Built by Unruly Media, Viral Spiral captures the most buzzed about online videos from the past 5 years, stemming all the way back to Dove’s infamous ‘True Beauty’ campaign. This interactive info graphic is one of the coolest we’ve seen yet. Using their technology, Unruly scans the sharing of the most popular branded videos each year, and then presents them with real time updates, displaying their actual share counts via Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere.

By moving your mouse over each circle, the relevant ad[...]

This year’s New York Ad:Tech event was a buzzy success. Based on the heavy emphasis towards mobile and “SO-LO-MO” which refers to Social, Local and Mobile marketing strategies, it is evident that the advertising forefront is finally getting comfortable and poised to really start jumping into the mobile and social media bandwagon.

Mike Flynn, VP of Ad Tech North America, further supported these efforts by announcing, “This year, mobile became a core component of many marketing campaigns, as ecommerce, social and local all converged to reach the consumer. This trend will continue as digital becomes synonymous with mobile as the platform for publishing and media, retail and shopping, brand building and direct sales.”

As many already know, Ad:Tech is comprised of top movers and shakers in the advertising world providing some great new insights, advertising/marketing trends and directions that are happening or emerging. Conference pass holders had additional benefits and were able to take part in many different sessions related to brand marketing, advertising, media and SO-LO-MO. A great draw this year were some of the top-notch keynote presentations[...]

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-6522" title="FR blog" src="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FR-blog.png" alt="" width="229" height="288" />Want to know what the most buzz worthy films are right now? <a href="http://www.nextmovie.com/" target="_blank">NextMovie.com</a>, a division of <a href="http://www.mtv.com/" target="_blank">MTV Networks</a>, has rolled out its newest feature called <a href="http://www.nextmovie.com/movietracker/" target="_blank">MovieTracker</a>. This tool, which can be compared to Billboard Magazine’s renowned <a href="http://www.billboard.com/#/" target="_blank">music charts</a>, further expands MTV’s presence in the growing social entertainment world by ranking the top 25 films that generate the most buzz via popular social media platforms like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, and blogs. Using <a href="http://trendrr.com/" target="_blank">Trendrr</a>, a social media “intelligence platform,” MovieTracker gathers comments from multiple social networks to generate the list. Users can browse the rankings and expand each listing to see more information regarding the buzz surrounding the movie. The rankings provide users with “Related Stories” and “Latest Tweets” with the option to tweet about the movie directly from the page.

With MovieTracker, MTV has now created a new platform for targeting young moviegoers. <a href="http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/161419/mtvs-nextmoviecom-accelerates-move-into-social-e.html" target="_blank">Scott Robson</a>, the man behind the curtain, believes that MovieTracker stands apart from<a href="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/?p=6520">[...]</a>

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5905" src="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/turntable1.jpg" alt="" width="402" height="259" />As <a href="http://turntable.fm/lobby" target="_blank">Turntable.fm</a>, one of this summer's most hyped music sites, gets ready to launch its <a href="http://www.apple.com/iphone/" target="_blank">iPhone</a> app, there is much <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/07/turntable-fm-iphone-app/" target="_blank">talk</a> about it hitting the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle" target="_blank">"trough of disillusionment"</a>. This is the stage in the hype cycle of a new tech trend where the original users of the technology begin to feel that it has been over-hyped and is beginning to lose its original mystique. After all, once DJ GranEthel starts trying to spin 50's doo-wop hits in a hip-hop room you know its time to get out.

This has happened to pretty much every hot technology website that has tipped into the mainstream. It happened with <a href="http://www.facebook.com/" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, with many users either ignoring their accounts, or severely limiting their viewing options once everyone's aunt was able to create a profile. This also happened with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Roulette" target="_blank">Chatroulette</a>, which disappeared into obscurity as quickly as it emerged into popular culture. <a href="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/?p=5897">[...]</a>

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and today happens to be my birthday. As an avid Facebook user, of course I couldn’t help but notice all of the “Happy Birthday”s and “Happy Mother’s Day”s going around. This was step one in my discovery of the many social media avenues available (and being avidly used) for holiday greetings. Social media has become an important way for marketers to make money as well. With Mother’s Day spending up 16% from 2010, and up 11% per person, many retailers have launched social media efforts for the holidays (Marketing Charts)[...]

While watching the local news on Sunday night, they mentioned abruptly that President Obama was going to address the nation at approximately 10:30pm. I logged on to Facebook around 10:15pm and saw “Osama is dead” in my news feed from several friends, and that was how I learned of the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead! However, I was not the only person to find out via a non-traditional news source. According to a Mashable poll of 20,000 readers, the majority said they found out about Bin Laden’s death through Twitter or Facebook. Twitter reported that the evening of May 1, 2011 reported the highest sustained rate of tweets ever with an average of 3,000 tweets per second (TPS) from 10:45pm – 2:20am EST. It is also interesting to note from Twitter’s TPS graph below, that the peak of 5,106 TPS was achieved before President Obama began his speech at 11:00pm[...]

Online Viral Marketing is a marketing/advertising method that encourages consumers to pass along an email message, text, or video among their social networks. Viral marketing is essentially, a reverse funnel method. In traditional advertising, the aim is to reach as many people as possible at the top of the funnel and then filter downwards to obtain the optimal consumer who will take an action/convert (purchase, information request, lead capture, etc). Conversely, viral marketing starts very narrow at the top with one person who then sends the ad message to their personal network. This network creates a chain reaction, to which the volume of people who receive the message are already at the bottom of the funnel (or are most likely to be susceptive to the messaging).
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Perhaps one of the most illusive spaces in digital marketing is social media. Questions like how and when to reach consumers to what to say in the content are constantly plaguing this difficult, yet extremely important segment. If there is one place to begin, for a marketer to really understand how contact and communication works in social media, it is by understanding the rules of content decay. Not only is it difficult to understand the value of content on social media outlets, but it is also becoming more and more difficult for your content to stand out in the digital realm. And of course, now is when your content standing out in social media matters most. “Captivating attention is even more crucial today for effecting a behavior change,” Steve Rubel says in his post about Content Decay. Because this post was so smart, and here at Luminosity we love smart analysis, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to talk about ways to overcome content decay[...]

I went to see the movie about the creation of Facebook – The Social Network – last night. All weekend I’d been hearing people talk about it. One person even said something along the lines of, “I want to update my status about how good that movie was.” So, I went, I watched, I loved.

I wasn’t expecting to like it. I was expecting it to be another Ben Mezrich creation of fortune meets the already fortunate (we all remember 21). And while Zuckerberg, as a Harvard student, certainly didn’t go from rags to riches, he did create the website that literally defines a generation – my generation. My grandfather had the great depression, my father had Vietnam , my older cousins had Y2K, I have Facebook[...]

I admit, I am an unabashed casual gamer. My love affair, which started with competing win/loss stats on the family computer on Spider Solitaire within the accessories->games from Windows OS quickly expanded out to Popcap games, Big Fish Games online (I think I’ve played every single free demo offered ranging from strategy, puzzles and yes, even hidden objects-guilty pleasure) to Droid game apps. Angry Birds Beta = Awesome.

You also can’t forget about social gaming .

Today’s Geek Out is a series of data points I’ve pulled together concerning casual gaming, social gaming and beyond[...]