It’s clear that social-media has reached a saturation point in our popular culture, but it’s surprising that so many businesses, especially SMEs still find it hard to commit to full-time social-media marketing strategies. The good news is that with each week, more big brands continues adopt new and exciting social-media marketing strategies, which allows us to provide more examples and case studies for those that are still on the fence.

FORD SPENDING 25% OF MARKETING AVENUE ON DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA
David Kiley wrote a Business Week article describing an effort by world renowned car brand Ford, investing 25% of its marketing avenue on digital and social media, to reach out to potential customers around the world.

Perhaps Ford’s biggest single bet on digital and social media has been the Fiesta Movement, a program that began in 2008, 18 months before the cars will actually arrive in dealerships. Ford gave 100 European Fiestas to people to drive and live with. The results of the blogging, Facebook-ing, YouTub-ing and Tweeting by those people, plus the echoing of those messages by the blogosphere, followers, etc. has been an eye opener. Consider this: The awareness level of Fiesta, a car that is not even in the U.S. yet (though it has been a fixture in Europe for years), is 37% among Generation Y, according to Ford-commissioned surveys. That is about equal to the awareness level of Fusion and Flex, models that have received, especially in the case of Fusion, hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional media spend. “The Fiesta movement has changed the way the whole company views media planning and buying,” Farley said at the conference.

Here we have one of Ford’s online video storytelling, featuring the Ford Mustang muscle car.

Gary Dilts, senior vice president of J.D. Power’s global automotive practice, who is former sales chief at Chrysler, says he would have thought any company “crazy for starting such a marketing program 18 months ahead of showroom launch.” But, Dilts added, “I think the Fiesta campaign, and the other digital video Ford is running is already a case study for any marketer in or out of the auto industry.” Up to now, Monty’s responsibility as Ford’s social media chief has been concentrated on North America. But he is gearing up to take his job globally, coordinating social media practices among Ford’s global operating units, all of which, under CEO Alan Mulally and Farley, are much more answerable to Michigan headquarters than in the past.

COCA-COLA CAMPAIGN SENDS 3 BLOGGERS AROUND WORLD
Forbes featured an article by Emily Fredrix, soft drink giant Coca-Cola is launching a new social media push that will send three bloggers to over 200 countries to uncover what makes people happy in as part of its "Open Happiness" campaign.

The effort, dubbed “Expedition 206,” marks another venture by a big-name brand to delve deep into social media. Such efforts, which include blogging, posting updates on Twitter and adding videos to YouTube, can generate talk by consumers and sales, companies hope.

The around-the-world journey is ambitious, involving stays of just a day or two in each of 206 countries, all where Coca-Cola ( KO – news – people ) is sold. The three people – who will be chosen in an online vote starting Wednesday – will spend the entire year traveling. Coke will pay their travel expenses and pay them a salary. It wouldn’t disclose the cost of the venture.

COCA COLA’S URL SHORTENER
And coke’s efforts do not stop there. Mashable featured an article by Adam Ostrow, describing the new steps taken by soft drink giant Coca-Cola, in creating a URL shortener of their own for the convenience of twittering and flexibility – as this allows them to maintain their own branding, something that we envision more companies will likely do in 2010. Speaking of which, we have our own URL Shortening Service that allows us to brand the framed links – UR1 – where we have some very interesting plans laid out for its future…

URL shorteners are a dime a dozen, and some industry onlookers actually believe they are bad for the Web. But in reality, if you’re sharing links on a service like Twitter, you need one, at least for the moment. So how do you choose? Some services offer detailed analytics (like bit.ly), while others offer schemes that can get you more traffic ( DiggBar and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr for example). Coke moving to its own shortener is a big deal in this little corner of the Internet. While for most people, tinyurl, bit.ly, or any other third-party service will continue to be more than sufficient, big brands and celebs certainly have an opportunity to benefit by launching their own shortener. With the relative ease with which it can be done, expect Coke to be far from the last major name to go this route.

BIG BUSINESSES HIRE TWEETERS
The Times and Democrat highlighted a Heather Lalley, describing a new marketing strategy by big businesses – hiring Tweeters that enable them to expand the business to greater horizons around the world, using various social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Multinational corporations, such as Ford Motor Co. and Coca-Cola Co., are beginning to use social media to increase positive sentiment, build customer rapport and correct misinformation, says Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s Atlanta-based director of social media.

“Having the world’s most-recognized brand, we feel like there’s an obligation or a responsibility when people are talking about us, we have a duty to respond,” Brown says.

STARWOOD LAUNCHES TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND IPHONE APPS FOR LOYALTY PROGRAM
Starwood have launched applications for many of the major social media platforms; such as Twitter, Facebook and iPhone, to enhance its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty program, as featured in an article by Mary Elizabeth Hurn in DM News.

The social media tools, which can also be downloaded by non-members, include SPG TripShare, a Facebook photo application developed with Buddy Media . Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, explained that Starwood’s goal is to create loyalty among and retention of current customers, “but getting new members is always great.” The apps can be accessed at www.spg.com/stayconnected. SPG also launched a travel tips “mash-up” using Twitter and Google Maps. SPG Insider enables travelers to Tweet about restaurants, bars and entertainment destinations around the world from their Twitter application of choice. The app then uploads the tip and places it on the map using longitude and latitude coordinates.

TWEETING PLANES
In an extremely interesting article from Mashable by Pete Cashmore, we find that now, even commercial jets are making waves by applying the benefit of Twitter for its passengers.

Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up! ). .

Typical status updates read “flying over San Francisco Intl, California 94030, USA on United Airlines” or “flying over Grantsville, UT 84029, USA on United Airlines”. It seems the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information.

EARNING FANS VERSUS BUYING EYEBALLS
An interesting discussion about the use of social media and its potential ROI in comparison to the old days and what we can expect from new engaged audiences took place in Marta’s article featured on the Espresso blog:

Instead of relying on traditional advertising to introduce their feminine hygiene products to teenage girls (who represent a massive pool of prospective life-long customers) or wasting money “selling” to them, P&G created BeingGirl.com , an online community where teenage girls can “Learn and share about growing up and puberty while having fun playing girl games and listening to the latest teen music”. Instead of bombarding their target audience with ads or pouring dollars and resources into “campaigns,” P&G is investing in conversations; in context that supports the growing library of content (both user- and professionally-generated) around the issues that their target audience cares about. The challenge in moving from traditional to new marketing is in weaning oneself off of the addiction to “buying eyeballs” instead of “earning fans.

RAKING IN THE MILLIONS USING SOCIAL MARKETING
The Bonafide Marketing Genius Strikes Again; explaining that tweeting to promote a low graded movie was all it took to rake in millions at the movie box office. If this does not prove the value of social-media, is there really anything left to say…?

Remember the Blair Witch Project? Rumored to be “the most profitable movie in US history”, Blair Witch cost $38,000 to make and raked in $48 Million in its first weekend thanks to an expertly orchestrated buzz campaign in the pre-Facebook era (or was it just plain dumb luck? Thoughts?) And so the clever folks at Dreamworks (or whomever they hired to promote the film? Anyone know?) have done turned their artillery on hungry-for-good-horror fans across the social web to promote Paranormal Activity, another low-budget film ($11,000) that screened in just 160 theaters last weekend… and grossed $7 million.

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