Heineken Beer Tender

A simple little app that lets you share a keg of beer with a friend anywhere in the world as a gift with you getting one in return.

iLike Diesel

This was one of the first campaigns that used Facebook in the real world bringing interaction and fun to Diesel stores.

KLM Meet and Seat

A fun little campaign from the Dutch airline KLM who wanted to start making flying more fun by having people network with each other.

Kraft Likeapella

Lots of brands have thanked their followers but none have done so in a more personal way than this video from Kraft who thank every single one of them personally with a song.

Citroen Car Crowds

Rather than rely on their own designers to build the next great car Citroen are going to work with their Facebook fans to deliver a brand new motor.

Volkswagen Fan Wagen

One of the biggest car brands in the world kitted out a couple of their best known models to be themed in the same way as Facebook.

Heineken One Like One Balloon

Heineken came up with a really cool way of engaging with their fans and getting more likes than ever by promising to blow up a balloon for every like.

Corona Light

Corona wanted to create buzz without a huge budget and they did it by giving their fans the chance to appear on a New York billboard.

What Zurich Needs

You don’t often see great political campaigns on Facebook but this one changed the way people thought about voting and about their city.

Smiles Orange Juice

This brilliant campaign did a great job for an orange juice brand in Isreal by getting people to smile to juice their own orange.

Schweppes App

The drinks company provided a useful app that allowed people to change their photos on their profiles in to a beautiful design.

Facebook Physical Book

A phone company wanted to create something special using Facebook and they did so by allowing people to download a physical copy of their profile in book format

Playboy Video

The adult magazine created a smart campaign that used Facebook connect to personalize videos for users and create a special piece of content.

Take My Lollipop

This was probably the scariest Facebook campaign ever as it used Facebook connect to use your own photos and data to scare the life out of you.

Whopper Sacrifice

This is an old campaign but it got huge attention at the time. Instead of adding friends this smart app asked you to remove 10 friends to get a free whopper.

Balteco

This is probably one of the most ambitious Facebook campaigns ever created with a huge production budget and an immersive story.

Flair fashion Tagging

This campaign used the tagging feature on Facebook and replaced photos with outfits to give their women readers a great fashion resource.

Trident Gum

This campaign from Trident was all about getting people on board despite the fact that they were doing their taxes. It promised a fun audit of your Facebook profile.

Heineken Personalized Bottles

Yet another one on the list from beer brand Heineken who gave designers all over the world a great chance to personalize bottles.

Cadburys

The chocolate brand wanted to cash in on the olympics so they allowed you to connect your Facebook profile and support the UK team in a virtual parade.

My Saddest Friends

People love to cheer their friends up and this simple app aimed to find your saddest friends and cheer them up via facebook which launched in Isreal was a great way to make people happy and got extra exposure for the brand

The Museum Of Me

One of the best known campaigns of the last couple of years that turned your Facebook profile in to a private gallery featuring all your content.

Subway Youth Campaign

When Subway wanted to tap in to a youth audience they turned to Facebook and a voting campaign that imspired the entire community.

Real World Renault

A motor show is not somewhere that you would expect to see Facebook but Renault were able to use it to their advantage at their own stand.

Budweiser Canada

When one of the biggest beer brands in the world wanted to crack the Canadian market they turned to this agency who created a first person hockey game.

Placing one on a billboard in Berlin and at street level, passersby were invited to kick, punch, smash, and headbutt the backpack and try to break it. Of course, nobody was succeeded, but the genius part was that with every punch and attempt, the impact would end up taking a photo of the person hitting the billboard and posting it up on the main site.

The result was that there were 97 hits recorded per hour, lots of coverage on both online and offline media and fan activity on its Facebook page increased by 220 per cent. The campaign works so well as it’s instantly accessible to everyone, it’s immediately sharable, there’s a gamification element as it records how hard you hit it and most importantly, it lets you hit stuff, which is the sign of a good campaign in our book.

The campaign was created by Publicis, an ad agency based in Munich, Germany.

Full story at http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-knowledge-graph-121585

Knowledge Graph? “Graph” is a technical term used to describe how a set of objects are connected. Google has used a “link graph” to model how pages link to each other, in order to help determine which are popular and relevant for particular searches. Facebook has used a “social graph” understand how people are connected. “Knowledge Graph” is Google’s term for how it is building relationships between different people, places and things and report facts about these entities.

Big Change, Subtle Appearance

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the coming change. At the time, I felt what was described seemed more an extension of things Google had already been doing rather than a dramatic shift. Now having seen it first-hand, I stand corrected. The WSJ had it right. This is indeed a big change in line with other major launches like Search Plus Your World last January and Universal Search in 2007.

Big change, but I don’t think it’ll be a shocking change to most Google users who will begin seeing it over the coming days on Google.com, if they’re searching in US English.

Google will still look largely the same as it does now. Knowledge Graph information flows into new units — they have no official name (and I did ask), so I’ll call them “knowledge panels.” These panels appear to the right of Google’s regular results, rather than disrupt those familiar links:

Knowledge panels don’t always appear, only showing up only when Google deems them relevant. But when Google does think they’re relevant, they’re a pretty cool search exploration tool. When the head of Google Search, Amit Singhal, let me play with the new system following his keynote talk at our SMX London show yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of it like a form ofStumbleUpon or channel surfing for search.

Full story at http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-knowledge-graph-121585

Test Drive was the appstore’s way of letting users try out the most popular apps on their desktop first before they decide to purchase it for their phone.  Serving over 16,000 different apps, Test Drive has been made available as a beta product on Android where 5,000 different apps can be tested out with the service.

The idea is that since users don’t want to pay for the privilege of using an app that they mightn’t like. Test Drive acts as a demo option where users can test out apps first and if they like it, they can then make a purchase. The feature lets you test out apps over the cloud, so a copy of the app will launch over wifi where the inputs and interactions are communicated back to their servers.

On the Amazon Appstore developer blog, the general manager of Test Drive Jerry Heinz writes:

“The more we remove friction for customers who want to try apps, the more apps they will try. Those customers are more likely to find apps they are excited to download. In this way, Test Drive helps customers understand the value of premium apps and help drive download of freemium apps”

We’re not sure about the latter part concerning freemium apps as they’re designed to allow users download free but pay for additional content, but it’s a useful idea for those who purchase and download apps regularly. The beta is available for free to customers who update to the latest release of Amazon Appstore for Android on their phone. For now, it will only be available on select phone models, but will see a wider release over the coming months.

There seems to be a lot of this going around, even the celebrity Katy Perry launched a Facebook timeline themed video yesterday. The story of the musical dates back to the early days of Facebook in 2004 and covers everything up to the IPO although they clearly performed it before Mark Zuckerberg got married on the weekend as that would have been the logical final act for a musical.

The video has close to 100,000 views and is starting to be picked up by blogs all over the world so I guess you have to say that this was a great way for the singers to raise their profile online and attract a whole new audience. We are not sure you will get through the whole video as you all know the story at this stage after a movie and constant coverage, but the singing isn’t half bad.

Online commerce site Shopify has analysed data from over 25,000 Shopify online stores and found that Pinterest users spend an average of $80 per order, the highest of any site and twice the average of what Facebook users would spend.

Delivering the same amount of referral traffic as Twitter, those users referred to a site by Pinterest are 10 per cent more likely to buy than those who arrive from other sites and 70 per cent more likely than those from referred from a website.

This and other relevant information can be found in the infographic below.

This is the same auto-complete that it introduced to search results last year and that improved the speed and efficiency that searched for stuff on the web. The big difference here is that the auto-complete will only work for the contents of your own mail box meaning that you can scan through your inbox much quicker and, in theory, find your emails far more efficiently. This is one of those features that most people will find annoying at first, but once you start getting used to it for a couple of weeks, you will never be able to do without it again in the future.

The only downside is that once again paying Google customers will be treated as second class citizens:

We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future.

Everybody is always looking for some sort of new service that will replace email once and for all, but if you ask me, it’s innovation like this that will keep Google and Gmail ahead of the pack for some time to come.

This infographic that we came across today does a good job of sharing the info around these power users showing how they make up between 20-30 per cent of people using the service. They tend to be female, they interact with comments and posts on a regular basis and they carry serious weight when it comes to issues like political debate. If you are not a power user yourself, we’re sure that you know one as they are the people who will comment, like or share anything a couple of minutes after it is posted. So the big question is: Are you a power user or not?

Leap Motion is a gesture control device that prides itself with its accuracy. Able to distinguish thumbs from fingers and handheld items like pencils, the device  is able to sense specific movements so instead of having to flail your arm wildly to pick up movement, it will be able to pick up specific movements so even subtle movements are picked up. Users will also be able to create custom gestures. The development team, LEAP Motion, describe the product:

“Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.”

Imagine typing away on your keyboard and only having to hover your fingers above it to select or highlight something on screen. Leap Motion offer a number of scenarios where the technology could be used such as design and gaming. The tech demo (found below) looks impressive and will be retailing at $69.99 when it’s made available. A limited number are available to pre-order for the device’s first shipment this winter.

The NDRC is bringing execution teams (ace developers, hot designers, creative marketers and smart business people) together with idea owners (budding CEO) and experienced entrepreneurs (executive chairperson) to participate in a five-week challenge this summer to build and shape ideas and make them ready for the next step.

Very often start-up teams focus on the technical solution and revenue potential without giving due consideration to exactly who the customers are, where they are and how to engage with them.

The aim for the project – called Swequity - is to have digital marketing expertise on each team to help ensure that there is lots of appropriate customer interaction, soliciting and interpreting feedback, iterating the value proposition and solution accordingly.

The Swequity teams require experts who appreciate the importance of the competitive landscape, pricing, customer segmentation and buyer behaviour. The output from the team will be so much stronger with your involvement – more accurate positioning, more focused language used to communicate the unique value proposition and a targeted outreach strategy to get the brand in front of customers.

In return, you will get to work in a startup environment and experience first-hand how the role of digital marketing necessarily evolves as the startup matures. You, along with your team, get to choose the startup idea you work on and will own a part of that proposition from the outset. You will be mentored by an experienced entrepreneur and will benefit hugely from the learnings they have to share.

The Digital Marketing Institute is delighted to be taking part in this project!

So, if you have a passion for taking exciting ideas and shaping their stories, if you believe you have something to contribute in a dynamic start-up challenge, and if you have time this summer, then fill out a short online application form about your expertise and interests at www.inventorium.org/swequity by Friday 1 June

If you are interested, contact swequity@inventorium.org or phone: +353 1 5424172

www.inventorium.org/swequity

While Chrome 13, the browser’s latest incarnation, is one of the fastest web browser out there in the market (how fast depends on whether you’re working from a Mac or Windows system), Statcounter doesn’t exactly match the statistics that can be found elsewhere.

For example, according to NetMarketShare, IE is far and away the most popular browser out there holding 54 per cent of the market. Firefox and Chrome are neck and neck with only a percentage point separating them (Firefox holds 20 per cent) while Safari is far behind with only 5 per cent.

The stats acquired by W3Counter has less separating the top three browsers, but the story remains the same. IE holds a 29 per cent market share, Chrome is second with 26 per cent and Firefox just behind them with 24 per cent. Chrome 18 is the most popular web browser holding 22 per cent of the market, but IE still has three different versions of its browser in the top ten.  
Going by our own site, Chrome is the most popular browser used (37 per cent) with Firefox in second place (24 per cent) and Safari and IE third and fourth respectively (15 per cent and 14 per cent respectively). While one website doesn’t imply that these are general trends, we have noticed that Chrome is a browser that’s on the up, converting more new users as time passes.

But on the up doesn’t mean popular and depending on where you look, as the examples given above illustrate, Chrome is either neck and neck with Firefox, or is shadowed by IE’s dominance because it’s made standard with every Windows desktop and laptop in existence.

Chrome could very well be the most popular browser out there, but until there’s more evidence to confirm this, it’s best to take such claims with a grain of salt.

IRELAND'S marketing colleges are failing the country's thriving tech sector by turning out "unemployable" graduates who have learned "the history of the television" rather than the very basics in IT marketing skills, a leading tech-sector businessman has claimed.

Ian Dodson, who runs the Digital Marketing Institute, set up by the Irish digital industry itself to remedy the education problem, says almost none of Ireland's dozen-plus colleges that offer marketing qualifications carries a relevant digital marketing content. This is despite the fact that the internet has been with us for more than 15 years.

"The industry and the students are being done a major disservice by being taught by people who have never worked in the digital industry. When they emerge after four years in college, companies in our industry have to send them off on courses on how to use basics like Microsoft Power Point and Office -- before they even approach becoming employable. We are being sent babies who need to be taught how to walk."

"Take Paypal, which has been looking to fill 1,000 jobs. They will be lucky if they get 500 Irish people who are qualified enough in language skills. At the moment, there are almost no regular marketing jobs out there yet on our website but Irish digital companies are advertising, looking for 200 people in Dublin alone at the moment."

"We need people who know about analytics, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on, not people who can tell us how the telephone developed through the ages. Colleges are doing their graduates and the industry a major disservice.

"We are being fed this rubbish that it takes years to change a college course curriculum. No it doesn't. Just add relevant modules and we will have graduates ready to take up jobs when they leave college."

He added that there is a whole new gamut of job types such as SEO manager (search engine optimisation) and analytics manager that didn't exist five years ago.

The Digital Marketing Institute was set up three years ago to train candidates, using teachers who are working in the industry.

It was established as a direct reaction to the shortage of qualified Irish candidates.

"When we look back 10 years ago we see that foreign direct investment companies came to Ireland because we were turning out qualified graduates who suited their industries, now we are not. It's that simple. In fact western Europe is asleep at the wheel at the moment when it comes to relevant digital education," said Mr Dodson.

- Mark Keenan

(From http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/poorly-trained-graduates-are-unemployable-3113061.html)

A new report from SEO and PPC consulting and technology firm Greenlight suggests that a significant proportion of users aren’t warming to Facebook advertisements with 44 per cent of users saying that they’ve never clicked on an advertisement or sponsored listing on Facebook. To add further worry, this was the most popular answer of those choices available.

Only three per cent of users surveyed said that they clicked on them regularly while 10 per cent said that they do it often. With 31 per cent saying that they rarely click on Facebook advertisements. This 44 per cent figure becomes more worrying when you realise that in that survey, 13 per cent of those surveyed said that they don’t use Facebook so you could say that roughly half of users never click on advertisements.

Cause for concern?

This report come at what is a crucial time for Facebook with the company now trading on the stock exchange and their share price performing quite steadily. But is this cause for concern? Well, the idea that almost half of users ignore advertisements isn’t encouraging to say the least.

Also, Facebook and Twitter were the two sites that users would be least likely to trust their personal data with. This isn’t particularly helpful when you consider the fact that Facebook uses personal data to better target users and present ads that the user would be more likely to engage with.

Yet advertising on Facebook has become the norm for brands and an integral part of any strategy due to the amount of users there. It’s very difficult to ignore a potential audience of 900 million.

Also, despite the large percentage that said they never clicked on an advertisement, another report from TBG Digital says that sponsored stories bring a 32 per cent decrease in cost per sales and an increase in clickthrough rate (CTR). As well as that, in Greenlight’s experience, when a brand runs a traditional ad format alongside a sponsored story format, there’s usually a 30 per cent increase in conversion rates.

The findings are part of Greenlight’s global Search & Social Survey (2011-2012) where 500 people – ranging from professionals, students and the unemployed – were asked how they engage with online advertising, search engines, and social networks. The full report can be found here.

There are hundreds of video sharing sites out there, but since the early days, YouTube has been head and shoulders above the competition and it was that dominance that persuaded Google to buy the site for $1.5 billion; many would argue that it has been the company’s best play in the social space over the years. Some of the stats from Google are truly amazing:

Today 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Like many 7 year olds around the world, we’re growing up so fast! In other words, every single minute you now upload three whole days worth of video instead of two. That’s 61 Royal Wedding Ceremonies, 841 Bad Romances, and 1,194 Nyan Cats.

We’ve come along way in the past 7 years. What started as a handful of videos shared among friends has transformed into a global platform delivering the next generation of channels to anyone, anywhere, and on any device. This last year was especially big for us. We helped bring more great channels to YouTube and we redesigned the site, making it easier for you to discover, watch and subscribe to the videos you love. And all 800 million of you all over the world have shown us we’re on the right track by increasing subscriptions 50% and watching over 3 billion hours a month.

The only slight blot on their copy book has been the ability to find an ad format that turns the huge traffic into a cash cow for Google and ongoing copyright battles with studios all over the world. They have achieved a huge amount in the last seven years though and we expect them to grow from strength to strength.

These are never breaking news stories but rather some of the deepest thinkers and smartest minds from the world of technology and social media, offering their thoughts and views regarding the biggest stories of the week.

You won’t make it through them all in one sitting but it’ll bring you up to speed with this week’s happenings. So just sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy.

- Can Facebook stay cool now that it’s an enormous public corporation?
- The ultimate list of reasons why you need search engine optimization (SEO).
- Why people post their innermost thoughts on social media.
- Why sharing is the new search [Video].
- Pinterest set to announce new funding at $1 billion valuation, with an eye on ecommerce.
- Disassembling Android: Chinks in Google’s mobile armor.
- At your service: how businesses are taking care of their customers online.
- Twitter and Reddit as crowdsourced fact-checking engines.
- Twitter breaks into TV dollars with ESPN deal.
- What if “the social graph” isn’t revolutionary but merely social graph 1.0?

- Facebook vs. Google: The epic battle.
- Can the Internet ever be an intimate social space?
- Spotting the next big thing: Why emotions are big business.
- Facebook has got too many friends and not enough customers.
- What’s the next Instagram? Video sharing apps are fighting to become the next big thing.

- These are the technical reasons why Facebook’s iOS app is so terrible.
- …and its aggressive approach to solving its mobile problems.
-  The top 10 tech startups best positioned to strike engineering gold.
- Mobile – Facebook and Google can’t live with it and they can’t live without it.
- The business benefits of Twitter.

- The paradox of Twitter.
- Subscription commerce – the next hot trend in ecommerce.
- 14 tips for making the most of the tablet for your business.
- Why Facebook needs to take marketing seriously.
- Four years of app store: Developers weigh in on search, discovery and curation.

On Simply Viral this week, what’s more refreshing than a cool drink on a hot summer’s day? A giant drinks machine which acts as a cool, refreshing shower for beachgoers in Rio de Janeiro.

The biggest thing to take from this is that PayPal accounts for around 60 per cent of all web transactions or 66,059 total calls made during the test period. Its closest rival was authorise.net which accounted for 16 per cent of all calls or 17,991 total calls. Google Checkout came fifth with 3,407 calls made during the test period. This isn’t entirely surprising considering that PayPal experienced a huge increase in payments during 2011, jumping from $750 million to $4 billion in one year.

It should be mentioned that, like all studies, this is a glimpse of what is a large market so the findings should be taken with a small pinch of salt. Other notable details include Google being the fastest when it came to average transaction time at 0.26 seconds (PayPal was 10th with 1.45 seconds) and in the worst case scenario, you could be left waiting for 92.4 seconds to process a payment.

The findings were compiled with data derived from 113.626 calls and was taken between the period of January 13th to April 20th. The data was pulled from all New Relic customers with apps making external calls to payment gateways; the top 15 gateways featured averaged at least four calls per day.

You won’t expect to see these vending machines coming to every street corner or shopping center any time soon, but you can see how they work well in terms of engaging with the consumers for these particular products. One campaign comes from China and the other from Argentina and both have been well thought out.

Corelle China

This plate brand wanted to highlight that their products were 100 per cent chip free, but nobody seemed to be believing them so they placed vending machines with the plates for sale in prominent city center locations. There is no better way of highlighting the strengths of the product than this.

Rugby Beer Machine

This beer company was having a tough time getting cut through among rugby fans in a country obsessed with football so they decided to create an innovative way of getting your beer out of the machine. Although it looks fun, we’re not sure this would get approved over here from a health and safety perspective.

According to AdAge, Amazon is pitching ads on the device’s welcome screen and telling ad agencies execs that they must spend around $600,000 for any package that includes such an ad. The campaigns would run for two months and would also include inventory from Amazon’s “Special Offers” product. For $1 million, advertisers would get more ad inventory and be included in Amazon’s public-relations push, according to two different agency executives.

This isn’t the first time that Amazon has introduced ads on their Kindle range. Other models display full-screen ads that the company calles ‘sponsored screensavers’ when users power down the device. Whether ads on the Kindle Fire will appear in a similar way when the devices are powered on or woken up is unclear.

However, the agencies that have spoken to AdAge had declined Amazon’s offer for several reasons. For one, Amazon isn’t guaranteeing the number of devices that the welcome-screen ads will reach, telling agencies that it hasn’t decided whether the ads will start popping up on devices that have already been purchased or just on new devices.

Also, disrupting the consumer experience is a concern, especially if the ads start showing up on devices that have already been purchased. The idea of turning on your Kindle Fire and finding that ads now appear on your device could upset users who are used to an ad-free experience.

Despite this, the ad pitch is still very much in its infancy and if Amazon decide that the ads will only appear in new devices, they could take a different approach and sell cheaper Kindle Fire devices with ads while leaving the more expensive devices ad-free. The second generation Kindle Fire is expected to be released later this year so it could be a case that we’ll see two similar devices being sold when winter arrives.

Once the car drives past the building, the Fiat begins to follow the car for a few more shots before it mysteriously disappears into thin air. Chances are the car drove into the car park located beside it or took the road to its right. The street view shot changes from one side of the road to the other so it’s possible that the car drove off at this point.

If Fiat’s car was driving past Volkswagen HQ the same time Google did, you could pass it off as coincidence, but the fact that it was parked at the front door (you have to wonder how long it was parked there before anyone at Volkswagen noticed) means that they knew Google’s street view car was going to arrive that day.

Fiat’s Swedish HQ is located 45 minutes away from Volkswagen’s so if it caught wind that Google would be capturing the streets of Södertälje, it wouldn’t have taken too long to take advantage, but Volkswagen will have to live with the fact that Street View has made its HQ a place to show off Fiat’s new model. That is until Google updates its Street View images which it does every year or two years.

[Via Yahoo! news]

Twitter is now launching a number of experimental features on the site with tailored suggestions. Taking place in a number of countries around the world, certain users will be able to see a list of accounts that Twitter will recommend you can follow. The tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. The reason that Twitter is able to do the latter is because the site receives visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn already do.

So by identifying accounts that are frequently followed by those who visit popular sites, Twitter can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t want your Twitter activity to be tracked, you can disable it through the second experimental feature: A personalisation section in account settings. Users will be able to tailor Twitter based on their recent website visits and disable these features, which in turn will stop the collection of information for tailored suggestions.

The director of growth and international at Twitter Othman Laraki wrote on Twitter’s blog that: “Today’s experiment in providing tailored suggestions lets novice users go from zero to pro faster and more easily than ever before…we hope this experiment immediately makes Twitter yours, and you can start getting closer to the things you care about with a few clicks or taps.” The last line hints that this feature will also be extended to Twitter’s official app on iOS and Android devices over time.

Also, Twitter recently announced its support for the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Track (DNT) and said that those who have DNT enabled in their browsers will not have any personal information collected and won’t see any tailored suggestion.

As soon as you spot somebody illegally parked in the street, you fire up the app and take a picture of the offender. The app then uses your IP address, taps into a database of license plates and creates an online banner featuring the illegally parked car. The really smart part is that the car is turned into a banner advert that blocks users screens completely and is only shown to people in the local area using their IP address to target them. To remove the offensive banner from the screen, you are requested to share the picture of the car with your social network.

The thinking behind this is absolutely brilliant because it guilts people into thinking about their actions and because the campaign targets such a local area, there’s a very good chance that the offenders will see the ads. Possibly the smartest and best thought out campaign we’ve seen this year.

For a group of young people in Silicon Valley working for Facebook, that is about to happen today and what did they choose to do? Work all night and make their company even better. Facebook gathered all their staff for an all night hackathon to celebrate their upcoming IPO by building new products for the site and it shows the one reason why I would invest in the company for the long term: The culture.

Despite all the praise that has been heaped onto Mark Zuckerberg for being a genius and connecting people all over the world, it is his work on forming a unique culture at the company that impresses me most. See trends come and go, products go out of fashion, markets change, technology improves, but the one thing that makes sure you will be around for a long time is culture.

Google has a great culture. Like it or loath it, Apple has a culture that works. People are totally bought into the vision of the founder and that is what keeps them up working all night and on the one day they should be kicking back with a beer. Mark Zuckerberg has convinced them that they are changing the world and people live for stuff like that far more than they do for money.

I personally wouldn’t invest today because I think the markets are a little wild and the IPO overhyped (I’d still expect the stock to fly today) but I would put my money in to the company over the next 10 years. The culture is in place for them to deliver time and time again and to grow the company in to something special. Culture is about making people love coming in to work rather than dreading it. It’s probably the hardest thing you have to nail as a company and Facebook have it hands down which is why they are around for the long term. You only have to read this quote from one of their engineers said over on his account to see what a unique company it is…

Facebook’s 31st hackathon will kick off from this spot in just a few hours. Thousands of people from across the company will stay up all night long to build brand new Facebook products. Then, at 6:30AM, Mark will open the NASDAQ from this spot and Facebook will begin trading on the public stock markets. What should we work on tonight? What features or fixes would you most like to see in Facebook?

It’s a simple code printed on to the side of a Guinness glass, but the real beauty is that it only works when you fill it up with beer. Not just any beer either because as the creative says if you fill it with a normal larger or any other inferior product, it just won’t scan.

Try and scan it when the glass is empty and it won’t work either. The code itself takes you through to special Guinness content on Facebook and Twitter, giving you the ability to download vouchers and to invite your friends along to the bar where you are at.

Don’t expect QR codes to start taking off in a big way just because of this campaign, but it is refreshing to see a campaign where the product is put at the very center of the marketing. If you want to see how it works have a look at the handy chart that Guinness have produced for you here although we are not sure what Guinness drinking purists here in Ireland will think about this new design.

However, that doesn’t mean that you should focus solely on just the one site. It’s important to broaden your range as you can practically generate leads from anywhere and have at least two or three different sites to help you reach as large an audience as possible.

Unbounce and Bop Design have created a new infographic that shows the strengths of both social media sites. Facebook is the most popular site, but Linkedin is more focused on professional content.

Each site has its own benefits, but one useful piece of information to take away from this is that 41 per cent of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing has acquired a customer through this channel. While not as high as LinkedIn, it should be enough to make B2B marketers realise that there are benefits to having a presence on Facebook and other sites too.

Now the service has gotten a redesign which makes navigation easier and gives it the look and feel of a magazine app. The first thing you will notice is that the display is a lot more visual. Virtually every news piece on display has an image to accompany it which makes the magazine much easier on the eye. The further you scroll down, the more news items will load up so you’re able to look up at least 50+ articles at any given time.

Also, if you want a more traditional layout, you can customise it so that all news pieces are presented as a list. Each piece is accompanied by a ‘share’ and ‘save’ function, the latter is the handier function as you can quickly gloss through the different articles and bookmark them for reading later.

More importantly, the customisation features available have been tweaked to allow greater input as to what content you want to appear. Following the same principles as the main page, each category is represented by an image and its follower count. Alongside the option of following over 340 different media outlets, you’re also given the choice of following specific topics and industries so that you can keep up with all the latest news in those sectors.

On the LinkedIn blog, Joann Wu writes: “One of the key design principles that drove the approach for the visual change was to simplify the experience; creating an elegant, delightful and customized experience for news consumption.” The style wouldn’t look out of place if it was an iPad app (the mobile apps have gotten a redesign as well with LinkedIn Today given prominence) as the magazine style is reminiscent of the numerous iPad magazine apps out there.