When you want to send a friend a virtual gift, Facebook now splits the gift dialog into different sections:

Click on Sport and Celebrities and you find a variety of branded virtual gifts:

Do you think those branded virtual goods are attractive to the Facebook users?

Brands are increasingly the sum of their most loyal and influential fans.

Taken from:

Matthew and Mark had to cancel their sessions at the Startup-Day. Christoph Janz and André Ballay spontaneously decided to join the Startup-Day speakers team. Welcome Christoph and André!

Christoph Janz is the (co-)founder of DealPilot.com, which he sold to Bertelsmann, and of Pageflakes, which he sold to MySpace-founder Brad Greenspan last month. His session is titled “Monetarisierung im Web 2.0″. He worked over ten years in the web industry, so I’m looking forward to learn from his insights, especially from his experiences in oversea. Btw: he is also an investor looking for the next big thing, so talk to him!

André Ballay is working at the 24 IP Law group. I don’t know André personally, yet. Robert Harrison, our patent lawyer, recommended him to us and Robert is a really smart person (I pitched him our business idea in the three minutes and he summarized it in three sentences; maybe he should do the pitching for us). André Ballay will inform us about intellectual property: copyrights, patents and brands. These are important issues, especially in the web industry, so we are happy to cover this topic as well at the Startup-Day.

I’m looking to meet you in Karlsruhe! Until then, have a good time!

Social marketing means: let the people do your marketing. And marketing not only means advertising. Primarily, marketing means to know your market! And who does know your market better than your customers? So it seems to be obvious to let the customers do the marketing.

(click here and read more…)

Never thought about this before: brand mashups. Today, I recognized this phenomena watching movie ads. Milka presented a new chocolate: Milka chocolate combined with Daims. Seems to be a trend in the candies industry. Ritter Sport combined their chocolate with Neopolitaner. Does anybody know an example from the web industry?

Jeremiah posted an impressive list of examples of (negative) social media branding:

Companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant. This doesn’t include the list of fake blogs, that’s on a different list.

See the list at: A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media

Last weekend I went shopping in Hamburg. When I saw a group of teens of which one wore this typical alternative clothes, it seemed to me that you have to wear Chucks to be alternative. This is somewhat schizophrenic, because alternative means being alternative to the mainstream. However, Chucks are mainstream in the alternative culture. Let’s take this thought further …

(click here and read more…)