As someone who used to work at a sports bar, I understand the chaos that occurs during the Super Bowl. I had the pleasure of working at Buffalo Wild Wings as a waitress in Chicago in 2007 when the Bears made it all the way to that last game. This was the first time in 21 years that our team made it, and boy did I underestimate the amount of excitement that was in store for me when I walked through those doors.

I was being high-fived and hugged by complete strangers as I tried to deliver mozzarella sticks, our usually-quiet phone systems were ringing off the hook, the wings were taken out of my hands before I even set down the plate, and I was hit several times with blowup footballs that my managers so kindly gave away to one of my tables. Needless to say, the sport has a following in North America.

Literally. The sport has a huge following on Twitter. Not only do the majority of the players and announcers have their own personal Twitter accounts, but the National Football League (NFL) has its own account with roughly 2,799,121 followers. In other words, social media has a big impact when it comes to the reputation of the game. Twitter works like a domino effect: The NFL could tweet something, and then one of their followers tweets it to their followers, and so on and so forth.

Fan and player interaction

As with any other big TV event these days, social media gives fans an opportunity to interact with others watching the game. This makes it more fun. When I think about my uncle who lives in a

Defensive Justin Tuck of the New York Giants. Image via nfl.com

house with four football-hating women (even the dog is a girl), I think about how much he enjoys being able to trash-talk on Twitter. It’s a way for fans to connect (and compete) with others who are watching the game in a different place.

The interaction between fan and player has also changed, as players now have the ability to talk directly with fans via their personal accounts. For example, New England Patriots’ superstar quarterback Tom Brady can explain to fans (after the game) that the reason he fell at a pivotal moment is that an opponent grabbed his facemask. So social media is also an opportunity for athletes to maintain their own personal brands.

Watching it for the ads

Finally, we have those advertisements to discuss. Brands have been leveraging the Super Bowl, America’s biggest TV event, for years with blockbuster commercials and special Super Bowl deals. But brands have also begun to increase their social media efforts before, during, and after the game.

A scene from one of the five competing Doritos Super Bowl ads

Budweiser ran a campaign on Facebook that asks fans to guess Super Bowl scores and answer Super Bowl trivia in order to win special deals.

Pizza Hut bought a “promoted tweet” for #ReadySetHut so that Twitter followers would consider buying their product for the big game. Meanwhile, both Doritos and Pepsi let fans vote via Facebook on which commercial would air during the game.

In other words, whether or not you’re a fan, there are plenty of good reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

Check out our roundup of this year’s best Super Bowl ad campaigns.

Image courtesy of Daily Pic, via Flickr

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of brands marketers should be aware of: personal brands, corporate brands and professional brands. And ­– to make things even more confusing – these three things are beginning to converge.

Brands brands brands

First, a summary of those three types of brands. A personal brand is simply a culmination of factors that make up an individual’s public image. This can include content on social networks (pictures, posts, interests, etc.), as well as anything in the media about that person.

Personal brands are not created; they just are. That is, most people don’t write something on a Facebook wall because they want others to think of them in a certain way; they do it because they want to, because it’s a reflection of who they really are.

A corporate brand is a culmination of factors that make up an organization’s public image, whether it’s an airline, a media company or a not-for-profit. While personal brands aren’t usually created on purpose, corporations spend lots of time and money cultivating their brands through ads, logos, mascots (ever seen the GEICO gecko?) and, of course, content.

A professional brand is a brand that’s created intentionally by an individual. For example, if a person wants the public to see them as an expert in their field, they can foster this perception through social media, blogging, guest posting or speaking gigs.

When the professional gets personal

Consider the following example, which was pretty common a few years ago. You’re launching a new product and decide to hire a PR firm to promote it. If you see that Joe Shmo will be in charge of the account, you’ll probably google Joe Shmo.

Once you find his Facebook profile you might see that he clearly stays out all night and spends all day complaining about work. This will give you a negative opinion of the company, and you’ll probably go in another direction.

Once people realized that their personal brands were affecting their corporate brands, they began to create a professional brand. They changed their names on Facebook and maintained two Twitter accounts. But it has become apparent that it’s pretty hard to keep these two brands separate. After all, it doesn’t take much for a prospective client or employer to connect the dots.

So where do we go from here?

From the organizational perspective, corporate brands need to be aware of the personal and professional brands of their employees because clients can (and do) look them up online. You should be including social network and Google searches in your employee background checks to see what kind of footprint your employees have online.

Although most people aren’t comfortable with a prospective employer snooping through their personal lives, any content they have put out for the world to see is fair game. That said, companies should be reasonable and not expect someone to be devoid of a personal life. If the candidate’s professional footprint is more prevalent than their personal one, then that person has done a good job maintaining his or her brand and will likely represent your company well.

From the individual perspective, it’s crucial that you create and cultivate a professional brand online. If you have some things out there you’d rather were hidden, there are a few things you can do to help cover them up: guest post on websites so that those articles come up first on search engine pages, change your name on your old social accounts, or set your social accounts to private.

Or better yet, don’t put anything out there that you wouldn’t want your clients or employer to see. Because they will.

Image courtesy of Matti Mattila, via Flickr

Whether you’re a rookie or a veteran in the digital content space, you’re probably aware that linking is important. But knowing that linking is important and learning how to use links correctly are two different things.

Although linking has been around since the dawn of the Internet age, the world of media and marketing is changing, and the nature and importance of the link is changing with it. Here’s what digital marketers and content creators need to know about linking in 2012.

Panda updates and social media

Google recently launched Google Panda, an overhaul of its secret sauce search-ranking algorithm. And because Google Panda constantly changes what it considers a “high quality site,” brands can now no longer spend time factoring in black hat linking tactics like plugging in unrelated keywords or creating a website specifically for a keyword to improve their rankings.

Social media has also changed the game for brands because consumers are now getting their information from many different sources. Although linking is still extremely important, companies have to worry about getting their brand noticed in more places than just a search engine.

Internal vs. external linking

Digital content, whether in the form of a corporate website or blog post, should have a balance of internal links (links to other pages in the same site) and external links (links to other websites).

Once content goes live on the web it’s “crawled” by search engine bots or “spiders.” If you can use internal linking effectively then these bots will be able to easily move from one webpage to the next, boosting your SEO in the process.

Internal linking will also improve “time on site”, a measure of how compelling or “sticky” your content is. Easy navigation won’t just help bots get around; it will keep human beings on your site too.

External linking includes links on your site to other locations on the web as well as links back to your site. The best way to generate incoming links is to create quality content that others want to reference – simple as that. Another way is to write guest posts for relevant sites, demonstrating your thought leadership in a given industry (and getting a link-back in the process).

Your content will look good in the eyes of Google if other reputable websites reference your page through linking. This will then increase your PageRank and help your website slowly make its way to the top of the Google search engine.

Incoming links also have an important promotional value. If another website links to your content, you’ve engaged that site’s community – introducing your content and brand to a whole new audience.

Linking responsibly

If used correctly, the combination of internal and external linking will provide your brand’s website or blog with increased SEO success as well as increased traffic and overall interest in your site.

Don’t forget that the words you choose to link to are important. Many brands spend lots of time on keyword research. Although all linking is worthwhile, linking to specific keywords like HR software (see what we did there?) can up the benefits of linking even more.

In the end, linking is the key to getting your website ranked in organic search – in other words, that number one Google spot you’ve had your eye on. And in turn, linking will help connect your brand to communities and customers you never expected to reach.

It’s the Muppets.

The Jim Henson-created franchise has been in a slump for decades. Their biggest hit was the The Muppet Movie back in 1979. But that was before social media.

The Muppets, released last week in North America, has garnered critical acclaim and fans are pouring into theatres. But perhaps their biggest success has been online: This old-school franchise is the new kung-fu master of branded entertainment.

As Alex Rowland wrote in Sparksheet , branded entertainment works best when users forget they’re watching an ad and when they’re given opportunities to interact with the brand.

Disney chose die-hard Muppet fans Jason Segal and James Bobbin to write and direct the film, and brought in Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie for the soundtrack, ensuring an authentic Muppet experience while delivering quality content that works on multiple channels.

For two years Disney used – you guessed it – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even Google+ to generate buzz online.

They kicked-off the campaign with a decidedly unorthodox but wholly Muppetesque cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which went viral, winning two Webbies along the way.

Next, Kermit appeared in *cough* person at the world premier of the latest Pirates of the Carribean installment for the release of The Muppets’ first trailer.

Arguably the campaign’s biggest hit, the series of trailer parodies poked fun at this year’s most anticipated blockbusters. The lighthearted videos capture what so many fans love about the Muppets – their infectious silliness.

As one of the first official brands to join Google+, the Muppets filled the user engagement quota by hosting a Google+ hangout.

As opening weekend approached, the Muppets took a tongue-in-cheek spin on cause marketing with their “Muppets Fan-A-Thon.”

Riffing on the film’s central plot point, Muppet characters urged viewers to “pledge a like” on Facebook. If the page reached the modest goal of a “bazillion” likes, Disney would release advanced screening locations. No, they didn’t reach the bazillion mark, but with 2 million likes, Disney’s not complaining.

Finally, taking aim at haters on Digg and YouTube, the franchise released another viral hit. This time, ill-fated Beaker burns down the set with his rendition of “Dust in the Wind.”

Yes, The Muppets’ aesthetic is 1970s oddball. Yes, their jokes are goofy. But that’s why we love them, and it took a flawlessly executed social media campaign to remind us.

And in case you haven’t had your fill of Muppet-driven branded content, check out our Q&A with Sesame Street’s new media director, Dan Lewis.

Fat Tire’s success is rooted in community. In the old, basement-brewing days, Lebesch would offer samples of his homebrew to everyone – from friends and fellow brewers to cowboys and microbiologists.

Two decades later the brewery’s “high involvement culture,” as it puts it, has carried into the digital realm through a variety of Facebook pages, apps and other social platforms that harness the passion, conversation and sense of community that go along with a good beer.

From Barstool to Facebook Wall

Craft brewers are bold. Shunning the ways of big, watered-down commercial breweries, they are known for their innovation and non-traditional ingredients. Good brewers also know their customers personally, be it through philanthropy, volunteerism, sponsorship of local events or by sharing – or even creating – a beer with them.

Dean Browell, Executive Vice President of Feedback Agency, a social media consultancy based in Richmond, Virginia and London, England, has been a longtime friend to the beer community and counts a growing number of impressive keynotes under his belt at the annual Craft Brewers Conference.

“Craft beer is a source of experimentation and taste that lends itself to discussion, exploration and more,” says Browell, whose PhD thesis focused on generational differences and online technologies. “It’s one of those drinks that sparks conversation and practically requires you to drink with others, daring interaction.”

Online these qualities are reflected in the communities that have sprung up in and around specific breweries and beers, and between craft brewers themselves.

While they might not always have deep pockets like commercial brands, craft brewers have repeatedly launched social media campaigns that yield results.

An app on New Belgium’s Facebook page, “Share Your Joy Ride,” asks brew fans to create and share their own Fat Tire labels by uploading photos. During the summer months, winning beer label creators were awarded with a special 20th-anniversary edition Fat Tire cruiser bike.

Not content to settle for just one app, New Belgium offers a variety of branded Facebook apps, such as FoodBuzz (for sharing New Belgium-inspired recipes), Beer Ranger (for connecting local brew pages that are geographically relevant), and Mighty Arrow, a partnership with Outside magazine that sees one dollar of every download donated to local animal protection agencies (at the time of writing, the app had been downloaded more than 10,000 times).

The brewery’s Facebook page boasts almost 200,000 “Likers” who routinely share their hobbies and passions with the brand, and most importantly, buy their beer; New Belgium is now the third-largest craft brewery, and seventh-largest overall brewery, in the United States.

QR at the Bar

Brewing was once but a hobby for Colorado homebrewers Jeff and Stephanie Crabtree. Today the husband-and-wife duo crank out more than 900 barrels a year, along with a hefty dose of digital media.

Like many craft brewers, Jeff Crabtree thrives on direct interaction with customers. While he can’t sit at the bar with everyone who tips back Crabtree’s tasty creations, since September he has slapped QR codes on his beer bottles that allow him to engage with customers the new-fashioned way.

Anyone who orders a Berliner Weisse Ale – an old-style German wheat ale – can scan the QR code on the bottle’s label with their mobile device and view a video message from Jeff Crabtree himself who delivers the lowdown on the brew they’re about to imbibe.

Crabtree drinkers have an opportunity to hatch the next installment in the Digital Age series, by subscribing to an exclusive email list that allows them to keep the relationship going and ultimately decide on the next QR-inspired brew.

By adding a digital signpost to a real-world object, craft brewers have created an ideal inbound marketing tool. While beer lovers tip one back, brewers can collect data on their customers and measure the results of their campaign in real time.

Check-in to Your Beer

With location-based services all the rage, it comes as no surprise that there’s already a crowded market of mobile apps that allow users to “check in” to their favorite pint. One of the most popular is Untappd (think Foursquare for beer geeks), which provides an interactive beer rating and recommendation system.

Untappd users can literally place smaller, independent beers on the map by sharing what they’re drinking and where. Touting over one million check-ins, Untappd is available free on Android and iOs and can be synched with Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter.

Back to the Real World

Proving that the craft brew community is just as strong in the non-digital world, the East Atlanta Beer Festival recently

launched Re:Brew, a free iPhone app that helped concert-goers find – and rate – the best craft beers at this summer’s festival.

As people rated and chatted about their favourite microbrews at the festival, the event’s beer list was adjusted to highlight the most popular offerings.

Beer festivals aside, Twitter is flush with hashtags that paint a picture of the growing American passion for craft beer. Brewers & Union, based in South Africa, provides an ongoing chance to win a case of craft beer each week by simply tagging tweets with #idrinkcraft.

Whether it’s through Facebook pages, check-in apps or hashtags, craft brewers are giving macro-produced beers – and their marketing whiz kids – a run for their money. Most craft brewers live by a simple motto: No crap on tap. And now they’re bringing that philosophy to the digital marketing space.

These TVs aren’t tuned in to your favourite soap opera or hockey team. They’re showcasing catered in-store entertainment. McDonald’s recently announced the creation of McTV, a customized digital network that will feature content from the likes of Mark Burnett and BBC America.

The channel, which will be making its debut in 800 Southern and Central California restaurants, will screen programs and ads on a one-hour cycle.

As Time’s Allison Berry points out, this is a smart move for the fast food giant. “The channel should be an effective way to present a positive, controlled brand image, particularly after McDonald’s has taken hits by its portrayal in Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me,” she wrote.

But McDonald’s isn’t the first company to commission in-store content. Here’s a look at other brands that have embraced the screen in a theatre, fast-food restaurant or megastore near you.

Pizza Pizza

Pizza Pizza is ahead of McDonald’s when it comes to in-store content. The Canadian pizza chain teamed up with Rogers Digital Network Solutions back in 2008 to create Pizza Pizza-TV.

The narrowcast network – available in hundreds of the pizza chain’s stores across southern Ontario – features local sports highlights, entertainment news and music videos.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart’s in-store entertainment system dates back to 1997. According to USA Today, Wal-Mart had installed almost 130,000 TVs in approximately 3,000 stores in the United States by 2007.

Which means that Wal-Mart TV had the potential to reach about 127 million shoppers a week. What’s unique about Wal-Mart’s system is that each store can fine-tune the message that best suits clients at a given time.

Cineplex Entertainment

Gone are the days when trailers were the first thing you saw at the local cineplex. Movie theatres often showcase trivia questions, exclusive interviews with stars and entertainment news before the lights dim and the feature presentation begins.

Cineplex Entertainment (which operates theatres in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia) has expanded its content beyond the theatre; the company distributes 700,000 copies of Cineplex Magazine in theatre lobbies.

The magazine, which is published 12 times a year, features original content and celebrity interviews. Similarly, Cineplex.com features tons of original content as well, including video interviews and daily blog posts.

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy, Creative Director Charles Lim and Community Manager Joey Tanny

Maybe it’s our creative director’s near-obsessive attention to detail. Maybe it’s the tsunami of tweets our community manager cranks out on a daily basis. Or maybe it all just boils down to Content. Whatever it is, it’s working. And we couldn’t be more proud.

On Monday the third-annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPA) ceremony took place at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, with hundreds of digital publishers, editors, and designers in attendance.

This year Sparksheet was nominated for seven awards in the blue division (B2B), and despite the slew of quality competitors, Sparksheet did what few expected, taking the top prize in every category:

• Best Online-Only Site GOLD
• Best Web Design GOLD
• Best Blog GOLD
• Best Use of Social Media GOLD
• Best E-Newsletter GOLD
• Best Mobile-Optimized Site GOLD
• Best Article or Series (for Brand New Havana) GOLD

As the winners were announced, the Twittersphere lit up: some at the ceremony had never heard of us, others were simply baffled by our success. Here are some of our favourites from the evening:

@CraigSilverman: Hey look at the Sparksheet editor eating his too many awards! #COPAwards pic.twitter.com/9MP7GWFF

@Mastheadmag: We lost track of how many awards Sparksheet won. #COPAwards

@PoppedCulture: One last award for @nationalpost - a silver for best companion website. #COPAwards @sparksheet won everything else.

@mattlundy33: At the #copawards. Wtf is sparksheet?

@thismason: In the end, we snatched victory from the jaws of Sparksheet #copawards

@VickiJane13: Sparksheet is cleaning up in here! Anyone have any idea what that is? #copawards

@mattlundy33: Sparksheet is like when the Lord of the Rings ran the table at the Oscars. #copawards

@ALeeGreenberg: Who IS Sparksheet, you ask? Big time #copawards winner, for starters.

@ssawchuk: Sparksheet. Win all the things. #COPAwards

@spafax_arjun: With all their mega COPA awards, pretty sure the @Sparksheet guys are going to be insufferable #spafax

Congratulations to all the other nominees and winners (other multiple-award winners included the CBC, Globe and Mail, National Post, OpenFile and Torontoist). And a huge thanks to the COPA judges and crowd for your support!

The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like a nod to newspapers, but you’re not really a news site. Do you consider yourselves a blog, an online magazine, an aggregator or something else entirely?

The reason we call ourselves an online magazine and not a blog is because we knew that when we launched, the business world was not completely familiar with the word “blog.”

In addition, our site features deeper and richer articles than a typical blog. All of our articles are at least 1000 words. We publish once a day, 24 articles a month, which is essentially the same amount of articles that are in a print magazine.

You’re the first person ever to tell me that we have a newspaper type of name. The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like it’s socially important, it sounds like it’s established and that it’s been around forever.

The site has a particularly memorable look, with its jungle-themed design and cartoon illustrations. Where did that come from?

The site definitely has a unique visual display. Our mascot is this little guy named Scout, named by our user community in a contest during our one-year birthday celebration.

I wanted to have a site that was visually stunning, looked very professional, and that when people came to it they just assumed it had existed forever. In reality, even though we have more than 100,000 e-mail subscribers, we’re only 22 months old.

Many of your headlines include a question, a number (“4 Tips,” “5 Steps”), or a “How to,” making them very SEO-friendly. How much do search engines factor into your editorial process? Do you create content based on what people are searching for?

No, we do not. We only get 15 percent of our 900,000 page-views per month from search. We do not try to make things that appeal to search engines. We don’t ignore search engines, but it’s not our primary focus. Our primary focus is to appeal to people.

I have a background in copywriting so I know what a good headline is. We write headlines that people want to share, that people want to click through on Twitter or Facebook to read.

SME went from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in 20 months, and it’s all from social media. Our articles have titles that are designed to really draw people to the content. We’re about people optimization, not search engine optimization. We’re trying to optimize for the human mind.

In your latest book, Launch, you discuss the “elevation principle,” which goes something like this: Great content + other people – marketing messages = business growth. Why are “marketing messages” subtracted from this equation?

Edelman did a study and found that only a third of people trust businesses, meaning that 66 percent don’t. In the book, I postulate that part of the reason is that people think businesses are just out to take their money.

Everywhere we go, all we see are marketing messages. It’s permeating our culture and people are tuning out.

If you want your content to be received as a gift instead of a lure designed to convert someone into a prospect, then you need to put away those marketing messages. I don’t say “don’t do marketing,” but what I do say is not to embed those marketing messages into your content.

If your content has ads all around it then what you’re doing is sending people away from it, or you’re telling the people that all you really care about is getting conversions, not providing great content.

You practice what you preach because Social Media Examiner is an ad-free space. Of course, that brings up an obvious question: How does Social Media Examiner make money?

You’ll only see one ad on our site, which is for our own events. Once people receive our content and decide to sign up for more via our e-mail list, then they’ve opted into a secondary channel, which I call the backchannel. Through that channel I can embed some marketing messages. That’s how we grow our business.

We send out a daily e-mail blast to 100,000 people, 6 days a week. Inside that e-mail we have a 70-word description of the day’s article with a link. Underneath it we’ll have ads; some are from sponsors, others are for our own events.

Our sponsors are mostly social media-related agencies. Anyone who wants to be in front of social media marketers is the ideal sponsor.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

There’s a sidebar on the homepage where you can input your information. We also have a cookie mechanism whereby first-time visitors are prompted to subscribe with a one-time pop-up.

Chris Brogan says that “e-mail is the golden ticket,” and that’s true because a large e-mail list is more important than followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. People have given us permission to communicate with them. E-mail is still the secret magic bullet.

Many other media brands have made the leap from print to web. You guys have made the leap from web to events. Any plans to extend the Social Media Examiner brand from web to print?

No plans. We’re new media in every way. Even our events are completely online. We don’t do anything in the old media kind of way. For me it makes no sense to go backwards. There’s a place for print, but not in my company.

Pam Didner at Content Marketing World 2011/Photo courtesy of Content Marketing World

You were a speaker at last week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland. Tell me, what does a company that makes computer hardware have to do with content?

It’s funny you asked. We did in-depth research on how consumers and IT managers view Intel. Words such as “innovation,” “quality,” “performance,” “trust,” “reliability” are used to describe our brand.

Once we start talking about “technology” and “innovation,” there are a lot of stories that we can tell. Imagine the content we can create or stories we can tell through the experiences that technology enables in people’s lives. We have more to do with content than ever before.

Computer chips don’t necessarily lend themselves to great storytelling. How do you weave the many, complicated things Intel does into a compelling story?

It can be very challenging to find the right story to tell. We look to our R&D department, which we call Intel Labs. Not sure if you remember the Intel Rock Star Commercial. We showcased Ajay Bhatt, who is the co-inventor of the USB drive. There are some amazing things our engineers are doing at Intel Labs. The stories are there, we just need to find them.

Intel is a multiplatform company, and it’s also an international one. How do you create content that works across geographical and cultural boundaries? Which platforms work best for which audiences?

I’d like to address that at the B2C and B2B levels. B2B is much easier to scale, especially since our target audience is IT managers, whose challenges tend to be similar across regions. Most IT managers battle similar issues such as security threats, Windows upgrades, downtime, etc.

In addition, IT managers tend to be the no-nonsense type of guys. B2B content and creative are easy to scale.

Cultural differences play a much bigger role in B2C, especially on creative development. During the creative development and storytelling stage, we engage with geographies. From time to time, we customize multiple versions of the same content to meet different geographic needs. For example, for the Intel Rock Star commercial we have a Chinese version featuring a prominent Chinese engineer from Intel China.

Can you talk about how you’ve leveraged social media to promote Intel products around the world?

Social media is part of the overall integrated campaign, especially in North America. We leverage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – wherever it makes sense.

Outside North America, our various regional offices need to make the call on how to leverage local social media. Social media does require subject matter expertise and some regions just do not have the resources to do that.

You were involved in creating Intel’s online IT Manager Game, a simulation of an IT professional’s average day in the office. With social games going mainstream, is it only IT professionals who are getting in on the fun or have you seen other, more surprising demographics participating as well?

IT Manager Game was first launched in May, 2006. We are currently designing IT Manager Game 4.0. The game has more than 120,000 registrants in 16 countries. There is no paid media promoting the game, so it’s been a purely viral success.

We specifically target IT professionals. The player profile: men under 40 working as IT managers or in IT support/Help desk for big, small or medium-sized companies.

You’ve said that marketing and innovation are “BFF”, but that current corporate practices of putting marketing at the end of the process often put them in more of an “it’s complicated” situation. Can you unpack this analogy for us?

All marketers can relate to this situation: A product group hands over an almost-finished product and expects last-minute marketing magic. At Intel, we follow a process called the “Marketing Life Cycle.” We move marketing upstream.

Marketing is engaged with the product group 24-36 months prior to the product release. Our marketing research and branding teams work in tandem with the product groups to provide input on product features, research and brand strategy during the product definition stage. This gives us enough time to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

How can marketers be more like magazine editors, as you’ve suggested?

Social and search are rewriting the rules of engagement. Our audience is out there constantly searching for information and evaluating new technologies, even when they are not purchasing.

We need to engage with them on a timely basis. Most importantly, we need to engage with them on the topics they care about, yet in an authentic way. This requires some level of planning, especially when multiple marketing functions are involved.

The first step is to have an editorial calendar which rallies the different teams. Once you know what topic you would like to use to engage with your audience, the next step is to build a story that’s both relevant to your audience and your company.

In a way, it’s very similar to publishing a magazine. You have the theme for that edition, then you build stories around it.

But a mobile plan that ignores ethnicity is equally as incomplete, according to statistics revealed recently by Nielsen in The New Digital American Family, a study of family dynamics, media and purchasing habits.

Just as visible minorities are adopting social media in higher numbers than their Caucasian counterparts, their adoption of smartphones outstrips the national average.

As of December 2010, 31 percent of all mobile users in the U.S. had smartphones. Among white mobile users, however, only 27 percent reported owning a smartphone, such as an Android, BlackBerry or iPhone.

By comparison, 45 percent of Asians, Pacific Islanders and Hispanics owned smartphones. Likewise, 33 per cent of African-Americans choose app-based smartphones with web-enabled operating systems over traditional feature devices.

With 95 million smartphones expected to sell in the U.S. during 2011, a mobile marketer who overlooks the high levels of ethnic diversity among users is effectively leaving money on the table.

Smartphone adoption among US mobile users by ethnicity (Source: The Nielsen Company)

Smartphone OS (operating system) use by ethnicity (Source: The Nielsen Company)

Get granular

As multicultural marketing company Translation says on its website, “The difference between ethnic stereotyping and cultural accuracy is all in the details.”

In mobile marketing, that means tailoring your campaign to each user group’s preferences because Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians use their phones differently.

For example, Hispanics are more likely than the average U.S. household to have cell phones with Internet and video capabilities. Plus, Hispanics write more texts than any other race or ethnicity, sending 943 texts per month, versus the national average of 740.

African-Americans run up more mobile voice minutes per month (1,261) than any other group. And at 36 percent, Asians and Pacific Islanders prefer Apple’s iPhone to all other operating systems – more than anyone else. –

Marketers ought to get granular and design a mobile marketing plan that reflects the nuances of how different ethnic groups are adopting and adapting to smartphones.

Pepsi vs. Coke

Successful examples of well-crafted multicultural mobile campaigns exist in both the commercial and nonprofit arenas.

During the lead up to Super Bowl XLV in February, Pepsi launched its Familia de Campeones campaign, targeting the Hispanic community.

Over the course of the eight-week campaign, Pepsi generated 123,000 opt-ins through a mobile microsite, SMS, and QR codes on point-of-sale materials in Hispanic-targeted locations across the country. Once on the site, users were able to upload a family photo and create a free customized poster mailed to them within 4-6 weeks.

Similarly, Coca-Cola created a mobile campaign in June for attendees of the Essence Music Festival, the U.S.’s largest music and empowerment event for African-American women.

During a performance on the main stage, the audience was asked to text “celebrate” followed by their first and last name to a designated number. The first 500 people to do so were rewarded with tickets to a barbecue event, as well as four VIP passes to the festival. Within 30 seconds, 3,145 people had responded, according to Coke.

Mobile activism

Community advocacy groups like Reform Immigration For America (RI4A) are also tapping mobile phones to engage support for immigration reform legislation. By texting “justice” to 69866, citizens can join the Immigration Cell Phone Action Network. As of June 2010, RI4A has built the largest bilingual mobile advocacy list in American history with 150,000 subscribers and more than 340,000 calls made for reform.

Likewise, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) recently launched OurChinatown, a hyperlocal news and culture blog driven primarily by mobile journalism. Reporters covering Manhattan’s Chinatown use smartphones to gather news and file stories, video and photos in real time. The mobile-optimized website features stories in English, the best of which are also translated into Chinese.

When marketers – and community advocates – take the time to craft multicultural mobile campaigns, the results are clear. It’s not enough to just integrate mobile into your marketing plans, as Coca-Cola’s Wendy Clark suggests. You should also ensure that your plan reflects how the smartphone’s most enthusiastic American adopters – Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians – prefer to use their mobile devices.

How do you maintain Playboy’s unique voice, outlook and culture across so many disparate media, from print and video, to Facebook and Twitter?

It’s a challenge to ensure that all of our mouthpieces are aligned in terms of voice, tone and messaging. Back in the day, the magazine was it.

Now we have constant external communications on TV, radio, Playboy.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Ustream, TheSmokingJacket.com and other communications vehicles.

Each of these platforms must stick to the brand’s identity and [they] are constantly monitored to make sure they’re on-brand and in line with Hef’s vision and our editorial director’s ideas.

That said, each platform communicates and publishes differently and may also have separate audiences, so the way they represent/interpret the brand may differ slightly.

What’s the goal of Playboy’s social media activity, and how do you measure success?

We have a number of goals in social media. First, building celebrity for our Playmates and models. Years ago TV was the only way for a Playmate to make the major step from centrefold to household name. Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are prime examples, but since we know that every Playmate with some charisma and a story to tell isn’t going to end up on TV, social media is the way to grow their audience.

Each new Playmate goes through our social media training and is introduced to our fan base (5 million+ on Facebook, 250,000 on Twitter) when her issue comes out. Within days she’ll have a thriving fan base of her own and we’ll work with her to create content and identify digital influencers to interact with. There are over 90 Playmates actively using Facebook and Twitter with a combined following of over 2 million, giving Playboy the sexiest army of digital brand advocates in the world.

Second, increasing engagement with our fan base beyond the pages of the magazine. We create specific content franchises for each platform in order to properly use each channel and not just post content for the sake of having a presence on a certain site.

Third, generating revenue. A few years ago, managing social media for a brand was mainly focused on growth, engagement, listening or some other buzz term. Monetizing was a nice-to-have but certainly not a primary objective.

Now once we reach a certain scale, revenue is a must in order to justify the existence of jobs like mine, right? True success in this space is quantifiable.

How would you describe the quintessential Playboy reader, and have your perceptions of him or her changed as you’ve engaged with readers online?

In terms of our social media audience, it spans beyond just the obvious, which is the guy who appreciates beautiful women.

Some of the other types we see include people that love the brand and its history, women that became fans after watching The Girls Next Door on E!, women who are aspiring Playmates, and people in search of men’s entertainment and lifestyle content.

We all know that Top 10 lists and sexy photo galleries are good for traffic, but Playboy has made its reputation on long-form articles and in-depth interviews. How do you attract eyeballs without sacrificing the quality of your content?

It’s important for us to recognize that there are many different types of people that come to Playboy.com via many different entry points. For example, if someone gets to the site to check out the latest Playmate, how can we make them aware that there’s a great interview or gaming feature they’d be interested in?

Or if they got to Playboy.com from a site that linked to an interview, how can we keep them on site to enjoy the eye candy? The “link-bait” may bring in more visitors, but the “long form” is what will build a true audience for a site.

With the Playboy mansion, you guys were pioneers in extending the “magazine experience” into the real world. Do you think being involved with things like events and nightclubs is an increasingly important part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21^st century?

Absolutely. Playboy allows consumers to interact with the brand and experience the Playboy lifestyle through parties and experiences at the Playboy Clubs. In 2006, we opened a multi-faceted entertainment venue in Las Vegas. More recently, we’ve opened Playboy Clubs in London, Cancun and Macau and look forward to continuing the expansion.

The Playboy brand has always been representative of “the good life” and we have always offered exclusive opportunities to enjoy that good life via nightclubs, parties and special events.

Playboy.com features a mix of free content and premium stuff. Do you think you’ve struck the right balance between the “open web” and “walled garden” approaches to online content?

Playboy has a number of web properties that aim to reach different audiences. Playboy.com includes a mix of girl features, entertainment stories and longer articles.

The Smoking Jacket, Playboy’s safe-for-work site, includes shorter posts, lists, “quick hits” that you’d want to pass along to your friends, and non-nude girl features. Playboy’s subscription sites offer extended girl content.

Our sites aim to attract different readers and viewers; we work to give fans a variety of content, both free and paid.

When people think of Playboy, they obviously think of your founder, Hugh Hefner. How have you brought Hef’s considerable legacy and personality into the online space?

Hef is extremely active on Twitter and it has become a part of his daily routine. People always ask if it’s really him, and it is Hef on his iPad from the Playboy Mansion. A lot of his tweets are answering fan questions, good or bad, so Twitter truly is an engagement platform for him.

Photos courtesy of Playboy

Note: If these apply to any person, real or fictional, it’s purely coincidental.

Content marketing is approaching a bubble

First, every software technology company is launching a “content” product. It’s amazing the number and velocity of startup launches in and around content marketing. Second, the term “content marketing” is being bantered around like social media was just a few years ago.

What does this mean? Well, I’m not complaining. I first started using the term in 2001 and people still thought I was crazy in 2008. That said, people are more confused about the true power of content marketing than ever before. Lots of education is needed.

So, will this bubble pop? Honestly, I’m not sure. Content marketing is here to stay, but with it being “the flavour of the month” it’s hard to get a true feel for where it’s going (and how fast).

Integration will make divorce look like child’s play

This is going to hurt. Content owners exist throughout most organizations. (Frankly, all employees “own” content to a certain extent.) Currently, the problem is that content owners in multiple departments aren’t talking to each other. Email doesn’t necessarily talk to social media. Social media doesn’t talk to PR. PR doesn’t talk to internal publications.

Integrating workflow throughout an organization is going to hurt. Positioning a Chief Content Officer to take control of the brand story is going to take a while. I’ve recently talked to two Fortune 50 CMOs that are trying to find a solution for this.

They know this is important. It’s important in order to communicate effectively with our customers and prospects. It’s important because if we want to talk to customers like human beings we have to all get on the same page. But, yes, it’s going to hurt. Why? One word: politics.

Where is the content marketing career path?

The more I talk to journalism and business professors at universities across North America, the more I realize that they are not talking about content marketing as a career path.

That’s one of the reasons we are holding a seminar for students called Futures in Content Marketing.

Especially for journalism and writing major, universities need to start talking about the real opportunities for young storytellers… with brands. The job market for journalism majors has never looked better, but we have to look at the market in a new way.

There is no silver bullet

Marketers always look for the silver bullet solution when it comes to content marketing. Well, there isn’t one. Your story is different than every other story on the planet. That means the strategy and execution of that story is different as well.

What does this mean? You have to plan; tactics alone won’t do anything. It hurts me when billion-dollar companies want to do a blog or get active on Twitter without having any idea of what they want it to do for the business and what they actually want to say to their customers.

Your story is meaningful, but you have to plan out how that story should be told and why anyone should really care in the first place. There is no roadmap you can steal from someone else. You have to go through it for yourself.

Getting out of the dugout

When people ask me where we are at in the lifecycle that is content marketing, I tell them this: “If content marketing was a baseball game, we are just getting out of the dugout.”

Many of us think that the true revolution is social media. Not true. The revolution we are seeing is that we can now share our story and engage directly with our customers without any barriers.

Yes, that means social media. But it also means print, in-person, mobile and the 10 new tools being developed right now.

But the good news is that you haven’t missed it. There is still plenty of time to see this evolution (or revolution) within the walls of your company. It can start with you. Frankly, it has to.

Content Marketing World takes place September 6-8 in Cleveland. As an official media partner, Sparksheet brings you original conference-related content before and after the event.

Last December, Groupon reportedly rebuffed Google’s $6-billion buyout offer, earning headlines and some headshakes around the world. In June, the company filed its long awaited S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling its desire to become a publicly-traded company. Its IPO is being valued at $20 billion.

With promises of new repeat customers and increased sales, businesses have flocked to Groupon in droves. But in the aftermath of cars washed, teeth whitened, and yoga classes taught, some merchants have questioned whether they’re getting the raw end of the daily deal.

Back in February, online marketing consultant John Kurien wrote a think piece for Sparksheet predicting that Groupon and its host of competitors were a game-changing opportunity for online retailers. In the piece, Kurien outlines three ways that marketers could leverage these social commerce sites.

In light of all that’s happened since, we decided it was time to check back in and see how Groupon’s partner merchants are faring in these three areas.

Acquiring new customers

Image via noclipmode.com

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason stressed that it is not the deal itself that benefits merchants; rather, it’s the customer acquisitions from the deal that make it lucrative. In other words, the onus lies on the merchant to engage its new customers, whether it’s through Facebook, Twitter, or plain old email address acquisition.

As part of his ‘anti-Groupon’ series for TechCrunch, guest contributor Rocky Agrawal spotlights Posies Café owner Jessie from Portland, Ore., who nearly bankrupted her business by running a Groupon deal.

In an interview with Agrawal, Jessie acknowledged that aside from running a bad deal (her $13 deal was more than twice her average sale of $5), she also did little to convert her new patrons into regulars.

Agrawal argues that Jessie’s story exemplifies the flaws inherent in Groupon’s merchant information pipeline.

On the flipside, American Apparel praised Groupon’s ability to court new customers. After selling more than 130,000 discounted gift cards via Groupon, the retail giant reportedly signed up roughly 25 percent of new customers to its email list, generating nearly $1 million in surplus revenue.

Selling up

Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

Once a business has courted a new customer with a discount, Kurien suggests, chances are they will spend more than the amount of the coupon

According to a Groupon survey, diners who cash in restaurant deals are highly likely to spend more than the coupon value – roughly 98 percent of patrons, says Groupon.

Restaurant owner Carey Friedman of Grandpa Eddie’s BBQ in Richmond, Virginia, supports this claim. Friedman even went so far as to write a post for TechCrunch on just how positive his Groupon experience was.

Not only did Grandpa Eddie’s Groupon customers spend an average of $12 more than the coupon, but 70 percent of them were new customers. Even better is that 800 of these new customers returned to the restaurant after they had already claimed the coupon.

While this experience was overwhelmingly positive, this New York Times article suggests that running a restaurant deal is still a crapshoot.

Aside from restaurants, businesses of all types have experienced the highs and lows of running a deal. Whatever the business, merchants must have enough sense to navigate Groupon’s terms and methodically calibrate a deal so that it is difficult for customers to spend just the value of the coupon.

To that end, Groupon champion Bob McKeon credits a strong understanding of Groupon’s terms to the success of his photo printing business. If a merchant is unwilling or unable to discount his or her product by 75 percent, he says, running a deal is not the right move.

Free publicity

Image by Narisa via Flickr

One of the most enticing aspects of social commerce is the social aspect. After scoring a deal, many people’s first inclination is to share it with friends, either through email or social media. This brings a viral aspect to the deal, and means that no matter how many people sign up, businesses will earn a good deal of exposure.

Harvard professor Benjamin G. Edelman, one of the authors of To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts, names the free publicity factor as one of Groupon’s greatest strengths.

In his TechCrunch post, restaurateur Friedman also points out that his barbecue joint gained new customers from the exposure alone. These were people who didn’t necessarily buy the deal, but who saw the brand name – either on Groupon itself or through social networks – and figured they’d give it a try.

Café owner Michele Casadei Massari also acknowledges the promotional benefits of a Groupon deal, pointing out perhaps its biggest attribute – it’s free.

“Groupon gave us a massive marketing campaign that a small business like ours would never be able to afford,” Massari mentioned in the New York Times piece.

So what does the future hold for Groupon, its subscribers, its merchants and its eventual shareholders?

Considering its ever-mounting number of competitors, it remains to be seen whether people will tire of being constantly bombarded with deal-mails or, conversely, whether Groupon and the like will breed a society of ultra-dealmongers. That is, those consumers who wait only for deals to buy, consequently eroding prices.

One thing’s for sure is that the cacophony of nay-sayers is growing louder and more difficult to ignore in light of the IPO, leaving many critics wondering whether Groupon will regret spurning Google’s billions when it had the chance.

Every brand wants its content to go viral, but in the end it comes down to what Alex calls “the perfect combination of creative genius, market timing an emotionally engaged audience.”

While most people would consider the duel between the Old Spice hunks as the epitome of viral branded content, what truly makes a video (branded or not) go viral is the emotional response it evokes from an audience, whether it’s laughs, tears or anything in between.

Helping brands find this much sought-after sweet spot is the aptly-named Lucky Branded Entertainment, a New York-based creative agency and film production company that creates entertaining web content for brands.

As a reference tool, Lucky created The Viral Collection – a curated compilation of the web’s most popular viral branded videos. According to the site, TVC is a free resource “for marketers, creative directors and social media experts,” featuring more than 700 videos and counting.

Below are some of our favorites from the collection:

To promote the 2012 Focus, Ford tapped spokespuppet Doug to star alongside “Ford Marketing Specialist” John (comedic actor John Ross Bowie) in a series of YouTube adverts highlighting the newly redesigned Focus. 

Every time I see Starburst candies, and by see I mean forage through a pack for the yellows and pinks, I think of this commercial. Five years later, this spot still strikes a chord. 

Produced by the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund, “Dear 16 Year Old Me” is a heart-wrenching cautionary PSA about the dangers of melanoma. (I highly suggest watching with tissues handy.)

A look at how Google Chrome can help capture and preserve life’s most precious moments. (I’d keep the tissues around for this one, too.) 

What happened when tea giant Tetley took to the supermarket with a band of butlers to promote its “Infusions” line of beverages. Note to self: change supermarkets.

Evian’s grown-up rendition of one of the web’s earliest viral hits, the dancing Oogachaka baby. 

This has resulted in the creation of useful quality content, which has resulted in more empowered customers, leading to better, more relevant products.

Two recent examples of this come from Whole Foods Market and Procter & Gamble.

Branded lifestyles

Whole Foods recently launched several new branded content initiatives through its highly successful YouTube channel called Thrive. Thrive features fascinating, insightful stories from people who share their personal accounts of sustainable urban farming, organic cooking and family legacies built around good eating.

The utility in these content experiences is clear: what you see inspires you to do things that can better your life, empowered by people you can relate to – Whole Foods shoppers and the food growers themselves.

This isn’t just a means for Whole Foods to get its brand name out there. The grocery retailer is tapping into communities that are already a part of its success as a business, and is creating a platform of transparency and goodwill that drives its brand value in innovative ways. You might think of this as a new “Do-It-Yourself” network of brand advocates.

Life Goes Strong, a joint venture of P&G and NBC Universal, is a network of websites that provides lifestyle content for the 40-plus crowd. For example, couples who are seeking guidance on relationships, parenting, or even matters of divorce, can get firsthand advice from people who are actually going through these experiences and detailing them as they happen.

Similar experiences are shared around a whole host of relevant themes, from health to technology to fashion and career management.

While the idea behind this isn’t new, it does prove a point about the value of consumer demand: products are only as relevant as the things people care about. As this platform evolves (the site is in BETA), it will be interesting to see how P&G and its portfolio of brands use the site’s content and conversations to create better products, and to allow those same people to tell stories about how those products have affected their lives in positive ways.

Citizen storytelling and branded journalism

These are just two examples that signal a change in how the consumer landscape is driving new market opportunities for brands based on profound shifts in online publishing and digital media.

And while online publishers such as AOL (which now owns The Huffington Post), and Yahoo! position their business models around the development and syndication of original content, there is a huge opportunity for brands to be part of this equation, along with their customers.

Google, through YouTube, has allowed independent content producers of all types to build their own “micro networks” with original content, and actively engaged audiences.These citizen-created networks have produced everything from new types of music to new types of exercise.

Where brands have entered the picture here is even more interesting.

Pepsi’s live social media events in Brazil, for example, have renewed interest in its products and its push for cultural empowerment through live product demonstrations and guest talks ranging from environmental advocacy groups to concerts, art shows and photography exhibits. (Full disclosure: I am employed by the agency that does much of this work with Pepsi).

PepsiCo's Director of Digital and Social Media Bonin Bough speaks at Social Media Week in São Paulo, Brazil. Image by PepsiCo Brazil via Flickr.

Pepsi effectively turns these events into platforms where attendees help build stories for and on behalf of the brand. Pepsi deploys teams of journalists, genre experts, anthropologists – and in some cases, scientists, product engineers and musicians – to go to these live events and curate conversations with people in real-time.

The relationship is mutually beneficial: What people get is a shared voice that reflects the impact they have on their own local culture, while the brand gets valuable insight into what culturally drives its business.

The future of branded storytelling

Brands and agencies have traditionally relied upon creative teams or bloggers to drive these social conversations forward. But brands have begun tapping into vocational skills not commonly found in the marketing and advertising worlds – skills resident in disciplines like investigative journalism, data science, applied mathematics and cultural anthropology.

So what does this look like?

Source (where content comes from), voice (a brand, consumer or expert position), intent (where audiences are being cultivated) and format (method of delivery - the combination of platform and experience) are the key components of storytelling.

Brands can no longer afford to just aggregate or curate content and expect people to advocate their products and services; much of the value of branded content is predicated on who is telling these stories, why they matter, and how those stories are distributed.

In the case of Whole Foods, stories around sustainability and urban farming are relevant because they’re being told by real subject matter experts who are also a part of the company’s supply chain.

Pepsi’s efforts in Brazil resonate because the journalists and experts on the ground are immersed in the communities they write about.

For P&G, the way the brand will continue to build credibility with consumer advocates is by empowering real people to develop the skills to become the subject matter experts.

In all cases, we can see how these values are co-created: there is a clear, definable collaboration between brand and consumer.

If brands can get this formula right within a variety of business contexts they will win in areas where many studios, TV and online networks have continued to stumble.

Plenty of techies are praising Google+’s clean design and privacy features, but others are decidedly less impressed.

Of course, with any new social network there’s always room for improvement ­­­­– and Google is sure to take these critiques to heart as it continues to tweak the platform.

Here’s what a sampling of tech writers are saying about Google’s latest project:

Mule Design’s Mike Monteiro:

Putting screenshots of Google+ and Twitter next to each other you’ll notice two things. One, there’s a lot more density on the Twitter side. That means more stuff, and stuff is good, as long as stuff is ordered, which [Twitter] generally seems to be.

Mashable’s Ben Parr:
The core of Google+ is the Stream, which doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It’s a lot like Google Buzz or the Facebook News Feed.

Wired’s Shimrit Ben-Yair:
On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.

The Guardian’s Charles Arthur:
Google+, with its complicated desktop interface, strikes me as something which looks wonderful on a 21in screen, but once you shift onto a smartphone (which is where more and more people are going to experience the web) then it’s going to struggle to be useful.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler:

Whether they’ll admit it or not, Google is making a bold and perhaps risky move by attempting to attack social from scratch. What if they flop again?

Ann Curry @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

Ann Curry takes her role as anchor to heart. Curry believes that television news anchors are responsible for holding down the journalistic principles of truth and accuracy in a world where the real-time news cycle often leads to error and misinformation.

Opening with a tongue-in-cheek impression of her Japanese mother, Curry charmed the crowd into a tweeting frenzy at last month’s 140conf.

During her 10-minute talk, entitled “Journalism in the State of Now,” Curry boldly declared that today’s journalists find themselves “where no generation has gone before.”

In particular, Curry addressed social media’s role in igniting social activism and spreading knowledge. She said that Facebook and Twitter offer people a platform to express their hopes and frustrations, or what she calls their “beautiful outrage.”

We caught up with Ann Curry backstage to chat about the changing state of news journalism and how she approaches her role as anchor across multiple platforms.

Known as the digital middle class, these Brazilians made up 42 percent of the country’s Internet population in 2010, and are highly coveted by digital marketers, despite their average monthly income being only US$581.

This historic shift has forced Brazilian brands and marketers to figure out how to engage 101 million people to whom they never really had to pay attention before.

It’s clear that the “social pyramid” traditionally used to describe Brazil’s social structure no longer works. Today, a diamond is more accurate. In 2010 alone, 19 million Brazilians "graduated" from classes D and E to Class C.

Social media nation

An impressive 45 percent of class C Brazilians are active on social media. Brands, therefore, have focused their marketing efforts on channels such as YouTube, MSN Messenger, Twitter and Orkut, the Google-owned social network that still trumps Facebook in Brazil.

Popular chocolate brand Lacta, for example, partnered with Orkut on Fazendinha, Brazil’s answer to Facebook’s Farmville game (the name literally translates as “little farm”). When players plant a cacao seed on their virtual farm, the seed grows into a tree that produces MiniBis, Lacta’s new chocolate snack.

These social networks have also given brands access to a previously elusive demographic: middle class women. According to research, 83 percent of class C women access the Internet on a daily basis, and 40 percent of them spend more than two hours a day on social networks.

In order to engage this underserved market, popular Brazilian clothing chain Marisa launched a flashy new website that includes a virtual changing room where shoppers can “try on” clothes on a variety of body types.

Almost half of the Brazilians who use social media belong to Class C, and the vast majority of this "digital middle class" are female.

Different market, different rules

Brazilian brands have learned that the products and strategies they’ve used to reach class A and B consumers can’t simply be “pushed down” to class C.

This new middle class is, after all, making the transition from a very different economic reality in which a can of condensed milk was considered a luxury item to be offered as a gift on special occasions.

Brazil’s emerging consumers will be loyal to brands and products that cater to their unique needs and norms. Sales at the Casas Bahia retail chain skyrocketed after the brand figured out that class C customers loved furniture with mirrored doors because it made their small homes appear bigger.

And since many class C customers live in isolated areas where electronic products such as mobile phones are essential, Casas Bahia added a video series to its shopping website to explain in plain language how to use these unfamiliar items.

Class C-targeted ads also tend to be more didactic and direct. Most middle class Brazilians access the Internet from pay-by-the-hour Internet cafés (LAN houses) and don’t have time to ponder the pros and cons of buying a product while surfing on the clock.

With this reality in mind, department store chain Ponto Frio, one of the largest in the country, has added video and 3-D presentations on its website to reel in customers.

Class warfare goes digital

If wider access to credit lines over the past decade is largely responsible for allowing class C to participate in the economy, Orkut gets credit for putting class C on an even social footing, at least online.

About half of Orkut’s Brazilian users come from the digital middle class. Meanwhile, the upper classes are quietly fleeing to rival Facebook to escape Orkut’s rapid “favelization,” a term commonly used to describe the influx of lower income users.

Some things change more quickly than others.

Ann Curry @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You’d think these things would be obsolete by now. But, as I theorized on the 140conf stage in front of 800-plus people (not to mention the thousands who tuned into the webcast), face-to-face events like 140conf have only become more meaningful in a connected age.

As humans, we like to get together to share stories and ideas and conversations with people from around the world. The problem is that as soon as the curtain goes down, all of these stories and ideas and conversations fade into the ether – save for a photo or two. That’s why we partnered with 140conf curator Jeff Pulver to keep the conversation going before, during and after the event.

Before the conference, for example, we caught up with Funny or Die marketing director and conference speaker Patrick Starzan to chat about the online video website’s viral success. We also ran a short think piece by 140conf opera singer Ja-Naé Duane.

Then, while the conference was going on, our “ground team” at Sparksheet HQ was glued to the “backchannel” in order to curate a stream of the most interesting audience tweets in real time. Meanwhile, I shot some exclusive backstage videos with the likes of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Today Show anchor Ann Curry. Stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.

For now, here are some key takeaways from two eclectic, content-filled days:

Cory Booker @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

The web is a big tent

Have I used the word “eclectic” yet? Because there really is no better word to describe Jeff Pulver’s events. In keeping with the micro nature of Twitter, 140conf consisted of about 90 10-minute talks spread out over two dizzying days.

The lineup included everyone from tech-savvy farmer Steve Tucker and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra, to radiation oncologist Krupali Tejura and Newark mayor Cory Booker.

It was an important reminder that when we use terms like “users” and “audience” and “readers” and “consumers,” what we’re really talking about is people. All different kinds of people. Everywhere.

Jeff Jarvis @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Slow down

It’s funny. According to the 140conf tagline, this event was all about “exploring the state of now” and taking stock of what’s happening on “the real-time web.” But one of the main lessons of the conference was that we all need to slow down. Fast.

The problem with the web’s hurried pace is that it doesn’t leave much space for verification. That’s why media scholar Dan Gillmor is trying to launch a “slow news” movement, where citizens join journalists as “active consumers” of the news who approach so-called facts with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Case in point, NPR news curator Andy Carvin recounted how he helped unmask an American activist who spent months posing as a Syrian blogger called “Gay Girl in Damascus.”

The hoax fooled mainstream media outlets for months, but media critic Jeff Jarvis suggested, in a separate talk, that the onus of verification rests on readers as well as journalists. “I’m not asking you to question the article,” Jarvis said, “I’m asking you to question your assumptions.”

Cathy Brooks @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Listen up

While media pundits like Carvin, Gillmor and Jarvis talked about slowing down, several other 140conf speakers encouraged us to put away our smartphones, tablets and laptops  ­­– and listen up. Storytelling consultant Cathy Brooks, for example, began her talk with a tongue-in-cheek spoken-word piece that implored the audience to “shut up and breathe.”

In an informative talk on how to interview famous people, film journalist Warren Etheredge explained that “the first step in having a conversation is preparing yourself to listen.” Etheredge said the only interview question he prepares is the first one – the rest flow from listening to the person’s answers.

Social marketing expert Ted Rubin even coined a new buzzword for the value of listening to our customers and peers: Return on Relationship.

Ian Spector @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You can’t plan everything

Another term bandied around quite a bit at 140conf was “serendipity.” Indeed, many of the presenters had stumbled upon online success (or at least celebrity) accidentally.

Ian Spector, for example, launched a website in 2005 filled with funny “facts” about actor Chuck Norris. To date, the site has received more than 250 million views, and spawned a bestselling book series.

In a different vein, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spoke of the many unexpected ways merchants and brands use the location-based platform. But the theme of serendipity was summed up best by former news anchor Anita Cochran in the title of her ten-minute talk: “What, I’m a brand?”

The Lupus Ladies of Twitter @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

All good things

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the many speakers who took the 140conf stage to talk about how they are using the web to help people.

From the “Lupus Ladies of Twitter,” who used social media to raise awareness and build support for a groundbreaking new Lupus drug, to Hollaback’s Emily May and her crusade against street harassment, these inspiring people reminded us that the web is about more than ROI or ROE or ROR or any other catchy acronym.

It’s about people from all over the world getting together to do good things. Sort of like 140conf.

Funny or Die features a mix of original videos and user-generated stuff. How do you strike a balance between content creation and curation, and does one type of content inform the other?

Our goal is to always get our best content out there. When we started we were only producing exclusive content, about one video a week. Now we’re doing about 25 videos a month.

Obviously it’s important for us as a brand to be creating content, but the curation is also vital; whether it comes from friends of Funny or Die or our homepage editors scouring the Net on a daily basis to find the funniest stuff out there.

At the end of the day it’s about making our audience laugh and want to come back. That’s not something that can be done solely by pushing our own content.

In the last couple of years you guys have established yourselves as specialists in branded entertainment. Is it a challenge to create content that has to reflect both the Funny or Die brand and someone else’s?

The branded content is a big part of our business and revenue stream. These campaigns are developed by the same team that creates our original content. Depending on the deal with the brand, it’s then featured on our homepage.

In terms of the challenge, it really depends on the brand. Some brands are great and have a genuine understanding of the Internet and its capabilities. Even with guidelines in place, the objective is always to make a funny and effective video.

Other brands are more conservative and put a lot of restraints on the creative process, sometimes resulting in a less-funny video. There is always the challenge of making a suitable video for the brand while maintaining the integrity of what they’ve come to Funny or Die for in the first place.

You’ve said that you’ll work for any brand as long as it’s done transparently and the Funny or Die writers have total creative control. But have you ever been approached by a brand that’s just unspoofable?

For us, there’s no brand that’s unspoofable. In fact, the ones that might fall into that category actually end up being the most spoofable.

When Mini Cooper approaches us to do a collaboration, it’s a lot easier than if, for example, Intuit comes to us. It’s hard to make tax software funny. But there’s never been a case where we’ve had issues coming up with ideas or have questioned whether or not we were the right fit for a brand.

We’ve done a lot of thinking about what makes a video go viral online. Have you come close to identifying the secret sauce?

My caveat would be that if anyone says that they know the components of a viral video then they’re lying. I do, however, think that there are some underlying elements.

A viral video has to have a universal theme, something that everyone gets. The content must affect the viewer at an emotional level. Take Susan Boyle, for example. Otherwise, it has to have a laugh-out-loud or shock element. Ultimately, viral videos are things that people want to discover and share with their friends. People want to be the ones discovering that video. Influencers and people who share videos a lot are those who get the videos quicker, and that adds to the virality of a video.

We have a promotional strategy for all of our bigger videos. Obviously we spend a lot of time developing our social media accounts – Twitter (2 million+ followers), Facebook (900K+ followers), Tumblr, etc. - but we also have an outreach program to bloggers. That helps expose the content to those outside of our community.

A lot of your user-generated content consists of spoofs of advertising campaigns like the much-imitated Old Spice spots. Do you have a sense of how these spoofs affect the brands themselves?

With any successful campaign the next logical step is spoof-making. The people who make these spoofs are looking for attention. There is already a focus on these campaigns, so the best way of drawing attention over to you is by making a quality spoof. I think it’s a smart strategy, especially for young productions teams, and hopefully they have something to follow up with.

I can’t speak for the brands, and I guess it depends on the spoof, but I think that’s something that would continue to draw attention to the campaign. I would think most brands would be excited about that. Imitation is a form of flattery. Brands need to understand that they don’t have control of the online world. Online, the users control the brand.

Funny or Die has a presence on pretty much every digital and social platform. How do you maintain a consistent brand voice across each one?

I have a team of three people and we control all of the social media channels. Our approach to each of the platforms is different because each community is different. We do maintain a consistent voice, but we have different content calendars and strategies for each platform.

The overarching theme is that we always want to be communicating with our followers, having a two-way conversation. We want to make sure that they feel part of the community and that they own a little bit of the brand.

The latest episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis features embedded hashtags that link the video to Twitter. Do you think this sort of cross-platform storytelling is where things are headed online?

I’m really glad you noticed that! We’ve developed a large presence on each of the platforms, but now we’re trying to figure out how to integrate that more with the Funny or Die experience. The embeddable hashtag is one of our attempts to drive engagement.

I actually got the idea from watching TV that displayed a hashtag in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. I would follow the hashtag and see what engagement it drove, which made me think, “why wouldn’t we do that for our own videos when our viewers are actually online?”

It’s a way for us to cross-promote our content on different platforms, integrating the social experience with the content and shaping the conversation.

Funny or Die seems to have become a platform for certain celebrities to relaunch their brands or rescue their reputations. I’m thinking of people like Lindsay Lohan and Chris Klein. What do you think it is about the site that makes it a “safe space” for celebrities to make fun of themselves?

You can look at Funny or Die as an online SNL model. We have access to incredible writers and directors who make the whole process super easy and quick. It’s also a very safe environment. We always operate in the best interest of the talent. None of our videos are ever mean-spirited in tone.

For example, in 2009, Lindsay Lohan was facing a media firestorm. She called us on a Tuesday, we had scripts to her by Thursday, we shot on Sunday, and the video was up on Monday. All of a sudden it seemed to reframe her in the public mind – for that week, at least.

Funny or Die wasn’t always this type of space. We really had to build up our reputation as a place for celebrities to change public perception.

Finally, we can’t talk about Funny or Die without talking about Will Ferrell. How much of a role does he have in the site these days and how much do you think his unique brand is intertwined with that of the site?

Will definitely checks in from time to time. We’ve hired the right people to ensure that his and co-founder Adam McKay’s voices are maintained. They actually brought in our head of creative, Andrew Steele, who was a head writer at SNL for 17 years.

Will’s involvement was super important coming out of the gate, especially when the Internet was still foreign to most people. Will was already an Internet celebrity, so it helped us leverage collaborators. We didn’t start out with people knocking down our doors to make a video with us.

I think that Funny or Die is something that Will is proud of because it has built itself into its own brand. We can make deals now without playing the Will Ferrell card. But the brand itself is still representative of Will and Adam’s original vision.

They started the site as a creative sandbox for all of their friends to play in, and that’s sort of what it’s become and what the attraction is.

Patrick Starzan will be speaking at 140conf, which takes place on June 15 and 16 in New York City. As the event’s official content partner, we will bring you original 140conf-related content before, during and after the conference. Sparksheet readers are entitled to a 25% discount on registration with promo code “sparksheet” - http://nyc2011.140conf.com/

On the other hand, the face of a social media site like Facebook or Twitter would probably look more like a laid back, twenty-something dude (ala Justin Long in those Apple commercials).

But in the last month or so, LinkedIn has made a huge effort to catch up with its hipper rivals – and gotten a much-needed facelift in the public eye.

GigaOm reports that LinkedIn is launching a new button this month called “Apply with LinkedIn.” The function essentially lets job candidates use their LinkedIn profiles as resumes, to apply directly for jobs.

As Mashable’s Sarah Kessler points out, this is a smart move for LinkedIn because employers are a vital demographic for the now public company; hiring solutions generate a whopping 43 percent of the company’s revenue, according to GigaOm. Forbes’ Dan Schawbel predicts that more companies will use LinkedIn’s button as job boards become less popular.

This news comes on the heels of LinkedIn’s new share button which, much like Facebook’s ubiquitous “like” button, allows readers to share articles with their social networks.

And earlier this spring, the company launched LinkedIn Today, a daily online “newspaper” that curates stories shared by LinkedIn users around the world.

Shares rose to an impressive high of USD $122.70 soon after LinkedIn went public a few weeks ago, causing Slate and other publications to speculate whether social media represents a new tech bubble.

However, shares have since dropped to approximately $77 on Wednesday, suggesting that this bubble may burst before it’s fully inflated.

Whatever the case may be, we’re not going to underestimate LinkedIn anytime soon.

That’s how Wayne Sutton, cofounder of TriOut, summed up social media’s diversity problem in a tweet during last year’s BlogWorld conference.

On first blush, you might dismiss calls for greater diversity as growing pains for a young, expanding business sector. Certainly, social media is not the only area of business in which minorities and women are under-represented. But as educator Kyra Gaunt noted here on Sparksheet, “The structure of these conferences often replicates white privilege. And we should be concerned about this.”

The lack of diversity in social media circles is particularly alarming when you look at the fact that minorities are using social media at higher rates than whites. For example, 36 percent of Latinos and 33 percent of African Americans access social media tools like Facebook on their mobile phones in comparison to just 19 percent of Caucasians.

As marketers, we have a vested interest in the issue of representation because the more minorities find a voice, the more we learn about how these groups want to be reached and marketed to via social media.

Uncovering diversity

After attending South by Southwest in Austin this March, Jay Baer – co-author of The NOW Revolution – posted a piece on his blog entitled “Blinded by the White: Social Media and Diversity.” Baer observed that most SXSW attendees “appeared to be 25-39 years old… and the vast majority were White.”

In response, Danny Brown, co-founder of Bonsai Interactive Marketing, wrote “Social Media – It’s Not Just for White Folks”, adding the weight of data and statistics to argue that social media is, in fact, highly diverse if you’re willing to do the research.

In fact, it turns out that in the United States, a higher percentage of visible minorities are visiting social networking sites on a weekly basis than their non-ethnic counterparts:

The percentage of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds who visit popular social media sites at least weekly. Source: Merkle, View from the Social Inbox: 2010

Likewise, a new annual social media study of more than 23,000 Canadians reveals the relatively high percentage of immigrants and ethnic community members who are not simply following people but producing their own content online.

The numbers show that immigrants and visible minorities in Canada are creating content across 10 social media platforms in significantly higher proportions than the national average:

Canadian minority groups are creating content online in significantly higher proportions than the national average of 20 percent. Source: Delvinia and Environics Analytics

Where are the leaders?

Common sense would indicate that the social media industry’s thought leaders would closely reflect the ethnicity of its most prolific users and that conference organizers wouldn’t be at a loss to find speakers of colour.

But that’s clearly not the case. Peter Chow-White, co-author of Race After the Internet, an anthology to be released in the fall, sees this as part of a larger racial picture. “As long as you have structural inequalities in society,” Chow-White told AP Online, “you cannot expect to have anything less than that on the Internet.”

The structural argument is especially compelling when you compare the high number of minorities using social media with the depressingly low number of Internet start-ups founded by African Americans (1 percent), American Indians (1 percent) and Other Races (7 percent). By comparison, whites account for 87 percent of venture-capital-funded Internet start-ups. Only Asian Americans come anywhere close to competing at 12 percent.

But others, like Lewis Lalanne – also known as Nerd #2 on My Note Taking Nerd Blog – are not persuaded. Lalanne contends that “when more minorities, specifically Hispanics and blacks, get out of their own way, that’s when I believe you’ll see them rocking the mic with the white boys and girls at SXSW, making the big bucks online and blessing the world with their potential.”

Or as Blogworld tweeter Wayne Sutton suggests, perhaps we need to “stop complaining about the lack of diversity in the tech and Web space and just do something about it.”

Photo by Julien Perron-Gagné via Infopresse

One thing about the digital age is that it’s made lying much more complicated. I learned my lesson recently when I told a friend I wasn’t feeling well, forgetting I had just checked into a bar on Facebook. Financier Marcus Schrenker learned this after he was caught faking his death because he forgot to erase his Google search history.

What’s clear is that the Web is so smeared with our digital fingerprints that we can’t hide anymore. That was the lesson delivered by Wired magazine reporter Evan Ratliff at Infopresse’s RDV Web conference in Montreal earlier this month.

Fascinated by Schrenker’s epic Web fail, Ratliff decided to see for himself if it was possible to “vanish” in the social media age. He disappeared from the real world while tech-savvy amateur investigators attempted to track him online. The experiment lasted less than a month before Ratliff was found in New Orleans, and forced to pay a $3000 reward to the person who caught him.

The folks at Dell can tell you that the lesson applies to brands as well. Until a few years ago, the computer company had no official presence on the social web. But when customers googled Dell, they’d be led to a complaint site called Dell Hell, set up by a disgruntled customer.

Dell learned the hard way that there’s no such thing as not being online. There’s already a conversation going on around your brand, so you might as well join it. The first step is finding the people who are talking about your brand. The next step is turning skeptics into fans, and fans into brand advocates.

That’s exactly what Dell did to get itself out of PR hell. Dell hired a dedicated corporate blogger who owned up to the brand’s poor service and worked to address individual customer complaints.

Now Dell had a human face and voice that people wanted to engaged with. And here’s the good news: Everyone knows that humans aren’t perfect so as brands become more human, they don’t need to be perfect either.

Nestlé learned this lesson last summer in the wake of a Greenpeace campaign accusing the brand of contributing to rainforest destruction. Initially, Nestlé’s social media team responded by snapping back at critics on Facebook.

By failing to use a basic social skill (being nice to your customer), Nestlé managed to alienate even more people. How did it resolve this social media crisis? By apologizing, like humans do when they make mistakes.

As Ratliff, Dell and Nestlé all discovered, hiding out on the Web is no longer an option. This can be challenging and scary for brands and individuals used to being in control of their identity. But it’s also an opportunity. Because when you think about it, there are worse things for a brand than having a whole bunch of people trying to find you.

The Groupon phenomenon and other social buying sites like LivingSocial have drastically changed the way we think about e-commerce and online marketing. The integration of purchasing capabilities into social platforms like Facebook allows businesses to establish relationships with customers and then translate them directly into sales. In other words, Return on Engagement is now easier to measure than ever.

This week GameStop Corp. embraced the social shopping trend, opening its own Facebook store. Instead of merely browsing the video game company’s products, customers can now purchase items directly through the Facebook application much in the same way as on their website.

Sally Beauty Supply also launched a Facebook store this week, providing the brand’s 48,000 fans with the ability to buy everything from hair dryers to lipstick directly through the social network.

Beyond Facebook, social commerce is making its mark on the mobile world. Swap.com released an iPhone app that facilitates transactions between individual buyers and sellers. Shoppers use their smartphones to scan a barcode somewhere in the real world and are instantly connected to other users through the application.

These developments will inevitably change not only the way consumers purchase products, but how companies promote them. Smart brands will have to figure out how to leverage consumer relationships and turn forums for conversations into measurable forms of commerce.

Top stories

‘Bring it on, Groupon’: LivingSocial gets $400 million infusion from investors

Watch out Netflix, here comes YouTube: The online video leader is shifting its focus to original content.

The least social social network finally opens up: LinkedIn’s answer to Facebook’s Open Graph.

Google introduces plus-one, its answer to Facebook’s “like” in a move towards social searching.

Apple curates a mobile advertising gallery in its new iAd Gallery app.

Facebook tests real-time ads generated based on your posts and status updates.

In another example of moving from “click to brick,” the world’s first “Skype booth” opens at Estonia’s Tallinn airport.

Views from around the Web

Mashable takes a look at how Facebook’s latest iPhone app, complete with event check-ins, better accommodates its users.

Business oracle Warren Buffett cautions investors against over-valuing social networks.

Why the Mad Men-Netflix content distribution deal is a game changer.

The New York Times paywall: A flexible monetization strategy or just plain confusing?

Slate breaks down the algorithm behind content farms.

Speaking of Slate, editor David Plotz spoke to Sparksheet this week about the challenges facing online journalism.

This week in social media

New Mac & Cheese contest turns Tweets into ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aEUlobecG4&feature=player_embedded

Tweet mirrors in London share real-time images on Facebook and Twitter:

Photo via thealttab.com

Skittles: Touch the Rainbow?

Hipmunk introduces a Facebook campaign that turns you into a chipmunk:

It’s easy to see why some companies avoid the blogosphere. Blogs are a pain to maintain. Readership grows slowly and not always steadily. And it’s hard to communicate your company’s values without sounding like a worn-out press release.

But a survey of the blogosphere reveals a slightly more optimistic picture. In spite of the challenges, smart companies are maintaining successful blogs by telling relevant stories to well-defined and engaged communities.

Finding the right voice

Corporate blogging works well for brands that create a distinctive voice people trust. Many technology-related businesses find success by providing expert opinions about developments in their industry. Tech companies also benefit from a sophisticated understanding of the Web; they just ‘get it’ when it comes to capitalizing on a blog’s strengths, giving them an advantage over, say, a scuba gear company.

Google’s continued success in the blogosphere is directly related to its expert content. The Official Google Blog consistently ranks as a top technology blog, according to Technorati. It’s no surprise that people trust Google when it comes to finding strategies for maximizing search results or managing digital content. With separate blogs for its various applications, such as Google Docs and Gmail, Google keeps users informed by highlighting the most effective ways to use its services.

Engaging loyal customers in your business

Some of the most successful corporate blogs are collaborations between brands and their customers. Of the larger companies in the blogosphere, none invites users to participate in its business practices like Starbucks. My Starbucks Idea is devoted to aggregating comments and suggestions.

Starbucks’ loyal customers have generated more than 24,000 product ideas for new coffee or espresso drinks, including fan-favourites like “skinny” holiday beverages. This process has also produced the Starbucks Card Mobile, which allows customers to pay on their phones. To top it off, Starbucks keeps people updated throughout the development process by indicating whether an idea is in the review or launch phase.

Identifying, understanding and catering to a community

Once a company finds its voice and establishes the best way to engage customers, a corporate blog can focus on building communities around its brand.

In a sense, Lululemon can be credited for fostering an entire lifestyle community built around yoga. The clothing and accessory company’s blog extends this community online, offering expert opinions from yogis and runners alike.

From demystifying its product lingo to sharing yoga techniques and retreat dates, the company proves that understanding and catering to the values of a particular community is what any great blog – and indeed, brand – is all about.

Whole Foods Market uses a similar strategy to cater to its own community of health food lovers. The Whole Story provides healthy recipes, shares shopping tips, and offers tangible rewards in the form of in-store promotions. It even follows produce on its journey from farm to market, taking readers behind the scenes of the local food business.

Telling the right story

Lululemon and Whole Foods Market build stories around their customers’ lifestyles, which reflect the brands’ values. General Electric, on the other hand, uses its blog to mine the company’s own impressive story.

Edison’s Desk lends a human voice to GE’s technologies while reinforcing the company’s history. The blog integrates Thomas Edison’s story into even its most recent posts on the correlation between science and music. This innovative approach to branded storytelling differentiates GE from its competitors.

Corporate blogs and social media

Corporate blogs may garner less attention than in previous years, but companies that use them successfully understand that blogs are an effective tool for telling stories and building communities around those stories.

Of course, the corporate blog is best used as part of a larger new media strategy. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al give brands the ability to reach a tremendous number of people simultaneously.

But harnessing the strengths of the corporate blog, companies can use them in combination with social networks to turn fragmented conversations into fully engaged communities.

But whether you want to call it aggregating, curating, or simply old-fashioned editing, how we sift through the ever-growing digital trove of professionally produced and user-generated content seemed to be on everyone’s mind at this year’s SXSW.

Sharing the floor with the Guardian’s media reporter, Jemima Kiss, Katz discussed how the Guardian is seeking to strike the right balance between original reporting and curated content on its digital and print properties. Tellingly, the Guardians’ last few hires haven’t been journalists, but “community managers” tasked with scouring the Web for sources and stories.

After the session, I asked Katz to expand on the role curation plays in the new journalistic age:

For Matt Williams, CEO of mega-popular social news aggregator Digg, content is increasingly curated through communities. Williams said people “expect serendipity, timeliness and personal relevance when reading the news,” and look to their friends, influencers and social networks to filter content for them.

Williams, who took over from Digg founder Kevin Rose last year, said Digg is moving “in a direction that’s much more serendipitous and personalized.” To me, these seemed like opposite editorial approaches.

Personalization makes me think of the highly-customizable news experience offered by digital apps like Flipboard, while serendipity brings to mind the eclectically curated experience of leafing through a newspaper or print magazine.

I sat down with Williams after the session and asked him to explain:

It seems fitting to end our little exploration of curation with the guy who wrote the book, Steve Rosenbaum. An Emmy award-winning television producer, Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net – an online video aggregation tool – and the author of Curation Nation.

In his book, Rosenbaum argues that businesses and publishers need to sift through the Web’s clutter to curate meaningful experiences for their audience. I caught up with him in the SXSW media lounge and asked him what role brands will play in the age of curation:

Austin Convention Center by adamjackson1984 via Flickr

Anyone who has been to SXSW can sum it up with one word: Huge. At any moment there are dozens of panels, parties, meet-ups, showcases and sessions to attend on topics ranging from design and advertising to the future of journalism.

Because we’re interested in all the above at Sparksheet, I’ve spent the last few days bouncing across Austin to participate in conversations about every aspect of the media and marketing universe. I’ve discovered that while the jargon may differ from industry to industry, the major issues are pretty much the same. Here are some lessons and observations from the past few days:

The old battle lines are being redrawn

In his book The Chaos Scenario, media critic Bob Garfield argued that both brands and journalists are being threatened by the ‘new media apocalypse.’ So it was fitting on Saturday that Garfield moderated a panel on “Brand Journalism,” featuring representatives from JWT, Pepsi and GMD Studios.

While a typically skeptical Garfield questioned whether brands can do “real journalism,” JWT’s Kyle Monson and David Eastman insisted that brand journalism is about making advertising more like content, not vice versa. Pressed by Garfield to name some examples of great brand journalism, Eastman pointed out that “if this were something brands did well, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about it.”

Later in the day, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen held court on the other side of downtown Austin about the enduring animosity between journalists and bloggers. Rosen argued that it’s time to stop worrying about who is a real journalist; what matters is preserving “acts of journalism,” regardless of who commits them. Instead of “bloggers vs. journalists,” Rosen suggested we start thinking of content in terms of “raw vs. cooked” or “institutional vs. individual.” How about branded and unbranded?

No matter the platform

At SXSW, designers, journalists and marketers all seem to agree that from the consumer’s perspective, content should be platform agnostic.

In a Saturday panel called “The Great Paywall Experiment,” The Wall Street Journal’s Chief Product Officer, Daniel Bernard, insisted that “content has to be available anytime, anywhere the user is.” Bernard said that the Journal originally charged separate prices for its print, online and mobile products but discovered that readers wanted the freedom to move from one platform to another without being charged at each point.

On Sunday morning, The Guardian’s Deputy Editor, Ian Katz, pointed out that his newspaper’s (impressive) coverage of the recent Middle East revolutions was scattered throughout various live blogs, Tumblrs and Twitter feeds, raising the question, “Does it matter where we publish news?”

Apps are disruptive

While users may not be picky about platform (as long as content is available where they need it), SXSW has made it clear that the growth of mobile is changing the game for publishers and advertisers alike. In his “Awesome Internet Design Panel,” Jeffrey Zeldman proclaimed that apps have introduced “beautiful design ideas” like simplicity and customization that can “percolate” into the non-mobile space.

In the “Great Paywall” panel, Daniel Mandell, the director of business development at Wenner Media (publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal) suggested that the App Store model of paying for content a la carte has given brands the opportunity to “retrain” users to start paying for content.

The year of the paywall

Speaking of paywalls, after a decade of debate over whether content “wants to be free,” it looks like premium content is poised for a comeback. Wenner Media’s Mandell spoke about Rolling Stone’s decision to charge for access as the music magazine “dipping its toes” into the world of paid content. But Mandell acknowledged that “content has to be rich enough for people to dip into their wallets.”

From Jay Rosen’s perspective, paywalls are “not an ideological issue, but a practical one.” Rosen said that paywalls would make journalism more like private newsletters, an industry that informs a special class of citizens rather than the public at large (sounds like an ideological issue to me).

For Typekit’s Mandy Brown, who spoke on Jeffrey Zeldman’s design panel Sunday evening, whether or not people will pay for content is indeed a practical issue.  Digital consumers “need the process of paying for content to be as simple and quick and natural as everything else we do” online, Brown said.

Live doodles of Christopher Poole keynote by inuse pictures via Flickr

Playing together

Perhaps the overriding theme of SXSW so far ­is that all this interacting and engaging and creating should be fun. Saturday’s keynote speaker, Seth Priebatsch, explained how companies are adding a “game layer” to our online interactions. In yesterday’s keynote, Christopher Poole, founder of the popular and controversial message board 4chan, argued (contrary to Mark Zuckerberg) that the anonymous nature of online play breeds creativity and collaboration. Later on, Publicis’ Marci Ikeler drew out lessons from 4chan for advertisers, insisting that – like 4chan’s dedicated members – brands need to invite customers to “co-create experiences that are meaningful to them.”

In a Saturday panel called “The Sharing Economy,” representatives from ridesharing company Zimride, renting community Rentalic and experts from Shareable magazine and Latitude Research explained how sharing with strangers online (think craigslist and Netflix) has empowered us to share offline.

And that’s what SXSW is all about: Tech geeks from around the world getting together to connect, collaborate and share some real-life fun.

Twitter launched in the summer of 2006 at a time when broadband access was spreading around the world. By March 2007, SXSW delegates were discovering the platform as an ideal way to connect with each other and share news and events tips during the festival. It’s hard to remember a time when “tweeting” wasn’t a household world, but this was the moment when Twitter went mainstream.

Four years later, Twitter still matters. The microblogging service has created a back channel between individuals and the brands, institutions and media outlets that serve them. In 2011, a company big enough to have a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), should now be hiring a Chief Listening Officer (CLO) to not only monitor the various conversations that are taking place about their brand in real time – but to participate in them.

Twitter has also made brands more human. When a company hires someone to represent them on Twitter they can no longer hide behind their corporate logo or press release. Brands online are expected to connect with consumers in honest, unscripted ways that are breaking down the boundaries between content consumer and content creator in dozens of industries.

Facebook, by contrast, remains a closed community. Each of Facebook’s 600 million plus users decides who is part of their social network. Any information that flows in and out of this network is limited by its size and by various privacy settings.

Twitter is unbounded. When you post a statement on Twitter, anyone can find and share it with their community. This ability for random strangers to amplify and distribute a message has changed the balance of power on the Web.

We’re living in an age where a teenaged protester in a farflung country can have the same reach and clout online as a celebrity or established media outlet. Look at what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya, where Twitter is giving disenfranchised people a voice, and a way for journalists and activists to find them. News is reported on Facebook; news breaks on Twitter.

While misinformation and clutter will always exist in such an open medium, Twitter has brought honesty and accountability back to the Web. Unlike the chat rooms and message boards that came before it, Twitter is all about connecting with like-minded strangers using your real name, not a screen name or alter ego. This in turn has helped make the Internet an extension of the physical world, a place where real business and social relationships can bloom.

Many of the friends I am looking forward to connecting with during SXSW 2011 are people I first met in this virtual marketplace. I can’t wait to find out what sort of revolutions this year’s event has in store. And I can’t wait to share them with the rest of my friends on Twitter.

Something happened to me recently. My title went from “Editorial Director” to “Content Director.” My job description changed but minimally; the changes more reflected the work I already do and have been doing for quite some time.

But first, let’s step back a bit and examine the word “content.” It’s both misunderstood and overused and that’s a dangerous combination. It runs the risk of becoming a redundancy, or worse, a buzzword, like “boutique” or “bespoke” (this is also happening to the lovely word “curate.”) But the word is also important. Because I believe we live in a world where almost everything is content.

The content era

Everything – from nacho chips to shoes to television – throws content at us and it is this content that makes up the stories of our lives. That sounds grandiose, I know, but think about it.

Nike is a content provider. Sure, it was providing content when it printed “Just Do It” on t-shirts but now its shoes are content too. In fact, one could argue that Nike running shoes are social media hubs.

A few years ago that sentence wouldn’t have made any sense at all and now it’s indisputable. Not only can the shoes sync to an app and measure the development and rhythm of your jogging regime, your shoes can broadcast this to your peers around the world. So Nike shoes are content.

Content hubs

In my work, or because of it, I’ve argued for years that airlines are content providers. Think of a flight as an immersive media experience. You travel and you are surrounded by media: both your own and what the airline provides in the forms of print, audio and video (and, for some, in the form of digital as well).

The travel industry, with its built-in narrative and movement, is well placed to create an unbroken circle of meaningful messaging to an engaged public. I think we’re seeing this with hotels, as well.

And if one can let their imagination go, this is true of almost anything: Any place where people congregate, whether it be virtually, socially or for purely commercial reasons, can be and is a content hub.

From custom publishing to content marketing

Content marketing is a phrase we hear everywhere now but the idea is old. Humans are storytellers. If you want to connect with them, tell stories.

A Content Director’s role, then, is to ensure that brands are leveraging their own narratives in compelling ways to successfully engage with the population. And this is the crux of the evolution from “publishing” to “content.”

Custom publishing was kind of a less sophisticated form of content marketing. Even the term “custom publishing” refers to a time when an overall media solution wasn’t really something anyone could wrap their head around.

The Custom Publishing Council, for example, is now the Custom Content Council. The logic was and is semantic but also unimpeachable: Publishing sounds like a “print” word.

To further the point, I attended the International Content Summit last November in London, a conference organized by the APA, the U.K.’s version of the CCC. (The P in APA stands for exactly what you think it does but let’s face it, ACA sounds awful).

Platform agnosticism

Until recently, media was created in silos. So you had your Web team doing one thing, your print team doing something else and so on.

We still see that now in some companies, where communications, marketing and branding are housed in different departments and each department is competing for budget.

Custom publishing was a kind of “either/or” affair with little integration between print and Web (or, later, mobile and apps). Content marketing sees a bigger picture and gets to the heart of what “custom media” has always been – a more sophisticated, more immersive branding and marketing tool.

But as the public’s sophistication grows, industry will have to grow too. The market is a multimedia, multitasking, on-the-go place. It doesn’t sit still. And it doesn’t understand why it can’t get what it wants when it wants it.

We live in a world where the platforms we use need to fit the strategy of our choosing. In the past, most content strategies were reversed – the strategy fit the platform. That’s over now, just another quirk in our Content Revolution.

You serve as editor-in-chief of Watch!, CBS’ glossy entertainment and lifestyle magazine. Where do you see Watch! fitting in to the media landscape – is it an industry publication, a consumer magazine, a fancy promotional tool for CBS’ TV lineup?

It’s interesting because it started off purely as a promotional vehicle. What we found in the first year was that people really responded when we started doing Q&As and stories about our celebrities from a more editorial standpoint.

So we made a very concerted effort to approach it as an editorial product and as a consumer product. We offer our readers content around beauty, health, wellness, food – all kinds of expert information. And I’m very happy to say today I think it is right up there with consumer-oriented publications like People or Us.

Before we had this magazine, we would develop all this great photography and these press kits and what not and then we would just give them away to other journalists, to daily newspapers or magazines. You’re giving them stuff, and they’re going to present it the way they want to. This removed the filter and allowed us to talk directly to the people we want to reach.

It’s been a rough few years for the print magazine industry. How has Watch! weathered the storm in terms of circulation and subscriptions?

We’ve actually been growing. One of the advantages is that we have very little overhead. We’re not a weekly or a monthly, we’re bimonthly. And 90 percent of it is done by freelancers. We also have the world’s best sales department selling the magazine – to have the CBS sales people supporting it and talking it up to clients is invaluable.

What role does the Web play in building and monetizing the Watch! brand? How has the magazine’s content changed and evolved in the digital age?

We really haven’t. Right now our website is primarily a subscription generator. We have TV to tell people to subscribe, and they go to our website, and the website feeds the addresses, and we send the magazines out.

We’re obviously interested in any platform that helps us promote the brand. We haven’t refined our digital strategy yet, but it is definitely something we’re hoping to do in the next year – to really embrace social media and video and more interactive elements.

You launched Watch! in 2005, when the media world was a very different place. What would you do differently if you were launching Watch! today? Do you still think you’d invest in a glossy print publication?

Yes, because I think our viewers are a little more traditional. They don’t want to go online for everything. A lot of people sit at their desk all day and click on blogs and what not, and it’s really nice to have something tangible in your hand. We actually upgraded to a better paper stock last year, so we’re a hundred percent about the printed product.

Our editorial philosophy really targets that working mom who comes home and just wants a couple of hours by herself. Our motto is “escape into entertainment,” so we do a lot of glamour and fantasy and big photo shoots, and having that printed glossy product which someone can curl up on the couch with and read is really what we’re aiming for.

You started your career as a newspaper feature writer and then as a media reporter. Do you see the lines between journalism and corporate communications blurring in a world where everything is content?

Well, I mean it’s kind of a big question. I’m very fortunate to work for a company that is a content company. CBS in every division is creating really compelling and engaging content that people want to read, want to watch, and want to listen to. We’re just following that mandate.

There’s a lot of content competing for the same audience’s attention, and that’s what we always consider when we’re doing the magazine. We’re actually on newsstands and have to sell copies of a magazine, so we can’t just do what the network wants to promote.

We have to think, “What do readers want to read about, who are the stars that are going to sell copies, who are the most popular people on TV?” That’s what helps us sell subscriptions or helps us sell copies or sell ads. We can’t be just a shill for the network.

You know, someone could easily pick up Entertainment Weekly, People, or Us Weekly. We have to be just as, if not more, original and compelling and provide real value whether our content is “branded” or not.

Jeremy Murphy will be speaking at this year’s Custom Content Conference, which takes place March 23-25 in Charleston, South Carolina. Sparksheet readers are entitled to the member rate discount with promo code SPARK.

Photo by Robert Scoble via flickr

Another week means another battle in the tablets wars. The release of Apple’s iPad 2 dominated this week’s headlines. Even before Wednesday’s launch, an alleged prototype spotted in China sparked much speculation in tech circles ranging from the device’s size and price, to whether Steve Jobs would make an appearance despite being on medical leave. Jobs did take the stage, announcing the new product to the delight of Apple fans and shareholders alike.

Reactions were mixed among critics and some felt strongly that there were more developments that Apple could have made. The newest iPad does enable significant face time, integrating both a front-facing camera and HD video capabilities. Apple has also created a Smart Cover and applications for Garageband and iMovie to beef up its pioneering tablet. As for price, the iPad 2 costs the same as the original iPad at $499.99 to $829.99.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry maker RIM conveniently garnered some attention of its own this week by leaking the April 10 launch date of its Blackberry PlayBook tablet. The company also showed off some of the PlayBook’s gaming capabilities at the Game Developers Conference, right around the corner from the iPad 2 launch in San Francisco. Even Hewlett-Packard joined the tablet conversation, accusing the PlayBook of copying its operating system design.

When it comes to tablets, Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha believes the most important feature is software. It remains to be seen whether software alone will make up for a higher price in Motorola’s own Xoom tablet. What we can say with certainty is that this week’s launch of the iPad 2 will continue to drive innovation among the companies vying to loosen Apple’s iron grip on the tablet market.

Top Stories

Google fixes a glitch and restores thousands of Gmail accounts.

Facebook makes group messaging easy, acquiring messaging service Beluga.

Apple’s subscription fees come under fire by publishers.

YouTube creates a new class of dot-com millionaires.

Views from around the web

The Daily is rumoured to renounce its iPad-only status and prepare for an Android launch this spring.

U.S. State Department invests $150 million in teaching Egyptian organizations and individuals about digital media.

Seth Godin weighs in on the battle between Apple and the publishing industry.

Google to launch in-app payments this May.

What the partnership of titans Nokia and Microsoft means for the mobile space.

This week in social media

Coca Cola continues to spread joy with the Happiness Truck:

Teach a man to tweet? Charlie Sheen attracts more than 1 million fans less than 24 hours after Ad.ly teaches him how to use Twitter:

With global economic parity looming, companies can no longer rely on themselves for the answers. They must co-create new value systems with their customers and other businesses not only to survive, but to grow. And stories – or the act of curating them – can provide amazing new opportunities for growth.

There are a host of companies that have built strong values and a strong “metastory” around their businesses, from more traditional brands like 3M, to the modern darlings of the technology boom, like TOMS or Zappos. Across this spectrum is a way of thinking that takes on organizational inefficiences and creates layers of transparency and authenticity that permeate all communications.

At the same time, more and more companies are taking on the complex problems of the world – from socio-economics, to trade, to education and government. The ability to directly address problems and provide solutions to complexity is the bedrock of storytelling in the 21st century.

A narrative theme is what courses throughout a brand experience, starting with a strong metastory, then extending into specific programs and media.

The business of curation

So how does storytelling actually impact business?

Understanding the value of curation is a great first action step. As my friend Ishan Shapiro says, curation can be defined as “storytelling through the use of available knowledge, information and experience.”

This means that we go from merely aggregating media assets – video, text, sound, pictures – to building currency around experiences that have cultural, social and educational impact. And where companies are relevant in these contexts, market opportunities abound.

Charmin’s installation in Times Square, Dove’s Real Beauty meet-ups, Amex’s OPEN kiosks and HP’s innovation installations are all proving that branded content can provide an experience of real meaning and “shareability.” In each of these examples, a “metanarrative” spawns extensions whereby people are inspired to create their own media based on themes or topics related to these initiatives.

Holistic storytelling and branded experiences

Each of these brand initiatives applied an underlying theme or topic that resonates with people in their daily lives:

• Charmin explored the meaning of comfort by installing bathrooms in Times Square
• Dove broke down cultural mores around beauty with TV commercials and then extended the narrative into other channels such as social media
• HP branded collaborative innovation by inviting prolific artists to create music with their fans (Disclosure: HP is a client though I did not work on the initiative mentioned)
• Amex redefined financial independence by listening to the needs of small business owners and providing them with tools to share

In the case of AMEX, “open” was the underpinning theme; the program extensions are varied; and the medium – Open Forum – is a portal that uses multiple social, digital and offline channels, featuring business owners sharing their success stories.

In each case, storytelling is a holistic practice. Channels and inventory play second fiddle to experiences that are relevant to various audiences and consumer segments.

This is especially important when we consider that consumers today exhibit widely varied behaviours; they aren’t just car buyers or soda drinkers or banking customers. They’re people with sophisticated needs living in a world where solutions to complex problems present even more problems. So we must co-create systems that are culturally relevant and scalable.

In the case of HP, the meta theme of innovation culminated in a strong partnership strategy that produced amazing user-generated experiences co-created between people and the brand. Based on these experiences, new stories – and new ideas – have emerged that continue to evolve.

How Nike does it

Nike’s work on “The Human Race” is a great example of how to leverage people and technology in unprecedented ways. The company has long identified running as an activity that connects people, and one that can enable them to converge around a cause while feeling good about themselves.

And the best part about this platform is that it has unlimited scale. As long as we are around to run, The Human Race continues on through local events and illustrative iterations as well as a wonderful array of shareable and immersive content that provides more unique experiences on mobile devices and screens of all types.

As for sales, the marketing elements are baked into the experience: You simply buy a pair of Nike+ shoes, monitor your distance and become a part of the movement.

Nike uses the metanarrative of “running as a life activity” to rally affinity groups around causes. These experiences result in a wide variety of new stories and activities supported by the brand. These also build or extend brand equities (attributes that consumers can personally invest in).

Stories we need

So how does storytelling impact business? By enlisting people as participants in the stories they already care about so that they buy the products required to fulfill a human need. From there, business growth is organic and can take on many exciting dimensions.

Of course, telling stories and allowing them to flourish across various channels and media types is not all that easy. Major brands like Nike have their own media ecosystems with which to create these immersive experiences (hence the notion of platform).

For those brands which do not have such a luxury, the onus is on them to come up with more creative ways to engage customers. But again, this depends on allowing curation to evolve as a practice of the people, not just what we as marketers or brands dictate.

There is no question that people are willing to engage and participate. If we can make stories the catalysts for reinvention, the possibilities are limitless.

Photo via freshnetworks.com

As we look back on the various online marketing and e-commerce trends of 2010, the one that sticks out is the incredible growth of localization. And there’s no better example of this phenomenon than the rise of Groupon, which recently shocked the business world when it rebuffed a reported $6 billion offer from Google.

Groupon dominates the sub-category of localization known as social commerce. Social commerce websites include group buying sites like Groupon, which promote daily deals in specific cities through email and social networks (typically, a minimum threshold of buyers is needed for the deal to come into effect), coupon sites like RedFlagDeals.com and “flash sale” sites such as Beyond The Rack, where discounts are offered to members only.

Groupon operates on a percentage model, taking a cut (usually around 50 percent) of revenues from vouchers bought through the online promotion, with the rest going to the retailer.

With their ability to leverage social networks and amplify word of mouth, social commerce sites have not only changed how brick-and-mortar businesses view the Web, but are also providing Web-based businesses with a powerful tool to increase sales and generate brand buzz.

Groupon’s meteoric rise

You’d be hard pressed to find any media critic at the end of 2009 who predicted the rise of social commerce as a trend, or Groupon as a billion-dollar company. At the time, pundits were expecting 2010 to be characterized by the proliferation of social media and the increasing importance of mobile marketing.

Since then, Groupon has grown to well over 50 million subscribers in 35 countries and has been consistently adding at least six cities a month for most of the last year. This meteoric growth has led to a recent $1 billion investment and the apparent decision that Google’s rumoured $6 billion just wasn’t good enough.

And while Groupon is by far the biggest of the social commerce or group buying companies, it has plenty of competitors, most notably LivingSocial (which recently got a major boost from Amazon), nipping at its heels.

Beyond brick and mortar

There’s been lots of talk about how Groupon and its imitators are breathing new life into the offline world. But there’s much more to social commerce’s potential than the phenomenon of brick-and-mortar businesses leveraging the Internet to get people through their doors. What’s been overlooked is the tremendous opportunities social commerce offers e-commerce-oriented businesses.

Groupon itself appears to have realized this and has been running a variety of national campaigns with e-commerce sites since this past Black Friday (similar to the Woot.com model). For companies like chocolate.com and barclayswine.com, one can only imagine the incredible brand exposure of a city-by-city Groupon campaign throughout the continental United States.

With that in mind, here are three ways that social commerce can fundamentally change the world of online marketing:

Acquiring new customers

Social commerce represents an almost risk-free way to attract new customers. There is no upfront advertising cost for businesses, no paying for clicks, impressions or committing to an up-front budget. Even better, the business controls the cost of customer acquisition depending on the type of discount they choose to offer.

Now, some have questioned whether Groupon is a good deal for all merchants, considering that the company takes a significant portion of voucher revenue and that many Groupon buyers are bargain hunters whose sole loyalty is to Groupon itself (call them “Groupon groupies”). But any type of promotion will attract people looking to take advantage of a good deal on a one-time basis. The onus is on the merchant to turn new customers into loyal, long-term advocates.

Selling up

Once you have drawn a new customer to your site, chances are they’ll find something else that floats their boat. Social commerce promotions are an excellent way for e-commerce merchants to increase their overall orders due to impulse buys, or by offering incentivized specials once customers come through their virtual doors.

Restaurant deal recommended on Facebook

Free publicity

This may be the most interesting perk of social commerce promotions. First, there is the viral aspect of having people tweet your deals or post them on Facebook. Numerous deal aggregator sites also help prolong PR buzz for days. Second, search volume and direct traffic increase exponentially when a promotion is in play, which ultimately boosts sales.

For instance, the online printing company I work for ran deals on RedFlagDeals.com over two days in November, resulting in a sevenfold spike in daily traffic on both days. Worth noting was a 500 percent increase in direct traffic, a 200 percent increase in search traffic (both paid and organic), as well as an expected increase in referral traffic from RedFlagDeals.com.

As you can see, social commerce and the Groupon phenomenon is not just helping increase the potential e-commerce revenue stream. It’s also changing the way businesses promote their brands online.

iPad App by Ben Dodson via Flickr

Earlier this month media tycoon Rupert Murdoch made waves in the media world with the launch of The Daily, trumpeted as the first newspaper specifically designed for the iPad.

This daily publication is now downloadable in the U.S. app store with a free two-week subscription and the option to renew at 99 cents a week. While four dollars a month isn’t going to break the bank, the big question is whether an iPad newspaper is something anybody really needs.

When Apple’s groundbreaking tablet computer came out last January, many saw the iPad as the struggling publishing industry’s knight in shining armour.

But in the year since customers like me lined up outside the Apple store, traditional media outlets like the New York Times have found it difficult to charge a subscription fee under Apple’s strict in-app purchasing guidelines. So instead of redesigning the newspaper for the iPad age, legacy papers simply reformatted their existing iPhone apps for the supersized device.

While a few magazines have been specifically tailored for the iPad in the past few months (most notably Wired magazine and the iPad exclusive publication Project by Virgin), these are monthly publications that do not offer the scope and timeliness of my local newspaper.

Apple’s new in-app subscription policy opened up the door for companies like Murdoch’s News Corp. to create apps using a business model they’re familiar with.

At first glance, The Daily brings the best of print, broadcast and online media to the iPad’s rich screen. Once you start the application and load the latest issue, you’re taken to a home screen featuring a TV news-style video of the day’s headlines (or, if you prefer, an audio stream). Touch the screen at any point to interrupt the announcer and jump to the relevant article.

The articles themselves have several “touchpoints” that allow you to interact with the content and scroll through panoramic photos (I loved the picture of Egypt’s Tahrir square in the middle of the protest), sound clips, and videos. While the text downloads to your device, the video and audio stream from the Internet, limiting anyone who doesn’t have a 3G-enabled iPad if they’re on the go and away from a Wi-Fi connection.

As you’d expect, The Daily makes an effort to integrate social media networks like Facebook and Twitter into the content. While the Facebook sharing capability is still very raw, an article on Rihanna is complemented by the pop star’s constantly updating Twitter feed.

Of course, none of this is particularly new. Newspaper websites already have social networking widgets. RSS feeds, Twitter lists and existing apps like Reeder, Feedler, Newsrack, and Early Edition already allow us to customize and streamline the way we get our news. Why would I pay for something updated daily when there are so many 24/7 news sources available to me for free?

Perhaps it’s a matter of convenience. RSS and Twitter still require you to do quite a bit of legwork. It can be a pain to sift through your favourite sites and import them into yet another app. If you’re someone who prefers to have your news curated for you, The Daily may be the closest thing to opening the door and finding today’s newspaper on your doorstep. Or is that yesterday’s newspaper?

It’s quite flattering to think this would influence other people’s views. But I’ll usually turn the question around to find out what’s important to the person asking the question. Because we’re all looking for different things when it comes to air travel. Some prefer the full-service treatment, while others are just happy to get from A to B for as little as possible.

The same is true when airlines are trying to connect back the other way, especially in the digital environment. Different consumers have different needs, preferences and quirks. Online is essentially a permission medium – the customer will only build relationships with brands that play it their way. So some kind of aggregation is helpful for brands to understand their customers.

Digital types

TNS’ recent Digital Life study, conducted in 47 countries around the globe, uncovered six different types of digital consumers. Here in Australia, with our high Internet penetration and diverse online population, four of the six segments emerged as dominant:

1. Functionals access the Internet to perform tasks such as e-mailing, reading news, checking weather and personal banking. Functionals are less interested in social networking and are not driven by the need to express themselves.
2. Networkers access the Internet to build and maintain relationships, mostly via social networking sites, and predominantly as a way to keep in touch rather than as a means of self-expression.
3. Knowledge Seekers access the Internet to gain knowledge and information and to educate themselves about the world.
4. Influencers access the Internet for almost all parts of their lives. They are heavily involved in social networking, blogging, mobile Internet and online shopping. Influencers like to share opinions and will contribute to blogs and other channels that rely on user-generated content.

The predominance of these different types of Internet users varies greatly across different markets with different cultures and varying levels of Internet diffusion:

*Developed Asia includes Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea.

Rules of engagement

So how do airline marketers know if they have permission to engage? Taking my home market of Australia as an example, we’ve outlined the degree of openness to brand communications via different channels for each of these digital segments.

When targeting Functionals (our largest group – got to love that Aussie pragmatism!), an airline has several options but would be best to communicate through general browsing and shopping channels. In particular, the need is to try to attract the attention of those who are actively in the purchase-cycle mode with facts and proof points.

On the other hand, airlines might want to focus on branded communications when targeting Influencers, a group that is nearly as large and obviously key in generating excitement around a brand. Like Functionals, Influencers like to hear from (new) brands when they are in planning mode, but here the focus is on more emotive or intriguing messages.

Not every consumer wants to interact with brands in the same way. "Tune out” represents respondents who “don’t even notice” branded communications.

Airline horses for digital courses

Smart brands might want to find out which type of digital consumer their customers are. We asked our six segments of Australians where their loyalties lie when taking to the sky. Like any other mix of humans, our different digital segments favoured different airlines:

• Networkers – the group that values keeping in touch with friends and family on a regular basis – are big on JetStar, one of the two true low-cost carriers in Australia.
• Functionals – the segment more likely to be made up of older, more conservative people – are really Qantas’ heartland.
• The sought-after Influencer group is a battleground between Qantas and Australia’s domestic Virgin brand, Virgin Blue.

Knowing this, the weight each airline would put on any one of these segments needs to be different. For example, the barriers to persuading a Functional (and therefore the cost) would be higher for Virgin than for Qantas.

Tone of voice and exact mix of communications will also need to be nuanced differently because what appeals to Influencers about Virgin Blue will be different than what this group finds appealing about Qantas. As a hypothesis, the former might win hearts with its quirkiness and personality, while the latter might earn points with its status, leadership and scale.

It really is horses for courses when you talk to online consumers.

Oh, and for those of you who are still wondering what my favourite airline is – it’s Ariana Afghan Airlines. Doesn’t that prove the point?

Disclosure: Sparksheet is published by Spafax, a WPP company.

Will the iPad and its dozens of competitors launched at CES finally get advertisers to spend money on digital? Are tablets going to save the day for revenue-starved publishers?

I get the feeling that many of the print owners who once saw tablets as a Valhalla are now a little more concerned as to whether or not this can deliver any meaningful benefit.

What remains critical is how The Times of London does with its subscription model, how Murdoch’s new initiatives like The Daily – News Corp’s new “iPad newspaper” – perform.

But in terms of the iPad, I’ve generally detected a bit more cynicism in the last few weeks – not cynicism, concern – that when it comes to developing significant revenues, things aren’t going to work out quite as people thought they would.

Tell me about the increasing importance of data in the advertising world. Is that entirely due to digital?

No, not entirely due to digital. It dates back to the old quote by John Wanamaker or Lord Leverhulme or the other 25,000 people who are claimed to have said, “I know half my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Data was important well before the digital age. But with the advent of online media and cable and IPTV people are becoming more concerned about measurement and ROI. And the fact is that we now have the ability to measure in ways we didn’t before.

Speaking of metrics, is Groupon really worth $6 billion?

Oh, who knows? I mean somebody at the Telegraph reminded me recently that in 2008 I had sort of hinted that $15 billion was a high valuation for Facebook, so what did I think of $50 billion!?

Apparently Goldman Sachs valued it that way but you’ve got to be careful as it might not be pure equity and their valuation is 25 times their revenues! That said, it does appear from some of the information coming out that Facebook is profitable and has decent margins at low levels of revenue.

So who knows – maybe Facebook really is a money-making machine!

As for Groupon, it’s an interesting concept but it’s a coupon concept – a promotion concept. It’s very difficult to conceive of a company that started two years ago being worth $6 billion now, but who knows?

Are you still as enthusiastic about the BRIC economies as you were last year?

More so. Actually, what was really interesting in 2010 is that America bit back and traditional media bit back.

But although America will do well again, I think 2011 will see yet another rebalancing in favour of the BRICs and “the next 11.” They were the last into the recession and in the last few months India and China have surged yet again.

Travel Marketing

Caribou Coffee warms up potential customers by transforming bus shelters into branded experiences.

Southwest Airlines turns direct-connect into direct revenue – a competitive advantage they do not intend to share.

ITB encourages travel suppliers to establish trust with consumers before moving into social media marketing.

Media + Magazines

AOL takes aim at Flipboard with its new interactive magazine app, Editions – “The magazine that reads you.”

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reports that few business executives believe their companies use social media effectively.

The Independent demonstrates how newspapers and Facebook can work together to create a personalized media experience for readers.

Branded Content + Entertainment

With digital screens, real-time images and sounds, facial recognition, and some high-power fans, Discovery Channel series “Storm Chasers” comes to life when the “Urban Tornado” campaign touches down on the streets of New York City.

Tostitos focuses on making connections, using its Facebook page to launch an emotional social media campaign that reunites consumers with friends and loved ones.

Pizza Hut joins forces with Movies on Demand in an effort to entertain customers while they wait for their deliveries.

The rise of Twitter has created a marketing opportunity and identity crisis for media brands looking to do what they always say they want to do: “engage.” What Twitter does better than any other platform is allow brands to put on a more human face.

Whether you’re a New York Times reporter or an airport, Twitter makes engagement easy. But it also makes it easy for others to hijack your brand.

The rise of social media has brought back a classic dilemma: How much of their own content should brands control? Allowing fans to create their own works from copyrighted material has always been a perceived problem – just look at the tussles in fandom’s most celebrated community, the Trekkies.

Two decades ago fan fiction was a popular but hidden practice, distributed in underground networks, through gatherings, and in the mail. The old kind of mail. Yet the digital revolution has brought fandom out into the open and so far the evidence is clear: Fan-generated content is good for business.

Mad Men Wars

What’s the problem with fake Don Draper, now with nearly 13,000 followers? Two years ago cable channel AMC thought something was, and shut down a host of Mad Men Twitter characters, claiming copyright infringement and false marketing.

The Mad Men-Twitter wars, now peacefully ended, are instructive. Creator Matthew Weiner is notoriously protective of his show and its messaging, hating on spoilers to the extent that even the teaser clips at the end of each episode are so cryptic that they’re effectively pointless. He’s so obsessed with preserving the series’ historical accuracy that creating official Twitter accounts for characters from the 1960s probably seemed sacrilegious.

But AMC underestimated the zeal of its fan base. Character-driven – as opposed to plot-driven – shows inspire identification and, therefore, fiction. While online social networking clearly does not fit within the universe of the show, the themes of Mad Men – secrets, obfuscation, ambiguity – compel fans to fill in the blanks. AMC should have realized that it did not need a centralized Twitter campaign: The fans would do it themselves.

The Social Networks

Meanwhile, many younger and less high-brow TV series have experienced the opposite dilemma: So well-suited to Twitter are shows like Fox’s Glee and NBC’s Community that networks have felt compelled to participate. Glee’s official character accounts are among the most popular on Twitter, garnering tens of thousands of followers (Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester tops them at 120,000).

Yet despite its openness to Twitter, the network isn’t too active on the site. The official Glee characters have just a couple hundred tweets apiece; likewise for some of Community’s ensemble.

To cater to its base, the modestly-rated Community staged a “Twittersode” to promote its second-season premiere (it wasn’t the first twittersode: MTV did something similar last year with its transmedia web series Valemont). But the effort came off as a somewhat desperate attempt to generate some Glee-like buzz.

Community and Glee’s Twitter accounts are both pretty funny, but neither show seems to be able to meet the demand from their audiences.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

What’s the takeaway from AMC’s and the networks’ diverging Twitter experiences? Serve your fans, or get out of the way. If your business or brand is developing a following, give consumers more content; if fans beat you to it, let them thrive. In the end, fan activity cannot be forced or faked.

CBS realized that the crowd has the answer when it optioned a Twitter account, now the decently-rated $#*! My Dad Says – a practice it is repeating. Old Spice followed demand when it had actor Isaiah Mustafa record dozens of personalized YouTube videos to Twitter fans.

If consumers want to hear more from your brand, they’ll say so. And if they don’t hear back, well, they’ll just do it themselves.

Yes, social media helps our patients feel safer and better informed. Social media allows us to break down the perceptions and barriers that may exist and aids us in delivering our services directly to the user.

We have had viewers from all around the world view our videos and even schedule procedures based on our in-depth information. With our YouTube page, we feature videos from our Emery King Medical Video Library, which chronicle a number of various medical procedures done at our hospitals and tell the stories behind them in a  “fun but informative” way.

Who is your primary audience for this content: the wider medical community or patients of the hospital?

Our primary audience is both patients and medical practitioners. People are empowered to go online and research for themselves in today’s society. We want to provide the most accurate and trustworthy information possible so our patients and future patients can make informed decisions about their healthcare.

Medical practitioners use it as a teaching tool for other medical practitioners. Emery King does a wonderful job of describing and translating the video so that any and everybody can understand and enjoy the video.

You also use these new channels to reach out to hospital staff with handwashing videos and the like. How has the DMC’s staff responded? And how have you made an effort to get a variety of stakeholders (from orderlies to doctors) involved?

Our internal staff’s response to our YouTube videos has been great so far. We haven’t had a great deal of resistance from any group of people. The Handwashing Dance video went over very well. Employees loved to do it and were happy to see themselves, their fellow co-workers and even their bosses in a fun video.

Some of our recent videos include a wide variety of hospital staff, including the “Monday Morning Hustle,” which features the accounting department and their weekly exercise routine, and “Behind Sinai-Grace Today,” which was a special behind-the-scenes look at a weekly internal video broadcast that one of our hospitals puts together.

We’ve just started an “introduction class” that’s open to all employees to learn about the basics of social media. Our hope is that our employees will take a liking to our social media efforts and as a result become positive ambassadors for the great medical work being done here at the DMC.

Privacy is obviously a huge concern with hospitals. Have you had any pushback from administrators, doctors or patients on privacy grounds? How do you find a balance between transparency and privacy?

We follow HIPPA guidelines in regards to patient information. If we decide to follow a patient, doctor, or administrator’s story, we always make sure to get their full permission (through use of a publicity release form).

The DMC’s ER wait time tab on Facebook allows patrons to check ER wait times for each of the DMC’s facilities. What sort of effects have you seen it have on the ER?

Our ER volumes have definitely gone up since the multimedia launch of our ER wait time campaign. We of course don’t want a huge number of people getting injured and rushing into our ER, but since this is sadly the case we wanted to offer patients a way to check the wait time in our emergency rooms to reassure them that they won’t be waiting an ultra-long time in our hospitals.

We have a “29 Minute Guarantee” that we always try to stick to in getting people seen by a doctor as soon as possible. People have slowly been telling us that they appreciate the fact that we’re informing them about their wait times instead of finding out about it at the last minute once they’ve already arrived.

What kinds of results do you anticipate from these projects? How do you measure return on engagement?

Since social media is still relatively new for us, we don’t have a set standard on how to measure its effectiveness just yet. We always have a “call to action” on our various accounts and pages that leads viewers to our main DMC phone number or website.

We monitor and track our social media sites and can determine if viewers click directly to our website and even use it as a referral to see one of the DMC specialists.

An example of this would be when we covered a live surgery via Twitter. Our social media team was inside the operating room during a minimally invasive Birmingham hip replacement surgery and with permission from the patient, we covered the step-by-step procedure in real time, in an effort to educate potential patients and the medical community.

Two weeks later, we found out that someone who needed the same surgery saw our live coverage on Twitter and called DMC to make an appointment to get the surgery done.

Oftentimes, I hear marketers say, “We need an influencer outreach strategy,” and my usual response, either under my breath or out loud, is, “No, you need a customer advocacy strategy.” Many think they are one and the same but they are actually very different.

An influencer is someone with significant social capital. They may have several thousand Twitter followers, RSS subscribers and Facebook “likes” and they are frequently retweeted, quoted, interviewed, invited to speak at conferences and may even have written a book or two.

Influencers have a considerable amount of reach, hence all the attention that big brands give to them by seeding them with products before they hit the market or giving them insight into the product roadmap. The relationship between a brand and influencers is usually built upon incentives.

An advocate is different. They may only have a few hundred followers, may not even blog and many won’t know what an RSS feed is. The main difference is that advocates don’t need or want incentives. They will talk and talk and talk about the brands they care about even if the brand completely ignores them. They are vocal, passionate and always give a brand praise both on and offline.

When comparing the reach of an influencer to an advocate, the influencer clearly has an advantage. But I would argue that if you take the collective reach of all your advocates and compare it to the reach of influencers, the numbers will show that the advocates’ reach is much wider.

Imagine for a second what the impact would be if a brand paid just a little attention to its advocates. Most advocates are very easy to approach. While influencers consider themselves influencers, advocates don’t really care to label themselves. And that makes a brand’s job so much easier.

Identifying advocates is really not that hard to do. If you spend enough time in on Facebook, you will begin to see which fans stand out based on how they interact with your content (share, comment, like, etc.). There are tools like Syncapse that are building this capability into their product roadmap.

Zuberance is a great tool that identifies advocates already living in your brand’s ecosystem and empowers them to share reviews and content about your product with their social circles. RowFeeder is an exceptional tool that pulls data directly from Twitter and Facebook, and allows you to easily see who is referencing your brand and how often.

I have never studied the psychology of a consumer’s purchase behaviour. But what I am confident about is that there is a strong emotional connection between a brand and its advocates.  I call it emotional equity. It’s the reason why I only buy one kind of television, Sony. It’s not out of habit, convenience or price because Sony is actually pretty expensive.

I grew up with Sony, from the Walkman, to the Playstation to the television in my house. Sony has always been a part of my family. That equity can stem from just about anything: a personal experience like mine, the value the product brings to someone’s life or the fact that it simply kicks ass.

When a brand actually spends time nurturing its advocates and connecting on a human level, its emotional equity will grow exponentially. And that’s a hard bond to break.

As you all know, we’re high on air travel around here and 2010 was a huge year for airline news. These past 12 months saw many a mid-air scandal, myriad mega-mergers and a deluge of tweeting. And with the holiday season in full gear, airport security remains a “touchy” subject.

Content is at the core of what we do at Sparksheet so we always keep a close eye on how it’s being created, shared and monetized. Brands, now involved in a group embrace with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, have put a whole new spin on storytelling, creating transmedia campaigns and series that bridge the gap between advertising and entertainment.

Of course, the world of media and magazines continues to be transformed by the digital age. Aiding its metamorphosis in 2010 was the introduction of the iPad which, along with Amazon’s Kindle, spurred on the meteoric rise of the eBook. While this year saw more proclamations about the death of the print newspaper, huge news stories like the WikiLeaks cables injected new life into purportedly dying beasts.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Confounding airlines and the tongues of news reporters alike, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull filled the air with ash for seven long and flightless days. The TSA’s patdowns and backscatter x-ray technology threatened to prolong the American Thanksgiving rush, but what came out of it in the end were some rather “junky” YouTube videos.

Twitter-savvy director Kevin Smith ruffled the feathers of Southwest Airlines with statements like “You [messed] with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!” after he was booted out of his single seat for purportedly being ”too fat to fly.” On the other side of the curtain, disgruntled JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater caused an incident memorable enough to warrant an eight-part Wikipedia entry.

We also saw some major mergers this year, with United and Continental becoming United Airlines and LAN and TAM poised to join forces in Latin America. Meanwhile, outer space acquired its first commercial caller, as Virgin Galactic’s V.S.S. Enterprise made its inaugural trip in October from a runway in New Mexico.

Branded Content + Entertainment

Old Spice, Nike and other brands proved that advertising can be as entertaining as unbranded content.

QR codes brought “traditional” media into the digital fold, with everyone from grocery stores to Dom Perignon crafting up clever 2D messages.

It’s that time of year when top 10 lists warrant their own top 10 lists: Time Magazine offers its top picks for entertainment, while Mashable serves up Twitter’s top trends.

Media + Magazines

The newspaper got its own doomsday clock this year but that hasn’t stopped muckrakers and newsgatherers; the recent WikiLeaks fiasco has brought issues such as transparency, freedom of the press and journalistic ethics back into the limelight.

The iPad launched in spring of 2010 to mixed reviews, selling over a million units within the first month.

Who said magazines can’t still turn heads? We leave you with the best magazine covers of 2010.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/94JyA918au4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Emily Gannett on treating events like digital campaigns:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/h1TuIwNZ8Gc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Sesame Street is an old and beloved brand and new media are, well, new. How did you find your voice on these still-emerging platforms? And how do you make sure it’s consistent within the larger brand?

Moving to newer mediums is nothing new at Sesame Workshop. We’re more than just a TV show – and have been from the start. Books, LPs (!), magazines, home video, etc. are all part of Sesame’s rich history in media. Maintaining a consistent voice across media is a hallmark of the institution.

The show is targeted at toddlers, most of whom haven’t gotten around to setting up their Facebook or Twitter accounts just yet! So who are you trying to reach and why?

That’s the subject of my @BrandsConf talk, but the short answer is parents, both present and future. We know from research that children learn better when an adult is present. In fact, a lot of our content is written for two audiences – the children, of course, but also the parents. That’s why we have celebrities on the show; it’s not as if the children know who these visitors to Sesame Street are.

Grover made a splash on YouTube recently with his parody of those viral Old Spice ads. Sesame Street characters have also spoofed Mad Men and other grown-up pop culture stuff in recent years. Why is it important for you to engage adults and how big a role does nostalgia play in the popularity of the brand among older demographics?

Sesame Street has spoofed grown-up pop culture stuff for our entire history; it’s just that we don’t remember the parent-directed features of Sesame content that we consumed as children, because it was invisible to us.

And engaging adults is fundamental to our success. I watched the “Smell Like a Monster” spoof with my three-year-old on my lap, both of us enjoying it (albeit for different reasons), and two months later, we’re still able to carry on a brief conversation about it. It’s pretty amazing.

How much room do you have to improvise in your engagements with online followers and friends? Your tweets seem very polished, almost as though they were written by Sesame Street writers (especially when you’re tweeting in character as Elmo or another member of the Muppet cast).

The characters tweet for themselves – I just help them with the keyboard.

In all seriousness, a show writer authors the character tweets, with rare exception. I’ve improvised a few times, on rare occasion making a tiny edit to add some temporal context that couldn’t have been written beforehand. And there are a few tweets I’ve written entirely myself (e.g. a couple Count von Count ones because I like to make math jokes).

@BrandsConf is all about exploring the human voices behind brands on social media. Do you ever find it difficult to separate your personal and professional identities? Or is this point moot given that you’re often tweeting from the perspective of a furry monster?

It’s funny; I don’t think humanizing a brand is, necessarily, the same as putting an actual human personality behind it. Maybe we’re an exception, but look at it this way: Elmo is definitely “humanized,” to any meaningful definition of the word. But he’s not a human –  he’s a monster, or, if you want to be a spoilsport, a puppet.

You can humanize something in many ways.

At the moment of writing, @SesameStreet has 278, 244 followers on Twitter, but is only following one account – the Sesame Workshop. Is it fair to say that you currently use Twitter as a broadcast channel rather than a two-way communication platform?

Definitely, and by design. We’re not a service provider like, say, an airline or cable company, so we don’t have to use Twitter as a conduit for customer service. And it’s not really manageable to have Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Oscar et al replying to people on Twitter all day (although it would be fun to try for a day or two).

I definitely monitor all replies sent to us, though, and we look for other ways for people to interact with our characters. For example, we did a fan-driven interview of Elmo timed around the launch of the 41st season of Sesame Street; that went up on YouTube at the end of September.

There’s been much debate over whether the Internet is ultimately making people smarter or stupider (see Shirky, Clay vs. Carr, Nicholas). Given that Sesame Street is fundamentally an educational program, what do you think? Do you see these new tools and platforms – from YouTube, to the iPad – as beneficial to children or distracting?

I’m a big Clay Shirky fan and a firm believer that we should, as individuals, find a better way to use our cognitive surplus (or, some of it) than the things we typically do. (For what it’s worth, I find Carr interesting as well.) The reason why, though, goes back to something Sesame Workshop’s founder, Joan Ganz Cooney, observed almost half a century ago: It’s not if children learn from media, it’s what they learn.

Learning happens whether we like it or not. But the medium isn’t the problem; the content is. My kids love the iPod Touch and play games which are generally educational and built for their age bracket. They’re playing, they’re learning, and they like it. It’s a great combination.

A child’s cognitive surplus – that downtime outside of school or the similar – isn’t going to be applied to writing Wikipedia. It’s going to be best applied playing in a way where productive learning is the intended byproduct.

How has Sesame Street used these new media and technologies to educate children beyond the TV show?

We have a few iPhone applications, a fantastic child-oriented website at SesameStreet.org, an eBook store, a YouTube channel, a Wii and DS game coming out, a robust home video collection, and more. We want to reach children through media; we will be wherever they are.

What are you hoping to get out of the conference? What are you most looking forward to hearing and talking about?

I’m approaching it with an open mind. The best stuff to learn is the stuff you never would have expected to.

@BrandsConf takes place on Thursday, December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Photo by ChernobylBob via flickr

This is my fifth decade in the marketing communications business and I can say without any hesitation that right now is the absolute best time to be a consumer marketer and brand builder.

My optimism and enthusiasm are fueled by three powerful environmental factors that are taking hold in business today. First, the consumer is in control. Second, brands live in glass houses: They are on display all the time. Third, the people behind the brand matter and have a voice.

As someone who began his career right smack in the middle of the Mad Men era I can see how this positive assessment of the environment might seem counterintuitive. Viewed through the lens of traditional marketing these factors could be seen as constraining, intimidating and threatening to a brand.

But, viewed through the lens of social marketing they can be seen as liberating, supportive and opportune assets upon which to build powerful, purposeful and profitable brands.

For some inspiration on how best to make the most of today’s environment, look to an innovative management concept that resonates with many businesses today, Open-Book Management (OBM). Open-Book Management is a management style and technique where employees are educated about all aspects of a company’s business. They’re given all relevant financial information such as revenue, cost of goods, profit and expenses, so they can make better decisions.

It is a broad and powerful approach to running a business that requires truth, transparency and trust. Here are some thoughts on how to apply the OBM philosophy to the branding world.

Have an open mindset

Be ready, willing and eager to share every decision, action and reaction that is taken to build your brand. Be simultaneously open with your employees, business partners and consumers.

Internally, that can include opening up the books to everyone who touches the brand, sharing business plans with outside partners and stakeholders or proactively providing consumers with information that empowers them to make better, more informed decisions.

Resist the urge to be selective and in total control. Share whatever you can, whenever you can without disclosing information that would help a competitor.

Be open for inspection 24/7

Have the welcome mat out for your customers. Encourage them to drop in and check out any aspect of your brand at any time. Communicate news and updates about your brand and the people behind it as often as you can. Have conversations about programs and promotions before they are launched.

A simple rule of thumb: If there is something happening that can affect the brand experience, positively or negatively, get it to your consumers openly and honestly before someone else does.

This is the first time that I can remember that how a brand reacts to and handles a problem is more important than the problem itself… for better or worse.

The Motrin Moms Baby Wearing video controversy and Target’s refusal to engage a blogger by declaring that its customers don’t blog are examples of defensive reactions that didn’t work.

On the positive side, Domino’s Pizza avoided a lingering PR disaster when it responded swiftly after a few workers posted videos of themselves abusing customer orders. Domino’s immediately created its very own Twitter account to promote positive coverage and address customers’ concerns.

A YouTube video apology, featuring the company’s CEO, was also posted to help repair the damage. Domino’s consumers ultimately brushed the incident aside and the brand is moving ahead stronger than ever with a renewed emphasis on product quality.

Transparency can be a differentiating competitive advantage when managed smartly and swiftly.

Open inside, then out

People love stories, and the people behind a successful brand are often the most interesting parts of the brand’s story. Informed, committed and empowered employees can be a brand’s best marketing resource and most efficient media. Social media have opened the door to wonderful possibilities in this area.

Just like any media plan, opening up on the inside requires carefully planned, resourced and monitored implementation. Companies like Zappos and Best Buy can serve as great models of how to make this work. If you are held back by fear of your employees interacting with consumers in real time then perhaps you might not be hiring the right people.

Open up

An open mindset expands a brand’s horizons and builds its community. Liz Strauss captures this beautifully with this thought: “Build an irresistible community that includes all of the people who help your brand thrive. Build something you can’t build alone.”

A brand’s life should be an open book. And remember, an open book has nothing to hide.

@BrandsConf takes place on Thursday, December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Social Media played a big role in the debate, as consumers shared their war stories on Twitter and YouTube. Key players jumped on the opt-out day train, with Loopt and Foursquare offering iPods and badges to those who requested a pat down in lieu of a an AIT scan.

Amidst growing hysteria, critics like Politico’s Micheal Kinsley called for some perspective. Meanwhile, the TSA continues to defend its position in light of recent terror attacks, but promises to address the growing oeuvre of stories of less-than-pleasant pat-down experiences.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

Despite a poll suggesting 61% of Americans are opposed to the new AIT scanner technology and pat-down procedure,  U.S. airports reported few holiday travel hold-ups.

Jamaica makes 100,000 fast Facebook friends, thanks to social media marketing.

In a surprising turn of events, PhoCusWright’s Online Travel Review reported offline travel bookings surpassing online bookings in 2010.

Media + Magazines

Amazon’s new plan to dismantle Brick-and-Mortar competitors? Hit them in the aisles.

iPad or Android? The platform debate for the publishing community.

The Last Newspaper, now on display at The New Museum.

Branded Content + Entertainment

NetFlix takes aim at their competition with a new streaming-only solution.

Tim Burton crowd-sources some creepy tales in the weeks leading up to his upcoming Toronto showing.

Online ad network RadiumOne introduces Like-vertising – a new approach to targeted-advertising.

Looking down the list of @BrandsConf presenters, your name stood out as someone who, as an educator and academic, is neither representing a corporate brand nor working for an agency that does. What drew you to a conference about the humanization of brands?

I think that going to college has become like going to McDonalds: It’s convenient, it’s expected, it’s right in your neighbourhood. As a professor who’s taught at four very different major brands or institutions, my experience has been that if college was a brand, students would quickly stop buying it, because it’s not giving them what they want.

There’s really no other context – except maybe the music industry – where people make money from people who don’t get anything back from it, qualitatively speaking. Students spend four years expecting to get a degree that will get them a job.

That’s the only incentive for a majority of students. And we’re not really helping them do that. Right now they’re being trained to be consumers of their own education instead of being consumers and active participants in their own life.

Are you suggesting educators should start thinking more like corporate brands, or less?

What’s the guy’s name, Ray Anderson [CEO of Interface Global], he was in that film The Corporation. He took his enormous textile company and his employees on, and together they restructured the entire company to make it sustainable – it was an overhaul of the entire company, and productivity went sky-high as a result. I think we should all think of that model.

The landscape has changed with the Internet. Jobs that exist right now, we all know, are not going to exist very soon. There are all kinds of new jobs developing, and most of the faculty has not been trained in the new model, and aren’t interested in new technology. They aren’t interested in engagement or honesty.

The advancement of knowledge is coming from collaboration in the open-source domains – yet somehow none of that collaborative or community-oriented interaction is impacting the way people think about education. What we have ended up with within the institutional model is a situation that is not unlike that of the music industry: a couple of stars who are supposed to make up for the whole system.

So Michael Jackson or Prince are supposed to make enough money to keep the whole industry working. The Harvards and the Yales and the Stanfords do great things for our country while the rest of these institutions are sorting people out to be labourers.

It doesn’t have to be like this. All of the social media platforms that exist now are helping us realize that if there are 6.5 billion people on the planet, there’s probably enough room for everyone to do something that they love and make money off it.

You like to say that people need to agree to be offended. For example, you were outspoken about Twitter’s decision to pull a series of posts with the hashtag #thatsafrican, after an article on the Huffington Post suggested Twitter was “becoming racist.” Do you think constructive dialogue exist online, where there’s so much opportunity for misunderstanding and miscommunication?

Yes and no. If you take a look at any of the comments on YouTube, you think “Oh my god this is not possible!” The comments are just flame after flame after flame. It’s ironic, because, as an educator, part of my job is to tell people that there is this thing called listening. And one of the benefits of social media, at least on Twitter, is that you spend a lot of time listening to people.

People say that, you know, only 19 percent of people are actually putting out new content, but the flip side of that is that the other 80 percent of those people are listening to people they would have never encountered if they weren’t on Twitter.

For example, people get to be privy to black conversations that would have previously been off the radar. Last week I had to block somebody for the first time, and it was somebody commenting on the For Colored Girls movie that’s coming out. The film is creating a lot of stir online in the black community.

A black man sent me a tweet that said “I want you to read my blog,” and the blog was all his opinions on the film – and he admitted he hasn’t even seen it, nor does he intend to. I asked a friend of mine, who is also on Twitter, if she knew him and she told me he had sent her something similar, and she had blocked him long ago.

At first I decided I wouldn’t block him, because of my motto. But the conversation just immediately went south. If I disagreed with him, he would start flaming me. Eventually I just said, “You win.” I am not going to force a dialogue with someone who isn’t interested in a dialogue.

But the technique of being able to hear someone who doesn’t agree with you is the only way to be able to expand yourself and your network. Otherwise, you’d just be working with the people you went to high school with. You don’t have to agree with them, you just have to listen to them: “Agree to be offended and stay connected.”

As an ethnomusicologist, you’ve studied the unique ways that African-Americans communicate through everything from hip-hop to schoolyard games. Do you think black people use social media differently than others?

That’s a great question. Sometimes I liken this to that Verizon commercial: You come with your network of people behind you, your way of talking, thinking and feeling, you bring that right online with you, and you’ve got your little crew behind you. People that you agree with.

What’s happening is that we are finding out that our crew and tribe don’t have to look like us. There’s a ton of people worldwide who identify with our lifestyle – the culture, the food, the music – who were not raised in our network. And all of the sudden you start making new connections.

And not only do you have pushback from the opposition, you have pushback from people who are simply curious. “Do you really believe that? Is that really the way black people think?” There’s a forum for questions like that. And that’s totally new.

These conversations that used to take place only with our closest allies – the underbelly of what we talk about when we talk about ourselves – these things are all online now. It’s all open. The problem is that this sort of openness is not reaching the classroom, the faculty meeting, or the State senate.

We’ve been to a bunch of social media and business conferences, including the Supernova Forum in Philadelphia this summer, where several speakers noted the lack of racial and gender diversity. Is it important for you as an African-American woman to represent at these events?

Yes, yes. You know, I’m a TED fellow as well, and it’s the same there and all the social enterprise conferences I’ve been to. Deanna Zandt has said that social media give us access to each other, and so let’s mix our DNA. The way that our species develops is through mixing our DNA. We’ve learned this through the royal families and blue bloods of Europe, when they all married each other. It was not a good thing!

The results you get on Twitter and other social media, they allow you to replicate and mediate this diversity. But the structure of these conferences often replicates white privilege. And we should be concerned about this.

What are you hoping to get out of @BrandsConf? What are you most looking forward to talking and learning about?

I want to engage people who are there. I’m always trying to steal design contexts from other industries. I want to see if that concept of redesign that works elsewhere can make education seem new.

I always thought that it was a gimmick when you would go into a grocery store and see that All-Brand or Tide had a “new and improved” formula. That was before I understood brand marketing and design. The truth is that once I’ve been exposed to something for a long time, its effectiveness begins to wane. So you have to change the brand slightly, to keep people buying. What do we do in education like that, that’s going to give it some new vim and verve?

We can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and do a complete overhaul, but what if we look at the untapped resources in the classroom? How will the experience be altered if you consider that there might be students who are experts on what you’re talking about?

There’s a revolution that’s needed, and it needs to be real-time. I want to initiate that, and engage in that, because the way things are, both students and faculty are not benefiting or learning. And what kind of branding is that?

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

©istockphoto.com / Emrah Türüdü

Can brands be human? Can brands be more human? People tend to shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes or simply get freaked out at the slightest thought of making something that is not like us “human” (if you don’t believe me, watch science fiction movies like A.I. or Blade Runner). Before getting into a philosophical and semantic debate over what it actually means to be “human,” first think about what a brand really stands for.

If you go back to the early days of products and commercialism, you’ll note that soap was just soap for a very, very long time. All soap was made the same way, and the only way to differentiate it was for the company manufacturing it to give it an original name and make it look different (ok, some of them smelled different too).

In the decades after WWII, companies spent their time, money and effort trying to differentiate their products and services from those of their competitors. Some of those differences were legitimate, while some were not all that obvious. For the most part, brands came of age in a world where the things products did were pretty similar to what everyone else’s products did.

The only way to get around that problem was to create some kind of emotional attachment to one product over another. Enter Madison Avenue, which mixed advertising messages with psychology in the hope that a large group of people would feel emotionally connected to a product. And buy it. Lots of it. Over and over.

In today’s world, most products and services are decent; in the old days, you could use advertising to sell something severely sub-par. In this age of consumer reviews, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and beyond, it’s hard to get away with being that bad.

But we’ve also reached a point where that emotional connection between customers and brands goes both ways. The individuals behind the products are talking (or typing) directly with consumers. They’re putting a human face on something that for years was locked behind a passive-aggressive customer service rep.

At the same time, the customers at the other end are developing their own personal brands. They’re publishing, broadcasting and connecting. We’ve come to a point where certain individuals online have more influence and power than some of the biggest corporate brands.

What makes this so interesting (and scary for marketers) is that human beings are like snowflakes in that no two are alike. Those differentiators that brands fought so hard to implant in the consumer’s mind at the genesis of branding are intrinsic to humans. My Digital Marketing Blog will look nothing like your Digital Marketing Blog.

We want our brands to be more human because brands are made of human beings. Take an industry you hate (airlines, mobile carriers, automotive, you name it) and you’ll note that these industries are not made up of evildoers. They’re made of people.

They’re good people. They are people who are trying to make a living, trying to make a difference in the same communities as you and your children. They actually care about their customers. They want you to spend more with them and be loyal to them.

Science fiction aside, it’s probably impossible for something un-human ­– whether it be a robot or a brand ­­– to actually become human. But what we are seeing is that brands that embrace the human beings that make them so interesting (whether they work for them or just like chatting about them) are much more successful than others.

These brands can engage people much in the same way us humans can – and have done since we first rubbed two sticks together and invited the people around us over to warm up. These brands may never be human, but they can become more humane.

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet brings you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Branded Content + Entertainment

Museums, retailers and airlines bring guerilla marketing into the social savvy aughts: Guerrilla Marketing in 2010.

Edelman’s Carole Cone warns marketers that “Cause-related marketing, as we know it, is dead.”

Jumping on the latest zombie trend, BrandFlakes suggests you can speak “directly to your audience’s desires. Even if their desires include BRAINS…”

Media + Magazines

Print Matters! The NY Art Book Fair’s patrons redefine print, “unrestrained by the dictates of readability.”

What do last week’s US election results mean for marketers and media types? Advertising Age considers.

Is online media pioneer Slate falling behind its younger, less erudite competitors? The NY Observer discusses.

Airlines + Travel Marketing

The Cranky Flier discusses how Southwest Airlines measures the success of “Bags Fly Free”

Looking to update your customer experience? Here are a few lessons for travel brands.

Ease your airport anxiety: iPhoneness releases a list of the Top 10 Airport Apps for iPhone.

by @jeffpulver via Flickr

Jeff Pulver is the founder of the 140 Conference, the VON Coalition and Vivox, and the co-founder of VoIP provider Vonage.

Why another social media conference focusing on brands, and why now?

I am fixated on one thing: the humanization of brands. I announced this conference when I was in Los Angeles doing the 140 Conference because that’s where it hit me for the first time ever: Corporations now have to hire people to represent them from the human side, whether they like it or not.

It was the growing popularity of Twitter that forced corporations to have a public face. And now, if you’re not listening, your competition is. So the question is, how do people deal with these realities? I don’t know all the answers, so I thought by convening a conference, we could try to explore that.

More than anything else, I think we’re going to create a fraternity and sorority of people whose day jobs have been turned upside down because nobody went to school to be a brand ambassador.

Also, it’s not like this is just hitting one industry; this is hitting every industry. What I’m doing as a one-day event could very well be a three-day conference with multiple tracks, but I had to start someplace.

The reason it came together so quickly is that I realized this phenomenon was really a 2010 thing. Brands hit critical mass on Twitter in 2010, so why not address these things now?

What are some of the challenges brands face now that they need a real person – or a team of people – to be their face and voice on social media?

Well, if you work for Disney as a mascot, and say, you’re Goofy or you’re Mickey or Minnie Mouse, people see you and they relate you to the brand. And some people actually love you because of who you represent.

In other words, people often extend their love of the brand directly to the person who represents them without any indication of who that person really is.

I had this experience at SXSW – you walk around, and you see people and say, “Oh you’re with JetBlue, you’re Virgin America, oh you’re Southwest – I love you.”

So if you’re a company the question is, how do you stick your DNA into this person to make sure they’re speaking up properly all the time? Are they allowed to connect with your customers, and are these their customers or your company’s customers? What’s the nature of those relationships?

Who’s following up on what you’re saying? Because truth be told, I don’t believe Richard Branson is running the Virgin account.

It’s the fans that are driving the brands now, not the brands that are driving the fans. And when you start building walls around what the brands are allowed to do and not do, it takes away from some of the creativity.

But if you’re the owner of the brand, you should have the right to determine how the brand is used and how it connects with its audience. So it comes back to the question: Who do you hire to represent you? Do you hire a recent college graduate to be your online brand ambassador, or do you hire a skilled PR person who has years of experience?

These are the sorts of questions we’ll be exploring.

I know that you see social media like Twitter as a way to connect to individuals on a personal and meaningful level. Do you think brands can play a role in creating these spaces for people to connect?

What I think is fascinating is that brands today can do one-to-many marketing in a one-to-one way. It’s sort of like standing on a street corner and speaking: Anyone can stop to listen and you can talk to each and every one of them.

To me, this isn’t about media. It’s about communications, and it’s about connecting. At the end of the day, it’s really about being able to be heard, and about applying what’s been heard to effect change or to take action. While so many people talk about social media, I’m much more focused on social communication, and how these tools enable social communication to happen.

If you look at how the these platforms are changing things, they’re really changing the relationships between customers and corporations, corporations and their vendors and distributors, and between corporations and their employees. And they’re driving conversations that would never otherwise happen.

Can you think of some examples of brands that have become more “human” through their use of social media?

On many different levels, yes. If you take a look at Kodak, they now have a chief blogger and they engage with people on a regular basis. That’s an old company engaging in new things.

I’m also a big fan of The Today Show – and now if I’m watching The Today Show, I could tweet a comment and all of a sudden someone responds. Or what about when I tweet “Good morning” to the US Air Force and the Air Force tweets back, “Good morning.” That’s cool.

You established your own personal brand as an expert in Voice over Internet Protocol, which has been in the news lately with the recent Skype integration on Facebook and the newly launched Google Voice. Do you think VoIP – that is, speaking and listening through the Internet – will play a big role in the way we communicate online going forward?

I still think voice is the killer app. Other things will come and go, but at the end of the day, people like to talk – there’s something about voice that allows people to communicate effectively and get things done that they couldn’t do without hearing voice.

But I think having the ability to use these platforms is one thing, having a need is something else. Just because you have an engine, doesn’t mean people want to use your engine to go place to place.

So does Facebook need to have voice embedded into it? No. Is Facebook a better experience if people can talk through it? I think so, but the interface that we need for something to be successful on Facebook, I don’t think it’s Skype. And I don’t think we know yet what it is.

Why don’t you think Skype is the best fit for Facebook?

There’s nothing about Skype that makes it Facebook friendly. In my experience, if you try to do something and it’s not natural, the traction will never be there.

I think that voice could work on Facebook; the question is whether or not the Facebook community thinks it needs voice. Something will be successful if you identify and solve a problem that people have, rather than taking a solution and applying it to a problem that doesn’t exist.

In addition to @BrandsConf, you’ve organized 140 Characters conferences and smaller, less formal events around the world. Why is connecting with people face-to-face so important in the digital age?

I believe that the more virtual we become, the more we need things face-to-face. Conferences and events have the power to reinforce relationships we establish online, but they also allow us to take advantage of ones that are waiting to happen.

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” –http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Social media does many cool and interesting things when it comes to content, but it’s also an incredible driver for contests. This often forgotten medium is in desperate need of rejuvenation, and all of the moving parts are now available through both online and mobile channels to make it happen.

Branded contests never made it to primetime before the social web because brands could not defer attention from the main reason to be marketing in the first place: getting people to buy their products.

But things have changed. Brands can now do many fun things to keep consumers engaged, and they don’t have to break the bank to do it.

Chevy hits a speed bump; Doritos cashes in its chips

Us marketers may have become a little gun-shy since 2006 when Chevy teamed up with the hit reality television series, The Apprentice, to launch its Chevy Tahoe SUV. Part of the campaign involved an online contest where consumers could create their own Chevy Tahoe SUV commercials online.

Contestants could choose their own terrain, soundtrack and stock video clips and write their own text to accompany the video. The disaster that ensued included environmentalists and Iraq War opponents hijacking the contest and creating a slew of anti-SUV and anti-Chevy “commercials.”

Chevy eventually changed the campaign, censored the ads and then killed the website. But the damage was already done as several of those videos were captured and posted on online video sharing sites like YouTube, where they are still easily viewed today.

A few years later, Doritos launched a similar online video campaign, encouraging consumers to create their own Doritos spots. The winner of the Crash the Superbowl contest would get their videos shown during the Big Game.

This branded contest has been running for several years and has been a huge success. Doritos is now super-active in multiple branded contests throughout the year, and has created its own social media platform for deploying branded contests through digital and mobile channels.

So, why did Doritos score on the same field where Chevy struck out? For a few reasons:

1. Doritos’ brand and product are relatively innocuous – it’s hard to get worked up over a neon orange chip!
2. Doritos learned from the mistakes of others, including Chevy.
3. Doritos stayed focused on the fact that it was a contest (with a valuable prize), whereas Chevy wanted some good, free commercials as testimonials.

Mind the Gap

Prior to its rebranding snafu a few weeks back, Gap made the headlines in a positive way for its Casting Call contest.

This year’s edition was predominantly driven by the Casting Call iPhone app, which made it easy for parents to upload photos of their kids in hopes that they would be named the new face of babyGap and GapKids.

Along with a microsite and the branded mobile app, the real spin of momentum behind the contest was in encouraging parents to leverage Facebook and Twitter to get the votes out for their kids. Gap is expecting over one million entries.

Contrast this with Gap’s aborted campaign to “crowdsource” its new logo design, which some saw as a cynical attempt to save face and score some free design work.

Contests tell stories

What makes social media “social” is not necessarily how engaged a brand is with its consumers in terms of conversation. Social media are, fundamentally, about the ability to share media (text, images, audio and video) in an easy and fun way.

Layering mobility on top of this ability to share makes branded contests even more accessible to the masses.

Branded contest aren’t small. Social media and the mobile platform are powerful broadcasting channels (like television and newspapers) when they want to be.

The big idea here is that if your brand is compelling enough – and if the prize is worthy enough – customers are not only willing to create compelling (and branded) content, but they’re also willing to tell and share their stories with anybody and everybody they’re connected to.

Telling stories. Isn’t that what marketing is all about?