TidyCat Apologizes For Comparing Town to Used Cat Litter

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This guest post was written by Kevin Dugan, a full-time marketer, a long-time blogger and a proud Cincinnatian.

Some of you have probably seen TidyCats #lifestinks campaign. It's online with a campaign site encouraging consumers to Tweet about why life stinks and with videos designed to go, uh, feral perhaps. It's offline too with TV spots, out of home ads - even a mobile tour.

It's all designed to make sure we understand that TidyCats covers up the smell of used cat litter. Who knew?

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by Steve Hall    Apr-10-12    
Topic: Opinion, Social



Girl Scouts Learn How to Penetrate Social Media

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Aside from the assuredly unintended innuendo of the title, this guide from Captains of Industry entitled, Market Penetration Guide For Girl Scouts, offers up sure fire advice on how to sell Girl Scout cookies through social media.

by Steve Hall    Apr- 9-12    
Topic: Social, Spoofs



How to Optimize Ads for Facebook

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This guest article is written by Craig Robinson of Qwaya.

Once you've learned the correct way to approach and implement your Facebook advertising campaign, the next logical step is to optimize the ads themselves for the most effectiveness. Any marketer online, whether an individual affiliate or a large corporation, knows the key to receiving clicks and traffic is to make ads that appeal to as broad a base as possible within any given niche.

Obviously, there are many different ways in which to optimize ads for this goal, and also many different areas to target in terms of a respective niche. Age, gender, location, browsing habits, interests, income and even vices - depending on who you're advertising to, you may have to tweak multiple aspects of your ads.

Assuming you have the right tool to help you optimize your ads and keep track and control your campaign, here are some various steps to properly optimizing your ads for an audience.

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by Steve Hall    Apr- 5-12    
Topic: Social, Tools



Pepsi NEXT Creates Taste Test Ads Using Facebook Profiles

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Barbarian Group, in partnership with Funny or Die, is out with new work for Pepsi NEXT. Called Internet Taste Test, Facebook users can sign up to have customizes taste test videos by LA improv actors made for them based on information in their Facebook profile.

To kick things off, Barbarian Group hooked up with comedian Rob Riggle to produce video impressions of wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and Scumbag Steve.

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by Steve Hall    Apr- 5-12    
Topic: Social



Buddy Media Adds YouTube to Social Media Management Offering

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Social software provider Buddy Media has announced the launch of its YouTube social marketing solution, billed as the first global solution of its kind. With the service, brands and agencies can deploy a suite of social applications which Buddy Media would love for us to call "sapplets." These "sapplets" will help brands and their agencies customize their YouTube pages and deliver relevant social content globally based on a user's country and language settings.

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by Steve Hall    Apr- 3-12    
Topic: Social, Tools



How to Improve Your Brand's Facebook ROI

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Want practical tips on how to get the most out of your brand presence on Facebook? As part of our white paper series, we'd like to offer this best practices guide for creating Facebook pages and and a media strategy for those pages.

Entitled Guide to Business Success on Facebook, you will learn the sixteen steps you must take to create a successful branded Facebook page, how to craft content for the page and how to involved your audience. Additionally, you will learn the 28 best practices used by brands in vertical segments such as automotive, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, financial services, retail, technology and telecom.

Download the white paper now.

by Steve Hall    Mar-26-12    
Topic: Research, Social



Agency Creates World's First (?) Pinterest Campaign

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Israeli agency Smoyz claims to have created the world's first Pinterest-based campaign. For its client Kotex, the agency identified 50 women who they felt were "inspiring," studied their pins and identified what inspired the 50 women. The agency then physically created personalized items based on the women's pinned items. To receive the item, the women repinned the agency's creation and the agency sent the item, along with some Kotex product naturally, to the women.

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by Steve Hall    Mar-22-12    
Topic: Agencies, Brands, Social



Kayak Demonstrates How to Book A Flight Using Only Your Mind

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Kayak is getting kooky again. This time with a Barton F. Graf 9000-created video that demonstrates how you can plan a trip using only the power of your mind. And, inadvertently, illustrating just how easily the capital of California is forgotten.

Monitoring for online mentions of "mind control", "using only my mind", "thought control", "hypnosis", "telekinesis", etc., the team at Kayak will be delivering this YouTube video link directly to consumers on Twitter, blogs, forums, Yahoo! Answers and other online destinations. An interesting approach. Perfectly personalized in that appropriately kooky Kayak way.

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by Steve Hall    Mar-21-12    
Topic: Brands, Social, Strange, Video



Pinterest Is All The Rage But It's Not the Only Game in Town

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In this Future of Publishing episode, Viglink's Oliver Oliver Roup and Host Murray Newlands interview Stipple's Rey Flemings and Luminate's Chas Edwards. Both companies are involved in the monetization of images. Although companies like Pinterest have been using social media to monetize images, there are many more options than just attaching Amazon or other affiliate links to them. If you're wondering how (or why you should even bother) to make money from your brand imagery, check out part one of this three part series on image monetization.

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by Steve Hall    Mar-21-12    
Topic: Social, Video



Five Best Practices For Social Media Measurement

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More from our white paper series. In this white paper summation of a webinar, KDPaine & Partners Katie Delahaye Paine and SAS Global Customer Service and Media Intelligence Manager John Bastone outline three areas of focus and five best practices for getting the most out of social media measurement.

Paine and Bastone explain how and why brands must listen, process and respond in social media channels and put forth five tips for social media measurement success:

1. Consider how social media will drive profit
2. Know what you want out of social media
3. Be sure your social media participation is two way
4. Forget about impressions and hits
5. Blend social media data with internal data.

Download the free white paper and learn how to get your social media measurement house in order.

by Steve Hall    Mar-15-12    
Topic: Research, Social