This will blow you away, well if you like electronic music funky robots and Pokemon style fighting that is. If any one knows who built this please leave a comment as we'd love to know. I engaged with this brand for far too long, any one that says advertising is dead is an idiot, this is just new advertising at it's very best. I can not get the brand out my head now, it's impressed me that much - I wanna buy the company, I am so impressed with the level of work I am seeing today. I'm gushing now aren't I - Ok I'll stop.

But I do soooo love robots
Ok sorry. STOP.

I take my hat off to the team and the client on this one, amazing work, I’m talking about the viral campaign at http://www.lightfootlogistics.co.uk. Why do I like it so much? Well a) it’s funny b) it’s on brand and on market c) I’m a fan of longform online viral entertainment that holds your attention and opens your mind up to deep brand engagement.

So take a look, get a coffee and watch this set of very funny and well produced webisodes of Lightfoot Logistics. It looks like the campaign is being supported by a good online ad campaign driving traffic to the site via banners, which again I like it when a client has the foresight to support a campaign in this way, as well as benefit from the viral spread. Great work guys.

(Nestle, drop Viral Agency Inc. a call in the morning, info@viralagency.com, we can provide you with 24 hour professional Social Media monitoring Viral Agency Inc)

I started writing this post, over my Sunday morning coffee and the papers, and initially as a “will the latest viral campaign (attack) to stop Nestle using unsustainable palm oil, and the companies bad handling of its social media communications have an effect on the Nestle share price” but as I drilled into it, eureka! I can now show a direct negative effect that the social media campaign has had on the companies share price. Or it's one huge coincidence. We'll see what the markets have to say on Monday.

Nestle share price falls inline with viral attack

I love to look at the business metrics and not just the social metrics when I am looking at the effects of any viral advertising campaign, and these sort of findings gets my heart pumping, as it may prove the relationship between social media marketing, online sentiment and the brands share price. On the 18th of March the Nestle share price dropped by 0.95 or 1.79% this is in perfect correlation with the rise of negative online sentiment towards the brand as the social web strikes out against the company's use of unsustainable palm oil in its products.

As I look today I can see that the Nestle shares taking a drop as the Nestle online brand looses 78% of its positive sentiment, moving into negative online sentiment.

Looking at the Nestle Brand Loosing Ground.

Nestle online brand sentiment falls in to negative

The Nestle brand has for sure taken a battering this week. Nestle online brand sentiment shifted from 43% positive on March the 15th to 35% negative on March the 17th (in 2 days) after the KitKat Palm oil viral video campaign went live, that’s a negative shift of 78%.

Today, being Sunday the 21st of March we have tracked Nestle online brand opinion at 50/50, meaning things could go either way.

Now this starts to get exciting for all of us, as we are identifying negative effect on the Nestle share price too. As the markets closed on Friday the Nestle share price was on the fall. What will it do next week?

What can Nestle do?

It will be very interesting to see as we track Nestle's online brand sentiment and share price into next week, and to see if it can climb back to its pre-viral attack levels. Looking back over the brands high point for 2010 we see that in February the Nestle positive brand comments was at 51% ahead of negative.

But my question to you is, what should Nestle do to fight back and regain its lost ground? The easy answer is – give in to social pressure and stop using unsustainable palm oil. That may bring back confidence by consumers, but will it bring back the confidence of the market.

Asa Bailey
CEO Viral Agency Inc

What people really think about the new Apple iPad

It seems that everyone I speak to has an opinion about the new Apple iPad and I have to say that most of them have been negative, but this is probably as I live in Britain and anything new and exciting is often welcomed by a good dash of cynicism and envious off the cuff comments, as is the British way. But, what is surprising is the real data of opinion on the social web. We took a look under the hood of the Internet to find out what people are really saying about the new devise and it seems that Apple must be doing something right.

In wake of Mr Jobs comments and after showing of the new bit of kit, social media felt a massive influx of iPad related posts, tweets, mashups as Apple endured praise and criticism from all over the world. Here’s a look at the social media buzz surrounding the iPad:

Activity surged on the day Steve Jobs unveiled his precious new product and nearly 400,000 bits of content were generated on the interweb on this day alone!

Were the same but so different

This is a conversation in response to what Cory Gilbert wrote in his blog regarding Social Media not being any different from broadcast media, especially as we see scale from a few friends to many, such as in the case of a brand who may have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousand followers, fans and subscribers.

Fame and conversation are inversely proportionate. As a fanbase grows the intimacy of the conversation necessarily shrinks because a celebrity must attend to the whole fanbase to maintain it and doing so means broad messages. So it is with brands. This line of thinking is counter-cultural to the ethos of social media in the same way most bulk emails from friends start with, “Sorry for the bulk email but…” No one working in social media seems to want to acknowledge that as it’s growing its taking on more and more characteristics of broadcast media – at least insofar as commercial applications are concerned.

I agree, and would like to add to this thread, - here you go we are having a conversation – Social Media is about broadcasting – what shock horror Mr viral himself just said it.

The core concept for me is that within social media you find many micro networks, groups of a 100 friends or so who do indeed follow and chat with each other.

The key for us as brands and advertisers is not on how to get 1 to 1 with these people, its about how to inject brand communications (broadcast) into these micro groups. How do we get people talking about our brands and adverts, its not about US actually talking to users – well not on mass anyway, obviously that’s impossible even with a social media call center type thing running in the background.

The key is – how do we broadcast commercial messages that are then shared via social networks. AKA and may I introduce - Viral Advertising.

Read Corey's full post here

Facebook Vs. Myspace will Myspace fight back?

Yes Myspace is dead, but for good? and was it facebook that did it?

Statistics for Facebook, how they are the leaders in the social race and where Myspace.com failed to keep up -

Firstly Facebook.

As we all know Facebook is, at the moment, the biggest social networking site.
But as businesses, do we really understand how 'big' Facebook is, but also how to use it's full potential.
Here are some statistics on Facebook as a whole - there company figures, how there growing internationally and also though technology.

0 As a whole Facebook as over 400 million active users.
0 An average of 50% of the active users log onto facebook everyday.
0 There are more than 5 Billion pieces of content shared each week.
0 1.5 million businesses are active on facebook.
0 Facebook translates into over 70 languages.
0 Out of the 400 million users, 70% are outside the united states.
0 On the whole there are 100 million users accessing facebook though mobile devices.
0 200 mobile operators in 60 countries help to promote Facebooks mobile products, a couple are, apple, orange, 3, t-mobile.

As you can clearly see facebook is by far the dominator of the social industry, some active users of Facebook have said that it is the heart of the internet, as it generates a lot of content rivaling Youtube, Flicker, etc. In my personal opinion it is a great opportunity for businesses (new and old) to get involved in, it is a great way for a business to get noticed, there are 400 million users that are ready to have business integrate with them.

With statistics like that, the question i want to ask is, is facebook ever going to die? what is next for the social giant? or is it nearing the end?, what else is there for this social god to get involved with, they already own the social market and are close contenders in content holding, the next few months will determine Facebooks fate, hopefully they wont crumble like the other social giant myspace did in 2008.

In 2008, the "big" social media giant Myspace fell at the hands of the ever growing facebook. but what was Myspace doing to fall at the hands of the new rookie contender facebook.

Myspace was the biggest social networking site the world had ever seen, no-one had ever seen the internet being used in this way before, there was never a way of connecting millions of people together in one place at one time. Myspace had more than 110 million active users; that doesn't even touch the skin of the amount of facebook users(400 million); but again this was loads in the beginning.

In 2006 1 in 4 americans  owned Myspace and in the UK it was as common to have Myspace as to own a dog. Myspace was working in 20 countries worldwide and had a heap of content being uploaded everyday.
So if Myspace had all these good statistics going on, how did they crumble? surely they would have kept going and improving like facebook.

Maybe Myspace was too complicated, with it's theme changes and all it's editing facilities. facebook came along with a new, easy to use profile that had no need for any themes, but was purely a way to socialise with friends . In 2008 myspace eventually died out and was crushed by the new social media giant, facebook.

Myspace failed at the first hurdle in the battle to win social power, maybe because facebook came up with loads of new applications that were unseen by anyone on Myspace, but also after seeing this myspace had no way of creating there own applications and moving with the internet.

A final way Myspace failed to gain the most power was that didn't have enough capital coming in compared to facebook, which at the time was this shiny new social network, which was waiting for advertisers and business to jump on.

Myspace had already been offered all the advertising that was necessary and businesses were just not making money from it anymore. The question that many of us want to know is; is Myspace dead for good or will it return more powerful than ever, for that we will have to wait and see.

AB.