Based on the legendary Budweiser – Wass up TVC I found today probably the best viral piece of work that I have seen so far in 2008.

Budweiser – Wassup (Original)

Obama – Wassup 2008

This clip expresses for me in the best way what’s going on right now. And it seems like that I’m not the only one who thinks so, according to the view counter and the history statistics this clip reach almost 1 million users during the last 24 hours. Let’s see how many it will be till the end of the elections.

UPDATE:
Just saw that Tim already posted the clip and that there is also a microsite explaining the background story. DDB and Budweiser are both not involved, but I think both of them will definitely gain momentum. What a nice show case for the guys in Chicago.

I found this interesting presentation from Edelman digital last week on Slideshare. It shows clearly that even we are all sharing the same web it is essential to take local habits into consideration. Social media is evolving differently in the world. Consumers have different preferences how to interact and share.
via: Terminal Moraine
Even it looks that Facebook is becoming the leading global player there are several other local champions – especially in Europe. Brand websites will lose attention to the consumers since a new web (in social networks) is evolving and if your brand isn’t part there you are out of the conversation, out of the loop, out of the mind, out of the consideration set.

I watched today the Real Time Design presentation of Leisa Reichelt & Matt Balara at the Next 08 conference in Hamburg. They found a super cheap and great tool for doing guerrilla usability testing, it is called Silverback.

next08: Real Time Design from Matt Balara on Vimeo.

Silverback captures the screen activities of the user (even with a small animation for mouse clicks) and the participants reactions via the build in iSight camera of your mac. Together with voice recording this turns every Mac into a mobile research facility. You can save participant sessions separately and add further notes. At the end you get a Quicktime movie of each participant that shows both the screen activity and the user reaction (video and audio) in one clip.

Silverback has a 30 days trial periode, afterwards you can purchase a license for just $ 49,95 (10% of all profits go to save to gorillas). It’s a great tool for ad hoc research and way much more.