Social Media Revolution

Have you seen this video? It was published on 30 July 2009, and has been viewed 2,015,452 times to date. It reveals some interesting statistics, and I think it’s worth spending a few minutes to watch.

Soccer World Cup with Google Maps and Street View

Google has launched Street View in South Africa, so you can now see your favourite World Cup stadiums and city hotspots online. The image above is from Google Maps, and shows Green Point’s Main Road, with the Cape Town Stadium in the background. Truly magnificent! Of course, license plates and people’s faces are blurred to avoid privacy issues. What is interesting though, is that I’ve seen company signage on cars and this of course cannot be hidden. Try Street View for yourself, but I warn you, it’s addictive. Images are not live, and they’re not current, they can be up to a few months old. So there’s no need to worry about stalkers and the like. This is simply an archive of street imagery that Google has been collecting for a very long time. The launch of Street View is a real big shift for us in South Africa – and I’m very excited about it.

This Google video explains Street View adequately, and towards the end of it you’ll see imagery from Cape Town, which feels nice, I must say.

Are you a mobile user? This video explains Street View for mobile:

If you want to be creative during the World Cup season – or really at any other time – Google allows you to create your own Google Map with a tool called MyMaps. It’s really very simple to do, and it can be done in just minutes. Look at this short video to see how it’s done:

CleverPete has made his MyMaps public. He’s done the Waterfront bus route in Cape Town. Check it out here. This map was created a while ago, but it’s now very interesting because Street View has been activated.

Try Street View by clicking this link.

Brady Corporation goes Google Apps

Brady Corporation has recently adopted Google Apps as their communication and collaboration suite. Small businesses, large corporations, and even cities like Los Angeles, California have shifted to Apps. Read this interesting post: The City of Los Angeles uses Google Apps.

Brady Corporation is a $1.2 billion international manufacturer and marketer of complete solutions that identify and protect premises, products, and people. They have 7,800 employees across 90-plus locations.

Google Apps is a Cloud-based solution, so deploying to users in a single location is the same as deploying across multiple locations. There are no hardware and networking infrastructure concerns. Everything is online. Simple.

Brady says:

“We went with a “Big Bang” rollout for our 6,000+ users, and it’s been a great success. We chose Google Apps for cost savings over other solutions, but more importantly because we believe it’s the strongest platform to take advantage of future advancements on the Internet.”

To share their story they’re hosting the following webinar:
Choosing Google Apps as the Best-in-Class Cloud Solution
Thursday, June 10, 2010
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

Where are your videos?

We spoke to a company today about doing Event Coverage for their workshops. They responded by saying that they have an internal video team. Good. Where do they publish their videos? On their website. Good? Not really.

Firstly, their website is completely built in Flash. Flash is yesterday. Ask Steve Jobs. Then, the videos on their website do not play. They have a video player, but clicking play does not seem to feed the video. That’s one of the many disadvantages of hosting your own videos. That’s yesterday too. Online video hosts such as YouTube are where videos should be. Online video hosting means no strain on your own servers, and you also have the advantage of reaching the huge YouTube community, as well as the opportunity for others to embed your videos into their websites. Viral possibilities. Powerful! CNN, The White House, and BMW would not have their own YouTube Channels unless they saw the value of the platform.

I can’t find this company on Facebook, nor on Twitter. Maybe they’re there, hidden? Their website doesn’t have links to these social networks either. Sad.

This company is doing stunning work, but they fail to see the value of Social Media.

We don’t need YouTube. We have our own website. We have our own web servers. CNN has their own news network. Yet they’re on YouTube. And on Twitter. And on Facebook. I think that’s worth considering.

What are you doing online? Are you ‘playing’ where your potential clients are ‘hanging out’ – or is your head still somewhat stuck in the sand? Is control still the highest priority for you? Even when it damages your brand?