http://bit.ly/twitter_dell

Popularity: unranked [?]

Looking for the perfect, unique gift for the Gmail addict this holiday season? Look no further than the Gboard, a keyboard just for Gmail users. Rather than commit all of those keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory, you can execute the same tasks with action-specific keys. At $19.99, it’s an interesting stocking-stuffer. Check it out!

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Vail Resorts has abandoned its long-time advertising strategies and practices. In their place, the billion-dollar-a-year corporation, which operates five major resorts and twenty hotels, has built a new in-house marketing operation that uses social media and other digital venues to constantly engage skiing enthusiasts in real time…more here

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5 Cool Ways Brands Are Using Facebook for Black Friday and Beyond

Tis the season to use social media for holiday shopping. In fact, data from eMarketer shows that 17% of all consumers are using social media for their holiday shopping needs, and brands are proving to be savvier than ever with their online holiday shopping bag of tricks.

Yesterday we highlighted Toys”R”Us’ quickly growing fan following on Facebook, which is due in no small part to their clever use of their Facebook Page to promote in-store Black Friday deals. Of course, they’re not the only retailer being smart about their social media strategies this holiday season. Here we look at 5 different brands with creative approaches for using their Facebook Pages to reap in the rewards of the marriage between social media and holiday shopping. …read more

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For Big-Spending Consumer Brands, Has Scale Lost Its Power?

Small Players Like Method Leverage Digital, Social Media in Quest to Gain Share

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Have digital and social media leveled the marketing playing field so much that scale is losing its power? …read more

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Check out Coke’s Expedition206! Wow!

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Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) practice has recently released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities* and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. Conducted in conjunction with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, this second edition of the Tribalization of Business Study measured the responses of more than 400 companies including Fortune 100 organizations which have created and maintain online communities today. …read more

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Facebook’s Big Changes: Action Items for Marketers
Social-Media Site Streamlines Apps Before Fanning Across the Web

Facebook’s latest round of updates announced this week will affect everyone: marketers, developers, publishers, consumers and anyone else remotely connected to their site and platform. And some of the changes will especially impact marketers.

In a rare move for any company, Facebook not only announced what changes will take place, but it publicly offered a timeline for when it will happen. Of course, the timeline may shift, and some specifics have yet to be ironed out — I’ve found in consulting both with Facebook executives and analysts covering the announcements that, many of the details aren’t yet known and a number of important questions cannot yet be fully answered. However, marketers should still appreciate the wealth of information Facebook has provided on these changes, including a gallery of screen shots. …Read more

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Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. …read more

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Charles Nelson, president of Sprinkles Cupcakes, doesn’t have a Facebook profile. Nelson, who works seven days a week, has no time for chatting online with Facebook friends.

But Nelson is logged on to Facebook all the time. That’s because more than 70,000 people have declared themselves fans of Sprinkles’ Facebook page, which is at facebook.com/sprinkles.

Each day on the site, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as “ganache” or “bunny,” and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores around the country and whisper that word get a free cupcake.

“On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,” Nelson said. “What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.”

Facebook is not just for friends anymore. The free social networking site — blocked in some workplaces as a potential time-waster — is increasingly becoming an inexpensive marketing tool for small businesses.

Sprinkles is among a growing number of small businesses taking advantage of a relatively new program on Facebook, one that allows them to claim their name, become visible even to folks who aren’t on the site, and stay in close contact with their customers. The business, in effect, can act like any other person on Facebook, posting status updates and seeing what its fans are doing. …read more here–>

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AdvertisingAge has been exploring how various agencies are integrating social media services into their operations. Some like Edelmen have hired inhouse social media teams; others, like BBDO are using young mentors to teach all their executives how to Facebook, Blog, twitter, and otherwise function and think like authentic socail media players.

Doug Checkeris, CEO of MediaCom North America, how they are handling integrating social media services.”There are lots of ways for us to get the individual components done by specialists. We don’t necessarily need to bring all of those resources into the building and make them into a socail media team. What we need to do is have a clear idea of what we want to do and get the best people in the business to work on it. In terms of bloggers we can find them. Every situation will require different blogging specialists. We can search that and source that. We want to concentrate on understanding the inside driven strategy and how it relates to choosing social media and how we apply it to an integrated campaign.”
(http://tinyurl.com/yqmnbg)

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