Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Mashable has declared today, June 30, as Social Media Day – #smday if you’re on Twitter – to celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. And while everyday is Social Media Day here at 360i, we’re getting in on the action by bringing you the all-time top 10 social media posts from our blog.

10. 10 Social Marketing Resolutions for 2010
9. REPORT: Nielsen and Facebook’s Advertising Effectiveness Study
8. Forrester Unveils New Segment of Social Technographics – The Conversationalists
7. A Look at Notable Social Shopping Sites: Social, Wired & Fashion Forward
6. The SEO Implications of Social Check-in Sites
5.  REPORT: Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Platform
4.  REPORT: Twitter for Marketers
3.  100 Ways to Measure Social Media
2.  REPORT: Social Graph Ad Targeting
1. 360i Publishes Social Marketing Playbook

For more information on Social Media Day you can follow @mashSMday on Twitter or check out a list of events on Mashable’s Meetup page.

How do you plan to celebrate Social Media Day? Let us know in the comments below.

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.

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Whenever mobile social media comes up in conversation, I tend to hear a lot of f-words. Hopefully they won’t be censored here, as the ones I’m referring to are Foursquare and Facebook.

Perhaps I’m part of the problem. When I’m not writing about all the mobile check-in apps I use or what it’s like to be a Foursquare Super Mayor, I’m making overblown claims about Facebook gaining a universal following thanks to growth in its mobile user base. The f-words play important roles, but mobile social media is much bigger.

To give a sense of how much bigger it is, below you’ll find various forms of mobile social media that may be relevant when developing a marketing program. Perhaps mobile social media is part of the core idea, or it comes up specifically when assessing mobile or social media. However the plan comes together, the tools and tactics should come last, but understanding them provides a sense of what’s possible.

Much of the information below has been adapted from a guide to mobile social media that I’ve been working on and has just been published on 360i’s blog. The guide has much more information overall, while I’ve added some color in here that you won’t find in the official perspective.

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Today, we released the fourth POV in 360i’s summer mobile series – a comprehensive report on Mobile Social Marketing.

Mobile social media, any form of social media accessed through mobile devices, has much in common with online social media: the power of building relationships with consumers, the large and rapidly growing user base, and the potential to incorporate sharing and community functionality into every form of content. In this report we dive into the new opportunities created by mobile social media and how marketers can make the most of them.

360i POV on Mobile Social Marketing

Key Takeaways

• Introduction to Mobile Social Media: A look at what mobile social media is, as well as the challenges and opportunities it presents to brands
• By the Numbers: Social networking is the fastest growing mobile content category – here we take a look at some stats on consumer adoption rates
• Categories of Mobile Social Media: There are many different kinds of mobile social media, including extensions of online social networks (like Facebook for mobile), mobile-central social networks (like MocoSpace), location-based check-in services (like Foursquare) and more
• Location-based Check-in Services: We take a deeper dive into one emerging field within mobile social media that has garnered significant attention from consumers over the past several months
• Developing a Mobile Social Strategy: So, where should marketers begin? Hint: It’s time to bring back the strategic lens as described in our Social Marketing Playbook

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Social media is driving much of the growth of mobile media, just as it has fueled much of the growth in online pageviews and content. New sites and applications seem to sprout daily, while business models of existing players continually evolve to meet marketers’ needs. Marketers should continue to turn to the strategic lens to evaluate opportunities, as it can increase the chances of success for any social marketing program, mobile or otherwise.

Read the blog and follow us on Twitter all summer to learn how you can make the most of mobile social marketing in the future.

This week, Internet traffic soared to new heights following the United States’ dramatic win at the World Cup, LinkedIn added new features to up engagement, Google garnered buzz thanks to speculation that it’s working on a proprietary music service and Bing rolled out a new Entertainment page in addition to some key updates to its iPhone app.  Read our full summary below and be sure to check out this week’s POV on SMS Marketing if you haven’t already. It’s the third installment in our summer-long mobile series — and its completely free to read and download.

Report: U.S.-Algeria Game Might Have Set a New Internet Traffic Record

Mashable reports that Wednesday’s stunning World Cup game between the U.S. and Algeria – in which the Americans won in dramatic fashion, advancing to the second round by a heroic goal in the 91^st minute – just might have set a new record for Internet traffic.

Mashable came to this conclusion by monitoring Akamai’s Net Usage Index, which tracks visitors per minute on 100+ news sites in the Akamai network. Following Landon Donovan’s epic goal in the game’s final moments, Mashable says that traffic spiked to 11.2 million visitors per minute – a figure greater than the previous high which occurred after the 2008 presidential election.

These figures aren’t yet set in stone, but by early estimation it looks like matchup will go down in history as one of the most exciting sporting events – as well as one of the most highly-trafficked time periods – of recent times.

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“Ubiquity” was one word that struck me when David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” kept mentioning it at a Gotham Media Ventures breakfast panel last week. The other was “China.”Those were the answers. The questions, if you summon Johnny Carson’s Carnac, were, respectively, “What is Facebook’s goal?” and “What is Facebook’s biggest obstacle in achieving its goal?”

China may be Facebook’s single biggest obstacle in growing from 500 million users to 7 billion and beyond as it tries to gain adoption by every single person on the planet. Yet there’s a bigger obstacle collectively: the other 4 billion people who are neither currently using Facebook nor living in China. How will Facebook colonize the rest of the world?

The question came up on the panel, and I had an answer. By the time Facebook has exhausted other courses of pursuing growth, it’s going to go for its most ambitious marketing push yet: Facebook will give every person alive age 13 and up a phone.

Facebook will need to do this once its growth levels off, as it reaches somewhere between 1 and 2 billion users. Once it has signed up between 15%  to 30% of the world’s population, one of the most ambitious companies the world has known will need the mother of all stimulus packages.

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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.

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