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.

If Firefox is your browser of choice, click here right now and download Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment that attempts to find a new way to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Try it a couple of times and you’ll be hooked.

Essentially Ubiquity is a way to work with the command line within Firefox, but the result is that you can use natural language commands to do all sorts of things on the web superfast. Just hit “Control/Space” and type whatever you want to do into the command line. Ubiquity comes pre-loaded with a slew of commands, but you can create your own commands to mashup your daily tasks too.

But how could typing commands make your life on the web easier? Here’s just one example — let’s say you want to send someone an email with directions to your office. Rather than going to a map app page, typing in your address, copying the link, going back to your email program and pasting in the map you can simply type your address in the email, select it, enter the command “map”, click on the preview, and then insert the map. You don’t have to fully type all the commands either, there’s a handy autofill feature.

Check the list of commands here, and look at the tutorial here and you’ll start to see the potentials.

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.

…Read More…