Congrats to Shivani Thakkar and Sapna Rohra for winning the Bollypop!
Bollypop is an online dance contest run by Saavn, one of the world’s largest distributors of Bollywood films and music. To enter the contest, people simply upload videos of themselves dancing to Bollywood music that they’ve downloaded from Bollypop. The Bollywood community votes on their favorite submissions and a pool of finalists (the most popular) are then handed over to famed Bollywood director, Ken Ghosh, to choose the ultimate winner. The grand prize is a role in an upcoming Ghosh movie filmed in Mumbai–what an awesome prize!
Contests like Bollypop have emerged as a very popular and successful way to use KickApps’ media sharing and social networking applications to grow and engage a website’s audience (check out the VIBE Verses for another great example–incidentally, the mastermind behind Bollypop, John DeMarchi, also created VIBE Verses). What does a web publisher stand to gain?
1) Both Bollypop and VIBE Verses have created communities around these contests. VIBE rolled from one contest to another (perpetual campaigns) and now have a highly engaged group of hip hop fans. With these communities, brands like Saavn and VIBE have tremendous access to a highly motivated, energized and engaged customer with a strong affinity to their brand.
2) These contests provide web publishers and their advertisers with some very unique opportunities to create branded experiences for the aforementioned highly motivated, energized and engaged customers. In this case, Saavn partnered with Verizon to promote the company’s Bollywood films and music videos on FiOS TV and VCast.
Drop us a note if you’d like to learn more about how KickApps can help you create contests like these. In the meantime, check out the winning video below.
Last Thursday we hosted our second Social Media Seminar. We held our first seminar last month in New York City and this time decided to take it on the road by heading south to Washington, D.C., and just as we did in New York, we partnered with the good people at Clickability on the event.
The idea behind these seminars is to provide people in the trenches with insights, best practices and tips from practitioners who are themselves in the trenches. The half day seminars are chock full of case studies and informative presentations as well as what has become an extremely interactive Best Practices panel to wrap things up. Oh, and also lotsa drinks during the cocktail hour!
The impetus for heading to D.C. was that we believe that the application of social media has a natural home in the public sector. It’s now very clear that there are many opportunities for government agencies, non-profits and other public interest groups to use social media and the Internet to more effectively achieve their organization’s missions and goals around education, awareness and engagement with its constituents.
Many that attended the seminar on Thursday recognized that the possibilities are endless however also realize that there are unique challenges that the public sector faces. Much of this right now is centered on simply grasping what social media in all its forms means to their organizations, how to craft a strategy to meet their goals, how to get buy in from superiors, training and frankly, where to even begin.
This is where we hope the seminar provided a starting point for attendees. After a lovely lunch provided by the Willard Hotel, I kicked things off with a brief introductory presentation about the State of Social Media (Alex usually does this however he was stuck at LaGuardia because the Northeast was hit by a terrible storm that day, so, apologies to everyone who was expecting him). This was followed by:
Alan Wolk of The Toad Stool did a presentation about the basics of social media. He hit on everything from social networks to blogs and message boards to mobile.
Mario Armstrong, who among many things is a correspondent for NPR covering technology, has his own show on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate, WEAA, and XM, spoke about how he’s using social media as a platform for increasing interest amongst high school aged students around science, technology, engineering, math and the environment. I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with some of the students from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute that are working on designing their online community site and all I have to say is wow! What an impressive group of people. (Disclosure: KickApps has partnered with Mario to provide the social media platform for the site.)
Todd Marks of MindGrub presented a case study around Voice of America’sUSAVotes2008.com. He talked about how the site fit into VoA’s mission and provided a behind the scenes peek into how his team helped VoA put the site together in a mere two weeks. (Disclosure: USAVotes2008.com is powered by KickApps.)
The Best Practices Panel delved into topics about strategy, internal buy-in, things to avoid, transparency, conversations, and much more. The panelists were:
Sandy Carter of IBM. Sandy heads up marketing for SOA and Websphere and has done some very innovative things with social media and marketing. Her book, The New Langauge of Marketing 2.0, is a must read—has a bunch of case studies that are very helpful.
All in all, a good day that was full of informative and inspiring conversation about social media. Two highlights stand out for me personally:
Engagement between attendees, presenters and panelists. Check out Pete Erickson’s blog about some of the discussions.
Sandy Carter giving away a copy of her book to the person with the best question. Pete, who ‘won’ the prize handed it to the woman who he refers to in his blog as, “a woman who claimed openly to be barely web 1.0 literate asked the panel if her non-profit is even a candidate for web 2.0.”
We’re starting to plan for our 2009 seminars. Let us know where you’d like to see us bring it!
Mike Sommers, KickApps’ senior vice president of products, was interviewed by Pixel Heads Network about KickApps, our products, vision for the market, how we differ from sites like Facebook and MySpace, the Social Graph Engine, the importance of developers (we call them KickDevelopers) to the KickApps eco-system and much more.
We’re constantly upgrading the KickApps Platform with new features and functionality. For example, two weeks ago we released v3.2, which included new video and audio players in the Widget Studio, new activity feeds to keep everyone informed about what’s going on in their community, and the integration of ClipBlast!’ and Pixsy’s video search.
Now you can keep up with all of our upgrades by subscribing to this RSS feed. We’ll provide updates of all new releases as well as general maintenance. Another resource for all things KickApps is our community for KickApps users, KickDeveloper.
For you Twitterheads out there, follow KickDeveloper (@kickdeveloper) or grab this widget:
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.
Blog 
