It’s always exciting to see brands being brave which is true of the newly relaunched Skittles website – http://www.skittles.com/

It’s a really nice example of a quick to produce/cost effective solution that leverages different social media sites, all linked together through a really simple primary navigation/promo space box that floats in the top left corner of each section/site you navigate to.

Their ‘homepage’ and ‘products’ pages are actually their www.wikipedia.org page, their ‘chatter’ section of the site is the brand’s twitter page, the ‘friends’ section of the site links through to their Facebook fan-page, and their ‘media’ section links through to their YouTube & Flickr pages.

This is a fantastic approach that intelligently leverages existing consumer and brand generated content, bringing together communities of brand advocates.

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It’s another great example of brands needing to be increasingly brave and letting go of some control, as true brand ownership shifts to sit with consumers. Skittles recognises that they can only participate in these conversations.

It’s a huge step for a brand – nice one Team Skittles!

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Hungry? How hungry? Would you sacrifice 10 of your Facebook friends for a Whopper?
If this neat little campaign was running here in Australia I would have a smaller number of friends…
without hesitation. Most likely the work of those damn CP+B’ers.

Social Media Today has compiled this list of the current Top 25 free ebooks on Social Media:

1. Belonging Networks Corporate Social Networking
2. Social Web Basics
3. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for Advertising for Social Media Web Sites
4. Social Media and Customer Service
5. Center For Social Media – Youth As E-Citizens
6. How Blogs and Social Media are Changing Public Relations
7. Social media and the banking industry
8. Social Media: 40 Places to Find Web 2.0 for Your Web Site
9. Social Media Marketing Strategies Guide
10. Nielsen – Pharma & Social Media
11. The Need for Speed – Using Social Media to Speed Innovation
12. What is Social Media?
13. ComplexDiscovery – User Generated Content, Social Media, and Advertising
14. Social Media Guide Release
15. Social Media & Marketing – Online Networking & Advertising February 2008
16. ebook: The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
17. What is Social Media? – Book 2
18. Social Media Maps
19. Social Media Manifesto by Brian Solis
20. New Media Case Studies 2008
21. The Impact of Social Media on Innovation – Josh Bernoff
22. The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations
23. Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
24. The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
25. The Essential Guide to Social Media

British Social Media Case Studies from the IAB:

BBC Learning G.I. Jonny (334k)
British Heart Foundations ‘Food 4 Thought’ (754k)
P&G Being Girl website (754k)
Brands in social media (734k)
Burnout series, Burnout Dominator (782k)
BBC, Doctor Who (248k)
Nickelodeon, H2O (767k)
Hotel Chocolat (556k)
Sony BRAVIA Paint (750k)

Peter Kim’s fabulous list of companies using social media. Last count (November 23) was 324.

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang and David Armano:

Video clips at Ustream

With all the weird and wonderful information out on the web, its a wonder how we get anything done.
As Mitchell Kapor writes:

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Giants like Google and Yahoo have spent a lot of time helping us find what we’re after,
and services like Tumblr and Delicious can help us find similar content. But what happens
to your own little nuggets that you want to track?

Storing and indexing your own content is, for me at least, the next great frontier on the web.
Steppping into the ring with an excellent service is Evernote.

You can clip content in the traditional way with broswer add-ins, run a desktop application with drag and drop functionailty, and even take voice and image notes with the iPhone application. It’s got the standard features like tagging and grouping content for later but you can then retrieve the information from any of the three platforms.

One of the coolest features, beyond its portability, is the text recognition. Written a page of notes and don’t have the time to type them up? Snap a quick shot and they’re permanently saved. It’ll even pick up text within documents, including handwriting.

Solves so many issues for me with notepads, clippings and ramblings all over the place.

Whilst we’re on the indexing trip, a recent article on Marketin Pilgrim talks about recent advancements in video searching. New services are not only searching out tags and external data attached to the clips, but digging into the video to pull out dialouge and even characters within the clip.

So it’s not only the way we access information that’s changing, but they way its stored and shared. Makes it such an exciting time, can you think of where we will be in another 12 months time?

Let me google that for you.

Great quote from a Paul Buchheit presentation.

Gmail now with themes, like this wonderfully retro “terminal”. Eyes hurt now.

And a great little “digital in the wild” observation from Iain.

Gizmodo has been doing a great weekly wrap up of the latest and greatest iPhone apps released that week.
Like Bryan Enos Bloom or the trippy RJDJ, or how could you go past the instant rimshot/cricket soundbite generator. Seriously, people are buying this stuff. Except maybe the last one… it’s free.

Boom-tish.

Tin Eye, an interesting “visual” search engine. As in you upload an image and it’ll will return searches of similar images. It has some interesting uses, such as say you have an image of a cityscape somewhere in the world but have no idea where it is. You could then upload it to Tin Eye and it will either find that same image with details or a similar one. Or… if you were an image creator you could upload your work and see if anyone has ripped it off. The company who makes it ideeinc have a whole bunch of other “visual” search engines as well. Neat.

The iTunes App store where you can download/buy new apps for your iPhone has turned into a boonaza for small time developers who armed with good idea now have platform that can propel them in supedevstardom . And along with the fame comes the money, small time success stories are talking about profits of $250, 000 in two months. The full story from Wired.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Introducing Ubiquity for Firefox, and experiment in connecting the Web with language. labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Ubiquity’s goals are to:

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily