All News

What do Justin Bieber and Google have in common (beyond the YouTube love affair, naturally)?

According to Forbes 100 most powerful celebrities, Bieber is the youngest on the list sitting solidly in the No. 3 position, in between Oprah and U2. He's got 33.9 million Facebook fans and 11.4 million Twitter followers, and his video "Baby" is the most-watched YouTube clip ever, with more than 561 million views. He isn’t merely a celebrity who was discovered on YouTube; he is the king of it.

Meanwhile, Google is ranked 4th in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2011, and 2nd by the BrandZ Most Valuable Global Brands, keeping good company in the digital space along with Apple, IBM and Microsoft. In fact, the only brand listed in the top five that is not a technology company is Coca-Cola.

But the reason for calling out this social media couple goes beyond the stats and revenue streams. What each of them hold, for very different reasons, is immense cultural capital. Only they arrived at it in totally different ways--one through entertainment, and one through usefulness.

Luxury brands have been hesitant to leverage Facebook within marketing efforts, fearing it might dilute brand equity. Among Interbrand’s Global 100, luxury brands have an average of 1.5 million fans, compared to communities in the fast-moving consumer goods category1 that are averaging 360,000 fans.

With Facebook communities an average of four times as large as major consumer brands’, luxury brands sit on a missed opportunity. Based on a series of five factors, a WDCW analysis shows that while enjoying larger communities, luxury-brand Facebook pages rate around a 6.5 out of 102 in quality of engagement and content. This poses an opportunity and a dilemma: How does a luxury brand maintain its equity and exclusivity within a social network while simultaneously harnessing and nurturing a fan base?

This is a story of a teenager who did something so generous — so big-hearted — that it’s making plenty of adults swoon.

Allan Guei, 18, was a star basketball player at Compton High School in the Los Angeles area before he graduated last month. He also had a GPA above 3.0, and his good grades made him eligible for an unusual competition: A free-throw contest in the Compton High gymnasium. The top prize: $40,000 in scholarship money.

Today’s true champion is Allan Guei who just graduated from Compton High School. Allan won $40,000 for in college expenses in a free throw contest, but since he already had a basketball scholarship covering his college tuition, Allan surprised everyone at their graduation ceremony by giving that $40,000 to the seven runner-ups in the free throw shooting contest.

The free throw shooting contest was part of a documentary to show the world that Compton, Calif., is not as bad as people think it is. And this generous young man proved just that.

Why would an 18-year-old kid from Compton, Calif., give away $40,000?

“I thought it was the right thing to do, because I was already well taken care of to go to a school and to go to a university for free. So I felt it was important to help the others. They were good kids. I felt like they needed it more than I did, because they were having a lot of financial problems to get into school and stay in school,” says Allan Guei, winner of the “Free Throw” competition.

The event - a foul-shooting contest for top academic students at Compton High School in Los Angeles - was created with a simple premise: Organizers wanted to show the kids at Compton how to create community spirit with college scholarship money as the incentive.

Allen Geui won in front of a packed house.
Following a tear-jerking gesture from the winner - it appears the true lessons learned were by the adults.