Branded Entertainment

It’s the third-most-popular social network, which means you need to at least familiarize yourself with the site’s business potential.

Robin Good: Trendwatching.com focuses this month on a new interesting emerging trend: FLAWSOME.

A growing number of people cannot stand anymore the idea of buying services and products from companies that sell themselves through a facade of superhuman perfection and infallibility.

What many consumers are looking for increasingly, are brands capable of admitting their faults, and being humble enough to come down from their traditional branded pedestals.

From the article briefing: "Consumers don't expect brands to be flawless. In fact, consumers will embrace brands that are FLAWSOME*:

a) Brands that are still brilliant despite having flaws; even being flawed (and being open about it) can be awesome.

b) Brands that show some empathy, generosity, humility, flexibility, maturity, humor, and (dare we say it) some character and humanity.

The two key drivers fueling the FLAWSOME trend:

1) HUMAN BRANDS: Everything from disgust at business to the influence of online culture (with its honesty and immediacy), is driving consumers away from bland, boring brands in favor of brands with some personality.

2) TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH: Consumers are benefiting from almost total and utter transparency (and thus are finding out about flaws anyway), as a result of the torrent of readily available reviews, leaks and ratings." 

Great examples included.

Recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/ ;

The second screen—whether it be your laptop, tablet, or smart phone—is changing the way audiences watch and actually interact with the programs they watch.

Thinking about the sheer volume of information — stories, images, videos, data — available from The New York Times can evoke a simultaneous glee and terror.

It is simply impossible for readers to see them all.

The task for beta620, the Times experimental projects group, launched Deep Dive that uses the Times’ massive cache of metadata from stories to go, as the name suggests, deeper into a news event by pulling together related articles. So Deep Dive would provides readers a collection of stories relating to a topic, based on whatever person, place, event or topic of their choosing.

What’s interesting about Deep Dive? At least three things:

1) Deep Dive relies on the extensive tagging system the Times uses for all its stories and makes the Times Topics pages possible. As part of the editing flow tags are applied to stories by editors or producers, with suggestions provided by an internal algorithm. Deep Dive looks for connections among topics.

2) Deep Dive’ unique interfact, where the related articles flow into the same frame as the main story when selected. You need never leave the page; jumping backwards or forwards in articles all happens in the same space. That’s a departure from the pageview-driven way most news sites are designed. But Deep Dive’s UI matches its underlying thesis: that individual articles are really pieces of a larger story, told in pieces over time and across bylines and datelines.

3) More interesting, Deep Dive will also allows users to save their “dives,” which would be constantly updated with new articles. What Deep Dives promises is an alert more directly based around a specific developing story.

But beyond those elements, the real promise of Deep Dive, though, is that it continues to show the Times’ flexibility in providing different ways for different kinds of readers to access its content...

read full article http://j.mp/x2SoPf 
 

visit also http://beta620.nytimes.com/projects/deep-dive/ 

and read here:  http://beta620.nytimes.com/projects/deep-dive/exploring-stories-with-deep-dive/  

Curated by Giuseppe Mauriello

Digital marketing isn't a fad - it's the future. And although it may be a notoriously difficult task to project the future; the most telling variable is what's happening in the present.

Look around you and you'll notice that the world is connected, communicating and constantly clicking.

There's no reason to believe that the demographic cohort that will follow Generation Y, will be any different. In fact, the next generation will be the first that cannot conceive a world that isn't defined and enabled by the Internet, mobile devices and online social networking. Still not convinced?

The following Infographic by ROI Media  - http://bit.ly/JOOy40 - presents an overview of the digital landscape, and the changes pointing towards the need for social media marketing in commerce.

Download / Embed Here: http://bit.ly/JOOOA7 ;

Announced today, Facebook Timeline brand Pages appear to be a powerful new tool for companies and businesses. This is what they look like . . .

A recent study by Shareholic showed that by January 2012, the percentage of total referral traffic from Pinterest beat YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace.....