Enjoy this weeks hottest stories in social media… Our Social Six categories are Communities, Tools & Technologies, Measurement, Influencers, Partnerships and Fun Stuff. What was your favorite story this week?
COMMUNITIES
Slap A QR Code On That Product So That People Can Like It
QR codes have become all the rage recently. The funny little squares are popping up on all types of products, allowing consumers to snap photos with their phones and find out more about what the product has to offer. Now, a Belgian company, Boondoggle Lifelabs, has created a service that will allow users who use QR codes to automatically “Like” the products Facebook page. In addition to taking users to a specific landing page, it will also let them automatically “Like” the product or brand. It is an extremely convenient way to show your passion for a product with just the snap of a camera phone.
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES
Unsocial: Foursquare Plus LinkedIn Minus All Your Friends
Up until now, social media has been all about who you know. Apps are based around your friends, what they are doing and where they are doing it. But now, a new app called Unsocial may be changing all of that. Unsocial focuses more on who you should know, rather than who you do know. The setup is simple. Unsocial links to users Linkedin accounts and allows users to tag certain terms to their account (i.e. marketing, social media, journalism etc.). The app then aggregates users in the nearby area that the user might be interested in getting to know.
MEASUREMENT
More Chilean Miner Stats for News Sites, Social Media, Search Engines
The Chilean miners have officially all been rescued, and the world was watching, tweeting, and updating statuses about it. According to statistics, the word “Chile” was mentioned a total of 667,000 times last Tuesday and Wednesday (the days the miners were being rescued). There were also around 104,000 tweets per hour containing one or more of the trending phrases (including Chile, Chilean, miners and rescue). Check out this article to find out some more social media statistics from one of the biggest stories of the year so far.
INFLUENCERS
Apple’s Steve Jobs takes shots at competitors
Steve Jobs went off on Google this week at Apples quarterly earnings call with investors. In case we could not tell before, Jobs made it extremely clear during this public rant about how he feels about Google’s Android products and policies. He discussed his disapproval about their privacy policies, their inability to “work nicely” with tablets, the Androids “fragmented” nature, and the way they report their numbers (just to name a few). He also pointed out that Android is the iPhones biggest competitor and that iPhones and Androids are leading the pack when it comes to smartphones. Also this week, Jobs quipped at reports about how fat their Dell notebooks looked, right before announcing the new MacBook Air. It’s been a sassy week for Jobs, but he keeps getting the last laugh.
PARTNERSHIPS
Let the Groupon partnerships begin. Ning, a platform that allows users to customize their own social networks, is partnering with the group buying website. Anyone with a Ning network will be able to install a Groupon widget to be updated about local deals. While the group buying market is relatively new, it is a quickly expanding one and Groupon seems to have an edge against the competitors. Groupon has deals in over 100 cities around the US and is worth a little over 1 billion dollars, so they definitely seem like the right people to be partnering with. For Groupons benefit, by partnering with social networking applications, they may potentially gain thousands of users. Yet again, another smart move for Groupon.
FUN STUFF
Twitter Co-Founder Makes Apple Vodka Ad
Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, has always been an outspoken fan of flavored vodka. Now, he’s capitalizing on that love and starring in a new campaign for Stolichnaya Vodka’s “Would You Have a Drink With You” ads. The commercial stars Stone as two different characters, one as the “Twitter Co-Founder” and the other as “Nerd of the Year”. The commercial is entertaining and points out strengths and weaknesses of Twitter, while Stone has a drink with himself.
Houston, We’ve Had A Check-In: NASA Astronaut Just Used Foursquare From Space
Location based services had an “out of this world” experience today. Doug Wheelock, a NASA astronaut and International Space Station Commander, has become the first person to “check in” from space. He was awarded the “NASA Explorer” badge that came with the message “You are now 220 miles above Earth traveling at 17,500 mph and unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge! Show this badge and get a free scoop of astronaut ice cream”. But for anyone hoping to achieve this badge as well, don’t stress if you’re not an astronaut. As written about in last week’s Social Six, NASA will be providing these badges to non-spacemen soon.
Alyssa is an Influence Marketing Intern in our Chicago office.
