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Sunday Funday

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I realize it’s been a week since my last post and I missed this week’s Snaps To. My apologies, I was a little busy adjusting to working full time. Anyway, here we go!

Sunday Funday is a weekly round-up of the week’s news in the marketing, advertising, or PR industries. Or anything else I find amusing.

With the ever-increasing presence of social media in our day-to-day lives, it’s becoming as common to some of us as eating and sleeping. This has led to an interesting trend as many people decided to give up social media for Lent this year. Jesus died for our sins, so we can lay off the tweeting, right?

Tonight was the season 3 premier of Game of Thrones on HBO. Big news to those of us who can stand the confusion long enough to have watched all the previous seasons. To celebrate the premier Ommegang, a craft brewery in Cooperstown, N.Y. that specializes in Belgian-style beer, teamed up with HBO to release a blonde ale called “Iron Throne”.

My Facebook newsfeed turned a brilliant shade of red this week as many people changed their profile pictured to a red equal sign showing support for marriage equality and gay rights. Huffington Post takes a look at the popularity of this trend through numbers and geographic location.

In recent years Microsoft has struggled to compete with Apple’s seamless operating system and software. Businessweek takes a look at how well Microsoft’s Xbox, Skype, Office, and SkyDrive work well together.

I’ve never been a big fan of weight-loss products, diet fads, and the way they are promoted. Luckily, Weight Watchers and Slim-Fast have abandoned diet-focused ads in favor or ones promoting overall wellness.

Some claim that ads are nothing more than heartless industries trying to take advantage of unknowing consumers. These days, though, advertisement can be used to spread important cultural messages. Expedia’s “Find Your Understanding” commercial, promoting gay rights and marriage equality, actually helped the couple featured in the film with their efforts to secure parental rights to their son.

One more article about Game of Thrones (can you tell I’m excited?): Voyage to 10 Game of Thrones Cities on Travel Site Kayak

I might be one of the few people that doesn’t like April Fool’s Day. I don’t like being pranked, OK?  Youtube just made an announcement that they were shutting down and removing all their videos (GASP!) but it just turned out to be an April Fool’s prank. Jerks.

Money can’t buy happiness, sure. But there’s nothing wrong with using technology to track it. I love the idea of the app featured in “Can an App Actually Make You Happier?“

I posted a video previously about Bing and Jay-Z creating an interactive map around the world for users. Similarly, Artist Jay Shells has wandered around New York, putting up signs with rap lyrics at the specific places the songs referred to in the songs, creating a new map of the city based on its homegrown art form.

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Facebook to adopt Hashtag. All is right with the world.

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Praise to all that is holy in the social media world! Big news last week as rumors surfaced that Facebook is considering adopting the hashtag. I wrote a blog post a little while back about the power of the hashtag, made popular by Twitter and later adopted by Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. Currently, Facebook is the only major social media platform that does not use hashtags (much to its users’ chagrin). But that’s all about to change.

According to an article by the Wall Street Journal, “Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag, one of Twitter’s most iconic markers, into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations, said people familiar with the matter. It is unclear how far along Facebook’s work on the hashtag is and the feature isn’t likely to be introduced imminently, these people said…. Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter’s lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up, giving users more reason to stay logged in and see more ads. Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags, allowing users to sort photos by the symbol.”

While many industry experts speculate over how this development will affect the ongoing battle between the two social media titans, I’m more interested in the impact this will have for marketers.

THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING! Ok, this probably won’t change everything. But it will make campaign integration in social media much easier for marketers. In my marketing classes at DU, whenever we wanted to use social media to engage with consumers through our campaigns we would develop a hashtag for Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest while having to develop a separate way to promote on Facebook. And that was annoying enough as a student. I can’t imagine how frustrating it’s been for experienced marketers to deal with Facebook’s “uniqueness”.

Adweek speculated on how this change will imact marketing, saying, “If Facebook does adopt the hashtag, it will bring the feature to its biggest platform yet and conceivably bring more marketers than are currently on Twitter (definitely more than are on Google+ or Instagram). That “allows the hashtag to play out on all channels and become a bigger part of all advertising—OOH, print, TV, etc.—which will encourage more consumer conversation around brands,” Tuff said, adding that hashtags could boost brands’ use of Facebook’s People Talk About This metrics by easing the reliance on post-tagging.”

Marketers of the world, rejoice!