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Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

February 16, 2010

Would You Sacrifice 10 Friends for a Whopper? – Learn Social Media by Example

Stat Box

Brand: Burger King (Food Industry)
Campaign Website: Not available anymore
Channels Used: Facebook
Appeal: Free Whopper & humor
Target Audience: Teenagers & young adults
Date: January 2009

While elaborate campaigns can be great, it is often sufficient to just pull one BRILLIANT idea out of your sleeve.

Burger King did that with “Whopper Sacrifice”, a simple Facebook app that got more buzz and love than 10 elaborate campaigns combined. Here’s how they did it…

The Idea: Sacrifice Ten Friends For a Whopper

The "Whopper Sacrifice" also had a nice interface

The "Whopper Sacrifice" also had a nice interface

Think about it. Which 10 of your Facebook friends are you willing to unfriend for a free whopper? I can think of around a 100.

The idea behind this application is hilarious. Use the Facebook app “Whopper Sacrifice” to delete 10 people from your friends list and get a free hamburger coupon.

“Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test,” the Whopper Sacrifice site explains. “Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we’ll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends.”

Oh, what people wouldn’t do for a free hamburger!

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Social Media By Example — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Roba @ 9:38 pm

February 13, 2010

The Olympics Block Social Media (Or Not Really)

Rule 49 of the Olympic Charter says: “Only those persons accredited as media may act as journalists, reporters or in any other media capacity.”

Ambiguous, you might say, and Olympic stars agree.

American skier Lindsey Vonn tweeted, “Because of the Olympic rules (blackout period) I will not be able to post any updates from now until march 3rd. Sorry, it bums me out too!”

Meanwhile, speedskater Nick Pearson also tweeted that “Due to Olympic regulations I can no longer post pics on Twitter through the Olympics.” Too bad.

message

Vonn's Twitter Message

Messgage

Pearson's Twitter Message

Complete social media black-out, you say? Oh, Olympic Committee, it’s 2010, and the time for transparency is here.

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Roba @ 9:30 pm

January 8, 2010

Are You Ugly? Social Networking is NOT For You!

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek, way before social media invaded us and altered the way we “see things”!

Just a couple of days ago, as I was surfing the net hungry for new brilliant ideas, yummy unique technologies and intriguing social media news, I was SHOCKED to read this title on Mixx: Social Network Removes 5,000 Users For Putting On Weight During Holiday Season!

My pupils grew wide with anger and disappointment, my veins stuck out from under my skin and I felt furious enough to feel steam coming up from my boiling head: Is this what we are turning into: discriminators? And not even based on race, religion or ethnicity, but based on looks, and publicly as well?

This is a sad, sad day for me. It should be that for the whole world as well! How could people stand by and watch this farce without any complaints! When did “gaining weight” become the new face of ugly?

BeautifulPeople.com Promoting Hitler's Plan!

BeautifulPeople.com Promoting Hitler's Plan!

BeautifulPeople.com: Ugly people on the inside!

In order to better understand this travesty, I decided to visit the site and see what was going on.

Another HORROR faced me as I the homepage downloaded to reveal the following taglines:

Even thin could be ugly!

Even thin could be ugly!

  • Do looks matter to you, when it comes to selecting a partner?
  • Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful?
  • No more filtering through unattractive people on mainstream sites!

In the back of my head, all I could think about was a way to hack into this pompous website and tare it down to senseless binary digits of zeros and ones while thinking: What about those not so attractive people who have so much beauty on the inside; those who will take care of you, be there for you and make you smile? What about those who suffered a certain accident or are surviving from a disfigurement? Aren’t those beautiful people too?

My Evil Experiment!

After rethinking my evil plan to destroy this website, I came up with a better, more refined experiential plan: Setting up an account on BeautifulPeople.com just to see how really “beautiful” those people who joined are. Also, I want to find out the percentage of real beauty vs. fake beauty which I can uncover!

I am still in the process of figuring things out… Stay tuned for the unavailing of the truth behind this biased, discriminating site!

Before I wrap it up here, I am anxious to know your opinion about such sites: Is this a normal way to judge and evaluate people? Would you ever join such a site?

Filed under: Controversial Picks — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Beirut @ 4:02 pm

December 5, 2009

Ikea’s Social Marketing Genius

Watch that movie and weep. It’s not sappy of course, but its so simply brilliant it’s almost hard to bare. Ikea practically invents Facebook tag marketing.

How? They use the photo tagging function where users were able to tag objects in photos of Ikea showrooms with their own names to win these very products. What they managed to do is: advertise their products socially, spread the love, and involve people in conversations.

This campaign was done by Forsman and Bodenfors, who have been working with Ikea since 1996. This is their first social media campaign.

Via Advertising/Design Goodness

Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — Roba @ 4:20 pm

October 9, 2009

Women’s Domination: Sex Appeal, Competition & Multitasking!

A few days ago, I came across an article entitled: “Why women dominate social networking”, and it made me wonder: What are the logical reasons for such a phenomenon?

Join me to take a look at the following quotes:

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult,” by Charlotte Whitton, and “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women,” by Madeleine K. Albright.

1,2,3... Go!

1,2,3... Go!

The two main points that could be easily deduced from these quotes are the following: women have the ability to get things done faster than men, through multitasking, and women are clearly competitive amongst each other. These are facts that are scientifically proven in more than one article and study and both in real life and virtually!

Therefore, in my opinion, apart from the fact that women actually dominate social networks through sex appeal, they also do so through their competitive nature and their multitasking skills!

Women & Competitiveness…

The way I see it, women are always competing amongst each other. Let’s take Facebook for example, if female A posts a few pictures of herself wearing something “sexy”, female B automatically sees them and goes out, buys some new seductive outfit, takes pictures and posts them on Facebook! Thus, more interaction on Facebook! The same could be easily applied to written wall posts and comments, games played, things shared and so on.

As for LinkedIn, if female A has many contacts and recommendations, female B gets jealous and starts engaging more with people and looking for contacts to add. Again, more interaction on LinkedIn.

And the list goes on!

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Controversial Picks — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Beirut @ 6:35 pm

August 29, 2009

When will Facebook realize that it won’t ever be “Twitter”?

Watch the sequence very carefully: First, Facebook changed their status feeds into a Twitter-like live stream, then they introduced their own version of real-time search, after that they acquired FriendFeed, and now they plan to launch Facebook Lite – a simplified (twitterified?) version of Facebook itself -.

Their obsession with Twitter is far beyond my comprehension! With their huge size, and continuous growth, they can’t be threatened by the increased popularity of Twitter. It probably has something to do with their strategy of biting off chuncks of every aspect of the social networking market. But the question is, do Twitter’s features really suit Facebook’s digestion system? How far should Facebook go in changing its anatomy in order to catch up with Twitter’s *cool* appeal?

Broadcast vs. Feed

Facebook is for feeds – mostly friends’ feeds -, Twitter is for broadcast; this is a core and fundamental difference that defines the nature of both services. You log on to Facebook in order to check out your friends’ activities and connect with them, while on Twitter you log on in order to say something, broadcast it, and promote it to the world. It is not common to add people who you don’t know over Facebook, but it is very common to follow and be followed by people you have never met in your life on Twitter and start some conversations with them. Facebook friends are also limited in number; you can only add up to 5000 friends, which limits the broadcasting capabilities for those trying to reach more people, unlike Twitter, where there is no limit whatsoever. In my opinion, even though many companies and celebrities find Facebook’s fan pages useful, I don’t think it gives Facebook a business and marketing value as Twitter does.

Facebook Lite... a Twitter look-alike?

Facebook Lite... a Twitter look-alike?

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Controversial Picks — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — Fadi @ 7:36 pm

August 25, 2009

What are you working on? Top 5 Enterprise 2.0 Platforms Reviewed

Communication has always been a key factor in determining the efficiency of how companies do business. For a long time, fax, telephone and email managed to facilitate business communications and saved companies a lot of time and effort. Today, social media comes into play, it opens new channels that give any company’s communication methods a whole new untapped dimension. From Wikis and shared feeds, to online real-time collaboration and microblogging, there is a new generation of platforms that aim to tackle this area and give your business the tools it needs to fit as a 2.0 enterprise.

Most Popular Enterprise 2.0 Social Platforms

We, here at Thoughtpick, were interested in researching the Enterprise 2.0 social platforms out there. Obviously we found many, we checked out most of them and decided to bring you the 5 most popular ones according to compete stats, with Yammer being the most popular.

Below are the top 5 picks along with our opinion:

1. Yammer: It takes microblogging to the Enterprise Arena. It provides a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting short – 140 char - messages. It builds on Twitter’s concept that we have all grown accustomed to, and adds corporate necessary options such as employee profiles, file sharing, groups and organizational charts. Recently it rolled out some new features that include a revamped iPhone app, “like” options, threads and an improved search.

Thoughtpickers’ opinion: The power of Yammer - like Twitter – lies in its simplicity. It provides a very simple and clean interface that allows for easy flowing interaction between employees – interaction that is built on 140 char text messages. Yammer is mainly a microblogging tool and thus it lacks some features that other Enterprise 2.0 social platforms offer such as wikis and feeds. With over 40,000 companies worldwide signed to Yammer, one should not neglect the power of this tool. It’s worth checking out.

[read full article >>]

Filed under: App Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Fadi @ 5:25 pm

August 19, 2009

Social Media & Mental Health: Are Our Minds Safe?

Does the extensive use of social media sites, channels and tools cause some kind of disturbance or another to our mental stability? What are the psychological issues and disorders that social media can help breed, promote and encourage for both kids and adults? How can we control our social media presence to contain such a serious dilemma?

A Brief Prelude…

No one can underestimate or try to deny the power of social media and its ability to raise awareness for important issues and spread the word about various causes, but is that it? I mean apart from the privacy related problems and the work related concerns, are there no other negative “side effects” that we seem to be overlooking?

Common Mood Disorders

Common Mood Disorders

So, what other concerns could I talking about? Mental stability negatively influenced by social media, and here is how…

The top 7 psychological disorders social media helps promote…

In addition to their ability to brainwash us, I think social media channels and social networking sites pose the following psychological threats on our mental health and personality:

1. Schizophrenia: “a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality. Distortions in perception may affect all five senses, but most commonly manifest as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking with significant social or occupational dysfunction”.

As the above definition clearly suggests, perception disorders are a mental problem, especially when it comes to certain complexes such as the “God complex” and claiming that one is someone he/she isn’t! Social media can help encourage such disillusion perceptions due to the fact that they allow for claiming to be who you are not and describing yourself differently using various channels!

2. Insomnia & Sleep Disorders: insomnia is “difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep, or both”.

In general, lack of sleep can be very problematic and I believe social media can cause it as well as insomnia at a more advanced stage. I take myself here as an example. I use social media from morning till after midnight and I confess Twitter has kept me up for early morning hours on several occasions. Not only is that not healthy, but it also can stress the mind and further cause lower level outputs. [read full article >>]

Filed under: Controversial Picks — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Beirut @ 5:28 pm

August 5, 2009

How Safe Are You? Privacy and Risks in Social Networks

It is true that social media platforms can suck your time like a vampire turning you into an ethereal zombie wandering in the post-Internet’s waste land. Furthermore, they have the power to expose you to the pleasures of experiencing a thousand and one nights of pain and to bring you ridicule by your ex or even spin your moral compass so fast that it might stunt your emotional growth that of a whole generation. Still, those are problems for later decades and a different generation.

2049128409_31595220b5

How social media allows you to experience pain anytime

For the rest of us, using social media networks bears some serious risks to our lives, and no I’m not talking about that “life” where you went broke playing Texas Hold’em and you would have to wait 24 hours before you can carry on with your addiction. I’m talking about risks that would directly impact your financial, legal, or health and might cause irreparable damage to any or all of those.

Honestly, all joking aside, how much time do you spend thinking about the repercussions of anything you do on social networks?

How about that new friend that you recently added and perhaps are falling for ? Is she really a girl ? Or is she just seeking her 15 seconds of e-fame ?

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Controversial Picks, Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — M. Bamieh @ 3:17 pm

May 3, 2009

Facebook-Like Platform: Is IBM Running Out of Ideas?

How saturated is the online social media world nowadays? What is the destiny haunting the new emerging social media tools and networks? Did Facebook lead social media to its final stage of saturation transforming it into an otherwise mass media tool? Are there any limits to incremental innovation? And did real genuine innovation just fade away with time and advanced technologies? Are business giants such as IBM really refining existing platforms or just simply mimicking them?


We can all agree on one crucial point: Innovation is key! Yet, if each social network is a scribble, what happens when too many scribbles are painted on the same board? Loss and confusion indeed!

This brings me back to the article that provoked me to write this piece: “IBM Launched World’s Geekiest Social Network, My developerWorks” and my question is very simple here: Why? Why did IBM invest in people, time, money and resources in order to develop yet another social network for users? Is it concern? Care? Appreciation? Enhancing user-experience?

Well, I personally don’t think so!

Allow me to demonstrate using a few simple equations:

  • Our day is 24 hours and this is a fact.
  • Let’s say that the average sleeping hours are 8 per day, which leaves us with 16 hours.
  • From those 16 hours, we work around 8 hours (and some work up to 10 or even 12).
  • This leaves us with around 6 to 8 hours.
  • This time we have left we need to divide between having meals, resting, using transportation, seeing family and friends as well as using the Internet to check out our e-mails, chat, maybe download music, read articles and of course use our favorite social network to stay in touch with our online communities.

Now, the day will never get longer, we need to sleep and work will never end, and those are yet more facts!

If I am using Twitter + Plurk + Ning + Facebook and it is already taking so many hours from my day, hours which could be spent on doing something more interactive, why would I want to waste more time to sign up and learn how to use yet another social network which really is just another imitation of the one I am currently using and affiliated with?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Why don’t those big business giants create joint ventures with existing influential social networks to create unique comprehensive value-added experiences for their users? Do they not recognize that with our busy lifestyles, the saturation of Web 2.0 services will eventually lead us to reach a point of maybe just giving up on those services at a certain point?

* I’d like to thank tina_manthorpe for the scribbles image.

Filed under: Controversial Picks, Web News — Tags: , , , , — Beirut @ 11:29 am
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