Brandjacking the Eclipse: As expected, lots of brands were getting in on the eclipse action this week. Our favorites? Royal Caribbean got Bonnie Tyler to sing Total Eclipse of the Heart on a cruise ship — sparking its own trending topic and earning Tyler a No. 1 Spot on iTunes. Oh and NASA’s moon account “blocked” its sun counterpart on Twitter, trolling “HA HA HA I’ve blocked the Sun!” alongside a screenshot of the blocked page. So dumb, and pretty clever, too. (LINK)
Facebook on Your Face: Thanks to patent filings, we’re learning more about Facebook’s augmented reality project. In addition to being able to superimpose photos and videos on top of a live image of the real world, the glasses will also play audio when connected to a pair of headphones or speakers. And they’ll look like real glasses. Supposedly. This tech is a long way from mainstream, but at some point it looks like you’ll be browsing Facebook with your face. (LINK)
SocNet Horse Race Update of the Week: A new comScore report came out this week that found Snapchat is the third-most popular app among 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S., two spots ahead of Instagram. YouTube and Facebook were ranked first and second, respectively. That comes just a few days after an eMarketer report predicted Snapchat will be bigger than Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. by the end of 2017 among 12- to 17-year-olds and 18- to 24-year-olds. Snap this week also announced a partnership with Barstool Sports for a behind-the-scenes show on American college football, and CNN is launching its own daily news program on Snapchat following the success of NBC News’ twice-daily show. (LINK)
Happy Birthday, Hashtag: Ten years ago this week an icon of the social media age was born: the hashtag. Designed as an organization tool for social conversation, now around 125 million hashtags are shared by Twitter’s 328 million users every day. For example, check out our #FallonBrainfood presentation with Twitter this week. And the most popular regularly occurring hashtag tradition is #FF, which stands for #FollowFriday and has been used more than half a billion times since it was first tweeted in January 2009. #TheWalkingDead is the most tweeted television show hashtag of all time and in the movies category, it’s no surprise à #StarWars.
GREG SWAN 