Katie Perry

Ben & Jerry’s – the loveable ice cream brand that rose from humble beginnings to become an American staple – has made a name for itself by doing things a little different than the rest, whether that be by doling out free cones or concocting flavors named for playful pop culture references. This summer, Ben & Jerry’s is carrying on its whimsical mantra by touring the country and serving up free scoops along the way.

360i-ers pose with the Ben & Jerry’s street team.

This week, as part of the brand’s 2011 Scoop Truck Tour, @BenJerrysTruck is braving the bustling streets of New York to deliver free scoops to fans and businesses tweeting at the team with the hashtag #OMGFreeBenJerrys or requesting a visit via the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook page.

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On Tuesday, we hosted a special panel session in our New York offices that focused on the new era of online influence. The event was part of 360i’s Inspired Speaker Series, which brings together some of the brightest minds across various industries to discuss trends in the dynamic digital landscape. The goal of the series is to illuminate these topics and provide an opportunity for our employees and clients to enrich their own expertise in digital.

Sarah Hofstetter, SVP of Emerging Media & Brand Strategy at 360i, moderated the panel discussion, called “What does ‘authority’ mean in the Digital Age?” You can watch the complete session and read our highlights in the recap below.

What Does “Authority” Mean in the Digital Age? from 360i on Vimeo.

Thanks to our guest speakers for sharing their insights:

• Jeff Bercovici, Media Reporter, Forbes (@jeffbercovici)
• Nihal Mehta, Co-founder & CEO, Local Response (@nihalmehta)
• Jon Steinberg, President, Buzzfeed (@jonsteinberg)
• Todd Wasserman, Business & Marketing Editor, Mashable (@toddwasserman)

Read highlights from the session »

Last week’s headlines surrounding Facebook were clouded by reports that the company had hired a PR firm to “plant” negative stories about its chief rival, Google, in the press. Amid the turmoil, Facebook announced a seemingly minor update that allows users to tag brands in their personal photos on the platform.

A Coca-Cola tagged fan photo on Facebook

This is a big deal. Facebook users upload some 200 million photos every day (source: Quora) and Photos is the most popular native app within the platform. The ability to tag brands and products will offer a powerful glimpse into how people interact with brands in their everyday lives. It’s real life product placement, with your friends and family – the people who can presumably influence your purchase decisions most.

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Today at WOMMA’s School of WOM conference, 360i’s Sarah Hofstetter (SVP of Emerging Media & Brand Strategy) joined Jessica Robinson, Associate Director of Consumer & Customer Engagement at Kraft Foods, to lead a session on how Oreo manages its global social community on Facebook.

Snapshot: Oreo’s global Facebook community

The session uncovered the best practices that have catapulted Oreo to global success on Facebook – the brand currently has 19 million+ highly engaged fans from all over the world – and answered a series of key questions along the way.

1. What does global community management require of marketers? Managing a global community requires marketers to be able to articulate their brand’s universal truth AND their brand’s role in digital and social media.

2. What are the key challenges in managing a global community? Beyond the operational challenges of balancing local content with global page management and moderating user-generated content, one of the core challenges for many global communities is how to bring people together across geographic and cultural lines. One way to do this is to invite fans to become a part of a large, community-building initiative that transcends local market discrepancies and emphasizes on the brand’s universal truth. An example of this is Oreo’s Guinness World Record event, which brought thousands of fans together from around the world to participate in something BIG.

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Loopt, a popular location-based app with more than 5 million registered users (for comparison, Foursquare has about 7 million) will soon debut a new feature that allows advertisers to push “perishable” alerts to people using Loopt in the vicinity of their businesses. While the concept seems like a logical extension of Loopt’s current functionality, the integration of Groupon-like deals within location-based apps is something entirely new – and something that the Wall Street Journal says marks “the next step in the evolution of location-based marketing.”

The feature, dubbed Rewards Alerts, merges two pre-existing Loopt functions: Loopt Star, an in-app rewards game that allows users to unlock special deals, and Proximity Alerts, which lets people know when their friends are nearby – without even checking in. Rewards Alerts will allow businesses to push notifications of special deals to Loopt users in their vicinity, thus combining the power of location with the allure of flash sales.

The key difference between this service and similar ones via Facebook Places or Foursquare is that a user will receive a notification without having to check in to a particular venue. While companies like Placecast and Xtify already have the ability to push location-based mobile alerts to people who opt in, these services do not currently provide time-sensitive, flash sale notifications.

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Google has announced significant updates to its Social Search offering that continue to socialize and diversify the content within its results pages. These changes, which build on Google’s previous version of Social Search, increase the visibility of social results and add a personalized layer atop the engine’s much-guarded algorithm. As Google puts it, “Relevance isn’t just about pages – it’s also about relationships.”

Back in October, Bing partnered with Facebook to infuse data from the world’s largest social network in its results. While Google’s new update does not bring in Facebook data, it does have significant ramifications on how marketers approach their search engine marketing efforts [Further reading: 360i’s Report on How the Social Landscape Will Change Search].

Social annotations are now more prominent within Google’s results.

Of important note is that social relevance now directly affects results rankings within Google, meaning that a social endorsement of a particular result (i.e. a friend tweeting an article) can propel it higher up in the rankings. Before these updates, Google automatically relegated all social results to the bottom of the page.

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We were excited to join Foursquare today for a combined Social Media Week session that looked at the rising platform and ways in which brands are tapping mobile-social in general. If you haven’t heard of Foursquare, you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past year (or not attending any #SMW11 events for the past week) – it’s the biggest of the location-based “check-in” platforms and has even found its way into the plotlines on Gossip Girl.

To say Foursquare is “growing” is an understatement. When measured by volume of check-ins, the platform grew 3,400% from 2010 to 2011. Its community has ballooned to about 6.5 million – not too shabby for a not quite two-year old company that as of early last spring hadn’t yet notched its one-millionth user.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley – Image via VentureBeat

At the helm of this growth is Foursquare’s CEO & co-founder Dennis Crowley (perhaps you’ve seen him on a Gap billboard or on Twitter, where he’s represented by an avatar of the holiday claymation character Hermey). Thanks to Foursquare’s meteoric rise, Crowley has become a poster child for the mobile-social networking trend. Today, he sat down with Fast Company’s Austin Carr to discuss growing pains, new product roll outs (look out SXSW 2011) and answering the question: “How do you build something that changes the way people experience the physical world?” Our recap of the Q&A follows.

What are people doing on foursquare?

People are doing a little bit of everything. Different things draw people to Foursquare – some like to check in and leave “breadcrumbs,” says Crowley. Others use it to find tips or create relationships with merchants.

Given then range of use cases, does Foursquare need to work more toward defining itself?

Crowley says the broad range of reasons for using Foursquare is a good thing because it shows how “rich the platform is, and how rich it could be.” Internally there are challenges, because it’s important to keep employees on the same page, he said. Part of improving this is to create a company mission statement, which he says is in the works right now.

Is this mission statement something that will be pushed toward users?

“We don’t want to tell people how use the product. We want them to tell us,” Crowley said. By listening to users, Foursquare’s leadership has realized that the platform is much bigger than they thought. In fact, they often get ideas for new capabilities and features from users themselves – a sort of crowdsourced product development.

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