Old Spice – It’s the campaign your campaign can smell like.

In short: Old Spice has redefined what a social media campaign is capable of. From this point forward, all social media campaigns will be judged against the success of this campaign.

For an overview of just some of what W+K has done for Old Spice, check out this NOTCOT Blog Post.

The piece of this campaign that has received the most attention is a series of YouTube videos, where Isa Mustafa (the Old Spice actor) makes more than 180 personalized videos that address everyone from Kevin Rose and Perez Hilton to random YouTube users who had commented on the original Old Spice videos. One person even requested that Isa make a wedding proposal video for his girlfriend:

(She said yes.)

The results speak for themselves: 5.9 million views and 22,500+ comments IN TWO DAYS.

In addition, many advertising/marketing blogs have written lengthy case studies about the success of this campaign, and even many of the traditional news outlets have started to cover the cultural phenomenon that this campaign has created.

Following the release of the videos, Google’s CFO said that Old Spice Is The Future, and Alyssa Milano agreed to date Isa if Old Spice donated $100k to the oil spill cleanup efforts:

It’s important to note that this was not just a social media campaign, and was done as an extension of a major media spend which established the character and helped to build the campaign’s awareness, but it does show how you can take a traditional campaign to the next level through the use of clever and well executed social media efforts.

Side Note: One interesting media buy for the Old Spice campaign was BustedTees, where they sponsored Free Shipping for a week:

Calvin Klein Puts Up A QR Billboard – In New York and Los Angeles, Calvin Klein put up a billboard that featured nothing more than a giant QR code and the call to action “Get It Uncensored”.

Users who scanned the code would then be able to view an ‘uncensored’ 40-second commercial featuring Calvin Klein models, and were then given the option to share the ad through Facebook and Twitter.

CNNMoney Features Best Places to Live with Gowalla – As part of Money magazine’s annual 100 Best Places to Live list, CNNMoney has partnered with Gowalla to help people discover the best parts of each city.

Through the partnership, users can take branded trips through many of the cities, and each of the top 25 cities has a trending list of locations where you can see which spots are the most popular amongst Gowalla users.

Help Vince! – The New England Patriots have teamed up with geo-location service SCVNGR to create a city wide scavenger hunt where fans can try to track down Vince Wilfork’s “missing” Super Bowl championship ring.

Using the app, fans will seek out more than 200 places throughout New England, complete challenges at numerous locations, and earn points and prizes for top scorers. The grand prize includes lunch with a Patriots player, and goes to the first person to successfully find the ring.

Barbie Gets Social – Barbie is releasing a new “Video Girl” doll that includes a working video camera and comes with video editing software that girls can use to make their own videos. They developed the doll in collaboration with iJustine, a prominent video blogger, and are launching the doll with a promotion on Foursquare and Twitter:

Fiber For Communities – When Google offered to bring ultra-high speed fiber Internet to a chosen community, they were overwhelmed by more than 1,100 community responses, as well as 200,000+ responses from individuals.

In response, Google created Fiber For Communities, a site where they can “provide additional resources for anyone interested in ultra high-speed Internet access”.

Small Discoveries – As part of their 25th anniversary, Discovery Channel created a program called My Discovery, where viewers and users could share tweet-length discoveries at any scale, from personal life to the wider world, and then Discovery would show the best of them online and on-air.

As Twitter notes, this campaign is interesting because instead of focusing on thousands and thousands of tweets, they chose to highlight a carefully-chosen group of tweets that “surprise, delight, or tell a story”.

Patron Cocktail Lab – Patron Tequila has created the Patron Cocktail Lab application on Facebook, where users can create new drinks in response to a challenge that Patron posts each month.

Once a drink gets created, Patron will have pro mixologists give ideas and feedback through the Patron Facebook wall, and users can vote on their favorites. Then, at the end of each month, a winning drink will be selected and will become an official, Patron-recognized drink.

Starbucks Has 10 Million Fans – On the heels of Lady Gaga reaching 10 Million Facebook Fans, Starbucks has become the first brand to reach the milestone, making Facebook an important channel in their ongoing social media efforts.

Facebook Has 500 Million Users – The rumor that’s been buzzing around the social media world for the last few days is that Facebook is preparing to announce its 500 millionth user, which would mean that they are adding an average of 100 million new users every five months.

At this rate, it won’t be long before any campaign that wants to reach a majority of the online audience is either run through Facebook, or risks leaving a large number of people out of the loop.

Hulu Serves A Lot Of Ads – According to ComScore, Hulu now serves more than 560 million video ads per month, making them the largest online video ad server, and placing them ahead of even Google, which serves just over 200 million across all of its properties, including YouTube.

Quick Hits:

• Moo has posted a few of the recent business card redesigns from their Business Card Project, which was featured in a previous Social Media Digest.
• Sony Pictures is the latest to use Twitter’s new Sponsored Trending Topic ad, with a sponsorship of the hashtag #SocialNetwork for the upcoming film about the founding of Facebook, called The Social Network.

Fast Company Influence Project – Fast Company has created what could be the most effective link bait campaign ever. (Link Bait = Any content or feature, within a website, which somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. – Wikipedia)

Called the Influence Project, its stated goal is to discover who are the most influential people online. In order to prove their influence, users must create an account, and then get others to sign up through their unique link. The more people that sign up through your link, the more ‘influence’ you have, and the larger your picture grows. The person with the most influence at the end of the campaign will be on the cover of an issue of Fast Company, and everyone who participates will appear in a giant spread of all participants.

While this sounds like a great idea for all involved (and they’re producing some pretty interesting blog content as part of the campaign) many claim that Fast Company is confusing ego with influence, and noting that the scoring is coincidentally shaped like a pyramid scheme.

Social Media Brand Engagement Database – The ENGAGEMENTdb is a database and raking of the top brands on social media.

Each company gets a unique profile that lists their social media profiles, including social networking, collaborative tools, blogs, mircoblogs, image/video sharing, social bookmarking and more. They are then ranked based on the number of places they engage consumers, with a higher ranking given to companies with more profiles.

While it’s interesting to just dig through this information and see how your favorite brands are engaging their consumers, it’s also a valuable tool for marketers/advertisers who are looking for examples, or want to see what their competitors are up to.

Humongo Nation – Humongo is an ad shop out of Connecticut (formerly Plaid until they were purchased) that takes a yearly trip around the US to meet with clients and companies they admire and celebrate their innovations.

This year, they’ve loaded up their Ford Flex with cameras and mobile wi-fi so that they can live broadcast the whole trip, and they’ll be sharing their experience with the world in a number of ways, including a blog to showcase the food they eat along the way.

Last Call For Facebook Gifts – In a somewhat surprising move, Facebook has announced that they will be closing down Facebook Gifts to focus more on “improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the ‘Like’ button and the Wall”.

The news is surprising because they were making $1 from each gift, and since each gift is just a single image, each sale was almost pure profit. Rumor has it that they were selling millions of these gifts each month, and with the forthcoming growth of Facebook Credits that trend was sure to continue, but apparently they have other plans in mind that will give them a better return on their time and investment.

The Role of Advertising on Facebook – Amidst continued controversy about their privacy policies and exactly how much information they shares with advertisers, Facebook has published a blog post about the role of advertising on Facebook, and how advertising works on their network.

In addition to talking about the types of data they share with advertisers (aggregate and anonymous) they try to dive deeper into how advertisers can target you, and why you see the ads that you do.

Wheat Thins – Crunch Is Calling – Wheat Thins is running an online campaign on YouTube called Crunch Is Calling, where they track down people who have tweeted about Wheat Thins, and then play a practical joke on them based on their tweet.

One woman tweeted that her life was over since she was out of Wheat Thins, so they dropped a crate full of them onto her driveway. Another said that he air guitars with a Wheat Thin, so they set up an air guitar jam session at his house.

It’s a fun campaign, and best of all, they claim that each of the tweets is genuine, so I’m sure the people who star in each of the spots will be Wheat Thins customers for life.

Justin Bieber Will Tour North Korea – The social media world can be a great way to build buzz, but it can also bite back if you’re not careful.

Recently Justin Bieber’s people launched a “My World Tour” voting contest that asked Bieber fans to vote on Twitter about which country he should tour next.

Unfortunately for Bieber fans, the people running the contest didn’t put a restriction on which countries could be nominated, so the group Anonymous from the notorious internet forum 4chan rigged the contest and nominated North Korea with more than half a million votes.

No word yet on how they plan on getting out of this one…

10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics – Want to spice up a presentation with a social media infographic? Mashable has put together a list of 10 of the most beautiful infographics, and in addition to being filled with tons of useful information, they look pretty good too!

Twitter @EarlyBird – Twitter is going after sites like Woot! (which was recently purchased by Amazon), Groupon and Gilt by creating an account called @EarlyBird that will share “exclusive offers from Twitter’s select advertising partners”.

Details on the account are still pretty slim, but rumor has it that they’re going to do large offers that are limited in quantity, and then send them out early in the morning.

NBA Pays to Promote LeBron James on Twitter – The social media world was buzzing about the announcement of which team LeBron James would play for, so the NBA decided to capture some of that excitement by sponsored the “LeBron James” trending topic on Twitter.

Users that clicked on the trending topic were shown a tweet from the NBA Twitter account that promoted Decision 2010, and could retweet the message if they felt that it would be interesting to their followers as well.

Ironically, the tweet directly below the tweet from the NBA was from Conan O’Brien, so said that “I don’t care where LeBron James ends up… As long as it’s not at 11pm on TBS.”

(On a related note, LeBron has officially joined Twitter under the name @KingJames, and within a day of his first official tweet, he had amassed more than 100,000 followers.)

Best Buy Movie Mode – Best Buy has created a new “Movie Mode” app (available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile) that adds interactive content to your movie watching experience.

The first movie to use the Movie Mode app is Despicable Me, which allows you to translate the words that the Minions are saying during the end credits, as well as unlock exclusive content after the show.

It’ll be interesting to see how this app is received, since the theaters are usually a cell phone free zone, but if users are engaged by the content and it enhances their movie watching experience, we may have a whole new way to engage movie viewers.

APB’s Human Avatar – All Points Bulletin is an online MMO game that features a customization engine where you can create any character you want and then unleash him on the streets of the game.

To promote the game and its customization engine, APB is creating a human avatar, where fans will decide the haircut, tattoos, piercings and clothing of a real person, and they will then turn that person into a character from the game over the course of three weeks. (Yes; with real tattoos and stuff.)

YouTube – Life In A Day – YouTube has teamed up with Ridley Scott to create life in a day, a global experiment to create a user-generated feature film in a single day.

To participate, just film your life on July 24th. Then, they’ll select the most compelling and distinctive footage and edit it into an experimental documentary film that will premier at the Sundance Film Festival.

Cavaliers Owner Dan Gilbert Loves Comic Sans, Hates LeBron James – When LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for Miami, the entire state of Ohio was pretty pissed off, but perhaps none more so than majority owner Dan Gilbert, who wrote a very emotional letter to Cavs fans about the loss and what the team plans to do without King James.

What made news however wasn’t the letter itself, but the font that it was written in: Comic Sans. Almost instantly, the font took center stage, with ‘Comic Sans’ becoming a trending topics on Twitter, and blogs such as TechCrunch jumping in on the action, with a LeBronified Filter that turns every font on the site into Comic Sans.

Just remember, sometimes even the strongest message can get overshadowed by the medium…

Seth Goldstein, the chairman and co-founder of Stickybits, described the progression of media on the Internet as such: In 1996, sites became media. In 2001, search became media. In 2005, people became media. In 2007, status updates became media. In 2009, places became media. And in 2010, he predicts, objects will become media.

To help objects become media, Stickybits allows a user to scan any barcode using the Stickybits iPhone or Android app, and then add a comment, photo or video to that barcode, thus automatically turning any object into a threaded conversation. Think of it as a mix of QR Codes and Foursquare for products instead of places.

As with any service however, Stickybits needs to make money to survive, so recently they announced their first official sponsorship, which will allow PepsiCo to add “Official Bits” to their entire product line, including Pepsi sodas and Lay’s potato chips. Just like with paid search, when a user scans an official bit, they will see the sponsor’s message first (in Pepsi’s case, it might direct you to their Refresh campaign) followed by user messages in chronological order.

The goal of Stickybits is to turn any product into an automatic social network, and allow users to ‘check-in’ to that product with their phone. As with any new service, the challenge will be to get users accustomed to a new and unfamiliar action, but with a few more major sponsorships like the PepsiCo deal, and a surge of early adopter users, Stickybits just might be able to position itself as the next step in the progression of media.

Source: TechCrunch

The Twitter Platform – In response to Twitter developers demanding to have more insight into the future plans of the company, Twitter wrote a post on their blog about the future of the Twitter Platform to explain what they’re building, how they will sustain the company and the ecosystem, and where they believe there will be opportunities for Twitter’s partners.

Nike Breaks Own Viral Record – Nike’s new Write The Future ad has taken top spot as the ad with the most views within the first week of release with 7.8 million views, beating out the previous Nike ad, “Earl and Tiger”, which received 6.3 million views in its first week online.

Nike Doubles Facebook Fans with Write The Future – In addition to setting viral records, Nike also showed that a hit spot can help drive interest in social channels as well, with their Facebook page gaining more than 500,000 “Likes” in a single day during the debut of the spot. Though a large ad buy helped drive an audience to the page to watch the premier, it’s safe to assume that at least a few of those new likes were driven there by word of mouth.

Buy. Earn. Play. – Zynga has teamed up with 7-Eleven to create a series of products that will include codes that can be redeemed for exclusive gifts in their online games, bringing the digital and the real world yet another step closer together.

The Lazarus Effect – (RED) worked with Spike Jonze to produce a 30-minute film called The Lazarus Effect to promote the work that the organization is doing to help eliminate AIDS in Africa, and is using social media in addition to traditional channels to help get the movie out there. Though the first airing will take place on HBO, the film will then be instantly available on YouTube where it can be watched globally for free, and then shortly thereafter on a custom iPad app that will include the full film, along with additional information and ways to get involved.

Visit PA on Foursquare – Who says that companies are the only ones that can get in on the Foursquare action? To help drive interest in the Keystone State, Pennsylvania has partnered with Foursquare to create three badges that can be earned at one of the 100 locations that now include tips for what to do when you’re visiting.

Macy’s iPad Catalogue – Macy’s has been digitizing their catalogues for some time now, but to help get it into the hands of consumers, they partnered with Zinio to bundle their Summer catalogue with digital issues of 20 popular magazines like Elle Décor and Marie Claire, and made it smaller and non-Flash compatible to work on the iPad.

Gowalla Events – Location Based Social Networks have always struggled with how to handle events (birthday parties, weddings, concerts, etc.) because they usually don’t last for more than a day or two, and while the people involved in the event want to check-in, the event itself doesn’t provide much value to others who are in the area. However, Gowalla seems to have solved that problem with the addition of Event check-ins, which allow anyone to create a temporary check-in location that will automatically expire the day after the event. The goal is to let people add the event to their location history, including comments and photos that they share during the event, while not cluttering up the rest of the Gowalla system in the process.

Twitter Statistics – During Twitter’s Chirp conference, they gave a number of statistics that provide insight into the often secretive company. Among them, the fact that Twitter now has more than 100 million registered users, and gets more than 300,000 new sign-ups per day.

Facebook Statistics – If you’ve ever wondered how many users Facebook has, or how many friends those users have on average, then check out Facebook’s official statistics page, where they keep up to date numbers on a variety of things that can be useful for research and presentations.

The Nets and Gowalla – The Nets teamed up with Gowalla recently for a ticket giveaway promotion, and VaynerMedia created a fantastic case study deck that covers the whole process from beginning to end, and shows how location based apps can be used for social promotions.

Elements of Twitter Style – To help people better understand the content and formatting of their tweets, and to see how that style impacts how well they are received on the service, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software put together a style guide for Twitter that features a ton of great tips and tricks for making the most of your 140 characters.

Jimmy Choo on Foursquare – Jimmy Choo is organizing a ‘Trainer Hunt’ throughout London for the release of their new trainers line. To get involved, users follow the company on Foursquare, and when the account checks in at popular/stylish locations, they just need to be the first person to find them, and they’ll win a free pair of shoes.

Location-Based Ads See 50% Engagement Rate – According to a recent study by the Mobile Marketing Association, one in four US adults use a mobile location-based service, and nearly 50% of the people who are exposed to a location-based ad take some sort of action.

Starbucks Card Facebook App – Starbucks is continuing to make their Facebook Page a sticky destination with the addition of a Starbucks Card app that allows you to manage your card balance, view your rewards, and even reload your friends’ cards without ever leaving the Facebook site.

Location Ads Coming to Facebook – According to AdAge, McDonald’s will be the first company to use Facebook’s upcoming location check-ins as part of an advertising campaign. The feature, which will allow people to check-in at a local McDonald’s by using a Facebook app, will also include a featured McDonald’s product when that message appears on a user’s wall. At this point, it’s all still rumor and speculation, but don’t be surprised to see an official announcement in the next week or two.

Dairy Queen Blizzard Birthday – Dairy Queen is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Blizzard by driving a Blizzard themed truck through 25 cities across the US and Canada, and documenting the whole thing on Facebook and Twitter along the way.

Facebook Impact – Inviting others to join Facebook has a huge impact on the usefulness of the social graph, and a new page from Facebook allows you to see which of your friends has invited the most. You can also see how many people you have invited, how many have accepted, and invite new people right from the page if you’re unhappy with your results.

Lady Gaga on YouTube – The music video for Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” has now been viewed more than any other video on the site, with nearly 200 million views in less than 6 months, edging out the previously most viewed video, Charlie Bit My Finger.

AOL Mystery Flyer – To promote their travel site, AOL is sending a mystery flyer on flights with 10 major US airlines to see how they stack up. Along the way, the mystery flyer will be sharing their experiences through Twitter, and grading each airline to give you an honest opinion of who’s doing the best job.

Reddit Self-Service Advertising by The Oatmeal – Reddit is a popular link sharing site, and The Oatmeal is a popular online cartoon, so when the two work together, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be good. To help users get comfortable with Reddit’s new Self-Serve Advertising model, The Oatmeal created a guide to the new service that’s equal parts entertaining and informative.

Axe Undie Run – With a brand like Axe, you can’t just sponsor any old charity, so they’ve decided to put their support behind the college tradition of the Undie Run. At 10 schools across the country, Axe will show up with a truck, and the school that donates the most clothing before their Undie Run will be declared the winner.

Crysis Contest – To build up social buzz around the release of the Crysis 2 video game, EA created a contest where entrants would tweet a message (Hey @Crysis, I want you to put my name in the game! http://crys.is #Crysis2contestXX) and 25 people would be selected at random to have their name, gamertag or PSN ID tagged in the New York landscape that the game takes place in.

Underground Puzzle Revealed (NSFW) – Remember the #UnderGround puzzle from the last Social Media digest? Well, it turns out it was an ad for Daffy’s, which offers high fashion clothing with more bang for less buck. They apparently also offer X-rated ads, as this one certainly wouldn’t get by the censors in its uncut form.

Swagger Wagon – Proving that the minivan doesn’t have to be a dull ride, Toyota’s Swagger Wagon campaign includes a fantastic YouTube music video that’s sure to have all of the hipster dads reconsidering their Caravan purchase.

Fantasy University – Fantasy University is a social adventure game that aims to put a new spin on the old-school Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) format by heavily relying on a custom Facebook app. Students must first ‘apply’ to the game, and if they’re accepted, they will embark on a journey instilled with grown-up humor dialogue, fantasy art and exuberant pop culture references.

Pringles Helps the Oversharers – Though it’s easy to agree with the premise of the campaign (the stuff that some people share online is totally ridiculous) the connection to Pringles seems loose at best (they need help to start sharing things really worth sharing, like Pringles). Either way, Pringles has created a pretty clever campaign where users can share their friends’ overshares from Facebook or Twitter by reposting them onto the Pringles site, as well as by creating an ‘Oversharers’ video that uses Facebook Connect to put their friend’s overshared update into a pre-made video from London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Would You Check In To A Box Of Tampax? For Charity? – CauseWorld is expanding the ‘check-in’ beyond location to now include product check-ins, which consumers can do by scanning the barcode on everyday items from P&G and Kraft using the CauseWorld app. Though CauseWorld is currently using a charity to help motivate people to get over the unnatural idea of checking in to a product, this could become more natural as people get used to the concept of checking in to both places and products during the course of their day.

Jacques d’Azur Can’t Go To Cannes This Year – Stella Artois is sending one lucky person to the Cannes Film Festival this year, and created a rather unique campaign that uses Facebook data to customize the experience for each user. Just click ‘Connect’, and watch as a custom movie invites you to participate.

The Plastiki Expedition – The Plastiki is a sailboat made entirely out of recycled materials that’s sailing from San Francisco to Sydney to help promote plastic recycling. Along the way, they’ll be using Twitter (http://twitter.com/plastiki), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/plastiki), YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/theplastiki), MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/plastiki) and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/plastiki/) to update their fans on their progress, so you can follow along as they bring attention to their cause.

Postbellum Data From Foursquare and Gowalla – South By Southwest was the site of the latest battle in the Location War between Foursquare and Gowalla, and the data that both companies have released indicates that usage was strong, with nearly half of the attendees using at least one service to check in at some point during the conference. TechCrunch has assembled a number of statistics about the usage of both Foursquare and Gowalla during the conference, and it’s a good indication of their potential, since SXSW served as an ideal test bed for location based social networks due to the high percentage of advanced social media users in attendance.

Lady Gaga First Artist With One Billion Online Video Views – With three videos each getting more than 100,000,000 views, Lady Gaga has become the first artist ever to get more than one billion combined views of her online videos.

Zynga Stocking Pre-Paid Game Cards At Stores – Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, Mafia Wars and YoVille, has bridged the digital and the physical world with pre-paid game cards that will be available at more than 12,800 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Target and Gamestore stores. The cards, which will be available in $10 and $25 denominations, can be used to purchase virtual goods in Zynga’s online games, and should open up a whole new line of revenue for the company as younger users who weren’t able to purchase items because they didn’t have a credit card for online purchases will now be able to use cash to buy digital goods.

Clever Twitter Accounts – Twitter is using the @CleverAccounts account and a related Posterous Blog to highlight unique case studies of people and companies that are using Twitter in clever and unique ways.

Rapportive – Rapportive is a new social CRM tool that integrates directly into Gmail for easy access to the social information of anyone that you email.

When Do They Sleep? – By analyzing the time that tweets are posted by users, SleepingTime.org can make a surprisingly accurate guess of the sleeping schedule of many active Twitter users. It’s not the most valuable bit of information, but it is a good example of the types of information that companies are able to gather from the ‘extra’ data that is being generated by social media users.

SWIX – The Social Web Index is a new online tool that provides a free scorecard for online social media marketing efforts, giving you an easy way to track analytics and reporting for social media campaigns. With existing support for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and more, it’s one of the first tools to tackle the often challenging task of keeping track of results across a number of different channels in one location, and could potentially provide a valuable dashboard for anyone looking to track their online effectiveness.

WOMMA Guide To Disclosure In Social Media – In response to an increasing need for specific guidance on adequately displaying disclosure online to comply with new FTC requirements, WOMMA, AKA the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has released a new guide for disclosure in social media, which includes a special section dedicated to sponsored tweets. This section calls for the use of three new tags: #spon for sponsored tweets, #paid for paid tweets and #samp for when the user received a sample, and since a number of large and active social media companies are members of WOMMA, it’s expected that these tags will quickly be adopted as the standard way of disclosing sponsorships online.

The CMO’s Guide To: The Social Landscape – CMO.com and 97th Floor have created a handy chart that compares the top 10 social networks across four different measurements: Customer Communication, Brand Exposure, Traffic Generation and SEO. If you’re looking for a quick guide to some of the basics, then keep this close at hand.

Comfort Place – To promote their new Grilled Cheese Bacon Burger, Carl’s Jr. has created an app on Facebook called Comfort Place that allows you to automatically post comforting videos, songs, pictures and words directly on your wall or your friend’s wall for 24 hours.

Please Don’t Rob Me – Last week, Please Rob Me had a lot of people worried about the privacy concerns associated with location based social networks, but Please Don’t Rob Me aims to fix that by allowing users to go on the offensive. The site works by aggregating any message posted by a user that contains the phrase “Don’t rob me”, “Someone robbed me”, “I own a gun” or “I set a trap”, and helps to show robbers that not every Twitter user is an easy target.

6 Tips For Running Promotions Within Facebook’s Guidelines – Facebook’s new promotions guidelines are rather complex, so InsideFacebook.com has done their best to simplify them down into a set of six guidelines that should give you a good idea for how best to run a promotion on the social network.

When Crisis Attacks – Scott Monty (who does social media for Ford) looked at the recent tragedy at SeaWorld and shows how social media was used to effectively respond to the situation in a timely manner, and also looks at ways that SeaWorld could have improved their response. Social media’s ability to provide speedy and accurate information in a time of crisis is often overlooked as a benefit of having active social media profiles in place, but as this blog post shows, a well thought out social media strategy can be incredibly effective at managing public opinion and controlling the fallout from a potentially negative story.

The Del Taco Super Special Show – This is a great example of what’s possible with a Facebook based ‘microsite’. Users are incentivized to vote for their favorite clip with a free taco offer, and the community aspect of the page is increased through the use of comments. Plus, Del Taco also includes links to their Twitter profile and YouTube page to increase the number of touch points that they can have with each customer, and a store locator to help drive in-store sales.

Live Positively – Pepsi may have moved all of their ad dollars from the Super Bowl to social media efforts, but Coca-Cola wasn’t about to sit idly by while Pepsi grabbed all of their online audience. In a campaign that led up to the airing of their Super Bowl commercial, Coke agreed to donate $1 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for each Coke themed virtual gift that Facebook users sent to one another. In addition, they allowed fans to get a :30 preview of their Super Bowl spot to help build hype for the big debut.

Chicagoland Toyota Dealers Prius Giveaway – Toyota dealers in the Chicago area are giving away a Prius to increase the number of fans on their Facebook page. The giveaway hasn’t generated as much buzz as I’m sure they were hoping for, but it does serve as a good example of how giveaways will be integrated into Facebook in the future given Facebook’s new restriction on contests, as users must install the ‘Prius Giveaway’ app to enter.

Super Love Sender – Target combined the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, Charity Giving and Elf Yourself into a single Facebook campaign with their Super Love Sender app. With the app, users can send love themed cards to one another that feature football stars delivering a customized message, and for each card that gets sent, users get to vote for their favorite charity (out of five) that will receive a share of $1 million.

2010 Edelman Trust Barometer – Every year, Edelman surveys consumers to discover trends in trust, and this year, one of the most surprising results was the percentage of respondents who trust ‘people like me’ (AKA friends and peers) which dropped from 47 to just 27 percent. Whether this is just a temporary drop fueled by the sudden increase in peer to peer sharing or an indication of a larger trend, this fact could have a huge effect on the benefits of word of mouth marketing, and even social media marketing in general.

BrandBowl 2010 – Mullen and Radian6 monitored the Twittersphere during the Super Bowl to see which brands received the most, and the most positive mentions on Twitter, and then ranked each ad according to how ‘popular’ it was online. While not the most scientific of measurements, it does give some interesting insight into what resonated in the minds of consumers.

Foursquare Inks a Number of Partnerships – Geo-location service Foursquare has been on a tear lately, partnering with everything from Bravo and the New York Times to the movie Valentine’s Day and even Harvard. Their latest partner is perhaps the most interesting, as Zagat puts Foursquare in direct competition with Yelp, which recently added geo-location check-ins to their own service. Regardless of who comes out on top though, it’s hard to ignore the recent trend of big name companies turning to leading geo-location services to help them reach their target market on a hyper-targeted, local level.

Facebook Statistics – According to Facebook, users now share more than five billion pieces of content per week, which is five times as much as was shared back in July. Their other numbers are equally interesting (for instance: more than 200 million users log in to Facebook every day) and show that, like it or not, Facebook continues to morph beyond its initial role as just a social network and into what is quickly become its own self-sustaining microcosm.

How To Split Up The US Pete Warden has gathered data from more than 210 million public Facebook profiles, and has used that information to generate insights into Facebook’s userbase, as well as society in general. In his most recent visualization, he looks at the connections between places that share friends, and has made some interesting discoveries, such as the fact that Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas have closer ties to Texas than to Georgia. Since Pete plans to release the data that he has gathered to various universities later this month, expect to see more unique observations coming out soon as researchers pick and pull apart his numbers.

Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook – Mashable put together an infographic that looks at Facebook’s growth over the past 6 years, and the numbers that underlie that growth. While not the most detailed report, it does reveal trends about how users are interacting with the system.

Super Data – Twitter is usually pretty private about their data, but they were curious about how groups interacted on Twitter during the Super Bowl, so they decided to track brand mentions and other tweets about the Super Bowl in real time, and then share the results on their blog. What emerged was a detailed report on what resonated well with the Super Bowl audience, and what events compelled people to share with other users.