By now all you Twitterers, Tweeters, Twits, addicts, are probably aware that Shaquille O’Neal, a.k.a. The Diesel, Big Daddy, Superman, The Big Cactus, The Big Shaqtus, Shaq Fu, Shaq, is on Twitter. @THE_REAL_SHAQ is the real Shaq, at least according to this Mashable post. Ever the quotatious 7 footer, he’s probably one of the most entertaining people to follow on Twitter. Here are some classics:
kobe is a beast dude, the best player n da game, i admit , i miss playin wit him
Ok i couldnt take it, i had to get a double cheeseburger from whataburger, pls 4give me lol
I feel pretty good about the win, dam near broke my hip on da dive, lol
Still tryin to get steve nash to join the twitter universe
On my way to the 1st annual phoenix shaqsgivn dinner, feed 750 families
Didnt get much sleep last nite, laker loss imsomnia, lol
Just saw the the great phil jackson, gave him a kiss on da cheek
Using the KickApps Widget Studio we created a Shaq Twitter widget for all you fans . All it took was a few minutes of drag-and-drop creativity and the Twitter RSS feed. Feel free to place it on your blog or website by clicking ‘Steal This’ and copying the embed code.
Or, you can easily make your own customized Twitter widget powered by your Twitter’s RSS. Check out this video for more information.
UPDATE: Create your own mini-Twitter widget here. All you need to do is enter your Twitter RSS feed.
Since Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidential election this month, there has been article after article written about the role of technology in his campaign (here’s a very interesting overview by Mario Armstrong on NPR member station WYPR’s Midday with Dan Rodricks, this week–starts about midway through).
Many have credited Obama’s use of social media organize and communicate with supporters locally, get his message out and raise money. Indeed, MyBarackObama.com, and his use of blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, has arguably created a new precedence for how political and public interest campaigns will likely begin using the internet.
As many of you know, KickApps was approached by John McCain’s campaign about 3 months ago to host John McCain’s official social network, McCainSpace. (After abandoning their attempts to develop a site internally, they came asking for a solution that works out-of-the-box, could be easily customized and launched very quickly with all the bells & whistles.) The site’s user demographics are particularly interesting, with approximately 60% of members were 30 years or older. Additionally, many of the most active members claimed to be first time social networkers and bloggers. If anything, this election cycle showed that social media is very much firmly part of the mainstream.
What does this mean for the government and public interest organizations?
Most government and public interest organizations’ websites tend to be primarily used to provide information and educate people about a given topic. As a resource, these websites have become invaluable. That said, most are also pretty static and staid in their presentation of this information, and I’d argue, a pretty boring monologue presence in a multilogue world.
While changing government’s culture and bureaucracy is a daunting task, best left to people much brighter and more capable than those of us who work at KickApps, there are some easy opportunities for government agencies to leverage social media to better meet the needs of their constituents. Just as Obama successfully used social media to get his campaign messages out, government agencies and public interest organizations can very easily and cost effectively adopt similar tactics.
A good starting point for this are widgets. Easily shared and deployed throughout the web on social networks, blogs, etc., widgets could play a very important role in providing people with real-time information and news updates.
Here are some examples of crime bustin’ widgets that we created using the KickApps Widget Studio in a few minutes. Powered by information from the FBI’s RSS News Feeds, each are shareable with several clicks of the mouse and embeddable on any website.
Here’s one powered by an Amber Alert feed.
As you can see, the power of viral syndication could very easily be put to use to inform and even organize people very quickly. In fact, please consider taking a moment to embed any of these on your blog or website.
Like I said, this is just a start. Could there be a day when we join the IRS’ social network? Hmmmm…that thought may just be a little too exciting for a Friday afternoon.
Click here for more information about the KickApps Widget Studio and here for the latest updates from last night’s release.
Today we announced that the New Orleans Hornets is the latest professional sports team to have launched a KickApps powered community (you can read the press release here).
Social media, online communities and customer participation are an obvious for sports (well…any ‘product’ where customers are passionate, really). We’ve seen a great deal of success with the Phoenix Suns’ PlanetOrange.net–they even won an EMMY award for the site, the San Francisco 49ers, New York Knicks and many others. You can learn more about our sports customers here.
As if we planned it, the bible of the sports industry, Sports Business Journal, published a special section this week about the intersection of social media and sports. One of the stories was: Five people to know in social media (subscription required). Eric Fisher of SBJ lists the usual suspects: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Chris DeWolfe of MySpace, Alex Blum of KickApps… (that’s right baby!).
If you’re in the sports industry and are trying to understand social media’s role in sports you should pick up the issue. Even better, give us a call: +1 (212) 730-4558 or drop us a note here.
Last week I had the great pleasure of attending my second Monaco Media Forum. As in past years the delegates attending the conference were a virtual who’s who of web technology, advertising and media industries from all corners of the globe. It was also great fun to bump into old friends who I haven’t seen in a while.
The highlight of the event for me was helping lead a conversation on “User Generated Data” moderated by Esther Dyson. Other panel members were; Richard Cooperstein, Head of International Business Development & Strategy, Facebook; Matteo Fabiano, General Manager, TagLift; Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf; and Lisa Sounio, CEO, Dopplr.
It’s clear that most people are now truly beginning to understand the tremendous value in the profile and social graph data that comes readily from the natural interaction with social media applications like the ones provided by KickApps. The initial focus for use of the data has been to inform more intelligent ad serving but all acknowledged that the various ad solutions and ecosystem required to take full advantage have not materialized yet.
In many ways the advertising industry consists of some of the most creative, innovative minds but when it comes to process operational advances they tend to be stuck in the Stone Age. There are very few positive things to be drawn from the current global economic crisis but if it causes the advertising industry to finally throw out its dated, inefficient methods and replace them with new and more effective approaches where relevance is informed by social graph data, and formats are highly engaging, interactive and viral, we have the chance of exiting this current crisis stronger than ever.
KickApps has been focused on delivering an approach for utilizing data which respectsend-user rights and allows publishers to establish trusted relationships with their sites’ audience. Additionally, with our approach, the publisher retains ownership of this trusted relationship, not KickApps, and this is an important key to the accelerated adoption of the KickApps platform. It’s also why I tend to believe that the data portability efforts from Google, Facebook, and MySpace and the branded namespace approach of Ning will never satisfy the needs of the serious publisher looking to add rich social media experiences to an existing web site or as part of a new niche oriented social network or UGC site.
Mitch Pirtle, KickApps’ technology evangelist, will be keynoting at CMS Expo on December 4th and 5th, in Denver.
KickApps makes it very easy to integrate social media experiences into your current CMS. As part of this, we also have single sign on plug ins and modules for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Go to KickDeveloper.com for more information about this.
Finally, thanks for the organizers of CMS Expo, we’re able to offer you a reduced registration rate: www.cmsexpo.net/kickapps.
Oh…btw…we’ll be making a BIG Joomla related announcement while Mitch is in Denver.
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