It’s here, and it’s not just a phone. Facebook's highly anticipated event today confirmed swirling rumors that the social network would release a product closely tied to a mobile device, and that product is Facebook Home.

"We asked ourselves if sharing and connecting are what matter most, what would your phone be like if it put your friends first?" Facebook stated. "Our answer is Home. Home isn't a phone or operating system, and it's also more than just an app. Home is a completely new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps."Continue reading...

A Canadian beer brand (ostensibly), in a stroke of marketing genius, has major alcohol brands jumping on its ad bandwagon promoting “Responsibly Beer.”

It’s actually an ad campaign by the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission and there’s no actual beer brand—just pure advertising to influence drinkers to do so responsibly.

The provincial AGLC went all-out with the ploy, creating an age-verification splash page, a Facebook page, Instagrammed "Responsibly" beer cans on Twitter and a Pinterest, too.

“The idea was to play on the very common slogan ‘drink responsibly’ to catch people’s attention, which will hopefully get them to our website enjoyresponsibly.ca to find out more about the concept behind the fictional product," said AGLC spokeswoman Michelle Hynes-Dawson, FoodBeast reports. It's "about giving a definition to 'responsibly' and moderation.”

“In terms of Facebook and Twitter, it worked well with the campaign concept and the demographic we are trying to reach," she added of the focus on young adults between 18 (the province's legal drinking age) and 24 years-old.Continue reading...

#Hashtags #Are #Coming #To #Facebook

— Team Coco (@TeamCoco) March 14, 2013

Facebook is taking on growing rival Twitter in the hashtag realm by integrating the iconic marker into its own platform as the battle for mobile usage and ad dollars heats up.

The social behemoth is testing allowing users to click on a hashtag to pull up all related posts on a trending topic or event, incentivizing users to stay logged in longer and see more ads. (Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year uses hashtags so users can sort photos.)Continue reading...

What do Veronica Mars and Patrick Robinson have in common? Kickstarter—their platform of choice for rebirth.

The power of the crowd just amped up as "Veronica Mars, the single best TV show about a smart-ass teen detective," may finally become a movie thanks to loyal and generous fans.Continue reading...

Facebook’s redesign of its News Feed, the largest since launch of the feature in 2006, gives users increased social savvy including new ways to catch up with friends by sorting through splashier photos, videos or music choices rather than being confined to parsing by "Top Stories" or "Most Recent." 

The new feeds include: "All Friends," "Photos," Music" and "Following." The mobile app will reflect the changes in the next few weeks. 

"This is a high-stakes move," notes the Chicago Tribune. "News Feed is indisputably the most valuable real estate on Facebook. It's the place that people get updates from their friends. And it's the place that Facebook is betting advertisers have the best shot at connecting with its 1 billion-plus users."Continue reading...

It's not exactly Hollywood and Vine, but it's close. Steve Madden is the latest hip brand to turn to Twitter's new microvideo-sharing app Vine, which streams 6 second video clips.

The brand will use the service—which recently earned itself a 17+ age rating and "contains age-restriced material" caveat after users started uploading pornographic videos—to promote a sneak peek of Madden's Spring collection and a one-day-only sale.

My #firstpost on Vine vine.co/v/bngJYEWnPjn

— STEVE MADDEN (@SteveMadden) February 7, 2013

Continue reading...

The Polaroid brand name has long been married to a seemingly ancient past that had cameras that actually printed physical manifestations of each image soon after they were taken. These days, photographers of all stripes, whether casually clicking on their phones or pulling out their high-end single-lens reflexes, have gone all-digital.

Now Polaroid—which hasn’t produced its iconic cameras or film since 2008 after going bankrupt and being sold off in 2001—is rebranding itself for the digital age and opening up branded stores that aid consumers in printing out their favorite digital works. Its first branded store, Polaroid Fotobar, has now opened in Delray Beach, Fla., just north of Boca Raton. The stores, announced at CES in January, aim to help folks “liberate” images from the “confines of their digital devices.”

Photography as a hobby has gained a lot of interest now that it has gotten much easier for people to tote around cameras and capture images in all sorts of locations, however it remains unclear how many consumers want to print out those images rather than just keep them all in purely digitized forms.Continue reading...

When an ad for a cookie contains a "Do Not Attempt" disclaimer, you know you've got marketing gold. 

As the Super Bowl went dark for nearly half an hour, the Oreo employees tasked with handling the brand’s social media during the game went quickly to work and came out with a tweet that won the company major kudos. “Power out?” it asked. “No problem. You can dunk in the dark.”

Oreo has since been showing its social strength, launching a “Cookie vs. Crème” debate on Instagram that encourages consumers to post images that lets the world know which side they fall on. That battle also raged on its Twitter and Facebook pages and is now being followed up on the brand’s YouTube page with a series featuring four inventors who have created “high-tech, robotic-like machines that divides the two for maximum cookie enjoyment,” Mashable reports.

The first inventor to be featured is physicist David Neevel, who explains his position in a monotone while his Rube Goldberg-esque machine gets the separating done. The following three inventors will each be introduced to the world in the next two weeks. The hope is to not only create a hunger for the cookie but for the brand to add some YouTube followers as well. "We are continuously looking at YouTube as a means to share Oreo video content to keep our fans engaged and excited," Janda Lukin, Brand Director for Oreo at Mondelez, told Mashable.

The YouTube channel, which has about 9,500 followers, has got some catching up to do. Oreo’s Facebook page has 32 million likes and its Twitter page has more than 77,000 followers. Of course the YouTube numbers could follow what happened to Oreo’s Instagram followers, which went from 2,200 before the Super Bowl to 87,000 after the game ended. Touchdown! Continue reading...