Activ8Social

Ready for the Mashup? This week we cover Twitter and the Super Bowl, Facebook’s spin on group buying, the first of what could be many social media IPOs, and a cool new game that should settle more than a handful of friendly bar bets. Don’t worry, we promise we won’t take shots at any of our own teammates via Twitter.

In case you didn’t already witnessed it firsthand, earlier this week Facebook rolled out a brand new “social’ advertising format to the right of your News Feed, called Sponsored Stories, which seeks to even further leverage each user’s likes and interests. Sponsored Stories is the newest brain child of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc. It’s a reasonably simple concept.

As Ad Age explains, Facebook will take on one of four actions in the daily activity of your Facebook friends and turn them into ads on your home page: 1) Likes,  2) status updates or “page posts”, 3) Places check-ins, and 4) app activity or “application play”.

In our fourth installment of Monday’s Social Mashup in 2011, we review how the NFL’s players are turning to social media to oppose the impending lockout, what a new crowd sourcing website from France promises do for brands, what Google’s answer to Groupon offers, and how the University of Texas athletics department has become the real “ESPN The Ocho”. As much as we wanted to unlock the Golden Egg for you, we promise not to talk about the impending Angry Birds television show.

In this week’s social mashup, we take a long look at Foursquare’s new Jersey Shore Badge.  Ha. Just kidding!  We do, however, provide our thoughts on a long awaited mobile announcement, an intriguing social media sports sponsorship, a Q&A site getting serious buzz, and a young start-up launched by some Harvard undergrads.

Welcome back folks! This week we get back to our regularly scheduled programming as we present to you many of the top stories from this past week in social media and sports. We have everything a reader could ask for … one of the world’s most innovative brands and its newest gem, a battle for social media supremacy among NFL football teams off the gridiron, a web discovery and referral tool that claims to dominate Facebook, huge announcements from the world’s largest technology companies at the world’s largest tech trade show, and a unique rules violation involving social media, golf, and the PGA.

Activ8Social’s team will be attending What’s Next DC at the end of January and providing our social media input as floating experts throughout the day. We are supporters of the awesome team over at Green Buzz Agency and would like to help them spread the word about this new up and coming conference series. It’s an event we are pumped about and an educational experience we think will spark at least one original idea you can bring back to the office. Below is an overview of What’s Next—Your Marketing Communications Roadmap.

After last week’s review of the top five trends of sports and entertainment social media in 2010, we’ve shifted our focus to 2011. Move over Nostradamus and The Great Swami … Activ8Social is in town, and we’ve analyzed the zodiac, assessed the constellations, consulted the Farmer’s Almanac, and spoked to fortune tellers to come up with our list of top 2011 trends. Let us know if you agree or disagree, and what your predictions are for the new year ahead of us.

“Geolocation”, “Group Buying”, “Social Gaming” and “Virtual Goods” are a few social media buzzwords you will hear circulating throughout the sports industry in 2011. Each of these categories hit the mainstream news cycle this past year with companies like Foursquare, Zynga, and Groupon battling for headlines in a race for reach and revenues. 2011 will be the “Year of the Deal” for fans and Facebook Places will be a major player given its combination of geo-location and group buying with nearly 600 million users. Mobile isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s going everywhere. Athletes, teams, leagues, and brands alike will focus on accessing fans through their smart phones and harnessing the power of “Geo”.