If you have not heard of TROLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO, click on the link to find out.

It is Edward Hill (now 75), who used to be a popular Russian singer and he is singing “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” to a Russian audience in the 70s or 80s in the vokaliz style (sung, but without words).

You must be thinking to yourself – how could this silly, looping video be viral?
All it took was someone to make the video loop seamlessly.
The website only comprises

• the video,
• a link to ringtone download (with an iPhone version even!)
• and a Facebook group which now has 10,000 fans and growing

In another blog post, we discuss the elements of things viral.
Firstly, it is remarkable – Trololo is entertaining, makes you laugh, and go “WTF!?!?”

It is memorable – Trololo gets your attention, and you just want to watch it just to see how long this will last (then find out that it is actually looping).

Now, you can also sing along with subtitles!

What do you think? Is Trololololo!! the new Rick Roll?

Read it on other sites:
Urlesque, Jehsmith, NowPublic

Just what is Social Media about?

What is the buzz about social media?
Why is everyone talking about it?
It is just another fad, or is it here to stay?

It has been around for quite some time – many businesses are using it as a new marketing tool; MNC, SME, even non-profit organizations like churches, museums, schools are implementing this to get closer to their audiences.

Social Media at a Glance

As of 30 Aug ‘09, this is the definition on Wikipedia.
Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.Social media supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer tosocial media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

As you probably know we are already moving on to Web 3.0 from Web 2.0, websites do not exist to merely provide information like how they worked in the 1990s, it has evolved to exist as cascaded communities, or ‘tribes’ as how Seth Godin would describe them, exchanging valuable information because people these days do not have enough time and attention to spare.

Social Media is…

· Blogs
· Micro-Blog
· Social Networking
· Social Bookmarking
· Social News
· Photo/video Sharing
· Mash-Ups
· RSS
· Podcasts & webinars

What would you add? Do you have any suggestions/feedback? Share your opinion in the comments box below!

Alice in Wonderland – this highly anticipated movie by Tim Burton, most of you must have seen the posters by now.
I noticed something interesting about the URL they chose to advertise… seems like a new concept.

Think about it – Why did the marketer in Disney decide to use a Facebook group instead of an official domain?

True enough, social media is picking up very fast. One of the reasons Disney chose to advertise on the social networking site Facebook is because that is where the target audience are. Therefore it would make sense to connect with the internet-savvy bunch on the sites they frequently visit.

Fan pages have also been set up by the studio:
The Loyal Subjects of the Red Queen
The Loyal Subjects of the White Queen
The Disloyal Subjects of the Mad Hatter

Look at how well the group is doing – over 1million fans. It definitely is a great platform to not only inform and promote, but also to connect. It has created an on-demand experience as it is easily accessible.

Do you think that a movie still has to has its own domain?

Many pundits are expecting that businesses will be putting much investment into social media marketing in 2010. With so many different social media platforms on the internet, how does one determine make a decision?

Fear not.
CMO.com’s Guide To The Social Media Landscape had been really useful in helping businesses identify and evaluating the different platforms for their marketing campaigns.

You can download the PDF here.

Thanks to Twitter being the raging buzzword of 2009, URL shorteners have found their place on the Internet. TinyURL, memURL, ShortURL, bit.ly, Doiop, Snurl , tr.im, is.gd. (Whole long list of them here.)

As users struggle to share a link in 140 characters, URL shorteners certainly help alot with long URLs because every.character.counts.

Tracking
Bit.ly’s tracking function provides basic analytics, allowing you to see the other people who have shortened the same URL, what they are saying, how many people have clicked, etc.

Link Preview… but who would use this all the time?
You can preview on TinyURL what link you will be redirected to, by typing ‘preview’ at the front of the hyperlink.
E.G. http://tinyurl.com/yhkfkgh could be retyped as http://preview.tinyurl.com/yhkfkgh

Disguise for malicious scams and spams
Thing is, you never really know where you would be headed to. Not only the technically-unsavvy ones would suspect it is a virus, really. With a habit of hovering all links I click, I am hesitant about clicking shortened URLs, no matter how convincing they may look. (Think RickRoll!) And no, I’m definitely not clicking on anything that says “This is cool!! Check it out… ”

Does no good for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (I’m not even mentioning the geeky things like DNS and servers.)
With all path data and permalinks removed… how is it any beneficial to SEO?
Well, unless you tell me that… Google algorithms are now so smart they’d know what yhkfkgh means.

Beware of Murphy’s Law
You are totally reliant on the service. If the service goes down, most likely your URL would be gone too. On June 15th 2009, Cli.gs got hacked, redirecting shortened URLs to a specific allocated site. If anything can go wrong, it will.

My all-time issue with URL shorteners is not being able to pre-empt users on the site they are about to enter. To solve this nasty issue, Vincent Gable has suggested that Twitter allow link embedding, e.g. so people write “this is my website“, not “this is my website: http://vgable.com “.

Tell me what you think – do we really need to use URL shorteners outside Twitter?

P.S. I just had to post these parodies: HugeURL and Woofer FTW.

Hop over to read more about URL shorteners:

• SEOmoz – Useful reviews on pros & cons of various providers
• Joshua Schachter on TinyURL

Oatmeal did a comic strip which all web designers would be able to relate to… clients.

Seriously, sometimes they just say the darnest things.

Recently, IKEA launched a marketing campaign on the social networking giant Facebook.
An account was created under the store manager’s name so people had a face to relate to. A photo album containing showroom images was uploaded and users were supposed to tag themselves onto any object in the picture. The first person to tag a furniture would get to take it home.

View the photo album here.

IKEA UK has released a free iPhone catalogue app that lets you browse the latest catalogue on your phone. Download it here.

Source: Mashable

Who would have thought of using colour pencils to decorate your wall?

500 Pencils did.
I’d love to have this somewhere!

Squidoo, founded by Seth Godin (yes, I’m a believer!) If you haven’t heard of it (what?!) – time to educate yourself. To save myself of the trouble of attempting to describe what Squidoo does, just read it here. but point of clarification – it’s not the next Wiki.

My very first lens on Social Media. I definitely won’t claim to be an expert at this (because I jolly well know I am not!), this lens serves as a learning guide for myself as I share my knowledge and reflections with others who might be interested to find out.
What I’m struggling with is maintaining the rankings though; I’m competing with a pool of 900,000 other lenses on Squidoo! It will only get more challenging in the future.

Go get your lens now, there are tons of tips on how to do it.

More at Toxel