Facebook has become an epicenter for the “wisdom of friends” where we all share and influence each other.  Savvy brands know to “fish where the fish are” and enable customers to interact with their products in an environment where they are already spending a lot of time.

With holiday retail in full swing and cyber Monday sales rising 14% over last year (Coremetrics), brands who are social and who connect the shopping experience with the Facebook social graph will win.

We are proud to work with Buy Buy in partnership on their Facebook presence to help provide not only conversation but helpful utility.

Best Buy Facebook Page, Get Advice

Our “Shop + Share” application allows users to shop for Best Buy products and share with or get advice from their Facebook friends. By leveraging the Remix API, Best Buy is one of the first major national retailers to make a true social shopping experience on Facebook.

“Fast Company” recently cited Best Buy as a brand doing it right by tapping into peer recommendations.

Social shopping is imperative for retail brands as they need to provide experiences that make it very easy for fans to tap into the knowledge of their friends, whose opinions are more likely to make an impact on their purchasing decisions.

Since 1988, as World AIDS Day is observed on each on December 1st.

Vitrue is proud to be working with (RED)™ , a simple idea that transforms our collective power as shoppers into a financial force that helps those affected by HIV in Africa.

(RED) product partners include powerhouse brands like Starbucks, American Express, Converse and Apple – just to name a few.  Our spending dollars when buying red products from these brands delivers a huge impact on the fight against AIDS.  To date over $140 million has been raised.

Yesterday’s observation was tremendous and the social media response was significant.  Major pushes on Facebook and Twitter to turn them each RED – literally. As “Mashable” cited, you could show you support by changing your profile picture on Facebook or tweeting with red hash tags – even Twitter turned their home page red.

Today the (RED) Facebook page has toped over 380,000 fans and the Twitter followers are over – 914,000 - such powerful adoption.

Using social media to do social good just makes sense.  People connect to causes and brands that are good and do good.  Any effective communication strategy is tied to giving consumers the power to express their values and emotions by doing things that matter in their lives.

Social media environments provide an unparalleled environment to make social change.  We are all influenced by social actions and simply fanning, commenting, liking, tweeting power incredible social awareness and change.

We are proud to support (RED)’s Facebook page.  By making it easier for consumers to interact with brands and entities that give back, it is a powerful way for charities to spread their message going forward. With brands and charities showcasing content and by simply sharing something you think is cool you are powering significant social change – be it a thought, a video testimonial, or an inspirational song.

We enthusiastically welcome interest and inquiries from other charities so that we can provide expertise on how to best leverage this marketing medium as we firmly believe social media and social good need to be tied together.

We wanted to provide some simple yet powerful takeaways of where we see social media headed as we head into 2010.

We have never seen a hotter market or a more fascinating time – as social media is truly changing how we interact with each other let alone our favorite  brands.

What we see working at Vitrue is staying committed to aggressively driving social media marketing forward and continually striving for strategic and creative new ways to meet and exceed evolving client and market needs as being social is now intrinsic to mainstream culture.

This morning we saw a great article in “Ad Age”, Starbucks Rings in the Holidays With Big Social-Media Push, that hit on one of our core trends.

“It’s like we’ve taken the version 1.0 of last year and now we’re really doing it at scale and going to a lot more places where our customers already are,” said Chris Bruzzo, VP-brand, content and online at Starbucks. “People are saying this is going to be a big year for social media and we’re a microcosm of that. Whereas last year it was a curiosity, this year it’s a core part of the program.”

So what do we anticipate seeing more of next year?
Check our top trends and let us know what you think will shape the future of social media.

Vitrue’s Seven Trends for Social Media in 2010

1. “Grass Roots Social Media” - push to customize and segment, making more localized and more relevant
2. Integration of social media will become the norm/become fabric of corporate marketing programs – what typically was siloed management of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, social media will be come much more integrated – like in the 90s for ad serving  whole departments are being created to manage social media. Testing and trials are over. It is here to stay.
3. Social communications sophistication - companies will be employing some of the same tactics they have used with email marketing over the past 10 years.  They have learned about messaging their customer base from years of trial, and now will be using much of the same process and policy.
4. Brands going global in their social strategy
5. Platform approach – brands need management systems and scale – everything is getting more social at an exponential rate
6. “Wisdom of friends” vs the “wisdom of crowds” purchasing influence continued to be shaped more and more by our peers
7. Facebook continues to evolve as the “identity platform” as its social currency, interactivity and its maturing portability is unmatched

Facebook recently updated their policies for promotions and sweepstakes and there are two important changes for brands to know.

First, promotions run on Facebook must be located “on an application box in a tab on a Facebook Page” or “on the canvas Page of an application on the Facebook Platform”.  Secondly, there is a new requirement that all promotions must be submitted to Facebook at least 7 days prior to the start of the promotion AND receive Facebook approval. This means that brands will no longer be able to run promotions and sweepstakes within the News Feed. These changes to the Promotion Guidelines are very much in line with a very important Facebook goal: improving the quality of the Facebook environment.

All of the recent Facebook changes are an attempt to streamline the Facebook feed and improve the quality of the user’s experience.   With such massive and global adoption, the Facebook stream has become cluttered.  We all have Facebook “friends” that we haven’t spoken to in ages and with whom we rarely if ever interact.  The Live Stream gets filled up quickly with updates that just aren’t meaningful to a user and reduces the quality of the Facebook experience.

E mail is another communication channel that has had to deal with this very issue.  Facebook is attempting to proactively deal with its own version of junk mail and spam and re-launching the News Feed as an algorithmically determined summary of what is important to a user based on which friend or brand that user interacts with the most which could end up being a huge benefit to Facebook users.

Clearly Facebook will need to continue tweaking the algorithm as many users have been vocal about their displeasure with the change, but as Facebook continues to improve this area and as users grow more accustomed to the experience, the News Feed could be a positive development for users.  Facebook should be commended for focusing on improving the quality of the user experience.

So how is this change related to the change in the promotions policy?  And what impact does this change have on brand marketing on Facebook?

Previously brands were allowed to run promotions with very little regards to the quality of the promotion.  Even low quality promotions were guaranteed to appear in a user’s stream.  Many promotions have been wildly successful at gaining fans but have had the side effect of cluttering up the stream.  While this offered an essentially free marketing channel to brands, it did very little to improve the quality of the Facebook ecosystem.

While some brands have stuck to using the least costly methods of fan engagement, Facebook has seen other brands invest in creating high quality promotions and applications that users want to interact with often.  Facebook recognizes that its very existence depends on creating a high quality user environment.

Facebook is the platform, but without content that users want to engage with on a regular basis, it would become less valuable over time. By requiring brands to run promotions via the application box on a Facebook Page or on the canvas Page of an application, Facebook accomplishes two goals.  First, it helps to keep the stream clean. Second, it signals that Facebook is committed to Pages building app-based promotions.  If your promotion is of low quality and not engaging (i.e. not created in a way that Facebook users want to interact with it), it is unlikely that your promotion will make it into a user’s News Feed.  That means that brands must be willing to invest heavily in building really cool promotions and apps if they want to effectively market to Facebook’s 300 million users.

Facebook’s recent changes to its promotions policy coupled with its recent efforts to clean up the stream will go a long way toward improving the quality of the user experience.  As a brand, you must ask yourself if you are ready, willing and able to build a high quality Facebook presence?

In partnership with Publicis and General Mills, Vitrue launched an engaging Facebook presence for Yoplait’s “Know Your Girls” breast cancer awareness and education campaign.  Over the past 11 years, Yoplait has raised over $22 million for breast cancer and this year strives to take it a step further by tapping into Facebook to educate and unite women.

By establishing a comprehensive Facebook hub that is filled with information, Yoplait is helping empower and inform women as well as provide them the tools virally educate and raise awareness within their own social circles.

The campaign’s creative touts a strong message in a fun, sassy and truly all-girl manner of “Know Your Girls”.

The comprehensive Facebook presence enables women to connect and share through four different applications, all of which integrate into the publisher feature of a user’s wall enabling their social actions to organically spread and create awareness.

Yoplait Pledge - Know Your Girls

The pledge tab asks young women to “pledge” to get to know their body through education and awareness.  For each pledge executed, Yoplait will donate 10 cents to  the Susan G. Komen for the Cure® for research on young women. For every pledge received by October 31, 2009, Yoplait will donate 10 cents to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, up to $100,000.

The “Your Girls” tab allows you to add a photo of “Your Girls” as an empowering, proud and oh-so-sassy statement. No need to worry – no boys allowed – this is a gender-gated Facebook application.

Yoplait Lower Risk - Know Your Girls

The “Lower Risk” tab, provides fun and educational messages that can be downloaded and printed or shared with friends on Facebook.

The “Quiz” asks users a series of questions to test their knowledge of breast cancer and prevention and displays key facts after each answer to help expand knowledge.

The wall posts coming show the unified passion for a cure and each message provides another unique face and inspiring story behind the ongoing fight against breast cancer.

It’s our hope that this page and its message continue to grow and be shared throughout Facebook’s vast community.  And, hopefully, with programs like Yoplait’s “Know Your Girls”, that one day every woman will be empowered through education and awareness to take a stand against breast cancer.

This initiative is especially near and dear to my heart as my mother is a breast cancer survivor, and I know first-hand how early detection—through awareness, education and empowerment—can save your life and the lives of those you love.

Help us spread the word.

Kellogg Cares - Feeding America

This summer we were proud to announce our partnership with Kellogg, Facebook and Ashton Kutcher’s production company, Katalyst – for the Kellogg Cares initiative in support of Feeding America. 

We are now happy to say that the program has won a Sammy Award for “Best Social Good Contribution” from digiday for overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in social advertising, media and marketing. 

We hope that you can check out the Facebook presence and help us continue to raise awareness for this important cause.  As we stated before, by simply fanning the page or offering a comment your actions have a powerful and critical ripple effect.