Abrams Research Blog

It’s no surprise to anyone who has seen a news headline in the past month that British Petroleum has now unleashed the worst environmental disaster in American history.  It is a tragic, now political event of truly epic proportions.  And while there are very few who would stand in defense of the company right now, Patrick Barbanes over at SocialMediaToday argues that BP actually is getting one thing right: social media.

It started on May 19th when someone created a parody twitter account called BP Public Relations.  Here are just a few of the tweets:

Then, a spokesman for BP, Toby Odone, responded by saying:

I’m not aware of whether BP has made any calls to have it taken down or addressed. People are entitled to their views on what we’re doing and we have to live with those. We are doing the best we can to deal with the current situation and to try to stop the oil from flowing and to then clean it up…People are frustrated at what’s happening, as are we, and that’s just their way of expressing it.

Barbanes says this is an exemplary reaction, admitting that most companies have no idea how to respond to biting attacks via social media. Barbanes says, “That is about one of the HEALTHIEST and most enlightened responses I’ve ever read from a corporate spokesperson about a parody of their company.” And while Barbanes scoffs as the suggestion that a company should embrace these kinds of fake accounts by exposing them as false and then highlighting the real account, does it help more for the company to condone the outlash?

BP’s response might seem so ahead-of-the-curve, though, only because of its unique position at the moment. All eyes are on the company. So while their decisions seem brilliantly sympathetic to the lives they have affected, it might not be a blueprint to follow for other companies. The moral of the story here might be that it’s too soon to tell how exactly a company can effectively respond to parodies, but we should be taking notes nonetheless.

There comes a time in the life of every business when a difficult reality must be faced: value optimization cannot continue indefinitely when the underlying business model fails to generate sufficient profit. Twitter’s most recent announcement, that it intends to integrate advertisements through Promoted Tweets, is therefore the long-expected, highly anticipated (and somewhat feared) step towards diminishing the disparity between operating costs and profit.

Unsurprisingly, the news has been met with a firestorm of opinions. But before we get to that, let’s cover the changes.

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Foursquare and Gowalla. One, a fantastic childhood game. The other, an offshoot of a popular smoothie brand? Nope! They’re both big names in the newest social networking trend—geolocation. The progression makes sense: profile viewing led to wall posts, which led to to status updates, eventually leading to status updates on your mobile device, which could only logically lead to where we find ourselves today—in love with physical location updates. And word on the street is that these location-based services, though still relatively under the mainstream radar, are here to stay. But nothing this interesting stays a secret for long, and starting this weekend we may see the beginning of the end: this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), running March 12-16 in Austin, Texas, will be the “ strategic playing field” for the current geolocation forerunners.

So what’s the attraction?   read more »

For today’s post, let’s first take a trip back to London, 1910:

“Mary Poppins: Now! Shall we get on with it?

Jane: Get on with what?

Mary Poppins: In your advertisement, did you not specifically request to play games?

Jane: Oh, yes!

Mary Poppins: Very well then. Our first game is called ‘Well Begun is Half-Done’…

Michael: I don’t like the sound of that.

Mary Poppins …otherwise entitled, ‘Let’s Tidy Up the Nursery’”.

Michael:  I told you she was tricky!”

Ah the British… so neat, so orderly, so astoundingly capable, with a clever phrase and an affected accent, to make something so ordinary and unpleasant sound so intriguing. So who better than the practically perfect Mary Poppins to personify the recent decision by the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to clean up internet advertising practices and regulate marketing and brand activity on social media websites? read more »

Sorry, kids. If you thought that friend request from your mom was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. According to a 2009 study by the Continuum Crew communications firm, last year saw a “dramatic rise” in the amount of time your parents and grandparents spend using the internet and social media platforms. Gone are the days of “facespace” and the “webernet”; that vast generational gap may not be growing as quickly as we think. Bad news for the teenage set, but great news for almost anyone else.

The shift in media consumption that Generations Baby Boomer (1946-1954) and Jones (1955-1964) are currently undergoing is a product of the realization that news coverage is readily available through the internet, often at a speed, depth and breadth unavailable from traditional media sources. Though younger generations have unhesitatingly embraced this idea for more than a decade, older generations have, until recently, relied upon the mediums of their youths—newspapers and television networks.

However, this last year has shown a remarkable change in direction. In Continuums’ study, the number of Baby Boomers reporting an increase in internet use rose 24 percentage points between 2008 and 2009, and a majority indicated that the internet, as opposed to the cell phone, is now the media service they would be least likely to give up. Even more telling: the majority of these users have only joined in the last six months. read more »

After the launch of Google Buzz and your personal information’s unexpected debut into high society, you may be tempted to conclude that February has not been the best of months for social media. But rest assured, Google is Google and with enough consumer ire the kinks will be worked out and your focus will eventually shift back to where it should be, on Google Logos.

In the meantime, there has been some good news for Twitter. The best being, of course, that the Dalai Lama now has a Twitter account. So with the Vatican, the Dalai Lama (and as of February 22, Lil’ Wayne) all official members, the implications of this exponential growth become clearer. According to the Neilson Company’s recent report, social media use has grown 82% in the last year alone. Twitter boasts 50 million messages a day, up from 5,000 in 2007. Someone is obviously paying attention. read more »

The Oscar Army

Watch out, Jersey Shore; The Academy Awards isn’t going down without a fight.

It’s 2010 and everyone knows the Oscars have been losing steam for years. With the advent of reality TV, YouTube and TiVo, the world of exclusive, self-congratulatory, 4-hour telecasts simply can’t compete. The show sank to its lowest ratings of all time in 2008, with the 2009 broadcast barely scoring any better. And really, who can blame the audience, when the best clips are available online later that night?  Anyone would rather watch a 4-hour marathon of something else—Jersey Shore, SVU, Ace of Cakes, etc. But this year the Academy Awards may have a couple of final tricks up its sleeve. read more »

The Real Thug Life

It’s official: Twitter is the reincarnation of 7^th grade.

When I was in middle school, I desperately longed to be one of the cool kids. You know, the ones who sat in the back of the room, “working” on their group project, but actually listening to the Bloodhound Gang’s take on human biology through headphones hidden in their sleeves and a CD player hidden in their desk. Instead, I used that 45-minute period to actually work, fearing a bad grade or some other repercussion. And in the end, we all got As and I threw my book through a window.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one. But somewhere around 11^th grade, I hit a happy medium. Leaving both groups behind, I wondered what would eventually become of them. Fast forward to a decade later: they’ve been found. Their place of residence? Twitter. read more »

Thoughts of the Catholic Church often elicit images of decorated robes, chalices and stained-glass windows. But priests wasting away hours updating their Facebook profiles? As of May 16th, college students may not be the only ones constantly hitting refresh to see if friend requests have been reciprocated. In a statement released January 24^th for World Communications Day 2010, Pope Benedict XVI challenges his ministry to welcome the technological age with open arms—all in the name of promoting dialogue between Catholics around the world.

From a leader who, in 2009, felt it necessary to remind us that the internet may also operate under aliases like “the digital arena” and “cyberspace”, recognition that a passive Internet presence will not satisfy the “digital generation’s” unquenchable thirst is quite a step in a new direction. Pope Benedict recommends the use of images, videos, animated features, blogs and websites to spread the Catholic message.  With the Vatican already present on YouTube, Twitter and promoting an iPhone app, the Catholic Church appears well on its way to digital stardom. And although we most likely won’t be seeing a compilation of funny papal outtakes with Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane in the Brain’ as its soundtrack, we can expect greater outreach to the youth of local parishes and those traditionally disconnected from larger communities. read more »

By now we all know the phenomenal cosmic power of the Twitterverse, but yesterday the Emerson College community witnessed a viral explosion that demonstrates the power that Twitter has to unite and engage a community in what could have been just another boring list-serv administrative email.

A very vague announcement was emailed out yesterday morning about an “important announcement being made regarding the future of the Emerson College by President, Jackie Liebergot. One of the students started tweeting with the hashtag #jackiessecret with predictions about what the announcement would be, and within hours it blew up with hundreds of students involved and over 1300 mentions in just one day. The numbers continue to grow as the campus continues to embrace the trend. Many of the speculative tweets were about Liebergot’s relationship to Lady Gaga (“Lady Gaga is my daughter”), Emerson College building a campus in space, you get the picture.

Overall, the “phenomenon” totalled 1,392 tweets and 298 contributors. Emerson is a smaller campus, with a student population of only 3,400, so a significant portion of their population was involved in this event. Over 200 people packed the auditorium for Liebergot’s announcement, which may not have had anything to do with the intrigue created by the Twitter explosion, but it’s highly unlikely that it had no effect whatsoever. Effectively, Twitter brought Emersonians together, and what could have been simply an overlooked email became an engaging and important news story.  As Heather Marie Vitale (Emerson, ’08) writes: “This movement was amazing to be a part of because of how quickly and thoroughly it brought together a community. It allowed several generations of Emersonians to become acquainted, joke and unite.”

When the time came, Jackie announced to a packed auditorium that she would be retiring in June of 2011 (Oprah Jokes ensued).