It had to end at some point…

After the third day of activity, Isaiah Mustafa and Old Spice have bid farewell to their ‘Internet friends’ and recorded their final YouTube video. Much has been written about the campaign over the last few days (see our case study with links here), and the buzz on blogs and Twitter have been explosive.

Here at We Are Social, we were a bit curious as to what the viewing figures looked like so we had a closer look at the Old Spice YouTube Channel. This is what we found:

• Total videos uploaded: 183
  • 12 July, 2010: 29 videos uploaded
  • 13 July, 2010: 89 videos uploaded
  • 14 July, 2010: 65 videos uploaded
• Combined viewing figures: 10,954,096
• Average video view (mean value): 59,858 views
• Median value: 40,536 views (Re: Idgit | Old Spice)
• Most watched video: 511,694 views (Re: Perez Hilton | Old Spice)

15 Most Popular Videos

YouTube viewing figures are based on data collection ending 14:00 BST (09:00 EDT, 06:00 PDT) 15th July 2010
View raw data here

Among these popular videos, celebrities and key online figures standout like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose. The video directed at ‘Anonymous’ deserves a special mention:

According to ReadWriteWeb:

How loved has the new campaign proven to be? 4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of [Anonymous]… 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan – which this savvy man in a towel did not do.

And now it occupies the second most watched spot, which is no small feat.

This covers off on the publicly available viewing figures (which have surely grown during the time of writing this), but there is surely so much more that can be learned from how the online audience behaved with this campaign and from the viewing behaviour on YouTube. Things like:

• Comments – Which videos were the most discussed/engaging? Was there any discussion of purchase preference or the Old Spice product in these comments, and how can this be fed back into product marketing and development?
• Demographics – Which audience(s) did this campaign appeal to the most? What is the age/gender make up, and the geographic spread of viewers? How does this compare with Old Spice’s target customer?
• Sharing data – How did the Old Spice videos make their way across the web? How did videos reach secondary and tertiary audiences? What were the most important platforms in driving this reach (Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Reddit vs. Digg vs. blogs)?
• Embed data – Who and what were the most popular / influential sources to embed the videos? What was the ratio of views on YouTube, compared to views of videos embedded elsewhere?

The opportunities for measurement are almost endless, and Wieden + Kennedy / Proctor & Gamble are sitting on some very interesting data behind the YouTube account login. We definitely hope to learn more over the coming months.

Time above shown in BST, which is 5 hours ahead of EDT, and 8 hours ahead of PDT

Meanwhile Twitter over the last few days has been busy:

Twitter data collection ended 13:30 BST (08:30 EDT, 05:30 PDT) 15th July 2010, query: “Old Spice” OR oldspice

Since 13 July 2010 there’s been about 175K Old Spice related tweets, and they were broken down as follows:

26% were retweets, which indicates how readily people passed around the content online. Meanwhile 8% were @replies, and the overwhelming majority of those were directed at @oldspice, showing that people were quite keen to get involved (even me). The remaining ‘regular tweets’ were, by and large, people commenting about the ‘old spice guy’/’old spice man’ videos as they watched, and shared the YouTube links. A cursory read of these Tweets were found to be extremely positive, which probably comes as no surprise. A word cloud, drawn from a sample of 10,000 Tweets from 13 July – 15 July tends to support this:

The words “Old Spice” and “@oldspice” were removed from the word cloud for clarity.

It’s worth noting that words like hilarious, like, love and awesome are among the 50 most prominent words of the 157,849 rendered in the word cloud.

So what now? It appears that Wieden + Kennedy and Old Spice have created a bit of a monster, but have phased out activity while it was still fresh and universally liked. I imagine the video viewcount will continue to climb as people make their way through all 183 videos, and the Twitter buzz will likely calm down. I expect attitudes towards the brand will remain positive, though it will be really interesting to see if this translates directly into sales.

As succesful as this campaign has been however, I can’t say that I envy the people behind it… I mean, how do they top that? Naturally, we’re hoping they (or perhaps even, we) do!

The Cannes Film Grand Prix-winning Old Spice campaign has evolved over the last 24 hours to dominate discussion in social media, in what is sure to become the ‘case study du jour’ for the foreseeable future.

“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” spot from Wieden + Kennedy Portland was launched in February during the Super Bowl. It featured Isaiah Mustafa, a former NFL athlete, being totally awesome and became an almost immediate hit online. It has since racked up almost 13 million views on YouTube, with a couple new iterations launched in recent weeks.

Yesterday, however, the marketing campaign took a different turn and really got ‘social media right’. It’s been updated and sees Isaiah Mustafa respond directly to YouTube comments, Tweets, Yahoo! Answers and blog posts about him in 117 publicly available, timely and personalised video messages.

To ensure maximum coverage Old Spice replied to some of the most popular personalities on Twitter, such as @Biz (Twitter co-founder), @ryanseacrest (TV personality), @kevinrose (Digg founder), @Alyssa_Milano (actor), and @guykawasaki (social media thought leader). Blogger Perez Hilton’ s video response has already clocked up over 115k views. They’ve also hit up media outlets like GQ, Huffington Post, Gizmodo and The Ellen Show. Starbucks have even managed to get in on the action.

So what are the results? It’s still early to tell, but a few things are apparent.

The activity, according to Campaign, appears to be targeted at the ‘Twitter generation’ and it seems to be doing the trick. There has been a noticeable increase in followers to the @oldspice account, as well as a surge in conversation volume about the brand over the past 24 hours.

Searches for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 10.45am today turned up the following:

That’s pretty spectacular, and the volumes were enough for Old Spice to trend on Twitter. What’s interesting though, is that Old Spice started yesterday as a Twitter Promoted Trend, but quickly ‘earned’ the status. TechCrunch explains:

[Old Spice] also just redefined the model for Promoted Trends. Old Spice is a promoted Trend, which takes you to the Old Spice Twitter account highlighting these videos as individual responses addressing each Twitter user who gets their own Old Spice commercial. The irony is that if Old Spice hadn’t paid to be a promoted Trend, it probably would have made it as a Trending Topic organically.

This morning Old Spice is still trending, organically.

There has been a similar increase in discussion on blogs as well. Again, a simple search for “old spice” or oldspice for the last week up until 11.45am today turned up the following:

But a key question is: can this goodwill and online buzz translate into sales?

Though the original adverts have been a massive hits, and clocked up millions of views on YouTube, sales of Old Spice haven’t necessarily seen the same upward trend. Just yesterday AdWeek reported that sales of the Old Spice body wash have actually dropped 7 percent over the last year.

So this surge of social media activity certainly comes at an interesting time, and it will be worth keeping an eye on, especially as brands like Dominos Pizza publicly pin their good fortunes on social media activity.

Ultimately, this level of social media engagement which was born from a television advert is really remarkable. Old Spice has done a great job in updating the campaign so that it really ‘works’ online. Most importantly though, the video responses are consistently funny in their own right, making it hard not to love this campaign.

So on that note, we’ll leave you with Isaiah Mustafa’s responses to The Huffington Post, Guy Kawasaki and Perez Hilton – some of the finest examples:

Huffington Post

Guy Kawasaki

Perez Hilton

Update: ReadWriteWeb has the lowdown on how the Old Spice videos are being made:

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. Here’s how it’s going down…

Fast Company also have an interview with our old friend Iain Tait who’s been working on the project:

One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally relevant community.

Iain also gives more background on the project on his own blog.

And now it seems, the end has arrived, with this closing message from Isaiah:

Update 2: We’ve conducted some in-depth analysis into the results of the campaign – Old Spice videos viewed 11 million times.

Update 3: Wieden+Kennedy have released a nice video case study of the campaign.

Visits to MySpace UK have halved in 6 months say sources
UK visits to MySpace have dropped from a from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010, according to a TechCrunch Europe source.

MySpace maintains the figures “aren’t accurate,” however independent measurement service comScore shows a similar decline in MySpace UK’s traffic over the past 12 months. Interestingly, Facebook is the third biggest referrer of traffic to the site.

Orkut about to fall to Facebook in India
Google-owned social network Orkut’s fortunes in India may soon be changing, as Facebook narrows the gap with the country’s most popular social network:

In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut’s 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut.

By contrast, Orkut remains dominant in Brazil, “with 29 million visitors a months versus only 8 million for Facebook”. ‘Western’ social networks can sometimes run into challenges in gaining a toehold against local competitors (e.g. Facebook vs. China’s RenRen, 51 and Kaixin001), but Facebook’s growing popularity in India and Twitter’s rapid adoption in Japan suggest that this is not always the case.

Foursquare launches location layers – this is Big
Two Foursquare ‘location layer’ campaigns announced last week from the Independent Film Channel and Huffington Post signal big moves for the location-based service. The campaigns allow users to ‘opt-in’ to get news/tips/content pushed to them whenever they check in near an annotated location.

The development is culmination of several other experiments by Foursquare with partners, such as the Canadian newspaper chain Metro’s review integration in January, and the Wall Street Journal’s location-based news in April.

Social media boosts Domino’s Pizza’s UK online sales by 61.4%
NMA reports that online sales for the Domino’s have increased by 61.4% in the first half of 2010, in part down to innovative social media marketing over the past year:

Our main Facebook site has in excess of 36,000 fans and there are numerous fans of individual store sites too. In addition, we have led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfans programme and the development of a link up with Foursquare, the location-based social media site.

BMI integrates live Twitter feed onsite for city destination pages
BMI destination landing pages for cities around the world now incorporate ‘the uncontrolled madness’ of Twitter, thorough a feed dedicated to Tweets about the city in question. The Feeds are moderated for “swearing, competitors and racial slurs,” and feature alongside travel-related content like maps, tips and things to do. BMI wants to demonstrate their belief in transparency by moderating the feed as little as possible, and note they rely on an automatic filter list to automate most of it, and manually monitor sensitive destinations.

UK Government to use Facebook for ideas on cuts

The UK Government is teaming up with Facebook in the hopes of using the social network to harness ‘civic spirit’ in the country, and allow people to submit ideas for where public money might be saved.  The UK is the second largest country on Facebook, with over 26 million UK users. Users will be able to get involved:

…via a ‘Spending Challenge Channel’ on its Democracy UK page. There will also be microsites specially tailored to focus on key issues open for discussion and debate among the voting public.

The move follows the previous week’s launch of the Your Freedom website which was aimed at allowing users to submit suggestions for legislation they would like to see repealed or modified.

Facebook unveils child safety ‘panic button’ (which is just an app)
Facebook has announced that it will incorporate a ‘panic button’ to the social networking site, aimed at children and teenagers to allow them to easily report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

Facebook had previously resisted adding a panic button, and its launch follows ‘months of negotiations’ between Facebook and CEOP. But as Techcrunch reports:

while a few media outlets are reporting today that it has launched [a panic button], the reality is somewhat different. What Facebook is launching is a tailor-made marketing application and campaign for a government body which till now had no presence at all on the social network. That’s quite a different thing altogether.

Bebo had previously announced adding a panic button last November (not that it did them much good).

‘One third of young women check Facebook when they first wake up’
A recent study polled the habits of 1,605 adults using social media between May and June 2010, and uncovered some interesting online habits from both men and women on Facebook. Chief among them:

• One third of women aged 18 to 34 check Facebook when they first wake up
• 21% of women aged between 18 to 34 check Facebook in the middle of the night
• 50% are happy being Facebook ‘friends’ with complete strangers

Facebook’s OpenGraph, Three Months Later
Three month’s after the announcement of OpenGraph at the Facebook F8 conference, fbLike has compiled a list of six OpenGraph use cases including CNN, Yelp, IMDB, Fandango, Levis and themselves.

In particular, the simplicity of the ‘like’ button comes into it own for Yelp, IMDB, Levis and Fandago, which allows for easy recommendations to be shared directly across a users’ new feed.

Since meeting Lindsey from the Londonist at the recent launch of Eurostar Culture Connect I’ve been keeping up to date with everything happening on the Londonist site and this particular post caught my eye. This ‘New City Landscape’ has been created for the Urban Tick blog by Fabian Neuhaus from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and displays London’s Twitter traffic on a contoured map.

Just like a relief map, the peaks in traffic are displayed with different colours representing different ‘heights’ in traffic. There’s also the nice touch of themed place names such as Peckham Crag and Clerkenwell Ridge.

The We Are Social offices are North of Piccadilly Circus (Piccadilly Rock) and just West of Soho Square (Soho Mountain) so we’re smack bang in the middle of the highest peak. Are we the one’s propping up Soho Mountain? I guess it’s possible with the entire company tweeting throughout the day on our own profiles as well as multiple client accounts.

I agree with the suggestion (in the comments of the Urban Tick post) that it would be great to see an interactive live version of this on a Google map like the London Underground Live Tube Map we saw a couple of weeks ago. Then we could really work out who the key contributors are.

Social media helps drive purchases by 10x
Recent research reveals that customers visiting an online store via social media are 10x more like to by something than other users: “whereas 7% of all visitors to an online store make a purchase, a significantly higher 71% of visitors initiated via social media will click their way to the transaction section.” The study showed that while many online stores are good at attracting visitors, a small amount will be converted to customers. But “reassurance from a positive review” and “social media marketing” can be highly effective in closing sales.

Sorrell questions commercialisation of social web
WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell likened social media to letter writing at one of the closing sessions of the 57th Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, and said that it could be “polluted” by attempts to monetise it. On the same panel, Keith Weed, the global chief marketing officer of Unilever, likened social media instead to the modern day equivalent of a pub or bar chat, and that social networking sites “will and they must” find ways to monetise their offerings.

…companies like ours can develop with companies like Facebook or Microsoft. So I think ‘yes’, they will monetise. How they do it, I think [Sorrell is], right they have to be clever.

Facebook commits to UK support
King Mark Zuckerberg was in London last week at the first official London Facebook Developers’ Garage event, and he committed to increasing support for UK brands and content providers. Zuckerberg also “stressed the importance of the UK to the company, and highlighted personalisation and its virtual currency Facebook Credits as key themes for the year ahead.”

Statistics update reveals that more than one million websites are using Facebook’s platform
Facebook has updated their official Statistics page, and announced in the process that more than one million websites have integrated with its developer platform, up from about 80,000 websites.

This difference is due, in a large part, to Facebook’s launch of the Like Box and other social plugins in late April; the company said this week that more than 300,000 sites have already implemented the plugins, and the number appear to still be climbing.

Elsewhere, it was reported in a study by Experian Simmons that half of US web users visit Facebook each month.

Twitter makes it easier to find friends and colleagues, Facebook ‘blocks’ Twitter friend finder
Last week Twitter announced that it was making it easier to find friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn, by improving their Find Friends section and tweaking their LinkedIn and Facebook applications.

The Tweets application by LinkedIn allows users to see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. Meanwhile the Facebook app was meant to show which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, but this was blocked by Facebook disallowing people to see which of their friends on the social network also have Twitter accounts.

A whole new way of experiencing LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups received their first major overhaul since August 2008, which is one of many that are expected in the coming months. In addition to improving the look and feel and ease of use of groups, LinkedIn has also:

• Made it easier to receive email updates from select group members
• Made it possible to vote up or down content and discussions
• Introduced a way to highlight the most active members/contributors to a group

We expect that these changes could go a long way to changing the way that users interact in groups for the better.

Foursquare hits 1.7 million users, and the threat from spammers looms
Foursquare announced that it had passed the 1.7 million user mark, after having added 100,000 in a mere 10 days. At that rate, the location-based service should hit 2 million users before August.

But with growing popularity, comes a greater threat from spammers. The Next Web notes that while spam is still a minor problem, it is becoming more prevalent as people ‘innovate’ by changing their profile name to a company name in order to raise awareness atop local leaderboards, or by leaving advertising messages as ‘tips’.

Foursquare, Starbucks need better blend of offers
When Starbucks and Foursquare announced their joint loyalty program last month in the US, it generated quite a bit of positive publicity. The offer, $1 discount on Frappuccinos to the mayors of individual Starbucks stores, has since come under criticism from Forrester analyst Augie Ray who laid out five reasons that it has become both ‘noisy and bothersome’, and potentially damaging in the long term.  Fair play to Starbucks for being amongst the first to implement a nationwide Foursquare promotion, but there are certainly some lessons to be learned with respect to offering better targeted and easier to redeem Foursquare offers.

Virgin America Offers Free Flights to Twitter Influencers
Virgin America has partnered with Klout, an analytics service that tracks users’ influence on Twitter, to offer free flights (plus tax) to influencers in Toronto:

The offer includes free round-trip airfare (Wi-Fi included) between Toronto and San Francisco (SFO) or Los Angeles (LAX) between June 23 and August 23. Those who received invitations for the offer — whether or not they decide to accept the flight that comes with it — were also invited to Virgin America’s Toronto Launch Event on June 29.

Interestingly, ‘influencers’ who have been offered the free flight aren’t require to blog or Tweet about the experience, though Klout has requested that users who do accept the offer and chose to write something,  disclose the promotion. Handing out free flights to those with Twitter ‘influence’ is not without its critics however, and some question the validity of ranking people based on an algorithm alone.

JD Sports campaign turns 900,000 visitors into 180,000 sign-ups
A recent campaign for the JD Sports-owned fashion label Bank managed to generate 900,000 unique users and 180,000 sign ups for a competition to become the face of Bank and model the Autumn/Winter 2010 range.

It used Facebook Open Graph – only two clicks to connect with a site and then sending info that they’d signed up or voted for someone into the user’s Facebook profile, which meant that their friends (on average 150 people) also saw it.

LOFT ansers the Facebook call for ‘real women’
Meanwhile, LOFT, a US fashion retailer, received interaction of an entirely different nature on its Facebook Fan Page. The company  posted images to Facebook of a tall, blonde model wearing the brand’s new silk cargo pants, and received a number of complaints that the trousers were not universally flatterig unless you’re a “stick like model”. LOFT quickly responded to calls for ‘real women in photos’ the next day by posting pictures of its own staff – ranged from size 2 to 12, and from 5′3″ to 5′10″ – posing in the cargo pants. In so doing they managed to turn things around, address the negative sentiment head-one and show that they were indeed ‘listening’ to their customers.

Digg redesign takes the fight to Twitter, Facebook
Digg has also recently announced a redesign, and “aims to directly challenge Twitter and Facebook by redefining the way Diggers share, view, and submit content.” Chief among the changes, are the ability to follow friends, publishers, and “taste-makers”; as well as  view content shared/promoted by their friends.

The idea seems to be that Digg will become much more of a true social networking site, but still based around links and news so as to cut out miscellaneous status updates so common to Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, it will now be easier to submit stories to the site, as well as become easier for Top News to spread amongst friends.

Meanwhile, a rumour has been spreading, in part by Digg founder Kevin Rose, that Google is readying ‘Google Me’, a social service intended to go head-to-head with Facebook.

FourWhere now combines Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare
FourWhere, free service developed by Toronto-based social media monitoring and analytics company Sysomos, now integrates information from the three leading location-based services: Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare.

If you’re not familiar with Fourwhere, it integrates data from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, and displays it using Google Maps API in order to provided users with “ an easy way to discover places and comments for thousands of restaurants, bars, cafes, stores, tourist attractions and other venues.”

Bart De Waele with some excellent home truths for social media:

Gov websites ‘should be hubs for debate’
Simon Dickson has drawn our attention to a statement made by new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, in response to a parliamentary question raised by Tom Watson concerning the government’s future plans for the Number 10 and Cabinet Office websites.  Maude’s short answer has some big implications on the form and function for future UK e-government sites:

The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges…

Enabling the government’s websites to facilitate debate and dialogue would be a most welcome development.

Yelp goes head-to-head with Foursquare, adds badges & Royal hierarchy
Yelp has announced an updated iPhone app, placing itself in direct competition with location-based social network Foursquare. Having previously added the ability to ‘check-in’ at locations, Yelp has now updated its app with other Foursquare-inspired features such as ‘Yelp badges’ and the opportunity for users to attain a ‘Royal’ status at locations.

As for crowning royalty, Yelp is taking a medieval approach to Foursquare’s mayorship feature. If a user has the most check-ins at a business, they are bestowed with the title of Duke or Duchess. If a user racks up enough of these titles in a specific neighborhood, they become the Baron of that area, or the King at the city level.

Social networking heats up on ‘browsing phones’, according to ComScore
According to a new study from ComScore, social networking is the fastest growing activity among people with smartphones / feature phones that offer Web browsing.

ComScore estimate that approximately 20 percent of mobile users are now accessing social networking sites via their phone, either with a dedicated app or through the mobile browser.

Yahoo! and Facebook announce site tie-up
Yahoo! struck a deal with Facebook to make it easier for users who maintain presences on both sites to share what they do across them. So what does it all mean?

The deal means that people who maintain profiles on Yahoo and Facebook can link the two pages and cross-pollinate both with one update.  It will also mean that those who use Flickr, Yahoo Answers or the social site’s video and music services can pipe any media or data they create to friends who use only Facebook.

Twitter rolls out “You both follow” feature
About 10% of Twitter users have been given the chance to play with a new ‘You both follow ‘ feature when accessing the site via their web browser. “When you click on another user’s profile, you are now given a list of people you both follow.”

Over on The Wall Blog, Jennifer Whitehead notes another (perhaps more useful) use of the feature is to click on people whose profiles you DON’T follow already, so that you can see if you have friends in common: “not a mind-blowing development but useful if you see Twitter as a way to do a bit of marketing for yourself or to start conversations with people you’d like to know.”

Zappos lives up to its reputation for customer service
Over the past few years, online retailer Zappos has been highlighted alongside the likes of Ford, Dell or Comcast fairly regularly as a ‘go to’ case study for their use of social media for customer support. And it’s easy to see why with this example.

A pricing bug on a Zappos sister site called 6pm.com gave customers the ability to purchase any product online for no more than $49.99. The mistake was eventually caught 6 hours after it went live, but not before customers had taken advantage of the pricing bug to the tune of approximately $1.6m.

Balancing the backlash that might ensue online against the cost of eating the loss, Director of Brand Marketing Aaron Magness explained on the Zappos Blog that they would honour all purchases.

As Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles put it: “Zappos… clearly understands that its reputation is worth far more than $1.6m and that sometimes eating a loss is the smart thing to do. Interestingly, one might even suggest that Zappos will only boost its reputation and customer loyalty with this move.”

Independent blocks anonymous comments
The Independent dealt a blow to trolls everywhere by only allowing people to post comments if they sign in using their Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Open ID or Disqus accounts. Editor Martin King explained the move with the following:

Websites have been encouraging cowardice. They allow users to hide behind virtual anonymity to make hasty, ill-researched and often intemperate comments regardless of any consideration for personal hurt or corporate damage.

Well said. While this might not be able to stop individuals posting under a pseudonym using, say, a Disqus account, it is nonetheless a step in the right direction to try and deter those who seek only to defame or abuse in comments sections across the web.

BBC iPlayer adds Twitter and Facebook to socialise TV
The BBC’s video on demand service, iPlayer, is launching iPlayer Beta at the end of June, allowing users to link their Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger accounts to their ‘BBC ID.’

Users will more easily be able to share what they’re watching over social networks, while viewers using Windows Messenger can sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime.

Buy lettuce, get virtual currency
Social gaming company Zynga and Green Giant have teamed up to offer purchasers of Green Giant vegetable products free virtual currency that can be used in Farmville.

At first glance, the promotion seems like a very good fit. Zynga will be able to easily track redemptions to determine if the promotion is a success, while Green Giant can (hopefully) get more people eating their ‘5 a day.’ More importantly though, “the promotion highlights just how prominent virtual currency and games like Farmville have become in the mainstream.”

BP beaten in social media stakes by fake tweets
BP has had something of a mess on its hands lately in social media in the form of a tongue-and-cheek account:  @BPGlobalPR. The account has swelled to over 97,000 followers, eclipsing BP’s official @BP_America account by some 88,000, and claimed to be the oil giant’s official voice throughout the ecological crisis in the Gulf, while delivering a healthy dose of satire.

The anonymous Tweeter has since penned an editorial in the Guardian, been unmasked by Wired magazine and even given a book deal. There is also a T-Shirt range with proceeds going to benefit the Gulf Restoration Network. Long may it continue.

Dr Pepper rolls out Facebook status takeover for teens
Coca-Cola has launched a Facebook app for Dr. Pepper which gives consumers the chance to win £1,000 if they allow Dr Pepper to take control of their status update.

The app ties into their ‘What’s the Worst that Could Happen?’ creative, and chooses updates at random with varying degrees of embarrassment such as ‘what’s wrong with peeing in the shower?’ or ‘never heard of it described as “cute” before.’

Domino’s UK Rewards Foursquare Mayors, Yahoo acquires ‘Asian Foursquare’
Domino’s UK is starting a nationwide Foursquare promotion that rewards mayors with free pizza once a week, a deal similar to the one Starbucks announced not too long ago. Additionally, every Foursquare user will receive a free side dish when spending over £10.

In other location-based news, Yahoo has acquired Koprol which has been described affectionately by TechCrunch as the ‘Asian Foursquare.’

Google Moderator on YouTube enables real-time feedback from your audience
YouTube has integrated the use of Google Moderator into every single YouTube channel. Google Moderator is a social platform that allows users to solicit ideas, ask questions, and have their community vote for the best comments in real-time. Crucially, it also allows users channel owners the ability to remove any content that their audience has flagged as inappropriate.

Twitter passes 15 billion tweet mark
After reaching 10 billion tweets at the beginning of March, Twitter has now announced that it has delivered its 15 billionth tweet:

It took Twitter almost a year to hit five billion, but only four months to hit 10 billion. By adding another five billion tweets in three months it is now growing at more than one billion tweets a month, which means it should hit 20 billion before the summer is out.

Assuming we even get a summer in London this year…

It’s Monday, so as usual, have some Monday Mashup goodness, fresh from We Are Social towers.

Twitter to ban third-party ads
Breaking news from Twitter’s blog – they will be blocking any third-party paid Tweets service from using their API. Services such as ad.ly and Magpie are nascent attempts at direct advertising in Twitter – something we largely regard as unconversational and spammy. Twitter’s recent launch of promoted Tweets hopes to maintain the balance between revenue and conversation, and third-party ad services are an obvious threat. Is this heavy-handed monopolism or an attempt to keep the platform clean and spam-free? My view is towards the latter but no doubt detractors will say this is an unwanted restriction on third-party developers and will harm the Twitter ecosystem.

Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns
Today Mark Zuckerberg made his first public comment in the ongoing controversy around Facebook’s privacy controls. In an email to Robert Scoble, he acknowledges that Facebook has “made a bunch of mistakes” but stops short of making an apology. However he promises “an improved product” which they might preview this week. We wait avidly to see what they will be.

Meanwhile, the continuing controversy isn’t distracting Facebook from pushing for expansion, especially in growing markets. Not happy with laying waste to competitors like StudiVZ in Germany, this week also saw the launch of Facebook Zero, a stripped-down version of the mobile site built for pay-as-you-go customers, which is free for users of more than 50 mobile providers in 45 countries – an attempt no doubt to push mobile access to Facebook beyond the iPhone and Blackberry markets, which are increasingly saturated these days. One place however where Facebook may have trouble expanding is Pakistan, which has recently blocked the site after groups encouraging drawing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad proliferated.

Diesel Cam brings social media into the store
A nice campaign from Diesel, providing Facebook Connect-enabled booths in stores to allow people to share photos of themselves wearing Diesel’s clothes with their friends on Facebook. Some of the most innovative campaigns are now blurring people’s “real” and “virtual” lives:

Lifehacks galore
Lots of useful tools received an update this week – Tweetdeck gained some powerful features, including that to filter out certain keywords (so no more being envious of people at #sxsw, hurrah!). Google Wave came out of beta to public use, although I’ve still not yet found a use for it that doesn’t just replicate existing apps’ functionality. And Twitter finally released an official app for iPhone, an upgrade to Tweetie, which they bought out last month (and by far the best and most stable iPhone app for Twitter I’ve used).

Maturing behaviours on social networks
As social networking takes a firm hold in our collective consciousness, perhaps it’s no surprise that people have grown more conscientious of placing too much sensitive information online or being too liberal with friend requests. A new survey out shows 74% of people are now careful about what pictures they upload, although 87% still believe their online and offline identities correspond with each other. There’s some nice detail on differences internationally – Brazilians have on average 360 friends on their profile (no doubt thanks to Orkut’s dominance there), while Brits have just 173. 1 in 3 Facebook users don’t trust the service, while 55% of users are blocked from using social networks at work – perhaps no surprise that personal social networks rather than professional ones such as LinkedIn enjoy more popularity. The full deck is worth a read.

Real-time influencing traditional media
An interesting report from warc on how television advertisers are increasingly becoming more flexible and innovative in producing their spots around live events. After major live events such as the Winter Olympics and Superbowl, American advertisers commissioned and adapted advertisements with the starring athletes – with feedback from social media playing a key part in which adverts got the heaviest rotation. Our friend Chris Stephenson has some further thoughts which are well worth picking through. While we might not have quite that level of responsiveness in the UK yet (although Simon Pegg got a reply to one of his Tweets by an eagle-eyed continuity announcer), with the World Cup coming up who knows what might come up?

Maybe it was a digital election after all
The new government’s boxes might have only just been unpacked but there’s already some studies on the effect of online on the UK election. A third of respondents to a survey said that online content had influenced their voting decision, although perhaps disappointingly for those arguing it was a ‘Twitter election’, only 5% of voters said they read political content on the site. A lack of comparative stats for the TV debates or newspapers makes this survey a little hard to place in the wider context, though.

Twitter reworks trending topic algorithms
And finally… Justin Bieber no longer features in the top ten trending topics on Twitter – something we should all be thankful for.