eThos from Hemant Soreng

Three athletic young adventurers have produced a video claiming to show ‘one of the most impossible-looking activities that anyone has ever seen’ – walking on water.
Ulf Gartner and his friends Sebastian Vanderwerf and Miguel Delfortrie call it ‘liquid mountaineering’, a new sport that is not only challenging the laws of gravity but is also encouraging thousands of fans to slip on watertight shoes and run as fast as possible into the nearest lake.
The video shows the men racing in turns into a lake in Portugal. After several false starts they manage up to nine or 10 high-speed tiptoe-like strides before their legs buckle beneath them.
Over 2 million people have watched the YouTube video in the past fortnight. So “amazing feat” as a viral theme works, as Lenovo did with “Amazing Bees viral” !! Are brands listening?

The subject did catch your attention, didn’t it. Well, not exactly how it sounds, but two members of this year’s losing team Oxford in the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, lost the race and have won $ 65 million.
As I surfed TV channels in my hotel room in Istanbul on 3rd April 2010, I happened to watch this amazing boat race and heard an even more amazing story.

As the story goes, when studying at Harvard in 2004, Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, Olympian rowers and member of Oxford’s rowing team, along with their partner Divya Narendra (incidentally, is also a rower) sued Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, just six days after the site was launched. The three Harvard seniors,  accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. And it seems just before this year’s boat race the trio had made a cool $ 65 million through an out of court settlement.

Reminds me of the nursery rhyme with my own (corny) twist :

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently to the Bank,
Merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

So do we know all about Social Media Marketing? Many corporates seem to think so. Dell found it the hard way after “Dell Hell”. Now Nestle is the new kid on the block to do so.
SMM strategy seems to be setting up channels in the Social media space,”engaging” with the customers and building a community. Easier said than done. It has to be done right, which is again relative and need to be find out, learn and change. It is iterative. There is nothing right and wrong. It will always be learn, learn and learn and implement.

Here is how screwed up on their Facebook page

http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=6786&tag=nl.rSINGLE

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

Love this viral which is a rage on YouTube