What’s the coolest thing you can think of doing with a large group of people? Calm down and get your minds out of the gutter! We’re talking about flash mobs.

Thanks to the help of the internet and social media, flash mobs have really gained popularity over the last decade. Despite the fact that they are difficult to arrange and even harder to execute, they have become marketing commonplace and a well timed job can affect a much greater target area. More then half the challenge is actually getting them on camera, or everyone’s efforts can be wasted.

Youtube is strewn with every oddball group with a message’s failed attempts at recording public shock and awe. But every once and a while you’ll find a gem that’s worth sharing. Personally we love them, and this world record attempt at The World’s Largest Water Balloon Fight, while not a traditional flash mob, is exactly why!

8,957 people! 175,141 balloons. Enjoy.

The music industry is often quick to make use of the latest technology for promoting their music. The Kaiser Chiefs band have been the first to put the hype of social media to work for them. Their promotion for their new album, ‘The Future is Medieval’, includes giving fans the ability to create their own cover for the album, choose 10 songs out of 20 to download, and even earn $1 per album that they sell via their own page on the Kaiser Chiefs site and social media channels.

It’s a brilliant marketing campaign that’s using their audience as sales people. The other unique outcome is that every single album will be different, with a different mix of tracks off the new album as well as its own unique cover.

On top of being such an amazing concept, it’s also housed in a super cool interface on their site. Check it out and create your own album at www.kaiserchiefs.com

As far as social networking goes, over 500 million people now have Facebook accounts, and that figure is growing exponentially. Facebook represents the simplest and easiest form of social networking, a place where you can register and account and then immediately and easily start befriending the people you know in real life… But one social platform that seemed to lag for a while was Twitter, and as the platform has found it’s niche, so more people are getting into it and finding uses for it, and the number of Tweeters worldwide is exploding. But even so, the most common comment from Twitter newbies is, “I don’t get it.”

The thing with Twitter, as that once you get your head around it, you quickly realise what an amazing medium it is. As a news distribution tool, Twitter is invaluable. When Paris Hilton got bust for weed at the 2010 Fifa World Cup, the first place the news broke was on Twitter, and that was within seconds of the incident. The news spread across Twitter like wildfire, and by the time the game in Port Elizabeth that the socialite was meant to be watching kicked off, the buzz had died down and the Tweeters had moved on to other news. Hours later the news began breaking in more traditional news media, and my immediate reaction was, “That’s such old news!” As a source of entertainment and information, Twitter rules supreme. And as for marketing brands? Well that’s a whole new blog!

The thing with Twitter is that the majority of people, when they first create an account, don’t understand it or how to use it. Trying to get started on Twitter is difficult, mainly because, unlike Facebook where you can cruise your friend’s profiles and send requests to mutual friends, most people on Twitter follow strangers. I have never met 90% of the people who follow me on Twitter, and of the 10% I have, I probably only knew 5% of them before I began Tweeting. I have also had a lot of my friends in real life unfollow me, so out of courtesy I’ve done the same. They say Facebook is the place where you connect with the people you were at High School with, and Twitter is the place you connect with the people you wish you’d been at High School with, and I think here in lies the trick with Twitter…

Twitter is like any social environment where you interact with or meet strangers. Unlike all the other social networking platforms where you befriend real-life friends, Twitter is about “meeting” strangers. It is voyeuristic in that Twitter gives you an insight into the lives and thoughts of people across the planet, be they celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, or some random pretty girl from Johannesburg. Like a nightclub or even High School environment, the cooler and more likeable someone, the more likely they are to be popular and get followed.

So here are a few tips to assist you in maximising your Twitter experience, and getting the most out of this incredible social network…

Profiles:

1. Your Profile Picture

This is one of the major aspects most people judge who they follow by. When following someone, most people will go on the person’s avatar first, and then look at their tweets. It is recommended you have an attractive or humourous avatar that intrigues people. Twitter is like real life. If you’re going to befriend (ie: follow) a stranger, an attractive stranger is going to be a more likely choice. Unless you’re Gareth Cliff…

2. Your Bio

Try utilise as much of the 160 characters in your bio as possible, and make it as entertaining or informative as possible. I’ve followed people with hardly any followers based on an entertaining bio, or because I see potential synergy with me personally or with my company.

3. Background image

Make your own background image. Granted most people are accessing Twitter through mobile, but still, having a personalised profile is important. A background image can be used to tell more people about you and increase your chances of a follow. Use it…

Followers:

So now you’ve got your profile set up and you want to grow and keep your followers… How do you do this?

1. Engage

Make sure you engage your followers. Reply, retweet and interact. If people are @ing you and you ignore them, it won’t be long before they’re going for that unfollow button.

2. Who to follow

Don’t follow too many people. Try keep the number you follow lower than the number of followers you have. This is difficult when first starting out, but following hundreds of people and having 10 followers will make people assume you’re not particularly interesting. This is where your bio or profile pic will help…

3. Power of the RT

RT interesting or funny Tweets. This has two benefits:
- It stokes the person you have retweeted and increases the likelihood of them following you back if they aren’t already.
- Your followers will always appreciate a good RT, so it’s a double win.

4. Immerse yourself in the community

Find the influencers and insert yourself into or participate in conversations with them. A lot of the biggest names on Twitter, especially in SA, are often asking questions. Get involved. Talk to them, answer their questions and RT them. Also @ them with funny or interesting tweets. It raises the chance of a follow back and exposure to their followers, especially if your contributions are interesting or entertaining.

5. Lower your expectations

Not every one of your tweets will be read, and even fewer will be retweeted. Don’t expect people to react to every tweet. It takes time, so be patient.

Tweets

1. Inform/Entertain

The secret with Twitter is to keep people interested in what you’re tweeting. If your tweets are uninteresting or boring, people aren’t likely to follow you, and in the event that they do, it’s a matter of time before they unfollow. Find a happy balance between oversharing and not tweeting. Flood people’s timelines and you’ll irritate. Never tweet and it’ll be adios…

2. Beware of commentary of your own life

Unless you’re Paris Hilton, nobody cares that you just had a bowl of cereal and are now getting in the shower. If you are going to tweet about what you’re up to, make sure it’s something interesting, or make the mundane entertaining.

3. Use Hashtags – #

I’ve picked up at least 20 followers just through the #NowPlaying hashtag. Hashtags expose you to a world beyond your followers as people read tweets according to trends. #FF is a huge one where every Friday people recommend who on their timeline people should follow on #FollowFriday.

4. Consistency is key

It’s ideal to maintain a balance between how often you tweet and how cool your tweets are. If your tweets rock, people won’t tire of being bombarded with them. Overshare and bore, and people will unfollow you.

5. Time your Tweets

Most SA Tweeters are most active between 7am and 9am every morning, and 4pm to 6pm in the evenings. You are most likely to get retweeted on Friday between 4pm and 5pm.

6. Space for RTs

Although you have 140 characters in a tweet, reducing this will increase the likelihood of a RT by allowing space for the RT. Count now many chars: RT @(YOURNAME): takes up, and subtract that from 140. This is your ideal limit. Obviously not always possible, but keep it in mind.

7. Use Special Characters

This is something I don’t often do, but I’ve just found a cool resource here: http://www.computerhope.com/tips/tip150.htm. It’s something I’ve seen people do, and they’re always well recieved. Special characters can be used in many fun ways to make your tweets more interesting and original, and not many people know about them so your followers will be impressed by your skill.

Advertise:

Market your Twitter usernames and links to your profiles wherever we can… Facebook, Email signatures, Business Cards, Web pages, blogs, etc… The more places you have it the more likely you are to pick up clients.

Being masters of the tactical, viral and sneaky marketing campaign, we Gorillas smell a rat here… Yes, global warming is real, and the ice-caps are gradually breaking apart, but an iceberg off Cape Town? Let’s see what comes of this, and if some brand suddenly takes ownership of this as a viral or campaign teaser. If not, start preparing for climate change, cos it’s real…

What does FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that the social media platform will launch a new Groups feature, allowing for shared social space, mean for the future of the internet, social media and marketing?

The recent announcement that FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be holding a press conference at FaceBook’s head office in California at 10am local time yesterday was met with a wave of speculation and interest. For 60 days the entire company had been under lockdown working on a new project, and Zuckerberg’s forthcoming announcement had the entire social media industry guessing. What would FaceBook be announcing? Was it a partnership with Skype that would allow video chat through FaceBook? Was it a locations based application that would rival Foursquare? Or was it a complete overhaul of the social media platform’s design? So at 8pm South African time I found myself glued to my laptop, watching events unfold via a live video feed directly from Palo Alto…

Recent Developments…

Mark Zuckerberg opened the conference by stating that all the rumours and conjecture had been well off the mark… He stated that the project his team had been working on, and would be unveiling, was something more fundamental to the nature of social media. Zuck then began running through various recent developments and news. Facebook Places is already the biggest location app on the market and is growing fast. He also spoke about recent changes to Games and the continued rollout of Facebook Questions.

He then announced that his team had developed a system that would allow FaceBook users to download their FaceBook profiles, essentially offering them the opportunity to backup whatever they have posted to their accounts. His team had also streamlined the Dashboard for the Applications individuals use, but none of these were the major feature FaceBook had called the press conference to announce…

The Big Announcement: Giving You More Control

Zuckerberg then shifted gear, getting to the main reason for the announcement, a new feature targeting “the biggest problem in social networking.”

Privacy and sharing issues have always been a problem for FaceBook and its users. The privacy issues were dealt with ages ago, and everyone seems to be happy (or at least placated) with the current solution, but the issue of sharing is still a major area of contention. In real life people have different circles of friends and people that they interact with in specific places and ways, but on FB there is no way of differentiating these circles. An individual’s interaction with work friends is very different to that with their family, football buddies or the people they party with. But on FaceBook, all an individual’s friends are lumped together as one, and anything and everything shared or posted is shared with everyone…

Lists were introduced as a way of dealing with this, but they require a lot of work by individual users, and only 5% of FaceBook users have made use of lists. So essentially the photos of you drunk and falling over at last weekend’s Pearl Jam concert is being shared with everyone you are friends with on FaceBook – work colleagues, family, church friends and dozens of other people you may prefer didn’t see these photos… Concerns like these are limiting users’ social experience, and it is a major concern for FaceBook, so Zuck directed his team to find a solution to this problem, and this was the crux of yesterday’s announcement.

Zuck explained that the ideal situation would be to map real-world groups, get everyone to participate, and make it useful in a variety of contexts. Using FaceBook Photos as an example, Zuckerberg explained how most users don’t upload photos, but 95% of Facebook users are tagged in at least one photo because of social solutions. Friends tag friends…

Using this logic, Zuckerberg felt Facebook could make use of a social solution to build the best possible group communication tool and to make it easy for friends to set up. 5-10% of people create groups and do the work for their friends. As a result, everybody will benefit.

So this was the crux of the announcement: Facebook has created a shared space for communication, group chat and e-mail lists, called Groups. It’s not the same as the current Groups feature on Facebook, though.

Zuck then handed over to Justin Shafer, the product manager for Groups and he went into more detail. Unlike the old Groups, the new groups give every friend/member control over this shared space. Everyone can add mutual friends to the group, post content etc. The new solution also offers Group Chat, allowing members to chat with groups of friends. Essentially groups work like mailing lists – you can send and receive e-mail from your group and communicate with work friends or personal friends, etc. Thus the content you share within your network is not being shared across your entire FB friend list. “We think this is really going to change fundamentally how you use Facebook today,” said Shaffer.

Chris Cox then took the stage and began discussing social design. It’s about the approach the company is taking to how users manage the social graph. In a nutshell, FaceBook want to replicate real life social dynamics and structures as true to life as possible. Cox explained how the company thought about audience and space – the dinner table, the locker room and the bar are all different social spaces. Each has different groups, different languages, different histories, etc. Facebook wanted to build something that tapped into that.

In summary, the organizing principle of the announcement is giving users more control over their FaceBook experience…

The Future…

So looking forward, what does this new system bode for the future of social media? Will FaceBook users embrace the new Groups structure and utilise it as Zuck, Shafer and Cox envisage, or, like Lists, Groups and other failed solutions, will the new Groups simply dwindle into obscurity? Only time will tell, but given the amount of attention and hype FaceBook have generated with their “big secret announcement”, most of the civilised world should be aware of the new Groups structure within the next few days… Which was probably half the reason for creating the hype. For Groups to work, FaceBook need a massive uptake so the system quickly reaches a critical mass, becoming a ubiquitous part of the FB experience.

So if this happens, what will it mean for the future of social media, marketing and the internet? It’s Gorilla’s opinion that the new system could potentially reinvent the internet, building social networks within a social network. Which raises some interesting questions in terms of targeted marketing… Or perhaps this is even FaceBook’s true intention behind the groups. Marketing Nike football boots to every Group called “Football Buddies” or “Soccer Bros” will certainly be easier than the current system of algorithms, as will targeting specific members of a certain age demographic, gender, geographic location, and countless other criteria with marketing messages.

Similarly, this new development could negate the need for internal corporate communications… By forming groups on FaceBook, any company, from a small local start-up to a massive multinational, could communicate directly to everyone of its employees instantly – an almost indispensable tool. And one that makes companies that ban their employees from access to FaceBook look rather primitive.

The potential the new Group features offer opens a myriad of opportunities that we probably have not even conceived, and as it evolves (as social networking seems to do daily) the consequences for individuals, marketers and brands could be far reaching. Or, as the success of the entire system is based exclusively on the acceptance and implementation by Facebook users, perhaps it will simply fade into unused obscurity… Only time will tell.