Our Spark of Inspiration

There were a variety of odd video shorts we wanted to do. One of them was a continuation of our April Fool’s website, GemiFuz. We’d build some sort of cheesy animated GIF application and create an infomercial to promote it. I think I was the only fan of that one.

We also wanted something that would reflect Infuzer culture, while taking a jab at this profession we continue to love, even when it beats us down from time to time. Our initial pitch: what if we created a “bad santa” character who asks kids what they want for Christmas, then only gives them cliched digital marketing advice? The kids’ reactions would be entertaining, simply from the sheer dumbfound look on their faces. The worse the advice, the more the entertainment.

“You know what you need? Google places for your friends to hang out with you.”

“Hey kid, you need a coupon to build a larger fan base.”

In the end we flipped the delivery. The kids now dish out the marketing advice. Maybe the kids are trying to pitch an idea to a client. How hard could that be to shoot something like that? Hell, what if we got our children to pitch a funny set of ideas to Santa?

They say never work with children or pets in Hollywood. Luckily we took on a set of kids that were really stellar to work with and a lot of fun. Personally, this was the longest film project since art school, so it was a lot of ups and downs trying to edit the story together. Santa’s Little Helpers Save Christmas might have been a challenge, but without those projects, how do you learn?

Below are some of the outtakes and bloopers from our big day of filming. Thanks to everyone for participating! We hope you enjoy our short “film” and get a couple of laughs out of it. A very special thanks to Sufjan Stevens and Asthmatic Kitty Records, our hacker, Marc had the chance to booth babe for them at some festivals and they are awesome folks!

Please share the link the tell us what you think below and on Twitter! Happy holidays and have a great new year!

For the mega-fans and data nerds out there (welcome to the club!) we’ve included a poster sized infographic below. Print one out for the Cards fan you love most, they make a lovely holiday gift! Be sure to leave a comment below and let us know what you think. After the break we’ve separated the individual graphics to better highlight the details.

The Tweet Is On – St. Louis Cardinals 2011

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Daily Cards Highs & Lows

Daily volume levels of Cardinals mentions

Top 10 Cardinals Player Mentions on Twitter in 2011

Unsurprisingly, Pujols gets mentioned more than any other teammate over the season.

Emotional Tracking of Cardinals Mentions vs Games Out of First Place

Overall the emotion stayed positive from March forward, steadily increasing even into September when things were bleak.

Total Cardinals References on Twitter in St. Louis in 2011 vs 2010

The Cardinals bring home a championship and the fans just can’t talk about it enough.

Cardinals Mascot and Critter References on Twitter in St. Louis in 2011

The rally squirrel comes from left field (no pun intended) to emerge as the season’s most popular mascot. Is a changing of the guard in the air?

As the average sports fan becomes more comfortable sharing their thoughts online, the data we see becomes more representative of real life. As this picture becomes more clear, details take shape that tell a far greater story than previously possible.

What we show here is just scratching the surface of the possibilities, but it does show one important thing: The Cardinal fans, much like their team, don’t give up easily.

The Tweet is on – STL Cardinals 2011 by Infuz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.stltweets.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.infuz.com.

If you choose to reuse this art we ask that you attribute it to Infuz and link back to this blog post. If reuse is on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ please refer back to the Infuz account on that channel if possible.

Hootsuite Spreads Its Wings The “Social Media Space” is ever-expanding and Hootsuite recently unveiled its App Directory – a repository of third party applications to manage brand engagement for additional social media channels. Pro and Enterprise Hootsuite accounts have access to the launch set of YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, and Get Satisfaction apps, but more networks are on the way.

Time to Get Your Google+ Pages Earlier this week, Google launched Google+ Pages – the official venue for brands and business to connect with people in the Google+ Space. The details are still shaking out, including limitations on brand-to-consumer communication and promotion restrictions.

Adobe Embraces HTML5 Adobe has ceased efforts to bring Flash Player to mobile devices. Citing the ubiquitousness of HTML5, they’re now focusing on supporting Flash development for Adobe Air applications and investing in HTML5 conversion.

I Prefer Cotton Candy, Myself Interactivity in video gets taken to new heights with Mozilla’s release of Popcorn 1.0. How long before we’re not content to watch a video unless we can interact with it or expect it to change depending on who is watching it?

Dashboards All Around Not to be outdone by the rest, Twitter rolled out the Activity Tab, highlighting what your friends are doing on twitter besides tweeting and retweeting. TIme will tell whether it’s worth visiting Twitter in a browser to see who your friends are following and favoriting.

The Shirt Off Their Back It seems like every time a news story breaks about a company’s use (or lack of use) of Twitter or Facebook, it’s a lesson “What Not To Do”. Sometimes, like Dustin Godsey’s recent experience with DKNY, a brand gets it just right. After mentioning a torn shirt on twitter and exchanging a few emails, Dustin received a brand new one from the company.

Socialbots Set Their Sights on Facebook As if inflating Twitter follower counts wasn’t annoying enough, socialbots – programs designed to trick spam and fraud filters for social media sites- managed to scrape a significant amount of “secure” content from Facebook before they were unplugged. The creators say they weren’t trying to be malicious, just help improve the system. Tell that to the unfortunate folks who thought they were making new Facebook friends.

If You Build It, Someone Will Put An Ad On It In 2005, AT&T’s foray into Internet TV was looked at by many as a risky venture. (Fun fact: In a former life, I actually wrote some of the billing software that supported it.) Fast forward 6 years and almost half of American households have at least one Internet-capable TV. LJ is capitalizing on the trend by building advertising capabilities into their software. Internet TV advertisements may be the best of both worlds: the reach of a TV commercial, with the ability to target content to the viewer’s specific interestes like an Internet Ad.

Google Changes Everything – Part 1 Google was busy this week, and the impressive pumpkin carving was the least of their feats. The week started with the notice that Google is now able to index comments made on public Facebook pages. Suddenly SEO has an entirely new sandbox to play in, and privacy-conscious users have another reason to close down their profile.

Google Changes Everything – Part 2 Google’s gotten “Fresh” with their search engine and when the content is posted or last updated may now affect placement in search results. About 35% of search results will be affected, likely because that percentage of Google queries are date-sensitive. Ask Google about Ancient Rome and the “Freshness” isn’t so relevant. Ask which Kardashians are still married, and content more than a few hours old might be out of date.

We decided it would be fun to do a quick analysis of the tweet-stream flowing into STLTweetsduring the game time. The graph below plots the “relative emotion” in 5 minute intervals from 6:00PM to midnight. We examined every tweet that had an “emotion word” (like yay, darn, win, lose) and counted those tweets as either positive, negative or both (ignoring tweets with no emotional content). Next we computed the relative percentage that we’re positive and negative, subtracted those percentages and plotted the net difference. If the line is below the zero-line, that time period was dominated by negative-emotion tweets.

It was quite a ride. If someone has a timeline of the game, I’ll add the annotations.