To compete in the smart phone category with competitors such as Apple, Nokia took the help of social media to push its sales. Nokia started relying less on search engines and more on social networks.  Nokia leveraged Facebook, Bebo, and Tagged heavily.

Nokia also leveraged the power of Youtube to show off the phone’s features. Mark Loughran, General Manager, Nokia UK spoke about the product: “The Nokia N8 is a great multitasker, packed with market leading innovations, which include the best picture and video capability available on a smartphone,” but the ability for consumers to see these innovations on YouTube rather than hear about them has been a big plus.

As a result of the social push, the Nokia N8 was the fourth most searched for mobile phone for the week ending 25 September 2010.

Facebook has partnered with bing to bring your friends’ recommendations to online search. So don’t be surprised the next time you search something in Bing, your Facebook friends recommendations along with their photos show up in your search results.

Bing now uses ‘Facebook like’ to used to improve search results. When you search for a keyword in Bing, other than the normal search results, Bing also gets to you results of the keyword “liked” by your friends in facebook. This would help us in not just searching but also making decisions based on what our friends feel about the product or service. Indeed a great feature. But remember to integrate Bing with your Facebook. Danny Sullivan has  detailed information  for you.

Shrinidhi lists some of the advantages why an event should be live blogged….

• # Traditional media may not be able to cover an event live and delivers event news to public after a delay of few hours to a day. Live blogging, on the other hand can bring in instant updates and happenings of the event, both for the people attending the event as well as to those who are not able to. Conventional media (print & TV) only gives a high level reporting of the event (due to time and space constraints) while bloggers can report each activity in detail and let readers chose what they want to read
• # Live blogging ensures extended reach for an event, reaching out to those who may not be physically present but are keen to follow the developments (like what did a particular speaker say etc) Live blogging lets them follow the updates from the comfort of their office/homes.
  # Live blogging effectively documents the keynotes shared by the speaker. A journalist composing his report at the end of the day will have much less to recall vis-à-vis a blogger who blogs soon after the speaker finishes speaking
• # At most of the conferences, end of the day all discussions are forgotten and people get busy with their day to day work. Live blogging can well document the day’s proceedings and facilitate further discussion on the topic among interested individuals, even after the event.

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Foursquare is the new craze for social networking users and marketers are not far behind. Companies have started offering discounts and offers for users based on foursquare checkins. But the biggest ever opportunity on Foursquare is here.

Mazda is giving away a $15,000 car on Foursquare in the largest single prize yet on the geo-social platform. The “Inner Driver Challenge” campaign will feature soul singer Mayer Hawthorne’s tour locations and end Dec. 7.

More details here

Do watch out for Locate 2011, India’s first conference for location based services.

All of us know that Hollywood movie directors keep their ear to the tweet ground to understand the ‘pulse’ of the audience even before the movie releases. But research at Indiana University, US has proved that analyzing and keeping an ear to tweets can help you in predicting stock market fluctuations. The researches measured the ‘collective mood’ of the tweeters by analyzing 9.8 million “tweets” from 2.7 million users of the micro-blogging service during 10 months in 2008. Researchers could predict with 90 % accuracy the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and with 87.6% accuracy the he daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They analyzed the positive and negative feel of the tweets and also analyzed the mood of the tweets such as calm, alert, sure, vital, kind, and happy. The researchers then compared the sentiment to Dow Jones.  The research proved that tweets could predict the result of the stock average as early as 2 to 6 days.

Social media can next be used by stock and mutual fund companies too for appropriate management of portfolios.