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[...]

<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>

Luminosity attended the 2011 Marketing Outlook Forum, sponsored by the U.S. Travel Association, in Fort Worth, TX last week. With attendees from destinations around the country, marketing companies and research providers, the conference provided a great forum to share information about the state and future outlook for travel within and to the U.S. As usual, I was able to follow the entire conference using Twitter even when I was only physically able to attend one session at a time. Below are five key thoughts that caught my attention during the conference, as told on Twitter, with some further thoughts from me. [...]

The Luminosity team had a wonderful time at the American Marketing Association’s Research and Strategy Summit in Orlando this September. From Ford Motor Company to ABC TV Network to Southwest Airlines, we were inspired by the way our research and strategy colleagues are leveraging data in fresh ways. Likewise, sharing our expertise on some of the industry’s hottest topics revealed lots of interesting approaches thriving in the marketplace. We also met a diverse set of practitioners at our booth in the Exhibit Hall, where attendees selected Luminosity’s research personality bands to express their inner research style—quant, qual, or hybrid.

In the process of learning from the research community in person, we also followed the action virtually via the AMA Twitter stream. Here’s our recap of the top 10 most thought provoking tweets from this year’s conference:

1. @ResearchRocks

#amaresearch ian Lewis: #mrx need to not just show the “so what” it needs to show the “now what”

2. @silentmovie

“Hiking is the new pilates.” Coleman Outdoor #amaresearch [...]

<img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4468" title="spg-foursquare" src="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/spg-foursquare-300×187.jpg" alt="" width="219" height="140" />Starwood Hotels, whose properties include the St. Regis, W Hotels, Four Points, Westin, Le Meridien and Sheraton hotels, just made a smart move by incorporating the oh-so-popular <a href="https://foursquare.com/" target="_blank">Foursquare</a> into their Guest Rewards program. Foursquare has begun (starting yesterday) offering members of the <a href="http://www.spgpromos.com/socialcheckins/?EM=VTY_SPG_SOCIALCHECKINS_SPECIALOFFERS" target="_blank">Starwood Preferred Guest</a> (SPG) loyalty program additional points, badges and rewards for their checkins at participating hotels<a href="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/?p=4462">[...]</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).
[...]

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-4180" src="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/seamless.png" alt="" width="113" height="422" />My last look at my credit card bill was dominated primarily by one entity–not clothing purchases, not electronics, not booze, not taxi fare, and not the name of a physical retailer. My most frequent little luxury has become something very basic to city living–order-in food.

I first became acquainted with SeamlessWeb at an internship a few summers ago, when we'd have a corporate account to order food to be delivered to the office. All I had to do was log in, enter in my address, and SeamlessWeb would show all of the restaurants in proximity that were open and would deliver to my address. I could select straight from the online menus, add any meal or delivery instructions (meal add-ons, eco-friendly option to not include plastic cutlery, etc.), and order for groups simply by having people come to my cubicle and click on his/her selections. Best of all, I'd never have to interrupt my workflow for more than five minutes and never have to even move my fingers from my computer to get food (because who does that prehistoric thing called phoning into restaurants anymore?).

SeamlessWeb cleverly realized that not only corporate offices are busy and hungry–so are individuals. And individuals favor ease–why try to spend time figuring out which local restaurant will deliver to you when you have the whole directory in one space in front of you with ratings and delivery times listed for each restaurant along with popular food items that other customers "like" and recommend?

Now that SeamlessWeb has moved to the mobile sector, I've found myself ordering food through my iPhone application while in a taxicab, attempting to perfectly time my order to arrive at my apartment shortly after I get dropped off. Here are some other interesting promotional techniques SeamlessWeb has used effectively<ahref="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/?p=4030">[...]</a>

<a href="http://rethink.thearf.org/" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-3985" src="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/rethink2011-logo.jpg" alt="" width="207" height="86" />The Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think 2011</a> in New York City, NY on March 20 – 23, 2011 had over 1,000 attendees and some amazing sessions. Over the four days attendees, including myself, learned about everything from social media research to neuromarketing measurement to media strategy. With so many sessions, I again relied on <a href="http://twitter.com/" target="_blank">Twitter</a> to keep up with sessions I wasn’t able to attend. <a href="http://luminositymarketing.com/blog/?p=3984">[...]</a>