Religion is trumping pop culture on Facebook, as the "Jesus Daily" page continues to have more active fans and engaged followers than the official Justin Bieber page.

According to AllFacebook.com, during the last three months, more people have “Liked,” commented and shared on Jesus Daily than on any other Facebook page, including the Bieb’s. With almost 8.6 million fans, Jesus Daily counted 4.3 million interactions in a single week, compared with 866,000 interactions from Bieber’s 36 million fans.

Jesus Daily launched as a hobby in 2009 by social media savvy North Carolina diet doctor Aaron Tabor, who learned many of his marketing moves by pitching his diet business on the QVC home shopping channel.Continue reading...

Daily Deal sites are among the fastest growing online vertical. Leaders like Groupon, LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe dominate a category that has attracted $1.6 billion of VC investment this year so far, according to the most recent 2011 Daily Deal Investment Index.

“Globally, there are more than 3,000 total daily deal companies, including more than 1,000 in China, more than 900 in Europe, and more than 600 in South America," according to dailydealmedia.com.

Groupon expects August U.S. sales to rise 12% over last month, with marketing expenses down 20% and declining, as the brand’s focus moves from subscriber acquisition to securing paid customers. Its CEO, Andrew Mason, recently addressed rumors surrounding an imminent IPO: “When I read some of the press this weekend, I realized a rational person could read this stuff and wrongly conclude that we’re in trouble. The irony is hopefully clear: We’ve never been stronger.”

Mason accused competitor LivingSocial.com of “buying gift certificates from national retailers and reselling them to users to give the appearance of a 50 percent off deal,” to which LivingSocial spokesman Brendan Lewis replied: “No Groupon executives have access to our internal revenue or financial numbers, and thus any claims made by such executives should be met with deep skepticism.”Continue reading...

SocialTwist has just hit a key benchmark, partnering with 100,000 brands and websites to create “customer advocates” to help relay deals and other marketing messages.

In the past year, 4.8 million customer advocates have used the platform for referrals, offers and content sharing with friends.

Also making the service a player to watch: Sanjeev Agrawal, former head of product marketing for Google — and the former VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft) and CEO of Aloqa (acquired by Motorola) — has just signed on as its president.Continue reading...

Pfizer was compelled to take down its Facebook page after being hacked July 19th by U.K. hackers, The Script Kiddies, who claimed responsibility for the social misdeed on Twitter. The group's grievance, apparently, is that (in their words) the pharma giant is “A Corrupt Corporate American Company guilty of cutting corners and killing people.” Such are the charming times we live in.

A screenshot of the hacked posts shows the Pfizer logo smeared in red (above) and information about Pfizer's $2.3 billion settlement of a U.S. investigation of its drug-marketing practices in 2009. 

Hackers have been targeting government agencies and major corporations in the past several months — if you haven't read about Operation Shady RAT, Vanity Fair has a good backgrounder — so the fear is this attack is just the tip of the online iceberg for Big Pharma, an industry that was already tiptoeing (read: reticent) to embrace social media.Continue reading...

Millions of people have joined the tablet revolution, but as always, the question remains: What’s next? The mysterious TabCo claims to have the answer — with its circular (maybe) product, and its circular (definitely) marketing.

With more than 18,000 followers on Twitter, the rumor mill is buzzing and people on the social web are are beginning to recognize TabCo as the newest and most aggressively marketed product in the tablet sphere.

Aside from an active YouTube channel and social media accounts, they’re now infamous for skywriting “Forget the fruit – Visit www.whoistabco.com” outside Apple’s WWDC 2011 last month, as shown above.Continue reading...

The next retail marketplace is online. No, not real-world goods purchased via the web, but virtual goods purchased online for your virtual life. It's a brave new world that Warner Bros TV is leaping into by releasing lines of "branded virtual goods" based on some of its programming.

The Time Warner-owned TV hit-maker just announced a partnership with Virtual Greats aimed at creating "custom branded boutiques for the initial launch of branded virtual goods from popular series The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and Pretty Little Liars." So what the heck is a "branded virtual good?", you ask?Continue reading...

Celebrities getting paid for tweeting brand mentions is nothing new in the US.

Last year we looked at sponsored tweets middleman Sponsored Tweets and its stable of ready-and-tweeting celebs. We found famous names such as NFL star Nick Mangold and Lindsey Lohan getting, respectively, $1,764.75 to $2,985.80 per tweet. Even Kim Kardashian was available for the right price.

Twitter, meanwhile, is opening the floodgates to brand marketers by ramping up "promoted tweets" next month — a move that will, according to All Things D, "give marketers a chance to place their message directly in front of users who follow particular brands, via ads that will show up when a user first logs on to Twitter.com."

But over in the UK, they're still struggling with product placement tweets from celebrities. Now, the ISBA, which represents British advertisers, is pondering producing a guide on celebrity Twitter endorsements for its members. But how enforceable could any rules possibly be?Continue reading...

Lacoste is wooing its Facebook fans with a variety of original content. Above, a message from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, who remixed their hip-hop classic The Message for the Eau de Lacoste L.12.12 fragrance campaign; below, a one-on-one with a Gossip Girl.Continue reading...