Social media has long been a digital driver for the hybrid sport/entertainment brand that is World Wrestling Entertainment. WWE now boasts more than 73 million Facebook fans, 30 million Twitter followers, one billion video views on YouTube and an average of 50 trending topics weekly on Twitter. 

Now WWE has tapped social video startup Tout to leverage and amplify WWE’s assets including television, live events, digital and print. The partnership has helped the WWE garner 100 million fans globally. One of them — 27-year-old Alex Guerrero, Jr, from San Antonio, Texas — became WWE's 100 millionth fan, winning a free trip to Monday Night Raw’s 1,000th episode on USA Network, which is broadcasting live tonight from St. Louis, Mo.Continue reading...

Remember Air Jordans? Or the Nike shoes in the “Back to the Future” films? Or, well, the bazillions of other Nike designs that have hit store shelves since the company changed its name from Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike back in 1978?

Well, that’s OK, you don’t need to remember anything anymore. Thanks to the beauty of online, you can save those brain cells that were hanging onto every detail and spec of all Nike products and now depend on Nike’s new Shoe Boxxxx game on Facebook.Continue reading...

Anheuser-Busch is hoping it can be more persuasive encouraging responsible drinking via Facebook than Pernod Ricard has been. Pernod's 2012 responsible-drinking campaign included a Facebook pledge on responsible drinking — a move that garnered only 115 "likes" after a week.

Now the American beer giant's new responsible-drinking offensive is testing Facebook to see if it can rally support for a social-responsibility message that it has been repeating for 30 years now. "With close to half a billion adults on Facebook, we see an enormous opportunity to expand our reach to newer generations of adult drinkers," stated Kathy Casso, VP of corporate social responsibility for Anheuser-Busch.

A new website, the optimistically-named NationofResponsibleDrinkers.com, asks adults to pledge their commitment to drink responsibly and share it through Facebook.

Pledgers are swearing allegiance to respect the legal drinking age, enjoy alcohol responsibly and "know when to say when" — or volunteer or find a designated driver if they've had too much. Indications of pledges are then plotted geographically on an interactive map as the "movement" spreads.Continue reading...

Ford has been moving from one major social-media marketing innovation to the next, so it comes as little surprise that the brand is mounting a major digital and social effort around the 2013 Ford Fusion mid-size sedan.

"Random Acts of Fusion" is a multi-platform, transmedia campaign that features Ryan Seacrest as its "emcee." It centers around a contest in which consumers will "Unlock" how Fusion is able to "transform" the lives of people who drive it, Crystal Worthem, manager of Ford Brand Content & Alliances, stated.

In its slowly unfolding, almost teasing aspect, unlike previous Ford campaigns predicated on quick social-media participation, the Facebook-centered campaign is building anticipation by inviting fans to register and then stay tuned: "What's in the box? Register below to find out. Ryan will send one to each of the first 2,500 people who sign up for Random Acts of Fusion. Then come back to Facebook.com/FordFusion on July 5th to find out what happens next."

The teaser campaign "is designed to invoke emotion, which the [car] design does," Scott Monty, Ford's director of social media, told brandchannel. And the promotion is built "to go with people where they go — desktop to mobile to digital to social to experiential."Continue reading...

As Wall Street embraces the inevitable tide of social media, fiduciary responsibility is taking on new parameters.

In a different kind of security risk as Morgan Stanley Smith Barney is stepping up its social media reach, granting its 17,000 financial advisers partial access to Twitter and LinkedIn over the next several months. The move expands a year-long experiment with 600 employees to test whether social media would be a helpful tool for its employees.

Of the 600 advisers involved in the trial, 40% cited new business through their social media use and of those 240, 60% said those new customers had more than $1m worth of assets. “The big takeaway is that it works,” commented Lauren Boyman, director of digital strategy at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, to the New York Times.Continue reading...

A lot has changed since Project Runway debuted 10 seasons ago on Bravo. For a start, it's no longer on Bravo — and TV is no longer a one-way, passive experience but more about hybrid TV/social viewing these days, of course. So P.R.'s TV home, US women's cabler Lifetime, is leveraging visual social platforms Pinterest, Instagram, Piictu and Viddy ahead of the 10th season debut on July 19. 

While still maintaining Facebook and Twitter marketing, Lifetime's "Make it Work" season launch campaign — a reference to P.R. mentor Tim Gunn's catchphrase — asks viewers “to share images and videos that inspire fans to showcase their fashion choices and encourage armchair designers nationwide to share their style" to spur buzz and tune-in.Continue reading...

Richard Branson’s diary was stolen last week. Promoted on Twitter and Facebook, the so-called "crimson bandit" behind the theft posted three videos on YouTube with this comment: "As willing as I am to play this game with you and your fans in Australia, South Africa, the UK and the US, you must know there's no way for you to catch me Richard!”

The game: “Solve the puzzles left behind on the participating Virgin Company pages and you could win amazing prizes.” It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that the bandit was no other than Branson himself, as he revealed in a tweet and on his blog. 

The graphics are fun, but as social media teaser campaigns go, Virgin could do a bit better than this — Americans, for instance, wouldn't know that "diary" refers to his planner or schedule.

If you hurry you can still see one way that Ford just keeps on using Facebook for paid advertising even as rival GM has pulled its paid ads (and invested in Manchester United as a way to reach Chinese car-buyers). And next week, you can read a report that presumably will underscore how many advertisers still agree with Ford, not GM.

Ford is currently running ads for Ford-logoed licensed merchandise such as t-shirts and toy cars with the Blue Oval logo that the company just got out of hock. The idea is to promote them for Father's Day, so they're June 1st through 10th in advance of Father's Day on the 17th. The ads — a first for Ford's licensing operations — appear on the right-hand side of Facebook user profiles to visit Ford and motor sports-related FB pages, according to Bloomberg.Continue reading...