Coke's Android-vertising

One of the things that I love about Android devices is the Live Wallpaper feature. However, but because my phone doesn't support that particular feature, I'm left to envying those that have those animated wallpapers (playing with the display devices at Best Buy).

Well, now Coke has taken advantage of Android's popular Live Wallpapers by releasing a holiday-themed Live Wallpaper of their own. The wallpaper, like all Live Wallpapers, responds to touch and movement. In this case, if you tilt your phone, it'll send a man in a shopping cart rolling across the screen. Also, if you shake your phone it will start to snow, essentially turning your phone into a snowglobe.

It's a neat idea, mostly because it's fun and well-timed with the holidays. However, I'm not sure we'll see this become a trend with other companies, because Coke has one big advantage over most other companies: cultural icon status. 

What I mean by that is that Coke doesn't just have strong brand awareness and recognition, but that the brand has extended beyond the levels achieved by most companies and has become a cultural symbol. That's why it's nice to see Coke take advantage of their status and venture into this new form of advertising.

The Lesson Any Company Can Learn from Mint.com

Mint.com has quickly become the premier financial management app for keeping track of accounts across multiple banks. And today, Mint.com announced they are partnering with educational publisher Scholastic to launch a free, online curriculum aimed at educating high school students about personal finance.

But this post isn't about fiscal responsibility (I'm by no means an expert on that subject), but rather the idea of taking on that educator role. This program is a good idea for two reasons.

1. Mint.com is directly speaking to a large age demographic (high school kids) that doesn't typically use finance-management tools. However, many high school kids have smartphones, which makes them a potential user base and a growth opportunity for Mint.com.
2. Mint.com is taking efforts to establish itself as a thought leader in both the finance and mobile industries.

That second point is the primary takeaway that we can all keep in mind. Mint.com is by far the most popular app of its kind, so in many ways it doesn't need to educate a mobile user base that typically doesn't even use their product. However, by doing so they are better positioning their brand in the public arena.

Facebook Friday: Update Oopsie Reveals Future of Facebook

The blogosphere was in a frenzy yesterday with the unceremonious and unexpected launch of Facebook's new features. There was just one slight problem...

The update wasn't supposed to happen.

Unfortunately, the new features were gone as quickly as they came, leaving the social media news giants scrambling to piece together what some off the changes were. Based on user comments and screenshots, a few things start to emerge:

• The new Pages layout, which was revealed last week, is still set happen along with the ability to switch accounts at the click of a button.
• There's a new RSS feed-like feature called "Outside World" to filter news outside of Facebook.
• There's also a new "Memories" feature that is apparently a snapshot of status updates and new friends from previous years.
• Photos are also getting upgraded with a Lightbox UI to better display photos. This feature has been alluded to before (back when Facebook upgraded its photo resolution capabilities).

Of course, because this was an accidental launch, well have no idea if/when these changes will officially take place.

But what we do know is that the old adage of "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" still rings true, because that accidental inch Facebook slipped up on has led to miles of content and speculation for blogs and news sites across the web.

Video Post: Social Media's Impact on News in 2010

For the final Daily Axioms video post of 2010, I look back at the a couple of the biggest news stories from this year and the role social media played in how we as a society viewed them. From the Winter Olympics to the Chilean miners' rescue, it was a big year in the headlines and social media had a definite influence.

What I Learned from the Science of Blogging Seminar

Last week, Hubspot's Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella) held a webinar called The Science of Blogging based on his research into blogger and blog reader habits. It was a great seminar with some eye-opening points, and if you didn't get a chance to check it out, here are some of the main takeaways.

• Analysis of 170,000+ blog posts show that links about videos get more hits than photo links. 
• However, photo links get more comments than video links. 

• Incentivizing commenting by the audience tends to work, because the word "giveaway" gets by far the most comments.

• Something to keep in mind when sharing blog posts on Facebook: As the reading level required for a Facebook post goes up, the chance it gets shared goes down significantly.

• Most blog views and links happen early in the week, but blog comments and retweets happen later in the week.
• Blog articles posted around 10am tend to get the most amount of views.
• Most re-tweets happen between 2pm and 5pm.

With the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, obviously bloggers have to keep the best practices in mind if they are going to set themselves apart from the rest.