Yesterday, we bore witness to one of the greatest sporting events in the history of the modern age. A clash of titans, as it were…the New York Giants slugged it out against the New England Patriots and emerged to come out victorious in what is now being called the most-watched television program in US history and also the highest-rated Super Bowl in 26 years! Congratulations to the New York Giants!

But while we remember the game, let’s not forget all the other news that are happening around the Internet simultaneously as the big game. Not only was this the first time the Super Bowl was livestreamed on the Internet to mobile and tablet devices (leading to more viewership, I’m sure), there seemed to be a greater play on social media by not only the NFL and the NBC Network, but also advertisers too. Twitter reported today that the service set a record for the most tweets sent per second (TPS): 12,233 tweets! That’s an amazing amount since in 2008 during the Super Bowl, it was 27 TPS, and in 2011, it was 4,064 TPS. Of course, this massive record of tweets per second occurred during the last three minutes which is when Twitter says an average of 10,000 TPS were sent. But what does this all translate into? Well during the Super Bowl, there were 13.7 million related tweets sent out during the five hour game. These numbers are absolutely staggering!

And what about the other part of the game? The so-called “Brand Bowl”? Well some of them did very well in terms of the conversation, but it’s a bit of a mixed reaction. First, let’s see which of the brands succeeded in getting the most comments:
 In Advertising Age this morning, Bluefin Labs analyzed data of all the television commercials to see which one of them earned a spot in the top 10 highest rated spots with the most response. It should be noted that Bluefin only reviewed content pushed on two major networks: Twitter and Facebook. I wonder how these would be changed with Google+ or on social sporting networks like on OnShare?

Regardless, each ad was tracked for 45-minutes after it began to air and what’s surprising is that one of the first commercials to air during the game was the David Beckham H&M underwear commercial and received 108,914 comments – a sign that the first is the best? Either that, or sex sells…

Not surprising, Chrysler’s hit ad featuring Dirty Harry himself, actor/director Clint Eastwood in “It’s Halftime in America” was a rousing success with over 95,000 comments and came in second. It was definitely one of the big winners of the evening and people are STILL talking about it today! But nowhere on this list was the GoDaddy commercial – perhaps a sign that after years of the racy ads, the public is getting tired about ripping on them and decided there’s much more worthy commercials to talk about?

Perhaps the biggest stumble in the “Brand Bowl” this year was the use of the hashtag in commercials. In light of the McDonald’s hashtag debacle, it might not have seemed good to throw out a hashtag unless you were 100% sure that your commercial would ellicit the response you were hoping for. Some had a pretty good chance at positive reactions, like the Audi vampire commercial (#solongvampires) and the Bud Light Platinum (#MakeItPlatinum), but then there were others like GE’s commercial with the hashtag #whatworks — a friend of mine said that he would tweet out “#whatworks not this commercial”. Hashtags were genuinely a gamble for advertisers in an attempt to get into the social scene.

But did advertisers really embrace the role of social media this Super Bowl? According to the Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Solis, maybe not and they’ve discovered five interesting trends out of the 87 advertisements:

• Brands heavily invested in promoting their traditional websites
• Many did not promote a call-to-action
• Only a sixth of ads explicitly promoted social media
• Hashtag marketing emerged to stimulate continual engagement
• Cutting edge marketers teased with new marketing tactics, including Shazam

So while I think that the hashtag attempt on commercials was a fumble, it’s a trend of the Super Bowl nevertheless. But is anyone still surprised at any of these trends? The website is here to stay and advertisers will continue to push people to them just like they asked them to call their 800 numbers for several decades. There are a few risky marketers who will ask people to tweet at them using the hashtag, but if anything, the Super Bowl is showing us that advertisers are starting to be a slightly bit more innovative in how they reach people, especially on television. Just take a look at this breakdown from the Altimeter Group:

Maybe the 32% of brands during the Super Bowl were airing ads more as brand promotion, but the question is why aren’t you giving your customers something more to take away from it? Even those commercials that asked viewers to use Shazam were giving them a song that would forever be associated with their commercial (lasting branding) and also invited them to rate their commercial (feedback), but by not doing anything like that leaves much to be desired.

So I leave you with this fascinating tip from the Altimeter Group report: promoting traditional websites still king with brands while social integration is “nascent”. Yes, that’s right…brands seem to be gun-shy at using social media to help converse with their customers and the viewers. If anything, the most successful commercials from last night will become viral and people will be talking about it. But will the brands actually be listening?

Photo Credit: Football field by Juggernautco/Flickr

Earlier this year, renowned author and industry thought-leader, Charlene Li started a new type of agency, called the Altimeter Group, that would be centered on providing a “pragmatic approach to emerging technologies in companies”. It has since evolved to move from a single person team to one of the most influential and talented groups in the tech scene. Joining Li are Forrester Research alumni including Jeremiah Owyang, Deb Schultz and Ray Wang.

To help mark this special occasion, the team at Altimeter Group threw open their doors for an open house to welcome their friends, clients and fans. Affectionately known as “The Hangar”, the new spaces include offices, a conference center, a lecture-style room for presentations and a cafeteria to allow for catering during special events. One of the traditions also being started when you visit The Hangar is to have your photo taken using a old-school Polaroid camera that will then be posted on the wall for all to see.

Here are some of the photos of the evening:

Welcome to the Altimeter Group’s Open House. Ready for lift-off!

Sam Levin and Daniel Brusilovsky

Vanessa Camones, Jeremiah Owyang & Janetti Chon

Kevin Marks & Charlene Li

The Altimeter Group: Ray Wang, Deb Schultz, Charlene Li & Jeremiah Owyang

You can view more photos from the Altimeter Group open house by clicking here.

Reporting live from the Altimeter Group’s offices, dubbed the Hangar, in San Mateo California. Yes, it’s now on FourSquare!

As reported earlier, Charlene Li announced the addition of Jeremiah Owyang, Ray Wang, and Deb Schultz to the team.

I was invited to stop by and help them celebrate the grand opening (albeit unofficial) debut of The Hangar. I brought the camera, so I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story…

For more pictures of The Hangar, please visit my album on Flickr.

Connect with me on:
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Sourced from PR 2.0

Today, Jeremiah Owyang is officially announcing that he’s joining Charlene at Altimeter. However, he’s not alone in this endeavor. Deb Schultz and Ray Wang are also joining the Altimeter team.

The Altimeter Group creates a bridge between businesses and emerging technologies.

The theme of the all star team is captured in the following statement, “The future of business requires a holistic approach to adapting and integrating emerging technologies.”

According to Charlene Li, “Ray, Jeremiah and Deborah are among the top experts in their respective fields,” said Charlene Li, founding partner of Altimeter Group. “Individually, they bring unmatched expertise to their roles with the firm, and collectively they are unstoppable professionals with the passion and prowess to advance entire industries through the innovative application of technologies to achieve business goals. Altimeter Group’s clients will benefit tremendously from their guidance and counsel.”

Altimeter will focus on the following four sectors, orbiting each client:

Leadership and Management – Charlene Li

Enterprise Strategy – Ray Wang

Innovation & Best Practices – Deb Schultz

Customer Strategy – Jeremiah Owyang

Companies often implement technologies without a clear view of how they fit into and support corporate goals. They thus end up with a bunch of point solutions, but no strategy — and worse, no results. Altimeter Group helps companies focus on the strategic goals they want to achieve, and then figure out which technologies can help them achieve those goals.

Essentially, the team is building a strategy consulting firm, which serves as a veritable Justice League for emerging technologies and not necessarily traditional research. In fact, the company maintains a steadfast policy and position that it will continue to recommend clients to Forrester for research and analysis.

Jeremiah shared his enthusiasm with me recently, “Altimeter is a small agile strategy consulting company that can bridge the gap between what the cool kids are doing and where brands know they need to be. As an analyst, I spent two years surveying the landscape. This is a clear opportunity and I’m going for it.”

Indeed the company is focused on helping companies adapt to compete not only for today, but also for the future.

The problem they’re addressing is common. Companies don’t necessarily have an integrated process for integrating and adopting new technology.  While this term is technically utilized when describing the integration of a person onto a team, Altimeter facilitates seamless “onboarding” of technology, solutions and services into the mix in order to achieve a desired result while rallying the team and processes in order to do so without the usual friction.

Altimeter creates a pragmatic process for companies.

The company also built a physical lab, dubbed the Hanger, in San Mateo where clients can safely learn about and experiment with new technologies prior to official adoption. It is at The Hanger, where Altimeter Group will host community events, training, and “unconferences” that provide experimentation, learning, and sharing around emerging technologies.

Perhaps most interesting is the team’s approach. Jeremiah compared Altimeter to a general contractor who lays out the blueprints and then find and assembles the best, most efficient contractors to do the work. Therefore the group is also implementing an innovation network to unite technology and marketing experts to participate with clients to collaborate, education, and execute.

Deb Schultz

I gave Deb a quick phone call to congratulate her while she’s traveling. Deb and I have collaborated over the years on helping shape and launch significant startups in Silicon Valley and Israel. She shared a few thoughts, “I’m passionate about emerging technology on the Web and its affect and impact on business processes and culture. I intend to help see these technologies flourish and in doing so, connect them to the businesses that can most benefit in an environment conducive for active and practical learning. This is about innovating on all sides of the equation.”

For more, please read the press release.

Update:

The Altimeter group is hosting an upcoming Webinar and discussion on “The Future Of Business.” Each partner will provide their unique perspective on how business needs to adapt to the challenges presented by emerging technologies, followed by an open discussion within the Webinar as well as on Twitter.

When: Thursday, September 10, 2009 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT

Register here.

For more pictures from the event, please visit my set on Flickr.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, or Facebook

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