What have Beyonce and Monopoly got in common?

This week Siren Communications discusses Brazil’s social media potential, the power cut caused by booty shaking Beyoncé and everyone’s favourite board game, Monopoly…
 
Beyoncé’s splashy halftime show, a freak power outage, and a captivating game of football combined to generate a record 24.1 million posts on Twitter during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. That’s up from 13.7 million last year, with brands ranging from Oreo to Tide and Budweiser capturing online buzz by linking the blackout to their brands in humorous tweets.
 
For big events like the Superbowl, the Olympics and the Presidential election, Twitter has fast become the go-to platform for millions of people, enables them to share quick reactions and participate in a massive, public, global conversation.
 
It took Oreo’s marketers barely 10 minutes after the power went out to tweet a picture of an Oreo cookie in the half-dark with the words: "You can still dunk in the dark." As of Monday, the image had been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times. Tide quickly followed suit with the slogan "we can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out" with more limited success. The message was re-tweeted about 1,300 times. Calvin Klein, meanwhile, tweeted a video of a shirtless, chiseled male model doing crunches "since the lights are still out…" . Following this success, watch as brands around the world set up their own 24/7 social media monitoring command centres to make sure they’re not in the dark the next time something like this happens…
 
In other news this week, it was reported that the world of academia has been jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. Eminent academics, more used to writing essays and journals as opposed to the 140 characters on Twitter, are among the thousands joining on a daily basis. For a Tweet-sized insight into the world of law, economics and technology, check out the likes of @RichardMoorhead, @deankarlan and @alicebell.
 
Gone are the days of buying CDs, now we bow down to the online music moguls, including itunes, which celebrated its 25 billionth download this week. To mark the momentous occasion its owners Apple rewarded the lucky downloader, Philip Luke, with £8,650 worth of goodies. We’ll be gunning to win the 26 billionth prize…
 
It seems that Google is paying the price for ‘snooping‘ this week as more than 100 Apple customers are seeking compensation for allegedly having their security settings tampered with, allowing the search engine giant to access personal information. As a result, Apple users were bombarded with sales calls and advertisements from websites that they had recently visited. Reports suggest that up to 10 million people may have been affected in what is set to become the one of the biggest lawsuits in British legal history.
 
With Rio Carnival kicking off this weekend, Brazil has just been highlighted as the new social media capital of the universe. As North America and Europe are now seen as being at near saturation with our online exploits, the big-hitters like Facebook and Twitter are seeing the South American country as the main opportunity for major growth. Unlike China, where there are all sorts of state restrictions on the web that, Brazil is seen as ripe for the picking. Facebook already has 65 million users in Brazil, making it the second largest market outside of the U.S. for the social network, and Twitter has recently set up a Sao Paulo office and is in the process of hiring a local sales, marketing and business-development team. This growth is set to be reflected across South America.
 
And finally…the cat reigns supreme on the Monopoly board after a global Facebook campaign voted for the feline token to be added to the game (replacing the iconic iron counter). The cat won by a whopping 31 per cent, beating off some stiff competition from other wannabe tokens including a robot, diamond ring, helicopter and guitar.