EVERYWHERE, a Social Media Marketing and Content Development firm based in Atlanta, GA set a record October 16-17th for the most widespread social network message in 24 hours. According to Radian6, the official online monitoring company, the phrase #BeatCancer set the record with 209,771 mentions on Twitter, Facebook and blog posts. This translates into an estimated number of impressions generated during this 24-hour period at over 100 Million. Attendees at BlogWorld & New Media Expo, which featured some of the biggest names in social media, were asked to send tweets and issue Facebook status updates with #BeatCancer in their posts. This massive viral effort spawned a worldwide online message that spread and quickly became the #1 most trending topic on Twitter. Not content to just perpetuate a hashtag followed by a message, EVERYWHERE sought out sponsors to raise money for non-profit cancer organizations. Sponsors eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors Brewing Company and Genesis Today were financial contributors to the #BeatCancer campaign and in the brief 24 hour period, over $70,000 was raised.

Of the effort, Guinness World Record® spokesperson, Stuart Claxton said, “We’re always on the lookout for new and exciting ideas, and when approached about a mass social media experiment that rallied people to support the fight against cancer, we were happy to oblige in adjudicating this record attempt.” He further clarified that this attempt “will set a benchmark for social media monitoring moving forward.”

Managing Partner of EVERYWHERE, Tamara Knechtel, who came up with the idea for #BeatCancer says, “We understand very well the power brands have to deliver messages in the social media space. We wanted to score the first Guinness World Record® by using social media for social good. I’m a cancer survivor and just about everyone I know has a close family member who has suffered from the disease. That said, we only had a matter of days to pull this off in time for BlogWorld & New Media Expo. We are grateful to our sponsors, eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors who stepped up to the plate offering a penny per #BeatCancer mention. In the end, they both gave far more than a penny per mention!” EVERYWHERE is now the first social media agency to develop a Guinness World Record for online impressions.

The money raised will be donated to four different non-profit cancer organizations including SU2C (Stand UP to Cancer), Alex’s Lemonade, Bright Pink, and Spirit Jump. All of the non-profits are 501(c)(3) organizations and accredited by The American Cancer Society. A listing of all organizations can be found at www.beatcancereverywhere.com. While the campaign is over, individuals may still donate at the aforementioned website.

The measurement firm Radian 6 provided all of the real-time tracking for the campaign. As of this release the current impressions total over one million mentions of #BeatCancer including tweets sent by athletes and celebrities including P. Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, Larry Fitzgerald, MC Hammer, Perez Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Maxwell, Alicia Keys, Shawne Merriman, and Denise Richards.

Question: What do 360 gamers in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin have in common if they are playing titles by Electronic Arts online?

Answer: In game advertisements bought by Barack Obama.

With the social networking groups on Obama’s site such as Black Gamers for Obama, is it any surprise. Further, back in September, there was a virtual election on XBOX Live and, as reported on Digital Spy UK, virtual voters backed Obama.

Now that the election is coming to ahead, and the candidates are focusing on battle ground states, this is an unprecedented move by Obama.  Now, I don’t think that this is as big as the first time a presidential candidate spoke on radio or appeared on TV in terms of milestones of the political process.  But when we look at the bigger picture, the use of the internet and web 2.0 technology, to me that includes online video games due to their social networking aspect, this is a huge move. It means that Obama has officially found a way to permeate every Social Media and Web 2.0 technology… and that is pretty damn cool. The results are evident as we see more and more young people and hard to reach demographics more engaged in the political process than we have in the past.

My prediction for the future of games and politics: if this proves to work well in terms of reaching potential voters and it is received well, the next time there is a big election there will even be candidate video games. Now what would those be?  Maybe online quiz games on policy?

Have you ever wanted to design a sneaker? Well now you can. RYZ is a community driven high-end sneaker company based in Portland, Oregon. RYZ’s business model relies solely on the internet for design, marketing, and sales of all or their sneakers, eliminating the need for expensive marketing and design staffs.

How it works.

RYZ lets you download the sneaker template and design everything from the inside and outside panels to the tongue, footbed, heel and outer sole. The designs are then posted online where designers may use social networks like MySpace and Facebook to build a buzz and create demand for sneakers. Viewers must then vote for their favorites design. The design with the highest amount of votes are produced by RYZ, and the designer will get $1,000 plus 1 percent royalties.

The retail price for the shoes are $90.00, and sizes range from 5-12.

RYZ founder Rob Langstaff, who used to head Adidas North America, says in a traditional footwear company, it might take 12 months — and a substantial investment — to get a new design to market.

“What we’ve done is compressed this time using the Internet,” Langstaff says. Design to final product: about 6 weeks.

Check out the Promo Video:

Source: NPR

On the verge of our country picking its next President of the United States, one candidate has truly taken advantage of how he uses the internet to spread his message of change.  Closely watching this revolutionary online movement is Barack20.com, a Web 2.0 marketing concept created by Social CRM Expert Brent Leary and Online Business Development Expert David Bullock. The concept was formed out of the positive reaction Leary received from his Black Enterprise article, Barack Obama’s Lesson in Social Media. Leary then joined forces with Bullock in producing a webinar of the same name. The webinar was not promoted to many but the response from those fortunate to catch it was significant.

Leary and Bullock propose that Barack Obama’s success with social media provides best practice strategies that can be employed by small businesses. Leary states:

“Our hope is to help small business people learn how social media can positively impact their efforts by taking a close look at how the Obama campaign used Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tools to engage millions of people.” Hence Barack20.com is born.

Leary and Bullock have no affiliation with Barack Obama, or the Obama campaign. The webinar, and their transcript of the original conversation, focuses solely on how the Obama campaign used social media to engage people at the grassroots level in order to win millions of votes and break political fundraising records. Bullock states:

“The idea is simple: digging deeper and showing true to life examples on how to really use social media to connect, engage and develop meaningful business relationships that create profitable connections for the business owner. In the end, transactions don’t occur without relationships. Social media bridges that gap.”

One thing is for sure, Barack Obama has made history both politically and technologically in his bid to become the first African-American President of the United States. All Barack20.com wants to do is educate small businesses on this social media marketing concept and have them apply it to their own businesses. I for one look forward to Brent and David’s next webinar scheduled for August 19, 2008, and in the meantime I’m noting how I can apply and put Obama’s Web 2.0 marketing strategies to the test.

A little while ago I posted about Carol’s Daughter doing a live web chat @ HSN and how all of their efforts in social media is making shopping personal again, only from your computer v.s. and actual personal shopper.  Nordstrom is another example of a retailer being ahead of the curve.  This weekend while I was WWS (Web Window Shopping) I noticed that Nordstrom offers RSS Feeds a.k.a Fashion Feeds, it was the first time I had come across this though I’m not sure if this is a new feature or not, considering they have been blogging since late last year.  Their feeds consist of New Arrivals, Womens, Mens, Handbags, and a few others.  They also allow you to create your own feed based off an advanced search conducted on their site, go figure…it is integrated into the search results.  All feed items link directly to product pages and a user is literally one to two clicks away from completing and order. Sweet.  They also have a Twitter account which can be used to syndicate feeds via Twitterfeed; better yet they could take a que from the NYTimes, Google, and the many other companies using Twitter accounts as Channels for specific content.  The only missing operator in this simple equation is building a network of followers on Twitter who are specific to the product feed that is being syndicated.

Carol’s Daughter will host another live web chat today.  However this chat is slightly different than the last.  This time Lisa Price, Carol’s Daughter CEO will be conducting the chat from HSN (Home Shopping Network) and will broadcast it on her site.  Lately I have really been looking at how retail operations are including social media technologies into their strategies, Carol’s Daughter is no stranger to this but she is quite the exception as well.  I will be doing another post following this one about another well know brand that has taken the leap into social media.  The common factor between the 2:

The proactive use of social media to seek out who your customers are, what they like, make the shopping process even quicker in a way that makes shopping personal…from your computer.

The chat w/ Carol’s Daughter startes like now, you can catch it here.

Just when you thought Twitter was falling off due to its technical difficulties, Twitter gets a new kid on the block: Karrine Steffans.

Karrine Steffans recently joined Twitter, and instead of quietly setting up an account, it appears as though she executed a pub stint by announcing her Twitter membership on her website. I suspect she also posted a bulletin to her MySpace fans, and today I learned that she sent this message to her e-mail list:

It’s been a while since you all have heard from me. I’ve noticed everyone has been blogging and video blogging all over the place and it made me want to find a newer, faster, more fun way of communicating with all of you. So, I decided to invite all of you to Twitter! This way, you will receive updates throughout the week, most every day, right to your mobile phone or computers.

To join:
Go to http://www.twitter.com/KarrineSteffans
Click the RSS feed button or
Use your own Twitter account and become a follower of my posts.
It’s that simple.

See you on Twitter!
Karrine

Say what you will about Karrine, but I give her credit for thinking outside of the celebrity (?) PR box to find new ways to interact with her fans. While I doubt she has a massive PR team working hard for her personal brand online, I respect her attempt at interacting with fans via MySpace, her hilarious (but now M.I.A.)  video blogs, and now—Twitter. What’s next? UStream? Friendfeed?

In her first three days on Twitter (and roughly 10-12 updates), Karrine has amassed 160+ followers, most of whom follow one user (Karrine) and are still exploring the service. I think it’s safe to conclude that her presence is bringing new users to Twitter, albeit in very small numbers. Kanye West has been using Twitter for some time now (apparently he is the person doing the Twittering), so imagine what could happen if he posted an entry about Twitter on his wildly popular blog and asked his fans to join?

Does this mean Twitter is truly hitting the bigtime? Karrine alone can’t make Twitter mainstream, but as more non-geeks join these Web 2.0 services, the more likely they’ll hit a tipping point a la MySpace. My first few years on MySpace were quite lonely and useless because I had to wait for critical mass to arrive.  I like Friendfeed as a service, but honestly, it’s currently a place for geeks. I know enough about geeks already (I am one, thankyouverymuch), I’ll be more interested in Friendfeed when more of my real life friends start using the site.

Of course it’s not enough for a celebrity to sign up for a social media site, but they must actually use it, embrace it, and send their fans to it. While Barack Obama is one of the top followed users on Twitter, rarely do I ever hear his campaign push its constituents to receive updates using the service. It’s always a one way pull to get people already on Twitter to follow him, rather than get non-users to sign up and follow him.

Clearly Barack and Kanye don’t need to push a membership drive for Twitter, but in the interest of the countless arguments for getting a Web 2.0 site to go mainstream, it will take numerous high profile users (i.e. real celebrities) to jump on board, actually use the service and encourage their digerati (i.e. regular people online) to migrate over as well. Sorry, Kevin Rose is not going to cut it.

Notable Twitterers of Color:
Barack Obama
Kanye West
Karrine Steffans
Denzel Washington
Tavis Smiley
Karina Pasian

You can catch me twittering here, and of course Black Web 2.0 can be found here.

Grammy Award-Winning singer, song writer, and producer T-Pain recently launched his much anticipated full digital independent record label Nappy Boy Digital. The label’s mission is to create a direct artist to consumer connection without the constraints of the traditional major labels. Nappy Boy Digital is an obvious next step for record labels who may have finally realized that the Internet is a friend and not a foe. But as I learn more about the label, I can’t help but wonder if T-Pain squandered this opportunity to make a lasting effect in the music industry.

It’s clear from reading the press release and my multiple visits to the Nappy Boy Digital website that Nappy Boy Digital is simply nothing more than a record label that will be using internet as their sole distribution method. Well it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that as internet music sales continue to rise and CD sales continue to decline, that a primary online distribution method is a no brain-er. What I was expecting from the subsequent launch of NBD was for T-Pain to use this opportunity to change the way record companies use the internet to market, build relationships with their fan base, and build communities surrounding their artist’s music. Lynne D has been profiling artists who have been on the leading edge of harnessing the power of the internet and social media, but what we are yet to see is a record label who has successfully grouped some of the most successful social media tools together into a package that can be duplicated for every artist on their roster on their very own web property. This is obviously not what T-Pain had in mind by branding his label as a digital record label.

T-Pain has failed to understand that everything on the web generally ties into one another; great music combined with social, downloads, and ringtones will create a following who will in turn use these tools to evangelize your music. Harnessing these tools collectively while giving your audience the ability to instantly own your music, can create a great reach with a very small budget. Instead of really impacting the music industry NBD will go down as a good opportunity squander by short sighted thinking.

At first glance eVIPlist.com may look like another Digg clone. While the site does use Digg’s open API its business and web strategy is far from the typical “rank news/info” model that we typically see from other sites using the same API. While similarities can certainly be found between eVIPlist.com and other sites such as GlobalGrind.com, a deeper look into the content will show otherwise.

eVIPlist’s content appeals to a “party-goer” demographic…I should say more of a XXL magazine type of audience. More importantly what also sets eVIPlist apart from other sites we have seen launched lately is its longevity. The site has actually been around since the web 1.0 days but in a different format, it launched under this domain in early 2001. Originally the site was a social network that was hugely popular in the Washington DC metro area, in this state the site connected party goers and successfully bridged the online/offline gap in that area. Most of you know that I am orginally from the DC area so I must say that the site in general holds a soft spot in my heart (I truly miss DC and was a member of the site nearly since its launch).

Anyway, the reason I write this is not because I endear DC; or to compare it to GlobalGrind.com and other sites; or even to review it (Urban 2.0 gave a good review over on their site). I write this to take a deeper look at how offline activites such as events and user generated content can feed off of each other sucessfully at a local and national level within the urban online space.

Web 2.0 has been adopted in the urban space largely as a promotional vehicle. Case in point: MySpace.com; it would be quite a task to count just how many club promoters use MySpace as a tool to gage interest and notify audiences of events. This is part of the reason I don’t frequent MySpace as much anymore, my personal proflie continued to be bombarded. Facebook is a bit better, you can specify if you will attend an event or not and I am not spammed as much in that sense. The social ranking approach is simplified which is why I think it will be sucessful for purposes such as these. Users don’t have to worry about having the one more thing to clean up on their profile. You either rank/bookmark an event or you don’t; or you see how many people have ranked/bookmarked it to determine your own interest…it is simple and it can end there if you like.

Using social ranking to rank party pics from local events.

Using social ranking to evoke online interest in local events.

Using social ranking to rank popularity of events.

I hear so many people complain about information overload, even on sites such as Facebook. One “friend” of mine on the site even asked for everyone in his friends list to stop sending him apps. I think this may be more of a common occurance than we think. So in times such as these, where we all suffer from a little information overload at times, social ranking tools such as eVIPlist can be a successful way to promote events (locally and nationally) without spamming your friends list and ultimately causing an insanely negative user experience.

We recently reported that Allhiphop.com signed a 5 year multi-million dollar exclusive ad deal with Radio One’s Interactive One. On the surface the ad deal looked like a win win for both companies. AHH, gets rid of the burden of searching for ad inventory by teaming up with Radio One’s well connected urban radio ad sales division, while Interactive One further extends their internet ad reach. Sounds like a perfect match right? I am not convinced.

AHH’s primary revenue stream is now in the hands of relative newcomer in the online advertising business. Radio One is a proven leader in radio ad sales in the urban market, but has not really reflected its radio ad sales success online yet. It’s not that I doubt Interactive One’s ability to draw advertisers (I’m sure their rolodex is filled with the who’s who of urban advertisers) but I do think that AHH generates too much traffic to settle with an ad group who has limited experience in online ad sales. Interactive One’s recent acquisition of Community Connect could bring some experience to their online ad sales division, but can AHH afford to wait for the two companies to synergize? And even after the two companies integrate, where do you think the large majority of Interactive One’s time and resources will go? Will they be focused on monetizing their own web properties or AHH?

Ad sales at AHH’s level is not just about filling advertising inventory, it’s about working with advertisers to create branding and sponsorships campaigns (the real money in web advertising). In the original press release, Interactive One stated they would act as AHH’s ad sales representative. But as you read on it seems as if Interactive One is interested in combining AHH with the rest of their online web properties to create one large advertising network (big difference). If this is the case, AHH is sure to suffer. Ad networks spread advertising campaigns and proceeds across a number of different web properties. The campaigns are usually very broad, and work well for medium and small web publishers who don’t have the traffic to single-handedly tackle larger campaigns. AHH is one of the most widely read online Hip-Hop publications serving millions of monthly unique visitor surpassing the need to “split” impressions and revenue.

Another possible consequence of the AHH deal is the lose (potential lose) of the relationship with their advertisers. In the media business the second most important relationship you have, behind the relationship of your reader, is the relationship with your advertisers. Without advertisers, there’s no money, without money there’s no power, without power there’s no respect (cue Lil’ Kim). While AHH focuses on content, Radio One is building direct relationships with the advertisers at AHH’s expense. Keep in mind that Interactive One’s primary business is content creation. AHH’s power is relinquished and Interactive One can use those relationships to compete within the same space.

I am not against ad networks, but I guess I am against exclusive deals with inexperienced ad networks that compete within the same space. Maybe I’m just trippin’. What do you think?