Capcom Blood Pool

Capcom, in support of their latest Resident Evil title Resident Evil Revelations, have created a swimming pool filled with blood.

The PR stunt comes hot on the heels of their 2012 human butchery.

It’s certainly an interesting way of getting people to associate your gaming brand with blood and gore, and will appeal to their core gamer market, but I can’t help but feel it’s a little contrived.

It’s certainly got the Internet interested, with most of the major gaming blogs talking about the stunt – whether it helps or hinders the release of the title remains to be seen.

I don’t know about you, but this sort of media activation just seems a bit too 1990s. If the aim was to get lots of folks talking about the new game, then it may have backfired as most commentators seem to have focused on the bizarre nature of the idea.

It’s all a bit lads mag and not particularly innovative, don’t you think?

You can get tickets via Eventbrite.

Warburton’s Loaf Sells for £112k on eBay

A loaf of Warburton’s bread sells for £112k.

I love the Internet.

NASA Invite Social Media Community to Launch

NASA will give 70 members of its social media community the chance to get a behind the scenes view of the US space program and an opportunity to see a launch in-person.

The NASA Social, scheduled for January 28-29, will coincide with the launch of NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K (TDRS-K).

The selected few visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA Socials are in-person meetings with people who engage with the agency through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks.
TDRS-K is targeted to launch at 8:52 p.m. EST Jan. 29 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

Registration for the NASA Social opens at 3 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 13, and closes at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Dec.19. Participants will be selected from online registrations.

This is yet another example of Nasa’s understanding of what people who engage with them in social media want – behind the scenes, exclusive access to content that would otherwise be obtainable.

I’m a big fan of their approach to social media and think they set a great example to other institutions as to how the online space (‘scuse the pun) should be approached.

Granted, Nasa have got some amazing content, but to see such a large organisation be so open is very refreshing indeed.

Twitter Photo Filters

Twitter have announced that they will be launching photo filters with the latest versions of their iPhone and Android apps.

The move comes hours after Twitter and Instagram integration ceased.

There will be eight photo filters, all of which can be applied directly in the mobile app.

This, along with the compulsory roll out of the new image heavy Twitter profiles, demonstrates just how much value Twitter is placing on imagery and the ease of sharing that content instantaneously.

The success of Instagram and PicPlz has shown just how important the ability to share image content is to users. Other social networks such as Path and Facebook have tried to integrate image sharing into their service with mixed results.

Twitter will be using Aviary, a photo editing SDK, to provide the tech behind the new tool, rather than creating their own.

This latest move puts Twitter in direct competition with Instagram, and ultimately, Facebook, for user’s affections. I for one am very excited by the new development, what do you make of it?

Twitter and Instagram Fall Out

Instagram has pulled photosharing from Twitter, the microblogging service confirmed on their blog on Sunday.

It’s the latest example of a pair of social networks ceasing official ties and preventing their users from cross-posting or integrating their content; Linkedin dropped integration withTwitter in the summer much to users’ dismay.

These moves demonstrate the coming of age as businesses of many of our favourite social networking services – to survive, no matter how big you are, you need to be ruthless and that means, it would seem, upsetting users in the short term.

Twitter are rolling out photo filters in a move to try and establish the service as an image-sharing platform in its own right.

Instagram, although owned by Facebook, is developing its web-based offering, moving out of the app space, somewhat, to a bonafide more widely accessible social network.

Ultimately it means that we will need to evolve the way we use our favourite platforms. New tools such as IFTTT aim to bring the loose ties of the Internet together in one seamless experience; it would seem that there is an opportunity here for them to deliver a real benefit for end users.

Business Insider makes the point:

Imagine if the New York Times were to allow Twitter to scrape its entire articles and republish them in Twitter apps.

That’d be nuts!

The only way the Times would do it is if Twitter were paying it.

That’s how cable works, after all.

They are, of course, right.

What is shows us is that we have moved into the next stage of the evolution of ‘social media’ as we know it.

The utopia of cross-service content agnosticism is at an end; money is now more important to social networks than the experience of the people that use them.

Community Management Must Never Be Fully Automated

Community management is one of the primary skills that you need to hone if you’re working in social media.

To help, there a range of platforms that have been created to schedule content, publish messages and alert you when a community member interacts with your community, be it on Facebook, a group of blogs, or on Linkedin.

These tools are incredibly useful and can save time, especially if you are in an agency, managing several communities at once.

However, it is incredibly easy to become reliant on the tools to do your job for you and it can lead to you becoming distanced from the group of people you are looking to get engaging with your brand.

Whether you’re managing a global community of ten million, or a local community of a hundred or so, understanding the dynamic of a group of people who are using a digital service to connect with a brand does not come naturally and is picked up over time.

It can be taught, but it is better to be in the community, understanding their needs and wants, to be able to judge how they will react to your content.

I believe that if you are to best serve any community, you must immerse yourself within it – by learning what the individuals within the collective want from you or your brand, you can hone your content and tone of voice to better connect with them.

The danger of using automated tools is that you lose the need to check in regularly to see what your community is saying, how are they are saying it and what makes them tick.

It is very easy to pull some graphs, talk about interesting ‘insights’ from data and find some nice and friendly verbatims to demonstrate just how much your community are discussing your brand.

What this does not reveal of course is the subtleties – what content has worked, what language has had most resonance and how big the core group of ‘superfans’ you have is.

I’m an advocate of checking in to your community every hour or so where possible of your own accord, not just when you receive a handy email notification. It helps you work what why there’s so much dead time in your community – is it just content you’re publishing that’s driving interactions, or are there genuine and structured conversations taking place without a catalyst?

As always in social media, technology and people combined is the best approach to take, not just leaving it to the machines to do the work.

Jamstar Acoustics

Jamstar Acoustics is a new ‘virtual guitar teacher’ available as a web app or via Samsung Apps.

According to the friendly press guys: “Jamstar’s unique technology allows the app to listen to you as you play on your own guitar, giving you real time feedback and correcting you, bringing a whole new approach to learning to play the guitar, making it much easier and way more fun.”

The app itself is clearly laid out and easy to interpret, which is one of the most important facets any tutorial tool can have.

The app is simple to use and looks like it could also be a lot of fun!

It’s great to see the opportunity to learn the guitar being afforded to people who might not be able to afford a one on one weekly tutor.

The democratisation of information facilitated by the Internet means that sharing knowledge and expertise, around any subject, can be done easily and relatively cheaply. If this means you get to learn a new skill, all the better.

If you like the sound of what you’ve heard so far, check out the introductory video below.