Speaking of managing social media...

Ashton Kutcher, the actor who's known as the dude that was looking for his car in the film Dude, Where's My Car? and the not-too-bright youngster in That 70's Show is also an active investor in the startup scene and has a pretty impressive count of over eight million Twitter followers.

That eight million just backfired in a big way when Ashton came home last night and sent out a casual tweet commenting a news headline about a college football coach being fired. Turns out the coach had been involved in covering up an incident of sexual abuse of a minor and Ashton got a lot of heat for standing up to the guy - without actually checking the story behind the headline.

What's interesting in this as far as social media is concerned is the conclusion Ashton Kutcher comes to and describes in an apologetig blog post: he declares that Twitter has become a mass publishing platform that's too big for him to handle and hands the control over his account to his PR firm.

Social TV Trends

As I've been working the last year in the mobile department of a TV broadcaster in Germany one of my biggest fields of work was Social TV and how to engage the audience while watching TV. Here are some of the trends and applications out there in the field of Social TV I want to share with you guys.

One of the key players in the area of Social TV is Twitter. More and more TV shows integrate hashtags in the program or try to get into contact with the audience while watching the show. This video gives a really good of example of what I'm talking about:

In the area of Social TV more and more "social check-in" services appear giving users the possibility to check into different types of media, but especially TV shows and movies, like foursquare or Facebook Places allow you to check into locations. Sharing what you're watching and what you think about the show is becoming more important especially in the USA. The two big players in this area are GetGlue and Miso.

GetGlue is one of the biggest services with over one million users especially in the US and a broad field of cooperation with TV networks, movie studios and other content creators. The users are rewarded for checking in with stickers most of them provided through the several content providers.

Miso on the other hand focuses more on TV giving the possibility to check into individual episodes of TV shows or matches of your favorite soccer team. The start-up that is also funded by Google Ventures is trying to expand it's functionality through syncing with your set-top box:

Another kind of applications is represented through Shazam and IntoNow. The first one got famous through the possibility to tag music you discover and is also expanding this into the TV program. But more importantly Shazam is teaming up with more and more TV stations to create the ability to tag TV series and thereby unlock additional content of the TV show.

IntoNow is a very young start-up that despite this fact has been acquired by Yahoo after 12 weeks of existence in the spring of 2011. With the help of IntoNow's Soundprint technology built into their application the user can check into nearly every program avaible even live programs like sports events. The app listens for some seconds to the TV program and compares the recording through digital watermarks with the live recordings in their database to determine what the user is watching. IntoNow created a very nice use case with Pepsi to show the marketing possibilities and with the support of Yahoo released a new version of their app for iPad and Android devices just yesterday.

Here is another very good video on the future of Social TV:

GOAB. A TV Experience Concept from SYZYGY on Vimeo.

And one of the best blogs on the topic is lostremote, for everyone who might be interested in more information and use cases.´

That's enough input for one, but what do you guys think? Is there a future for Social TV and how might this future look like?

Making Twitter favorites useful

I used to have a hard time figuring out what to do with the favorites function on Twitter. I used to favorite posts to save them for checking out later but rarely actually did anything about them afterwards.

There's a new service (in beta, of course) called Stellar that tries to make the favorites useful. It aggregates your favorites from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. You follow people to see what they find funny or interesting and if you happen to favorite their favorites they're gonna get updated as your favorites back to their originating services.

I've found it a pretty good way to find interesting things to read and watch for those rare moments you need to kill some time. It might be that I'm following the right people and not too many of them, who knows how useful you'll find it. If you wanna try it out I happen to have two invites. Just comment on this post with your email address and I'll send an invite your way.