» Media Coverage

Okay, so my title is a bit misleading. I don’t condone in anyway the stalking of people on Facebook. However, I’ve been guilty of it on an occasion or two. I think everyone has searched Facebook for an ex that dumped tehm years ago. You want to see if she’s as pretty now as she was your junior year in college. (Although you secretly hope she’s not.)

Twitter's Geolocation feature

The point is Facebook stalking is going on whether we like it or not. It appears that it’s going to get a lot easier on Facebook and Twitter as they both roll out new geolocation features. Twitter’s went live briefly yesterday and is expected to be announced at the SXSW conference on Friday.

Facebook updated their privacy policy last year to cover themselves when the location feature went into effect:

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

Some of you may not want your location broadcast across Facebook. You might be somewhere you don’t want people to know about, like a farmer’s market or comic book convention. Be on the lookout for this feature because you know the minute it goes active Facebook will start broadcasting your location. They say it’s opt-in but I’m skeptical. Facebook has a long history of thinking you should opt-out of features rather than opt-in.

As you can imagine, the BOALT office is full of technology nerds. Everyone has their own little device or site that they follow, but consistently the thing that many of us overlap on is the Technology, Entertainment, Design or the TED Talks.Their slogan is simply: Ideas worth spreading. So I’m taking a cue from them and spreading this. They release a new TED talk almost weekly, sometimes we miss them but when we do see them, they definitely blow us away because each presentation is always groundbreaking and thought provoking.

The one that stood out in the office this week was from Pranav Mistry and his SixthSense technology. Essentially Mistry has created a combination camera and projector unit call the SixthSense device. The unit enhances the physical world with digital information.

The camera on the SixthSense device will determine what physical object you’re looking at or holding and then project digital information onto the object. You can then interact with the digital information through a series of hand gestures. Confusing?

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Some exciting news is coming out of the GOSO office today. Everyone is pumped about the release of GOSO’s Dealer Inventory Facebook App. Essentially the app allows automotive dealers to showcase their inventory directory onto their Facebook page.

BMW of Minnetonka became the first dealership in the world to deploy GOSO’s new application, which was just added to their suite of web and social media products for auto dealers.

The Facebook App is only a small part of the suite of tools. But this is a big step for dealers looking to create a strong Facebook presence. Social media is not new to the automotive brands themselves.

Ford has had great success with both their Fiesta Movement and Fusion 41 social media campaigns but their hasn’t been a lot of big news for individual car dealers. The GOSO announcement today is a big step in including the dealer’s in the social media movement.

It’s pretty easy to see the updates on the LinkedIn’s new iPhone app. You might even get confused at first and think you’ve opened your Facebook app. The two have a very similar layout.

I don’t want to hold it against LinkedIn for designing a new app like Facebook’s current app. The Facebook app is  popular and very efficient. So why not design one that is similar to it? It makes it easier for users to understand the update which is a far cry from the bar navigation at the bottom.

Out With the Old

One of my favorite new features is In Person. The feature uses your Bluetooth connection to exchange contact information with another LinkedIn user. Sadly this feature is also taken from another iPhone app: Bump. Another nice change is making profiles a separate category. From there you can add profiles to your favorites for easy reference later.

In With the New

Everyone is a movie fan. Some people like pretentious arthouse films. Other likes explosions. While some still love a good romantic comedy. And sure most of us don’t listen to the critics; we do however listen to our friends and families.

In the world of Twitter, a 140 character movie review is often enough to help movie lovers decide whether to rush out to the local cineplex or wait until the DVD release.

Twitter was given large credit for the word of mouth success of films like District 9 and Paranormal Activity. It was also given partial credit for the demise of Bruno.

Avatar is the must see film of the holidays and it is dominating Twitter and YouTube. The $300 million film has been out less than two days but it has conquered the web. Advertising age has reported that fans have posted over 42,200 fan videos on YouTube. Just search “avatar movie” and you’ll see the cache of videos. Twitter had more than 30,000 Avatar tweets on Wednesday, a day before it’s release.

The Avatar explosion isn’t a surprise. The film has been on a marketing blitz for months. Part of that blitz is provided by the fans themselves through sites like Twitter. Of the 30,000 tweets on Wednesday, I guarantee several thousand were countdowns until showtime.

Our very own Adam Boalt posted his ticket purchase and excitement for the film, although he has yet to say whether he liked it or not. These countdowns and pre-release word of mouth gave a good little push for the film as well.

Boalt Tweet

Hopefully these 140 character movie reviews with ensure quality from Hollywood from now on. Probably not though.

How much has Twitter influenced your decision on buying a product or going to a movie?

GOSO is a web and social media marketing suite for auto dealerships and the brainchild of the BOALT team. GOSO.com went live in November at the Digital Dealer Conference and we’ve been making splashes in automotive circles ever since.

Well GOSO made another splash today when it was announced that GOSO was awarded the Best in Class in the Automobile category by the Interactive Media Awards. The Best of Class Award is the highest honor awarded by in IMAs.

This is how the IMAs describes the award:

Best in Show represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, your site had to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

For those of you that haven’t seen GOSO.com, jump over and see what an award winning site looks like. Congratulations to the GOSO team for all of their hard work.