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

“This completely new Fall 2009 version, designed by XPLANE, includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.”

And if you want to see the real truth about online presentations you should definitely see this other version:

Via TheInspirationRoom

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.

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.

It is not always so easy for a company to figure out its own online presence or the one from their competitors.  When building an Online Marketing/PR strategy it is always necessary to know who is talking about you and what they are saying.  It is also important to know who is talking about your competitors and what it is been said.

I recently collaborated in a Digital Footprint study for a well known software company, the study was focused on Mexico and Latin America and it was intended to identify the blogs, sites, and at the end, people, who were talking about the company and its brands.  The results are confidential, but they will enable the company to generate a strategy to start a relationship, or even a direct conversation with them.

The tools we used were almost all from Google, but there are also other online tools out there that can help you figure out what size your (or your competitors’) Digital Footprint is. Bryan Eisenberg compiled last year a set of 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition:

1. Statbrain – To determine the number of visitors a website has based on an algorithm an different information sources.

2. AideRSS – To find out which blog posts and topics are engaging people.

3. FeedCompare – To compare the size of  your feed to others.

4. Xinu Returns – To get a report on how well a site is doing on popular search engines.

5. Google Trends For Websites – To find how often a set of topics have been searched in Google over time.

For the rest of the list, click here.

I just saw an interesting diagram posted by Todd Defren at PR-squared that shows the evolution of advertising vs. public relations in this Social Media era.

“As you can see, PR is becoming increasingly interpersonal: there is a daily flow of interaction, responsiveness and adaptation going on amongst PR people and their ever-expanding publics. [...] Meanwhile, the advertising folks are coming to embrace more and more user-generated content, but as PAID media (versus EARNED media).

Advertising’s intrinsic, long-term value to the corporate brand is declining in the Social Media era. And the PR industry is the happy beneficiary.”

The diagram is really insightful and yes, I agree with Todd, but the counterpart of this is that nowadays in Latin America (for example), there are no agencies that can advice corporations on a complete Digital PR strategy.

Of course, you will find the traditional PR agencies that will offer some kind of “exercises” on the digital world, like including the posting of a video on YouTube or creating a “fan group” or a profile of your product at Facebook. On the other hand you will find also Online Marketing agencies that will offer the inclusion of  “social” into the online marketing campaign… all good ideas but, all of those are just tactics…what about the REAL strategy?

Companies must first be clear on what they want to achieve when they are going online, nevertheless if the effort is conducted by marketing or PR, and this is a great opportunity for agencies to make interesting proposals.  Companies need answers to questions like: What is the best approach FOR US to go online?,  Are we prepared to make a conversation?,  Do we really want to make a conversation?,  What we need?,  How is the roadmap-to-digitalPR or digitalMKT traced?

All of those tough, but really necessary questions to be answered prior to jumping online…  What do you think?

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

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

Vía Adverblog

 A great one-try-and-never-come-back experience: The Corona Beach.  It is a really well done website with a nice interface and effects.  The bad thing is the lack of content. As Martina asks: Is it worth to spend a lot of money in a website that is not going to generate repeated visits?  I think it doesn’t.

The guys at Grupo Modelo should re-think their online strategy for a while…  btw… why do they make these kind of nice and well-crafted websites for other countries and such awful ones for the Mexican market?

Nowadays Marketing and Public Relations are not what they used to be.  In the past those where considered as separate fields with different audiences and tools.  As technology evolves and the digital era is more and more within us, it is more difficult to define a clear separation between these two fields. That is why David Meerman Scoot, on his book “The new rules of marketing & pr” states the new rules:

• Marketing is more than just advertising.
• PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
• You are what you publish.
• People want authenticity, not spin.
• People want participation, not propaganda.

…for the next five rules it is highly recommended to read the book.  More on digital PR & online marketing soon.

It is impressive how good Absolut maintains absolut.com with attractive and innovative content.  Following the “In an Absolut World” campaign and doing more that just copy-pasting the mass media versions to the online world as some other brands might be doing, Absolut has launched a site in which the visions of artists, writers and actors from around the world have been collected and arranged in an interesting interface that, according to Martina, is powered by Flash and Papervision 3D. 

In this website the visions of twelve selected persons are shown but it also lets the users to submit their own vision. For more visit absolut.com