Each week we share some of our latest career opportunities on Twitter as part of #findajobfriday. This week, we’re taking things up a notch by running down 16 positions at three 360i offices across the country. See something you like? Learn a bit more about us and apply today.

New York, NY

Media/Search:
Media Supervisor – Search
SEO Manager

Social Marketing / Community Management:
Community Manager
Social Marketing Strategist

Insights & Planning/Strategy:
Customer Insights Strategist
Account Planner
Digital Media Planner
Digital Brand Strategist

Creative & Technology:
Creative Director
Sr. Front End Developer
Motions Graphic Designer

Atlanta, GA

Media Manager
SEO Manager

Chicago, IL

Account Coordinator
Account Supervisor
Account Director

Marvel’s Create Your Own Comic microsite recently picked up a Best in Class Award in the Entertainment category at the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition. The IMAs honor excellence in web design and development.

The Best in Class Award is the highest honor granted by the IMAs, with winners representing “the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism.” The Create Your Own Comic microsite earned 492 points out of a possible 500, making it eligible for inclusion in the IMA’s Top 10 Websites of the Year list.

Marvel Entertainment partnered with 360i’s Creative & Technology group to create a fully interactive destination within the Marvel.com family, fostering creativity and imagination among kids and parents. The action-packed microsite allows visitors to fully customize their own comic strip or book from start to finish, empowering them to create their own layout/design, choose backgrounds and settings – and even add fully editable characters from Marvel’s Superhero Squad.

As Wired magazine put it: Create Your Own Comic “is a great tool for beginning artists to practice storytelling techniques and panel layouts. But for someone with fond memories and a real lack of artistic skills, well, it can be a real source of hope.”

The Create Your Own Comic site won two Hive Awards (Best Gaming Entertainment Site & Best Web App) earlier this year. A similar microsite created by Marvel and 360i, Create Your Own Superhero, also received widespread praise – picking up a WebAward (Best Children’s Website) and a Webby nomination in 2009.

The Red Roof Inn website was recently named a Best in Class winner in the Hotel & Resort category in the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition, which honors excellence in web design and development. Red Roof Inn partnered with 360i on the extensive site redesign earlier this year, which aimed to refresh the creative, usability and functionality of the brand’s online hub.

360i approached the redesign project with Red Roof Inn’s long-term strategic goals top of mind. In order to more fully understand the brand vision – and the persona of their customer base – we worked closely with the internal Red Roof Inn staff and utilized market research to ensure an optimal customer experience on the new site.

Key changes included a new “fresh” angle that more appropriately communicated Red Roof Inn’s brand personality, as well as the implementation of interactive features like the Google Maps-powered Trip Planner and online RediCard loyalty program management that made the site more user-friendly. These features led to an increase in visitor engagement and higher conversion rates across the brand’s search marketing campaigns – as well as a more efficient and engaging digital destination for web-savvy and cost-conscious travelers.

The Best in Class Award is the highest honor granted by the IMAs, with winners representing “the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism.” The Red Roof Inn website earned 490 points out of a possible 500, and is now in the running for a spot on the IMA’s Top 10 Websites of the Year list.

We’re proud to announce that 360i and Universal Studios Home Entertainment have been honored with two Awards of Distinction at the 16th Annual Communicator Awards.

In the Public Relations category, 360i and Universal Studios Home Entertainment won an award for a Digital Word of Mouth campaign to drive awareness of its “Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas” DVD among a new generation of children – and inspire parents to relive their own childhood memories with the classic character.

To cut through the noise of the busy holiday season, Universal Studies Home Entertainment partnered with 360i’s digital publicity team on a high-impact DWOM effort that provided busy moms with digital assets (like exclusive trailers) and Curious George “Monkey Madness” packs that allowed them to host special viewing parties for their children and their friends.

The month-long campaign drove substantial earned media impressions among its target audience through overwhelmingly positive coverage garnered on some of the Web’s most highly-read mom and parenting blogs.

• 75% of posts included embedded video (outperforming typical benchmarks of 40%)
• 58% of all posts linked back to the official site; 1/3 linked to the Facebook Page
• 5,000 views of the trailer on YouTube as a direct result of DWOM efforts

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360i and Universal Studios Home Entertainment also won an award in the Social Media category for the brand’s ability to use Facebook as a platform to grow a flourishing community of movie-lovers. Universal wanted to support film fans, provide them with a common social point of reference within Facebook and build a community around the broad range of film properties that make up the Universal Studios Home Entertainment brand.

To start, Universal gave away 2,010 Blu-ray movies to promote the launch of its new Facebook Page. Then the brand used a combination of paid media via 360i to spread the word via paid search, the Google Content Network and Facebook advertising. Relevant fan sites and blogs were made aware of the promotion via a 360i-led DWOM outreach strategy. The comprehensive campaign also included a strategic Community Management program to ensure that fans were getting value from the Universal relationship.

Universal exceeded expectations for the promotion and created an opportunity for film evangelists to connect to the studio and for Universal, an extraordinary opportunity to speak directly to fans about their films that will continue to grow and live well beyond a point solution promotion.

• 66K fans/1 month – Exceeded goal by 32 percent
• ~150K fans to date
• Paid media efforts drove ~35K fans

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Universal’s initial hook to build a base of movie lovers has evolved into a flourishing community of brand advocates eager to engage with Universal via the world’s largest social network. You can join the community here.

Awards of Distinction are presented to projects that “exceed industry standards in quality and achievement.” The Communicator Awards is an international awards program honoring creative excellence for Communications Professionals. The awards are sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA).

At the first annual Hive Awards – honoring “unsung heroes of the Internet” – the Marvel Create Your Own Comic site picked up two awards for Best Gaming/Entertainment Website and Best Web App.

The microsite serves as a fully interactive destination within the Marvel.com family, fostering creativity and imagination among kids and parents. Our action-packed design and development work enables you to fully customize your own custom comic strip or book from start to finish. You can create your own layout and design, choose backgrounds and settings and even add fully editable characters from Marvel’s Superhero Squad. As Wired magazine’s Andrew Kardon wrote, Create Your Own Comic “is a great tool for beginning artists to practice storytelling techniques and panel layouts. But for someone with fond memories and a real lack of artistic skills, well, it can be a real source of hope.”

The IAC Awards recognized 360i’s creative work on Flash banners for InterContinental Hotels Group in the Hotel & Lodging Online Advertising category. The client engaged 360i to create sharp banner creative for the Holiday Inn & Holiday Inn Express brands that would clearly communicate its ability to fulfill any traveler’s needs while still providing great savings to a global audience – as well as highlight early bird purchase messaging so consumers could easily see the value of booking their stays in advance.

Congratulations to the teams from Marvel and InterContinental Hotels Group on these distinctions. We look forward to continuing to produce innovative solutions on behalf of all our clients.

Social Media Week kicks off today in six cities across globe, including right here in New York. 360i is proud to be a part of the action as official Communications Partner for the week. Be sure to check the SMW blog all this week to read our coverage of some of the more than 50 events taking place in New York through Saturday.

In addition, we’ll be speaking at a number of events. Here’s a quick rundown of where you can find us:

• Tuesday, Feb. 2 — Fashion Goes Social: The Devil Wears Prada & Tweets About It
  Speaker: Orli Sharaby, Sr. Social Marketing Strategist – Lifestyle at 360i
• Wednesday, Feb. 3 — How to Use Social Media in 2010
  Speaker: David Berkowitz, Sr. Director of Emerging Media & Innovation at 360i
• Wednesday, Feb. 3 — Social Graph Optimization, Sponsored by Meebo
  Speaker: David Berkowitz
• Saturday, Feb. 6 – EventCamp NYC 2010
  Speaker: David Berkowitz

Follow @socialmediaweek, @smwny and @360i for live updates all week long.

Dentsu presented us with a wonderful opportunity to increase the value we provide to our clients by granting an increased global presence, enhanced technology investments and expanded, integrated capabilities. At the same time, Dentsu has partnered with us to maintain the management style, culture of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that have defined our company to date. We will continue to run our agency in this way within the Dentsu family. You can read the official announcement here.

As we embark on this new and exciting chapter in our company’s just-over ten year history, we will continue to offer forward-thinking solutions to our clients and retain and recruit more great people for our growing team along the way. While we look forward to exploring each of the far-reaching benefits this new synergy has to offer, our chief objective and focus at 360i remains unchanged – to best serve our clients and to relentlessly pursue innovation and the emerging opportunities that will meet their business objectives. We are confident that this move makes us better equipped than ever to deliver on that promise.

As always, you can follow our journey and thoughts here on Digital Connections and of course on Twitter @360i.

Warm regards,
Bryan Wiener
CEO, 360i

Image by atomische via Flickr.

For marketers in the digital space, 2009 was a whirlwind year. Twitter took off amid a social surge, Yahoo! and Microsoft partnered up in search and Google gobbled up a litany of companies. During this time we’ve used our blog to cut through the headlines and share insights into what the year’s top stories mean for marketers. Look to Digital Connections for more of this in 2010.

Below you’ll find our most widely-read posts of the year (we’ve recently counted down the top five on Twitter, for those of you who follow us there).

1. 360i Publishes Social Marketing Playbook

No surprise here. We harnessed brainpower from dozens of employees across the agency to put together this comprehensive 56-page report for digital marketers entering the social space. The result was a highly-regarded document that was shared across several social channels, garnering more than 50,000 downloads along the way.

» Download the complete Social Marketing Playbook.

2. Introducing @TweetingBar

Who could forget the inauguration of 360i’s very own in-house twittering tap? Sure, @TweetingBar might not be the most important thing we did all year, but we did have tons of fun figuring out the technological implementation and demonstrating the ways in which technology can spur social media in new and exciting directions. Not to mention he’s always good for a fresh, frothy brew – and a laugh to boot.

» Follow @TweetingBar on Twitter.

3. 6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a “Caffeine” Boost

Late this summer Google announced that it would begin testing a new “next generation infrastructure,” dubbed Caffeine. According to Google, the new architecture would help the world’s leading search engine enhance its size, indexing speed, accuracy and more. As buzz began to build, a team of SEO professionals at 360i set out to test the differences between Google “decaf” and Caffeine. You can read our six key takeaways for marketers in this post.

4. Google Changes “Nofollow” Policy, No Longer as Effective for SEO

In June, Google’s Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under SEOs and Webmasters everywhere when he suggested that a previously sanctioned search optimization technique heavily relied upon by many site optimizers would not be supported in the same way. In short, he stated that the nofollow attribute that is considered helpful in preventing spam and even sculpting a site’s PageRank would no longer be as effective. This post takes a look at what the move means for marketers and the way they approach SEO.

5. The Social Marketing Playbook Quiz – Are You Game?

Quizzes aren’t known for their popularity, but our test of Playbook retention seemingly broke the mold. We challenged readers to take our quiz for a chance to win a free hardbound copy of the Playbook – and we followed through. Ten lucky quiz-takers received hardcover Playbooks for their efforts.

6. 360i Report on Social Graph Ad Targeting

Targeting is set to be one of the industry’s biggest buzzwords as we head into 2010. In this POV, we dive into the up-and-coming strategy of social graph ad targeting – that is, reaching consumers based on who they’re connected to within online social networks – and lay out the most promising opportunities it holds for marketers. As the report points out, social graph targeting can happen several ways (within a social network, across social networks and even across publishers).

» Read our complete report on Social Graph Ad Targeting.

7. 100 Ways to Measure Social Media

David Berkowitz, 360i’s Sr. Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, made waves with this column (originally published in MediaPost) that listed 100 ways marketers can measure social media. You can read insights from David every Tuesday as part of the magazine’s Social Media Insider blog.

8. 360i Releases New Report on Twitter for Marketers

This was the year businesses began embracing Twitter in droves. Whether they used it to build brand loyalty, drive sales or bolster CRM, brands interlaced the fast-growing microblogging platform into their broader social marketing programs. Our POV serves as a resource for marketers choosing to use Twitter to meet their broader objectives.

» Read our complete report on Twitter.

9. 360i Point of View on the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal

A search-shaking July announcement revealed the much-anticipated partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft and shed light on what the deal might mean for digital marketers. Our assessment was that it signaled a smart strategic play by both parties to focus on their core ambitions and areas of expertise. The upshot? The partnership will build more scale and efficiencies in search advertising, enable marketers to make the most of Bing’s traffic.

» Read our complete report on the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal.

10. New White Paper on the State of Search Marketing

We recently issued a whitepaper revealing key trends shaping search marketing strategy and introducing PageShare^SM, a new metric for quantifying the success of a brand’s presence on the search engines. As part of this report, a brand SEO audit calculating approximate PageShare was performed for each of the Top 100 Advertisers in the United States.

» Read our white paper on the State of Search Marketing.

The Social Engagement DPAC Award honors the best social media marketing campaign with a purpose to engage a consumer or user to build a relationship with the brand, product or service.

Campaign Overview

Sprite and 360i set out to engage moms in native online environments in a meaningful and genuine way while promoting the My Coke Rewards affinity program and, more specifically, My Coke Rewards for Schools. My Coke Rewards for Schools allows parents and friends to support K-12 students by donating My Coke Rewards points earned through purchasing products from The Coca-Cola Company. Donated points can provide local schools with crucial materials such as books, athletic equipment, classroom supplies and more.

The challenge? With so many brands competing for mommy mindshare during back-to-school time in the social media space, Sprite wanted to stand out from the pack and spark positive buzz online about its back-to-school initiatives.

Solution

Inform Campaign Strategy with Customer Insights
Sprite and 360i leveraged online buzz around back-to-school to learn which types of outreach and content would be most valuable and relevant to moms. We found that since moms are often social media early adopters who contribute frequently to social sites, newer platforms like Twitter and on-the-cusp social networks had potential to drive powerful engagement for the campaign. Moreover, research showed that this demographic is more likely to join a preexisting community than to create a new one. For that reason, Sprite partnered with the already-flourishing TwitterMoms community for a multi-faceted campaign spanning Twitter, the blogosphere and a variety of social networks.

Provide Value, Customize Outreach
The campaign inspired several mom bloggers and TwitterMoms members to write blog posts about back-to-school and embed the custom-developed Sprite Back-to-School widget, which aggregated user-generated tips and tricks. The call to action was then opened to the entire TwitterMoms community, who were encouraged to write their own blog posts and embed the Sprite widget to earn My Coke Rewards points that they could then donate to their local school.

TwitterMoms also launched a five-day long “tweet-a-thon” and a two-hour long “Twitter Party” during which time moms could tweet their back-to-school tips using the specially created hashtag #spritebts. They could also tweet to vote for their school to win points through the My Coke Rewards for Schools program.

Results

In the end, between the dozens of blog posts, hundreds of widget embeds, and thousands of tweets, Sprite had far exceeded average benchmarks established from similar TwitterMoms campaigns and made a huge impact among moms during the cluttered back-to-school time.

Total campaign reach: 3.7X outperformance of benchmark
Tweets using #spritebts hashtag: 1.5X outperformance of benchmark

Bryan was selected for his pioneering innovations in the digital space, specifically in the areas of search and social marketing. In 2006, he saw the beginnings of a powerful trend with the growth of social networks and online word of mouth and built out 360i’s social media practice, now one of the fastest-growing divisions at the company. As a direct result of Bryan’s perception, “360i is now one of the foremost pioneers in helping brands develop social programs,” writes Mediaweek.

Speaking about the awards, now in their 24th year, Mediaweek Editor in Chief Michael Bürgi commented, “The Media All-Stars program has become the industry’s most coveted prize, awarded only to the most deserving individuals, who represent a wide array of talents, insight and vision. In 2009, we particularly looked to professionals who are multidisciplinary experts.”

To read more about Bryan (including his famed time as a Kool-Aid mascot) and why he was chosen as a 2009 Media All-Star, head on over to Mediaweek.