Within these promotion guidelines, there is a clause which states that:

You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.

Which was a bit of a pain for agencies and brands who saw contests as a quick way to get their fan numbers up. That easy road of offering a holiday to Las Vegas to one lucky new fan was no longer possible. (’What? We actually have to provide engaging content or good customer dialogue instead? Noooo!’)

But of course, where there’s a rule, there’s a way to work around it.

Ford are about to launch their new SUV, the Explorer and have decided to announce details of the car not at a motor show, but on the Explorer’s Facebook page. As part of the campaign, they are sort of, kind of, a little bit offering the chance to win the new car if yo become a fan. But not in a way that convenes the rules.

Would you “like” us to give away an all-new Ford Explorer on Facebook? Help us reach 30,000 fans and Ford will give one away via an enter to win sweepstake launching later this month…”

So becoming a fan doesn’t enter you into the draw; it just helps get the numbers up to the magic 30,000 - at which point Ford will then run the sweepstake.

It’s a pretty effective way to get around the Facebook competition rules. Until Facebook change them again.

On the eve of the launch of a major new campaign, a couple of spoof sites popped up parodying the campaign’s central idea. (Some of the content is very funny.)

Going by online reports, Tourism Australia initially panicked, but their reaction since has been mature and sensible and shows an excellent understanding of social media. After all, the campaign has had a whole lot more coverage because of these spoof sites - that’s a whole lot of free PR. And if they had tried to shut down the parody sites, they would have been seen as miserable spoilsports.

It almost, almost, makes me want to visit Australia again.

More on http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.net

Here’s a rolling list of the World Cup tie ins that have appeared in the past few weeks. No doubt many more to come.

Visa - Life flows better with Visa

A fat man runs to South Africa. Looks lovely and nice to hear the Pixies.

Powerade- Rooney V Rooney

Great if you like seeing Wayne with his kit off. Otherwise pretty dull.

Mars - Work Rest Play for England

Ex-players big up the pride of wearing the shirt. Orchestral music. Emotion. Snore.

Wrighty’s World Cup X1

Promo for the Sun’s competition fronted by Ian Wright. As geezerish as you’d imagine.

Castrol and Ronaldo

A motorbike and a football player. Tedium ensues.

The Mag+ is a thoughtful concept for the digital future of magazines. The guys behind it have kept as true as they can to the unique experiences of magazine reading: it’s all about browsing and skimming.  So much so that there isn’t an embedded video in sight, which seems unlikely. Regardless, it’s a lovely piece of thinking rooted in the user experience.

Nothing like a natural disaster or charitable cause to get the hoaxers and cynical marketers active.

This patently stupid status update is spreading across Facebook:

This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for every time this is cut and paste as a status. You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help.

I know people are desperate to do something tangible, but copy and pasting a frankly ridiculous piece of bunkum on to a social network site isn’t helping anyone. Who starts this tosh and for what purpose?

Worse though are the companies making deliberately cynical attempts to capitalise on charity work.

The Box Prize Giveaway company, which has amazingly weaseled its way into the top 20 fan pages on Facebook, is trying to leverage some of the interest in breast cancer which has recently spread through the site. Their offer:

“We will donate $10,000 for every one million new fans added to our page by January 31, 2010″.

For a company that’s business model relies on high volume participants this is a great way to boost numbers. A million fans for $10,000? What a cheap piece of marketing! And all wrapped up in a warm charitable blanket.

Here’s a counter offer: I’ll laugh out loud for ten seconds for every million people who un-fan the Box Prize Company. Now that would be charitable.

Bra pic from Tracey’s photo stream.

A fun piece of research from Prospect Magazine has concluded that UK twitter users are mostly liberal bleeding heart environmentalists that hate the Daily Mail.

It hasn’t really surprised anyone who has followed the various scandals which have recently spread across twitter: their consistent element has been a desire to put a boot into the right wing and/or elite.

But are users of other social sites as easy to pigeonhole? Well, let’s see.

vimeo
You are way too cool for YouTube - it’s full of teenage halfwits - and instead use vimeo to share videos of obscure art installations, cult 1980s cartoons and the derivative TV commercials for pet food you worked on before being made redundant.

myspace
You are a spammer. And not a very good one.

digg
You are a computing student from Montana who can crack a Starbucks wifi network in minutes but doesn’t have the confidence to actually talk to the cute girl behind the counter.

bebo
You are 13 or, um, like 13 year olds.

last.fm
You are a Swedish teenager with black hair who will happily spend hours telling you why In Rainbows is the best Radiohead album.

friendster
You are the only one here.

friendfeed
You are a social media consultant who has more friends online than you every will in the real world. You would quite like to own a segway.

4chan
No one knows who you are. It’s probably best.

facebook
You are a human being on planet earth.

Any more? Share in the comments

“I used to love asos! Have you discovered Motelrocks yet? They have 20% off with code: xxxx. Check it out!!!”

Thanks!!!

I hadn’t discovered MotelRocks; what a thoughtful suggestion from… erm, who are you?

No shock to see that fashionlover090 is a spammer targeting twitter followers of rival (and much larger) fashion retailer ASOS. Regardless of whether this is an automated script or worse, a naive copy & pasting intern, it’s pretty pathetic. Couldn’t they at least personalise the spam? Or have a few variations on the theme?

Although I’ve got to hand it to them, 229 updates in one day is impressive.

Who thought this was a good idea? Presumably Motelrocks are paying an agency for a ‘Twitter outreach campaign’ or a ’social media engagement programme’. Something which sounds fancy but is boiled down, in this case, to Twitter spam.

I particularly like the “I used to like ASOS” line. A subtle suggestion that the competition is past it.

It’s work like this which shows how old dogs can’t always learn new tricks. It’s like taking email campaign thinking and applying it to a social platform. Send out one message to as many people as possible. Some of it will stick, won’t it?

Facebook Fan Pages are a great way for companies to manage this communications and the smart ones are doing really interesting experiments here.  Below, I’ve looked at 11 brands which are playing around, with different levels of success.

Threadless.com

These guys are amazingly innovative with their online stuff and this Facebook presence is no different. Facebook users can comment on each T-Shirt and there’s an embedded shopping component. Seamless and fits just perfectly. Threadless rule.

Best Buy
Best Buy really get the network potential of Facebook. You can browse the catalogue within the site, but crucially, you can then ask your friend set whether you should purchase a particular item. Their Gift Idea app also integrates with the Facebook wall function to great effect.

Adidas
This isn’t much more than a campaign site really but what’s interesting is the way Adidas localise the content for different markets.