Social Media Stories

Twitter announced that this Tuesday's Champions League semi-final game between Barcelona and Chelsea broke the tweets-per-second record for a sporting event.

More specific the activity on Twitter peaked at 13,684 messages per second. The previous record was the 12,233 tweets per second during the final of this February's Super Bowl between the NFL's New York Giants and New England Patriots.

For the record, the all time record belongs to the movie "Castle in the Sky" in Japan, which saw a peak of 25,088 tweets a second.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Facebook is gonna change, but you dont't have to worry. The famous social network already gave the new design and its features to all developer users in order to test it. So, let's have a look:

First, Facebook introduces timeline, which actually is a a stream with related information about you. This new feature helps you to remember when was the first time you have registered in Facebook as well as all the post, videos and photos you have uploaded during this time.

A new interesting feature is Facebook Gestures or the new ''like button''. In other words, developers and partners can rename the like button into dislike, cheer or anything else they want.

The change in the apps its not a big deal. You have to allow only once the app to share your information in your profile instead of being asked every time they share information about your profile.

Another new feature is Ticker. All the information about games and other not so relevant information, such as who of your friends invited you to play poker,will gathered to this tab.

From now on, Facebook will tell you what your friends are watching, listening or reading, allowing you share stories with them by clicking on a link.

Find out more: https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

British supermarkets Tesco have been in South Korea since 1999 under the brand name Home Plus and have managed to grown to become the country’s second-largest supermarket after E-mart.

The biggest problem is that E-mart have more stores than Home Plus and for this reason they decided  to expand their online sales insted of spending a lot of money opening new stores. In this case, the nature of the South Korean users and their experienced online behavior towards the web tools (10 million smartphone users in a population of less than 50 million) was the main reason in order to invest in mobile shopping.

After conducting an in-depth study in Koreans consumer behavior they find out that grocery shopping once a week is a hard task, since they are the second most hard working nation in the world.

The idea: Let the store come to people

They created virtual stores in subway stations where consumers can buy the products scanning the QR codes with their smartphones. After the completion of the purchase the products will be delivered to the customer home.

Even for a such well-educated nation towards their online shopping behavior, the results were really impressing: The number of the new registerd members rose by 76% while the online sales increased by 130%.

I am positive that a mobile application will be more suitable and flexible in this case, although this visual experiment in mobile supermarket shopping has done very well for Tesco in South Korea.

Find out more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8601147/Tesco-builds-virtual-shops-for-Korean-commuters.html

A small German pet company, GranataPet using the Foursquare API, installed 10 billboards in Berlin and Munich and when a user checked in to the billboard on Foursquare, it dispensed dog food for free into a dog bowl on the ground.

The challenge: Creating awareness for the Granata Pet dog food with a slim budget.

The idea: Catch the target group while walking the dog.

The competitive advantage: the dogs became the target consumer as they pull their owners back to the billboard day after day in order to get the free food.

The moto: check in-snack out!

The results: Increase in sales of 14%  and pet store requests to carry the product are 38% higher.

Enjoy:

http://mashable.com/2011/07/13/foursquare-marketing-campaigns/

WWF launched the greenest campaign ever with only two volunteers and a piece of paper.

Based on this strange leaflet promotion and with the power of the internet the campaign reached 285,142 people.

Brilliant.

WordPress, the famous software which is used in blog creation, has reached and now hosted more than 50 million blogs.

The counter on wordpress.com is counting the number of Wordpress installations as well as the self-hosted blogs which are used by developers and designers who have take control of their own installation of the open-source code.

The numbers are really amazing:

WordPress.com bloggers: 350,225

Posts: 302,882

Comments: 270,000

This means  that 210 posts and 188 comments are submitted each minute on wordpress.com.

WordPress is reported to power 14% of the world’s websites, with 287 million people accounting for 2.5 billion views on WordPress.com, reading posts that are written in over 120 languages.

The two-thirds of Wordpress accounts are using English languange with Spanish and Portuguese in second and third respectively.

http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/07/10/wordpress-now-powering-50-million-blogs/

Google has finally announced it's top secret project, Google+ which is  a combination of a gigantic  search engine and a social network.

The main difference with Facebook, is Google circles where users can share their interests and posts with different groups of people, like friends, family, classmates and colleagues with a simple drag and drop.

If you want to apply for beta testing click here: http://www.google.com/+

Watch the following video for more details:

The latest campaign of Coca Cola, ''the recycling king'' which promoted in Israel, is another proof that the brand is always ahead of the competition curve, especially when it comes to social media.

At this time, the brand placed 10.000 bins around the country and using Facebook places encouraged the users to check into the selected  spots and take photos as they recycled their bottles.

As a result, the campaign created a huge online buzz and is another example of an offline campaign which combined with online promotion.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/21/coca-cola-adds-10000-recycle-bins-to-facebook-places-in-israel/

Instant pages is a feature that delivers common result pages instantly. During the demonstration in San Francisco Google showed that a simple result could take 3-5 seconds to appear while in instant pages the result would be delivered instantaneously.

Google, as you can see in the following video, is able to perform this instant result by pre-caching the pages while you typing the queries in the search box. The pages which would be cached are chosen by the algorithm which predicts the results of the search that a user is most likely to choose.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/14/google-announces-instant-pages-delive...

After some years of research and practicing, companies are now certain that social media is driving to sales.

When social networks are used in the right way, campaigns can be ROI positive and companies can use the social media as communication tool in order to increase their sales.

Nowadays, users are familliar with social networks and they can use them in different ways. They can use the power of every network and companies know it. Every modern organisation is using social media to inform, sell and serve every client in a smart, interactive and cost free way of communication. In the following case studies we can see ROI profit social media campaigns:

Sony reported that their campaign through Twitter, where every user was encouraged to build a vaio laptop and win 10% discount, had an increase in sales of 1.5$ million.

McDonalds ran a campaign on Foursquare this April and resulted into a 33% increase in foot traffic to stores.

Dell reported a 3$ million profit on June 2009, through Twitter and the marketing department states that there is a shift in their customer's behaviour that shows the intention to shop through social media.

As we can see, users are trusting more the organised social profiles as they can be informed everything for a brand. A good example is Delta Airlines where you can book a ticket via their page on Facebook.

Internet shoppers can be informed for a product, shop online, request help through the online client service and even get a free coupon since the most online promotions are running social.

Without a doubt this social commerce trend will rise more and we are waiting to see more commerce.2 case studies in the future.