Friday Social: Trademarked hashtags, vloggers & Facebook videos

  • Social Media

Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf / @EllieHallsworth

1. Coca-Cola and trademarked hashtags

Coca-Cola seeks to trademark two Twitter hashtags. The company applied to trademark #cokecanpics and #smilewithacoke. Other companies have trademarked hashtags even as the ownership of hashtags is somewhat of a grey area legally. An interesting Wall Street Journal article suggested that the legal status of hashtags is among the top 3 legal issues facing marketers in 2015, so watch this space!

To see the Coca-Cola trademark applications, click here and here.

2. Virgin Trains in toilet paper saga

Virgin Trains came to the rescue when Adam Greenwood found himself in a, let’s say, predicament, using great, ultra-responsive social media tactics to save the day.

Teen vlogger Adam was stuck in a Virgin Trains toilet without loo paper, and when he tweeted for help, he got it.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, Adam said: “I got a tweet from Virgin Trains asking which carriage I was on, so I responded quickly. I tweeted back with the carriage number and shortly after I saw a guy looking quite worried in a full black suit, carrying toilet roll.”

A heart-warming tale, if you will.

3. Vimeo’s vloggers

Online streaming platform Vimeo has snapped up two of YouTube’s popular Video-Production-Sydney-Vimeo-on-Demand-homepagevloggers and signed them in a deal for exclusive content; namely for a new digital series for Vimeo on Demand (an online paid-for streaming service). YouTube stars KickThePj and Sawyer Hartman (with a combined subscriber base of over 3M) will each launch an online-video series exclusively to Vimeo On Demand, with two more series with other vloggers to be developed later in 2015.

The deal represents a step in the broadening of the online-video business, which is still very much dominated by YouTube.

4. ‘The Interview’ live-tweeted

Seth Rogan and James Franco live-tweeted the pulled and controversial film ‘The Interview’ from start to finish, in a celebration of its swift comeback. After Sony Pictures pulled the film from release due to threats in the wake of the Sony hack, the film’s future seemed dim. Thanks to streaming platforms such as Google Play and YouTube, as well as independent theatres, the film is available to watch.

The famous actors took to Twitter and shared a scene-by-scene and a breakdown of the jokes using #TheInterview

https://twitter.com/JamesFrancoTV/status/549338377309274112

5. Facebook news feed video triples

Noticed an increase in video content in your Facebook news feed? You’re spot on. Facebook reported that it hit a new milestone for video, achieving one billion daily video views in one period. Last summer’s Ice Bucket Challenge drew more than 10 billion video views by 440 million people.

Facebook also revealed the amount of user-generated and branded content in news feeds worldwide more than tripled in 2014 and the number of posts per person has increased 75% globally and 94% in the US.