Pod1 Blog

There was no need to watch the Oscars live this week you could have used Google instead, the search engine has released some lovely graphs to show how search traffic trended through out the night as different categories and winners were announced. I suppose this is one way to miss all those ‘gushy’ acceptance speeches. Anyway here is Google’s take on their lovely graphs, enjoy;-)

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony:

Click on the image above for the full article

Have you ever felt like painting your car with nail varnish? Well… you’re neither insane nor alone.

Brilliant video promoting new Fiat 500 Pink Limited Edition and http://www.pinkmyride.tv/

We’ve implemented Wordpress for many of our clients, and the social side of blogging is one of the main reasons to do that. The options for doing social networking around a blog have just got broader, as an enhanced version of the Buddypress extension to Wordpress has just been launched.

Buddypress offers bloggers the following:

• Enhanced membership and profiles for registered members (who might be anyone)
• Groups so those members can organise around shared interests
• Ability to have lists of friends among other members of the blog’s community
• Activity streams, showing what members have been up to
• Messaging and discussion tools that extend Wordpress into a true social application

Buddypress has matured and become very reliable, and the latest version addresses 2 important limitations of its predecessors:

• You don’t have to install Wordpress-MU any more, which made set-up and administration more complex. You can still use Buddypress with Wordpress-MU if you want to.
• You don’t have to create Buddypress specific Wordpress themes, as they’ve developed tools that make existing Wordpress themes work with Buddypress.

I’ve installed Buddypress on my personal blog so that people can see it in action if they’re interested. It doesn’t have much of a community at present (just me!) but you can see all the features in operation.

Michael Donnelly, Coca Cola’s Group Director for Worldwide Interactive Marketing gave the above presentation at the iStrategy 2010 Conference.  Very interesting to see how the uber brands of the world manage social media marketing and well worth the review.

A few key points from Mr. Donnelly that resonate:

• Your consumers own your brand.  Make your social strategy fan-focussed and let them choose how they want to engage with it
• Creating engaging communities builds a sustainable relationship with your consumers
• Fans don’t join online communities to be advertised at or sold to
• Fully integrate media campaigns with common social media functionality for maximum impact
• Optimise social medial tools  you have available to you
• Social Media should always support Brand Objectives
• “Keep it simple and intuitive”

There is one thing that isn’t in any doubt Google Buzz has certainly lived up to its name and generated more than it’s fair share of buzz since launch but unfortunately not all for the right reasons.

By far the biggest concern to date has been around Privacy Issues which Google has been quick to address but it seems in many peoples opinion not quick enough. This has resulted in the filing of a class action complaint, yesterday in San Jose federal court, on behalf of a Florida woman Eva Hibnick. The complaint claims Google has broken a number of laws relating to electronic communication, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The problem arose with the way that Google effectively turned Gmail into a social networking site overnight without informing users and leaving them to opt out or run the risk of allowing access to a wide range of information that they would have preferred to remain private.

Google has apologized for various Buzz shortcomings in a series of blog posts and took steps to address many of the concerns, including allowing users to shut it off completely, but otherwise is refusing to comment.

Google is no stranger to legal disputes but this may have a wider impact on how it approaches Social Media in the future. With many still trying to work out how best to use Wave, Buzz was an important next step for Google and with a more considered launch approach could have been an instant success.

There have been a lot of changes over at Facebook recently and not only the front page (can everyone stop moaning about it now please?)

We have been working on a lot of Facebook projects recently and are noticing how much functionality and brand activity is being developed behind the scenes. With the APIs so open its a pretty fast paced environment right now. Very exciting indeed.

Then there is the story that Facebook are going to launch a webmail product – to keep you on the site for as long as possible! Are we looking at yet a new benchmark in social media?

Find out what people talk & tweet about, why they tag the site in social bookmarking sites and how popular the site is in the blogsphere. You can do it all in no more than 5 minutes, just enter the URL of page or domain you want to check and hit submit.

A funny advert from Google

See what happens when a photo loving coffee cup is let loose on the tourists in New York City. Video for the Verbatim portable hard disks featuring an evil coffee cup.

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