Kraft Recipes On-the-Go

Challenge: Extend Krafts communications into the mobile market

Idea: Leverage Kraft’s authority with mom’s in the food product category by creating a useful mobile application for the on-the-go mom

Work: A made for mobile website that’s populated with easy to read recipes for making meal decisions at the grocery store, or anywhere else mom may need to plan for a future meal. Mom can also get grocery lists based on a selected recipe, save favorite recipes, and search through recipes in a plethora of ways.

Why it’s smart: It’s a wonderfully simple idea. By leveraging Kraft’s authority in food and within the mom market, they’ve made the task of picking out meals that much easier for the busy on-the-go mom. They’ve approached this mobile tool as a mom-helper, not as a creative, fun, gaming type application. Their mom target will appreciate the reason this application was created, and the simplicity and ease with which it’s used.

New Campaign: Miracle Whip Zingr

Challenge: Engage with, and expose a younger audience to the Miracle Whip brand

Idea: Miracle Whip is about adding spice and tang to any kitchen creation, so to embody that brand idea they created a witty, engaging, and fun application for facebook users to download and use within the social network, as well as around the web.

Work: A downloadable application that allows users to make ‘Zingr’s” (aka smart and witty comments) on photo’s and text within facebook and around the web.

Using UGC

Using UGC as a campaign, or part of a campaign, has become extremely popular. My personal opinion is that it’s overused. In, “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0″ Josh Green and Henry Jenkins discuss fan participation. Bud Caddell, a social media strategist at Undercurrent, took this article and translated it into a checklist that determines whether or not a UGC campaign is the right approach. If you can check off all of these, than UGC is a fun and exciting way to engage your audience.

New Campaign: Volvo

Volvo has come out with a new campaign that’s innovative, entertaining, and purposeful.

The overly large banner ad not only looks stunning but contains photos, videos, an advergame, and real-time Twitter updates. This is an extremely impressive show of creativity, and of how an average banner campaign can move from advertising to active entertainment that draws participation and promotes conversation.

Above I mentioned that it was purposeful. This is important to note, specifically about the Twitter integration, because Volvo didn’t just stick in a Twitter feed purely to jump on the Twitter band wagon. They made a conscious decision to use this integration as ways to show, and to drive, the conversation surrounding the new technology they’re launching.

When we speak about the change going on in advertising, and the way brands need to communicate and connect with consumers, an important part of that is brands allowing, actively promoting, and participating in open conversations. Volvo showed, through this banner, that they want to, and are engaging in, a dialogue. It’s all about conversations.

From the Tweet of @PSFK

Great thoughts from Gareth Kay we should all think about:

“Rather than focusing on social media shouldn’t we be focusing on social ideas?

…It means ideas that are inherently open, generous and want to include you.It means developing communication that lets you join the dots and complete the story rather than telling you what to do (in the same way at every point of contact). It means thinking about what it is that people like to do and working back from there to figure out what it is we can do as a brand to be useful, helpful or entertaining rather than starting from what we think first.While social media channels fade in and out of social significance (was it only two or three years ago that Second Life was the channel we were all talking about), social ideas are timeless in their power. There’s two types of ideas in the world – social ideas and anti-social ideas. And it’s plain to me that those ideas that contribute positively culture are the ones that are going to help build business.”

If PSFK isn’t on your list of daily blogs/sites, bookmark it now and start making it a regular habit. This site is packed full of interesting, intelligent, and inspiring content.

From the Tweet of @mikearauz

“Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there’s so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions

Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster.“

You can find more from Mike on his blog.

Useful Tool

Twitter is full of extremely smart people, constantly tweeting away about interesting and intelligent subjects. There are Twitterers that tweet about advertising, marketing, sports, music, culture, and anything else of interest to them and their communities.

Because there are so many people talking about so many things, Twitter is a great resource for real time (and recently past) searchable conversations. Twazzup is my new favorite Twitter search; it gives you real time results, words most associated with your search, pictures, trends, and links all related to your search query.

Cultural insight is hugely important in our industry, and being able to delve into the conversations of millions of people is highly beneficial. This is a tool we should be utilizing more.

From the Tweet of @kolywater

If Your IM Buddy List Was Honest

This is funny and truthful.

It’s also interesting to note that this resonates with so many people because these generic cliches of online behavior are universally recognized as truthful. These types of people are all different audiences, but are never thought of in that way. When we approach a new problem to solve, lets think about all the different types of audiences we may be appealing to, and how they may view, intake, and spread our work.

News filters one step further

EveryBlock has been around for about a year now. This social website filters information and provides a news feed for you based on geographic location, something I haven’t seen to this extent yet. With information overload a common problem these days, new web and cell phone based technologies are trying to sort and filter through information to make sure it’s relevant and useful to the individual user. These websites and applications are important to look at as tools and partners for brand initiatives.

*Important to remember is people like easy- these sites and tools increase ease as well as content consumption*

Introducing “From the Tweet of”

Just like a memo is titled ‘From the desk of…” here is where I am going to post interesting, relevant (sometimes), and fun quick easy niblets that I get off my followers on Twitter. I’ll post who I got it from so you can follow them if you like what you see.

This is from David Armono originally, but I saw the Tweet from @bud_caddell