A great thing happening around Social Media is that people can get with ease a lot of information about their interests.  In the Social Media era, people can -finally- get rid of all the Noise and grab the Signal.

One of the most interesting uses of social networks such as Facebook or Twitter is the approach given by the sector of Arts and Culture.  It is still quite impressive how many digital marketing or social media agencies have not realized this great opportunity, and are letting Museums or Galleries go by their own in the use of social networks.

Browsing across the Internet I found an interesting blog, called “Museum Marketing“, written by Jim Richardson, who posted an interesting article about how Museums can start working on Twitter.

Despite the specific objective of teaching Museums how to start using the social network, the tips might be useful for companies or organizations too.  So, if you are running a museum, or a company, who wants to start with Social Media, you should first read this.

Take a look at this great presentation by Shiv Singh from Razorfish about the importance of Social Media as part of the marketing mix. Explore how some companies have evolved from the Brand voice, to the Social voice and even to the Social Brand.  The point is that you’re never going to buy again anything alone, now you are influencing and been influenced by others, everyday.

Via Online Media Gazette

Few days ago Wired posted an article about the newest approach from Adidas on Augmented Reality as part of a campaign to be launched in February. Adidas shoes will come with codes in the tongue that allow you to hold it up to a web cam and launch a 3D world right in the palm of your hands.

Adidas plans to introduce three games into the virtual neighborhood. The sneakers will then serve not only as the key to get in, but also act as the controller for the games.

Augmented Reality has been said to be one of the trends for this year, but in fact it is not something new.  Four years ago, Latin American agencies such as Iconolab, were already working with that technology for digital marketing campaigns.

Read more | Via  DigitalBuzz

On the 9th of September Hasbro will launch the live worldwide game Monopoly City Streets using Google Maps as the game board.

“It would appear that Hasbro, makers of the Monopoly game, is attempting to turn the franchise into a massively multi-player online game”

More on the blog

Via TechCrunch

Today, almost every company trying to increase its online presence wants to be part of the conversation. Most of them ask their agencies to develop strategies to “use” social media as part of their online marketing campaigns.  Starting from here, the approach is wrong.  As said previously, companies must not try to join the conversation, they must CREATE the conversation; and using social media must not be considered as part of the advertising activities.  Until you don’t get that, you won’t be successful with social media.

It is clear that you, as a Marketing head of a company, might not necessarily know all about the Social Media stuff, and thus want hire a Social Media Expert to do the job.  Jason has just published at MarketingHackz his selection of the 5 things your social media expert should know:

1. How to pitch bloggers: “Pitching bloggers requires more of a relationship than anything else”
2. How to monitor social media campaigns: “Monitoring social media campaigns isn’t like loading up Google Analytics”
3. Strong personal profiles: “If your expert doesn’t have a strong presence online, they aren’t going to get the job done for you either”
   ….

Want to know the rest?  Click here.

Digital Inspiration posted about a set of 900+ interviews that Michael Stelzner did to Internet Marketers to find out how marketers are using social media to grow their businesses.  On the report, he also found the top 10 social media questions marketers want answered, including what social media tools are most popular, how they are using social media, what are the benefits of using social media, etc.

The results are interesting. Regarding the most popular social media tools: Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn and Facebook are the favorites.

As for the benefits of using social media, marketers answered the following:

If you are planning to jump into the social media, you might want to take a look at the full report.  Here.

Dear Agency,
This isn’t easy for me. I couldn’t be happier. I’m leaving you.

This one is not new, but is still good! Do you want to say goodbye to your agency but don’t want to hurt feelings? Don’t worry,  here you can generate your own letter by just answering a few questions.  Try it. Developed by Citrus.

Skittles has recently redesigned its webpage and btw amazed the whole online marketing industry with the new Skittles homepage, which is based entirely on content published on Social Media.

Yes, if you want to know more about the products, within the Skittles website you are sent to a Wikipedia article, if you want to see photos, then you are directed to a Flickr profile.

What about friends? Facebook. Videos? YouTube. And chatting? Twitter.

You’ve got to check it out to understand the concept. It is also good to read the interesting analysis from ViralBlog.

The Inspiration Room has published a great collection of blogs focused on advertising and marketing around the world and sorted by country/region.  Check it out.

Hasbro Mexico launched this website to promote the National Monopoly Tournament.  There are many prizes and the winner will have the chance to participate in the worldwide tournament to be held at Las Vegas.

The site’s quality is excellent and allows users to have the real Monopoly experience through a nice crafted interface. Try it, you can also play as guest. It was developed by LeoBurnett.

Via Deutsch.blog

The web is a two way communication channel that permits people interact with others and share information of common interest. Some companies have been able to identify this and start conversations with their audiences directly. Those conversations, when managed correctly, can evolve into really strong and engaging relationships.

In the past, public relations were supposed to focus only in maintaining a good relation with the media, journalists, editors and specific groups of interest. Within the Internet era, this whole new environment has forced companies to adapt their PR strategies to also include the audiences that can be reached online.

Companies, in their effort of jumping into online conversations must consider that, besides journalists, editors and specific groups of interest, in the online world the audience is millions of people that daily use search engines and subscription services to stay alert of the topics they are interested in.

Corporate Digital Public Relations are the set of strategies that a company implements to maintain a positive and long-term relationship with their traditional audiences in an online environment (journalists, editors, groups of interest), and with their new ones (ex. opinion leaders, bloggers and even real consumers).

In the offline world, Marketing and Public Relations are seen as separate fields -performed by different people, indeed- but when translated to the online world, as Digital Public Relations is an emerging discipline and uses the same communications vehicles as Digital Marketing, it is sometimes difficult to clearly distinguish between them.

Prior to the web, companies had two main methods for communicating with their audiences: through advertising or through media coverage. As new technologies have evolved, other types of interaction have not just emerged but been adopted by people to exchange their information.

Within this new paradigm, the web offers to the companies the opportunity to deliver targeted messages to specific audiences directly, without having any intermediate or needing to invest in mainstream advertisement placement. Today, companies need also to focus on “The Long Tail” [1] when designing communications and marketing strategies towards starting a segmentation of their messages, taking into consideration the broad kind of audiences they may have online.

On a day-to-day basis, Digital Public Relations and Digital Marketing might overlap their efforts and the line between them may appear unclear, but with the aim of establishing a common standing point and definition, it can be said that Digital Marketing Strategies are intended to create online user experiences while delivering brand content to the audiences. On the other hand, Digital Public Relations come into place when these online experience involve -or evolve into- a conversation.

“The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online news releases, and other forms of web content let organizations communicate directly with consumers” [2]

[1] ANDERSON, Chris, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. Published by Hiperion, 2006.
[2] MEERMAN Scott, David, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR – How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyes directly”. Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2007.

Chevrolet Mexico has recently launched the teaser website for the Camaro 2010. Quite disappointing for such a famous car.  As almost all car-related websites around there, we expected a more engaging experience, but there isn’t.   On this website you can only see a 360° view of the car, submit your answer to the question “What would you do with a Camaro 2010?”, subscribe for a newsletter and see a timeline showing photographs of the car.  Don’t click.

Vía Deutsch.blog

Following with the predictions for this year, here are the ones from LeoBurnett:

KitKat delivers the first website where nothing happens and invites everybody to have a break.

Vía Adverblog

This is the add in which John Lennon appears digitally to support the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. In this add Lennon says “Imagine if every child, no matter where in the world they were, could access a universe of knowledge,” the virtual Lennon says. “They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way.”

More info @ laptop.org

Via Deutsch.blog