American Express points can get you a case of Bordeaux, a Sony camcorder, concert tickets, a food processor, and a slew of other things.

As a continuation of the brand's Social Currency campaign that launched in March, and its social marketing for AmEx OPEN, Amex cardholders now have a whole new area to choose when looking to redeem points: advertisements on Facebook.Continue reading...

It was a regular Church Social today on Twitter. Around 1:30pm EST today, Pope Benedictus XVI tweeted to the world via an iPad. The holy finger typed up the Twitter message above to promote the Vatican's just-launched news portal, news.va.

When in Rome, tweet as the (holy) Romans do. Yes, the Roman Catholic Church, one of the oldest establishments in existence, has entered the era of Web 2.Oh Holy Father.

Of the over 2 billion Catholics in the world, almost 15,000 followers are following the Vatican's Twitter feed for the News.va site, which features on its homepage today a picture of the tweeting pontiff and the headline "A Historic Tweet" of Pope Benedict (as he's more commonly known in English) tapping out his first tweet.Continue reading...

The generational divide is in the Weeds, as digital gamers and baby boomers can now engage via a virtual haze of ganja gone Facebook.

According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report, urban fashion designer Marc Ecko and Lionsgate Films have joined forces for Weeds Social Club, a Facebook social game to coincide with the June 27th return of Lionsgate's hit original series for Showtime, Weeds, which this season brings pot-dealing soccer mom Mary-Louise Parker to the Big Apple.Continue reading...

Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point partially focused on society’s influencers, the people we all listen to and are affected by for one reason or another. These are the individuals are always after and now there is a new tool for brands to find those important voices online.

Social-marketing platform Involver has partnered with Klout, a startup that measures the online influence of individuals across social networks, to help brands “interact with and reward their fans on Facebook” based on how much online clout they have with other users.Continue reading...

Their trucks may be small, but their social marketing makes a big impact.

A few days before gourmet ice-cream sandwich food truck operator Cool Haus sends one of its vehicles to a neighborhood in Los Angeles, the company scours the social web (including its Twitter and Facebook outposts) to find a fan in that locale that has a lot of connections.

Using what Jennifer Grappone, a partner with Gravity Search Marketing, called “geoflattery,” the well-located person is then offered a coupon to use at the truck if they will mention the truck’s existence to all of their online pals, according to PC World.

Welcome to the new world of marketing. Speakers at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle last week agreed that marketers would be looking to combine social media with location services and mobile marketing.Continue reading...

The marketing campaign for Super 8, the sci fi blockbuster from Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams that opens Friday, just keeps heating up. The teaser above, an exclusive on MTV.com, has Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler and their friends witness an epic train crash, sure to change the lives of every witness and all the small town inhabitants living nearby in Ohio.

In a heavenly triumvirate, 7-Eleven is joining forces with Foursquare to send someone into near-orbit space as part of a location-based promotion where customers can check in as often as once every three hours at any 7-Eleven store, in as many different stores as they like, with an ongoing tally on Slurpee and 7-Eleven's Facebook fan pages and Twitter.Continue reading...

Luxury brands that don't allow fans to post comments on their Facebook walls score lower for engagement (and "Facebook success") than those that do.

That's just one of the findings from a new report that rates the Facebook savvy of 100 luxury brands across Auto, Beauty, Fashion, Watches and Jewelry, and Spirits and Champagnes.

The L2 "Prestige 100" Facebook report, produced in partnership with Buddy Media, gives top marks to  the top three brands on Facebook are BMW, Clinique, and Audi, #1-3 respectively. Each brand was scored against more than 200 qualitative and quantitative data points and ranked across four criteria: Size & Growth, Engagement, Programming and Integration.

Automotive and Beauty brands nabbed the top seven spots in the ranking, with the Watch & Jewelry industry earning the lowest average Facebook IQ. 

The Top 10 luxury brands on Facebook, according to the new report:Continue reading...

Visigoths may have settled west of the Black Sea in the 3rd century A.D., but now the barbarians are ransacking FarmVille on behalf of Capital One.

Using the unruly early Germans in its advertising has proven a brand bonanza for Capital One. Now, the credit card brand is bringing limited edition virtual Visigoth items to FarmVille players for one week.

Players with a Visigoth statue on their farms receive coveted “Double Mastery” points on harvested crops and trees, augmenting the rate at which they can advance to higher levels in the game.  

Additional access to branded clothing – a Farmville first – lets players outfit their avatars with  Visigoth costumes (male and female), and earn “Farm Cash” by interacting with Capital One TV ads featuring the Visigoths, characters that were introduced by the brand in 2000.

Capital One’s social media activities, as with many financial service companies, are limited by regulations, but now they’ve joined the ranks of 7-Eleven, DreamWorks and Lady Gaga in digging into FarmVille with a branded tie-in.

Will Ostrogoths be next?