The airline created partnerships with a number of popular Asian restaurants in Sweden, to act as ambassadors for Air China. At each restaurant guests were encouraged to check-in with Air China on Facebook as they sat down to eat.

Check-ins were displayed on a leaderboard on Facebook and every week those with the most votes won two tickets to China. The campaign garnered over 3000 Facebook ‘likes’ and reached over a million consumers.

Check the case in the video below:

Source: Creativity-Online.com

Viral marketing is just a tool that has the ability to disseminate appealing messages in a short period of time and it’s about great, fresh and appealing content.

Very basically viral marketing is a successful link baiting – content specifically designed to gain attention and attracting natural links. A strategy is a must here as well, a great content needs analysis and research of the topic, keywords, and of course a purpose and targeted audience.

Even if the content is so awesome, it won’t spread on it’s own when uploaded to a site or a video portal. It needs a first kick: identify people, blogs, organizations that might be interested to share it.

The influential ones, the better. BUT these are usually more picky about the content. Of course don’t forget about microblogs.

And connect to all of them, the more personal, relevant and targeted message, the higher are the chances it will be picked up, published and…yes, become a viral sensation with millions of views and social mentions, thousands of tweets, hundreds of post and links.

All the above is not a mantra, but may be helpful and the content created will eventually stand as the best one in a particular sector of the industry. Easy, isn’t it?

Sources: voltierdigital.com; slideshare.net

You can guess the outcome of the survey: your outcome is often much higher than you’d expect…

How did they come up with the total number of slaves working for me?

Your total slavery footprint represents the number of forced laborers that were likely to be involved in creating and manufacturing the products you buy.

This is determined based on information regarding the processes used to create these products as well as investigations of the countries in which these stages of production take place for known slave labor (within these specific processes.) This number is compiled from multiple individual product scores.

How does the survey actually works?

The survey asks users 11 lifestyle questions. These include: Where do you live? What’s in your medicine cabinet? What’s in your closet? What gadgets do you own? How much jewelry do you own? Also, have you ever paid for sex? Once the survey is complete, the site estimates how many slaves make products you use.

Call + Response even released an iPhone app, which has some interesting features:

Much like Foursquare and other location services, the mobile app will allow you to check-in. The app doesn’t say no to purchase things, but if there’s a better option, it will tell you. The idea is if you go into Starbucks and you want to find a better option, check in using the app.

You can also take a picture of a product and Slavery Footprint will auto-populate a letter to the company politely demanding products to be made without slave and child labor.

We believe that The Slavery Footprint is a great way to raise the awareness around the slavery subject. The survey is a bit long, but the great usage of HTML 5, combined with an interesting App for iPhone and Android and the (shocking) results that come out of it, makes this an interesting case.

We’re looking forward to see the results of it! Check your Slavery Footprint here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Dutch National Maritme Museum certainly doesn’t think so. On 2 October 2011 The Dutch National Maritime Museum re-opens its doors. Their historic building, ‘s Lands Zeemagazijn, has been fully restored and modernised. They are proud of the result and can’t wait to show it you!

The Dutch National Maritime Museum wants to let everyone discover how the Dutch culture has been shaped by the sea. Their goal has not changed. But now they are doing things differently, with exhibits and presentations that clarify, stimulate and inpire. Everyone, young and old, expert and layman, can now have their own journey of discovery through the maritime past and present of our country. And of course, the replica of the East Indiaman Amsterdam is back at the quay waiting for you.

Check out their Facebook page here.

Sometimes there may be some weird people sitting in the audience, but obviously you don’t except this.

Social experiments expose people and their reactions in difficult, different or really uncommon situations and show their natural responses. Carlsberg used kind of experiment in stunts in various cinemas across Belgium.

Some innocent couples entered a cinema and wanted to take their seat, but the room was already almost full with, well,  not-so- friendly looking gentlemen. How will they react? Carlsberg. Only two seats left.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See? Overcome your fears and be rewarded. Amazing. And also a way to enhance customer brand experience.

In the beginning of this year, Carlsberg launched a new global positioning and baseline ‘That Calls for a Carlsberg’. Carlsberg is a well-known brand, but people didn’t necessarily know what the brand stands for.

With this global positioning Carlsberg wants to add essence to the brand and tell the Carlsberg story, so every market understands that Carlsberg beer stands for tradition, quality, a great taste… and making the right choices.

And some background info – to reinforce the baseline “That Calls for a Carlsberg” Duval Guillaume Modem proposed an original experiment and the result can be seen in Kinepolis and on-line, actually becoming an amazing viral, 870.000+ views since 22nd of September.

Sources: duvalguillaume.com

What we like about this social program? That Microsoft listened and changed it’s approach on the Windows7 introduction completely compared to it’s Vista launch…

Other things we like about the DNA and approach: The actionable insights and ‘intel’ that were derived from a social monitoring benchmark, that was performed as strategic start. Listening and fans first, well that sounds a bit like: beyond advertising and towards smart marketing.

Also nice way of combining the traditional and the social world: the increase of the Net Promoter Score from 4 to 8 in one year, accomplished by the social marketing strategy. Could be called: tangible asset or some form of ROI, right?

Nice fact: bottom-up engagement strategy seems to work as well. TV is nice, but some brands seem to survive without it every now and then, I guess.

With no TV, no Radio, no Print and just 10% of the total Vista budget the aided awareness, consideration and preference of Windows 7 doubled, while trial, purchase, use and advocacy tripled. Could be called ROI?

Maybe, some CMO’s still need to discover their Social VSPOT first, in order to meet a ‘social ROI’ that they know, and is in their marketing comfort zone.

‘Pulling them gently through the funnel’, sounds like a VSPOT that could give ROI satisfaction.

April 17^th, the unbelievable sophisticated brand Sony PlayStation collapsed and from that point millions of the most loyal customers stood in their underpants, stripped from their credit card data and their so loved product, PlayStation Network, which was completely shut down for multiple weeks. We show you an interesting infograph on what happened from that date and possible suspects.

This infographic was made by Hive Empire. A complete coverage about this subject, including 10 lessons learned, can be found here.

With this attack on what was thought te be  a fortress of online gaming, do you think gaming took a big hit in its popularity? Let us know!

The Nursery & Garden Industry of Australia has released a pretty cool social campaign designed to help people Increase their Plant/Life Balance.

The campaign starts off with a 20,000+ plant give away at major train stations across Australia, with each plant having a special code to be activated through a Facebook app that aims to combine the digital and physical words into an innovative social campaign experience .

Essentially, the Facebook App teaches you how to care for a plant on your desk at work, but it’s a little more, the app challenges you, your friends and co-workers to be part of a 12 week experience that provides an ongoing series of competitions, educational pieces, friend interaction and giveaways as you learn how to improve your Plant/Life Balance.

Check the video to see how it works:

My first thoughts were: “Who cares whether you have a plant at your workspace or not?”. But if you combine it to something smart like they’ve done in this campaign, you suddenly want one as well! Too bad they only give them away in Australia!

Above picture is from a website, created by a guy who thought it would be a great idea. And it worked. According to his blog this page got over 100.000 page views and almost 10.000 people creating their own version of the logo.

The way it started was that Gap had internally created a new logo that they were pretty proud of. When they shared this new career turn, the fans were not very pleased and they took the space they needed to let Gap know they didn’t like the new logo. Gap then quickly tried to turn this around by asking their fans to think up their own logo ideas for Gap. Well, they did. That was how the Make Your Own Gap Logo website was born, in addition to an immensely popular Twitter account.

I think it’s good that Gap realised the strength of the fan base and decided to stay with the old logo. In the end, your fans are what you need the most, they are the reason you are in business. I think making a major change like the logo should also be left to the fans. On the other hand you could say that the brand is running the business and should know something about business running, therefore the fans shouldn’t meddle in certain business decisions. What do you think?

The tweet contains an important ingredient for a successful viral marketing campaign: Sex Sells. Unfortunately not many brands can set up similar events like Bobbi Eden did, although it will definitely become viral as well, can you imagine:

Bill Gates: I will give a BJ to all my followers, together with @SteveBallmer @BobMuglia RT

Bobbi Eden is not the first woman to make an erotic oath during the 2010 World Cup. Lingerie model Larissa Riquelme promised to run naked through the streets of Paraguay if her team won the tournament. When the Paraguayans were eliminated in the quarterfinals, it seemed that the South American beauty’s vow would not be realized. However, Riquelme has decided to run nude after all, as a “present” to Paraguay’s soccer players.

This kind off buzz doesn’t stick to just those 100,000 perverts, who really thought that Bobbi would give them some oral action (imagine if you would be number 100.001…). It even made the news:

Source: SocialMediaConsultancy.nl