English Premier League: The Social Media Season

English Premier League: The Social Media Season
19/05/2012 by Sam Laird

The English Premier League is arguably the world’s most popular sports organization, and this season saw explosive growth off the pitch in the realm of social media.

Manchester City snagged its first English title in 44 years last weekend to cap off another dramatic EPL season. To recap how the league developed digitally this year, Mashable hunted down some stats. We also consulted Sean Walsh, whose blog Digital Football is a leading source on the intersection between English soccer and social media.

“EPL clubs have been criticized in the past for their out-of-date approach to social media in comparison to the youthful and creative tactics employed by U.S. franchises in the NBA and NFL,” Walsh, who’s interviewed the digital directors of several top European clubs over the past year, told Mashable in an email. “But the 2011-2012 season has seen the rise of social media in ‘the beautiful game,’ and Premier League clubs have finally begun to invest in it.”

Walsh says EPL clubs added a total of more than 17 million Facebook fans over the course of the season. In total, the league has almost 60 million Facebook likes — all the more impressive when you consider England’s total population is just over 50 million people.

So far, both the league and its individual teams have a much stronger presence on Facebook than on Twitter, where clubs count a combined following of less than 4.5 million. But the EPL’s presence is growing rapidly on Twitter as well as Facebook — Walsh counts a 126% increase in followers league-wide since last season.

Premier League side Chelsea was also involved in a piece of Twitter history recently. Its win over FC Barcelona in last month’s Champions League semifinal set a Twitter sports record of 13,684 tweets per second, eclipsing the previous record set by the most recent Super Bowl. Chelsea takes on Bayern Munich in the Champions League final this Saturday, so we’ll see if it can make Twitter history again.

Liverpool, meanwhile, became the first Premier League team to promote itself using Pinterest. The team stocked boards with historic photos, fan gear, old uniformas and memorabilia. Pinterest has become one of the newest ways sports teams around the world are seeking to leverage social media.

Among Walsh’s favorite individual digital EPL moments this year: Manchester City launching a YouTube partnership taking steps toward integrating fans’ in-person and social media experiences; Queens Park Rangers owner Tony Fernandes using Twitter to ask fans which players they wanted the club to acquire; and midfielder Joey Barton using promoted tweets to apologize to fans for being thrown out of a match.

How do you think English soccer stacks up to other pro sports in leveraging social media? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy toksuede, Flickr.

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19 Funny Reactions To The iPhone 5

19 Funny Reactions To The iPhone 5

Posted By: Editor on 09.13.12

A few weeks ago, Smosh showed you what the new iPhone 5 would be like, in the video iPhone 5 REVEALED!. Sadly, only some of those things came true when the phone was announced yesterday. However, even though the phone is not as exciting as we thought, there were still were plenty of funny reactions to it!

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Lady Gaga’s Little Sister Shines in Fashion Shoot

Lady Gaga’s Little Sister Shines in Fashion Shoot
By Kathleen Perricone | A-Line: Celebrity Style – 12-12-2012

Natali Germanotta vogues Joanne Trattoria. (Marvin Joseph/ViralFashion.com)

Natali also happens to work at Joanne Trattoria, which has been the recipient of some bad reviews (the New York Daily News deemed it "the worst thing since herpes") when she's not immersed in her fashion studies. Describing the staff — who she was photographed with — as "like a family unit" to ViralFashion.com, she added, "I do a little bit of everything and adore my family."

(Marvin Joseph/ViralFashion.com)
The fact that Natali agreed to star in this photo shoot is surprising since she's rarely seen and typically allows her sister to get all the attention. But she did accompany Lady Gaga (real name Stefani Germanotta) down the red carpet at the CFDA Fashion Awards in June 2011. Natali also starred in Gaga's 2010 music video for "Telephone," her collaboration with Beyonce.

But although the photo spread paints Joanne as an extravagant place where people come to see and be seen, that's not exactly the case, says ViralFashion.com creative director Christian Fleres. "Everything about the shoot was over the top from the oversized meatballs and the 20 pound fish on the table to the big hair and jewelry," he revealed. "We had drama in mind the whole time, for that day everyone was playing the superhero version of themselves."
Sounds like Lady Gaga would be proud!

The Germanotta Sisters. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

Source: omg.yahoo.com

Lose Something? These Tiny Stickers Will Find It

Lose Something? These Tiny Stickers Will Find It

Good news for anyone prone to losing the TV remote.

A group of developers created a series of Bluetooth-powered stickers that track down the objects you're most likely to misplace. The StickNFind stickers are about the size of a U.S. quarter and sync with a smartphone app. They have a range of about 100 feet and a battery life that reportedly lasts almost a year.

Using them is easy: The objects you tag with the stickers are displayed on the app's screen, which lets you know how far away you are from them. If you lose something that's tagged, you can tap the object on your phone's screen, and the sticker will buzz and light up.


The developers say the stickers are also handy for finding your luggage at the airport. With the "Find It" feature, you can choose which object you want to track -- in this case, your suitcase(s) -- and you'll receive an alert whenever it comes into range. So, instead of crowding around baggage claim while hundreds of bags pile up on the conveyor belt, you can relax in the back of the line until your phone buzzes.

The group behind the project is currently raising funds through an Indiegogo campaign. At the time of this writing, funding was at $93,007 -- far past its original goal of $70,000. There are still 41 days left to donate. The group expects to release its first batch of SkickNFind stickers by March 2013.

Watch the video above to learn more. Does StickNFind sound like something you'd use? Tell us in the comments below.

TOPICS: APPS AND SOFTWARE, INDIEGOGO, MOBILE ADVERTISING, MOBILE APPS, NEWSY, NO LEAD IMAGE, STARTUPS, TECH, TRACKING, TRAVEL & LEISURE, VIDEOS

Happy birthday, Mark Twain, Mark Twain gets birthday tribute from Google, Pictorial homage to Tom Sawyer graces search engine on the author's 176th birthday

Happy birthday, Mark Twain

Mark Twain gets birthday tribute from Google
Pictorial homage to Tom Sawyer graces search engine on the author's 176th birthday

Wednesday 30 November marks the 176th birthday of the great American author. What's your favourite Twainism?

Open thread
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 November 2012 17.23 GMT

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, on 30 November 1835 – 176 years ago today. Photograph: Classic Image/Alamy
As Google has noted with one of its doodles, 30 November marks the 176th birthday of the great American author, satirist and wit. He was celebrated in his lifetime for novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but if Twain himself is right that the definition of a "classic" is "a book which people praise and don't read", then it might be said that his epigrams are his most popular surviving work.

What is your favourite Twain aphorism?


Mark Twain's birthday doodle from Google.
Mark Twain's classic scene of boyhood one-upmanship, when Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him, has been immortalised online by Google's home page.

The search engine marked the 176th birthday of the American author with a Google doodle today, showing his character Tom Sawyer tempting a friend into whitewashing over the Google logo that unknown and anachronistic hands have daubed over it. In the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom is ordered to undertake the job by his Aunt Polly as a punishment. A "deep melancholy" settles upon him as he surveys the fence, "thirty yards of board fence nine feet high".

When boys begin to approach and ridicule him, Tom persuades them the work is fun. "All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer", he tells them. "I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done." They take the bait and bribe him with their treasures to let them whitewash the fence for him, as "the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by … literally rolling in wealth".

Twain, born Samuel Clemens in 1835, published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884. Ernest Hemingway said in the 1930s that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn", and the novels are still hugely popular today, with Huck Finn hitting the headlines earlier this year over an Alabama-based publisher's much-criticised decision to publish a new edition replacing the offensive term "nigger" with the word "slave".

Twain died in 1910 and remains one of America's best-loved authors. His autobiography was finally released last year: Twain had specified that it remain unpublished until a century after his death, so that he might feel free to speak his "whole frank mind" as he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent".

Google is clearly in a literary mood at present, with the Twain doodle following a celebration of Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem last week. Other authors to have been honoured by the search giant include Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Agatha Christie, HG Wells and Jorge Luis Borges.











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Nikon 1 V2 photos, videos

Nikon 1 V2 launched by Nikon
Here is photos of Nikon 1 V2