Happy Holidays from Santa’s Little Helpers
As 2011 winds down, it’s time to unveil the Infuz Holiday Project and thank our clients, friends and family who supported us throughout the year. Back in October, we started brainstorming a variety of crazy ideas for our holiday card: applications, microsites, charitable projects and ridiculous stunts. We had some big plans on the table, but in the end we decided on something simple. A video.
The Tweet is On for the St. Louis Cardinals
To say the St. Louis Cardinals had a miraculous season in 2011 is an understatement. They captured our hearts and our minds with one of the more magical stories in sports history. It was the stuff of fairy tales and we felt it deserved something special in return for both the team and the fans. Today we’re turning the mirror around to show what the fans think about this team. By telling the story of the season through the conversations on Twitter we can start to see the living, breathing soul of the Cardinals as seen through the eyes of its fans. Twitter presents us with a new channel of discussion, not dissimilar from talk radio, or a group of barstools at the local sports bar. We all get to see these conversations unfold and that’s a fascinating thing.
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
This Week in Digital: November 11, 2011
Veteran’s Day, The Last Binary Date of the Century or a celebration of the latest incarnation The Doctor from Doctor Who. However you mark the occasion, you may want to take a moment to browse some of the big news in the digital space this week. Anybody who is anybody was releasing or announcing something big.
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.
This Week in Digital: November 4, 2011
Remember, remember, the 4th of November. Why? Because it’s Friday and I’ve got another round of “This Week In Digital” for you.
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.
St. Louis emotions show during World Series Game 6
Thursday’s St. Louis Cardinals World Series Game 6 was probably the most exciting game in Major League Baseball history. The game was an emotional roller-coaster.
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.
