Activ8Social

Say what you might about the television quality of Gossip Girl produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (creators of “The O.C.”), but it’s a weekly winner for the CW Network drawing nearly 4 million viewers on average. Equally interesting to us at Activ8Social is the CW’s winning social media strategy especially on Facebook.

Gossip Girl’s official Facebook Page clocks in at an impressive 8.5 million fans ranking #16 among all TV shows past and present—ahead of such household names like The Office and right on the heels of Jersey Shore. Considering the relative unknown stature of the show’s cast prior to creation, the CW has a real gem across multiple screens. To the CW’s credit, the GG Facebook Page is given prime real estate on the network website as seen above.

Can you believe that the Activ8Social company bracket predicted VCU, Butler, UConn, and Kentucky… to all have lost by the end of the second round!  Apparently, we don’t have the skills of Joe Pearlman who correctly picked all four teams. This week we bring you Google’s online magazine, a new mobile photo sharing application, AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, and LivingSocial’s aggressive battle to overtake Groupon.  And in case you are flying this week, we’ve provided you a little reminder on the FAA’s safety guidelines from the always entertaining Richard Simmons.

Mozilla, the non-profit organization with a mission to improve the internet through community software development, recently launched Firefox 4 for all major desktop platforms on March 22. All versions of Firefox currently combine for 30% of global market share, second only to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 45%. Google Chrome lags far behind in third at 17%.

The competition has seriously heated up in recent weeks with both IE and Chrome dropping new versions of their browsers with IE and Firefox borrowing heavily from Chrome’s user interface. The redesign has led to major success for Mozilla. Available in over 80 languages, internet users are downloading Firefox 4 Beta at an astonishing average rate of 5 million downloads per minute which is more than double the number of downloads IE 9 received in its first 24 hours.

Would you believe us if we told you that women ages 35 to 54 are the most active demographic in the United States when it comes to mobile phone socialization? Probably not your first guess, but the statistic is true according to Tag, a new product from Microsoft that enables mobile users to scan tags for instant access to information, websites, videos, reviews, and more.

The mobile sector is evolving faster than the speed of lightning. For example, Starbucks started accepting mobile payments via their Starbucks Card Mobile iPhone and BlackBerry applications at 6,800 retail locations and recently revealed that more than 3 million people have paid using Starbucks Card Mobile.

We’re taking a look at Twitter usage on the day of the micro-blogging site’s 5th birthday.  Twitter has seen unbelievable growth since it’s first tweet on March 21, 2006.  More than 140 million tweets are sent a day and the social networking site sees almost 500,000 new accounts created daily.  Here’s a few incredible statistics about Twitter’s growth from its blog:

• 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day. Time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

Zeta Interactive has analyzed over 200 million blogs, message boards and social media sites looking for keywords devoted to each of the 68 (so bizarre that this number isn’t 64 anymore) teams in the NCAA tournament.  They called their rankings the “positive online buzz rankings”.  Zeta not only searched for mentions of the teams but positive or negative buzz words associated with each of the teams to give them positive and negative scores.

For example, “Boston University is going to hang tough with Kansas” would be a positive mention while “Boston University is going to lost to Kansas by 90″ would be a negative mention.  Each team’s positive and negative buzz words were customized so that somebody saying Duke would only go to the sweet 16 would be negative while saying Richmond is going to the sweet 16 would be positive.

This week’s Social Mashup may be secondary to filling out your NCAA March Madness bracket (drop us a line if you want to know who we’re picking) but don’t let that stop you from brushing up on sports and entertainment social marketing this week.  We present to you Memolane,  a new social media visualization service, movie rentals on Facebook, and a social media game from Hollywood. Just to make sure everybody is totally clear, Charlie Sheen is in fact not dead.

A new social media service has entered the market that has the potential to replace grandma’s old photo albums.  What memolane is at its core is an aggregator of your social media history from all the major social media sites you often upload media to including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Instagram, Tripit, Vimeo, Spotify and Last.FM.

The battle for Geolocation supremacy in 2011 is just beginning. Just this week (and of course in tandem with SXSW), Foursquare 3.0 was rolled out to more than 7.5 million users globally while SCVNGR (which touts 1 million registered users by comparison) swung right back with their new mobile app called LevelUp.

For the past year, NYC city based Foursquare has enjoyed their top position as the number one “check-ins” service, but according to the The Guardian, the Google Ventures backed SCVNGR has said they will not let their “hyper-local” rivals Foursquare, Groupon, LivingSocial, (and Facebook Places) win without a major slug fest. SCVNGR claims their new mobile application is more user friendly for the general public while not compromising their unique place in the market. P.S. Does anybody remember Gowalla? Must be difficult for the Austin, TX based geolocation service to watch Foursquare this week at SXSW.

This week’s Monday Social Mashup may be a little too Apple heavy for you Steve Jobs haters, but how can you argue with that stock price? We review the official announcement of the iPad 2, free live streaming of March Madness, Angry Birds arrival on Facebook, and the updated Facebook ‘Like’ button. BTW, unless your dog is Lassie, you do not to need to create a Twitter or Facebook account for him!

The original iPad was the first tablet to hit the market and caused a sensation. It created a whole new genre of technological products. If you remember back to about a year ago on April 3rd, 2010, there were lines of giddy consumers stretching entire blocks looking to get an iPad. There was also short supply and insanely high demand that only Apple seems to be able to create. It could be argued that 2010 was the year of the iPad.

If there is one thing that Charlie Sheen is definitely #winning at right now, it’s the social media game.  In case you haven’t been following celebrity news (or mainstream media for that matter) as of late, Charlie Sheen has been a bit of a loose cannon on radio and television, but he’s certainly been entertaining to say the least. This interview on Good Morning America serves as a good example.

So what was the next logical step for the most talked about celebrity in the United States? Signing up for Twitter of course, and when Sheen’s official handle went up, people came flocking. Flocking to the tune of one million in just over 25 hours for the world record time of “Fastest to Reach the One Million Twitter Follower Mark”.