Check out this video to learn about 2.0 in a simplified, four minute video. Make sure to hang on for the saliant messages at the end!

Happy Halloween from all of us at Cybercom!

Tourism Ireland has launched a marketing campaign in Second Life, the online ‘virtual world’, showing its committment to new eMarketing platforms and desire to connect and communicate with today’s web-savvy consumers in new and innovative ways. Over the past three years Tourism Ireland has doubled its digital marketing spend to €6.5m, representing 14% of all of its marketing activity, and by 2008 its investment in eMarketing will increase to 25%.

It claims to be the first tourist board to launch a marketing campaign for a destination in Second Life, which already features many major brands, including Coca-Cola, Vodafone, IBM, Toyota, Sony and Adidas. Other travel and tourism enterprises active in this space include Starwood Hotels, whom have used Second Life to pilot the design of a new series of hotels and Thomas Cook, who offer its customers virtual package tours.

The decision to enter this popular ‘Virtual World’ is based upon the fact that 60% of Second Life’s users come from Ireland’s four biggest tourist markets – the UK, US, Germany and France. And half of those users are aged over 30 – a key demographic for tourism to the island of Ireland.

The Tourism Ireland campaign in Second Life will involve sponsorship of a range of events and activities from now until St Patrick’s Day 2008 in the replica city of Dublin in Second Life. The events kicked-off this weekend past with a ‘Discover Ireland Festival’, where five bands and seven DJs played on a stage located on Grafton Street, followed by a fashion show on a bridge on the River Liffey.

Clipstar.com, launched today, is a new social network talent search site offering a $1m (€694,000) prize for the best clip uploaded.

The brainchild of two former advertising people; Paul Barnes and Nigel Latham, it has been described as “XFactor meets You Tube”. The site, with its strapline ‘Clipstar – be somebody’, aims to be a “democratic global talent contest”. Users vote for their favorite clips and each category winner receives $10,000, with the overall winner of the year end grand final receiving the $1m prize.

The site’s Web 2.0 nature is sure to appeal to those who are already accustomed to using site likes MySpace to showcase themselves. It will certainly be interesting to see if the success of TV shows such as X Factor and the Irish You’re a Star can be emulated in an online format.

And perhaps make room on our TVs for better things!

Social networking is about staying in touch, sharing music, stories and photos, and building new and old connections. So, seeing as the Irish love to talk, it’s no surprise that Facebook’s popularity is growing fast!

Recent Irish statistics reveal there are now over 131,000 registered Irish users, representing a 95% growth since January 2007. This growth is in line with global trends as Facebook membership has jumped to 6 million in UK and over 49 million globally.

Bebo is still Ireland’s most popular social networking site with around one million registered users and third globally (behind MySpace and Facebook).

Profiles of Irish users differ between Bebo and Facebook. The majority of Bebo users are still in school whereas 90% of Facebook’s users are between the ages of 18 – 35.

Damien Mulley of Mulley.net agrees: ‘A lot of people that are using social networks are quite young, and apart from being young they are strong users of the Internet… Saying this Facebook growth in Ireland is predicted within the 30-50 year age group; with the college audience now established the growth is appearing to come from the more mature audiences who are working and out of college”.

Get yourself along to the upcoming IDMA event for more insights into the fast changing Irish digital market.

Yep, all those rumours were correct! Now it’s time to ask some serious questions of Microsoft’s $240 million purchase of 1.6% of Facebook equity. Some analysts are desribing the transaction as surreal given the fact that Facebook will only turnover $155 million this year.

We believe there are three key factors at play here:

1) MSN now has exclusive global third-party rights to sell advertising on Facebook. However social-based advertising is not working that effectively these days but no doubt MSN will try to ramp up media revenue from a sector that’s struggling to command decent CPM rates. Here’s hoping that we don’t see a clampdown on open widget APIs, commercial profiles and similar marketing opportunities that actually work on Facebook.

2) Supposedly it was Google vs MSN right down to the wire so there’s a huge PR win here for a somewhat battered MSN. Google has been first to invest and first to market when it comes to most of the “bright future” and “cool” 2.0 applications these days. As we all know, Facebook has been the global darling for the last few months so this somewhat inflated deal will certainly drive cool creds and kudos for MSN.

3) A foot in the Facebook door means MSN can strengthen their already dominant reach in the youth market. Google will always be a port of call for all age groups but MSN now holds even more weight to leverage further interaction and engagement between younger consumers (with lots of disposable income) and hungry advertisers. We expect to see MSN Messenger integrated with Facebook in the near future.

The IDMA presents “Raising the Bar in Digital Marketing” – four hours of “best in class” creative and strategy.

Speakers include Jay Stevens of MySpace.com, Tom Bazeley of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, Jonathan Forrest of Cybercom and Shenda Loughnane of ICAN.

Please call 01-6610470 for further detail.

Forget trying to figure out what everyone’s watching. Today, the more important question is: Where are they watching? And a pair of US studies recently released agreed that “where” is more and more often online.

In fact, almost 16% of US internet households watch TV online, which is almost double the number from a year ago, according to the Conference Board and TNS’s TV online study. In-Stat’s broader US video online study noted that all online video viewing is growing, with the majority of its respondents believing it will become “mainstream.”

“This is sort of the tip of the iceberg in the growing trend,” said Lynne Franco, director of the Conference Board Consumer Research Center. “And it’s free content that’s leading the way. We found that few people are willing to pay.”

Topping the list of what kind of free content was most watched were entire episodes of TV shows, with almost half of the internet households viewing, up from 25% last year. Last year, news was the most-watched TV programming online at more than 62% of households; this year news viewing only topped 44%.

Meanwhile, In-Stat’s survey found online video growing in popularity, and for the under-25 set, becoming a way of life. Analyst Michael Inouye compared the current video shift to what has already happened in digital music. “These shifts appear far more entrenched than a simple fad, additional reason to strategically review this evolving market and the new levers they bring,” he said.

In-Stat also found social networking is playing an increasingly larger role in what young people watch as their online peers’ views and opinions influence them.

We sourced this information at AdAge.com

MySpaceTV, the video wing of the online community network, late on Sunday unveiled its first original Web series to give its users a television-like experience with the interactive benefits of the Internet.

“Roommates” will track the lives of four women in their 20s who have recently graduated from college and are living together in Los Angeles.

The Web show debuts on Monday, 22nd October, and runs through to 21st December for a total of 45 episodes. A new, three-minute segment will play each day. Fans are expected to engage characters online and influence the plot.

“There is an opportunity to interact with a show in different ways than have been done before,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of MySpaceTV.

“Roommates” will utilise a real-time “polling tool” in which viewers’ opinions on characters and plot developments will be sought. Fans can chat online, as well as post comments on the characters’ individual Web profiles. The information will be scrutinized and the plot changed, accordingly.

 This information was sourced at Reuters.com

Check out the Hen Party on the new Harp website launched this week – TheHarpClub.com. See how far you can fly the HARP Hen across Northern Ireland. The Cybercom record currently stands at an amazing 314m.  We did have to test it a lot!

Also check out the new www.smithwicks.ie site for the amazing new Smithwicks “Shergar” TV advert which launched this week.  There are a lot of “Not the Usual Stories” out there… why not send in yours and win a trip to see ostrich racing in South Africa?!

For a Hatrick of Diageo experiences make sure you sign up for your FREE Guinness Poker Nights kit on Guinness.com. This isn’t a poker bluff – there seriously isn’t a catch – just sign up and, if you’re eligible, your kit will be on its way in no time!

Today is a landmark day for digital as the analogue BBC 2 TV signal is turned off in the Cumbrian Town of Whitehaven. It’s the first stage in a 5 year process that will see the whole of the UK switch over to terrestial digital.

The rest of the analogue signal in Whitehaven will shut down in four weeks’ time. The estimated 2,000 homes in the town and surrounding area, who have yet to convert to digital, have until 14th November to make the switch or they will lose their TV signal entirely!

Britain’s full rollout to digital is planned for completion in 2012.