The Social 7 - Week of March 9th

Hi everyone; welcome back to The Social 7, a weekly conversation on the top 7 stories in social media and marketing.  Instead of our typical video-cast, we’ve decided to write a blog post this week instead.  But don’t worry, our beautiful faces will be back to grace your computer screens next week!  On with the top 7 stories, and as always, feel free to submit ideas for future episodes.

Full stories and links are after the jump…

7. Jack in the Box Goes Social

Anyone who was watching the Super Bowl knows that the “founder” of fast food chain Jack in the Box was involved in a tragic “accident” in which he was hit by a bus and subsequently fell into a coma.  The stunt marked Jack in the Box’s first foray into social media, that included the launch of a micro site, http://www.hangintherejack.com, where fans of the chain could leave messages, photos and videos to the comatose Jack urging him to get better.  Fortunately for fans, Jack has had a miraculous recovery and is back running the company, starting with a major logo redesign.  Overall the campaign seems to have been highly successful for Jack in the Box, with tons of consumers taking part.

6. MySpace Execs Leave/MySpace Gets a Credit Card

Just as credit lines are being slashed for consumers around the world, MySpace is partnering with Citi to introduce a new credit card aimed at their core user base.  Citi Forward by MySpace rewards users for making payments on time, doing things that are “good for the future” (like recycling, donating canned goods, using CFLs, etc) with lower interest rates and points they can use to download music.

But while MySpace is gaining its own credit card, it’s also losing more executives.  Three execs, including Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, are leaving MySpace to pursue other ventures (read: start their own company).  The blog-o-sphere lit up with questions and predictions about what this means for MySpace, particularly since it recently lost the “biggest social network” crown to Facebook, but so far all that is clear, is that some lucky exec at MySpace is about to get a big promotion.

5. Twitter Rolls Out Integrated Search

There’s always constantly new ways to interact with Twitter, usually coming thanks to a creative developer making use of the Twitter API.  However, it looks like Twitter might actually be making a pretty major update to the site soon, by introducing integrated search.  Twitter added basic search functionality last year, when it bought Summize and integrated into the site - however the current solution still requires users to navigate to a dedicated page.  According to rumors (and screen shots from accounts that have had the feature rolled out to them) Twitter will be rolling out an integrated search bar across the site that will allow users to search without navigating away from their current page.  This will address a complaint raised by many of the top users and could maybe even bring some traffic back to the site (currently 70% of twitter-ers use another application besides twitter.com to view and update their feeds).

4. To Blog (sponsored by insert company) or Not to Blog

Should our conversations be guided by cash?  Forrester issued a controversial recommendation titled, Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox which sparked a firestorm of protest, as well as support.

“Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with “pay for play” pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.”

-          Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb

“Sponsored conversations are happening, yet we insist on it being done right and ethically, that means disclosure and being authentic.”

-          Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester (also produced A Running List of Sponsored Conversations)

Would you tolerate sponsored blog posts, tweets or other forms of online dialogue?

3.YouTube Serves Up 100 Million Viewers (or roughly the population of Mexico)

YouTube reached the magical milestone of 100 million video viewers in one month last week.  While this was music to YouTube management’s ears, other music-related news overshadowed this news, including a rumored partnership with Universal Music Group and the site’s decision to remove music videos from the UK.

2. Skittles Social Media Campaign

Last week, Skittles.com attempted to get savvy with the social Web, changing their Web site to portray different social media platforms.  The homepage, for example, shows you their Twitter conversation; the “friends link brings you to Skittles’ Facebook page; while the “Media/Photos” tab shows you their photos on Flickr.  This is a neat campaign and definitely an innovative way of connecting with those who are passionate connecters and active across different social media platforms, but are you having trouble seeing the value in this bold move?  Well, according to Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, Skittle’s new campaign increased traffic to their homepage by 1332 percent in one day!  How’s that for value?

1. Facebook Updates

In a two hour long press conference last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some rather large improvements being made to Facebook, especially in the area of branded company and personality pages (read his summary of the changes here).  From Zuckerberg himself - “Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations.”  In addition to branded page updates, Facebook will also be revising the homepage, allowing users to see friend updates as they happen (similar to Twitter) and choose not to see updates from certain people.  Of course, in the good ol’ social Web, rumors and inaccurate information began circulating, which the unofficial All Facebook blog attempted to address a day later.  A few friends of The Social 7 provided their candid feedback on the redesign:

sseverino: i can soon filter those boring status posts on #facebook!

JGoldsborough: Do think it hurts a Web site’s rep 2 redesign so often.

See you next week!

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