Grown Up Thinking

This Thursday is National Social Media Day! With only two days left to prepare, how will you celebrate? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

- Pick a social media personality and claim it for the day. I recommend being the Fail Whale or the crying Foursquare girl with the crown  Make sure you dress to fit your part like this guy!

- Set some resolutions for the next year of social media. Example: “I will tweet more often because I haven’t in months” or “I will tweet less often because my friends want to slap me.”

- Make a video and upload it on YouTube. Need ideas? Start simple with a demonstrative speech – like how to make a sandwich, how to make a scene at work, or how to make a grown man cry.

- Get your favorite social media infographic and make it your desktop background. Like this one.

- Throw an internet meme party. I will make my friends wear narwhal horn party hats (and bring my pet narwhal), dress as chubby bubbles girl, put Double Dream Hands on repeat, Ice all the bros in attendance, and insert photo bomb seal into all of the party pics (which I will then make into animated gifs). Friday will be boycotted, though, since it will only be Thursday…

Happy Social Media Day to you and yours! Tell us what you’re scheming for the big day.

Of all the new ads, ideas, articles, videos, and trends we sift through every day, these are the fun nuggets that stuck with us last week:

- The Oxford Dictionary is the most generous in adding Internet jargon to the official English language. Check out the list of last month’s new additions, my favorites being: baby bump, bestie, infographic, meep, newb, social graph, and ZOMG.

- Axe Sprayaway lets you remove what you think stinks on the web. Negative YouTube comment? New pic of your arch nemesis on Facebook? Opinion you don’t agree with and want to lash out against in a non-threatening way? Make yourself feel better with this fun tool.

- This conceptual work for UNICEF, done by students at the Miami Ad School, poses a new way to contribute funds to education by donating your misspelled words. A very creative and inspiring concept.

- The launch of the Tweet Button adds an easier way to embed Twitter into your sites with options to show the number of times the item has been tweeted and preload mentions.

- The Intel® Museum of Me is our favorite rendition of the myriad “social history” tools we’ve seen.  Beautiful and well done.

- Improv Everywhere did a great stunt called “Gotta Share” – it gives the flashmob a facelift and has all the social media rhyming words we could ask for

What’s floating your boat this week?

By now everyone is aware of the sensation Doppleganger week generated on Facebook, and a smaller buzz was created when a movement challenged women to change their status to the color of your bra to raise awareness for Breast Cancer. Both appear to have started organically.

Two new groups are getting viral traction on Facebook. The first one:  I’m With Coco, a group started to show support for Conan through the NBC debacle. The group, started up by artist Mike Mitchell,  is closing in on 1 million fans and has inspired a merchandise line featuring  a Shepard Fairey-esque image of Conan that Mitchell created.

The second meme of the month is “Can this Pickle Get More Fans than Nickelback.” It was inspired by the “Can this onion get more fans than Justin Bieber”, which had over 2-million fans before it was pulled down by facebook. This week, the Nickelback hating page reached their goal by netting more than 1,420,000 fans compared to Nickelback’s 1,413,167. The page continues to grow with pure viral pickle power.

Both social media movements have started small, but have resulted in big pay offs. Facebook is a tricky space. Their policies are ever-changing and they reserve the right to pull down pages that violate their terms. YET, if a brand approached this correctly, it could be a huge win. Conan could have put out a rally cry on the network and driven people to join a Facebook fan group, but a consumer did it instead. Who knows if there is some magic pickle man behind this viral effort. I’d put money on it that there isn’t, but you never know these days.

Back in November, a clam chowder joint’s viral stunt reported their sales tripled from a hoax campaign that put their billboard in the depths of the ocean. Damn, I’m getting hungry… gotta change my FB status.

Before you ask, a meme is defined as “any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation.”  Simply put, a meme is anything that is spread virally–used and passed on–and makes its way into the mainstream.  The 2.0 world has vastly accelerated the transference of these little nuggets, and you are probably familiar with way more memes than you think.

(more…)