UPDATE: As of Jan 2010, Facebook has blocked Seppukoo’s API access to their website.

If Facebook has taken over your life but you can’t find a way out, an “imaginary art group” has created a new web site that can help. Seppukoo.com allows you to deactivate your Facebook account with a virtual ritual suicide befitting of a samurai warrior.

Named after seppuku, an ancient Japanese samurai ritual in which samurai would plunge a sword into their own stomachs to escape defeat by their enemies, the web site invites users to “impress your friends, disconnect yourself” and “discover what’s after your Facebook life.” By entering your Facebook user ID and password (the site says no data will be stored on its server), you can customize a memorial page that will be sent to all your Facebook friends, who will have the opportunity to leave a farewell message.

If you later decide that life is just not complete without Facebook, you can log into the site to reactivate your account.

The creators of the site, Les Liens Invisibles (which translates to “The Invisible Links”) claims the site was not started to attack Facebook, but simply to help people “rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.” Les Liens Invisibles even has its own Facebook page.

Karen Eisenbraun is a freelance writer and is currently residing in the Kansas City Metro. She has experience in SEO, content management, website design, and green living. When not working, she enjoys rock climbing, yoga, and occasionally throwing herself out of airplanes.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

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Fall 2009 has been a fascinating one for narrative endeavors on social media, three high-profile gaming experiments stand out as the vanguard of both social media and branded entertainment. Valemont by MTV and Verizon, Circle of 8 by MySpace and Paramount Digital are each standout examples of narrative storytelling rolling out utilizing social media to tell its story, create fan communities and market products.
Valemont is a webseries whose driving platform is television, first airing as Two minute thirty second spots during commercial breaks for MTV’s The Hills and The City. Valemont artfully utilized an alternate reality game (ARG) through the website, www.valemontu.com, to create a fictional world. Where their greatest achievement lies is in inviting viewers to enter that world and play along within the narrative. Creating a centralized online forum, Valemont Commons, a where fans pretended to be part of the story and worked together to create events and solve the ARG’s mysteries was essential to Valemont’s success. The game led participants to Facebook using a quiz application to drive users to a Facebook community and to further identify themselves within the narrative.  Utilizing Facebook , a robust fan community fostered by the property’s online team who masqueraded as fictional characters, grew and after three months has thousands of active members, fan fiction, and spinoff groups created by fans themselves. Valemont is currently being considered for a second season, this time televised completely by MTV Networks. The social media groups already in place have helped put pressure on MTV but regardless of whether or not it becomes a TV show, new content is going to be created in the fictional universe by fans.

Circle of 8 is a movie released in ten parts on MySpace video will be released in 2010 on DVD exclusively through Blockbuster Inc. Circle of 8’s social media presence is undeniable, with over 100,000 MySpace friends. Yielded from promotions on MySpace’s front page and other traditional online advertisements, traffic has been driven to the movie and its associated products from Green Label Studios (Mountain Dew) and Kia. The question that Circle of 8’s rollout asks is why its fans are not as active on forums or groups as Valemont? The fan community surrounding Circle of 8 is participates less actively than that of Valemont, this is likely because it lacked a fan-interaction campaign like Valemont implemented. Complimenting the movie were a variety of branded flash games, contests and trivia games that led fans to clues in the movie’s mystery but did not support personal interaction, nor did it create a fictional space for the audience to play in. More interaction with fans has certainly created a more involved fanbase for Valemont but since Circle of 8’s story is self-contained the bottom line may be that the creators aren’t looking to expand the story into a sequel but rather are testing the waters for future project rollouts.

Narrative and social media are logical match, driving the creating of social communities and giving venues for marketing that are more subtle and palatable to audience members than traditional advertisements. These two narrative rollouts show the possibilities that are just beginning to be explored in the union of storytelling and social media platforms.

Caitlin Burns is a Transmedia Producer and Editorial Lead at Starlight Runner Entertainment. To read more analysis on Circle of 8 and Valemont, read her article in Multichannel News: The Next Wave in Branded Entertainment.

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Black Friday has come and gone, and so too has the constant flow of tweets, status updates, and blog entries exhorting us to “take advantage of special savings!” Experts predicted that purchasing would be down, but spending was actually up 0.5% from last year.  According to the Wall Street Journal, people spent about 10.66 billion dollars on Black Friday. Do retailers have social media to thank for helping Black Friday endure despite the recession?

While it’s hard to determine what impact social media had in terms of actual sales, it’s apparent that a lot of the major players (such as Office Max, Target, and Old Navy) put their faith in Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about their Black Friday deals. With advertising budgets hurting due to the economy, social media provided a cheap way for companies to reach a lot of people.

Consumers responded to this corporate outreach by visiting a whole slew of new blogs that cropped up. With names like Black Friday Ads and My Black Friday Deals, these blogs kept people (perhaps obsessively) up-to-date on retailers’ latest savings offers.

According to one pre-Thanksgiving survey, 1 in 5 shoppers planned to consult social media to find the best bargains. If businesses really did reach 20% of their potential customers through social media, this was money well spent. Having a person or small team to manage your Twitter and Facebook is going to be a heck of a lot less expensive than the money spent running ads in hundreds newspapers and websites.

The excitement was so great, that even the mainstream media picked up on the story. A few weeks before thanksgiving, ABC News encouraged readers to check Facebook and Twitter before heading out into the fray.

What About Next Year?

I think retailers will learn from this experience and continue to refine the way they use social media to interact with consumers. And if shoppers had a good experience using social media this year, the word will likely spread and make next year even bigger.

In the meantime, retailers now have their social media hooks stuck in shoppers. They can continue to capitalize on new Twitter followers and Facebook fans by keeping people aware of new sales.

In the old days, stores used to promise to “match or beat any price,” if you brought in a valid coupon proving another store was selling a product for less. I wonder if things are changing. Maybe we’re heading towards the day when retailers will be saying, “We’ll beat any tweet.”