Social Media Activism promoted at Oscars

The omnipresence of social media has been proven once again at the 82th Academy Awards. One of the men responsible for The Cove, the 2010 Oscar winner for Best Documentary, used the Academy Awards stage to promote a web and mobile-based activism. The film describes the annual killing of dolphins in a National Park in Japan from an anti-dolphin hunting campaigner’s point of view. During the accepting speech, Ric O’Barry held up a small black board with the words “Text DOLPHIN to 44144” on it.

Viewers who followed the sign’s instructions were subscribed to text updates and plugged into the larger social media campaign for the film’s cause. The campaign is rooted in a Takepart.com page that links to several ways people can get involved, including a letter-writing campaign and a Facebook Cause application page with more than 500.000 supporters. The latter has also been used to organize live-streaming Q&A events with Ric O’Barry.

Activist O’Barry has made a clever use of social media in order to reach people who had never heard about the movie before, and to inform them about the slaughter of dolphins. It seems like text messages and the web increasingly pay a significant part in activism lately: the American Red Cross, for example, ran a very successful text message donation campaign for relief efforts in Haiti, while Twitter was used by protesters in Iran to make voices heard and to organize events. The film itself has caused a major uproar, but the impact of the social media campaign of The Cove cannot be measured just yet. Nevertheless, this example illustrates how social media can function as an important weapon for activists.

Source:
http://mashable.com/2010/03/08/the-cove-movie-oscars/

Social Networking Sites over their peak?

Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Netlog are very popular with marketeers and investors. Their importance is reflected in the way these sites are treated by other media, e.g. tweets of famous people are regarded as reliable sources with news value. Provocative Facebook groups can cause a real controversy.

Nevertheless, a few cracks are showing up. For example, the user numbers of Twitter are not rising anymore. Twitter has been a hype so far, but it could become a victim of its own success. The expectations may have been too high, which might lead to a huge disappointment.

MySpace, Xanga and Frienster are examples of how the success of a Social Networking Site can fade away. In theory, the same could happen to Facebook and Twitter. However, Twitter does not need to worry yet as the statistics are still in its favour: its users are nowadays more active than ever.

Sources:

http://www.newser.com/story/79312/twitter-may-have-peaked.html http://www.appscout.com/2010/01/twitter_a_victim_of_its_own_su.php

Real Facebookfriends

The social networking site Facebook is all about friends: you add as many friends as possible, you comment on each other’s pictures, you post funny messages on each other’s wall, .... It is entertaining for a while, but you could wonder if it is really meaningful.

For Louis van Dievel Facebook has become irrelevant: you have hundreds of friends, without really knowing most of them. Of course, Facebook offers the ideal opportunity to get in touch with old school friends, old colleagues ... In a nutshell: people you have not seen in years. But, what then? What is the next step after adding them as friends? You post something on each other’s wall, or send some kind of message to each other. And in most cases, that is about it, you do not really do anything more to revive these old friendships.

When it comes to friends at present, the same thing happens: contacts on Facebook remain rather shallow. Occasionally, you send a virtual birthday card, or you answer each other’s post, but after some time you forget about it, or at some point you do not have anything more to say. As a result some people don’t think it is worth anymore to be on Facebook, and they quit.

Though this might be just a temporal farewell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2YHwCYVXyo

Source:

http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/cultuur%2Ben%2Bmedia/1.607267

Advertising taken to a new level

The French fashion brand Louis Vuitton is planning a large scale advertising stunt this week. On the 7th of October they are going to launch their new fall-summer collection for 2010 by Marc Jacobs with a live fashion show on Facebook. This will enable anyone to follow the show which will take place at the same time in Paris. Louis Vuitton, like many other brands, already had a fan page on Facebook where fans could follow the latest news, but they are the first to bring a fashion show live on the popular medium. This new take on advertising is bound to be copied by many and to be watched worldwide.

Louis Vuitton has already been advertising on the internet excessively. They created an interactive site featuring video’s of the three American astronauts Sally Ride, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. These three were also featured in the series of pictures made by Annie Leibowitz for the brand to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the famous lines “One small step for man and a giant leap for mankind”. Louis Vuitton is also active on Twitter.

What we should take into consideration when creating our own social network is that this is a new and fun way of advertising. A lot less annoying and more effective than the pop-ups that block your entire screen.

To all the fashionista’s out there: Wednesday 2:30 PM (Paris Time) on Facebook. Don’t miss it!

Sources:
http://www.knack.be/weekend/nl/mode/nieuws/articles/a16162-article.jsp