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.
Memolane takes your media from all the aforementioned websites that you authorize and generates a single visual timeline that represents an interactive scrapbook of your internet life. One of the coolest features about Memolane is that you don’t have to pull in all your content from the website you link to your account. Instead, you can pick and choose which gives users the freedom to create a scrapbook dedicated to specific events or dates in time. 
The website was dreamed up by Eric Lagier and after he won a prize for the concept, he quit his day job to devote himself full time to the startup. Last fall, the company caught the eye of the venture funds August Capital, which was an early round investor in Skype, as well as Atomico, the venture fund created by the founders of Skype. The two firms invested a combined $2 million Series A round of funding in Memolane. “The Internet tells the story of our lives, and it is still unexplored,” said Lagier. “It is a modern-day scrapbook that writes itself. This is a whole new chapter for social media.”
There are definitely creative implications for personalities and brands that are looking to leverage social media outside the box. The Activ8social team is already exciting about Memolane and kicking around ideas about how to use the service to document our client campaigns. What campaigns are those? For that you’ll have to wait and see …
Warner Bros. Facebook Movie Rental Service
Ever wonder when Hollywood might come knocking on the front step of social media? TV executives took the plunge with Hulu, and now the allure of 500 million plus members of the Facebook community is proving too much for Tinseltown. In a recent move that has enormous implications for the internet and media, Warner Brothers has decided to join strategic forces with Facebook to offer a movie rental service within the social network.
The combine communities of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Apple do not match the 500 million user audience of Facebook; however, 2 of those 4 services are of course solely dedicated to movies and television while Facebook’s user audience is not necessarily comprised of all movie watchers and consumers that are comfortable consuming movies online.
The Dark Knight is the first and only film at this time to be offered through the online rental service. Facebook Credits, an official form of payment for virtual goods on the social network, are the only accepted payment method. The movie, found directly on the Dark Knight Facebook Page, costs 30 Facebook credits which is equivalent to $3. Once the movie has been rented, the user has 48-hours to watch it through their Facebook account.
The convenience of the rental service can’t be beat and with the ability to comment on the video, we may be seeing the early stages of a groundbreaking Hollywood distribution platform connecting viewers and their friends.
Source Code Uses Mobile Tagging
Summit Entertainment’s new film, Source Code starring Jake Gyllenhall, is using an innovative digital component in its marketing campaign. The studio is using Microsoft Tag high capacity colored barcodes to offer a social media game called Source Code Mission. Barcodes that are found on movie posters and captured by a smartphone lead to a 10 to 20 minute game based on the movie’s plot.
Co-star in the film, Michelle Monaghan had this to say: “We’ve got this amazing interactive game, where you can take something – you can take a bus, a poster, anything like that, and you can really get a jump start on being part of the film. Before you see it, you can go online, and you can be [on] Facebook, and you’ll have your own sort of identity…you can kind of go on the mission as Captain Colter Stevens.”
This marketing campaign is a creative and engaging way to merge the online and offline communities together while authentically weaving in the plot of the movie. The use of social media games, mobile technologies, and barcodes such as Microsoft Tag to entice interest in blockbuster films may be the next big promotional wave to hit Hollywood. Clearly digital marketing budgets are growing as studios look to differentiate themselves online.
The Source Code is an action thriller where a soldier crosses over into someone else’s body and has to locate the bomber on a Chicago commuter train. The movie is released nationwide on April 1 but premiered this past weekend at SXSW in Austin, TX.
