You Are Media

Viral Video: Kobe Bryant Jumps over Aston Martin

Genius Nike Kobe Bryant Viral Video

In early April a days before the 2008 NBA Playoffs Nike released a video that took the sports world by storm.

It was NBA superstar Kobe Bryant jumping over a speeding Aston Martin car in a parking garage.

Large blogs like Jason Calacanis covered the video it made it to the front page of Digg. The next day the TNT show Inside the NBA showed the video and created their own spoof.

This campaign was particularly well executed by Nike for a few reasons:

The video is 54 seconds.
The video includes an NBA superstar and his teammate letting loose - which lends to authenticity.
They showed the product in the very beginning of the video.
The video was extremely well done leading people to believe it was real.
It was just before the playoffs which lent to controversy of whether Kobe was being irresponsible.

Most companies may not reach this type of success but the elements of tying a product directly to celebreties in short viral videos is a great model to generate buzz about a specific product.

» Twitter is to Friendster as __________ is to Myspace

Thinking about Twitter’s scaling issues, it makes it seem that there is an opportunity for history to repeat itself here. Friendster was a social networking pioneer. Its feature set was also…

» What Microsoft can do to beat Google to the (next) Punch

It’s understood that Google is light years ahead of Microsoft today in search. Even a Yahoo! acqusition probably will not help materially as far as momentum goes. Google is smarter and they are…

In this post from Nielsen you’ll note that niche Social Networks are growing at the most brisk rate. LinkedIn (business), Buzznet (music and entertainment), and Imeem (music) are the top growth social networks over the past year.

We see anticipate that niche social networks is the real growth opportunity “general purose” in the social networking space.

» Cloud Computing Tips for the Enterprise (or paranoid individuals)

I am still very much a creature of the desktop revolution. I still feel much more comfortable creating, storing, locally than from the cloud. My obsession with mobile has left me with the…

» Opera on Mobile Social Network Growth

Today Opera released mobile browser stats. Some pretty interesting insight into the growing popularity of mobile social networking.

Social networking stands supreme
Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic

Snapshot: United States

More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

» Tips to syndicate your blog

The blogging world today is all about distribution. The wider the distribution, the easier it is for people to discover. The content part is up to you. That’s how you get people, subscribing to your…

» Social Networking Goes Mobile

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of chatter about mobile social networking. My thoughts have always been that the mobile phone is quintessential social network.

Now that mobile…

Mobile Status Report From Admob

Mobile Handset usage as of April 2008

Handset Distribution
Motorola still on top with about 35% of traffic.
Blackberry #2 with about 12%.
Blackberry has just about 50% of smart phone traffic as well.

Multimedia
33% of handsets support streaming video.
64% of handsets support downloadble video.

Download Report Here