Social Media and New Markets

But, the Turkish like it slow

What will the Oscars represent?

The screenplays for “The Hurt Locker” and “Up in the Air” won top honors Saturday evening at the Writers Guild of America awards.

“The Hurt Locker’s” Mark Boal received the WGA award for original screenplay for his gripping drama about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. Boal, who is also nominated for an Oscar, thanked the American soldiers in the war-devastated region who let him “get up close and personal” to the “chaos and hellishness” when he was embedded there as a journalist.

“Up in the Air’s” Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner won for adapted screenplay for their dramedy about a corporate downsizer. The two have won numerous critics’ awards, as well as the Golden Globe, for their screenplay, which was based on the book by Walter Kirn. They are also nominated for an Academy Award.

“I can’t tell you how extraordinarily proud I am to be standing in front of you,” said Reitman, who also directed the film. “I am always a writer.”

Several writers who are nominated for this year’s Oscar in the original or adapted screenplay categories — including “Inglourious Basterds’” Quentin Tarantino and “An Education’s” Nick Hornby — weren’t eligible for a WGA award because their movies either hadn’t been written under the guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement or under a collective-bargaining agreement of one of the international guilds.

The winners were announced at simultaneous ceremonies at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and the Hudson Theatre in New York.

Other winners in film and TV categories included:

* Documentary screenplay: “The Cove,” Mark Monroe.

* Dramatic series: “Mad Men,” Lisa Albert, Andrew Colville, Kater Gordon, Cathryn Humphris, Andre Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton, Brett Johnson, Erin Levy, Marti Noxon, Frank Pierson, Robin Veith, Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner.

via LA Times

Meanwhile, there were the Chinese films with the Golden Bear(Berlin)

The Chinese Film “Tuan Yuan” , or Apart Together, won the Silver Bear for the best screenplay at the 60th Berlin film festival on Saturday. “Tuan Yuan”, directed by Wang Quan’an, who won the Golden Bear in 2007, is about a soldier who flees Shanghai in 1949 for Taiwan.

After many decades he returns to his old life to find his former love has long since married. The film opened the 60th Berlin film festival and was one of two Chinese language films in the main competition.

The other is the newest film “San qiang pai an jing qi” (“A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop”), by Zhang Yimou, whose classic “Red Sorghum” won the first Golden Bear for China in 1988. Altogether ten Chinese language films were shown at the festival.

via China

The unlikely Trilogy

Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu won the Berlin Film Festival’s coveted Golden Bear for best movie, with controversial Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski honoured by the Berlinale.

Kaplanoglu’s movie, Bal (Honey), about a young boy who goes in search of his father after he fails to return home was one of 20 films competing for the top awards at the 60th anniversary Berlinale.

The slow-moving Bal completes Kaplanoglu’s trilogy of films, which charts the life of a man called Yusuf in rural Turkey. The two previous instalments were called Egg and Milk.

via The Hindu

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The latest hot ads, will the banking moguls respond to this consumer strategy http://ow.ly/fYzE

THIS COULD HAVE BEEN A BANKING CAMPAIGN FOR CREDIT APPLNS

In an effort to keep making horrible ads that have nothing to do with whatever Burger King’s brand identity is they’ve come out with this ..

Let’s not forget their past insulting work here, Mexican get sizzled, and here, Slap that booty.

Obviously the only branding strategy Burger King can come up with is to be controversial. Brilliant.

So I’m out of the Burger King loop. They obviously want people in the business to write negatively about them because what women is gonna run out and buy this sandwich now? And do men really think they’ll get a blow job? No, the only thing Burger King wants is press, so stop giving it to them, they don’t deserve it.

Ads are meant to do one thing…sell product, period.

via Branding Blog Branding Company Corporate Internet Brand Image Strategy.

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Twitter’s march towards world domination continues as comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95% from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone. These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients

via Social Networking Watch: Twitter Eats World.

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Last month Twitter launched its ‘suggested users’ feature and the impact on those who were put on Twitter’s red carpet has been significant. Some of these profiles saw tens of thousands of additional followers added to their own personal profiles which created some very happy folks and, you guessed it, some not so happy people. The LA Times Tech blog has all the details but here are the high points.

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, co-founders of Twitter put this feature into place last month. When users sign up for a new account which is happening at a dizzying pace they are given a list of suggested users to follow. The folks at Twitter were noticing that many folks were signing up then not using the service. The hope by offering this was to get the newbies in the game. Makes sense to me since Twitter can be somewhat daunting for those beyond the early adopter / social media savvy part of the population.

The list includes Felicia Day, The Guardian, Rainn Wilson, Dell, The New York Times and CNN to name a few. The benefit to those who made the cut is very clear:

Since Twitter began endorsing a handful of personalities in mid-January, The Guardian was among several entities to reap a subscriber windfall. Its account jumped from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month, according to stat-tracking service Twitter Counter. And within the last two weeks, @GuardianTech added new users at a pace about 300% faster than the previous two weeks.

Day, an Internet video maven, experienced similar results. She has jumped from 20,000 to 83,000 since mid-January.

TechCrunch went… from 41,000 to 111,000 in the same period. The New York Times’ Twitter account increased its subscriber base by a factor of six — to 145,000.

The Twitter purists, however, are crying foul. The concern is that those who have grown their following organically and around ‘real’ value or severe self importance, you make the call are going to suffer. Leo Laporte of TWIT puts it this way:

via Twitter Fires Up the Spotlight.

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by Erick Schonfeld on February 22, 2009

If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.

And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million.

In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor Photobucket in the U.S. from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S. went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December the most recent data available, see chart below.

What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email.

via Facebook Photos Pulls Away From The Pack .

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With one sweeping shift this week, the ailing NBC network reordered the playing field of prime-time television. The introduction of a five-night-a-week program starring Mr. Leno, beginning next fall, was a concession that TV norms cannot continue, at least not at fourth-place NBC.

The programming and viewing habits of the last 50 years — exemplified by the checkerboard of competing programs on the broadcast networks — are being replaced by an Internet-influenced time-shifting model of scheduling. As a result, the very definition of prime time may be changing.

“We do have to continue to rethink what a broadcast network is,” Jeffrey Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, said at an industry conference Monday, hours before the news of Mr. Leno’s new assignment emerged. He warned that if changes were not undertaken, “the broadcast networks will end up like the newspaper business or, worse, like the car companies.” Maybe Mr. Zucker has seen the future; after all, his network has lost 50 percent of its 10 p.m. audience in the last three years.

The announcement of Mr. Leno’s show continues to reverberate on studio lots and executive corridors here, as the Monday-through-Friday “strip” is unprecedented in the modern network television era. NBC framed the decision in terms of competitiveness and cost-effectiveness, because it defuses the risk of Mr. Leno’s move to another network and saves untold millions of dollars a year. But it also reflects the increasing irrelevance of the network schedule.

The irrelevance is partly because of digital video recorders, the bane of many a television executive. Viewers in the 28 percent of homes with DVRs are recording programs at 8 and 9 p.m. and playing them back later in the evening, hurting the 10 p.m. hour. Of the 10 prime-time programs that gained the biggest audience from DVR usage this year, none were on at 10 p.m.

The biggest gainers from DVR viewership were dramas. According to statistics on time-shifting released by Nielsen Media Research on Friday, the NBC series “Heroes” benefited the most from DVRs, with a 35 percent increase in its audience after seven days of time-shifted viewing. The new Fox drama “Fringe” experienced a 26 percent increase, and the ABC series “Lost” had a 25 percent increase.

via Jay Leno’s Move Hints at Future of Prime-Time TV – NYTimes.com.

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