'Mariah Carey' Winner of Photobucket Celebrity Chick Contest

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Photobucket has announced the winner of its month long Celebrity Chick contest which asked people to send in images of themselves if they thought they looked like a celebrity. It was a promotion for the record label Disturbing Tha Peace and the label's recent single, Celebrity Chic with Ludacris, Chingy, Steph Jones and Small World.

Laura Pasqualoni was the winner with judges deeming her the best look-a-like to Mariah Carey. You can check out all the contestants here as well as the Celebrity Chick single.

by Steve Hall    Nov-13-07    
Topic: Good, Online, Promotions, Social, Video



Facebook Ad Announcement Leaves One a Little Wanting

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Yesterday Facebook unveiled its online ad plan to New York advertisers hither and yon. Here's the scheme prematurely hearkened as a contender to AdWords: advertisers can make their own branded pages!

For free!

And that's not all.

You can also buy banner ads -- LINKING TO YOUR PROFILE PAGE!

Overwhelming? Something like that. But it would be wrong to say Facebook disappointed its masses. It did toss in an analytics feature, after all, and friends can actually endorse stuff they recently bought, which then appears in news feeds.

That last part might be the most meaningful aspect of the announcement. If there's anything the inception of WOMMA taught us, it's that word of mouth has been a wildly underrated resource that fuels the success of any company. Our industry has been hard-pressed to generate WOM in a way that doesn't alienate buyers -- or worse, ring inauthentic.

So kudos to the Facebook team for thinking outside the box. We'll see how this simple idea affects the online ad mix.

by Angela Natividad    Nov- 7-07    
Topic: Announcements, Events, Good, Online, Social, Word of Mouth



Google Adds Big Boy MySpace to OpenSocial Adopters

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Once upon a time there was a social networking site called MySpace. Everyone was on it. Everyone loved it. It was the place to be. Then came the pedophiles. Then came the spam. Then came News Corp. Then came Facebook.

Oh, who are we kidding? It's still the largest social networking site in the world. It's just lost a bit of its shininess since Facebook took the spotlight. Well, MySpace isn't fooling around and has hooked up with Google as a premiere supporter of Google's recently announced OpenSocial development platform. OpenSocial hopes to bring some standards to social network development with its open API.

more »

by Steve Hall    Nov- 2-07    
Topic: Brands, Social, Tools



Hitwise Says Facebook Still Rules Over Google's OpenSocial

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Hitwise took a look at Google recent announcement about its new social networking endeavors and how that partnership stack up against social networking giant Facebook. Adding together the heft of LinkedIn, Plazo, Friendster, and Hi5 (though there may be others added), Hitwise concluded Facebook is still ten times larger than Google's OpenSocial architecture.

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by Steve Hall    Nov- 1-07    
Topic: Research, Social



Agency Life Making You Twitchy? Game On!

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Ever have one of those days where you just snap and kick the living shit out of something? Chances are you've had a few over the past few months, and so have your other agency chums.

Riester has an elegant solution: kickball! Check out the video for the Riester kickball tourney, which happens tomorrow. The spot is loaded with situations that will motivate your kicking leg.

This actually brings a spark of life into the room. Kickball is one of the few games we'll actually get off our asses to play, alongside four-square, double-dutch and tetherball.

by Angela Natividad    Oct-31-07    
Topic: Agencies, Events, Good, Social, Video



BustedTees Takes to Facebook

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If you're a fan of BustedTees and you use Facebook, now there's an application you can add to your profile to sell the shirts. The company, a sister to CollegeHumor, has just created the application which mashes up affiliate marketing with social networking.

Facebook members can display the BustedTees application on their personal page and receive $5 for every shirt sold. In addition, anyone who installs the Busted Tees application on their own page from a friend's page receives $1 for every t-shirt sold by the friend.

There's already 5,000 users. Hey, why not get some cash while wasting hours upon hours screwing around with Facebook

by Steve Hall    Oct-30-07    
Topic: Social



Web 1.0 vs Web 2,0 And What the Fu...Firebrand?

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Advergirl is examining Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 sites. Aside from the fact, the distinction is pointless and made up by geeks with nothing better to than invent a trend and slap a label on it, Advergirl (who we are most certainly not faulting here for trying to further explain the goofiness of the Web 2.0 thing) has collected nine categories of sites and asked readers to help come up with a better definition for and distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 sites. For us, the distinction is easy. Web 2.0 sites have bigger buttons.

OK, can we now move on to more important topics such as why the hell the brains behind sites like Firebrand think people give two shits about viewing and sharing ads social network-style. They're ads for fuck's sake!

by Steve Hall    Oct-29-07    
Topic: Social



Facebook Invites Ad Community to Witness Its Demise

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Facebook's up to something and we're not even going to speculate other than to say, "Facebook, Meet MySpace. May you both have a fine time languishing on the digital nursing home veranda awaiting certain death."

by Steve Hall    Oct-24-07    
Topic: Online, Social



Toscani's Anorexia Ads Unleash the Italian PC Police

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The Nolita ad at left features Isabelle Caro, a French actress suffering from anorexia.

Guess who's responsible for it? Oliviero Toscani, the guy who fell out of Benetton shortly after his controversial "We, On Death Row" campaign in 2000.

more »

by Angela Natividad    Oct-21-07    
Topic: Cause, Events, Outdoor, Policy, Social



Verizon Creates Reality Show Out of FiOS Installations

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In its quest to boot cable out of the home and replace it with FiOS, Verizon has launched a home upgrade reality show of sorts, My Home 2.0, which will be aired on TV as well as the web and include social media concepts such as blogs and YouTube videos. Five families in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will have a team of techno types come to their homes and outfit it with the latest and greatest Verizon has to offer.

The installations and block parties held in each neighborhood will be recorded and placed on the My Home 2.0 website, YouTube, Facebook and Verizon's FiOS on-demand cable channel.

If a reality show about people living on an island can sustain itself, we suppose a show about people getting new home technology toys could fair just as well.

by Steve Hall    Oct-11-07    
Topic: Good, Social, Video, Weblogs