1. Instagram Wall Art-  CanvasPop allows you to print your photos onto canvas. If you’re savvy with your iPhone camera and have some great shots, this is an awesome gift idea.
2. +Follow Pillow- Tweet…er…sweet dreams.
3. Social Media Magnets- Magnetic poetry with social media buzzwords? We may have to get some for our refrigerator here at Strategis!
4. Like Coffee Mug- Rather self explanatory for the coffee and Facebook lover. You can be one of 500,000+ people if you actually like coffee on Facebook
5. TweetBookz-  TweetBookz allows anyone to print high quality books composed of tweets from any Twitter account.

And while we’re on the subject of shopping, #CyberMonday sales last year topped $1 billion in the United States. It will be interesting to see how many people participated in Cyber Monday today. Even on Black Friday, online sales were up 24.3%. Did you spend time waiting in line at midnight on Black Friday, or did you wait for your lunch hour today to shop for#CyberMonday? We’d love to hear about your best finds or Black Friday stories.

For advertisers, DVR can add up to a lot of missed advertising. With television users fast-forwarding through commercials, we can guess that approximately sixteen minutes of every hour watched are missed advertisements. That’s about eight hours per week wasted on fast-forwarding. It’s a recurring question these days- how do we reach our audiences with marketing efforts if they are fast forwarding through our opportunities?

The survey says 55% of TV fans tune into their shows online; 62% watch more online content than they did a year ago; 15% say they watch six hours of online video a week. With the convenience of online streaming through YouTube, Hulu and Hulu Plus, and Netflix, it’s not surprising that more people are getting their TV fix through the internet. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to advertise commercials through YouTube and Hulu.

Personally, I definitely don’t fall into the 32% that watch more than 30 hours of TV a week. That’s more than a whole day wasted! I’m not completely innocent; I do watch a good amount of TV, and I DVR mostly everything I want to watch. I still pay for Netflix Instant (no longer paying for the DVD subscription- but that’s a story for another time), and watch it every once in a while when insomnia strikes.

Do you watch more than 30 hours of TV a week? How do you watch it? Live, on demand, DVR, online? It all adds up!

For the few short years social media has been around it has completely changed the game for advertisers. As we saw last year, half of the Super Bowl advertisers simultaneously launched social media campaigns. The unique nature of the Super Bowl can help spark social momentum like few other ad opportunities can. For example, you may remember last year’s Volkswagon ad, “The Force”. This ad became the most talked about commercial on Twitter and drove in 12.5 million YouTube views before kickoff. Today, that YouTube clip has been viewed over 42 million times. That’s not only bragging rights but 42 million free impressions that never would have happened without Volkswagen’s Super Bowl campaign.

If executed well, social media can help offset the one time cost of a 30 second spot. Knowing that it will help acquire more impressions might actually make the $3.5 million price tag sound a little less ridiculous.

Among the upcoming Super Bowl advertisers this year: Budweiser, Pepsi, Kia, Mercedes and Sketchers. It’s sad that I’m already looking forward to the last game of the season when the regular season hasn’t even begun. All I want to see are good, creative commercials and the Patriots win the title. I don’t think that’s asking too much!

I am sure we have one more invite left, so give us your best reason why we should let you come to the big dance.

Over the years I have found out that keeping up with all my social communications reading is more than a full-time job. I could easily spend my whole work day reading and most of all cutting through all the information that is out there.My mantra “Don’t always believe what you read”. In particularly I love the top five or top ten category of blog posts. I find them quick and entertaining to read and as a blogger the most challenging and enjoying to write. When composing a blog for this category you must be concise and hit your points spot-on. You truly have to think through your top picks and succinctly get to the point. Needles to say this suits my style and the posts I prefer to read.

One that caught my attention this week was Mike Proulx’s post on Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes. Mike leads digital strategy at Hill Holliday, an advertising agency based in Boston. The key word for me was mistakes. If you are like me you would rather learn from other mistakes instead of making them yourself. Mike touches on not monitoring, down sourcing to interns, not quickly responding, faking it and having an off switch or end date. All mistakes I see everyday and the post confirmed my thinking.

Here is Mike’s post: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jun2010/ca20100617_480316.htm

Every time you open a publication, you are bound to stumble upon an up and coming media concept.  They are small, they are uniform, they are scan tags.  These small images that viewers capture, via their camera phones, are popping up everywhere!  But what’s really the appeal?

Scan tags come in two formats, a QR code and a MS (Microsoft) tag.  To the untrained eye these two tag types look very similar but functionally, they are worlds apart.  The QR code is compiled similar to a bar code.  It is made up of pixels and always displayed in black and white.  Whereas the MS tag is made up of small triangular patterns and can be displayed in both black and white and four color formats.

According to almost all media articles out there, MS tags are the way to go.  They can be captured with ease unto sometimes faulty camera phones and are able to provide the publishers with scan demographic information.  Additionally, MS tags are built with Reed-Solomon error correction so that even if the tag is damaged, to some extent, the scan will remain readable.

After reading all these articles praising the MS tags and downplaying the effectiveness of the QR codes, I decided to perform a little science experiment.  In order to form a somewhat unbiased opinion on the tags, I would test their functionality.  With many newspapers, magazines, and sports brochures in hand, I was sure to get some real answers…

The truth is, daily group deal sites like Groupon, Living Social and Buy With Me are completely skewed toward urban areas—at least for the time being. If you think about, it’s really the nature of the beast: in order for these deals to work, there have to be enough people interested to make it worth while. Hello big cities.

But, there may be some hope for those of us in suburbia after all. Living Social launches in about one new market every day, and takes emails from consumers who are passionate about wanting to see deals in their area. What’s more, Living Social claims that they do use this consumer demand as a factor in gauging which markets to enter next.

So, for those of you out there who are also facing group deal discrimination, keep your chin up, and insist that these companies keep expanding beyond the urban hot spots. In time, these promotions will make it to your area and you will no longer feel as though you’re on the outside looking in. When it comes to group buying, the future is looking bright for us, after all.

AOL has been allowed to run significantly larger ads on their websites.  These ads will be four times larger than the traditional web ads. 

Facebook Paying Users to Watch Ads

A new advertising scheme developed by Facebook will allow its users to watch ads for credits.  One Facebook credit is equivalent to ten cents. 

Hearst Finalizes Deal with ITunes

Hearst will be the first major magazine publisher to sell subscriptions via ITunes.

NBCU is Pro-Synergy

Steve Burke, chief of NBCU, plans on executing more cross-marketing for his companies NBC and Universal.

No NFL= Huge Profit Loss

If the NFL does not resolve issues, resulting in the cancellation of the 2012 Superbowl, estimates say upwards of $180 million will be lost solely on television advertisements. 

“If the site doesn’t update regularly, I lose interest” – Beth V.

“If I feel like I’m reading the same stories or material over and over again, I get bored” – Barbara D.

“Honestly when I have to look too hard to find stuff I just lose interest.” – Melissa T.

“I want to see new content, not a rehashing of what I’ve already seen in other .” – Olivia C.

“There have been several blogs I follow and have just sort of burned out on.” Chris B.

“I can get the same info by reading headlines off an aggregator.” – Stephen M.

“Things that keep me interested are regular/new entries. Also, with the quick instant gratification of the internet and all the retweeting/reposting, etc, I look for the websites / feeds where I can find the info first.” – Greg B.

There’s a lot more where this came from but here’s a few more of my favorites summed up.

• The tone of what I was enjoying had changed.
• The content is no longer fresh.
• Some stupid interface change that I don’t like.
• My access is no longer ‘free’ (and I’m too lazy to create a junk email to log in with).
• I’m just too busy.
• I guess I went on vacation and when I came back, I forgot about them.

Strategis has worked on an inordinate number of social communications campaigns for Higher Education. Through testing and tracking we found some great successes, but most importantly we have found some failures. These failures can turn a great idea into a great waste of time and do more harm than good. Especially in the eyes of the folks in the Presidents Office.

1.  Having the wrong expectations

When starting any campaign we strongly suggest setting some expectations and goals. It seems when it comes to social the expectation is that it can solve all our student recruitment problems. A well planned social communications campaign should not be meant to replace your student recruitment campaign 100%; it is there to augment it. Your expectations should be to increase engagement through current students on the networks. By highly engaging those students you will drive awareness through their friends. As a byproduct of having a social communication campaign that is engaging you are able to increase enrollments, but not as a direct correlation to the campaign.

2.  No segmentation

Facebook and Twitter can’t be everything to everyone audience. You must keep in mind that what interests your Alumni won’t necessarily interest your Undergraduates. It is imperative to have segregated channels and content to match those channels. Alumni, Graduate, Continuing Education and Undergraduate should all have their own pages.

3. To much sell sell sell

We have found this is the quickest way to see your fan base quickly decline overtime. Your fan base is attempting to engage with you on a social level and doesn’t expect to get barraged with a sales message all day. They want to be informed, so provide content rich information that is useful (school events, closings, registration hours…). Your audience knows who and what you are and what you have to sell.

4. Bad customer response

This is a simple one. If someone posts to your wall or tweets you respond back quickly. They probably are looking for some quick information and would like a quick response. There is no one single best way to stop engagement in it’s tracks than bad customer response.

5. Don’t push… Pull…

Social communications is meant to be conversational and engage your audience. You should appear approachable through your content. You must foster an environment where your fans feel comfortable in interacting with you on your channels. These interactions will drive awareness which in turn drives consideration and ultimately drives sales.