PepsiCo recently announced it would forgo running a traditional broadcast advertisement during this year’s Super Bowl — choosing instead to focus on a large-scale social media and philanthropy campaign: the Pepsi Refresh Project. The project will give away more than $20 million this year. Rather than simply pick a handful of causes to support, however, [...]

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MasterCard and Amazon are teaming up for a holiday promotion that will ostensibly help customers buy gifts targeted toward their friends on social networks. The plan is being well-promoted and even comes bundled with incentives. But Douglas A. McIntyre sees one pretty big hole in the plan. “Most shoppers just want to go to a store [...]

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Last week, SmartBrief received about 438 mentions on Twitter, 112 shares on Facebook and 45 links on LinkedIn. Great, right? Well, not if we don’t know what to do with that information.
At an Ad:Tech session on Thursday titled, “Social Media Analysis: Real-time insights for your brand,” a diverse panel of researchers and practitioners shared strategies [...]

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Ford posted almost $1 billion in profits for its third quarter. While many analysts have attributed Ford’s good fortune to cost-cutting and a government stimulus program, Rachel Sklar posits that the company’s strong social-media presence also may be a factor. Ford has launched several popular social-media pushes over the past year, which may have helped [...]

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Today’s keynote at TWTRCON DC was an interview of Craig Newmark of Craigslist by Alan Murray from The Wall Street Journal. Like Twitter itself and everything at the conference (the TWTRCON “program” is, literally a bookmark), it was short and sweet. Since that’s SmartBrief’s mission too (we aim to save you time, keep you smart), [...]

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Social media is good for more than just wooing retail customers. In the Las Vegas area, commercial realtors are using it to find new tenants. Realtors there don’t expect social media to be the end of all their troubles, but say it can be a potent tool when used in concert with traditional advertising and [...]

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One upon a time, a panel of social media experts sat down and crafted a list of 16 rules for social media success. But that was in 2006– MySpace was all the rage, Facebook was still for kids and Twitter didn’t even exist yet. Truly, those were dark, dark times. Can anything written about social [...]

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Online advertising– especially on platforms like Google and Facebook– is still a pretty tiny slice of the pie for anyone seeking political office. All the same, some state and local candidates are hot under the collar about recent rulings finding that those teeny-tiny ads fall afoul of rules governing campaign media– because they don’t specify [...]

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