These days, I don’t spend my money anywhere until I’ve read customer reviews. From a new apartment to skincare products, if I have a choice between my total lack of knowledge and someone else’s experience, I’m going to take their opinion into heavy consideration.

Online customer reviews are plentiful, and, according to Adweek, we care more about those reviews than what our friends say when it comes to making purchase decisions. Fortunately, there are plenty of people out there who love giving their opinions, present company included. Jeremy’s recent blog post on Yelp highlighted an entire community of people reviewing for no other reason than because they wanted to. The only motivation for those of us who love to review is our desire to showoff. And nothing is more gratifying for us showoffs than to be able to plaster our opinions all over our social networks, which brings me to the whole idea of “social commerce.” In future tense, any business selling products that doesn’t utilize some customer review functionality is absolutely going to see it hurt their bottom line. Customer reviews encourage purchases, without a doubt.

Get your tablets plugged in and your creative juices flowing, because we’re helping to launch a new contest today for our client Intel, to promote the release of the mobile edition of the Core i7 processor. The “Extreme Photoshop” contest is taking place entirely on Twitter, with help from our friends over at Twitpic.

Here's the Deal

Basically the idea is that you show off your Photoshop* skills by manipulating an image with the theme of “extreme.” Upload your masterpiece to Twitpic (be sure to use the tag “intelcore” on Twitpic, and the hashtag #intelcore in your Tweet) then get your friends and contacts to leave comments. Every comment counts as a vote, so the sooner you get started, the longer you’ll have to grab votes.

“Glee,” a new comedy series on FOX premiered on Wednesday, and with it came a slew of social media marketing tactics.  If you didn’t catch the premiere, you’re definitely missing out.

The show is about a high school teacher who takes over the school’s Glee Club and is determined to turn it into something great. The premiere caught a lot of attention as approximately 7.5 million viewers tuned in. And with all of the new social media techniques FOX is using in lieu of traditional advertising to promote “Glee”, I think the show will generate an even larger fan base by the end of the season.

Are you the biggest GLEEK?

This is what FOX is asking its viewers to keep the buzz surrounding the new series alive on the web. They have created the “Biggest Gleek Social Media Game” where users can earn points from activity across Twitter, Facebook and MySpace when they mention the words “glee,” “the biggest gleek game,” or any of the cast. On Twitter, fans can also use the hashtag #glee to gain points. You can also receive points when friends reply or re-tweet your Twitter updates, for linking to “Glee” with a personalized URL, by inviting friends to join, and by uploading “Glee” photos to Facebook. Fans can climb up the leader board in hopes of gaining the grand prize of a trip to LA to meet the cast. The contest ends on September 23rd, so it should be interesting to see the results.

I’m on to my second post in my social media nonprofit series and I decided to check out the American Cancer Society (ACS).  As a side note, I will soon venture outside of the cancer world in this series but I couldn’t resist this one.

I saw the ACS “More Birthdays” television spot awhile back and I thought they did a great job.  Maybe it’s because I’m a cancer survivor and I agree that another birthday is a big celebration, but I wanted to check out what else they were doing around this campaign.

I started at Morebirthdays.com.  

Back in July, I predicted that Facebook would eventually kill Twitter. The argument I was making was that Facebook was taking steps to make itself capable of doing everything Twitter does, plus much, much more. When you add in the fact that their user base is roughly 25x Twitters (about 250m to 10m), it becomes hard to see a compelling strategy for growth for Twitter.

To clarify, I'm talking about the long term. Even if Facebook is wildly successful, Twitter will likely continue to grow for the next 6-8 months at least before leveling off or beginning to dip (like MySpace is now).

Recently, I went to a new restaurant with my friend, in hopes that our experience would be one I could enjoy and talk about later. As it turned out, I did talk about my experience later, but I certainly not because I enjoyed it. (I won’t name the restaurant here, but if you are savvy, I’m sure you can find my review if you really want to.) Anyway, here are a few things I learned from my experience, and what local businesses can learn from consumer review sites like Yelp.

Today I would like to take some time to continue the 26 Social Media Marketing Examples and examine Taco Bell. As a fellow “offbeat” connoisseur and fellow funny man I can definitely relate to Taco Bell and the approach they have taken over the years. Humor has typically been at the forefront of many of their traditional campaigns.

Without much surprise they have transitioned well into the social sphere, although, could use some fine tuning and focus with their social assets.  Below I will highlight some of their efforts.

Taco Bell Facebook Page

In his eternal campaign to impart his SEO wisdom upon us copywriters here at Ignite, Brian Chappell is forever introducing us to tools that can help make us writers more proficient and productive. A big part of getting us aesthetically sensitive artsy types to use something is that it has to feel right as well as be unassuming enough to incorporate itself into whatever wacked-out creative process we’ve already established. 

Enter the Wordtracker SEO Blogger plug-in for Firefox. It’s the newest SEO blogging tool that I’ve been introduced to, and I love it. After you download it, it drops a tiny icon into the bottom right side of your Firefox browser window. When you click on it, a frame pops up on the left side of your window, cleanly designed and easy to read.

Continuing the series, "26 Social Media Marketing Examples in Detail", I'll review SELF Magazine and their efforts within the social space.  Since I've been on a workout regime lately, I had actually come across several of these efforts organically, so I hope to share my thoughts below.  Here goes:

Facebook

SELF's Facebook Fan Page is currently being used as a way to share more of SELF content in another medium.  I tend to like SELF content, and I think judging from the activity on the page, its audiences are using its content posted to the Wall as a forum for discussions.  Overall, the look and feel of the fan page mirrors that of the magazine.   As you can see, the following shows how SELF has transformed the left side bar of their Facebook fan page with images and content that lead to their website.  This continues as a visual down the entire left side bar of the page.  In my opinion, this is a good usage of the real estate, and doesn't quite feel like an ad. 

Over the course of the last few years, YouTube has emerged as the undisputed king of video sharing.  Millions of clips have been uploaded to the site since its launch in 2005.  YouTube has become a major venue for mainstream artists and would-be Internet celebrities from around the globe to advertise their many “talents” to the masses.  Marketers have begun to use the site quite effectively as well.

YouTube is, in many cases, the first stop for marketers looking to launch viral campaigns.  Ray Ban, Nike, Dove, Ecko, and Burger King are just a few of the brands that have flocked to YouTube to launch big budget viral marketing campaigns.  However, the site can seem crowded, cluttered, and a bit overwhelming. In addition, YouTube is often criticized because of the low quality of the videos submitted; hence, the question beckons, is there an alternative to YouTube?   Ladies and gentlemen, meet Vimeo!

Vimeo was launched in 2004 as a video-centric social network site that has garnered a very artistic, high-brow following.  Artists from around the world who aspire to be serious filmmakers and future Pixar innovators upload videos to the site in droves to the tune of 13,000 clips a day in an attempt to have their work seen, heard, and noticed. 

So, how can Vimeo be used as a social media marketing tool?  The uploading guidelines for Vimeo explicitly state that there is “no commercial use” allowed on the site.  It would seem all hope is lost when it comes to using Vimeo as a marketing tool, but not so fast.  There are significant exceptions.