Yay! Friday! Autumn colors!
I hope your week has you making your boss look good all while breathing serenely. Inhale. Exhale. Ahhhh. Friday linking.
Peaceful linking,
helenjane@maplevine.com
Wine Spectator Wine Videos
This year the Wine Spectator held a wine video competition.
The grand prize is two passes to two nights of Grand Tastings and daytime tastings with the senior editors of Wine Spectator. As well, winners receive a tasting of the Top 10 wines from the Top 100 of 2006.
(Wine geekery at its finest.)
Is the payoff worth it to you?
How would you kick off a video competition on your site?
See the user films sent in for submission:
http://tinyurl.com/269w6a
Ellen + AOL = branding gold
Ellen and AOL's "Wish You Were Here," is a joint AOL/Warner Bros. Television Group marketing program for The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Fans across the USA try to persuade Ellen to visit their hometown. Visitors to the site can upload photos and videos to illustrate their story.
This is the perfect mix of personality, hometown pride and good will to make a video competition work.
The Case for Cause Marketing
From IMedia Connection:
Pioneering companies are showing their support for a relevant social issue and drawing the attention of their audience in the process. Marketing success around causes takes more than just a donation or public announcement. A company's commitment has to be genuine and represented across the total operation of the business.
But once a company has achieved that, the challenge simply becomes demonstrating the relationship between your company and a nonprofit or charitable partner in a way that the audience can relate to and appreciate.
Does your company participate in cause marketing?
Has it worked?
What causes do you care passionately about to make that connection?
Facebook, Facebook, Facebook </Jan Brady>
From Bloomberg: http://tinyurl.com/28tu5n
"Facebook won users because the site may be more private. It is designed to encourage people to use true identities, whereas MySpace has more anonymity and has been forced to confront reports of sexual predators on its site. Facebook also started a $10 million fund to encourage software developers to create customized games and videos..."
From the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/yvr3ap
"ILike, an Internet music company based in Seattle, was among the first to introduce a Facebook application when the site was opened up in May. The iLike tool, which lets users post clips of their favorite songs, has since been added to the pages of 8.6 million of the service’s 43 million users, and it gets twice as much traffic as iLike’s year-old Web site.
ILike makes money on advertising and commissions when users buy concert tickets or download songs from iTunes, but its goals are considerably more ambitious. “We have the potential opportunity to create the new MTV,” said Ali Partovi, its 34-year-old chief executive, who has spent the last two weeks traveling to Nashville, Los Angeles and New York, trying to persuade musicians and their managers to participate on Facebook as they do on its larger rival, MySpace."
From USA Today: http://tinyurl.com/3y3wn3
"Facebook's expanding user base of 43 million members includes the young, old and everyone in-between in the USA, industry analysts say. And it's poised to launch an advertising push that many tech analysts say could be as game-changing as the text-based ads that fueled Google's meteoric rise."
So how do you plan to stay on top of Facebook?
Advertising?
Brand presence?
Active participation in events? Link-driving?
Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV has 2,204 friends on Facebook and the number grows daily.
Would your wine club members "friend" you?
Serious Site Inspiration
Are you considering a redesign?
Looking for ideas on what you want?
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/ is a fantastic resource for CSS based design and gorgeous imagery.
Now get clickin'!
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