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The status update just became a little more important

by Scott Hoffman on February 8, 2010

Today seems to be my Google day; this morning I wrote a post about the Search Story ads from Google and followed by another covering the results of a Superbowl spot that aired for Google last night. Let’s go for the triple play; three Google stories in a row, and this last one strike even closer to home for me.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service, GMail, will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. Here is a more detailed write up on Mashable. As of July of 2009, Google had 146 million monthly users, if all those users began posting updates, it would create a wealth of personal and real time messages which in essence become the digital personalities of the people that author them.

This brings status updates into the center of the social media universe. I personally think that status updates are the most revolutionary form of expression, and it is a behavior that will continue to blossom. I have written about it here and here, and I recently presented at the Engage 2010 conference on the subject.

It is still to be seen if the Status update functionality will work well on GMail. I suspect that the public at large is ready for the idea, based on the successes of Twitter, which functionality is exclusively the status update and the Facebook status update which is one of it’s most popular features with over 45 million updates being published a day.

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Hell must have frozen over, last night Google aired a :30 second commercial during the SuperBowl. The ad was already in circulation on Youtube, and in fact was part of a series of 7 “search themed” ads. On Feb 6th Eric Schmidt announced the fact that his company had bought the spot on Twitter.

So I thought I would break down the results of Google’s $3,000,000 investment. The SuperBowl, which aired on CBS, was expected to draw an audience of 100,000,000 million. That’s pretty big, but it is largely unmeasurable beyond the audience who saw the ad.

But here is another way to try to measure the impact of the Google SuperBowl Ad. By looking at some of the indicators, beyond the audience size, and I focused in on the view count of the ad entitle “Parisian Love” on on YouTube.

The SuperBowl airing of “Parisian Love” quickly added 600,000+ 800,000+ views to the YouTube upload overnight. See chart from YouTube below. (The extra views are still growing at an rapid pace* as I write this post.) Up until last night night the Video had a little under 1,000,000 views – this is since the ad was posted in Nov 2009.

So was it a valuable investment? Maybe.

I say maybe because it is extremely hard to accurately measure the impact of an advertisement that appears on TV. The best that we can do is look at indicators, like the extra views of the Google Ad on YouTube. It would be really interesting to plot the volume of searches on Google over time next to the airing of the SuperBowl ad; what would the impact of that airing have on volume of searches conducted?

Eric, if you want to send me over those numbers, I would be glad to take a look!

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Google’s SuperBowl Ad is part of a series; Here are the rest

February 8, 2010
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Last night Google purchased a 30 second spot in the Superbowl. The $3 Million commercial was entitled “Parisian Love” and is embedded below. It was a very well done ad. Most people don’t know that it was part of a series of 7 commercials. I have embedded the other other six below. enjoy:
Parisian Love
An American [...]

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Toyota uses Social Media to answer Consumers Questions

February 5, 2010
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With the recent controversy surrounding the Toyota vehicle recall, Jim Lentz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, will answer questions from the public online. He is using the Digg.com engine to let users vote up those questions that they feel are most important. This is a great example of how big [...]

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Cool Data Visualization presentation at Engage 2010

February 4, 2010
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Yesterday, the highlight of my day was a presentation by Ben Cerveny, strategic and conceptual advisor to Stamen Design. His presentation was about data visualization, which I have written about before. Ben showed off some of Stamen’s projects.
The project that blew me away was the real-time data visualization of the popular site Digg. The [...]

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Social Media users are Fickle and Migratory, but behaviors are Persistant

February 2, 2010
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Today I gave a talk at Engage 2010, entitled “The Status Update being the Window to the Soul.” My presentation spurred a conversation with another Engage 2010 attendee, Kate Randall, or @kateonline (the discussion was done exclusively through Twitter, of course)
She stated, “A lot of talk about # of people on twitter at #wtengage but [...]

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Twitter Wisdom

January 29, 2010

“Ordinary people can spread good and bad information about brands faster than marketers.” –Ray Johnson

Thanks to Kent Huffman for sharing in the first place and Peter Twombly Diane Blackman, Mariam Shahab, Cathy Kincaid Hayes, Tom Edwards, and DGR Communications for spreading the information.

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Listening in social media is better than screaming – The Podcast

January 28, 2010
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A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?

By definition, Social Media encompasses the behavior of people talking with one another. And as Bill Cosby used to say, “kids, consumers say [...]

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What do our Kids think of Banner ads on Social Media?

January 27, 2010
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I received an eMail from a friend of mine that I respect and admire. The contest of that note described a conversation he had with his children about our industry, the Marketing and Advertising industry. It contained some deep knowledge that I wanted to share. He asked me to keep his identity anonymous. Here is [...]

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Real Time Web Widget from Collecta

January 26, 2010
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Congrats to Gerry Campbell and the entire team over at Collecta for launching the new real time search widget. I just set one up on the right side of the page that searches all mentions of “Social Media Marketing” and displays the results on the right hand side of the page.

Click here to get your [...]

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