Social Rewards, a social loyalty platform, has closed a seed round of angel funding totaling $600,000. The company was self-funded for a year with $250,000 from founders Joseph Morin and Mike Uesugi before raising any outside capital, and exceeded its original funding goal of $500,000.
Social Rewards provides a brand's customers with loyalty points for engaging in social media activity via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and YouTube. Points may be earned, deposited, redeemed, donated, or transferred into a "bank" built on the Social Rewards platform. The offering combines social media, affiliate marketing, and loyalty rewards to help companies identify brand ambassadors and increase social engagement.
more »
The team at Radian6 compiled their most-shared posts from 2011 into this eBook.
Use these 30 ideas to:
- Go beyond a grab-bag of tactics to become a truly social business
- Gain valuable business intelligence by listening intelligently to your community, industry and competitors
- Crowdsource fresh ideas from your biggest fans
- Use a social media crisis to turn frustrated clients into lifelong brand advocates
- Identify which tactics are working using smart analytics
Download the free eBook here.
So Facebook app, Dogbook, created by Lowe Roche founder Roche and his son, Alexandre Roche, about dogs and the people who love them, has undergone a redesign.">Dogbook, created by Lowe Roche founder Roche and his son, Alexandre Roche, about dogs and the people who love them, has undergone a redesign. The update brings some Timeline-like functionality to the site. Additionally, members will now receive birthday alerts which brands can sponsor to get their message to the site's 6,000 daily users. Later this year, Dogbook will roll out a Horoscopes feature and a Memories section for dogs that have passed away. And finally, the site will bump up the adoption section, giving members the option of becoming involved in charitable efforts.
To hype all of this, Poolhouse produced a video that features a collection of dogs singing happy birthday. It's not the VW Dogs singing Star Wars but it's amusing enough.
more »
Venables Bell & Partners is out with their annual Super Bowl study to see "what Americans will be doing around the water cooler this year." And in keeping with the current meme du jour, the study is accompanied by an infographic representaion of the findings.
Last year, almost one in five (19%) of Americans searched for ads before the game, about double (11%) who did in 2010. Of that group, 48% searched for ads on Facebook, putting the site just ahead of YouTube and media sources as the lead destination to find ads.
This year, more than a third (36%) of Americans plan to share their favorite ad via social media. Of that group, 87% will share via Facebook, ahead of emailing with a YouTube link (6%) and Twitter (4%). Doing a little math, this means that if 111 million people watch this year's game, there could be 35 million posts on Facebook about Super Bowl advertising. And if the average Facebook user has 130 friends, those collective posts could result in over 4.5 billion incremental impressions.
more »
This week's Future of Engagement features David Spark who heads up Spark Media Solutions and contributor to Mashable. Spark kicks off the interview explaining why content creation is so important saying, "content is the currency for social media and search."
Spark also says brands can't "market and PR" their way into content creation and social media. He advises brands that are considering content creation to focus on topics of interest related to the brand in question as opposed to simply publishing product information.
more »
- If you're into Juicy Couture...or at least their advertising.
- The Whitehouse enters the world of Google+.
- Slate has a minimum of kind words in its piece about Crispin Porter + Bogusky and its loss of the Burger King account.
- Peter Berg is out with new work for MINI, Another Day, Another Adventure
- Is Imogen Thomas the new face of Caprice lingerie?
- Lego launches a social media community.
- If tweeting, blogging, Liking and Plus-ing isn't enough for you while watching the Super Bowl now you can also play Chevy Game Time. Yea, there's an app for that.
- Check out the new brainstorming tool, Thinkerbot, from Nail Communications
The Barbarian Group has created an infographic that summarizes the milestones that occurred in the world of social media during 2011 across such platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook and Foursquare. Such milestones include YouTube's launch of movie rentals, Twitter's acquisition of Tweetdeck, announcement of Facebook's planned IPO, Twitter reaching 100 million users, Foursquare reaching one billion check ins, Facebook's launch of Timeline and the launch of Google Plus brand pages. Check it all out here.
Who says social media is just a fad and doesn't work? Not Israeli fund raising organization Latet which, along with Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R and Facebook app Shaker, launched an in-Facebook fundraising event during which celebrities - who were assigned avatars - gave live performances, talked with event attendees and posed for virtual snap shots.
The goal of the event was to solicit donations. Each person who donated was awarded a virtual t-shirt. The online event reached 2 million people. Many donated and Latet signed up 129 new volunteers.
more »
This guest contribution is written by Dave McMullen, partner and lead strategist at redpepper integrated agency.
Say the word "advertising" at a cocktail party and most people will immediately engage in a conversation about their favorite television spots. To be a part of this conversation used to be the holy grail of advertising.
Then along came the search engine, and along with it came a new holy grail--the top spot in a list of search results.
While the whole world was clamoring for Google's coveted number one, unsponsored search result listing, Facebook and Twitter began not-so-quietly supplanting Google as the central nervous system of the world wide web. These two social media juggernauts gave rise to an engagement era during which the once lauded "impression" began to fall out of favor as a legitimate measure of a return on marketing investment. And, as a result, yet another era in marketing arose. And we're smack dab in the middle of it at this very moment in time.
Welcome to the sharing era--an era in which a company's brand awareness and advertising messages have fallen, quite literally, into the hands of the market.
more »
In the second outing of our video series, Future of Engagement, host Murray Newlands interviews Chase McMichael of Infinigraph, a social media data intelligence company, about how brands can find out who their primary influencers are and how brands can connect with those influencers to further the brand message.
The notion of content curation and the examination of content to determine behavior and intent as it relates to the brand is discussed as well as how brands can better match advertising to content to increase response rates.
more »
|
