Activ8Social

We hope that you had an excellent weekend and managed to get off your couch for at least a little while in light of the excellent NBA and NHL playoff games taking place.  This week’s edition of the Social Mashup features two intriguing Twitter stories, a new advertising plan from Pepsi and MLB, and finally Google Offers going into Beta testing.  Hopefully if you were fortunate enough to win any trophies this weekend, you didn’t run them over in your celebration.

Twitter has been recently encouraging developers to move away from creating third party clients so that Twitter can have more traffic on their actual site which would lead to more monetizing options.  But that may backfire on Twitter.  Some of those developers may be looking to build their own competitor to Twitter.

This week’s Social Mashup features Major League Baseball’s digital campaign for the legendary Jackie Robinson, Living Social’s $1 deals, Reebok’s cool new mobile application, and Virgin America awesome new Foursquare marketing campaign. And no, we can’t believe Rebecca Black’s Friday has just topped the 100 million views on YouTube either. Watch out Biebs!

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the MLB’s color barrier becoming the first African American to play in the Major League. Every year on the anniversary of his first big league game, April 15th, each MLB team celebrates Jackie Robinson Day by wearing 42—which is the only number in history retired by all 30 MLB teams. This year, to honor Jackie, MLB has released a new digital campaign called IAM42 which is aimed at creating a personal connection between fans and the legend through personal videos and social media.

In the social media world, the key to financial stability is buy-in from the world’s Fortune 500 companies. Facebook definitely reigns king in this department as nearly every major brand across the globe has an established presence on the Facebook platform. One of the keys to Facebook’s success is the ease with which a user can quickly find a company’s Facebook Page (although we will say that we applaud Twitter for attempting their “Verified” system as their are fairly sizable community run brand pages on Facebook) and the fact that the Palo Alto technology company jumped to head start in 2007 when Pages launched.

A little over a year ago, we at Activ8Social produced our Top 30 Athletes on Facebook with Michael Phelps taking home the gold. This year we decided to ask a different question—who is the top professional sports team on Facebook? From Africa to Australia and football to futbol, the competition spanned five continents and six sports. Will you see one of the classic American teams like the Patriots, Yankees or Celtics own the number one spot? Or will it go across the pond to an EPL team like Arsenal or Manchester United?

Who had Charl Schwartzel in their Masters pool?  We wish we could claim it’s true for us, but sincere congratulations to young South African golfer on winning the illustrious Green Jacket.  In this week’s edition of our Social Mashup, we recap Facebook’s potential push into the China market, a new digital case for the iPad 2, ESPN’s live streaming, and the MTV O Music Awards.  And in case you weren’t one of the 25 million people (yes, you read that number right) to view the live Ustream feed of the bald eagle family in Iowa, here it is for your viewing pleasure.

MTV announced a new online awards show that will take place on April 28 and be shown on MTV.com, VH1.com and LogoTV.com. Voting opened up to the public this week on the O Music Awards website. The first ever awards show will find the artist to follow on Twitter, coolest Tumblr, best music hashtag meme, best independent music blog, most viral dance and more according to fans. The Super Fan will also be crowned during the O Music Award show. Points are awarded to voters, and the fan with the most points is titled “Super Fan”.

This year Chris DiMarco is not competing at the 75th Masters but that does not mean his presence will go unfelt in Augusta.  DiMarco’s radio show, oPINionated w/ Chris DiMarco, has been transformed into a YouTube show from April 6 through April 10th (Masters Week) on his brand new ChrisDiMarcoTV YouTube Channel which Activ8Social designed and helped launch in addition to the Augusta Challenge on Facebook.

What a weekend for sports!  Final Four, MLB opening day, playoff pushes in the NHL and NBA!  This week’s social mashup may not bring that kind of excitement, but we certainly hope helps cure your case of the Mondays.  This week we bring you Salesforce’s major acquisition, MLB’s new social media ambassador, the Google +1 button and per usual some new stuff from Facebook.  P.S. we think that social media’s version of jumping the shark will now be called shooting the elephant. Wow.

$326 million exchanged hands this week when Salesforce acquired Radian6. Each company is a serious player in their respective industries. Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software maker and Enterprise cloud computing company.  In layman’s terms that means they distribute business software on a subscription basis and host the applications offsite at an affordable rate taking advantage of economies of scale.