140 Proof, the proud sponsor of social advertising, brings you the latest social news from the Olympics. Here’s the latest roundup from the world of social:
Social Dominates as the Second Screen of the Games
Social and online channels have changed the face of the Olympic Games, perhaps even more than the first televised broadcast of the Olympics in 1960. This year, thousands of hours of coverage are planned, across global and domestic TV and online streams.
Consider this: in 1996, NBC broadcast 176.5 hours of Olympics coverage.
In 2012, the Games will be covered on NBC and online channels for a total of 5,535 hours.
All that coverage means huge volumes of second screen discussion in social. The Olympic opening ceremony alone earned almost 10 million mentions from fans on Twitter. Twitter reports that Olympic tweet volume is about 100X the rate seen for Beijing in 2008. (Thanks for providing us at 140 Proof with so much targeting fodder!)
Twitter Triumphs over Facebook for Olympic Mentions, But Official Olympic Channels Win More Fans on Facebook
The Telegraph reports that overall, 97% of social media mentions of the Olympics have originated on Twitter as opposed to Facebook.
The most popular Olympic sport on Twitter (measured in mentions)? Volleyball.
However, the Facebook page for the Olympic Games has won over 3 million Likes so far, with @Olympics on Twitter winning about half that with 1.4 million followers. YouTube trails with just over 100,000 subscribers for its Official Olympic Channel, and “London 2012” on Google+ has nearly 700,000 followers.
Social Is Powerful — and When Mishandled, It Can Cut Both Ways
Some of the social frenzy over the Games has even affected athletes’ performance in the Games themselves, with Australian swimmer Emily Seebohmblaming Twitter and Facebook for affecting her focus and ultimately her performance. Seebohm won silver in the 100 meter backstroke, but late nights talking to fans on Twitter and Facebook had her believing she’d already won gold.
The popularity of social media affects athletes financially, too — athletes sponsored by brands other than official Olympic sponsors are restricted in what they can share in social during the Games (an effort by the Olympic Committee to prevent ambush marketing). The restriction, known as Rule 40, has led to online protest using the tags #WeDemandChange and #Rule40.
Social is showing its power in other ways, too: tweets are getting news people kicked off Twitter, and athletes kicked out of the games. For example, the Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristo (@papaxristoutj) was ejected from the Games for criticizing Africans via a West Nile joke in her tweet. And earlier this week, Swiss soccer defender Michael Morganella (@morgastoss) insulted Koreans in a tweet and was similarly banned.
Journalist Guy Adams (@guyadams) was not kicked out of the games, but off of Twitter itself, for including an NBC exec’s email address in a series of tweets criticizing coverage of the Olympics. (The account has since been reinstated.)
140 Proof’s Favorite Olympians to Follow
At 140 Proof, our favorite Summer Games sports are swimming, weightlifting, and track. Follow our favorite Olympians in social:
@UsainBolt, Track, Jamaica
@RyanLochte, Swimming, USA
@dekker_inge, Swimming, Netherlands
@zoepablosmith, Weightlifting, UK
Four Apps for Following the Olympics
We recommend four great apps for following the Olympics in social:
For the fan who wants the latest updates on their number one sport, ifttt can send you a text message whenever Team USA wins a medal.
Chief Revenue Officer Andy Scott (@andyscott999) joined 50 other digital media executives at AppNation’s TV 3.0 Summit to speak about the future of the rapidly growing market for mobile apps and the growing trend of connecting apps with television.
Scott spoke alongside executives from NBC, Time Inc., ESPN, Group M, and American Express in front of a sold out audience of thousands on the topic of social and second screen technologies.
In a highlight of the presentation, Scott emphasized that despite the appearance of new “second screen” apps to the marketplace, only one second screen app will triumph — social:
Twitter, Facebook, etc, and smartphones have brought social back to the TV viewing experience. We’ve come full circle.
People aren’t flocking to the purpose-built mission control “second screen apps” — they already have Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social is the real second screen.
Thanks to the AppNation organizers for inviting us to speak at the first-ever AppNation TV Summit, with extra special thanks to everyone we met at the Chairman’s Reception at Pravda NY.
Last week, we were honored to host guests from Razorfish, Spark PR, and Schox PLC to 140 Proof for some bbq and baseball. Everyone met up at the San Francisco HQ office for grillables and 21st Amendment brew before heading off to watch the Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals 7-5.
Thanks to our friends for a great evening!
Update: thanks TaskRabbit for choosing our Grillmaster task as task of the week!
The LUMA Partners Digital Media Summit in New York last week was a great snapshot of the current state of digital media. 140 Proof CEO Jon Elvekrog (@jonelvekrog) joined 400 other CEOs of digital media companies to discuss the state of social, e-commerce, and more.
For the “Social: Facebook and Beyond” panel, Jon Elvekrog was joined by three other CEOs in the social space : Nick Brien of McCann Worldgroup, Reggie Bradford of Vitrue, and Nikhil Sethi of Adaptly.
The panel covered the spectrum of paid social strategies, from winning strategies in paid social to the most basic question: what’s the difference between social media and social advertising?
“Social media is tweeting to your followers. Social advertising is tweeting to everyone.” - @jonelvekrog
After the conference, Elvekrog noted that “most mobile advertising platforms still haven’t made big forays into audience targeting territory.” The big challenge facing most mobile platforms, says Elvekrog, is how to get out of the trap of “last click” strategies:
The current conventional wisdom is that focusing on local will super-charge mobile. But will this strategy hold water? Google will capture 80% of local advertising through its dominance in search and mobile maps. And other players like Yelp, LevelUp, and perhaps even Square will eat the other 20% of local advertising. The real challenge for mobile is to move up the food chain into demand generation and display.
The opportunity that advertisers understand but most mobile platforms are still catching up to, Elvekrog says, is that audience targeting will save mobile from a permanent spot in lower-funnel strategies. Deep social interest data, which abounds on mobile, is the key to unlocking display advertising and the demand generation ad campaigns that mobile will be perfect for.
DMS’12 is a wrap. Thank you to the 400+ CEOs for your participation, content contributions, thought leadership and fun. #DMS12
The biggest tech businesses in the world today depend on open source technology like BSD, GCC, and Linux, but few universities are teaching students how to build scalable, profitable startups based on a purely open source approach. Just recently 140 Proof CTO @jm3 was honored to be invited to the Hack Harvard tech meetup in Cambridge, MA to lecture about Open Source and Big Business. It was a great time!
We’re pleased to announce our new social ad solution for political campaigns.
Political Stumping Gets Social With New Ad Solution for Political Campaigns
140 Proof, the leading social ad platform for Twitter and Facebook, today launched a new social ad solution for political campaigns that allows candidates to reach large groups of targeted voters within the social stream. 140 Proof social ads enable candidates to amplify their campaign efforts and extend their reach beyond existing followers, putting their messages at the top of the social news feeds of over 100 million potential voters.
Candidates Can Extend Social and Traditional Campaign Efforts Beyond Existing Followers
Whether candidates just want to broaden the reach of their existing tweets and posts, or they’re out to own the social conversation around a Presidential debate, 140 Proof social ads are a natural extension of any candidate’s ongoing campaign efforts. 140 Proof creates real-time, top-of-the-feed ads directly from a candidate’s tweets, allowing them to conduct far-reaching conversations with social audiences at the precise moments that are relevant to their campaigns.
For example, candidates can use 140 Proof social ads to:
Reach new potential voters: a candidate’s regular tweets and posts are only seen by existing followers; 140 Proof gets these tweets in front of millions of new potential voters.
Capitalize on breaking news: 140 Proof allows candidates to be first out of the gate with commentary on breaking news and events (and even opponent missteps).
Augment crisis communications: when candidates must react to negative ads or campaign gaffes, 140 Proof gives them a powerful tool for rapid and far-reaching response.
Enhance TV and video ad buys: candidates can use 140 Proof to run ads that include a video within the ad itself, drawing more attention to viral campaigns or TV spots.
Own the social conversation around live events: candidates can run real-time campaigns targeting voters who are watching and commenting on live political broadcasts while on Twitter or Facebook.
Instantly Reach Targeted Groups of Voters on Twitter and Facebook
140 Proof also gives candidates the ability to precisely target these ads to their most coveted audiences, using technology that segments voters based on whom they follow, keywords used in their social streams and other publicly available keys from their social graph. Campaigns can work with 140 Proof to customize their own voter targets, or they can leverage 140 Proof’s pre-built political audience “clusters”, such as Swing Voters; Soccer Moms; NASCAR Dads; Greens; Tea Party; Union Interested; Hispanic; We are the 99%; and many others.
“Twitter and Facebook have become the de facto political platforms that decide elections, and experts are projecting that the ad spend in social media in this year’s election will be 15 times greater than in 2008. To be competitive in the social era, candidates will need to look beyond their existing followers and use tools such as 140 Proof to extend their reach,” said Jon Elvekrog, CEO of 140 Proof. “Candidates should be using their Twitter account as their mouthpiece, and 140 Proof social ads as their megaphone.”
We recently had the privilege of taking part in an amazing event to help young startup entrepreneurs.
Far from Silicon Valley tech IPOs and infectious New York startup buzz, some innovators in Michigan are humbly jump-starting their own startup renaissance. The University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship, an incubator for hackers and hustlers from the UMich Computer Science and Business schools, is creating opportunities to inspire student to launch world-changing startups.
The CFE recently organized a trip for 80 entrepreneurially-minded students to visit San Francisco and Silicon Valley companies, touring offices of growing startups like Twitter, Facebook, Twilio, and others. 140 Proof was asked to make one of its co-founders available for a “Founders Panel” on entrepreneurial life in San Francisco Silicon Valley. We happily accepted, and shared several stories about 140 Proof’s growth as a scalable business, the importance of teams and community, and the primacy of the Valley.
Although the event was professionally recorded, the videos and audio files aren’t up yet, so please enjoy an audio recording of my portion of the panel (no video):
Extra special thanks to Sam Schillace (@sschillace); creator of Google Docs, Dick Costolo (@dickc); CEO of Twitter, and Dug Song (@dugsong); CEO of Duo Security, for joining us on the panel and at this awesome event. We had a great time.
To any students or other CFE members who attended the San Francisco event: we’d love to hear your feedback on the panel, what you learned, what you liked, what you didn’t, etc. Feel free to ping us on Twitter (@140proof) or here in the comments. Thanks!
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was another blockbuster event. Between the sprawling vendor booths and the late-night sponsored dinners and cocktail parties, there were lots of interesting discussions on the future of mobile.
During the 140 Proof presentation on the Mobile-Local panel, we talked about a few key trends in the mobile space. Some of those topics are summarized below.
Mobile advertising is going to have another huge growth year in 2012. One of the most compelling trends in mobile is the desire to deliver audience targeting capabilities to brand advertisers on the mobile device. Of course, here at 140 Proof, we agree that targeted mobile advertising is the future. We’ve been on the cutting edge of leveraging the Interest Graph generated from social feeds to accurately match advertisers and users’ interests for almost two years – via both web and mobile applications.
Mobile payments are getting a lot of attention. Beyond Square and LevelUp, there appears to be at least a half-dozen well-capitalized startups trying to dominate the mobile payment space. The jury is out as to when or if a phone-based payment solution will ever replace the tried-and-true magnetic strip of the Visa-MasterCard duopoly. Sure the phone will replace watches for teens and twenty-somethings, but carrying a wallet is a deeply entrenched habit to break. As long as we still need to carry cash or a driver’s license, is it really that big of a deal to carry around a magnetic strip?
Social is mobile. Now this is a trend that we see unfolding in front of our eyes. Not only is there a huge macro shift to mobile computing devices (smartphones and tablets), but social media is itself becoming more and more mobile. There will always be “research use” of social networks on the desktop and certainly the “taking a social network break while at your work computer” trend wont going away anytime soon. However, the real-time nature and bite-sized consumption aspect of the social feed is perfectly suited to frequent mobile access.
Mobile local will take off. Everyone has heard the recurring tall tale of Starbucks texting you a coupon when you happen to be near a store. This has been technically possible for close to a decade, but the reality is that it simply has not materialized. Advertisers simply aren’t spending big to deliver location-based deals like this. The in-store or near-store mobile ad model based on a push system hasn’t attracted many big brand advertisers. However, a pull system focused on long-tail advertisers (small businesses) bidding to move unsold inventory (empty seats at a hair salon or excess muffins that will go stale in a day) is an interesting spin on mobile local. That said, cracking open the long-tail local advertising market is a big challenge and probably worth a blog post of its own.
I hope you enjoyed the wrap up. In 12 months, we’ll see how many of the trends actually take hold.
