November 21st, 2008 Posted by: Sam Granleese Comments (0)
One of the remarkable elements of the recent US Presidential election was Barack Obama’s online campaign executed by Chris Hughes (24 and co-founder of Facebook). The achievements in effective social media engagement have been written about extensively but the true magnitude, importance and influence of this channel have been unknown until now.
The Washington Post today reported that Obama officially raised over half a billion dollars online:
In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama’s online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.
This represents over 80% of all funds raised and demonstrates a distinct competitive advantage over his rival John McCain in engaging (and raising support from) the US electorate. McCain accepted the restricted (but guaranteed) public campaign finance.
Along with other successes such as Apple iTunes, this clearly leads the way for the evolution of ecommerce in the form of micropayments as a means of extracting revenue from the ever increasing long-tail of content or donations from political supporters.
November 11th, 2008 Posted by: kristy Comments (0)
Kanye West – made famous for being on the cutting edge of urban culture. The beats, the cameos, the fashion and most of all the heightened level of urban entertainment.
A man that knows what he likes and it looks as though he’s found something new from us that he likes, check it out here: http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/
… scroll down below Louis Vuitton.
A great example of customisable viral marketing. Whilst some of the ‘overlays’ are a bit dodgy, its still amusing enough to make you want to customise it, and send it to a bunch of potential non-voters.
The hit rate at last check has been astounding with an average of 20 emails being sent every second.
Socialmention is a new service based on the Yahoo Boss search API that tracks activity across blogs, micro blogs (twitter), social bookmarks (delicious), news, video, images etc.
Looks like a pretty cool way to keep track of what people are saying about brands. You can search by recency – in the past hour, 12 hours, day or week.
A great example of where Yahoo is going with opening up its platform. Not so great as a search engine, per se, but with tuned and pimped to do other cool stuff with a solid search underpinning, it’s got great potential.
Socialmention is pretty terrible from a monetisation point of view – there are sponsored links on the pages, but as the site uses AJAX the ads are displayed related to the overall frame (relating to social networking/blogging) rather than the content of what you are actually searching for. The ads always seem to relate to blogging or working from home.
A soon to be released game for the Nintendo Wii called Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destory is a side scrolling shooter with a great UGC element to it. You will have the ability to create your own character, enemies, shooting patterns, and levels – all of which you can post to the game’s website for download by any Wii owner.
User generated content for games is nothing new, however we are really starting to see a trend where games are becoming specifically designed to allow for all sorts of customisation and online communities to facilitate sharing of the assets they develop.
If you’re sick of having to set up a new profile for yourself every time you join a new social network – you may be in luck. MySpace have launched a “Data Availability” effort with big-name partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and fellow News Corp. unit Photobucket. The initiative’s goal is to let MySpace members share their public profile data outside of the walls of the social-networking site.
In a nutshell you create one profile representing your online identity and then you can take this with you wherever you go. Imagine all the time saved!
Facebook have responded with their own data portability initiative called “Facebook Connect” – expect to hear the phrase “opening of the walled garden” to be used a lot in the next few weeks.
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