The Feedback Mobile Lab has returned (finally!) from Bonnaroo. Here at HQ, we continued to monitor Twitter feeds for ‘Roo, but those in the field have returned with video treats and observations about social media use at the festival.
Notes from the Home Front
When you think of Bonnaroo what pops into your head? Certainly not Brazil! Believe it or not, the Manchester festival seems to be quite popular in this South American country as demonstrated by the surprising number of tweets in Portuguese.
On Friday the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) posted an article entitled, “PR’s Role in Building Bonnaroo,” highlighting PR’s role in the evolution of the festival. In essence, the PRSA attempts to take credit for Bonnaroo’s success, and seems to discredit the festivals original crowd and perceived purpose. We found it comical that the article was tweeted almost a week after its posting, used poor grammar, and came out when Bonnaroo attendance was low in comparison with recent years.
Saturday afternoon’s World Cup match between the United States and England was expected to be a popular topic among festival tweeters. However, surprisingly few tweets circulated around the world’s most popular sporting event over the weekend. Much to our dismay, Bonnaroo was a little late starting the game’s live video stream, causing ‘Roo-goers to miss the opening ceremony.
The most common themes of the weekend centered around the heat and the bands. Extreme temperatures caused tweeters to vocalize their discontent, but who could blame them? On Friday, Nashville was reported to have a heat index of 100! ‘Roo goers, likewise, expressed their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with band performances on Twitter. Reviews posted by Spin! and Rolling Stone magazines were frequently linked; however, it is indescernable if this was by those at ‘Roo or those at home living vicariously through the opinion of others. Our hearts were captured by The New York Times’ “4 Word Review” – short, sweet, and simple.
Another favorite of ‘Roo fans was Aziz Ansari’s photo with Beyonce and JayZ (http://bit.ly/d5005G) is staggering with 100 retweets.
Notes from the Field
In a previous post (Feedback’s Off To Bonnaroo 2010), we mentioned some of the apps the Feedback team was would be testing in the field. Well test they did! Here are some of their findings.
The biggest issue at the festival, by unanimous vote, was cell and wi-fi service. According to Dean (@dbrowell), Bonnaroo’s problem is that it has an end customer that is savvier than they are. They need the technology to accommodate them. In spite of this, though, our field agents were able to get a pretty good idea of how some of these apps worked.
The team agreed that the official Bonnaroo app, while an improvement from last year, still has a few kinks to work out. The schedule feature worked well, but Road Trip was virtually useless. Bonnaroo radio’s purchase feature, while a good idea, was ineffective. This function could greatly benefit bands, provided Bonnaroo and Apple can get it operating next year.
In the eyes of soccer fan Jeff (@ideaman), the FIFA app worked very well. A banner for MobiTV ran across the top, and for $9.00 he was able to sign up for the service and watch live matches streamed to his iPhone.
Hot Potato, while a cool app, did not achieve the level of adoption we had hoped for. It seems we were a bit ahead of the curve on that one though, because today an updated and much more efficient version of the app is available. Another new app, FriendMapper, was interesting, but likewise had glitches. Friends have to be logged in for it to work properly because it doesn’t automatically find and geotag you. The team believes that partnering with events or vendors would likely help remedy this issue and make the app more user friendly.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for observations from the field. Feedbackers at Bonnaroo have seen some things no man should see. Stay tuned for future updates and detailed reports on the utilization and success of social media at Bonnaroo.
Before we part, we at Feedback would like to send our sincere condolences to the family and friends of Matt Sloan. His untimely death was a shock and tragedy. May his memory rock on.
— Feedback Intern Brittney Trimmer (@bntrim). Video montage edited by Feedback Intern Brad Carr (@bcarr).
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Um meme é universal/A meme is universal
by Feedbackmeme – (n.) in Internet culture, an idea that is shared digitally across a culture. Also, typically funny.
When things on the Internet spread like wildfire as they often do, we might be tempted to assume that since we – the English-speaking Americans of the world – began using the web in earnest, that Internet culture is ours and ours alone.
But that, of course, is not the case.
From the cryptic blogs in the Cyrillic alphabet hosted on LiveJournal blogs to the old oekaki online drawing boards in Japan, foreigners have contributed just as much as Americans to the humorous or interesting posts we find on eBaumsWorld.com, that are emailed to us by friends, or are shared on Facebook. Digital emoticons, for example, are now used by the masses but first started popping up in international Usenet groups, one of the first forms of large-scale message boards from the 1980s. A smile or frown emoticon says the same thing no matter your nationality.
The Tenso meme, using a screengrab from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The principle of how an Internet meme catches on also applies to viral videos, save one crucial detail: creating memes requires considerably less skill and equipment to create, capture and share with the Internet. And unlike videos, a photo meme can transcend the language barrier. A video that begins in America may only reach an English-speaking audience; but a funny picture that requires no caption or language knowledge to understand could end up flying around the world.
Tenso, which originated in Portuguese, is a beautiful example of such a meme.
Tenso memes are typically four-panel comics that showcase something that might not have been obvious in the original image. In most cases, this is drawing attention to someone who has a less than desirable facial expression in a photograph. An example, shown right, is taken from a concert scene in the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World where an extra has a rather absurd face that doesn’t fit in with the crowd so much.
There are several instances of Tenso photos popping up on a forum called “Fórum Uol Jogos,” a popular Portuguese-language destination primarily for Brazilian Internet denizens to discuss pretty much anything from the latest video games to silly pictures like these.
Many memes are images adapted from their original media (a music video or a movie, for example) and applied to other pictures. Take the meme simply known as Dorgas, in which a Brazilian forensics dog has its picture taken in front of a large supply of narcotics. In the meme, people place a quote bubble above the dog’s head, and meme participants change what the dog is saying. The head of the dog has even been Photoshopped into the wildly popular “Advice Dog” meme, as well.
The Drago meme incorporated into the colorful Advice Dog meme.
Memes like this cross-pollinate on a near constant basis, turning pictures of a dog with a bit of text and point-blank humor into images that are instantly sharable and almost universally understood. It’s subtle humor that makes for big laughs and, if done correctly by a marketer, gives customers a reason to pay more attention to their brand.
So, to recap, memes must be:
- Simple.
- Funny.
- Universal.
“Language” is not necessarily included. Get all three of those right and you might have just created the next big Internet sensation.
- Brad (@bcarr)