It’s always nice to see websites stepping away from the typical pay per click banner ads and allowing real engagement with the users.

Soon Facebook will be allowing advertisers to replace their text and banner ads with polls and surveys. This allows them to get more information on what their customers think about their products and services. Even better it is hoped the results from this can then be released and allow users to comment back. What do the users get out of this? Well customers will have a collective voice to help inform change and also receive a “virtual gift” for their troubles.

Interactivity is much more engaging than passive images and video and this is exactly what social media is about. Involve your customers in your decision making process and your ads can become a lot more effective in a lot of different ways.

Facebook engagement

When social media platforms allow users to voice their opinions and rate products there are always going to be those using the system for selfish purposes.

Belkin have tried their own shady tactics involving paying users to post positive reviews on some of their products with low review scores. Bad social media tactics often result in a very bad backlash when found out!

Link: Bad Belkin, naughty Belkin!

Twitter is about to hit the big time, in the UK at least. Up until now, the clued up media types, web 2.0 geeks and technological innovators have been using Twitter to provide a running commentary of our increasingly digital lives. Whilst we have fallen in love with it as an inter/extra agency super speedy communication tool, very few people outside the digital industries in this country use Twitter, and as such, it has limited use as a community building tool. That is all about to change.

Tonight Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) is on the Jonathan Ross (@wossy) show, and if they end up talking about Twitter on air (which could very well end up happening; see here) a whole lot of the Great British public are going to want in on this new community, in order to get instant updates of what their favourite celbrities are up to.

From a marketing perspective this is brilliant news. Up until now we have only been able to monitor and influence 'the informed few', which is good, but does not give you a very broad view of all different UK communities. As Twitter begins to appeal to the masses, it will become not only a highly effective brand tracker but also a powerful and far reaching social media communication tool.

One of the biggest problems with implementing social media campaigns is the fact that returns on your initial investment are often a lot harder to measure than they are with traditional marketing.

This can lead to a great deal of marketing managers shying away from spending precious budget on something that is, at best, tricky to quantify. Scottish brewing company Brewdog are however bucking the trend and using social media as a marketing tool and actually “getting it”. You can read the Times Online article here.

As someone who works in social media marketing, it is nice to see a smaller company really get down to the root of what it’s about and use it to create an effective online marketing strategy in a way that many of their larger competitors have yet to see the advantage of. Cheers Brewdog.

Really like this article for tweeple to take heed of… tweeple, twiterati… are they the same thing, or do they mean something different?

Anyway, this e-consultancy article has 10 tips for Twitter that we should all pay heed to… (and yes, I confess to having a weakness for 10 tips type articles…)

Read e-consultancy’s 10 twitter tips