Nothing quite encapsulates the feeling of the weekend like a nice, cold beer. So, in honor of the many few cold cans I emptied this weekend, I am going to continue with our series of 26 Social Media Marketing Examples in Detail by examining the second most popular beverage on college campuses across the US: Miller Lite. Now if I could just get this headache to go away…

We all know that this golden purveyor of thirst quenching deliciousness is triple hops brewed, but what is the “original lite beer” doing in the world of social media? Let’s take a moment to examine:

Last fall, after planning a 3-week trip, I was attempting to sublease my prime location of a Brooklyn apartment on Craigslist. While attempting to dodge the typical sketchy Craigslist behavior, I got an email from someone promoting a site called Air Bed & Breakfast.

Air B&B is a listing site for people who have spare rooms or empty apartments they’re looking to rent out. It builds on the concept of Craigslist, but adds a humanized touch that created a pretty profound sense of relief in me. I’d personally rather rent to or from someone whose photo and stats I can see, however, I guess some people like to live on the edge.

Air B&B is one of those sites that had the foresight to build a social element right into their business concept. Creating a holistic social media approach is always going to produce better results than adding it after the fact. Lisa calls that concept of last-minute addition “social media as a condiment.”

Creative writing has made me a better copywriter, and copy writing has made me a better creative writer. You might be asking, “what’s the difference?” and believe me, there are plenty of similarities, as both require creativity— but they are very different beasts altogether. Nonetheless, the skills you use to be creative and the ones you use in order to effectively communicate ideas often go hand-in-hand, and there are ways to develop both at the same time.

One social media tool that has taught me about writing more than others is Twitter. Twitter is a great resource for writers as far as finding content is concerned, but it can also be a wonderful way to hone your craft and creativity. Here are some of the ways you can use Twitter to become a better writer.

This post may cause internal upheaval at Ignite Social Media, but we needed some outside input. We just couldn't decide which Ignite guy looked the best in gold spandex. We know it's a difficult choice, but please try and help us out by making your selection.

There are a ton of Twitter sites aiming to attach a Twitter rank to a user profile, and frankly most of them are spotty at best. Follower count in my opinion is one of the worst metrics to go by with Twitter, and unfortunately that is a main cornerstone to many of the Twitter ranking systems out there.

Many of the Twitter grader tools pull in specific information that the API provides, and there is one major count that is not currently being passed through in an easily digestible format.

Favorites As An Indication Of Quality

Favorites is a way for users to bookmark tweets from their Followers. Twitter users who have had a large amount of people favorite their tweets can be a great indication of authoritativeness and quality.

I have attempted to create a DIY way to decide which twitter users in a given sector are beneficial to follow, engage etc. The following 4 steps will show you how to set this up on your own and allow you to target key influencers and twitter users likely to add to the conversation.

Twitter is on the rise. There’s no doubt about it, and it will continue to rise. One of the things about Twitter that makes it such an attractive service is the variable nature of ways it can be used. So you’re on Twitter, you’re starting to follow some people you’re interested in, and now you’re getting a few followers of your own. So what’s it worth? Who is out there? Well, I’ve found in my various endeavors with the Twitterati that there are only a handful of different kinds of users. Who are you reaching? Which ones are going to do anything for you or your brand?

I know enough about SEO to be dangerous to people like Brian Chappell, who is our expert, but this is sort of an SEO 101 post anyway. When I started Ignite Social Media in July of 2007, I could see pretty clearly that I didn’t rank very well for my name. While I’m no “John Smith,” I do have some competition for the term “Jim Tobin”. Battling me for first page results on Google are:

• Jim Tobin, the Nobel Prize winning economist, called “one of the giants of 20th century econ” (pictured above right);
• Jim Tobin, a baseball pitcher in the 30s and 40s who apparently was pretty good;
• Jim Tobin, the CEO of Boston Scientific (pictured below right), who apparently made $38.1m bucks in 2005 (mad…); and
• Jim Tobin, who was convicted in 2005 of trying to help George Bush’s re-election effort by jamming Democratic phone banks.

This is post two of a three part series on how to use widgets for marketing. Widget development can be costly and time consuming. It is important to ask the right questions before developing widgets. Here is somewhat of a checklist that needs to be answered if you are considering developing a widget as part of your social media marketing campaign.

1. Why would people want to use this?

This should be your first question when you decide to develop a widget for marketing purposes. What is the widget’s purpose? Does the widget provide value to the user? Is it a badge that allows a user to proclaim a significant statement? Most people treat their social profiles and blogs as a declaration of who they are. If you can’t think of a reason that someone in your target demographic would add this to their blog or social profiles then you might want to reconsider using a widget for social media marketing.

Recently I stumbled across the microsite for the “Filter For Good” campaign, which is a collaboration by Brita and Nalgene to convince people to stop buying bottled water. Well, I didn’t stumble across it, exactly. There was an ad on Pandora’s website pointing me in the right direction, and the same day a few other people in the office also found it in the same manner.

The site initially caught my eye because I noticed they had placed a content aggregation widget on their landing page, which led me to be curious about what other social media tools they were employing. Here’s a brief survey of what I found:

Continuing with the series, 26 Social Media Marketing Examples in Detail , I will cover The Library of Congress. Perhaps you may think that this isn’t the most exciting example to showcase on a Friday, but hopefully you will be just as pleasantly surprised as I was to see the neat ways the largest library in the world is sharing some of its unique content. And if you are a library geek like me, you’ll find yourself subscribing to some of these tactics by the time you are finished discovering them.

Here is what they are doing: