Authored by Renan Borelli

Bracket This: Fans Get Mad About Social

Every year, this particular week is an important one for us here at New Media Strategies. It’s the opening week of March Madness, the 68-team tournament for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball……
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2011: The Year I Abandoned My Facebook Friends

Since the F8 Developers Conference in September, where Mark Zuckerberg announced major design updates to the Facebook platform, the way I participate on the popular social network has changed.  While the main headlines coming out of F8 focused on a significant overhaul for the profile format called Timeline, the most significant improvement involved the Facebook News Feed. These changes to the News Feed have slowly caused me to leave my Facebook friends behind. And I don’t really miss them.

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Changes To Google Reader Drag Us Kicking and Screaming Into The Google+ Era

Until recently, it’s been easy to dismiss Google+. Frequent discussions have occurred in the hallways at the @NMSosphere weighing the viability of Google’s upstart social network and whether it has the long-term capabilities for competing with the sacred social media cows that are Facebook and Twitter. “No,” people cried – there’s no time for another social network largely made up of tech-savvy millennials with dubious extensions for brands and products. “Yes,” others argued, noting that Plus’ easy-to-use interface would allow for better segmentation (with Circles) and could potentially be a haven for application development, free of the strict guidelines and rules of the Facebook platform.

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Grantland and the Resurgence of Long-form Content

In late 2010, rumors started to emerge that popular ESPN.com sports columnist Bill Simmons was planning a “top secret editorial project.” The initiative, shrouded in secrecy, was limited to rumors for several months, until talented writers suddenly started disappearing from popular blogs and websites.  Star writers at Vulture, Deadspin, and This Recording wrote goodbyes to their established readerships, claiming they were leaving to work for The Sports Guy. The sports and pop culture-focused site, to be named Grantland (after legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice), would be backed by ESPN, and attracted top sponsors in Subway, Lexus and Klondike. The site’s central concept would be to produce intelligent, entertaining takes on sports and pop-culture. It would do so by publishing almost exclusively long-form content, come to be known as “longreads.”

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Social Media Spotlight: World Wrestling Entertainment Understands Their Audience, Embraces YouTube

Love it or hate it, whether the wrestling is fake or real, the WWE has taken a steel chair to the status quo and demonstrated that it truly understands how their audience engages online -- by taking the lead in putting complete content on the world’s largest video-sharing site. The WWE knows that in social media, the best way to keep their fans hooked on their product is to give them as much of it as possible even if it means giving complete episodes away on YouTube. For free.

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Twitter Makes the 2009 NFL Draft A Sports Holiday to Remember

The NFL Draft is one of the most important dates on every serious football fan’s radar. No event offers a better reward for staying on top of breaking news and in-depth analysis than the NFL Draft. However, this year’s NFL Draft was different.  For the first time, the most important stories weren’t the ones written leading up to the draft – they were the ones during the draft.  The emergence of Twitter gave sports fans a chance to make the draft interactive, and they pounced on the opportunity.

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Special Olympics Uses Social Media to End the R-Word

NMS is working with Special Olympics to make Tuesday, March 31st a National Day of Awareness, where we ask ourselves and our peers to gain a greater understanding of the implications of our actions. We want Tuesday, March 31st to be a day where people take a moment to think about the weight and impact of our words.We want Tuesday, March 31st to be about respect and acceptance. On Tuesday, March 31st, we want to help end the use of the R-word – “retard” – forever. And we’re using social media to get there.

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