Grown Up Thinking

Social networking site, Twitter, seemed to steal the show during this year’s Super Bowl Sunday. The two major Twitter Super Bowl chat groups received hundreds of Tweets every minute throughout the night. While last year’s Super Bowl ads were blogged about shortly after they aired, this year’s had millions of people instantly display their feedback in 140 characters or less (as is Twitter’s maximum character count) thus providing an accurate and live pulse of the nation (check out this very cool interactive map that displays the most popular words Tweeted during the evening and from where they were sent).

And what better way for a brand to capitalize on this massive audience than having its Super Bowl ad stars Tweet to the masses. Pepsi’s PepSuber, E-Trade’s babies, and H&R Block’s Murray were among the characters who were Tweeting on game day. This type of social networking is proving invaluable for brands because of its impact and because it’s FREE! Because Twitter is an open dialogue it has the ability to connect with consumers more personally than TV spots and having grown over 600% in the last year, it can no longer be ignored by marketers.

A great site for Sprint that beautifully illustrates the Consumer 2.0 insight that bite-sized communications dominate.

Plug Into Now compiles small fragments of information onto one easily manageable page that changes dynamically and can be downloaded for use on Facebook, Myspace, and iGoogle. It’s admittedly quite mesmerizing (and the soothing voice doesn’t hurt either).

Visit Plug In Now.

So, much has been said about Joe Six-Pack and the newly famous Joe the Plumber but convenient store chain 7-11 actually conceived of an ingenious promotion to use Joe to predict the election. In this case, a cup of joe. The idea is quite simple, 7-11 created red coffee cups with McCain’s name on them and blue cups with Obama’s. They then track the cups that their customers are selecting on a nationwide map on their 7-Election.com web site, which even allows consumers to view results by state. Even more remarkable, the results of this poll were within 1% of actual results in 2000 and identical to final results of the 2004 election. Guess Joe really does play a big role in this year’s election.

Hotel 626 is a spectacular site for Doritos made by Goodby & B-Reel. Certainly not for the faint of heart. Terrifying and extremely well-made. Yet another example of how great brands can create a fully personalized, rich, interactive experience for Consumer 2.0 to make things memorable.

Note: best experienced with a web cam & microphone enabled. The site is only accessible from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., but you can override by changing the time on your computer.

Thanks to the guys at The Digital Stew for pointing me in the right direction. Yummy.

It’s no surprise that the online and offline worlds keeps merging into each more and more as technology enables us to keep connected at all times (especially here in the Mr. Youth office as admitted brand-lovers and tech geeks who gleefully exchange iPhone apps).

While the economy plummets and looming tension builds to keep everyone in the meatspace all a-twitch, the offline universe is evolving and adapting to reflect a space that is still thriving and positively teeming with great ideas: the online world. This month’s TrendWatching report focuses on the online/offline cross pollination that seeds offline content with a digital approach.

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