If you are like me, you are pretty excited about the Academy Awards on Sunday. Upon my daily online news scan I was a little surprised to see Twitter in many of the Oscar news articles listed. It seems that social media (Twitter in particular) is predicted to be busier than usual on Sunday.

I stumbled upon this article by WebProNews and it’s an interesting read!

Okay, so I’m not really an internet superstar, but I did recently make a video with friends that “went viral” (I guess I am kind of a big deal). It all started one night, sitting at home curled up with my cats, drinking wine and watching House Hunters on HGTV. I was chatting with one of my other single friends about the wildy popular “Shit Girls Say” video. My friend says, “We should make a ‘Shit Single Girls Say’ video” and we instantly start to rattle off all of the ridiculous/sad/pathetic things we’ve said to each other over the past two years. Then, a quick text to one of our funny male friends and it was set – we were making this happen!

We had a small “production meeting” soon after, picked out locations, wardrobe, and made shot lists.  We planned to meet at 8am on a SATURDAY morning. A SATURDAY morning during CHRISTMAS BREAK. That’s how excited we were about making this video.

The whole video took about 4 hours to shoot, and about 8 hours to go through the footage, trim it down, and fine-tune it. We uploaded it on a Monday night, posted links on Facebook and Twitter, asked people to share, then we waited.

Thanks to friends sharing the link, we reached a couple hundred hits within an hour or so. I quickly developed the habit of checking the view count every few hours and immediately when I woke up in the morning. On the 2nd morning I sent an email to my video making partners titled “30100 – that’s not a zip code”. We had already received over 30,000 hits in less than 48 hours. I submitted the link to popular sites like BuzzFeed and StumbleUpon. Someone (a stranger) posted it on Reddit. It was linked to on the Huffington Post, reblogged a couple thousand of times on Tumblr, and showed up on countless other blogs. It made #3 on Adult Swim’s Internet Treasures the week it came out. Random people were making animated gifs. We kept hearing things from our friends like “one of my friends from New York just posted it on Facebook!” and “Wait, YOU did this?!” Yep, we did. The view count kept climbing.  9 days after we uploaded the video, the video hit a million views. At the time I am writing this, 21 days after uploading, we are at 3.5 million views.

I’m not dropping all of these facts to brag (I mean it is pretty awesome), but to point out how powerful social media is. We made a hilarious video but a lot of people make hilarious videos and not all of them get millions of hits. It thankfully caught on, and now I’m set for LIFE!

…Not really.

Every year MediaWeek Magazine publishes a list of what they think will be the publishers and platforms that will matter most to marketers in the coming year.  Brands such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have hit this list, some more than once, some never to appear again. As a digital marketer, the companies on this list will impact your business one way or another, many already do. Read on and see who MediaWeek thinks are the Top 10 companies that will be influencing, shaping and making the biggest splash on the digital landscape in 2011.

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While daily product deal websites like Woot have been thriving since 2004, it is the local daily deal websites like Groupon, Homerun and Living Social that have exploded on to the scene in 2010 with new ones like Kaloopa and Qponday launching each week. Shoppers can now find local deals on everything from restaurants to surf lessons and even teeth whitening.  More than just offering consumers a discount, these sites also offer shoppers a fresh take on local merchants and service providers in their neighborhoods that they might have otherwise overlooked. Shopping local daily deal websites is a great way to experience your city.

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If you attend any Digital LA events, there will be a good chance you’ll bump into some of us friendly folks from Tuesday.  The most recent session was at the Roosevelt Hotel and centered around representatives across Disney, including Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Disney Interactive Media Group, Disney-ABC Television Group and Walt Disney Studios. The focus of the panel was to discuss Disney’s initiative of franchise development over multiple platforms and how their specific business extends products through channels like online, gaming, mobile, consumer products and theme parks. They openly discussed their challenges and areas that do not make sense to explore even though they are hot items at the moment. For example, Facebook does not make sense when you are targeting children who are not on Facebook. After the discussion, the panel fielded questions for another 45 minutes and talked openly. It was an excellent session and we’re looking forward to attending the next event soon – see you there!

By Guest Blogger, Mike Cooperman

Using social media to make marketing decisions is a great idea – if you know who you’re listening to.

A few weeks back, I had to take a new headshot for an upcoming speaking engagement.  I brought two shirt and tie combinations to the shoot – a blue shirt with a pink tie and a white stripped shirt with a black tie with blue designs.

Prior to the shoot, I thought I’d conduct a little social media experiment.  So, I posted a picture of both shirt-tie combinations on my Facebook page and asked my friends for feedback.  The result? Blue shirt, but do it with the black tie (except my buddy Dan, who wondered if they could get another head – that’s what friends are for).

What’s the point? I knew I wasn’t simply asking a bunch of 18 year old goth teens for their opinions. As a result, I got good information. See More

DigitalLA hosted a crowd of nearly 300 for a recent “Movie Marketing: Online, Social, Mobile” panel on the Fox lot.  Industry experts from Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Lionsgate discussed the evolving process of integrated online marketing campaigns, the importance of online influencers and the critical need to know who your target audience is for a specific release. See More