Super Bowl Archive

This evening during the Super Bowl, enterprise software provider Salesforce launched their first ads for Chatter, their Twitter-like instant messaging and private group chat function. The commercials featured an animated Black Eye Peas (hot off their pretty crappy halftime show) singer Will.i.am showing off how well he can communicate with his band mates using Chatter. Much like Leena Rao, I doubt the Black Eye Peas are customers of Chatter but maybe they are!

I was actually excited to see the Chatter commercials – but they weren’t what I was expecting. Show me a work team that is able to get more work done faster so they can have their weekends off to spend with their kids – that would have been emotion (like the Chrysler ad). Show me a manager who uses Chatter and has more free time to coach his or her team.

The Howard Development blog noticed that if you search on Google for the keyword Chatter, the ads that appear are, first a Salesforce ad and second, an ad for Chatter competitor Yammer.

You can see images from some of the ads below – here’s the text from the Yammer Chatter ads:

• No More Gimmicks – Choose real collaboration and build something special with your team.
• Better Than Chatter – Strengthen your collaboration with Yammer.
• Yammer Tops Chatter – See why Yammer is best for social networking w/ coworkers.
• Your Work Isn’t Trivial – Chatter: to talk rapidly or incessantly about trivial matter.

Today is the “big game” which is more commonly known as the Super Bowl. Back during my consumer marketing days, one thing was always clear — if you didn’t pay the NFL a bucket of cash, you could never say Super Bowl in your ads – you must always refer to the football game today as “the big game”. Based on what I’ve seen with television advertising, it looks like the NFL still has the same policy today.

If you aren’t interested in watching any of the Super Bowl commercials, here are a few good readings to occupy your time. I mean since the NY Giants aren’t in the Super Bowl this year, why even bother watching…

• Why do programmers write applications and then make them free? – StackExchange
• Overloaded to Death, “Cloud” Computing is Dead – Composite Code
• Want to know why charging $12 / year converts higher than $9.99? – Mark Suster
• VC’s Are Not Your Friends – Steve Blank
• This is how you don’t give someone feedback – Greg Tracy

Disclaimer: I am a NY Giants football fan but as an international tech blogger, I have put aside any bias to compose this post and report facts accurately.

The New York Jets came close to making it to the Super Bowl today. Moments ago they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers — the Steelers will now play the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl. The real question is how did they get so close but lose the big one? The answer is simple… (I didn’t even need to ask on Quora!) they didn’t have enough social media.

Late last year I came up with a formula that I have been using to determine which team will win a particular game. I’d like to share the formula for the first time with you tonight. This formula took hundreds of hours of research and an international team of experts to compile the research. To make sure any device bias was removed, half the team used Android tablets and the other half used Windows Phones. We had to figure out which networks mattered, how they mattered, why they mattered.

The end result is the following formula:

W = fβ + my_ / cos(tm * alexa) * √ff – (tW² * Q) – YT/vid + LS½GR

Below is a graph of the W values for each of the 3 playoff games that the Jets participated in. As you can see, in games 1 and 2, they were able to keep a good level of W while in game 3, their W score dropped to a negative number which had our entire team concerned that the Jets would lose.

Continue reading “Jets Needed More Social Media” »