Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…

The effects of nearly 75,000 hits from The Destroyer.

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

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Saw a blurb in Device.com and Core77.com that the Nike mobile truck had arrived.

Nike's Truck

Reminds us a lot of the Sonim truck we developed last year to roll the streets of Sweden and Germany promoting the Sonim XP1.  Retailers and customers loved it when our Sonim ambassadors drove up in this super-rugged looking truck, complete with video monitors, collateral and “torture test” events Sonim Launch Event Compilation - Sweden

Sonim's Rugged Launch Vehicle in Sweden

A few years ago, we helped Dr. Romanelli develop and implement the international marketing program for a co-branded product line he was doing with Jaeger-LeCoultre. The idea was to excite influencers, reach tomorrow’s luxury watch buyers, and get today’s buyers into the shops….around the world. Judging from the amount of global press coverage, traffic to the campaign site, and some spot checks at retailers where the watches sold-out, the project succeeded.

So we were happy to see this week that JLC is continuing with this PR/marketing strategy, making it happen with a fascinating and beautiful production collaboration with Marc Newson. It’s a good roadmap for how an old luxury brand can get the message out that it is fresh and relevant:

• Browsing daily newsletter from CoolHunting.com

• See a blurb on a new Jaeger-LeCoultre/Mark Newson collaboration (via Watchismo)

• Remember that JLC has a history of surprising product collaborations with artists

• Notice that the collaboration seems true to the JLC brand and technology

• Follow a link to the JLC site to see what else they’re doing. …Read More…

What if products could talk? What if consumers could interact directly with posters and packaging, if images on paper could provide answers to the questions that people have after viewing an ad?

And if products themselves could act as their own advertisements, how would that change marketing? Would this be the end, once and for all, of interruptive advertising? What happens when a consumer who is in shopping mode suddenly has instant access from anywhere to reviews, cost comparisons, and a wealth of other information about a product? How does that change the conversation?

Now is the time to conjure up answers to these questions as a new disruptive technology that enables products, packaging and ads to communicate via cell phones upon request may soon change everything we thought we knew about marketing.

We all know that old-school advertising is coming to the end of its lifespan and the general drift is towards creating content that consumers want to interact with — which takes time and money when done right. But SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get image recognition-based mobile marketing technology almost instantly mobilizes all existing marketing collateral, turning any image associated with a brand into an engaging connection between that brand and consumers.

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