Burberry Tweets Fall Collection Before Models Hit Runway

CCO Christopher Bailey Take Over Marketer's Feed For 'Tweetwalk'


Burberry has taken luxury-goods marketing to new social-media heights by tweeting its spring/summer 2012 collection before it was even seen on the runway.

Front-row celebrities at London Fashion Week -- including photographer Mario Testino, rapper Kanye West and the prime minister's wife, Samantha Cameron -- only saw the new season collection after Burberry had already tweeted pictures to its 535,000 Twitter followers.


Each picture was snapped and tweeted just before the model stepped out onto the runway, boosting Burberry to the status of the world's third-most-popular Twitter topic during the show on Monday.

A spokesperson for the 155-year-old fashion house said, "We did it because it's an interesting thing to do. As a brand we focus on social media and this was a natural continuation for us, a new way of using Twitter. It's all about gaining mindshare, not selling products."

Christopher Bailey, Burberry's chief creative officer, personally takes over the company's Twitter feed at important times in the fashion calendar. He said in a statement, "Twitter is instantaneous and I love the idea that a show can be streamed in many different forms. This collection is all about the most-detailed hand-crafted pieces and fabric innovation … and I love balancing those two worlds." Burberry has also put a film on YouTube demonstrating the intricate craftsmanship that goes into every piece.

In 2009, Burberry was among the first fashion houses to live-stream a fashion show. Last year, Burberry live-streamed in 3-D, and this year they're taking social media to the next level.

Burberry's commitment to social media has changed the way it does business. Gone are the days when the fashion pack would be kept waiting for hours for the runway show to start; events now have to start on time to satisfy the global online audience. Because so much of the collection is shot ahead of the show for posting online, designers can no longer leave anything -- apart from fitting clothes on the models -- until the last minute.

More importantly, the spokesperson explained, the collections themselves have been subtly altered. They have become truly global, meaning that the clothes have become more "trans-seasonal," so that every collection can work immediately in different climates around the world.

As well as the "tweetwalk" initiative, Burberry streamed its London Fashion Week show in HD through Facebook, creating a link so that every one of its eight million fans was able to stream the show on their own personal Facebook page and share it with their friends.

"Click to call" and "click to chat" facilities allowed people to contact the Burberry team to ask questions about the collection as it was being shown, using both phones and instant messaging. "There's no obligation to buy," the spokesperson said, "it's just about having a conversation with the team." Burberry employs 1,200 people at its London headquarters.

In another partnership, this time with photo app Instagram, Burberry hired British photographer Mike Kus -- who has 123,699 followers -- to share his images from the show.

Burberry live-streamed the show on YouTube, and also broadcasted red-carpet interviews. For its Chinese fans, Burberry streamed the show through Chinese social networks Sina and Youku. The luxury brand even reached out to iTunes, creating an album, "Burberry Acoustic," featuring music from the show that was ready to be instantly downloaded.

In 2009, Burberry launched a photo-sharing website called "art of the trench," which invites consumers to post pictures of themselves in their iconic Burberry trench coats. The site, which maintains control over the brand by also featuring professional photography, is still going strong.

Who Was Behind @Irene? An Agency, Of Course.

How a Staffer at Brooklyn-Based Shop Huge Became the Voice of a Hurricane

 

Hi, I'm @Irene. I've been the proud owner of this Twitter handle since 2006. Who knew that having one of the few, coveted first-name handles would veer my usual opining about social media as a product strategist at HUGE into the voice of a threating storm headed right for the East Coast. Hi there you 11,000 new followers!

At the beginning of last week, people began tweeting messages to me to, somehow, communicate with Hurricane Irene. In response, on Thursday, I posted "Btw, tweeting messages to @irene doesn't deliver any messages to the hurricane. Sorry."

Friends started retweeting the post, and more and more people started seeing it and following my account. By Friday morning, that tweet was reshared more than 100 times. I didn't think much of it.

But I wasn't the only one watching my reply messages on Twitter. Later that afternoon, the colleagues that help run HUGE's company Twitter account @hugeinc, Ross Morrison, an associate creative director, and Bjorn Larsen, a copywriter wanted to borrow my identity. "Just for the weekend," they said.

Yea, right.

Ross had found a photo of me on Buzzfeed with the caption:"@Irene Is A Real Person, Not The Hurricane."

"Irene has @irene? Our Irene?" Bjorn said.

At my trepidation, they couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to make the most of this serendipity. But their lobbying and a little nudge from our exec-creative director Joe Stewart had me turning over my Twitter reins by evening.

So they set a plan to give the tweeting masses exactly what they wanted: an accessible personification of the hurricane herself. But impersonating a hurricane is different than impersonating an escaped cobra. And I certainly wasn't going to lend my personal account to any effort that was insensitive to those who might suffer as a result of the storm.

So the account became a venue for more than just jokes. We wanted to be a central resource for updates and warnings about the hurricane. Our team even liaised with FEMA and offered to give them access to the account if they should need it as the storm developed.


The first hurdle, though, if we really were going to imitate a huge threat to property and safety without pissing anyone off was tone. @Irene had to have a female point of view. She had to be a self-aware disaster who understood her potential to cause devastation and that she had no control over her actions. (We all had decided earlier that if things turned ugly, the tone would shift accordingly.)

With CNN on in the background and Twitter providing all the real time information they needed from official sources, Ross and Bjorn made jokes about the coverage of the storm, but also posted relevant information from sources like FEMA and the mayor's office.

Holed up in Ross' Brooklyn apartment, they kept it going for two days through the storm's march up the coast, finally shutting it down and turning it back over to me shortly after the tropical storm left the country. During that time, the number of people following @irene shot up to almost 11,500 from around 630 prior to the hurricane.

So for a few days my usual agency soapbox was turned into an anthropomorphic character, a phenomenon that would receive immense attention. The least we could do was be helpful and funny. As @vosdscott pointed out in a tweet this weekend "Naming hurricanes may never be the same if this woman who turned her @Irene Twitterfeed into a helpful but lighthearted parody succeeds."

Our agency learned a couple of important things from this exercise. The first is that companies need to be set up to take advantage of these opportunities if they're going to succeed in social.

We found out about this on Friday afternoon and decided in the space of 30 minutes that this was how we were going to be spending our weekend. Rather than bogging this down with a question sent to the lawyers about "what are the implications if we do this?" Our Twitter team at work had experience and trust from management to know how to tread what was a pretty fine line. We were structured in a way that we had the ability to seize this opportunity.

The second is that we didn't use it to promote ourselves or to promote Irene. We used it to provide what people actually wanted and needed: an entertaining aggregator of key news related to the hurricane and a little entertainment while they were cooped up inside. If we had tried to be promotional or take advantage of the opportunity for our own ends it would have failed.

With that -- and NOAA's list of names for 2011 Atlantic hurricanes in mind, @jose should probably keep his eye on The Weather Channel.

Ford and Twitter Talk Keys to Marketing to Millennials

Self-Expression, Access and Connectivity Are Huge

By: Irina Slutsky Published: August 19, 2011

For Ford, millennials -- which the car maker describes as people between the ages of 16-32 -- are a challenging proposition. Never mind buying a car -- this generation is getting drivers licenses later, and less often, than previous generations.

But when it comes to Twitter, millennials are over-indexing. Twitter's director of sales marketing, Shane Steele, citing third-party research, said 55% of the Twitter audience is made up of millennials, compared to 40% of the rest of the internet. Ford has worked with Twitter to reach the social-media savvy set for years, having had a strong presence on Twitter since July 2008.

"This group of consumers is an incredible market opportunity, but the way that millennials interact with brands is totally different from earlier generations," said Sheryl Connelly, global consumer trends and futuring manager at Ford. Ford Motor Co. executives stopped by Twitter headquarters in San Francisco today for a panel discussion about millennial consumers.

Ms. Connelly added that millennials don't want to be talked at by a brand but instead want to be part of the conversation. "Understanding their priorities helps us market to them, so that we're giving a message that is relevant to them."

On Twitter, Ford said it has a chance to glimpse at the millennial mindset and figure out what this generation wants, likes and needs from its products.

While Ford execs said they are not building a car specifically aimed at millennials, they recognize that the old marketing message -- showing off the engine, the speed, the car body itself -- is not working for the new generation. Millennials are not as interested as baby boomers were in a car as a status symbol. The car for them is about basic transportation -- but adding technology to the car turns the car into a "lifestyle enabler," said Ms. Connelly.

Ford outlined several keys to getting millennials interested in Ford cars that boiled down to giving them what they've come to expect from their offline and online life: connectivity, individuality and instant gratification.

Self-expression. Ford said that because one in six millennials have a tattoo, the car maker lets consumers "tattoo" their cars. Allowing consumers a way to customize their cars -- offering choices of colors and patterns inside and out -- is a way to get consumers to view the the automobile as a "lifestyle enhancer," not only as a vehicle.

Connectivity. For millennials, the symbol of freedom and expression is not a car, but a cell phone, Ford said, so connecting the cellphone to the car is no longer an option, but a standard. Other data (weather, traffic, geography) is available in the car because millennials are used to having information at their disposal, no matter where they are. (This connectivity, Ford emphasized, is done with driver safety in mind.)

Gamification. Millennials have been playing video games since near birth, so incorporating gaming dynamics into the car is a natural extension of the way these consumers live their lives. Ford said that they believe placing game elements into the car will attract more drivers. For example, some cars have a video-game-like smart gauge with a visual display of leaves and flowers that either grow or shrink depending on how optimally the driver is using the car. This "game" can be played against one or multiple people to see who can grow the biggest leaves and flowers.

Access. Ford said its research shows that when millennials mention a brand, whether on Twitter or Facebook, they expect a response -- a human response. Unlike prior generations that were accustomed to one uniform marketing message from a monolithic brand, millennials expect to be met where they are, on an individual or group basis and they expect their concerns to be addressed almost immediately. Having team manage consumer relations on social media is another must when it comes to millennials.

Brand as content. More than any previous generation, millennials share content they think is cool and authentic, whether that content is created by individuals or brands. By watching the Twitter dashboard, Ford can see exactly what content is most shared and what search terms and hashtags bring millennials to Ford.

Watching TV While Gulping Mountain Dew: A Fascinating Look at the Shows Dewheads Tweet About Most

'Problem Solverz,' 'Dude, What would Happen?' and 'Empire Records' Get Them Talking

Last week in this space I shared some interesting data about advertising-as-media -- data generated exclusively for Ad Age by Bluefin Labs, which looked at the social-media response to two "Summer Time is Pepsi Time" spots. I was interested in the fact that people who are engaged with social media are prone to treating both TV shows and the commercials that air during them as, well, content -- content worth commenting about. (As I pointed out last week, while everyone in the business continues to obsess about time-shifting via DVR, Hulu, etc., most people still watch TV shows when the networks first air them.)

Cambridge, Mass.-based Bluefin's expertise is in providing brands, agencies and media companies with real-time TV-audience insights through social-media analysis. It's been building a massive database called the TV Genome, which it defines as "data created by mapping social-media commentary back to its stimulus on TV." The science behind Bluefin's research is pretty heady -- Deb Roy, Ph.D., the co-founder and CEO of the company, is director of the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab -- but it gets really interesting (and accessible) when you dive in looking for relationships and affinities.

The chart below represents an exclusive first look at a fresh-out-the-labs Bluefin data-mining project. It shows brand-to-show affinity: what the people who talk the most about a particular brand -- in this case, Mountain Dew -- in social media (primarily on Twitter and Facebook) have also been talking about when it comes to TV shows that have aired year-to-date. Some notes:

• First, you may be wondering what exactly people tend to say about Mountain Dew in the social-media sphere. I was curious myself, so I culled several examples from Twitter this morning: @earthtoanneh: "Things i've bought this holiday: mountain dew, mountain dew, bag for ipad, mountain dew. #yay"; @wh0isjack: "Mountain Dew > Every other beverage"; @miaashamiss: "They don't have mountain dew?! Oh, my god. What am I supposed to drink?!"; @rstevens: "Captain Beefheart, Mountain Dew and Photoshop. Any sufficiently late work night is indistinguishable from college." (I can definitely relate to that last one.) It's pretty clear that people who think to tweet about Mountain Dew are generally fans and consumers of the product.

• According to Bluefin, over 2,700 different shows (including made-for-TV and theatrically-released movies) have aired in prime time across all U.S. broadcast and cable networks year-to-date. Which means the top 15 shows below -- the shows Mountain Dew commenters commented about the most -- comprise a very select list. The rings of the circle represent the social-TV rating scale: If a spoke tip approaches the outermost ring -- if a blue-green line is long -- it means that the show has a high level of social-media engagement in general (not just among Dewheads); short spokes represent a low level of social-media engagement in general. The 1-through-15 numbers rank the shows most commented on by Dewheads, with the Cartoon Network's comedic cartoon "The Problem Solverz" in the No. 1 spot.

• In the case of Mountain Dew, the top 15 affinity show all have middle-of-the-road social-TV ratings -- which means that although people who are prone to comment about Mountain Dew are also excited about commenting on these particular shows, the general population of TV viewers is not nearly so excited about doing so.

• The tightest clustering for Mountain Dew commenters is around comedy shows. This isn't a huge surprise -- Mountain Dew is positioned as an irreverent brand with a goofy, quasi-comedic subtext (and of course Mountain Dew buys advertising time on irreverent networks and shows) -- but taken together with the other shows and the kinds of movies Dew commenters comment about when they air on TV (including indie-ish coming-of-age flick "Empire Records," the Mickey Rourke drama "The Wrestler" and the Johnny Knoxville comedy "The Ringer"), you can get an almost instantaneous sense of the psychographic at play here.

• "We see different dynamics across different brands, even when they're in the same sector," Bluefin's Tom Thai tells me. "For example, the Diet Coke brand has tight clustering around reality shows, while Sprite has tight clustering around movies."

MTV Teases New Web Awards Event

Voting categories include Best NSFW (not safe for work) Music Video and Fan Cover

MTV is pulling back the curtain—slightly—on the O Music Awards (OMAs), the network’s mystery-shrouded, Web-only awards show, which will be held on April 28.


Though the network still won’t say what the "O" stands for—that’s up to each viewer’s interpretation—it has revealed the inaugural OMA categories for fan voting, which kicks off today at www.omusicawards.com. The eclectic list of categories and nominees includes music artists like Lady Gaga and Kanye West, music services like Pandora—up for Best Music Discovery Service—and blogs like Gorilla vs. Bear (nominated for Best Independent Music Blog). Other categories include Best NSFW (not safe for work) Music Video, Fan Cover, Must Follow Artist on Twitter, and even Best Online Fan Army.

Though all the nominees are tied to music on the Web in some fashion, the OMAs aren’t focused on a single emerging art form, as the network’s Video Music Awards were when MTV rolled those out in the 1980s. But that’s not the point, argues Dermot McCormack, evp, digital media for MTV Music and Logo Group, who says the wide variety in the new awards show shouldn’t be seen as scattershot.

“We want to reinvent how award shows work,” said McCormack. “I’m sure it is going to be weird for some people. But this is about a confluence of events, and music as a category is at the center of this.”

As for what will happen as the awards are streamed on MTV.com, VH1.com and LogoTV.com on April 28—will there be an arena, a stage, music performances, comedy?—McCormack isn’t saying.

That’s less important, he argues, than trying to get users engaged online, something other awards shows talk about but rarely deliver on. “The OMAs are more about engaging audiences with a few tent pole events,” he said. “The main event is the conversations happening on the way up to, and then the day after, the event.”

MTV has signed three OMA sponsors: adidas, Ford and FUZE. Each brand will receive in-show integrations and will sponsor one or more awards during the show.

New Twitter Stats: 140M Tweets Sent Per Day, 460K Accounts Created Per Day

Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday and to commemorate the occasion, is revealing a number of stats showing its growth over the past five years.


It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day from the first Tweet to get to the billionth Tweet. In a given week, users send a billion Tweets. Users are now sending 140 million Tweets, on average, per day, up from 50 million Tweets sent per day, a year ago. The all-time high in terms of Tweets sent per day was 177 million sent on March 11, 2011.

In terms of Tweets per second, the all time high was 6,939 Tweets per second after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day. This compares to the previous record of 456 Tweets per second when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.

Twitter says that 572,000 accounts were created on March 12, 2011, with 460,000 new accounts per day over the last month on average. Mobile users are up 182 percent over the past year. And Twitter currently has 400 employees, up from 8 in January 2008.

Twitter's Promoted Trends To Cost $20,000 More

Brands that want a little piece of that sweet Twitter action are going to have to pay a little extra in the future, if rumors about Twitter increasing the cost of "promoted trend" ads by tens of thousands of dollars are true.

According to the All Things Digital blog, Twitter has started telling buyers that the price of a one-day stint at the top of the Trending Topics bar will go from between $70,000-$80,000 to $100,000-$120,000. Considering the spots have been continually selling out since their introduction last year, it's unlikely that the price bump will cause anyone to blink. But the news that the company is thinking of doing a similar increase for its less-successful Promoted Accounts program might. Looks like Twitter is serious about tripling its revenue this year, and potentially without its users - most of whom ignore Promoted Trends or Accounts quite easily - even noticing.

SUPER BOWL XLV :: "THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WHAT WERE THEY TRYING TO CONVEY EFFECT"

The Pittsburgh Steelers vs Green Bay Packers 2010-2011 Super Bowl XLV has made a lasting impression for at least the next 12 months and we are not just talking about the 31-24 victory by the Cheese Heads.

Advertisers, Account Executives, Copy Writers, Production Companies, Graphic Designers and Story Boarders have worked long and hard to launch campaigns by the Global Media platform provided by the National Football League and the FOX network.

According to USA Today's Ad Meter, Doritos and Bud Light tied for first of all Super Bowl XLV advertising.

In my personal opinion I think Audi and Chrysler provided the BEST Super Bowl XLV spots. The use of celebrity didn't really help marketers as it has in past years on the BIG GAME DAY.

Snickers should have saved the money and pulled out from the Super Bowl or used a totally different agency or a different creative strategy that would keep consumers engage into the brand. After the AMAZING success of the Betty White spot, I think the should have re-routed consumers to a digital platform maybe utilizing Facebook or an original domain that would've allowed users to take a deeper look into their Super Bowl XLV preparation and execution.  VOTE: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING

Sketchers and Kim Kardashian; though relevant to her brand and loosely-based from her past personal mishaps, I think it was too little, too late to actually resonate with target demographic in which the Sketchers was looking to capture. Though Kim was in a gym setting it gave no relevance to the actual product in which they are trying to sell. VOTE: BAD

In the world of Social Media (Twitter, Four Square, Facebook, etc...) I think only few marketers took an effective post Super Bowl XLV approach to give their brand and/or campaign extended life.

Audi "Release The Hounds" spot was very direct, reflective of the demographic (age, income, celebrity integration and music) in which they looking to target. Implementing the likeness and music of adult contemporary and smooth jazz saxophonist "Kenny G" was right on time as well as sitting the product "Audi A8" next to it's main U.S. competitor the Mercedes S500 allowed viewers to spark an instant conversation and/or debate in why they would choose Audi over Mercedes and allowed them to back their arguments up with simple but effective extensive online execution and information. VOTE: GOOD

Chevrolet "Miss Evelyn"



Have you ever had a conversation with a buddy about how you would make a great Super Bowl ad if you just had the chance and the budget? Answer: YES... Well Chevy Camaro's new 2011 Super Bowl TV spot titled 'Miss Evelyn' does just that, as the fun ad features the running commentary of a couple of armchair ad execs ideas come to life. A clever idea as the spot has everything a Super Bowl car commercial should have; sexy girls, a desert scene with mirrors, a cool car chase threw city streets with helicopters and hay bails, and a slow motion shot of the Chevy Camaro flying off a building. But all great ads need a twist, and in this ending we all get schooled. VOTE: GOOD


Credits:


Advertising Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners,

Co-Chairman/Creative Directors: Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein

Executive Creative Director: Hunter Hindman, Rick Condos

Copywriter: Alex Flint

Art Director: Dino Spadavecchia

Producers: Susan Crimley, TJ Kearney

Better spots not beyond reach

Chevrolet also leverage it's partnership with the Transformer's movie franchise and the NFL MVP Award to effectively position it's self as a leader in American Auto-Makers.


THOUGHTS FROM ADAGE.com..... AND I AGREE 100%

Treasure was hard to find in last night's Bowl, it's true, but there were definitely some pieces of gold among the dross. Wieden & Kennedy helped power both Coca-Cola and Chrysler to memorable commercials. In one Wieden Coke ad, a small bottle of Coke helps de-power a fiery dragon who is about to lay waste to an entire populace, and in the Chrysler spot, the automaker ties itself not only to the fading metropolis of Detroit, but also to themes of economic recovery and getting up after taking a punch. You can't import a car from Detroit if you live in America, as Chrysler suggested last night, but it's fascinating that Chrysler has enough chutzpah to think its cars are worthy of such an image.

The list goes on. Volkswagen won the sentimental vote with its depiction of a young child as Darth Vader. The NFL effectively plucked nostalgia with its culled-from-dozens-of-family-sitcoms montage (although one wonders if fans will remember the good feelings conveyed by this ad if players' and owners' contract fight cancels games next season).

Simply put, Pepsi and Anheuser may have won the Ad Meter, but they seem to have lost the war. The Volkswagen and Chrysler ads are the talk of the town this morning, not the frat-boy antics that Pepsi and Anheuser dusted off the shelf yesterday and pretended were new.

Maybe the Super Bowl simply doesn't fit either company's mission and marketing method as much as it once did.

'Refresh' remembered better than ads

Pepsi pulled all its beverages out of the big game last year, citing the social-media, good-feelings-themed "Refresh" campaign it was launching. The company got as much as if not more attention for doing so than it might have gotten if it ran ads in last year's Super Bowl.

Anheuser, for its part, is now controlled by a much bigger, overseas brewer, and these days seems uncomfortable talking about the image that the old Anheuser-Busch spent decades building. What does it say that the best Budweiser ad last night featured the company's iconic Clydesdales making a brief cameo, but not taking up the main storyline?

A Super Bowl without Pepsi or Budweiser? Why, it sounds un-American. But it might be more fun to watch -- and give millions of viewers more advertising that's truly worth their time and, yes, later consideration.\

By Brian Steinberg


All in all I think these large corporations that hire these "power house shops" should look to pull creatives from college students and smaller shops who often get over-looked when it's time to take the big stage. Though they might be used for online, on-the-ground and experiential programs these inviduals are in the green room waiting to on their names to be called so that they have an opportunity to play on the big field instead of the practice squad.

I think last year's Super Bowl ad's took a better approach to it's programs and executions beyond the TV platform. They gave the consumer to do quick at home research with the use of social media platforms. I also think that the use of celebrity is outdated though at times if done right can be very effective. In a time where our economy is still in the hole the average consumer can not relate to certain celebrities using certain products. i.e. When was the last time TMZ spotted Kim Kardashian purchasing or even jogging in a pair of Sketchers.

JACK DORSEY (CEO OF TWITTER) ON CHARLIE ROSE

Twitter Chairman and Square founder Jack Dorsey sat down with Charlie Rose last night to talk about Dorsey’s unique position of being responsible for two technology startups based on the idea of simplicity: Twitter and Square. Watching this interview you realize that Dorsey’s accomplishments have little to do with luck, and more with his focus on creating the purest products by throwing away any unnecessary flourishes. “It’s really complex to make something simple,” he tells Rose.


Dorsey describes himself as an “editor” who edits technology and teams “so that we have one cohesive product that we tell the world.” In the clip above (provided by the Charlie Rose Show), Dorsey talks about how he got the idea for Square and how hard it is to make mobile payments no more complicated than swiping a credit card.

Dorsey believes the most powerful technologies are those which disappear, like the iPad disappears:

“When you’re using the iPad, the iPad disappears, it goes away. You’re reading a book. You’re viewing a website, you’re touching a web site. That’s amazing and that’s what SMS is for me. The technology goes away and with Twitter the technology goes away. And the same is true with Square. We want the technology to fade away so that you can focus on enjoying the cappuccino that you just purchased.”

In the clip below, he talks about how he got the idea for Twitter from his obsession with cities and dispatch systems, but how he felt those systems were missing one thing: the people, his friends. Now Twitter is not just about status updates but about pointing to, and carrying via short links, other media on the Web. He boils down the essence of Twitter into this: “Any media that you can imagine it can point to a carry in real-time. And the only other technology I know that’s done that well is the web itself.”

Dorsey also pegs the number of registered Twitter users at 200 million (when I checked with Twitter to confirm this number, I was told it was very close, but not quite there yet—so chalk that up to rounding). Also, asked at the end whether Twitter is making any money, Dorsey said the company has revenues but it didn’t sound like it’s got any profits yet.

50 Cent Tweets a Little, Makes a Lot of Money $10M to be Exact

Not the most conventional way to trade stock market advice, but dolling it out on Twitter sure worked out for 50 Cent.

According to the New York Post, shares of H&H Imports dramatically increased in value thanks to the rapper and actor's endorsement tweets. The penny stock reportedly jumped 290% over the weekend.

The Post writes that H&H Imports is "a money-losing venture out of Clearwater, Fla., that owns TV Goods, a marketing firm recently founded by Kevin Harrington."

Tweeting that he'd "just invested" in the company, 50 encouraged others to follow suit--a move that has so far scored him a hefty $8.7 million. (And stocks aren't the only thing Fiddy is known for endorsing)

Not bad for one weekend and a few tweets. (via New York Post)

'BIG TWEET' STARRING BRANDON T. JACKSON & SYDNEY POITIER

Big Tweet from Brandon T Jackson

Up-and-coming actors Brandon T. Jackson and Sydney Poitier (yes, daughter of Sidney) star in this short about the ultimate face-off between Twitter and Facebook. Check out the synopsis below.

Big Tweet’s power on Twitter has become a threat to celebrities, advertising agencies, network television & Twitter’s main competitor, Facebook. Online followers are the new currency. And Big Tweet has them all. A billion. Whatever he says is heard. By millions. And his unmatched internet influence has now made him (and his main girl) the number one target of the corporate underworld and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Big Tweet and his girl are about to be DELETED! Ordered by an underground secret corporate society, a group of Mexican gangsters have been hired to kidnap Big Tweet and his girl. Their mission is simple: they must delete them both.

Coca-Cola Wraps Largest Social-Media Project Ever

Global Program with Local Activation, 'Expedition 206,' Comes to Close


NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- More than 275,000 miles, 186 countries and 365 days after embarking on Expedition 206 -- Coca-Cola's largest social-media project ever -- the company's three "happiness ambassadors" have completed their journey.


On Jan. 1, 2010, armed with laptops, video cameras, smartphones and plenty of other gadgetry, the three 20-somethings set off to visit 206 countries and territories where Coca-Cola is sold in order to document for the masses their search for happiness. They arrived back in Atlanta at the World of Coca-Cola Dec. 29, 2010, just before the dawn of the New Year. Their journey, tracked at Expedition206.com, as well as through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, has racked up 650 million media impressions around the globe and engaged billions of people.


In China, for example, instant-messaging service QQ received a billion visits related to Expedition 206, said Anne Carelli, senior communications manager-digital communications at Coca-Cola. Ten billion virtual stamps, created by the ambassadors in each country using Haibao, the mascot for the 2010 World Expo, were also traded through QQ.

"We have been extremely pleased with the success it's had in the different markets," Ms. Carelli said, noting that the program created more visibility for the brand in key markets like China. "It's really provided a platform for the different markets to activate as they see fit."

The program -- conceptualized as a global effort that would be coordinated by a team in Atlanta but actively managed by individual markets -- forced many local markets into the digital and social-media space for the first time. It also required increased collaboration among the communications, public relations and marketing teams, something Ms. Carelli says will be instructive for future programs. And it furthered Coca-Cola's goal of creating global programs that are locally relevant.

"It was intriguing how each market went about it in their own special way," said Tony Martin, one of the ambassadors. "We never knew what to expect. In some places we'd go eat with a family. Then, in the next place we'd hang out with a local, legendary surfer. Or we'd show up at an airport and there would be these local traditions."

The group also made appearances at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Canada, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa and the Shanghai 2010 World Expo in China.

The campaign bolstered Coke's Facebook presences in markets like New Zealand, and in other countries -- such as Argentina, Ukraine and Uruguay -- local teams connected with influential bloggers as a means of promoting the program. Still, there were areas where the program didn't take off. On Twitter, the main handle boasts only about 1,800 followers. Coca-Cola execs stressed that the measure of success was based more on local-level engagement, pointing out that the Dominican Republic and other countries started their own Twitter handles specifically to document the visit.

"We made the conscious decision at the beginning that this was a local activation," Ms. Carelli said. "Equally as important were the relationships formed with influential bloggers and communities. We tapped into [areas] where we might not have had as strong of a presence previously. ... It pushed a lot of markets to start [new] relationships."

The ambassadors also arrived with built in fan bases, having competed for the opportunity to be part of the program. Coca-Cola reached out to the likes of Lonely Planet, as well as its own agencies, including Ignition, an experiential marketing firm, and WWWINS, its digital agency in China, asking for recommendations. It received about 60 candidates that it then narrowed down to 18 individuals who were brought to Atlanta for interviews. From here, nine candidates, three groups of three, were ultimately tasked with promoting themselves to consumers, who determined the winners in an online vote.

Ms. Carelli said the program has exceeded expectations. Just the fact that the year-long trip was completed with the same three ambassadors, Mr. Martin, Kelly Ferris and Antonio Santiago, is an accomplishment, she joked. But that doesn't mean there weren't snafus along the way.

The trio made it to just 186 countries, not the 206 the company had planned on. Part of that was due to security concerns in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. And part was due to logistics. Each ambassador required about 85 Visas and numerous passports, which caused the group to miss some countries. Mother Nature was also a challenge. An August trip to Bermuda was rescheduled for December, thanks to a hurricane. And Christmas was spent in Ireland when snow stranded the ambassadors last week.

Your Followers Are No Measure of Your Influence

Popularity on Twitter or Facebook Is Just That; It's the Ability to Drive Behavior That Matters

By Matthew Creamer


Published: January 03, 2011
 
Since Malcolm Gladwell began popularizing his "Tipping Point" theory 14 years ago, marketers have fantasized about a world in which they can identify a small number of influential folks who can credibly, effectively and cheaply push product for them. In the '90s, that meant makers of the "dead chic" Hush Puppies brand had to channel their inner Margaret Meads and go on "cool hunts" to trendy shops to understand how their oxfords had become suddenly stylish. These days, faced with similar challenges, they might just try to get people with large Twitter followings to post about it. Which would be a really bad idea.


One of the nasty side effects of the rapid growth of social media is that it threatens to warp our understanding of influence. It's only natural that Twitter has given rise to any number of applications that rank users for various criteria, including their overall influence. Many of the 150 million or so of Twitter accounts contain multitudes: a feed of interests, passions and expertise, in many cases attached to a living, breathing, identifiable human whose popularity is neatly summed up by follower counts, the lists he or she is on, and the number of times he or she has been retweeted. But a marketer has to wonder what all that information means, if it adds up to anything more than a popularity contest and what, exactly, does a tweet influence a person to think, believe or do?

It's hard to imagine that Justin Bieber, with his 6.4 million followers, is driving much behavior other than getting people to talk about Justin Bieber, frenetically retweet him, and possibly buy a record. Is that influence?

Klout, an online service that describes itself as nothing less than the "standard of influence," thinks so. Its algorithm gives Mr. Bieber a perfect score of 100. "You can't get any more influential than this," reads his summary. "People hang on your every word, and share your content like no other. You're probably famous in real life and your fans simply can't get enough."

Indeed, Mr. Bieber is famous and, as a YouTube discovery, his fame has been built on social media. He has a prodigious understanding of how to use these tools that helped him rise out of Canadian obscurity before he had to shave. Yet it's hard to imagine how he is a paragon of influence. He simply seems popular.

Some recent research by Duncan Watts and three other researchers shows the problems with popularity. Mr. Watts, now a researcher for Yahoo, caused a stir a few years back with work that challenged the validity of "Tipping Point"-style thinking about the way influence works. Equipped with evidence that showed cascades -- chain reactions where one user passes something to another, and so on -- are nearly impossibly to predict, he argued that, rather than focus on finding a few, highly influential people to spread a message, anyone who wants to "go viral" should be on getting a message to as many people as possible. In other words, you have to hedge your bets and not simply rely on your models of influence, however finely honed they might be.

In a 2009 experiment in Twitter, Mr. Watts found that those findings were transferable to the then 3-year-old microblog. He and fellow Yahoo-er Mr. Mason looked at more than 1.6 million users and 74 million instances of sharing of something, known as "diffusion events." In many cases, the most popular Tweeters generated the biggest cascades. That's no surprise. "However," Messrs. Watts and Mason wrote, "we find that predictions of which particular user or URL will generate large cascades are relatively unreliable. We conclude, therefore, that word-of-mouth diffusion can only be harnessed reliably by targeting large numbers of potential influencers, thereby capturing average effects." In other words, reaching a large number of more ordinary Joes and Janes with a message might be more effective than trying to tap into Bieber fever.

When people try to think past follower count to a more nuanced metric, they might end up with something like what Twinfluence, a rival to Klout, describes as social capital. That metric combines the influence of a tweeter's followers with his followers' followers. Or they end up with something like Klout's amplification metric, which charts the likelihood that a tweet will spark some action. All this sounds nice, except for the fact there is only so much you can do with a tweet. You can retweet it or you can make the tweets one of your favorites or you can use the tweet as a stepping-off point for a conversation. And that's about it.

For those of us in the content game, that's fairly useful. The same goes for marketers who want to talk to their customers or give the appearance that they talk to their customers. For parties with other kinds of goal, that utility is less clear.

Think of Twitter as a game with just a few objectives: earn followers and retweets and clicks on your links. While services like Klout are wonderful at judging the winners on those rules, they're not as good -- even useless -- at providing a means of understanding how that particular performance might be extrapolated out to something as broad as influence. Thinking about this reminds me of studying for the SAT and coming across this bit in a Princeton Review book: "We're not big fans of the SAT. It doesn't measure intelligence. It can't possibly measure your future success in college. The SAT measures one thing, and one thing only: how good you are at taking the SAT."

The same might be said of many current ways of looking at effectiveness on Twitter: They have little respect for how an action on one of those networks might relate to behavior beyond Twitter.

Earlier this year, you may or may not have been swayed by Mr. Gladwell's controversial examination of the limitations of social media to formant consequential political activity. A similar argument can be made for marketing. There's a vast world of behavior beyond the retweet, from verbal word-of-mouth recommendations to actual purchases. Except in few cases, we struggle to monitor them. More than anything else, the limitations of a service like Klout might be a stand in for bigger problems in understanding how social media fits into the marketing's big picture.

I'm not totally sure why I came to remember the SAT line, but it may have to do with the fame-for-fame's sake quality of social media, the best/worst example of which can be found in a marketing stunt from the magazine Fast Company this summer. The Influence Project asked readers to create a profile with a unique URL to be shared by as many people as possible. The winner would go on the cover of the magazine as the most influential person on the web.

The project sparked both an enormous amount of tweeting and Facebooking and a rather nasty backlash. One newspaper dubbed it a "botched social media campaign." A few folks plotted to hijack it. One blogger asked, "What happened to the days when having influence meant producing thought provoking ideas and reactions?" Another, Amber Naslund, VP at the social-media monitoring firm Radian6, wrote: "To me, influence isn't about popularity. Or even reach. It's about the trust, authority, and presence to drive relevant actions within your community that create something of substance."

The final argument against looking at Twitter as a de facto measure of influence is so steeped in common sense, it might offend the intelligence: Simply look at who doesn't spend much time there. One of them is Seth Godin, by any measure, including Ad Age's Power 150, a thought leader for marketers and entrepreneurs and a popular blogger who uses Twitter (and Facebook) only for rote repostings on his blog posts. Celebrities like Kanye West are routinely late to the game and don't seem to suffer much for it.

And then there's Apple. Every marketer's favorite brand to this day still doesn't give a Nano about using Twitter proactively. There was a brief flicker of excitement in July when Scott Forstall, the senior VP in charge of Apple's mobile operating system, signed on and, rare for a less-than-household-name business executive, received a verified account. Today, Klout gives Mr. Forstall a score of 59 and credits him with "high percentage of amplified content." Thirty-six thousand people follow him, while he follows just one, Conan O'Brien. Guess how many tweets the appropriately-named Mr. Forstall has posted.

Not a single one.

How's that for influence?


Courtesy of http://www.adage.com/

FIND JAY-Z'S MEMOIR AT A BOOKSTORE, OR ON A BILLBOARD

PRINT advertising by publishing houses tends to boast about books that are being bold and original, but that can seldom be said of the ads themselves, which generally consist of ho-hum photographs of the book and author, a brief description of the subject matter and laudatory blurbs.

But a new campaign for “Decoded,” the memoir by the hip-hop performer Jay-Z, promises to be a real head-turner. Beginning Monday, reproductions of entire pages of the book will appear unannounced in locales referred to in those pages.

“If in certain pages Jay-Z is talking about something related to Times Square, then those pages might be on billboards in Times Square,” said David Droga, creative chairman Droga5, the New York agency heading the campaign. Mr. Droga declined to reveal locations beforehand (including the veracity of the Times Square example), but did describe the campaign in oblique terms.

While about half of the pages will be displayed in traditional outdoor advertising like billboards, the rest will be offbeat, printed in one instance on the bottom of a hotel swimming pool, in another on the lining of jackets in a store display window, and in another on the felt of pool tables in a pool hall, said Mr. Droga.

Along with New York, the pages will appear in cities including Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and London, and will continue to pop up until Nov. 16, when “Decoded” will be published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, with a list price of $35.

The best way to search for the pages will be, appropriately enough, through a search engine. Microsoft will host a Web page, Bing.com/Jay-Z, that will function as an online scavenger hunt. That site, and the Bing logo, will be featured prominently in the outdoor ads.

The scavenger hunt, also scheduled to start Monday, showcases a regular Bing feature, a 3-D map based on photographs (like Google Street View), which enables users to click on a spot on a map, then amble around at street level and look anywhere, as a pedestrian might. Although streetscapes in Bing are based on photographs from before the billboards went up, visitors will see the “Decoded” billboards superimposed in the 3-D map. Players will follow clues to bring them in the general vicinity of pages, while a “proximity meter” on the screen will indicate when they are getting closer.

Players who are the first to discover the pages will be eligible to win a signed copy of the book and the grand prize, a trip to Las Vegas to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in a New Year’s Eve concert.

Pages may end up first being discovered either inside the Bing game or in the real world. Clues about page locations will be given on Bing, as well as by Jay-Z on Facebook, where his official page has more than 4.4 million followers, and through Twitter, where he has more than 256,000.

Players who are the first to discover the page on the Bing map can stake their claim online, while those who discover the pages terrestrially can stake theirs by sending a text message that includes a code printed on the page. (Players can also, of course, search virtually and physically simultaneously by consulting Bing on mobile devices.)

For Bing, which according to comScore accounted for 11.2 percent of searches in September, behind Google, with 66.1 percent, and Yahoo, with 16.7 percent, the promotion could propel many to the site for the first time.

“We want to drive users into this experience,” said Eric Hadley, general manager of marketing for Bing.

In fact, Bing — and not the publisher — is footing the bill for the campaign. Mr. Hadley, who declined to reveal how much Bing was spending, said that “there are some hard costs associated with the project, but I would describe it as mostly in-kind.”

Clear Channel, for instance, a media partner for the promotion, has not waived fees for its billboards, where many pages will appear, but is substantially promoting the book in many other ways without extra payment, including running promotional spots as well as interviews with Jay-Z during regular programming on Clear Channel radio stations, and featuring exclusive videos of the artist on its Web sites.

“From a case-study approach, it’s a unique opportunity where we’re utilizing all of our media touch points to reach consumers and really show the power of our company,” said Evan Harrison, president of digital at Clear Channel Radio.

Some businesses hosting pages, meanwhile, are not charging fees, since they also stand to benefit from the publicity when a local television news crew covers, say, a restaurant that suddenly has pages of a book printed on its plates.

“People were lining up to be part of this, like premium hotel brands and sports stadiums,” Mr. Droga said. “It’s a sincerely mutually beneficial partnership. At the center is Jay-Z’s book, but all the players at the table stand to benefit.”

While publishers naturally are guarded about copyrighted material, this is not the first time that Spiegel & Grau has released some material free in the hope of spurring purchases.

In 2008, the Spiegel & Grau author Suze Orman appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to promote the book “Women and Money.” Ms. Winfrey informed her viewers that they could download a free electronic version, and during a 33-hour window, more than two million did so. Sales then flourished, with the hardcover edition selling about a million copies, according to Avideh Bashirrad, marketing director at Random House.

The first printing for “Decoded” is 125,000 copies, and Ms. Bashirrad said she was optimistic that they would sell briskly.

“This is in a different stratosphere than what publishers generally can do for books,” Ms. Bashirrad said. “Publishers don’t generally have the budget to do advertising on this scale.”

Pages of Jay-Z's memoir will be reproduced in public areas around the country and beyond.

GAP INTRODUCES NEW LOGO, MASS CRITICISM ENSUES

But Despite the Outcry, Retailer Remains Mum on Scope of and Reason for the Shift


NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It appears Gap is rolling out a new logo and critics aren't being too kind about the shift.

The new logo has replaced the retailer's iconic blue box, which had "Gap" emblazoned across it in capital letters, on the brand's home page. Now, a gradiated blue box is perched at the top right side of the "p" in Gap. The original logo can still be found on the retailer's Facebook and Twitter page, however.

The logo is pervasive in American culture, appearing on some 1,200 stores in North America. Gap also operates nearly 300 stores in Europe and Asia. Gap is the 84th most-valuable brand in the world, according to Interbrand's 2010 study. The group values the brand at nearly $4 billion.

Of course a brand is more than a logo, but as far as logos go, Gap's is an icon. Across the internet detractors have been picking apart the new look, with the most common sentiment being that it looks like something a child created using a clip-art gallery. A Twitter account @gaplogo has even popped up within the last 24 hours and is rapidly attracting new followers. It appears to be a parody account, given the irreverence. Posts detail, for example, how the "marketing team is huddled in a corner eating Ben & Jerry's and drinking scotch" and the "creative director just quit."


There are also references to another infamous rebrand: Tropicana. "Peter Arnell just called. He didn't say anything -- all we heard was laughing on the other end of the line," reads one tweet. "I'm not going the way of Tropicana's logo. Nowayjose," reads another.


Gap has remained mum. No official press release explained the shift, and calls for comment were not returned. It's not clear whether an agency worked with Gap to create the logo. The retailer has worked with Laird & Partners, as well as MDC's Crispin Porter & Bogusky in the past on creative campaigns.


Sales at the retailer have been tepid in recent months. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 4% during the second quarter.

Inside Gatorade's Social Media 'Mission Control'

Team Conducts Thousands of One-to-One Conversations Via Facebook and Twitter

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In a room crammed with flat-screen monitors, Gatorade monitors social media and deduces what its customers want and what's next -- or should be next -- for the multibillion-dollar beverage brand.

Launched in April, Gatorade Mission Control is credited with engaging consumers and informing the brand's strategy. The team has had more than 2,000 one-on-one conversations with consumers, while the brand's likes on Facebook have skyrocketed to 1.2 million, reaching the 1 million milestone a full five months ahead of schedule. Mission Control is credited with increasing mentions of G Series Pro, a subset of the G Series, by 9% on Facebook and Twitter.

Carla Hassan, senior director-consumer engagement, also said the brand has been able to reshape the conversation. Since the launch of G-Series and Mission Control, discussions about sports performance have jumped to nearly 60% from 35% in April. Gatorade is particularly proud of that stat, as it has been working to recast itself as a sports-performance innovator, rather than just a sports drink.

Four full-time staffers monitor the center, while executives, such as Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Robb O'Hagan and Ms. Hassan drop in frequently. Gatorade's agencies, including VML, Fleishman-Hillard and OMD, are also heavily involved in the effort. Mentions of the brand on Facebook and Twitter are monitored, as are online conversations surrounding Gatorade, its competitors and broader topics like sports or hydration.

Here, we talk to Ms. Hassan about Mission Control and get a brief tour of the space.

KATHY GRIFFIN TWEETS ABOUT KANYE & TAYLOR

Now I will admit, when the incident occurred last year with Kanye and Taylor, I was extremely appalled by the brutish behavior displayed by ‘Ye, but at the end of the day, in the words of self-proclaimed D-Lister Kathy Griffin:

JUSTIN BIEBER :: HAS HIS OWN TWITTER TEAM...LITERALLY!!!

Crazy!!  But dope!  There's an employee at Twitter whose only job is to monitor tweets about Justin Bieber (I know you have all seen him trending every morning!!).   At any given time, 3% of their server space is being used up by mentions for Justin, which means racks and racks of servers are for Bieber ONLY!  Nice Twitter game!! Show em how it's done!

THE NEW TWITTER: NEW FEATURES FOR USERS AND ADVERTISERS

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- Twitter made some major changes to its long-neglected website, including the ability to post and view photos and video, in a bid to increase the amount of time its 160 million users spend at Twitter.com.

Twitter is unique in that much of its user base interacts with the service through third-party applications such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Those applications have, in some cases, more features than Twitter.com itself. Twitter is rolling out the changes slowly; about 1% of Twitter users got the update Tuesday night.

Speaking at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, CEO Evan Williams described the service as an information network, one built to help users communicate and discover what's relevant to people in their world and what's important now on the internet. And with the redesign, he said, "you can click on a tweet and get a richer, faster, more detailed experience and get related content."

The company announced deals with 16 media content providers -- including YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic and Ustream -- to make the experience of viewing media and disseminating it more seamless. There are also new conveniences, including endless scrolling through tweets (no "more" button).

While some of the applications people use to access Twitter have become popular, Mr. Williams said Twitter's own site is the most popular by far, with 78% of those who have logged on to Twitter in the past month doing so through the website. Twitter's own mobile application is second, at 14%.

Like third-party apps, Twitter.com was built on the company's own API, which, according to execs, will make the website more reliable and secure. Twitter has had a consistent problem with "uptime," enough so that the trademark symbol, the Fail Whale, and "Twitter is over capacity" message have become a running joke and cultural touchstone among users.

Twitter infrastructure has to handle 370,000 new sign-ups a day, not to mention withstand the waves of Justin Bieber fever.

So what are the changes? The Twitter "timeline" shifts to the left and the right "pane" is the geography for an expanded look at whatever the user is clicking on, whether it be a detailed bio of a tweeter, a list of people who have re-tweeted the original tweet, or a photo/video linked to in the tweet, meaning users can click and view content without losing their place in the timeline.

The redesign is as much for advertisers as it is for users, as it will give new visibility for sponsored tweets and trends, as well as content disseminated by marketers.

Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo, the man charged with turning Twitter into a real business, said he plans to start showing it to advertising clients immediately. "The benefit of the new interface is there's much more opportunity for users to explore," he said. "It's an opportunity for users to engage with the tweet and to see the ways others have engaged with the tweet."

Of course, "users" can mean advertisers as well. In the prior iteration of the site, if an advertisers wanted to see how many people responded to a tweet or who re-tweeted their information, the process was cumbersome. Actually, there was no process. Just a whole lot of clicking around the site. Now, all the information is available immediately and without leaving the tweet.

More importantly for branded campaigns, if an advertisers wants to show a photo or a video, it's immediately viewable. "For example, we had the 'Toy Story 'campaign and back with the old site, they had a link in the tweet that took you to a trailer video for the movie that was on another site," Mr. Costolo said. "Now, the trailer is right there and so are all the retweets and all the people who have commented on the trailer."

Twitter has worked with most major film and television studios, as well as Nike, Starbucks, Virgin America, Pepsi and Coke. "The details pane and the way its going to enhance user engagement is going to boost their ability to communicate with their customers," Mr. Costolo said.

This redesign is so important to Twitter that even Silicon Valley venture capitalist legend and Twitter investor Ron Conway attended the announcement. "Over time, Twitter's going to monetize beautifully," he said. "I trust these guys."

HOW FACEBOOK AND TWITTER CAN MOVE THE METAL

DETROIT (AdAge.com) -- Automakers and dealers are chasing millions of customers who spend an increasing amount of time each day on social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

But what kind of content is appropriate for dealers to put on a Facebook page? How should they get started? How much does it cost? And does it really help sell cars?

"Moving the Metal: How Automotive Dealers Can Take Advantage of Social Media," an Automotive News-Advertising Age white paper available Aug. 16, addresses those issues. Also, on Thursday, Aug. 19, Automotive News will offer a webinar on the topic.

The auto industry will spend about $1.2 billion this year on social media advertising, according to consulting firm Borrell Associates Inc. And that number is projected to grow to $4.6 billion by 2015.

Forrester Research Inc. says social media is the fastest-growing segment in the interactive marketing category.

For dealers, the bottom line is that it doesn't take a large investment to increase social media business. Even the CEO of Dealer.com, one of the leading vendors selling social media services to dealerships, says the best way for dealers to get started is to identify and support a single dealership employee who already is a social media user, and use that person to start growing a local network.

With an estimated 142 million Facebook users in the U.S. and a worldwide total of more than 500 million, the auto industry has no choice. The customers are present in social media. The auto industry has to go there.

"Everybody's trying to tackle this beast called social media," said Joe Castle, a Chicago-area dealer at Castle Auto Group (Buick-GMC-Chevrolet). "'There's nothing to be scared of' is the moral of the story."