360i

To celebrate new UGG Australia concept store openings, UGG partnered with Swarovski Crystal to reward their new retail markets with custom bejeweled classic UGG boots. Personalized for each market, the limited edition boots celebrated each city’s skyline and other notable landmarks. The boots hit shelves early January 2011.

Forty-five days after the boots arrived at stores, UGG wanted to reignite conversations around the boots. 360i developed a two-pronged Digital World of Mouth® campaign that would speak to both the national #UGGlove audience and the localized markets selling the boots.

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Editor’s Note: Christine Hsu is a Social Marketing Strategist based out of Hong Kong, where she is tasked with ideating, crafting and implementing top social programs on behalf of 360i clients.

One of the greatest things about being in Hong Kong is having a window of insight into China, which is why I jumped on the opportunity to attend Social Media Week Hong Kong’s session on “Navigating China’s Online Space.” Featuring key players from a couple of the largest social networks in China as well as some local start-ups, I took four main points away from the event, which I describe below.

1) China is great at copycatting.

The speakers even confessed it themselves. China is proficient at copying what is going on abroad in social media. Due to the banning of major global social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, etc., Chinese companies have learned to create their own. In fact, RenRen.com, the largest social networking site in China with over 170 million registered users and 28 million daily active users, works almost exactly like our beloved Facebook, down to the ability to Like, share and upload photo. It even looks the same, thanks to a blue and white color scheme.

In similar schemes, Foursquare has a Chinese twin called JiePang, there’s Tudou and Youku where YouTube should be, there’s DianPing instead of Yelp, and Groupon has over 1,000 copycats in China alone.

RenRen’s profile layout mirrors that of the Facebook interface.

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Yesterday, Twitter introduced their new look to the world and has begun rolling it out to all users on their platform. Twitter.com has truly been made-over, with a brand new interface featuring a sleeker design, more prominent media content, related tweets and mini profiles.

Here’s a summary of the changes that were highlighted by Twitter (for the full video by Twitter, scroll to the end of the post):

• Design – The Twitter stream will now appear on the left side of the page. On the right side, what used to be the smaller right-hand column has now expanded into a dashboard-like panel that contains more information on features such as Followers/Following, Who to Follow, Trending Topics, etc. Besides these larger changes, there have been small design tweaks such as tabs to organize your lists and streams, a hidden “Tweet” button, and clearer re-tweet labels.

New Design – via Techcrunch

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First of all, the short answer is no.

Facebook announced last week that their Gift Shop is officially closing on July 31. Currently, the Facebook Gift Shop lives as a gift icon under the Publisher Box within a your profile. If you click the icon, it expands to show all the available gifts that can be sent to your friend. In addition to closing the Gift Shop, Facebook will also be ending the Virtual Gift Homepage Engagement Ad offering to advertisers.

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Amidst heavy coverage of the effects of Facebook’s recent Open Graph and Social Plugin releases, one unforeseen side effect arose that no one predicted, not even Facebook. In order to link more users to Pages , Facebook connected fans’ Likes and Interests on their profiles with corresponding Facebook Pages. However, by doing so, Facebook inadvertently created thousands of unofficial community pages based on the way users entered their interests.

If you used to have Lady Gaga listed in your Favorite Music section of your Facebook profile, you would now become connected to the Lady Gaga Facebook page.

There were some upsides to Facebook’s changes – turning Likes and Interests into Page Connections. Specifically, if an Official Brand Page was aligned with a user’s likes or interests, Facebook automatically added those users into the Page. Some Official TV Show Pages saw as much as a two-fold increase in fans in the span of a week.

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Facebook is continually changing the way that users experience and interact with their platform – sometimes, to the detriment of brands, but more recently, to their benefit.  This week, a small change was made to Facebook’s notification system that could mean big things for companies who manage Fan Pages.

What has changed?

Brands now have the ability to appear in fans’ “Notifications” feeds on Facebook if the fan has engaged with Fan Page content. After a fan likes or comments on a Fan Page and the brand responds through a comment, the brand’s activity will pop up in the fan’s toolbar as a new notification, saying “Brand X has commented on their status” (or post, link, photo, etc.).

Above: Fan Page updates are now appearing in fans’ notifications.

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Nearly three years ago, Forrester Research released a study of Social Media where they grouped Internet users into six segments of social media usage, dubbed Social Technographic Profiles. These six profiles – Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives, became widely used in the industry to describe the behaviors of consumers in social media, and to help inform corporate social media strategies.

This week, Forrester announced a new segment to be added to the Social Technographics Profiles – the Conversationalists. Conversationalists are social media users who update their status on Twitter or a social networking site (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) at least once a week. They are less involved than Creators, who write blogs, create content, or publish websites. But they are more expressive than Critics who simply post reviews, comment on others’ blogs, or contribute to forums.

The newly updated Forrester Social Technographics Ladder (Note: Segments are not mutually exclusive, therefore the percentages do not add up to 100%).

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