Advertising Age - The Media Guy

Who Got the Biggest Twitter Lift From the Oscars?

The trend lines on tweets that name-check the Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Film nominees basically go from flat line to huge spike to flat line again. One exception: Sandra Bullock.

Do People Tweet About Brands More Out of Hate Than Love?

The presence of two media brands -- the BBC and BET -- on this week's Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart raises some interesting questions about why people tend to tweet about brands.

How to End the Recession: Agricultural Subsidies for Facebook FarmVille Farmers!

The Facebook Generation is ready, able and eager to work. How else to explain that 81,125,786 users (as of this writing) are tilling the fields of their virtual Facebook farms on at least a monthly basis?

Google Drinks Your Milkshake! It Drinks It Up! But How Much Do We, as Consumers, Care?

Basically, in the Information Economy, Google pretty much feels entitled to eat just about anyone's lunch. If you're in a line of business that's at all connected to information, Google wants in on your action.

In Twitterlandia, Sarah Palin Is Crushing Limbaugh and Beck

Sarah Palin's Tea Party conference appearance, as you'd expect, caused the biggest recent spike in her Twitter profile: 49,397 tweets name-checked her Feb. 7, vs. just 11,277 for "tea party" itself. Palmgate -- the revelation that Palin wrote crib notes on her hand, seventh-grader style, to remind her of her own talking points during her Q&A session at the conference -- helped keep Twitter abuzz, whereas normally you'd expect a steep drop-off once she was offstage.

Top 10 Names Rejected in the Comcast/Xfinity Rebranding

Comcast is drawing snickers from all quarters for its announced rebranding -- which officially starts rolling out this week -- to Xfinity.

Super Bowl's Twitter Winners? Coke, The Simpsons, Brett Favre, Betty White ...

An informal review of sentiment -- conducted by checking the 50 most recent tweets that name-checked both a given brand and its associated celebrity (e.g., Megan Fox and Motorola) -- suggests that, at least with this subset of Super Bowl spots, consumers were mostly very happy with the match-ups.

What Will Happen to Media When All the Billionaires Bail?
If you're a certain sort of still-employed media person, you're probably wondering how much longer you can hold on to your job. But the larger question might be: Just how unreal -- illusory, delusional, unmoored from the realities of the marketplace -- has your job been all along?

I Swear to Good You Are God at This

San Diego-based Holiday Matinee is a lot of things: for starters, a creative cooperative, a marketing consultancy and a design shop, with a zesty roster of clients over the past decade including W Hotels, Zappos.com, MTV and Urban Outfitters. It's also a trend-spotting blog, an eco-conscious purveyor of fashion ... and now a book publisher.

Obama Introduces iPad, Steve Jobs Gives State of the Union Address ...

Apparently the president of the United States is giving some sort of speech later. But that hasn't stopped Steve Jobs from briefly overtaking him once already today as a Twitter trending topic.

Should President Obama Fire Jeff Zucker?

My fellow Americans, I say: It's time to rise up and refuse to sit back while Jeff Zucker continues to destroy a great American media company and its broadcast franchises. It's time for an intervention -- an intervention of the very highest order!

What Would Happen if 'The Situation' Wore His Pants on the Ground?

Because pop-culture junkies cannot live by Lenogate alone, this week's Trendrr chart -- possibly the most important Trendrr chart in the history of Trendrr charts ever -- takes a look at Twitter buzz surrounding something other than Coco and The Chin.

The Best New Pop Album of the Year, So Far

My love for Vampire Weekend hasn't dimmed at all in two years -- and now it's suddenly stronger, thanks to the release of their new album.

Wait, What if Leno Doesn't Have Enough Fans Left to Retake 11:35?

Never mind Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and Jenni "J-Woww" Farley of MTV's "Jersey Shore." The real action in the reality-TV genre is playing out over at NBC, with Conan "Coco" O'Brien, Jay "The Chin" Leno and Jeff "The Biggest Loser" Zucker supplying us all with endless drama, laughter and tears. (What should we call it? "Network Rehab"? Paging Dr. Drew.)

Be Honest: What's Your Real Twitter and Facebook ROI?

Facebook and Twitter are, of course, increasingly trying to prove that they can be real, self-sustaining businesses with meaningful revenues, and maybe even consistently positive cash flow. Good for them! But what about the rest of us -- the great unwashed masses of social-media addicts? What are we getting out of the deal?

Have You Read Ken Wheaton's New Book About Event Marketing?

You're maybe a little suspicious that for the first Media Guy's Pop Pick of 2010, I'm plugging (and giving away two copies of) "The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival"a new book by Advertising Age's Ken Wheaton. Probably you're thinking: Doing a solid for a colleague, eh? Well, no.

Google's Latest Triumph: an Apple Beatdown That's Not iPhone-related

The buzz about Google's Nexus One phone has been so deafening that maybe you missed a bit of news about the Big G's minor triumph in another area: Its new-ish web browser, Chrome, became the third-most popular browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox this past weekend. Which brings me to this week's Trendrr chart.

In Trying to Buy Yelp, Google Is Becoming ... Yep, a Media Company
Google, despite its protestations to media companies that it is here to help them, not compete with them, is officially becoming a media company.

A 'Mad Men' DVD Giveaway

For the 11th day of my 12 Days of Holiday Giveaways -- a share-the-love round-up of some of my favorite media of the year -- I'm giving away two copies of (you saw this coming, right?) "Mad Men: Season 2", which was released as a box set this summer. And for the 12th and final pick of my 12 Days of Holiday Giveaways: "Mad Men: Season 3" (which !

The Best Magazine Anthology of the Year

Vice came to its current position of global cultural influence (it's now published in 22 countries): by being a damn good magazine that's only gotten better with age, and its "News, Nudity & Nonsense" is my choice for The Best Magazine Anthology of the Year. Maybe you want one of the two copies I'm giving away in my random drawing?

The Most Fascinating Album of the Year

It's been pretty much a foregone conclusion since June, when The Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" was released, that it would end up on tons of year-end "Best Of" lists, and it's my choice The Most Fascinating Album of the Year. Maybe you want one of the two copies of "Bitte Orca" (in your choice of physical CD or digital download) I'm giving away in my random drawing?

Happy Avatar Day, America!

Wait, are you reading this at your office? What are you doing at work?! Don't you know that, if you live in the United States, this is an off-day? A bill was rushed through Congress earlier this week declaring today Avatar Day, a new national holiday, so that Americans can rush out to see matinees of "Avatar," the most-hyped movie of the year, before seeing it a second time tonight, because it's so amazingly good you have to see it twice. This week's Dumenco's Trendrr chart aims to see just how chatty the Twitterati were about James Cameron's new masterpiece.

The Sweetest New Sitcom of 2009

I didn't want to leave "Modern Family" off of my year-end giveaways list just because the "Modern Family" Season 1 box set doesn't yet have an official release date. So if you enter my random drawing for one of two box sets, you'll just have to be patient.

What the Trend?'s Top 50 Twitter Topics of the Year

What the Trend?/Twitter Zeigeist 2009, presented here as a barebones list. But I encourage you to check out the heavily annotated list, which appears on What the Trend's site here.

The Mascot of the Year

I'm giving away a T-shirt that features My Favorite New Licensed Character of the Year: Angry Panda.

The Most Awesome TV-Show Box Set of the Year

Today's giveaway? SpongeBob SquarePants! About time, right? If you haven't yet celebrated Spongebob's first decade -- Nickelodeon's undersea icon turned 10 this year -- the best way to do it is by scheduling a bunch of marathon viewings of the 14 discs contained in "SpongeBob SquarePants: The First 100 Episodes".

Book of Tens: Epic Media Feuds of 2009

What a year for feuds. With Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston both trying to get air time, the meltdown of the Gosslin marriage, and The White House declaring war on Fox News, much of what we read and watched was a vesion of "he said, she said." Here's the 10 most annoying spats of the year.

Sue Sylvester vs. Don Draper: A Twitter Beatdown

I thought I'd quantify the rather impressive impact of Gleeks (as fans of "Glee" call themselves) in the Twittersphere -- and, to put things in context, I decided to compare the "Glee" Twitter trendline with that of another media-world (and personal) TV favorite, "Mad Men."

The Most Twitter-Worthy Sitcom of the Year

"Glee" is my pick for the Most Twitter-Worthy Comedy of the Year. Maybe you want one of the two copies of "Glee, Vol. One: Road to Sectionals" (out on DVD Dec. 29) that I'm giving away in my random drawing?

The Blog-to-Book Book of the Year

What are holidays without food? Specifically, bad food -- or at least food that's bad for you? I didn't want to be sending any fruitcakes in the mail (plus, calling a fruitcake a form of media is a stretch even for me), so instead I've picked a, uh, cook book: "This Is Why You're Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks."