This depiction of the digital marketing landscape was shown at a Buddy Media event marking the launch of the social marketing software agency's new suite of measurement tools. - via Stefan

Oracle snapped up Atlanta-based social-media-management company Vitrue for a reported $300 million as consolidation in the space picks up.
Big enterprise companies such as Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce have all acquired companies that manage or measure social media as they attempt to add these capabilities to their offerings.
Founded in 2006, Vitrue had raised $33 million in funding; its clients have included McDonald's, American Express and Lowes. The company manages brands' presence on social platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Content is king for social TV users. Viewers want something special from their social TV services rather than commoditized content that can be found through online searches. The number one request for content is full-length episodes (88%), followed by sneak peeks of new episodes (75%), and behind-the-scenes extras (71%) and highlight clips (71%).

The majority of TV socializers are interested in rewards with real value, like free merchandise or signed cast photos. When putting aside the material aspect, virtual rewards offer an emotional pay-off, described as being similar to the feeling when 'liked' on Facebook. Trivia and casual games related to a show are of greater interest if they offer some kind of reward. Real fans want to have their knowledge and skills tested, and expect the game to be challenging.

Microsoft has officially launched an “experimental” social networking site called So.cl, which combines facets of social networking, search, and media sharing with a user interface resembling Google+.
When we last heard about it, So.cl (pronounced “Social”) was being billed as an “experimental research project” and was only available to students studying information and design at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. While the project is still billed as experimental, it’s now open to anyone who wants to give it a shot.

Bruce Daisley's presentation

From FastCompany: As the water crisis documentary Last Call at the Oasis opens, Participant Media executives Christopher Gebhardt and Chad Boettcher explain how they use social media to turn complex, overwhelming issues into hope and action.

Why do some brands make it into your basket while others stay on the shelf?  What makes us want to buy one and not the other?  Is it solely their inherent quality or is there something else at stake?
A branding expert would say that this is no accident: it’s the emotional tug of a successful brand at work. We thought it would be interesting and useful to compare two brands with very similar inheritances: Oxo and Marmite. One has tremendous, contemporary appeal.  The other seems to be dying in front of our eyes.  And yet it could all be so different.

Barack Obama's re-election campaign for the White House is poised to launch its secret weapon: an online tool that the campaign hopes will vastly increase its ability to mobilise volunteers and potential voters across the US.

The new tool, called Dashboard, is being seen as the possible Holy Grail of digital political organising, one that has eluded campaign chiefs for years. It is already being road-tested in several of the crucial swing states that Obama must hold onto if he is to remain in office.

The technology has been incorporated into the campaign's website, myBarackObama.com, and is expected to be made available to thousands of staff and volunteers across the country within the next 10 days. Its URL can be found through search, though it remains inaccessible to most Obama supporters until the launch.

Those who work in advertising often wonder if they live in a sort of bubble. You wonder, are civilians as active on social media and as inclined to pay attention to what brands are doing on Twitter, and is the rest of the world as preoccupied with that award-winning ad campaign that industry types can’t stop talking about?

The unsurprising answer is no, according to a study commissioned by San Francisco-based advertising agency Heat and conducted this past March by iThink, which found that people who work in advertising and marketing are worlds apart from the "normal" people when it comes to how they use social media and how they view social media marketing. - via Stefan

On May 8 Fosters lager brand launched an online Good Call Centre to complement their Good Call TV advertising campaign, featuring helpful Australians Brad and Dan. The site gives consumers the chance to share their friends’ problems, from a list of options, in order to receive humorous advice from Brad and Dan. The game has been publicised on Fosters’ YouTube channel and Facebook page, with responses to the campaign highly positive.

You will all know how negative I can be on Google+ and I didn’t expect anything other than an ordinary update to their app last night. But when I tested it out, I was stunned with the sheer beauty of it. The app, which launched on iPhone only (that in itself was a surprise given that Google owns Android), is a completely new social networking experience and reminds me of Path.
Google has already lost the desktop experience to Facebook, but this app brings them to the race on mobile. Although I still doubt that they can steal users away from Facebook, this is easily the best app I have ever played with in terms of functionality and design. It’s absolutely stunning and a joy to use. - via Nimi Raja

Let’s face it, good marketing campaigns using LinkedIn are hard to find. It is the most popular business social network yet there aren’t many examples of business marketing being done on there. LinkedIn does have a useful resource of success stories from individuals that use the site for networking or jobseeking, but I wanted to delve a little deeper and find case studies that show how LinkedIn marketing can be done a little differently, both for large and small organisations. Finding them has been a fairly painful process, so I hope you enjoy…

Truly social commerce, like truly social search, is one of the great unrealised hopes of the social web. It’s been frustratingly close for some time but remains tantalizingly out of reach.
The basic premise, of course, is straightforward: by combining social data (who I am, who my friends are) with commercial data (what I buy, what the retailer wants to promote) brands can deliver a more tailored, relevant shopping experience with benefits for both the user and the business.
Taken a step further, enlightened brands can enable users to sell direct to their social networks. This may be about identifying power users and enabling them to sell on the brand’s behalf (a kind of social affiliate model) or a more straightforward member get member approach, with baked in social context. - via Martin B

The model which has guided many people's thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%.
Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
This has been driven by the rise of 'easy participation': activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
Despite participation becoming relatively 'easy', almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive - they do not participate at all.

LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We’ve pasted the release below.
SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations. SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page.
SlideShare users have uploaded more than nine million presentations, and according to comScore, in March SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors.

Before approaching potential overseas partners, Watt and Dickie decided to amp up their guerrilla marketing efforts. Social media—social networks, bloggers, and videos—were both affordable and effective ways to reach their audience.

They identified the most influential beer writers and sent them samples. For a little over $2,000, they created a humorous YouTube video that quickly racked up 250,000 page views. 

"We got fantastic reviews and coverage," says Watt, whose official title is "Captain." "When we went to the distributors, we were able to say, 'We've done the marketing for you, all you've got to do is sell it.’"

Lots of social media case studies - via Shib Hussein