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

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.

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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.

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by Brian Solis, originally published at PR 2.0

To bypass the background story and skip straight to the instructions for Twitter Bowl, click here.

In 2008, Jeremiah Owyang had a great idea to extend the conversation about Super Bowl ads from my living onto Twitter. Chris Heuer, Stephanie Agresta, Darryl Siry, Ben Metcalfe, Eric Gonzales, and I quickly supported the idea and set up a series of Twitter stations to kick things off. Josh Bernoff of Forrester analyzed 2,500 tweets and organized the results into an impressive ratings summary. That was the beginning of #superbowlads on Twitter.

This year, we will continue the tradition of rating the Super Bowl ads on Twitter, but with a small twist – one that hopefully makes Josh Bernoff’s life a little bit easier. Unfortunately Jeremiah and Shirley are returning from Hawaii, so I had a different idea to get us back into the game, while contributing and showcasing the results in real time.

This year, we’ve also rallied the support of Louis Gray, Guy Kawasaki, and Jesse Stay, founder of SocialToo. Since Twitter is rooted in public interaction and provides the ability to extend its functionality, I wanted to find a Twitter application that would allow us to not only monitor discussions and ratings related to #superbowlads, but also provide the ability to capture and present votes.

SocialToo is a suite of productivity solutions for Twitter and other social networks. It’s most notable and unique feature is SocialSurverys, providing the ability to create elegant polls that can be shared across multiple networks (provides for automatic distribution through Twitter) and tracked in one central location for analysis.

Introducing the Second Annual Twitter Bowl…

Your hosts:

Jeremiah Owyang – @jowyang
Chris Heuer – @chrisheuer
Louis Gray – @louisgray
Jesse Stay – @jesse
Guy Kawasaki – @guykawasaki
Yours Truly – @briansolis

How to Play:

- If you don’t already have a Twitter account, join here.

- Vote for your favorite ads here and share the following link with everyone you know (do so often): http://poprl.com/FmN

- Discuss and rate each of the Superbowl ads on Twitter. Be sure to add “#superbowlads” to your Tweet.

That’s it!

Enjoy the game and follow the conversation. We’ll publish the final stats and compare the how Twitter compares to mainstream polls.

Don’t forget, share this link! http://poprl.com/FmN

For more on the subject, please read:

Louis Gray

Jeremiah Owyang

SocialToo Blog

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by Brian Solis

Microsoft Startup Zone, in partnership with Stephanie Agresta and yours truly of The TechSet, hosted a special event for tech innovators in Silicon Valley and San Francisco to celebrate the launch of BizSpark, a new program designed specifically for those who contribute to a dynamic ecosystem that helps startups flourish.

While glamorous and absolutely one of the best stops on our four city tour, it was also bitter sweet. San Francisco was the last Ignition event of the current series that spotlighted and introduced us to amazing entrepreneurs, founders, leaders, and influencers in Austin, New York and Los Angeles.

Ignition-San Francisco was hosted 52 floors above San Francisco at The Carnelian Room. The view and the company was nothing less than incredible.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story…

Transamerica Building

Stowe Boyd and Jeremiah Owyang

Krystal Ariel

Karl Long

Shobeir Shobeiri

Nick Starr

Carl Heiney and Scott Beale of Laughing Squid

Dan’l Lewin

Kedric Van De Carr

Scott Stanfield

Shaherose Charania

Anand Ayer

Daniel Riveong

Jackie Danicki

Cathy Brooks

Anthony Ha of VentureBeat

Oren Michels of Mashery

Chris Heuer

Karen Hartline

Tara Hunt

Arad Rostampour, Brian Solis, Rebecca Woodcock

Stephanie Agresta and Jacob Mullins

Christopher Peri

Adam Jackson and Marissa Louie

Kristin Kueter and Cathy Brooks

Arad Rostampour, Anand Iyer, Jacob Mullins

Dale Larson & Adam Jackson

Dave Mathews of Boxee

For more pictures from Ignition-San Francisco, visit my album on flickr.

If you’ve missed our previous events, you can relive the experiences below:

New York

Austin

Los Angeles

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