Sony is promoting it’s latest movie “You Don’t Get To 500 Million Friends Without Making A Few Enemies” on Twitter. This film is about the life of the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Sony is using the new Twitter advertising program, where you can promote a trend or a tweet for a specific trend.

It is pretty ironic that Twitter is promoting a movie about Facebook, a competitor, via promoted trends and tweet call #socialmedia!

In other hand, shouldn’t Sony have promoted this movie on a Facebook fan page!?

An Australian company is selling Facebook friends, Twitter followers and Digg votes for a price close to 20 cents each.

 Obviously this offer is for companies who want to promote their Facebook page or Twitter page or syndicate their content via Digg because today these social media websites are a very powerful marketing tool.

 
To be honest it is a pretty good idea, but why it is so important to have a large number of friends, followers or votes?

If you are a media agency working for a client, the number of Facebook and Twitter friends/followers can be one of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and obviously more you have the better it is.

 
From a users point of view, a Facebook group or Twitter account with a lot of friends/followers is more attractive and will rank higher on Facebook internal search engine as well as Google.

 
A number of votes on Digg allows your subject (with a nice link to your website) to be on the home page (or main category pages) and will attract large number of user scurious to know why so many people ‘digg’ it.

It is sad but true that on social media websites everybody is a sheep who follows the mass… but it is also the fault to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Google who promote more the most viewed, top follower accounts.

 
I think that this company have developed a good business and will have lot of confidential clients pretty soon…

HP is testing a new social network application for cell phones. The idea is simple, it is a little bit like msn messenger, you can see your friends pictures, name, offline/online, city and some information about the local time and weather of where they from. So far nothing very exciting…

The main idea it is to only promote the friends that you‘re actually contacting regularly. The application will show (promote) only people that you really know and interact via phone, text or other social media sites. We call that ‘Intimate Social Network’.

Intimate Social Network from HP

The new trends in social media will be increasingly about intimate social networking. Who cares about the pictures on Facebook of somebody that you meet twice at work and some random people you maybe never see? How many of your Facebook (or MySpace) friends are you really in contact with? Realistically, probably not a lot…

Also more and more people are worry about the access of personal information to random people or co-workers. This is why the next generation of social media websites or applications will look more like your MSN Messenger (or at least mine) with only the people that you actually personally interact with.

Intimate Social Network goes a little back to basics of social media networking, where the only contacts were people you actually knew. This will be a major change for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter where the number of friends/followers is commonly understood as popularity.

Personally I think that is a good thing that people focus more on ‘true’ friends than cyberspace ‘acquaintances’.

Last tuesday the Vatican launched its new website Pope2you.net for the 43rd World Communications Day. This new website offers the user a bunch of Social media applications such as iPhone and Facebook applications, video and blog.

Pope2You Website

The idea from the Catholic Church is to reach young people and change the image of the Church. Pope2You is more a portal for the different online applications.

Unfortunately the Facebook application wasn’t found by Facebook when I tried it… not a very good sign.

WikiCath (probably Wikipedia Catholic? ) is more or less a blog (or at least this is what I understand of it). In the business world it would be the company blog. It is a good idea and makes it easier to follow the news from the Vatican.

WikiCath

The iPhone application is a nice application which allows you to receive news, pictures and video from the Pope (Vatican). There is not much to say about it, except that this application does the job!

iphone Pope2You

And finally the YouTube Channel which is pretty well customised with links to the different Vatican websites. Once again nothing new here but nothing is missing as well.

Youtube Pope2You

This new campaign updates the Vatican’s online presence. At the end of the day the Vatican was not trying to be original or revolutionise the web but they have done a lot better job at it than most of the companies online…

Anyway, all these applications definitely facilitate communications with the Catholic Church and this is a pretty good idea for the 43rd World Communications Day

Today M&S (Marks and Spencer) is launching a campaign to celebrate it’s 125th birthday. All the stores across UK will host a Penny Bazaar Bonanza (1p Sale).

M&S - 1p Sale Website

Shoppers can buy a range of twenty items for 1p. M&S’s selection is composed of cuff-links, socks, scarves, purses and underwear.
 

This offer is part of the M&S charity program ‘125 Charity Challenge’.Charity Challenge’.

The M&S 1p sale has had a large effect on the online community, especially on Twitter where M&S is the number one topic! M&S has also set up a Facebook group for this event…

M&S -Trending Topic in Twitter

M&S - 1p Facebook Group

There has been a lot of online noise  for this offer…very good marketing!!!

Eight months ago, Ford started a social media campaign called ‘This is Now’ for the launch of the Ford Fiesta. The principal is pretty simple, upload a picture, video or song representing the concept ‘This is Now’. Ford uses the famous Flickr which is an image and video hosting website. This campaign is managed by We are Social which is a social media agency in London.

Flickr - This is Now

The ‘This is Now’ Flickr group is composed of various metaphoric pictures which represent the theme ‘This is Now’. As you can imagine there are a wide ranging number of representations of this motto, some of them very impressive.

To promote the Flickr group, they have set up a blog, a Facebook group and a Twitter profile! They have also contacted an impressive number of blogs, starting with the main marketing blogs and after fashion, art and photo blogs. The goal was to involve people who are not familiar with the automobile industry.
 

This is Now - Blog

‘This is now’ is a very interactive campaign with the usual elements such as photo posting, a blog (which allows guest writers to promote the events and pictures), Facebook and Twitter conversation.

After only eight months, the campaign is a ‘success’ according to Sandrine Plasseraud who is in charge of the Ford campaign for We are Social. With more than 40,000 pictures and reaching over one million people across Europe this campaign is definitely well managed.

Most of the online campaigns which include involvement/engagement of the public are normally the most successful and cost efficient. The blog, Facebook and Twitter were also an excellent choice of social media support to the main activity (uploading pictures on Flickr).

Ford has done an excellent job so far, let see what they will add (if any) over the next few months…

In the weeks following my first post regarding Carrie Prejean, the public interest in this story has carried on increasing. The number of searches on this subject is growing as you can see on Google trends.

Carrie Prejean - Google Trends

So what has happened in the past two weeks? Carrie Prejean has joined the ‘National Organization for Marriage’ and has started a campaign against gay marriage. She also promotes ‘proposition 8’ (Keep Marriage Restored) on her Facebook page.

Carrie Prejean Facebook

 
So where are we online with Carrie Prejean? First, Carrie Prejean experiences a search engine reputation management problem. Effectively, TMZ covers the two first Google results for ‘Carrie Prejean’ keyword (with ‘sexy’ photos of her at 17 years old). Also Google news comes up with some negative articles relevant to Miss California.

Carrie Prejean - Google Result

So what has Carrie Prejean done? She has obviously started to ‘collect’ friends on her Facebook profile.

Carrie Prejean - Facebook Friends

And Carrie Prejean updated her Facebook profile with different messages…

Carrie Prjean - Facebook Update

Carrie Prejean Twitter is yet not available. Thanks Twitter!!!

Carrie Prejean Twitter

At the end of the day, it seems that Carrie Prejean is working by herself for an online reputation (I don’t know who and what is doing her PR) and the result is not great!