Activ8Social

We hope you had a great weekend and are ready for last week’s top news in sports, entertainment, and social media. Today’s edition includes a major social media marketing push behind box office number one movie Cowboys & Aliens, the 2012 Olympics Twitter contest, Twitter’s new delivery of promoted Tweets, and finally Foursquare and Groupon’s official partnership announcement.

Hey everybody!  We hope you enjoyed the weekend. This week’s Monday Social Mashup reviews Dana White’s announcement he will pay UFC fighters to tweet, Google’s new music service, Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, and Groupon’s launch of their new product ‘Groupon Now.’

The NFL would probably prefer it if Chad Ochocinco never tweeted again.  The controversy surrounding his usual tweets is assuredly not the type of publicity the NFL is going for.  In fact, most major leagues have had at least some problems with their athletes using Twitter.  The same cannot be said for the UFC.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What a game last night! Wow! Our sincere condolences go out to all you Steeltown fans but then again six Lombardi trophies isn’t so bad either. As we do every week here at Activ8Social, we cover the top social media stories in sports and entertainment including the controversial Groupon vs. LivingSocial Super Bowl ad wars, Foursquare’s Super Bowl check-in, free Facebook on Gogo flights in February, Kia’s Australian Open campaign, and MySpace’s not-so-surprising for sale sign. And of course, don’t forget to vote on whether Barbie should take Ken back!

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 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.

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”.