This afternoon, team BuzzMob went out for a classic mobster family meal at Italian restaurant, called Cucina, to celebrate our Mobster May birthdays. Brad, Developer Extraordinaire, enjoyed a king size Panini.  Edmond, Chief of Mafia Operations Officer thoroughly enjoyed his Lasagna.  Don CEO, Jeff, kept it real with a chicken salad and Shawn, Mobster CTO, got fancy with his polenta with ragu of the day with a side of veal soup.

After the mob, went out for a stroll around the Irvine spectrum to scope out some new turf for a few good mobs deals

When you join the mob, you join for life and when you’re in the mob, you’re always family. Ciao Bella!

I love Nutella. It’s amazing. But a recent business decision made by the company’s owner, Ferraro SpA, might have me defying my tastebuds.  A woman named Sara Rosso loves Nutella so much that she named February 5th as World Nutella Day seven years ago, and has lead a huge group of  fans in an annual celebration of the hazelnut concoction every year since.  In response, Nutella just sent her a cease and desist  letter to halt the holiday. What??

In some situations, company concerns with IP and brand defense are understandable, but in this case Nutella should be thanking Sara Rosso, not suing her!  This random nut-lover is doing the job of 5 social media specialists that Nutella might otherwise hire.  Not only did she create a day honoring their brand, but the activity she promotes on that day asks for thousands of others bloggers and fans to create and post about how much they love Nutella!  They should be providing her with free product for giveaways, regular incentives, and all sorts of help with the annual event!  The best and most effective sales people any CG product (or any brand, for that matter) will ever have, are it’s customers. If the revolution of social media has taught us anything, it’s that brands should be celebrating these evangelist and cultivating meaningful relationships with them.

Apparently Ferraro SpA came to his senses after considerable fan backlash and an outpouring of support for Sara Rosso on Nutella’s facebook page.  He dropped the legal action and avoided any further PR fiasco. Thank God.

The lesson for corporates here is: while you may technically ‘own’ your brand or product… only if you’re very lucky, will your customers grow so loyal to your product that they’ll embrace it as their own and feel a sense of ownership. If you’re even luckier, they’ll voluntarily evangelize.  If and when this happens, you support and encourage that adoption like mad.  Of course the most difficult thing for corporates may be recognizing this in cases where it doesn’t look like the 1,000,000 Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter followers they’re after… but rather a random website by a single fan promoting a new national holiday.

Today, a few of us headed out to Annual Spring Carnival at Plaza Vista Elementary School in Irvine, where they had asked us to create a buzzmob and connect the crowd!. You might recall that Plaza Vista is one of the schools within the Irvine University School District that we’ve partnered with for an educational program rollout.

This carnival was unlike anything i remember from my days as a kid. There was a 300+ft bounce house maze things, 50ft rock walls, and people spinning around in those giant zorbs. It was huge and brought together 1500+ kids, parents, teachers, and community members to play at carnival style gaming booths, food stands with local fare, and games galore.

We manned a booth and gave popcorn to existing users, as well as anyone who signed up on the spot.  We ran a scavenger hunt and trivia for everyone through the app, with tasks like “find the principal and post a picture of you two together”, or trivia like “what year was the school founded?”.  Winners received gift cards and other prizes donated by some amazing local retailers.

The event was a great time, and people had a lot of fun with everything we did together on BuzzMob. We’re looking forward to the next one, which is coming up in just a couple weeks!

Check out the PV Spring Carnival mob when you have a minute!

Over the last few days, members of the BuzzMob team have been hard at work making the trek to Los Angeles’s landmark, Mann’s Chinese Theater, where BuzzMob is a social media partner at the 2012 AFI Film Festival.

As the official app of the AFI Film festival for 2011, BuzzMob was successful with expanding AFI’s on-site social media coverage. This year, the festival invited us back to create an attendee photo experience second-to-none!

Each day the AFI Film Festival presented a Gala Screening, made up predominantly of world film premieres. This year’s film standouts included “Hitchcock”, “Life of Pi”, and the debut of Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated “Lincoln”.

As one of the few movie festivals that provides free movie screening tickets to the public, The AFI Film Festival is known for connecting fans and celebs in a one of a kind event setting, complete with a red carpet entrance, introductions from the filmmakers and actors, and an exclusive after-party at the nearby Roosevelt Hotel.

In partnership with a fantastic AFI sponsor, New Amsterdam Spirits, BuzzMob created and developed a fully interactive digital photo booth for the Roosevelt ballroom, complete with real-time sharing and display on the HUGE 30ft screen in the ballroom. Through BuzzMob’s mobile application, attendees were able to view and share their event photos in real-time with their friends, bringing a new, exclusive dynamic to the event!

Throughout the AFI film festival, we watched as a sea of attendees, filmmakers, and celebrities used BuzzMob to share photos and messages from the event. Over ___ attendees participated in BuzzMob’s formal photo-op, and we had a blast showing off some of our exciting new event technologies and features!

We can’t wait to show you what we have in store over the next few months!