As marketers, your job is to be creative, creative, and more creative. Before a campaign is even launched, you’re already looking for ways to further the creativity and boost performance. Add to that those ideas that are churning around in your head about how phase 2 of said campaign can be even more creative, or the upcoming summer, or those year end goals, or, or…

No one ever said that being the marketer in the company was the easy job, and you’ve always got to be on the lookout for inspiration. Now besides the big ones; Christmas, national holidays, etc., when was the last time you looked to the calendar for inspiration?

Audiences respond well to creativity, especially when there’s a bit of factual information wrapped around it, so why not surprise and delight them with some offbeat holidays? Be it a social media item, an newsletter lead in, etc., put your creativity to use, and celebrate the oft less celebrated with your audience!

Coming up in June:

First Friday in June (June 1): National Doughnut Day

Yes, there is a national doughnut day, and no, Homer Simpson has nothing to do with it. Originally founded to recognize the Salvation Army “Lassies” who bravely took to the front lines to provide doughnuts and a morale boost to the troops.

If you’re in the food service industry, this should be a no brainer. If not, there are plenty of pop culture references to celebrate doughnuts. Alternatively, here’s a golden moment to bring a box of doughnuts to the team and feature a group photo on your social media channels. To boost fan interaction, toss out the, “What’s your favorite breakfast food?” question, or perhaps find out what their favorite Homer Simpson moment was. These questions might not have any specific relation to your product, but you never know what customer insight you might gain, and be able to use in the future.

June 5: World Environment Day

Supported by the United Nations, World Environment Day is used to spotlight important environmental issues. Each year, the organization takes on a different theme, with 2012 focusing on the Green Economy.

Did you miss Earth Day? Is your organization leading the charge on green technologies? A hot topic, and a dedicated day – this is your opportune time to focus on what your organization is doing to help the environment. Furthermore, this is a great time to point your community towards outside resources that support this theme.

June 6: Yo-Yo Day

Celebrating the birthday of the Duncan Toys Company founder Donald F. Duncan, Yo-Yo day spotlights, what else…the timeless classic Yo-Yo. Speculation places the Yo-Yo approximately at 3 to 4 thousand years old, with civilizations including the Greeks and Chinese spooling string and shooting the moon. And sorry Mr. Ma, but this day is not about you.

There are a number of ways you could go with this one. If you’re a solutions provider, the “Ups and downs” of everyday business life could be a focus. Likewise, an, “At the end of your rope?” theme can draw customers in. If you’re in the entertainment biz, perhaps talking about one of the oldest amusements on the planet might be the way to go.

June 9: Donald Duck Day

An internationally beloved cartoon character, June 9 celebrates Mr. Duck’s first appearance in “The Wise Hen,” June 9, 1934.

Be careful with this one, as Mr. Disney and his organization aren’t exactly keen on copyright infringement, but there’s no stopping you from celebrating! As kids (and grownups) who doesn’t love a good animated cartoon? Use this date as a chance to celebrate your inner child and what keeps you motivated, innovating, exploring, etc.

Little known fact: Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy. Who in your organization has the most unique middle name?

June 10: National Iced Tea Day

In 1904 tea plantation owner Richard Blechynden was set to sell his wares at the St. Louis World Fair. Unfortunately, it was an extremely hot day, and fair goers were in the mood for something a bit cooler than a cuppa. Blechynden took a risk, poured his hot tea over some ice, and thus – Iced Tea was born.

Iced Tea makes us think of the lazy, hazy days of summer. And although summer hasn’t officially started yet (see below), National Iced Tea day can be a great time to kick off your summer campaigns, or start reinforcing previously stated messages. Food industry marketers can seize this moment and offer deals to patrons, “C’mon in for a free Iced Tea on National Iced Tea Day,” etc. As the invention of Iced Tea arrived under adverse circumstances, you can always play the “necessity is the mother of all invention” card as well. If you’re particularly brazen, you can go out on a limb and bridge the gap between a century old beverage and semi-centarian musician Ice T.

June 13: Sewing Machine Day

The first records of a functional sewing machine date back to 1830, when Barthelemy Thimonnier created a machine that used a thread and a hooked needle to create the same chain stitched used in embroidery.

Now I realize that bridging the gap between your brand and a sewing machine might be a bit of a stretch, but only if you make it. Sewing Machine Day is a perfect time to delve into the world of rapid advancements in technology, and how your organization has contributed to making the world a better place. Perhaps something along the lines of, “Stitching it altogether,” can highlight your organizations’ services or products?

A sidenote: Thimonnier’s factory was burned to the ground by a mob of French tailors who feared job security as a result of this new invention.

World Juggler’s Day: Saturday closest to June 17

Just as the name suggests, World Juggler’s Day is set to recognize the skill and talent of those that keep multiple objects spinning, rotating, and otherwise defying gravity.

While the holiday is meant to celebrate those that can keep balls, pins, flaming batons, etc. in the air, there’s a very clear tie in here to celebrate just about anyone who works for a living. We’re all juggling multiple projects, tasks, appointments, people – let your community know about it, and better yet, what or how your products can better help them manage this balancing act.

Summer Solstice: June 20

Sometimes referred to as Midsummer (as in A … Night’s Dream), the Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year, and is the official meteorological beginning of the summer season.

Chances are you’ve already begun your summer campaigns, but June 20th is a great time to reinforce these messages. Perhaps a midsummer promotion is more to your liking? Celebrate the summer with fans with a, “20% off all purchases on Midsummer with the promo code Puck” and see who catches your literary reference. Leading up to the day, if your product or organization has something to do with the outdoors, you can always remind your audience that after this day, the days start getting shorter again, and which of your products they need to get the very best out of the summer.

Take your dog to work day: June 22

Established in 1999 by Pet Sitters International, Take Your Dog To Work Day is aimed at highlighting the fact that canines make for great companions, and encouraging their adoption from humane societies, animal shelters, and breed rescue clubs.

All memes aside, who doesn’t love a cute pooch? Take your dog to work day can be another great opportunity to highlight staff members, and their canine friends of course. Do you sell a physical product? Could a staff member’s dog have a good time with it, react to it, roll it around the office? Capture these moments and share them with your fans. You never know, you might end of with a new company mascot. But don’t take my word for it, have a view of Beast’s page and let the creativity fly!

Camera Day: June 29

While there’s no official record of who started Camera Day, June 29th can serve as good a date as any to celebrate the camera.

If your industry is in any way related to photographic images, this is an absolute do-not-miss. If you’re not related to a camera in any way, does your organization have an app? If so, there’s a camera sitting right next to your app. Likewise, chances are your social media channels have a number of images, either of your product, consumers, office team, etc. Camera Day can be a great way to encourage your customers to share their stories and include a picture (or 20). Action sports video camera maker GoPro capitalizes on the power of imagery every single day with their “Photo/Video of the Day” series – do the same here and encourage your fans to contribute with the content, perhaps even offering a prize to the top shutterbugs.

I’m sure one or more of these offbeat holidays have touched a nerve in your creative center, and now it’s only up to you to put this spark of inspiration to good use. Be they social media items, blog content pieces, a lead in to a newsletter, etc., surprising your community, and providing them with a bit of factual information, all the while driving your message home is a win/win situation for both parties!

Chris leachman via shutterstock

Late last year, marketing strategist David Meerman Scott released an absolute must-read book titled Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. In this e-book, David outlines a brilliant new PR strategy that involves taking advantage of happening news items, be it general news, or within your specific niche.

He skillfully lays out a plan whereby alert and clever marketers can take full advantage of trending stories and insert their own message into the news cycle, with the end goal of driving more traffic, brand awareness, etc. to their organization. He argues that by reacting quickly and presenting a blog post, social media output, or media alert that focuses on the hot keyword-du-jour, you could be rewarded with a landslide of media attention.

This got me to thinking. Other than the questions of time and speed, what’s the difference between newsjacking and content marketing creation? The way I see it, not much, as both are designed to focus on industry relevant topics and expand upon them while positioning your organization in a positive light, and providing added value to consumers. So, if we take the premises offered up in Newsjacking and apply them to our content marketing strategy, well…let’s watch the traffic magic happen!

David offers up a number of solutions for staying on top of what’s currently hot, which involves a method I’d bet most of us are already utilizing; monitoring keywords and phrases, tracking journalists and media outlets, setting up and following Twitter hashtags, Google Alerts, etc. This is all fine and dandy, but let’s face it, this can be rather time, and resource consuming. While searching for a faster, more efficient method of real time tracking of hot topics related to an industry, I happened to come across seogadget.co.uk’s content strategy generator tool.

Content Strategy Generator Tool (CSGT)

At its core, the content strategy generator tool is nothing more than a Google Docs spreadsheet. But oh, is it so much more! Instead of the various 5, 10, 15 sources you might be monitoring on any given day, the tool’s author Daniel Butler utilizes the power of importing XML for Google Docs and lays out a comprehensive search and results grid for any keyword or series of keywords of your choosing.

The tool is broken down into specific key areas:

• The latest news & discussions
• What content is being shared?
• What questions are being asked?
• Content aggregators

For the latest news and discussions section, the tool searches and delivers up to the minute results from Google Discussions, Google News, and Bing news. Shared content sources arrive via Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Topsy’s latest tweets and latest top trending tweets, Twittorati, and All Things Now. Questions come from Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, and How Stuff Works. Content aggregators are pulled from an overall blog catalog, Fark, Redux, Helium, and Cracked. Needless to say, that’s a pretty hefty collection of sources and just about every outlet you need to stay on top of what’s what.

Now granted, this tool is a match made in heaven for newsjacking, and you might be wondering how this can help you with your long term content creation process? The way I see it, this tool can serve two purposes in one. By running the tool throughout the day, you’re well equipped to be the top of the social media charts with up-to-the-minute information about your industry specific keywords, allowing you to quickly react to breaking news, all with cross references waiting at your fingertips.

The second purpose that suits the CSGT quite nicely, and perhaps more appropriate for content marketing, is viewing the long-term trending data. Personally, I found the Yahoo Answers, How Stuff Works, and Google Insights resources to be the best for this purpose. Keep this tool open throughout the week and take a few notes on what questions keep reoccurring. Is this something that your organization could answer? Better yet, can you position your organization as the thought leader on this topic? Perhaps it’s time to really dig into that “How to XZY… using Our Product” content series you’ve been putting off. If people are asking about it, there’s obviously a need for the content. You might not be the first to answer the question, but you can be the best!

Similarly, if there’s a trending news topic or topics tied to your specific keyword that are occurring repeatedly over the course of a few days, there’s no need to craft a 10,000 word masterpiece. Simply put your thoughts together, relate these thoughts to a specific solution your organization offers, and get it to the blog!

Down the Line

So far, the CSGT has helped us stay on top of the most up to the minute news, what the top shared items are, questions related to your keyword(s), and most recent postings from around the web all within one easy to comprehend format. And while content creation and publication can always benefit your organization, chances are, if you want to spread that message as far and as wide as possible, you’re going to need a little help.

Obviously, Butler was thinking the same, as in both the original and recently updated version, the CSGT has a second sheet at the very bottom titled “Source and Place.” Perhaps not the most aptly titled, but to call this “other” sheet anything less than amazing would be selling it short. What Butler has done with the “Source and Place” sheet is culled detailed information from Topsy related to top Tweeters in relation to your specific keywords. Just like the “Ideas” tab, the spreadsheet breaks down the number of times this tweeter has mentioned your keywords, how many followers they have, and their Twitter profile description. With the testing that I did, I’d guestimate that 80% of the experts that appeared in the spreadsheet included one form of contact details or another (Hint, hint…include your contact details in your profile!).

This contact list information alone should be enough to get you thinking about the outreach section of your content strategy, but the CSGT goes even one step further in v2 by utilizing Follower Wonk’s Twitter analytics features to segment out those that include the words “blog (blogger)” and “editor”. Needless to say, within one simple spreadsheet you now have a detailed list of experts related to your keyword search, AND a segmented list of influential bloggers and/or online media publication editors. Can you say wow? I can!

Is the CGST the Holy Grail for marketers? Not quite, as there a few sources and features missing, but Butler is very up front about this, and after doing a bit new of reverse engineering (it’s really not that hard), I managed to insert a few fresh fields that opened up an entirely avenue of content exploration.

In the brief time that I’ve been using the CGST, I’ve quickly found it to be my go-to, first-thing-in-the-morning source. For freelancers, this is the fastest way I know of that can get you up to speed in a new industry, all the while providing you with a details outreach list. For in-house pros, I challenge you to put your “normal” monitoring system on hold, if only for a day, and see what the CGST can do for you. Chances are, there are a few content sources or outlets that you might have overlooked, and a few experts that might have been below your radar.

Access the Content Strategy Generator Tool directly via Google Docs here.

The concept of changing people’s behavior by offering rewards isn’t new: think of store loyalty cards or airline points systems. Gamification takes customer engagement to a whole new level, offering a far more complex experience to encourage not only a greater level of engagement but also broadcasting brand loyalty through social media channels.

The trend of gamification is set to rise: according to a recent report by Gartner, by 2015 “more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.” The same report predicted that gamification strategies for marketing and customer retention would become “as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon.”

The rise of platforms and applications to enable gamification, such as SCVNGR, Badgeville, BigDoor and Bunchball, have made it easier for brands to structure campaigns.

Whether gamification is indeed the future of marketing or whether we’ve already passed the peak of a fad, there’s no doubt that the gamification of everyday activities and objects can change people’s behavior, increase their loyalty, influence their purchasing habits, and encourage them to share their involvement with a particular brand. It will also help cultivate your communities by continuously bringing people back to engage with your content and with their peers.

So what are the characteristics of a successful gamified campaign?

Setting up a challenge

A challenge can help motivate consumers to take that extra step, sometimes literally. The American Public Health Association teamed up with Shinobi Labs to incorporate its Mobile Adventure Walks app into their annual 5k walking challenge. The app was designed to add fun to exercise by asking participants questions about their walk and what they could see around them. The goal was to walk 5k, but the app turned the experience into an adventure.

A scoring system: badges and points

One of the reasons that gamification works so well for audience retention is the concept of beating your personal best. (We all want to become better versions of ourselves, right?) By offering a scoring system you encourage people to return again and again to see if they can score higher next time. Foursquare has been used by events and conferences such as Comic-Con and Consumer Electronics Show to encourage attendees to visit as many areas as possible and collect badges and earn rewards.

Progression: levels

Like in a standard computer game, allowing progression through levels can keep users coming back again and again. Starbucks has introduced this into its loyalty scheme: progression through the levels is rewarded with perks such as free drinks or extras, giving users an incentive to keep coming back.

Rating: rankings and leader boards

With gamification beginning to creep into the workplace, some managers are starting to recognize the motivational power of a leaderboard and use it to promote team competition, particularly within sales teams. The Salesforce CRM platform enables teams to track performance and offer rewards to the top achievers.

Multiplayer options

Some people just love a competition and multiplayer options can add a challenge by letting you compete against others. Nike Plus has a whole range of features to enhance your running experience, including being able to challenge up to 50 friends to compete individually or on teams.

The prize

You need to offer some sort of reward at the end of the experience: this might be monetary, such as cash or discounts, or have some other value, such as peer respect, recognition or fame. A reward system can motivate people to do something that might be seen as a chore. More than 3 million people have signed up to RecycleBank, a scheme where participants earn points by buying environmentally-friendly products or choosing ‘green’ behavior. They earn rewards in the form of discounts, offers, gift cards or charitable donations.

Gamification success

Just bolting on a points system or a Top 10 to your campaign is not enough: the game elements have to be well designed and integrated to make your audience respond to the challenge. Part of this is knowing your audience and their behaviors, including what social networks they are using so that they can easily share their success with their friends and family.

One thing is certain – utilizing gaming elements for marketers is a gold mine. Gamification makes participation interesting and compelling. A 2011 Latitude survey of US smartphone owners who played games casually found that a large percentage of respondents wanted to see gaming incorporated into a wide range of activities, from education to personal wellness and healthcare to financial planning and economic issues. Multiple studies also show favorable consumer attitudes towards in-game and around-game advertising as long as consumers receive value in return.

Also read: Why The Future of Work is Play

Repina Valeriya via shutterstock

Entrepreneur Jan Rezab talks with the excited confidence of a man who has the world — or at least the parts he wants — in the palm of his hand. And why shouldn’t he — he had started his first business by the time he turned 16, and now he’s the CEO of Socialbakers, a global social media analytics company which just opened its US headquarters in San Francisco (the fifth office, adding to ones in Prague, Munich, London and Paris).

Rezab says the company, founded in 2008, has been profitable since day one, and last year they received $2 million in funding. “I’m very success driven,” he says, “I really wanna make things work.” He’s young — only 25 — and he barely looks it. He comes to the interview early and well-prepared, in a suit and trademark rimless glasses. He says he’s also “vision driven,” which to him means pursuing “the right thing to do,” and making it easier for others — in this case, marketers — to see what the “right thing to do” is.

At its core, that’s what Socialbakers is: a tool to help marketers make the right decisions. “We believe that marketers are sometimes not making the right decisions,” he explains, “because they have bad data, or they don’t have any data.” Socialbakers aims to collect and provide the data, and more importantly, to make sense of it. “We’re trying to deliver the value of that data,” he says, “read it, for the clients.”

Beyond “listening”

Taking publicly available data and finding a way to sell it is nothing new. Social media makes it easier than ever to do, and the marketing industry is saturated with people trying to capitalize on that. But Rezab thinks most companies are going about it the wrong way: “The US social analytics market might seem penetrated,” he says, “when in fact there’s only social listening companies out there.” Social listening companies are those “that tap into a search stream and just download the keywords, download a particular keyword and their mentions.” “With Socialbakers”, says Rezab, “We’re looking at the competitive intelligence piece and the whole picture of it.”

An important elements of this is comparing social media profiles by category, so companies can see how they’re doing against competitors. “Before, for companies it was just about visitors on my website, maybe some impressions, right? And it was their own sites,” he says.

This all changed with with social media, which makes direct comparisons much easier. Rezab calls social media an element of earned media, a subset of marketing somewhere between paid media (advertising) and owned media (like a website) [not everyone agrees on these definitions: Forrester Research puts social media profiles under owned media]. For companies, says Rezab, earned media is “anything that [they] don’t directly control, that sits somewhere else, but [they] run it.”

Earned media, as he defines it, is huge right now. “Earned media is now mobile, you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest now, my god, for retailers, you name it, right? I mean there’s so many sites,” he says, “Somebody has to make sense of creating a unified set of metrics. And that’s what we’re doing at Socialbakers. Making sure we rank those companies, in the right category, and giving the proper metrics.’”

Another key element to providing the full picture is coverage of all major social networks. Socialbakers tracks statistics for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube, with advanced tools focusing on Facebook and Twitter. Rezab is open to supporting more platforms, as long as the data is publicly available and usable (they’ve been unable to track Google+ to the same extent as Facebook and Twitter because the proper APIs are not yet available). For platforms interested in partnering, he says “we’ll even help them create the metrics around what they do.” (Tumblr, we’re looking at you!)

But most statistics are still just “listening.” Rezab says a key element of Socialbakers is its engagement ratings. Instead of defining success by simple measurements of popularity like follower counts, Socialbakers tries to measure engagement with companies’ social media pages. This provides a more useful picture of how well a company’s social media marketing strategy is working, because “what is important is the quality of the fans and how they engage with your page.”

Engagement rankings are available for Facebook and Twitter, and are calculated daily by taking the number of likes, comments and shares or favorites, replies and retweets, respectively, and dividing them by the total number of fans on that day. Then an average is calculated, and that’s what Socialbakers calls “engagement.”

“Delivering actionable data, from our perspective, is critical to the market,” explains Rezab, “and delivering it in a centralized way,” with standard metrics. Simply put, Rezab sees Socialbakers as a tool to help marketers do what they do better, by showing them “what really works.”

Watch our video interview with Jan Rezab here:

“Because nobody knows the brand better than the marketers themselves,” he says, “and we keep giving emphasis on different studies, but really, the marketers know better. And when you show them that data, they suddenly know what to do.”

The engagement aspect is part of Socialbakers’ pro product; there’s also free data and rankings. The pro product starts at $50 a month to monitor one page, and goes up into the thousands for larger companies.

Socialbakers has more than 750 customers worldwide, with 60 in the US, a number it hopes to grow with the new US office. Including the free product, Socialbakers has more than 275,000 registered marketers.

“Typically the companies that started using Socialbakers went up in their engagement by 50–100 percent,” Rezab says. In larger markets where Socialbakers is very penetrated, like Germany or Turkey, “we look at the top 50 pages on the market, and we look at the ones who use Socialbakers analytics, and the ones that don’t, the ones that do have three times the higher engagement rate, on average.”

Data and creativity

Collecting data is pretty straight forward; it’s a matter of crawling pages and using APIs. The more interesting aspect — where Rezab and Socialbakers get to be creative — is with how that data is presented (when I ask him if there’s a creative element to his role in a data driven company, he answers enthusiastically: “Oh hell yeah.”).

Data’s only useful to most marketers to the extent that it can be effectively visualized. That’s very important to where Socialbakers is now, but even more so to its future. “For now, we’re tapping into maybe 5, 10% of the visualization potential,” says Rezab. In the case of actionable data (as opposed to creative data, like data relating to the elections or sporting events) visualizations can be improved, he says, by providing more data with less visualizations. “So taking 7 data sources and making one chart out of it,” he says, “That’s readable. That you get. When you look at it, you get the numbers, you look at the numbers, you look at the chart, you get it and you know what to do next. That’s actually quite an art.”

He gives the example of a new visualization they just created that shows “the amount of engagement by hours and days of week in a beautiful chart,” which condensed multiple charts into one. Before, making sense of the same data was a struggle. But now, “you look at this chart, and you see ‘aha!’, my heat point is between 11 and 4pm in the afternoon, from Monday to Saturday. And on Sunday it’s in the evening. And it’s like that for my entire market. Boom. Data decision, one chart, you know it all.” When a new customer starts using the pro analytics, Rezab says it should immediately make sense. “They open it up, they add Twitter pages, they add Facebook pages, they’re there,” he says, “they do not have to learn anything.”

Unsurprisingly, Rezab thinks analytics are key to brands, marketers and media organizations being able to make better decisions and optimize their investments, by knowing what content and what networks are most effective (he says right now, Facebook is leading in terms of marketing effectiveness). But his faith in data goes beyond marketing. He thinks everyone can benefit from data driven decision making. Someday, he expects social media analysis will be able to predict elections, equal to or better than current techniques like polling.

An emphasis on data driven decision making does not mean disregard for creativity, however. He thinks data can foster creativity. “Because ultimately marketing is about creativity,” he says,“But it shouldn’t be creativity-only driven. It should be data and creativity driven.”

Thinking globally

With offices in five countries and customers on every continent, Socialbakers is clearly a global company. But the company was founded in Prague in the Czech Republic (by Rezab and Martin Homolka, CTO, Jiri Voves, VP of Products and Lukas Maixner, GM for Candytech), and getting to a point where it could compete on a global level — against companies that started in tech hubs like San Francisco, (whereas Socialbakers is just now opening operations here) — wasn’t easy.

“To originate a startup from Europe is hard,” says Rezab. It involves bootstrapping, which Socialbakers did, starting with agency business before transforming into its current incarnation. “We had to make money since day one,” he says, “we had to eat rats for a year and a half, as founders of the company.” He says startups originating in Europe need to focus on “building a stable company with a good business model that will be profitable,” because many US investors don’t invest in certain areas of Europe.

Now, he says Socialbakers is getting an “amazing” amount of investment offers from important industry players in the US, because they’ve reached a level of relevance in the world. He says it’s just a matter of getting initial traction, but “not many companies get through that filter.” Fortunately, he thinks more will. He believes the Czech Republic just needs a “big exit” to put it on the map. “We hope to give it to the country,” he says, “and to support more entrepreneurship in a global way.”

For companies looking for a global market, he says it’s key to think globally from the start. “Build everything like you were physically [in San Francisco]. Just half of the day imagine you were there. And act as [if] you were there,” he says. “We don’t make it secret that we’re European, no way, we’re proud of it,” he adds, but for a company aiming for the global market, he thinks discounting the local market and local clients is the best way to scale.

Looking ahead

Socialbakers is already one of the worldwide leaders in social media analytics, and is doing especially well in Europe. But its footprint in the US is small, and the recently opened San Francisco office, and related hiring of Martin Huml as President and Chief Operating Officer and Katrina Wong as VP of Marketing, are an attempt to change that. “We have the data,” says Rezab, “and we just have the partnerships rolling out now, so it’s gonna be a good focus on the market, really get out there, show it to the advertisers, and make sure they love it… now’s the time to really pump out the US market.” For now, development will remain in Prague.

“You’ll be seeing some interesting stuff — product launches, feature launches, and partnerships being announced in the next sort of 12 weeks,” says Rezab. He mentions “the potential of crossing [currently covered social data] with other activities and platforms down the road,” and hints at improving social media management, which is something he thinks is lacking for teams and companies.

Overall, Socialbakers seems to be heading in the right direction: Recent research ranked social media engagement as the top priority for digital marketers in 2012.

Social everywhere

“Social media is not one platform anymore. It’s not a Facebook, it’s not a Google+, it’s a use case,” says Rezab. “We’ve all learned to be social, regardless of what. And that use case will never change.” He foresees a future where “social” is not a feature, it’s everything.

“I believe online will ultimately only be social, so we won’t call it social or online, it’ll be just ‘connecting.’”

Yuri Arcurs, artcasta, Oleksandr Kalinichenko and olly via shutterstock

According to a report by AdAge, Facebook has made a huge hire which will change the way the company markets itself to consumers. In fact, Facebook hasn’t done much marketing of itself at all, so this hire is a one to pay attention to.

Reportedly, Facebook has hired Rebecca Van Dyck to be its head of global marketing. Having spent just 11 months at Levi’s, Van Dyck worked alongside Steve Jobs at Apple during the release of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and iTunes. Needless to say, Van Dyck knows consumers.

Van Dyck’s history is impressive, as you can tell by her previous experience:

- SVP, Chief Marketing Officer at Levi’s (11 Months)
- Sr Director, Worldwide Marketing Communications and Advertising at Apple Inc. (3 years)
- Sr. Director, WorldWide Advertising at Apple (4 years)
- Global Account Director, Nike at Wieden+Kennedy (12 years)

Given that Facebook will be publicly traded within the next three to four months, the company will need to put itself out there to draw more users, developers, and most importantly, businesses to advertise on the platform. Given Van Dyck’s pedigree at Apple, the company could fast become a more user-friendly when looked at from the outside.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and haven’t heard back yet. We’ll let you know if we do, though.

UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson told us:

We can confirm that Rebecca is joining the marketing team and we are thrilled she’s decided to join us.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a company called TagMyDoc that found a pretty useful purpose for QR codes. I was hard pressed to find other actual useful purposes for QR codes, since they’ve become a bit of a marketing fail.

One company disagreed and sent me its QR code pitch, and it’s pretty darn good.

App2Card helps you build simple business cards to promote your app specifically, with a QR code on the back that brings people directly to your download link upon scanning it. The impressive part of the site is that the card itself is unique, in that it takes your app’s icon and makes it the entire front of the card.

If you’re a developer, it’s the perfect handout to get people to check out your app later, especially if you have a great icon.

Find your app, create cards quickly

The site requires no design work from you at all. Simply perform a search for your app if it’s on Apple’s app store, or create a custom card if it’s on another platform.

Creating cards for iOS apps is super simple, as the site grabs your icon and URL automatically. You’re shown the preview of your card, and can purchase them for a pretty good price, considering that they’re a cool custom size.

When you’re at a tech party or in a meeting trying to impress VC’s, dropping a few of these off is way more impressive than giving them your old boring card. After all, it’s your app that’s important, not you. They’ll stand out too.

So perhaps I was wrong, QR codes can be quite interesting when the idea presenting them is unique and executed well.

➤ App2Card

There’s no doubt about it, marketing on Facebook is something businesses are doing more and more as the social network grows closer to one billion members. The Facebook ad team has actually done a wonderful job working with engineers at the company to build an easy to use, self-service ad product that makes Google AdWords targeting seem silly and incomplete.

You can target Facebook ads to people of a certain age, location, or area of interest. You can get really focused with your marketing.

This infographic from Flowtown shows survey results the company collected about who is marketing on Facebook. Impressively, 69% of the businesses they spoke with are utilizing Facebook for this very purpose. The infographic also shows that Health Care is the most expensive industry to market on Facebook, and it would cost you upwards of $320,000 to get 300,000 likes on your Facebook page. Wowser.

Click here to see it in its full glory:

According to a report by AdAge, Bitly has pushed out new reputation monitoring and social search features for its popular link shortening and analytics service.

Since Twitter has decided to take control of short URL’s to do its own analytics service, Bitly has been forced to look elsewhere for growth and customers. The company has decided to focus on real-time reputation monitoring, so companies knows exactly who is talking about them, what they are saying, and where they are saying it. It’s a smart move, since Bitly has gotten wide adoption for its URL shortening service.

Bitly is very late to the real-time monitoring party, and competitors include companies like PeopleBrowsr. With the growth of social media, data and analytics are the only way to prove whether its a worthwhile marketing expense to manage a Twitter account and Facebook page. Companies are putting money into social media, so they are automatically putting money into analytics.

Andrew Cohen, Bitly’s general manager, told AdAge that Bitly has shortens 80 million URLs a day, which is an astounding number, considering Twitter started shortening URLs themselves. This points to the fact that most companies who started using Bitly have stuck with them.

New catch phrases are buzzing around, such as “Conversation Search”, since there is all of this data on the web with no way to collect how effective marketing efforts have been. While this might show that Bitly is reaching for a new source of relevance, it does have a strong user base and massive usage, which may make it a front-runner in the social media data race.

You can learn more about Bitly’s enterprise offerings here.

In what appears to be a first, a musician has turned to cult location-based game Geocaching to promote his music.

The campaign promoting German-American rock ‘n’ roll violinist David Garrett involves around 1,500 unique trackable items in the form of 2”x2” metal tags on keychains which have been hidden across the US and Germany. Each tag features a photo of Garrett and a unique code, and when they find one, fans can enter the code on Garrett’s Facebook page to log its movements before hiding it at a new location for someone else to find.

A range of prizes are available for participants in this innovative competition which looks to engage fans of the platinum selling star.

While it’s yet to cross over into mainstream culture, Geochaching is a pastime that involves hunting down ‘caches’ hidden at locations around the world. Caches are located with the aid of GPS tracking equipment or a mobile app.

Leveraging the game for a promotional campaign should be positive for both Geocaching and David Garrett, although it would be perhaps a little more interesting if each hidden item included a USB stick containing an exclusive track, or some other incentive for finding the itembeyond being entered into a prize draw.

There’s been a noticeable increase in the use of QR codes in marketing of late in the west, long after they became a common sight in Japan. However there’s still quite a way to go, it seems, before these little square blocks of data become truly accepted.

A survey of 1000 British teenagers has found that 72% of 11-18 year olds don’t have the software to read QR codes or aren’t aware their phone can read them. Additionally, only 43% believed QR codes could be read by a phone, 8% of girls thought they were a magic-eye picture(!) and only 33% knew what they were called.

This lack of awareness is understandable – most phones don’t ship with a dedicated QR Code reader built in, and limited space in marketing materials often makes displaying detailed instructions on what you need to do to scan such codes a little difficult to achieve. It’s not a new problem – in late 2008 I wrote about a Pepsi campaign that went as far as listing twelve tips for scanning a QR code – including the desperate-sounding “Try anything!”

The findings of the new survey, issued in a mailshot by youth research agency Dubit, shows that if the codes are to take off beyond curious early adopters, consumers need to be educated on how to use them. Whose responsibility is this though? Should phone OS designers add a large QR button right into the interface? Should an enterprising developer create and market a QR code reader with the aim of becoming a widely known brand that everyone knows they need to use? If so, where’s the economic incentive for them to do that when charging for the reader software would be pointless?

There’s no easy solution, but without one these handy physical shortcuts to the Web might remain strange little ‘magic eye pictures’ forever.