Shazam, Twitter, tablets and polar bears had our attention during the Super Bowl 2012, a social TV breakthrough.

On Sunday, even having two screens didn’t seem enough, as people watched the game on their TVs, while having Shazam open on their smartphones, tweeting from tablets and watching Coke’s Polar Bowl on their laptops all at the same time.

Whether because it was the first time the NFL had partnered with the host city, the success of the game’s first ever social media command center, the increased number of social media users this year or all these factors together, this Super Bowl was the most social yet.

Twitter and GetGlue saw the largest increase in activity compared to previous year. The former saw the numbers double since last year and the latter saw a 700% increase in check-ins compared to 2011.

The game set a Twitter record and registered a total of 12.2 million social media comments from 5.4 million people, and that’s not even counting comments related to #brandbowl.

Among the most buzzed-about Super Bowl commercials are the Doritos Baby Slingshot, David Beckham H&M ad and Chryslers’ “Halftime in America.”

People were posting 10,000 tweets per second on average and the second-highest peak in Twitter activity was during the half-time show featuring Madonna.

It was also the first time the game was being live streamed online with 2.1 viewers. The only drawback was that most of the commercials only appeared online after they aired.

For some, this “four screen social TV event” was a bit too overwhelming – Super Bowl, Brand Bowl and Puppy Bowl were going on at the same time, while people were trying not only to watch, but also share the highlights of each one.

This extremely social event, a breakthrough in terms of interactive and social TV, could be a stepping stone to a new level of interactivity – beyond just a hashtag or “Shazamed” content. After seeing the potential of social TV, brands can learn how to be in several places, platforms and apps at once and give their fans a truly 3D integrated experience.

How many gadgets did you use during the Super Bowl 2012?

Many companies are often afraid of getting into social media because it seems uncontrollable.

Social media gives your business an opportunity to increase interaction and be closer to your every-day consumer, but those conversations can be tough to control sometimes. The big challenge is crisis management: responding to negative feedback quickly and turn your customers into brand advocates.

Many people like to share their positive experience with a brand online. They tell their friends how wonderful the customer service is at company A or how great the discounts are at company B. Unfortunately, a lot more people are likely to share their negative experiences online. Social media makes it easier for an angry customer to bash your brand online and be heard (or even supported) within minutes by hundreds of people.

At the same time, social media, if done right, can be a great crisis management tool – it can help you address the issue and quickly deal with negative feedback.

Don’t be afraid of someone bad-mouthing your brand. Like I said before, the fact that people are talking about your brand (even if it’s not good) means that they care. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent time telling you about their bad experience and would have been off doing business with your competitors.

Today, more and more people realize that they have the power to affect how business is done. Most of them don’t publish negative feedback online just because, they usually have a purpose – to be heard.

If you spend enough time listening to what people say about your brand online, you can learn a lot about what is working and what’s not. Listening is a big part of successful crisis management. Are the buyers praising the special discounts you have just announced, or maybe a lot of them are unhappy with your customer service?

Make sure you address the complaints in a short period of time. The longer you wait, the more frustrated and angry your customers may become. Especially if the same issue has been brought up several times.

And again, don’t be afraid that someone might say bad things about your company. It happens to everyone. What will differentiate your business from others is how you handle the issue.

Have you had a situation when you had to deal with negative feedback online? How did you handle it?

Great communities inspire great conversations. Online communities are no different.

Fred Wilson once said in his blog, “modern [online] community building isn’t easy, but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredibly powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.”

One of the definitions of the word “community” is “body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a large society.”

The Internet allows people with common interests, be it Mac enthusiasts or IT people, come together even if they are “scattered through a large society.” People always want to belong to some kind of community where they can share their thoughts, opinions and interests with others.

Every business has the opportunity to take advantage of this phenomenon and unite their customers and fans in an online community with a common interest – their brand.

Many brands build online communities hoping that it would be an easier way to talk to their customers. They keep creating and pushing content out to their fans, failing to realize that many of them join an online community not because they want to listen to brands, but rather talk and share their experiences with each other.

Online communities can generate valuable content for your brand if you would just let your fans talk. Their opinions might not always be positive, but the fact that your fans talk about you already means they are interested in your business. And even negative feedback can be turned into a learning experience. Just make sure to address those comments in a timely manner (watch for a blog post on crisis management soon).

Sephora’s “Beauty Talk” online community on the website had exactly that result: “we realized that…clients were not only trying to talk with us – they were trying to talk with each other. And they were actually engaging in ways we had no idea they would,” said the VP of interactive media at Sephora.

A strong online community, where people have the freedom to express their opinions and know they are being heard, nurtures community leaders that can become brand advocates both online and offline.

Facebook is a great platform for your business to start building online communities. It is important to give your customers a voice, even though it might be uncomfortable at first. Ask questions, encourage conversations, monitor and listen. Your fans have a lot to say about your brand, don’t limit their ability to interact with each other and with you.

Does Facebook still feel threatened by Google+?

The social media giant is in the process of releasing new updates that make it more similar to the social broadcasting feel of Twitter and Google+.

The new Subscriptions feature, introduced by the social network this week, allows users to send updates to a larger audience without creating a Fan Page.

This opt-in feature (isn’t it unusual for Facebook to make something opt-in?) allows people who are not your friends to subscribe to your updates that are public.

How much is in your trust bank?

In a post for the Harvard Business Review blog, John Sviokla coins the term “trust bank” in talking about how Coca-Cola and Pepsi have built reserves of customer goodwill.

How’d they build up these banks? By embracing their customers through social media.

Citing Pepsi’s triumphant Refresh campaign and Coke’s embracing of Facebook, Sviokla points out that “in the wild and woolly world of social media, where brands can be skewered overnight, the only true protection is to have a great relationship with the audience at large.” (Skewerees: Southwest Airlines, Nestle…)

Building community on social media is about more than just converting online chatter to revenue. It’s about having real people online talking about you to their friends and defending you against detractors.

And the good news is that you don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar company with a huge marketing budget to have a trust bank that’s worth more than gold.

In fact, marketing on social media is largely crowd driven. Brands with the most active Facebook pages, for example, enjoy the benefit of having fans provide most of the content. And because of the way social networking sites are public and viral, that content gets shared word-of-mouth.

Now more than ever, companies that aren’t embracing their customers on social media are losing. Their trust banks are empty. And when the time comes to make a withdrawal, they’re screwed.

The ones whose banks are full, though, have it made for longer than you’d think. Despite the ephemeral qualities of social media technologies (whether it be Facebook and Twitter or MySpace and Friendster), the relationships are to a degree built regardless of platform. Relationships have meaning apart from the Internet.

And that’s why investing in social media now pays off now and down the road.

You can take that to the … you know where.

To many casual Facebook users — your aunt who’s annoyingly addicted to Farmville, your buddy the determinedly exhibitionistic public drunk — the headline-grabbing struggle between the World’s Largest Social Network and the users and pundits fired up about its seemingly cavalier attitude toward individual privacy has been so much technobabble.

If the privacy debate has shown us one thing, it’s that Mark Zuckerberg is right about one thing: people are becoming less private.

But that’s only because Facebook (and other social networks, but mostly the Facebook) has enabled people who are indifferent about most things in their lives, including what other people think of them, to become exhibitionistic on a massively global scale.

Still, the backlash was big enough that within the past 24 hours, Facebook has rolled out changes to your privacy settings intended to make them simpler to use.

As Zuckerberg explains in an official video, those changes include a “master switch” that will change all of your settings at once, setting them either to “Everyone,” “Friends of Friends” or “Friends Only.” More explanation about the new privacy interface can be found here.

It’s also possible to customize your privacy settings on the “granular” level, which is basically how it was before — that is, needlessly complicated and confusing.

The “master switch” is mainly a cosmetic change. And it is somewhat deceptive. You’ll notice that it comes with a not-quite-default “Recommended” setting that would make most of your content public and only a few things, such as contact information, private. Privacy advocacy groups caught onto this and aren’t happy.

Has Facebook made it so you can actually increase your privacy level? A bit.

The real change with this new policy is that now your friend list and the pages you’re connected to (i.e., have “liked”) can be viewable only by friends. This is a direct return to Facebook’s earlier, more privacy-friendly days.

Pundits are polarized by these changes. Some distrust. Others are saying move on.

What I think people aren’t talking about much is the bigger issue of openness.

Zuckerberg’s own Facebook bio reads: “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”

And in that video I linked above, he says, “In a more open world, many of the biggest problems we face together will become easier to solve.”

Let’s think about that.

While that’s a noble statement, no one has any illusions that in Zuck’s mind, the map of that more open world looks a lot like Facebook, commercial viability included.

But is there truth in what he’s saying about the power of openness? In a more open world, will global problems like war, climate change, poverty, hunger, human rights violations, and so forth, really be easier to fix?

It’s true that social media has facilitated many great causes. Networks like Facebook and Twitter have made it easier for charities to raise money and for people to unite around positive movements.

But what does any of that have to do with whether or not personal information is made public? Sharing that information with friends may facilitate relationships, but if the cost is making that same information available to, well, everyone, then is Zuckerberg’s more open world a world worth making sacrifices for?

As the world becomes, if not more open, at least more networked, it’s going to be interesting to see this push and pull between the desire for privacy on the part of the individual and the desire for “openness” on the part of the software creator.

One thing’s for sure, Facebook is not the Internet.

At least we still have that.

We’ve talked before about three screeners. You know, that plugged-in, slightly undead segment of society that talks about what they’re watching on TV live with their friends online and via text. Heck, we’re part of it.

Marketers are looking to get a piece of that sweet chatter pie, and I haven’t seen an attempt more creative than the social media technology that comes with the second season of the HBO series True Blood on Blu Ray.

If you’re not familiar, the show is a horror/melodrama about hillbilly vampires in the American south. Or something. It’s sexy, it’s bitey, Anna Paquin is in it. There.

With this interactive Blu Ray, viewers are able to upload their photos and see an image of themselves becoming more vampiric as the season progresses.

They’re also able to post Twitter and Facebook updates about the show using their custom True Blood portrait as their avatar, share scenes and win virtual prizes.

That’s a pretty clever way of infiltrating customers’ social streams and creating viral buzz. And an apt one, given that the show is about people biting each other and passing along a sexy condition.

Will you get bit? More importantly, would you even bother to push what are essentially ads for a show from your Blu Ray out to your social networks?

I gotta admit, if something like this had come with The Sopranos or The Wire — and had been done well — I just might’ve handed my personal brand over to Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell.

I mean, really, has TV ever been better than it is now?

[Via]

A recent TV campaign for a new Motorola smartphone satirizes both the pervading silliness in new media messages (the category of communication that brought us OMG and LMFAO) and traditional media’s struggle to get hip to it.

A “serious” anchorman reads inane new media messages, such as, “This just in via text message and wall post: The search is on for cute boots.”

The commercial is funny because it exaggerates. We all know that the mainstream media is becoming more and more social all the time. Nary an article gets published online that doesn’t come with widgets to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and a bevy of other sites — not to mention the comments section at the bottom.

And people turn to Twitter and Facebook to find out what news — local and global — their friends are discussing.

So what are the real differences between the news content that the MSM create and the news-like content of our tweets and status updates?

It turns out the Motorola commercial, while ridiculous, may not be that far off in concept.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism gathered a year’s worth of data on the top news stories talked about on blogs, in YouTube videos and on social networking profiles, plus seven months of same on Twitter.

The study found that not only do trad. media and social media differ from each other, different social media platforms each have a different function and personality. For example, bloggers tend to talk about stories that elicit emotion and involve things like political ideologies. On Twitter, the majority of the news talk revolves around technology. YouTube’s news content is dominated by foreign (non-US) video.

Perhaps the most surprising thing PEJ found, however, is that social media covers what the press does not (emphasis mine).

[S]ocial media tend to home in on stories that get much less attention in the mainstream press. And there is little evidence, at least at this point, of the traditional press then picking up on those stories in response. Across the entire year studied, just one particular story or event – the controversy over emails relating to global research that came to be known as “Climate-gate” –  became a major item in the blogosphere and then, a week later, gaining more traction in traditional media.  

That’s it? Climate-gate? That’s all the blogosphere generated? I find that surprising. Perhaps if the PEJ surveyors had drilled down to a more local level, they would’ve found less division between the press and the people. Having worked at an alternative newsweekly half of the past decade (which, granted, is not really part of the so-called MSM), I know that we always kept a collective eye to our Facebook and Twitter feeds for newsworthy local developments.

But, in any case, PEJ found that when it comes to breaking national/global news, the biggest news companies still have the widest reach:

More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four – the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.

Find out what else this rather stunning report uncovered here. And if you were shocked (or not shocked) by the differences between the Fourth and er… Fifth(?) estates, shout it out in the comments.

We could gaze at things like this all day.

Information Architects, the web design group known for its famous Web Trend Maps — compelling visualizations of the most influential websites — has turned to social media for its latest infographic.

Called Cosmic 140 and resembling a star chart, the map shows the 140 most influential Twitter users. It’s still in draft mode as iA is soliciting Twitter follower suggestions for tweaks at @iA.

Get an up-close look by downloading it as a free PDF here.

The map is actually kind of a Big Bang of Twitter. The epicenter registers the first tweets by the three Twitter founders (Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone) on 3/21/2006, each one having written “just setting up my twttr.”

Like a universe exploding outward from a central point, the map shows adoption along a chronological field organized by category — entertainment, technology, politics, humor, business, etc — and showing each users’ first tweets. The white circle indicates list rank, and the darker gray circle shows follower volume.

A few observations…

Late 2008 through early 2009 seems to have been the age of celebrity adoption, with characters like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Ashton Kutcher hatching accounts.

And it looks like after the geeks, the biggest early adopters were news outlets. CNN, Reuters, NY Times, The Guardian and the WSJ had all jumped on in 2007. And they say the news media is behind the times!

All in all, an interesting picture of the Twitterverse.

Yesterday, we wrote about a guy who had taken a vow of silence except on social media. Today, we’re looking at how those media are being silenced in an entire part of the world.

In case you haven’t heard, the government of Pakistan is in the process of blocking social media sites to all Internet users in the country — all because of one Facebook page.

Within the past couple of days, the Facebook page Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! has set off a chain reaction of Internet suppression in Pakistan.

Because of the page, which now has more than 80,000 likes, the Pakistani Telecommunication Authority blocked Facebook. Blockage of YouTube soon followed.

Sounding weirdly logical, a PTA spokesman told the press:

“Before shutting down (YouTube), we did try just to block particular URLs or links, and access to 450 links on the Internet were stopped, but the blasphemous content kept appearing so we ordered a total shut down,” he said.

As most of us learned back in 2005, when a Dutch newspaper’s decision to print 12 caricatures of Mohammed led to protests and killings around the world, Muslims don’t really like you drawing their prophet.

Now, in 2010, when something like a drawing is so easily and quickly distributed to the world via social and user-uploaded media sites, there’s not much to be done to prevent people from seeing it — short of blocking sites or taking away people’s access to the Internet. In 2007, the Pakistani government blocked YouTube for much the same reason.

These stories provides a diagram of how an idea, an image, a creation — content, in other words — can become powerful more because of its ability to be distributed than because of the actual content. The medium is the message, and therefore the medium is dangerous to those in power.

Hopefully one day governments like the one in Pakistan will realize the best way to fight “blasphemy” is to allow the people to do it for you. Hence AGAINST Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, a page that has garnered about 10,000 more likes than its competitor.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Today, May 20, is the day in question, after all.

And just because I haven’t posted anything musical on here in forever, here’s my favorite song about American-Islam relations, “John Walker’s Blues” by Steve Earle.