Twitter Got Gold

London’s Olympic Stadium will have many athletes in it this Friday. Twitter, is kicking off an Olympics events page that will contain tweets from athletes, their families, fans and others. Twitter is getting ready to join an Olympic relay that it hopes will help it gain ground on Facebook. Twitter has partnered with NBC Universal. With the partnership, Twitter hopes to use the Olympics as a launch pad into a more sustainable business. This is one of the first times Twitter will serve as an official narrator for a live event. NBC will be directing viewers to the Twitter page.

Twitter, which allows people to post 140-character messages, has built up more than 140 million monthly users.  Twitter has also become a resource for people to find news. The executives at Twitter decided they want the 6 year old service to find a larger audience and a serious money maker. As a result, Twitter’s Olympics bet is crucial. “This is a way for new users to sample Twitter,” said Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s vice president of media.

“There’s no way of knowing exactly how much advertisers will spend on Twitter during the Olympics, but there is no doubt they will be jockeying for ad space during some of the key events of the Games, when traffic on Twitter will explode,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said.

Twitter has prepared for the Games for months. The company has already performed dozens of promos with athletes and national sports associations to “sell” them on using its service. Twitter has requested that companies should buy ads on Twitter to spread their Olympics marketing messages.

 

Advertisers said Twitter has pushed itself to them as an effective marketing vehicle. Twitter will be visible offline, on television and online. The London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel dominating the skyline, will light up each night based on the sentiment of Olympic tweets, although Twitter said that isn’t part of its campaign. Once a night, the London Eye will light up in a pattern that reflects the prevailing sentiment about the games among Twitter users that day. Positive tweets will turn the thing yellow, negative ones purple.

Google ESP

Is Google becoming an extension of your mind?

GoogleNow, Google’s voice-powered digital assistant compares favorably to Apple’s own voice-powered digital assistant, Siri. To anyone who has used Siri, Voice Assistant will feel familiar. You ask a question, and a female voice responds and displays a response on screen. Google Now is a different beast altogether, and you must opt-in to use it. Google Now shows just how much and how useful it can be. The feature follows some of your activities and uses them to provide information before you ask. 

Google Now presents information in "cards". Google Now automatically creates and presents a series of “cards” that try to organize your life by presenting information Google thinks you’ll need at that particular moment - based on the information it’s collected via how you use various Google services - in a context that it hopes you’ll find useful. Google Now aggregates the information Google already collects about you on a daily basis: accessing your email, your calendar, your contacts, your text messages, your location, your shopping habits, your payment history, as well as your choices in music, movies and books. It can even scan your photos and automatically identify them based on their subject, not just the file name!

It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team's score while they’re playing;  all of this happens automatically. Google Now is designed to draw on information such as calendar entries, Google Maps navigation, and search history to anticipate information that a person will find useful -- something basic like a weather forecast or more sophisticated like a timetable to get to an appointment by foot, train, and bus.

"Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards.",  quoted by Steve Ballmer.

An Oracle of Media

Oracle is serious about hitting the social media scene hard. On July 10, 2012, the company announced the purchase of Involver (a company specializing in the development of customized social media campaigns).  This will be the third social media purchase Oracle has made in the past two months. In June, they purchased Collective Intellect (a company that assisted companies in monitoring the amount of buzz they generated in the social media world) and in May they purchased Virtue (a company that made the management of all different social media sites easier).

They already provide a cloud-based software service. Oracle is a clear and well-positioned leader in public and private cloud computing. Building upon its market leading commercial-off-the-shelf enterprise software, Oracle has enhanced its hardware, software and management capabilities through investments in innovation, strategic acquisitions as well as key partnerships. Soon, they will offer consumers a range of social media services, as well as, the cloud-based software services. 

Oracle adheres to three principles. Adhering to three principles has saved Oracle more than $1 billion in operating costs so far. With these principles, which are incorporated into the design of their software, they have coordinated and streamlined their business processes worldwide:

1. Simplify: Speed information delivery with integrated systems and a single database.
2. Standardize: Reduce cost and maintenance cycles with open, easily available components.
3. Automate: Improve operational efficiency with technology and best practices.

Social media marketing tool providers have become prime acquisition targets lately. This is due to the growing influence of social media such as Facebook and Twitter on customers' lives. Oracle has now become a social media powerhouse that will be hard for companies to push to the side, especially when they are craving a slice of that social media pie. Organizations operate in a new era of the “empowered consumer” where customers are more in charge of their relationships with brands than ever before. In this new era, customer experience has become the most important and defensible differentiator and driver of business value.

The e-Book Bible

For a two-week trial period, the Hotel Indigo in Newcastle has replaced hard copies of the holy text with electronic versions accessible through the Amazon e-reader. Yes, they replaced the paper Gideon bibles, the ones we are used to finding in the drawers of hotels and motels, with Amazon Kindles. It is the first in Britain to offer the service, which includes the ability to download any other religious texts that costs 5 British pounds or less, for free! Other downloads may be done, but they will be at regular price for the consumer.

Adam Munday, general manager of Hotel Indigo Newcastle, explained why the hotel chain made the swap: “Every Hotel Indigo draws inspiration from its local area to give guests an individual experience.” Newcastle was one of the largest print centers in England in the 18th century. The area is also home to the Literary & Philosophical Society -- the "largest independent library outside London" -- which houses more than 150,000 books and and extensive music collection. “We wanted to reflect this literary history in a very contemporary way”, stated Adam Munday. For the right reasons, going digital is a good choice for the city.

If other hotels take up the idea as well, it will obviously be good news for travelers who left their Kindle or paper books behind. On the other hand, a 2008 report by CNN revealed some hotels are taking extra measures to cater to their diversified consumers without doing away with the Gideon Bible. Some chains provide guests with other religious texts, including the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Hebrew Bible and some Buddhist literature. This trial period at Hotel indigo sounds exciting and interesting; however, I think a lost or damaged Kindle will probably be a hefty charge on the hotel room bill. More details, in regards to this blog, can be found at CNET News.