OK our latest installment to Sony Football Asia – introducing the KICKATHON. Can you kick your way to South Africa? Well if you can there are some 2010 World Cup tickets in it for you – check it out here.

Want the ultimate football experience in your living room? Check out our latest Sony HD World football centre and get your creative juices flowing.

Wired.com heads to San Francisco’s Exploratorium to see four exhibits that explore the effects of visual illusions and perceptual phenomena.

After weeks of hard work our new campaign for Royal Caribbean is now live, thank you to all involved. Get your creative juices flowing and design your very own “Dreamship” for the chance to win a Royal Caribbean cruise. Of course it’s up to the public so instead of our lame creations taking top honors get building now!

Just launched!

Now some of us fashion misfits at XM did not make the cut (Regina sets a high bar). So if you are cooler then the usual mob and like to showcase your style to the world then hit our new DKNY “Break the rules” competition for your chance to win a cool USD$2000 per week.

Spread the word!

http://www.dknyjeansintl.com/breaktherules/

In my previous article on Facebook’s usage in Asia Pacific, I compared Facebook with Kaixin001 and Xing in China. But it turns out that there are even bigger social networks in the Middle Kingdom. (Which just goes to show that if you aren’t as tuned into a particular market as you should be, you’ll miss important information!)

Thanks to a pointer at Plurk (which has since been deleted for some reason), someone mentioned that I should look at Xiaonei. That was a forehead-slapping moment! I had heard of Xiaonei, but for some reason, it didn’t cross my mind then to take a look at its usage.

That led to another forehead-slapping moment of realisation (and a really painful forehead!). I had forgotten about the other social network giant in China: QQ! QQ, of course, is more than just a social network. It has morphed into this giant portal-social network-instant messaging service, something that one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else (except perhaps in South Korea and Japan).
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Mention “social network” to anyone — especially a marketer — and you’ll probably get this response: “Facebook”. Facebook, the poster child for so-called Web 2.0 sites/services, has become so synonymous with the phrase “social network” that you will be hard pressed to think of another similar web service.

But while that may be true in a large and generally homogenous market like the United States, it does not necessarily apply in a fragmented market like the Asia Pacific. In this growing economic powerhouse, marketers have to consider the many different countries and languages, and the associated individual cultural eccentricities.
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I wrote about Cobra sometime back for monitoring brand and brand-related conversation in the online social media space. So far, Brandtology seem to provide some key differentiations. Not because it has more sophisticated technology stack, but its the use of a group of SMA ( social media analyst) to plough through machine-filtered conversations to better evaluate the sentiment and the quality of each post. As primitive as it may seems, till we can create Terminator-like type of machine, nothing can compare to a human-being “eavesdropping” on a conversation. After all, most of us understand sarcasm.

The following give an overview of Brandtology’s brand monitoring process:

Brandtology process for brand monitoring and analysis

Life in 42 seconds. Chris Milk’s entry into Beijing’s 42×42 film festival.

We are not talking about the venomous limbless scaly elongate reptile but a text analytic snake (a.k.a crawler) - COBRA (Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis). IBM’s brand monitoring tool.

The brainchild of IBM’s research and consulting team, COBRA builds on the advanced data mining capabilities of IBM to help the client keep a finger on the pulse of millions of daily digital postings. Basically, it crawls the social space where conversations took place.

I hope to get hold of the IBM folks to find more about it and how it compares to the technology of companies such as  Onalytica, BuzzMetrics, Brandtology, JamiQ and Visible Technology