12 Aug Topics That Are Igniting : 8/12/11
Xtranormal Partners with Toyota to Bring Animation Magic to Social Media Campaign
Xtranormal, the text-to-speech movie creator has partnered with Toyota for its Auto-Biography Facebook app. Fans are encouraged to share their stories as an animated character right next to a picture of their favorite Toyota. The campaign has seen quite a bit of success with over 11,000 short films created as of this past Monday. Through this campaign, the car company hopes to drive traffic to its Facebook page while creating a higher level of engagement.
Retail Trends Emerge from Etail East’s Social Commerce Summit
ETail East’s Social Commerce Summit took place this week in Boston. Attendees hoped to learn how to monetize their followers and measure the investments they’ve made in social media. A major trend that emerged was “discounting fatigue,” where business owners get tired of enticing their fans with deals and markdowns. Panelists suggested placing a greater focus on encouraging fans who’ve made a purchase to share with their friends. In other words, instead of converting conversation to sales, convert conversation to more conversation.
Social Media Could Have Made the Market Crash Worse
A study at the University of Indiana analyzed almost 10 million tweets from 2.7 million users during 2009. Researches discovered with 87.6 percent accuracy that the mood on Twitter predicted the daily up and down changes of the stock market three to four days in advance. The study argues that Twitter had a huge effect in causing stocks to plunge recently. Researches looked back at the dot com bubble of the mid-90s, before the existence of social media, and found media only accounted for less than 3 percent of the change.
PeopleBrowsr Launches Startup Accelerator for Social Apps
The social analytics company, PeopleBrowsr, launched PeopleBrowsr Labs in San Francisco this past Tuesday. It’s a startup accelerator that will offer between 20-30 social media-focused developers an opportunity to build their apps in a collaborative and supported setting. For $600 a month, developers gain access to PeopleBrowsr’s social API, which contains more than 100 terabytes of social data from sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Interested startups with between one and five employees can apply for a spot online now.
