relied on radio to transmit news such as the Titanic catastrophe; in the 1930s, we tuned into CBS to watch TV’s first coverage of a presidential election, and in the 1990s, we began to consume media more rapidly and more globally via the Internet. Last year, millions witnessed the presidential election of President Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president via live streams on social networks sites such as Facebook. Despite how our media consumption has vastly changed, it was the media networks that disseminated the news to the people. The earthquake in Haiti, with the exception of the Iranian and Moldavian Twitter revolutions is the first global catastrophic event that has truly shifted the way we consume news, placing citizen journalists in the epicenter of the journalism.

With many of the major communication lines down, media outlets, from television to newspapers, relied on user-generated content, including blogs, tweets, Facebook status updates, and YouTube videos to inform the public of the tragic event, emphasizing the importance and the power of social media today. According to Facebook, there have been 1,500 status updates per minute containing the word “Haiti” since the earthquake, with many desperately searching for relatives, uploading their photos on Facebook.  The Facebook group called “EARTHQUAKE HAITI” has drawn more than 100,000 members since going up on Wednesday and dozens are being added by the second. The group’s Wall is acting as a real-time wire service with messages that range from cries for help from within Haiti to donation offers and information gathering websites.

Twazzup.com reports that there have been 5,176 tweets containing words, “Help Haiti” and hashtags “#Haiti” on Twitter. Yesterday evening, 218 quake iReports from Haiti were sent to CNN. As a result, CNN’s iReport had 1.4 million page views, a 240% increase over an September-October benchmark; the usual traffic is between 200,000 and 400,000 page views per day.  Mobile has also played a key role in the Haiti quake, raising $3 million just for Red Cross alone via text messages.

For real-time Haiti coverage from citizen journalists follow the following tweeps:

http://twitter.com/fredodupoux
http://twitter.com/RAMhaiti
http://twitter.com/yatalley
http://twitter.com/zabelbok

To donate $10 to the Red Cross for Earthquake relief in Haiti, text Haiti to 90999. I just did!

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