Sorry for the lack of 3 of the Bests! I have just returned from a lovely holiday (thanks for asking). Hope you enjoy this weeks 3 best social media stories and 3 other things to get you giggling. We have the government trying to use an online social platform to give them ideas, Twitter trying to find a revenue stream and a psychic octopus. What more could you want!

3 of the Best

Top World Cup Players on Facebook, Day by Day

I spend a lot of time looking at graphs and tables of statistics, so when I see a great visualisation of data it always grabs my eye! The NY Times have been tracking all of the World Cup players mentions on Facebook across each day of the tournament. They have then visualised it with this player graph, the bigger the player the more they were mentioned. Really interesting stuff and as this is the first World Cup since the mass popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter I would be interested to see if anyone has managed to pull out anymore interesting information.

Twitter @Earlybird

It looks like Twitter may have finally found a revenue stream of sorts. They have launched @EarlyBird a Twitter account to get exclusive timed deals and offers. It looks like Twitter will be trying to partner with big international brands to offer a few big deals a day.

It will be interesting to see how this takes off, there are currently no offers on it but it already has over 10,000 followers. In theory Twitter could expand this out and have separate Twitter accounts for music tours or clothes shopping discounts. Perhaps Twitter is finally starting to find a way of making money!

Nick Clegg calls for ideas on to laws to be repealed

The government is asking for our help and ideas on if any laws need to be repealed or abolished. Anyone can submit an idea to the Your Freedom website and the users can rate and comment on them. The idea is the government will take some of the most popular ideas and use it to inform their judgment later in the year.

They wont out right appeal the highest voted idea and in many ways that wouldn’t be the best idea. One of the highest rated suggestions is to decriminilise cannabis, it will be interested to see if the government looks at this issue or ignores it just like President Obama did when he asked for questions from the public.

I’m not saying cannabis should be re-classified but if these forms of public participation want to show they are more than just paying lip service, they will certainly need to show at least some sort of due-diligence on the most popular suggestions. Equally I hope people realise that this is to help the government make an informed decision and find potential new ideas, it is not a referendum!

3 of the Rest

Paul the psychic octopus predicts World Cup defeat for Joachim Löw

Clearly the biggest news this week was Paul the psychic octopus predicting a loss for Germany! He has been wrong before though, ironically it was also in a Germany vs Spain match. This time however he learned his lesson and backed Spain! Check out this video of how he made up his mind!

3 of the best social media stories from the past week, and 3 other things you might find quite interesting .

3 of the best

Social Media Generation Taking Online Privacy Seriously

Sounds as if not all young people are reklessley posting every last detail about themselves in easy to access public networks. I still think people in general need better education in just who can see what they are putting online, and how easy it can be to create a dossier of information on you. Lets hope the much needed Facebook privacy changes make it all easier to understand for everyone.

irkafirka illustrated tweets

There is something very endearing about these illustrations of often quite mundane tweets. What I like most is it is a very simple way of showing how messages and ideas spread online. One persons innocent innocuous tweet being picked up and turned into a lovely drawing which is then sent back out into the world. What do you think, pointless or poignant?

Be careful what you tweet

A look at some of the faces that have fallen foul to a mis-tweet or two. Learn from their mistakes! Building your online reputation takes a lot of time but it can all come crumbling down very quickly!

3 of the rest

Who You Gonna Call?

Improv Everywhere spend their time making everywhere just that little bit more fun Watch them inject a much needed dose of enjoyment into a day at the New York library.

Daily Stack

Like most people it seems I am always trying new time keeping methods. Constantly changing my to do list programmes and methods in the hope I will find something that I can stick too. This is likely just another of those things but I love the idea of making my time keeping physical and digital. Great concept, now where can I get one!

Is Parade

A very cute visualisation of your Twitter account. Watch all your followers avatars march along in honour of you…their leader. I could watch this all day .

One thing we always talk about in Social Media is personality. Personality is important, it’s what makes your outreach connect with people and feel real. It gives a face to your games company.

The brand on the front of the box still matters more than the people in the back of the manual but I see a slow change occurring in terms of people caring about who makes their games.

I expect over the coming years a shift from following publishers to following developers and in turn their employees. Paying attention to the names behind your favourite games may never be a mainstream activity but I think with the opportunity to connect through social networks it will become more important to more gamers.

Why does this matter? Because it gives people the opportunity to speak directly to their fans to build a bigger fanbase for themselves, their company and most importantly the games they create.

On Twitter Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of War) and Tim Schafer (Brutal Legend) have just under 30k followers between them. That is a lot of people to be able to access at a moments notice, to crowd-source, to excited, to engage and to listen. The pair are dwarfed by comparison to the community manager for Call of Duty, Robert Bowling, who boasts over 100k followers! Just think what you personally could do with 100,000 people available at your finger tips.

What is great about these accounts is that they are so much more personal than any company blog or website. It is a direct link between fans and creators but there is a price and expectation you will pay for that access.

If you put yourself into these places fans will demand attention, they will pester you with questions, scrutinise your every update and will all hope to become your real friend. Managing expectations comes with the territory of Social Media and while you need to be careful with what you say, don’t let protocol get in the way of making your account interesting. There is nothing worse than a social network account that simply broadcasts; if your fans wanted that they would just subscribe to your RSS feeds. What they want is to hear from you directly.

I think the more games industry professionals get into direct contact with their fans the better. Then the industry can become more about the people than the brands. We will see how the shift from brands to people continues with the recent news that former Infinity Ward studio heads, Vince Zampella and Jason West, had started a new company with EA.

As the election draws ever closer we thought we should start highlighting how social media and the internet are being used in politics. I hope you will enjoy 3 of the west(minster) and 3 of the rest.

3 of the west(minster)

Can word-of-mouth predict the General Election result?

Tweetminster looks at how social media word of mouth can be harnessed to potentially predict the general election. It will be interesting to see how their model shapes up and if it falls in line with politicians current favoured method, opinion polls.

Create Labour’s next ad campaign

Labour has opened its doors to crowd sourcing in an attempt to create some cutting and memorable campaign posters. More than just a publicity stunt this could genuinely get the labour party some really great adverts especially if they creativity on mydavidcameron is anything to go by.

Party Matcher

Yahoo offers a survey to help you find out which political party’s policies most align with your own. Not bad for those people who really don’t know where to start. Yahoo also offer a bunch of other useful tools for politics and social media, such as their Twitter map of local MPs.

3 of the rest

A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things

I often wonder if being in power can be a little boring at times. As one of the most important men in the world it is often required for Obama to be interested in everything….even dull inanimate objects. This great series of photos shows Obama in some of his finest “hmm interesting” poses.

Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor

The internet is a wonderful place full of amazing information. It is also full of weird pointless stuff. This is one of my favourite pointless things from this week, Buble being stalked by a dinosaur.

I penned the suckiest movie ever – sorry!

Some interesting insight into how one of the worst movies ever came to be. Still doesn’t explain Travolta’s weird braided nose hair though!

5 of the best social media stories of the week as chosen by the Qubite’s. Also 5 of the rest aka “The Home of amazing”.

5 of the best

Old people talking about Facebook Exodus

Apparently teenagers are leaving Facebook as it is too full of adults, who wants their mum checking their Facebook wall after all. Anecdotally I don’t see much evidence to back this up, most teenagers I know cant seem to get enough Facebook! There are also a bunch of Youtube opinion videos from teenagers for some interesting insight. One thing I would say to many of those complaints against Facebook is that it is just a tool. A tool that is only as good as what you do with it, so if someones status updates annoy you just un-friend them. (more insightful Facebook advice is available on request )

The Whuffie Bank

A virtual bank, but not for your money. The Whuffie Bank is building a new currency based on our reputations. Twitter and Facebook are making our online reputation really important, we all excerpt our own influence over groups of people in different ways. This site offers you a way of turning your reputation into a currency that can be traded and used for … well whatever someone is willing to give you for it. I first scoffed at this site and thought “It will never take off”, but then I tried to be a bit more open minded about it. The money we use today is just a system we all believe in and use, what is to say a new virtual currency couldn’t exist and do the same? Food for thought.

YouTube to introduce live sports coverage

Youtube will start showing live sports shows, only Cricket for now but this marks an interesting move for the video sharing site. Obviously this means you can watch it anywhere without a TV licence, but what does it mean for the product? One of Youtube’s main features is the ability to rate and comment. This could be the beginning of live sport becoming social in a big way.

Virtual game purchases benefit Haiti Relief Fund

The recent events in Haiti have been tragic and is something we all need to help with. Whenever such atrocities happen companies often donate large sums of money, but more importantly those companies use their influence to encourage others to help. Hugely popular Facebook game Farmville has recently added some virtual items that can be purchased to support the Haiti Relief Fund. I think this is a great idea and something all people and businesses of influence should be encouraged to do. Think about how you can use your influence to help others when they need it most.

Manchester United bans players from using Twitter

After some high profile Twitter gaffs from professional footballers Man Utd have banned their players from having a presence on social networking sites. It is a shame that the club feels the need to control the PR of their players so heavily. The nice thing about footballers being allowed to use these networks is it actually made them appear as real people, with real faults. It also gave them direct contact with the fans who help pay their wages, something that is surprisingly lacking in the modern game.

5 of the rest

Silicone ‘clay’ lets consumers modify troublesome products

If the product you bought doesn’t quite fit the bill, maybe you can customise it? This stuff looks a bit like silly putty to me, but hey maybe it is just what I need to fix my action mans broken arm.

Crayola Color Chart, 1903-2010

How Crayola’s colours have evolved over the year. I like cool looking diagrams .

Crappy Taxidermy

This is a weird and slightly creepy site. Probably not for everyone and the title pretty much says it all.

Love Money

I have been whining about lack of really good online banking tools for a while, it looks like the banks aren’t listening but at least someone is! Love Money requires you put in your account name and password (which is a little scary) but in return offers you a financial breakdown of your spending in a really useful way. You can even set personal savings goals for it to track. Definitely one to watch.

Irrational Behaviour

For anyone interesting in videogames especially those create by Ken Levine (System Shock, Bioshock, X-com) should go check out Irrational games new website and should definatly check out their new podcast. A great example of how to do a company podcast and how to make it interesting.

An hour ago the Parlaphone Twitter account announced a competition to win tickets to the Blur film premier. To win you simply have to tweet #blurfilm more than anyone else does. Queue mass #blurfilm spam tweets. Wait, why is there so much spam? Parlaphone clearly said not to spam:

The problem is the entire competition was set up in a way that will always generate spam. In order to tell all of my twitter friends about the film I just have to make one tweet….that is how Twitter works. I make one tweet and all of my followers will see it. Sending each of them a message individually is still spam and unnecessary. This should have just been a random prize draw, even a Retweet competition would be better (although still spammy!)

Parlaphone in fairness use Twitter better than most, they interact with their followers and don’t just push news through an RSS feed but this is quite a faux pas. Fortunately it only lasted an hour, however even with the competition over some users seem unaware and are still spamming away.

Naughty Parlaphone!

UPDATE: Just got sent this screen grab from the Blur Facebook page encouraging users to tweet as much as they could. The comment has been taken down now, probably because the competition is over, but maybe to hide the spammy encouragement? Conspiracy! Double Naughty Parlaphone.

5 of the best social media stories and 5 festive stories for you . This will probably be the last 5 of the best until the new year. Have a merry Christmas from all of Qube!

5 of the best

The 100 essential websites

100 websites you cant live without, really useful list. A lot of the obvious things on here like Google and Youtube, some hidden gems though are Zamzar, They Work For You and  Say no to 0870.

Blippy launches the Twitter of personal finance

Personally I feel the financial services are way behind on online technologies. Not sure I want to go as far as sharing all of my purchases with my friends, but I can see personal uses for this, or perhaps allowing a parent to monitor their child’s spending. Shame it looks American like all of these awesome online finance tools (See Mint.)

Digg Dialogg: Trent Reznor

I like this use of Social Media for doing interviews (as long as the interviewer doesn’t then selectively pick and choose which to ask) but also this interview is interesting as it shows someone who understands how the internet works and how people consume media these days.

Extreme Gaming with an Epson Projector

Viral videos give me mixed feelings. Part of me feels I am falling into a marketing trap and the other part of me goes oooOO this is clever and/or funny. This viral video is more of the latter, a clever video that did kind of make me want a projector.

Will Facebook’s privacy blunder hurt advertisers most?

There have been a lot of mixed feelings over the recent Facebook privacy settings change. Are advertisers the ones who are really going to suffer most though?

5 of the fest

Family sees red over Christmas card ‘ginger kids’ joke

Bullying isn’t really a laughing matter, but sometimes people take political correctness too far. No I am not trying to say it is fine to bully people with ginger hair, it isn’t. What I am saying is she goes a bit far when she says, “I just said there was nothing wrong with being a ginger, or a ninja for that matter.”…. Err. Weren’t ninjas highly effective, trained killers?

French Roast

Ok not quite Christmassy, but there is some snow in it. Think of this as more of a Christmas present from me to you. A truly brilliant short film.

Sketchy Santa

The internet sometimes brings us together to share beautiful moments. In this case though it shows us some of the most horrifying child experiences many of us face….a sketchy looking Santa.

Rage against the machine for Christmas number one

You cant seem to move without this being discussed on social networks! Whether or not you want to partake in this, at least it is raising money for charity and now some of the band are also donating.

NORAD santa tracking

You may have seen this before but every year the NORAD (North american aerospace defense command) track santas movements across the world. I knew he was real mummy!

Welcome to Qube’s weekly video games column. We don’t have a name yet, but that can come later . Expect news, opinions, best practice and even the odd interview all focused around social media and the games industry. Excited? Good I am too!

To kick us off I thought I would get all social media and talk about a little social network called Twitter. All the rage in 2009, but how are games companies using it and more importantly how are they using it successfully.

The great thing about Twitter is it allows direct communication with your fans. It also helps that Twitter has certainly been embraced by the more geeky among us….many of whom just so happen to like video games.

The first mistake you can make is just to set up a Twitter account and spam it with links to your games or blog. That is quite a quick way to get unfollowed and recieve a negative reaction. What you need to do is engage with your followers and keep them interested. This is as much about customer relations as it is about marketing. Here are some great examples of games companies who really get Twitter:

Media Molecule (creators of LittleBigPlanet) use their Twitter account to to talk to their fans (duh!) but they spend a lot of time responding to peoples questions and spreading their love for their fans. Fan made sites, levels and sometimes Cakes are often Re-tweeted allowing the best fan work to be shared. Obviously they spend a fair amount of time talking about their game, but this is a Twitter account where the fans come first. Some Twitter highlights from Media Molecule include co-founder Alex losing his shoes and a request for Teabags resulting in loads of them arriving at the office, that’s crowd sourcing for you!Sega are really good at keeping their fans in the loop, interacting with them and also giving them great prizes! Every Friday Sega give away a bunch of prizes to their followers. This isn’t a #moonfruit retweet spam competition, just a plain old guess the answer to our question. This is about rewarding fans and having fun not spamming people until they hate you. I also really like how they use the one Sega account for all their English speaking regions, with responsibility flicking back and forth between UK and US with the timezones. It is a really great way of keeping the community together. Good work Sega!

Major Nelson, Director of Programming for Xbox Live, uses his Twitter account (and other social media profiles). Obviously this man is in a privileged position to Tweet out great content and news before anyone else, but what is really important is that he uses his Twitter account just like anyone else. There are plenty of tweets about Xbox sure, but he also tweets about his personal life. Keeping your Twitter account Human is so important, fans will engage so much more if they feel there is a nice person at the end of their @ replies.

Also big ups to @InfinityWard, @capcom_unity, @LucasArtsGames for creating top quality Twitter profiles too. If you want to find other games industry people on Twitter you should check out @samhouston‘s list over at GameIndustryTweet

Ten top quality stories (hopefully) half on social media and the general online world we work in….the other a mish-mash of silly, brilliant, funny, exciting, surprising and cute stories (again…hopefully)

5 of the best

Social Media Spins Into Specialization

An example of all the different services and businesses that offer Social Media in some form or another.

Oddities of outreach…

I love this quote “An outreach program should have only one objective; can I make these people fall in love with what we’re doing?” The reason the best advice in social media is to make great content and be honest is because it works! Great read.

Henry 8.0 – The Book of Faces

This is a bit hit or miss and it’s only real saving grace is Blessed. Still worth checking out though, they are all pretty short .

Just Married: Groom Changes Facebook Relationship Status at the Altar [VIDEO]

I am quite a big geek, and I think geeky things like “Should I give my child a fairly unique name so they can get the URL and a good Google rank easily”. However there is no way I am geeky enough to want to update my social networks at the altar!

Google to limit free news access

Looks like Google were the first to blink in the free news war of words with Murdoch. You can see what this is all about in a previous 5 of the best.

5 of the rest

The End Of The CrunchPad

I didn’t even know I wanted this until I found out it no longer existed. I assume $300 would translate to £300 but that would still be an amazingly cheap device considering the alternatives (which there aren’t really many of .) Fingers crossed this will flicker back to life.

Twitter Creator Launches ‘Square’ — Like Smartphone Paypal for Credit Cards

My favourite bit of how this works: “In order to accept credit card payment using Square’s iPhone app, a merchant attaches a card-reading dongle to the smartphone’s audio input — or “any device with an audio input jack.” Once the customer signs the phone with their finger, the transaction is complete, after which the app can e-mail a receipt to the customer:” Very clever! On a similar note I predict the next iPhone will have an RFID tag and allow payments oyster card style.

Christmas Cupzilla Cupcake

Feeling festive? Nothing is more festive than eating a Christmas cake..probably.

Saving Private Robin?

Robin Williams hasn’t really made me laugh in a while, but this was really funny.

Ministry of Sound To Take Over London’s Jubilee Line

This might just be so uncool that it is cool!

5 of the best

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened

This is a really amazing story. Have you ever thought about how secure your life is online and how much people can learn about you? It’s a bit of a read but well worth the time!

Twitter: Small Games for Simple Purposes

Some interesting and outside the box thinking on how you can use Twitter.

Ikea invents Facebook tag marketing

I’m not sure if Ikea really invented tagging people in pictures that aren’t them, but this is the first commercial use I have seen of it. What do you think, clever marketing or spammy idea?

Crowdsourcing Business Documents

How do you collaborate with your clients to deliver exactly what they want?

Social Media Needs To Become a Team Sport

I think too often emphasis is placed on one person running or controlling all of a companies social media. Just like you wouldn’t have a call centre with one member of staff maybe it is time to start thinking about the real resources good social media needs.

5 of the rest

Cutthroat Capitalism: The Game

Do you have what it takes to be a pirate in this day and age? Tom made $12m profit as a Somalian pirate on a lunch break…I challenge you to beat it!

What is Google Chrome OS? (Explained by Google)

Personally I am not sold on Chrome OS yet, however I do love the videos Google makes.