Tesco’s first game on Facebook, called Delivery Dash, is seeking to boost engagement through the theme of customers making a delivery. The game which launched last week, primarily targets female shoppers, who compete against the clock to pack shopping carts for friends – with increasing levels of skill required.

The average player spends 30 minutes a session on the game. The game lets Tesco “‘have a conversation with customers’ beyond a more direct ‘selling message’” David Price, Tesco head of social media commented, citing research that profiles the average, casual social gamer as a 41-year-old woman “which, he said, ‘sits nicely’ with the demographic of Tesco shoppers.”Continue reading...

Brands are ‘pinning’ it on Pinterest with increasing savvy, and although the site doesn’t carry advertising or sponsored content, publishers and brands are quickly getting hip to how to leverage the social thirst for sharing images to drive awareness and traffic to their own digital touchpoints.

With estimates of 18.7 million unique visitors in March, (according to comScore), “Pinterest has a message for the media: a picture is worth a thousand words," notes today's New York Times, or given Twitter's 140-character message limit, "about seven Twitter posts.”

Whole Foods, West Elm, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Gilt Home,  L.L.Bean, and even the National Pork Board are all early Pinterest adopters in what comScore VP Andrew Lipsman calls “the rise of the visual Web.” As he comments to the Times, “Pinterest is creating sort of a meritocracy of what’s visually appealing. Brands are scrambling and trying to figure it out. They know it’s going to be big, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to use it.” Well, they're starting to figure it out.Continue reading...

Think you're witty on Twitter? We've got bad news for you. Twitter users say only a little more than a third of the tweets they receive are worthwhile. Most are not worth reading at all, while 25% of tweets are actively disliked, according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech.

The new study (the aptly-titled "Who Gives a Tweet?") reveals some surprising data about the two hundred million Tweets posted globally on Twitter every day, and the factors that lead users to tune out or unfollow.

Twitter users participating in the study reported liking only 36% of overall tweets; actively disliking 25%; and having no strong opinion about 39% of tweets, indicating a waste of the tweeter and, er, tweetee's time.

The reasons cited for the 25% of disliked tweets: using too many hashtags; constant, boring updates about where people are (especially those "I'm at..." updates from airports, restaurants and other locations); and users who habitually complain. The most-liked tweets?Continue reading...

Nielsen just released a pair of research reports, “Reaching the Right Audiences Online: Early Findings from Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings,” and “Beyond Clicks and Impressions: Examining the Relationship Between Online Advertising and Brand Building,” that bring to light several emergent trends:

• While some websites perform well in reaching a target audience, nearly all campaigns reach a large number of consumers not valuable to the brand advertiser

• Advertisers wanting a strong online brand presence must move beyond traditional web metrics to verify if their money is paying off 

• Online delivers audiences more effectively than some popular TV shows.

• Click-through rate is not the right metric to measure brand impact – as virtually no relationship exists between clicks and brand metrics or offline sales

• Brand metrics for online campaigns can predict offline sales impact.Continue reading...

Conde Nast's Social Sidekick got off to an iffy start this week when Business Insider dismissed it as a "non-starter."

"It's a nice little feature - one that will increase engagement a bit and allow advertisers some flexibility - but is it really changing anything? Nope."

Kicking the tires on the digital sidecar to Conde Nast's vast array of content, Gucci is the exclusive launch advertiser for Social Sidekick through the end of October.Continue reading...

Solve Media, the TYPE-IN advertising company, has launched Solve Media Insights to offer marketers and advertisers the ability to survey consumer interactions with CAPTCHA ads and measure the effectiveness of consumer recall of key brand messages typed in, as seen in the above video.

Toyota tested the product for its January campaign to promote Toyota Care, its free maintenance plan with 24-hour roadside assistance. A survey with five possible answers to gauge recall was served, by Solve, to nearly 2,000 opt-in respondents.Continue reading...

Google has just unveiled a new tool for users, companies and brands to generate conversations and interact with consumers. Think of it as a virtual Speakers' Corner, except instead of offeirng a soap box in London's Hyde Park, you've got a platform to engage with the world.

Members can post a discussion topic on their YouTube channel page and solicit input as well as community participation, to crowdsource or vetnew ideas. The channel owner can moderate in real-time and select which questions they'll respond to. YouTube users can embed the module onto their channel.

An interview with President Obama and the World Economic Forum in Davos both have used the tool to debate economic and social issues. But now, anyone and any brand can exponentially increase their reach, such as what Stanford University is doing in its YouTube channel. Clearly, it's going to help advertisers and brand marketers engage customers in the world's second biggest search engine (after YouTube owner, Google, that is). Continue reading...