Burgers, lost holiday snaps, and doing the Harlem Shake

As always Siren Communications knows exactly what’s happening in the crazy world of social media.
 

Following in Google and Facebook’s footsteps, Twitter has opened the floodgates to a torrent of new advertising with its new Twitter Ads API programme. This gives marketers more flexibility over how they manage their campaigns on Twitter as part of the wider online marketing mix. This is designed to encourage an increasingly innovative approach to online advertising (not to mention a predicted 90% jump in revenue to around the $560 million mark, but who’s counting). However, critics argue that with this comes the risk of oversaturating the Twitter stream with advertising. Can Twitter find the balance between user experience, profitability and innovative marketing? Watch this space…

An announcement this week about a new Twitter app to be launched in March, is sure to be met with a mixed reception. ‘LivesOn’ will analyse your online behaviour and the way you speak, so your Twitter account will continue to post links and ‘favourite’ tweets creating a personal digital afterlife #weird #morbid

It seems that once again a rather crazy dance move has set the YouTube community alight. The Harlem Shake has taken off in such dramatic fashion that it’s even attracted some credit from the analytics bods at YouTube itself. In a recent blog on YouTube trends, it was revealed that over 12,000 Harlem Shake videos had been uploaded in record time. Collectively, these crazy dancing videos have been watched more than 44 million times in a week. For those of you unaware of this craze, all videos follow a similar pattern – one person, usually wearing a motorbike helmet, dances alone in a room of people looking rather bored. As the beat kicks in, the video cuts to the entire room going dancing nuts! The success of the video uploads has been attributed to the anticipation of the ‘group dance breakout’. With so much competition, it’s a race to get the highest viewcount – this video, shot at Maker Studios, is one such upload doing very well indeed with over 18m views. The Harlem Shake only goes to prove that a video which captures imagination, sometimes in its sheer simplicity, still has the power to reach many, many people. Will you be uploading a Harlem Shake? The team at Siren Communications might have to get involved. Time to find a crash helmet…

Strewth, the Ozzies have set their sights on digital domination by boldly setting out to make Australia the most talked about holiday destination on social media. The national tourist board is actively seeking ambassadors to represent the country in its latest campaign to add to its existing four million strong Facebook fans. As part of this ambitious project Tourism Australia has launched its own social media guidelines offering its very own ‘five steps’ to success.

The power and speed of social media has once again been revealed, as two English backpackers have been reunited with their lost travelling pictures after a Dutch advertising boss started a social media campaign called ‘who’s that girl?’ on YouTube and Facebook. Having misplaced the memory card in Amsterdam the distressed backpackers believed the snaps of their most memorable travelling experiences had been lost forever. However, the advertising boss stumbled across the memory card and in an attempt to track down the owners put together a YouTube/Facebook campaign by posting a selection of images with the caption ‘who’s that girl’. Fortunately a friend of the backpackers saw the YouTube video and contacted her pal with the good news!

This week saw Twitter hackers take over the @BurgerKing feed and announce that the fast food giant had been sold to rival company McDonalds. The hackers changed the profile image to that of the golden arches and tweeted, "We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you". The takeover lasted almost an hour before the account was shut down. McDonalds released a statement denying any involvement in the hacking, and if you read the Tweets it’ll be instantly obvious that this was not a strategic plan of attack by the major corporation. The @BurgerKing Twitter feed was back up and running later the same day with a welcome back Tweet and, hopefully, a trickier password to fathom. Burger King has since gained 30,000 new followers as a result of the Twitter hacking.