What follows is an excerpt from a “Digitas Perspective” client letter written by Beth McCabe, Digitas‘ vice president and director for social marketing and technology. You can read the full letter here.

Brand Pages: As of right now, brand pages have not changed to a Timeline view. While we do know that Facebook is working on them and there will be changes eventually, no dates have been given yet, and it’s unknown what the changes will be.

“Likes” in the Timeline: Timeline is a shift from a chronological posting of your activity on the platform to aggregated content displayed by relevancy via Graph Rank. Consequently, stories posted when users “like” your brand’s page may not be shown as the top story on their profile pages for long. Brand “likes” will be collected together and displayed as a group within the time period the actions were taken. This means that they may drift down the page and be shown with older content. In the same vein, because it is much easier to explore a user’s history on the Timeline, older “likes” will be uncovered as a user drills into past months and years in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Sponsored Stories: Though the number and format of sponsored stories has not changed on the newsfeed, they have been reduced within the profile Timeline environment. In the “old Facebook,” there could be upwards of seven sponsored stories along the right-hand column of a user’s profile. Now, with the addition of the Timeline navigator, the number of sponsored stories has been reduced to approximately two to three. As Timeline invites users to explore friends’ “digital scrapbook,” time spent on Timeline profiles will arguably increase because there is more to do and more to see. This adds to the value of the ticker’s real estate for brands and the stories their apps post there.

Graph Rank: For a long time, Edge Rank has been Facebook’s algorithm for determining relevancy and filtering the content shown on users’ newsfeeds. Graph Rank takes Edge Rank and adds Open Graph apps to the equation, including factors like how often you or your friends interact with content posted by an app. This rewards apps that are popular by pulling them to the top of the feed and highlighting their use. “How often will this app be used?” is a question we should strongly consider when designing these apps for our clients. Apps that only publish stories once (for example, when you first use them) will be less valuable to brands because they are less likely to earn high Graph Rank and will tend to drift to the bottom of the pile.

But where they are seriously wrong is when you enter anything like “Interlink,” ”Pronet,” “National Trust,”  ”Premier Traders” or “United Manufacturing” — hits will gush out from every corner of the world. This debate originates from a lack of understanding of corporate nomenclature — usability of a name in relation to “precise-searchability” versus “open-searchability.”

Often corporations mistakenly believe that their name is the sole “powerful name identity.”  For example, United Manufacturing and Distribution Chicago Limited refers to itself as United Manufacturing, while customers often use the shorthand UMDC; at times the company is called UMDC Chicago to differentiate from other branches in Atlanta, Kansas and Baltimore; its domain name  is www.unitedmfgdistributionchicago.com (a simple “united manufacturing” URL was already gone); and its stock symbol is UMAND.

Now try to find the company via a web search using any combination of those names — every variation buries the correct result among thousands of hits. Across the world, among established business communities, similar clusters of multiple names are common. None of these names show up on the top of a search page. A miniscule number of businesses in the world have a single, globally-workable distinct name identity.

If businesses around the world are already spending $400 billion annually to keep their name identities afloat, why do so many names still get lost?  Google’s algorithms and ad results trawl at the bottom; good names pop up that work well with ad words and other pay-per-click models. The rest stay at the bottom.

Let’s examine the three types of searching.

First, someone enters “footwear.”  Thousands of hits pop up, nicely stacked to choose from. In this type of search, advanced knowledge of a domain name is not required.  Second, someone enters a specific name of a footwear brand, like “Moda Shoes,” “Quality footwear,” “Footsie,” “Star” or “Babe.” Thousands of hits pop up, and further sub-searches may eventually provide that sought-after answer. Lastly, one enters Nike, Reebok, Adidas or Bata, and the right site pops up instantly.

There is nothing wrong in any of the above search procedures — they all work. But the last one is the most desirable from the marketing and image-expansion point of view.

Saving split-seconds so potential customers don’t get distracted by hundreds of other options is the hidden secret of cyber name identity domination. The bigger question, is why is this obvious hindrance to sales not corrected immediately? Who are the real beneficiaries of these lingering name disfunctionalities?

Now back to the argument. The domain owners with confusing and diluted origins may be discovered by random guesswork-searching, and should prefer a search engine approach. This group often finds refuge under scrambled SEO options and prays for direct hits. Without search engines and SEO, they would be doomed.

The fact remains that despite such heavy costs of customer acquisition, dysfunctional names still constitute the majority of business names on the web.
ICANN’s new gTLD (generic top-level domain) program of global cyber name identities is neither for diluted, conflicting nor dysfunctional names; nor for names that are unworthy of such expensive and exclusive undertakings. However, the spotlight has shifted to ”naming” and hardcore corporate nomenclature issues. (In response, here’s a white paper entitled “The World’s Largest Branding Revolution Starts January 2012,” in a free, downloadable PDF version: http://www.aarm.org.)

The big question of today is: At the end of any major branding, if there isn’t a distinctively exclusive and memorable name capable of withstanding global scrutiny, why isn’t the branding project erased? Is there any link between continuous high burn rate and duplicated, generic name brands that never make it to the top?

No matter what, Google search results, very soon, will appear like a full-blown colorful magazine, a richer experience tickling the end user’s fancy with accompanying designs, photographs, videos blended with text columns and a collage of social media. It’ll be a kind of cyber-immersion into “GoogleMatrix,” where a new world of highly affordable, measurable “selective pay-per-click” advertising would emerge.

These digitally intertwined, globally scalable and overhead-expenditure-free services would create further shock waves among current marketing and branding models. In conclusion, using the search engine as a net would rightfully work wonders — like huge drift nets and bottom trawlers, they’d overflow the decks. But when you are looking for a special guppy fish, distinctively called “Nemo,” the game gets more sophisticated for all parties — the search engines, the searchers and the searchees.

Google search will not replace domain names, but the search results will become clear indicators — shining stars and lost souls — creating a wider divide among winners and losers of the name identity game.

GRAPHICMAIL – While elements of design for web or print campaigns can be used across different mediums, there needs to be a clear distinction when designing for email marketing.

Email has many unique characteristics and you need to use specific email-centric design practices, such as creating a snippet is visible in the email client preview pane.

Newsletter recipients will initially see your email in a small preview pane, no more than a couple of centimeters in width and height. The email preview pane is your first impression, so it’s an important task to make sure it’s a good one and that key content, such as your proposition and call to action, is easily visible to draw people’s interest.

The Rule of Thirds: Divide your email newsletter space horizontally into thirds and put your most important content in the top two thirds of your email. These areas of your email are the most valuable because they are what the recipient sees first.

Effective Branding: A prominent logo in your email increases brand awareness and can reduce spam complaints if the recipients know that the email is coming from a company that they trust. Use fonts, colours and simple copy to make sure your email logo is unmissable and recognisable. If you embed the logo image, you can be certain that all recipients will see it.

Preview Pane Text: The area of the newsletter templates that is visible to the viewer in the preview pane is usually restricted to the top third of your email. This makes it very valuable real estate. Make sure you include information that will sell your product or service (such as a special or a chance to win something) which will encourage the people to read the whole email. Once you’ve lured your subscribers to open the message, more information can be included using a click-through.

With GraphicMail’s Advanced features you can make use of snippet texts, or “preheaders”, on that small piece of real estate at the top of an email. It’s your value proposition — a teaser for clients to read on. This is especially great for pulling readers from mobile devices since more and more read their email on a mobile phone.

Cross-published at the GraphicMail blog.

Like most books I was supposed to read in high school, all I can remember about George Orwell’s1984 is what CliffNotes told me to remember. And what I remember most are warnings against evil dictators, Big Brother and the thought police.

As I wondered if Heather was trying to send me a message, I sheepishly started reading the passage. By the time I was done I was ready to give her a promotion.

Here is an extract from the passage the arrow pointed to:

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

The context is less important than the content of this message. But if you’re interested, it’s in Chapter 9 when the lead character finishes reading a book he had been struggling to get his hands on.

Heather has known for a while that I have a fascination with the similarities between stories and brands. She also knows that this passage supports what I believe is yet another in a long list of parallels that can be drawn between good stories and good brands.

To understand why Orwell’s passage resonated with me, I should first let you in on a couple of beliefs I have about brands, in general. You should know that I don’t think brands are objects; rather they are labels given to objects for which we associate certain meanings.

Furthermore, you should know that I believe that the “best” brands contained within anyone’s favored set of brands satisfy needs that go beyond product or service functions. Rather, they are brands that have meanings we value as important. Mercedes means something important to the owners of Mercedes, as does the meaning of Subaru to its owners.

Understanding this, the real “a-ha!” for me is a point that Orwell makes in this passage about “best books.” He says they tell us what we already know and that they are the “product of minds similar to ours.” In other words, they don’t create beliefs and values as much as they reinforce what’s already there. And they do this by awakening our minds or putting “our scattered thoughts in order.”

When Steve Jobs passed away, one of the most poignant comments I heard about him was that he didn’t give us Apple computers, iPods or iPads. Rather, he gave us Apple. He gave us a meaning that we could connect with emotionally for those of us who, like Jobs, value what is promoted through Apple’s theme line, “Think Different.”

The reason we could connect with this meaning isn’t because Steve Jobs put that meaning into our belief system. It was already there. Like a good story, meanings associated with Apple are meanings that, to borrow from Orwell, “fascinate or more exactly reassure us.” Apple gave us something we were already predisposed to receiving.

The reason this is an important concept is plain to see when examining powerful brands like Apple, Harley-Davidson, Disney, Nike and others that tap into and/or celebrate our existing values. But just as there are lessons from success, there are lessons from underestimating just how important it is for brands to crystalize rather than create meaning.

Try as they might, brands like stories cannot change beliefs and associated values if we are not ready to have them changed. Marketing history is rife with examples that prove the point.

Oldsmobile learned this lesson the hard way when it tried to convince its audience that “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Despite its clever attempt to shed a different light on its brand, the belief that Oldsmobile is a car for older people was too entrenched to be radicalized.

As Sears learned through its efforts to shed light on “The Softer Side of Sears,” it was impossible for us to let go of its harder side image we had come to associate through brands like Craftsman, Die-Hard, and Kenmore.

We gave Radio Shack a “you’ve got to be kidding” snicker when they tried to go from geeky to hip with its new moniker “The Shack.” And then there’s the archetypal New Coke mistake that taught us that changing an image, especially when it ain’t broke, can be a costly mistake.

Time and time again we hear Chicken Little pronouncements by management that “We must change our identity (read: meaning) or we are going to perish.” More often than not, the only thing that needs to change is an improved sense of meanings that haven’t changed.

At its core, Old Spice is a brand we have learned to associate with masculinity. Granted, it might be our father’s aftershave. But “Smell Like A Man,” didn’t bother to change Old Spice’s meaning in order to reignite its appeal. Rather, it stayed the course merely with a more contemporized frame of reference we now have for masculinity.

Volkswagen’s Beetle found its link to its reverse-snobbery roots when it reestablished a cult following by introducing the new Beetle with alternative rock music. It furthered that link by attaching a flower vase to its dashboard. Sperry Topsiders, an old, tired brand sold mostly to men, dramatically increased sales by making its long-held association with the good life, on or around the water, relevant to women and kids.

Thank-you George Orwell for putting my scattered thoughts in order.  And thank-you Heather. You’ve been elevated to Super Assistant.

Media companies like USA Network, community sites like MySpace, B2B publishers like UBM TechWeb and product brands like Chiquita are now using “gamification” to drive participation, engagement and loyalty. But what took so long? Why didn’t gamification break out until 2010?

This is a particularly pertinent question for my company, Bunchball which has been selling gamification solutions since 2007. Our very first customer, in September 2007, was knocking on our door asking for our gamification platform before it was even completed. This led us to believe that the market was ripe with opportunity, but as it turned out, this was not the case.

We quickly found that not many companies were nearly as forward-thinking as this one in particular, and what followed was three years of trying to move the needle by educating companies about the art of gamification. In that time, we found ourselves dragging deals across the finish line because the market just wasn’t ready yet. Now, looking back, we have a much better sense of why that was.

New methodologies like gamification seem to follow a fairly predictable adoption curve – one which we were unaware of at the time. First, a large, high-visibility, successful role model for the methodology appears in the consumer world. Then, mainstream media, entertainment businesses and consumer communities adopt the mechanism a few years later. Eventually, an idea makes its way into the enterprise and onto the corporate intranet.

To understand this curve, consider the concept of social media. MySpace was on an explosive growth tear in the 2005-2006 timeframe. It was the role model that demonstrated to business owners of all types that social could drive meaningful engagement and revenue for their business, and within the next few years, every consumer facing website added social.

Years later, social made its way into the enterprise with platforms like Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast and Rypple. Any attempt to short-circuit this timeline and sell social into websites and the enterprise without a giant consumer role model would have been met with the same results that we had trying to sell gamification in 2007.

Today social games and applications such as Foursquare (an example of game mechanics in a non-game application) have become successful role models in the space. We’re now seeing consumer businesses start to adopt gamification, and as more of them achieve success through the implementation of game mechanics, they will serve as an additional set of role models for the late-adopters.

Consider USA Network, who built a gamified loyalty program around its hit TV show, “Psych.” The network saw page views for the Psych website increase from 9 to 16 million, time on site increase from 14 to 22 minutes per session and visits per month escalate from 2 to 4.5. It also experienced a 40% increase in viewership of the TV show among the age 18-34 demographic. For USA Network, gamification was able to positively impact not only online participation, but on-air viewership.

Now, consumer sites are beginning to serve as role models for the enterprise, demonstrating to management, HR and IT that gamification works as a methodology to influence user behavior. The key idea for businesses to remember is that people do not change when they walk in the office door in the morning.

They are still motivated by the same things that influence them when they’re not at work: reward, status, achievement, competition, self-expression and social connection. By incorporating game mechanics into traditional work tasks, businesses can provide a framework for making work more engaging.

Gamification as a methodology is still in its early days, but it is currently working its way through the adoption curve. Moving forward, be sure to keep an eye out for gamification in brand advertising campaigns, communities, loyalty programs, mobile applications and/or corporate intranets near you – chances are, it’s already there.

For more of Rajat’s thoughts on gamification visit his blog at www.gamification.com.

The second confession I have to make is that I did not see this phenomenon of a movie until well over a year after it was first released into the theaters. At first I trusted a few (mostly male) friends’ reviews of the film, but I finally caved in when more and more of my network unabashedly recommended that I see the film. After finding a second-run movie theater, one of the last few that was still actually showing it, I finally saw what became one of my all-time favorite movies.

So why didn’t I see it sooner? The critics raved, the massive box office numbers proved its broad appeal, and the media was all a-buzz with it. All things pointed to me seeing it much earlier than I did. But this was long before Web 2.0, and social media was in its very embryonic stages (think email and message boards) and had far less reach. Today I can see what friends from anywhere in the world think of a movie by going online instead of making a phone call, but back then crowd-sourcing took much more time. My limited view held me back from plunking down ten bucks to see the movie.

And today, 14 years after the film made such a huge splash, social recommendations, whether endorsements or disapprovals, play a bigger role than ever, especially as the social, connected web is reportedly eclipsing the “document” or “searchable web.”  Now, instead of relying on in-person conversations with my friends, I can see those friends’ recommendations from their Likes, their wall posts, their emails, their +1s, their tweets, their shares, etc.

In fact, social media has amplified the effect of social recommendation and endorsement by making it very easy to assert an opinion to be read by hundreds of trusted friends and contacts. If “Titanic” came out today, I’d find out much sooner how wrong those first male friends who warned me to steer clear were; but, equally quickly, I could broadcast through social media that they were clearly out of their depth!

Viral Infections

So what exactly is social endorsement? The simplest definition of social endorsement is a friend’s or acquaintance’s positive view on something, whether it be a piece of content (like a film) or a brand (like Leonardo DiCaprio or Paramount). And when a brand is looking to provoke positive emotions towards itself among its current and prospective consumers, the viral diffusion of this social endorsement spreads positivity about a brand quickly and broadly.

There’s a reason why the term “virality” has been adopted by brand and social media marketers to describe this process: the way a brand endorsement spreads is not unlike the way a virus might spread throughout a population. (For more takes on this idea, see insightful articles by Dan Zarrella and David Hornik).

What was thought to be a bad cold and an unusual increase in cases of pneumonia turned out to be called the 1918 Influenza Pandemic by historians, and claimed more lives than the World War that immediately preceded it. In studying a pandemic like this, epidemiologists often rely on a factor called R0 (r-naught). In scientific terms, R0 is the basic reproductive rate of an infection and is the mean number of secondary cases a typical single infected case will cause in a population with no immunity to the disease in the absence of interventions to control the infection.

Simply put, R0 is the rate at which infection spreads. When R0 is less than one (i.e. on average, infected hosts only pass it on to less than one other person), there is no chance for pandemic spread. Greater than one, and R0 shows us how quickly a virus can infect a significant portion of a population.

R0 itself has three main drivers: how long an infected patient is contagious (duration), how virulent and contagious the virus is (virulence), and the number of susceptible people an infected patient comes in contact with (contacts). When drawing parallels to the spread of a brand message, we can think of these three drivers this way:

• Infection Duration: How long something remains top-of-mind to a consumer
• Infection Virulence: How novel, interesting, and surprising is the content, and how appropriate is it to share with others
• Infection Contacts: How easily does the consumer have access to sharing mechanisms, how much of an “influencer” or “sharer” the consumer is

When crafting a brand marketing campaign that relies on word-of-mouth to spread (and really, don’t they all?), it’s critical to keep these factors in mind. It’s worth noting that “duration” and “virulence” are both largely in the hands of the brand. They shoulder the responsibility of communicating and interacting with the consumer in a way that entertains, informs, and delights them such that the message remains top-of-mind and interesting enough to share.

Where social media companies come in is in the “contacts”: how effective their platforms are in spreading a brand message and how extensive a reach their community of influencers has. Where StumbleUpon differs is that not only does it offer simple mechanisms for sharing and a passionate community of influencers, but it also has a direct effect on “duration” as the brand marketer gets 100% share of voice when interacting with the consumer and on “virulence” as its users look to the service to recommend great, quality content.

Positive Emotional Association: Context Matters!

We now understand better how a brand message spreads throughout a user population – but is it having the desired effect on those users?  We know from Brand Advertising 101 that a high-quality brand message in the right context to a consumer leads to a positive experience and emotional response, which itself leads to a positive brand association by the consumer.  If the message isn’t right – if the time, place, current activity by the consumer, attention of the consumer held, etc., isn’t right – then not only will a positive emotional response not be elicited and associated with the brand, but the brand risks a negative response and association if it annoys, distracts, deters, or otherwise thwarts the consumer. For example, lengthy video pre-rolls or full-page interstitials may be tolerated, but hardly embraced.

No, the best brand message is one that is delivered when consumers are effectively asking for it.  If they are checking their friends’ activity feeds, or trying to watch a funny cat video, brand messages are at best a distraction, and having an effect on duration or virulence is seriously undermined. One could, of course, take the “spray and pray” approach that is most often employed in social media, and blast a brand message out to as many eyeballs as possible, in the hope that something sticks. But the significant risk here is that what ends up sticking is not what the brand wanted to stick (think GroupOn’s SuperBowl ad).

When our users come to us and click the “Stumble!” button, they are in fact telling us something very important: delight me.  Delight me, surprise me, entertain me, inform me, show me something I’ve never seen before that’s relevant to me. StumbleUpon understands our users’ interests, both because those users have explicitly told our system as part of signing up for our service, and because our technology has implicitly deduced their preferences over time based on what they’ve thumbed-up and thumbed-down and what they’ve shared and commented on, not to mention positive associations with their friends’ interests.

This turns out to be an incredibly powerful combination: consumers’ openness to new things + nuanced targeting = ideal brand marketing opportunity. It’s the basic premise upon which StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is built: our users are looking to discover, asking to be delighted. With that right context and the targeting provided by Paid Discovery, a brand marketer’s experience in finding the ideal audience could be smooth sailing.

It’s clear to me now, some 14 years later, that had I seen Titanic with a wider knowledge of how my interests align with the movie’s promise, it should have been a dead ringer for me to be at the front of the box office line. Social media has enabled us to see content and brands through a light of discovering something new, but something that is also targeted specifically for me.

In the end, the ways in which brand content are shared through social media are no different than they were before, but the effectiveness and reach have been vastly improved. When we lower both the threshold and the amount of information needed to share, then what we’ve seen so far in the way of social recommendation is but the tip of the iceberg!

Cross-published at the StumbleUpon blog.

That’s what today’s most successful new companies demand from their advertising partners. Oh, yes – and ways to measure both. Quickly, so as not to waste precious marketing dollars and time on creative executions and ad buys that don’t make the web servers hum or the phones ring.

In other words, they want image advertising plus direct response “immediate results” – but minus the over-the-top sales pitch (think Dan Aykroyd’s hilarious “Bass-O-Matic” spots on “Saturday Night Live”).

Thankfully, creative agencies have discovered new ways to deliver direct response advertising while also supporting a more polished brand image. And fortunately for media buyers and brands, technological developments and access to volumes of consumer and other data have helped make measurement instant – and instant adjustments to both creative and media-buying strategies a reality.

This new form of image and direct response creative has converged with new analytic capabilities at the intersection of the retail and service sectors and the Internet. Start-ups now demand their agencies deliver fresh, compelling creative as well as media buys that offer instantaneous and measureable proof of return on investment (ROI).

The results of this approach can be stunning. Take Priceline.com, a company my agency was fortunate enough to meet more than a dozen years ago. Within less than six months of its 1998 launch, 62.5 million consumers reported they were aware of the name – the fastest branding of a new company in history, according to The Brand Institute.

More important, Priceline continues to enjoy record sales and a 20 percent compounded growth rate thanks in no small part to brilliantly executed creative and a media buying program that constantly challenges the status quo.

Why are companies like Priceline successful? Because an ROI-centric advertising program works in a world in which consumers make instant decisions and “click” to “buy now.” No longer is the goal solely to build a brand, or to stimulate intent to purchase. Instead, the objective is to generate an actual purchase and to be able to explain as much as possible how and why that purchase occurred so that additional purchase activity can be stimulated.

By tracking key ad components, correlating ad airings and website activity, and calculating the resulting response rate and cost of acquisition, an ROI-oriented advertising program can deliver unsurpassed value and assure client retention.

Relying on time-honored metrics no longer is enough. For example, research shows that the majority of consumers reached through television advertising respond by visiting the advertiser website, often located through a branded search engine, for more information. Understanding the link between ad airings and client-related search activity is an additional way to assess the impact of a campaign.

However, tracking the consumer response an ad or series of ads triggers is only the tip of the iceberg. Through the use of complex analytics, media buyers can test and assess strategies and optimize ad spends. As results are achieved and the cost of acquisition becomes clear, campaigns can be scaled and results extrapolated.

An ROI-focused approach to media buying addresses both the long and short term. Rapid and unpredictable changes in the media and economic landscape make real-time testing more critical than ever before, while tracking and analytics enable a media-agnostic identification of best-performing channels. The result is a customized, hybrid approach that focuses on what the client company seeks to achieve, as opposed to simply repeating what has worked in the past.

All this is not to say that longer-term brand objectives no longer are important. Cultivating and maintaining a trustworthy brand is an integral part of what drives response – especially ongoing response. However, as consumers increasingly embrace mobile technology, understanding “now” behavior becomes an extremely important consideration for everyone with an interest in advertising.

As a musician, there are few things as aggravating as noticing crowd members typing away while you pour your soul into your craft (I write that in the least pretentious way possible). But during 20-minute guitar solos (or any drum or [shiver] bass solo), I have been known to distract myself by conversing with friends. (At a jam band concert, is it no longer cool to concentrate on rolling a fattie during the self-indulgent moments?)

Transfer that conversing to your mobile device, and “friends” to anyone else on the group messaging channel sponsored by the band, and perhaps a beverage company “fueling” the band and its fans, maybe a carmaker funding the concert series.

Oh, so are you starting to see the marketing potential in this?

When I heard mobile group messaging services were the hit of the South by Southwest Digital Conference, I replied, “You mean chat rooms for mobile devices? People still use chat rooms?” (Besides for business purposes — then we like to call them “online meeting rooms.”) I don’t think I’ve been in a chat room since I was 14 — and I’ve repressed most of those traumatic experiences.

But yes, mobile chat services — that can work on both feature phones and smartphones — are suddenly all the rage, as names like GroupMe, Beluga and textPlus accrue more buzz than Rebecca Black’s potential follow-up to the beloved song, “Friday.” SXSW cred should not be discounted (at least in terms of digital toys — the music side jumped the shark a while back) as both Twitter and Foursquare used the conference to jumpstart their products.

Group messaging companies are still in their infancy, but it appears GroupMe is already luring in the brand dollars with its new Featured Groups, allowing companies to create groups around their products or services (media companies like MTV are first on board) or encourage users to start up conversations and then engage with them.

In theory, this could be the most direct tool yet for engaging consumers through social media. But will mobile chat rooms lose their luster, just like their online cousins did? Probably — but how fast?

As Yahoo and Nielsen extrapolate in their new “Cross-Platform Optimization” study, “At a certain point, adding more money to a medium will stop delivering additional reach. At this point, putting this money to other media will be more effective.”

In studying four multiplatform campaigns in the auto, CPG, retail and credit card categories, Yahoo performed custom reallocations to determine the point of diminishing returns and discover which channels were sucking up too much cash for what they brought to the table.

No surprise, all four were overinvested in traditional media and underinvested online: the auto campaign had a 15% over-allocation in TV; the credit card had 40% too much in TV; and the retail had 20% over-allocated to TV. The CPG campaign, interestingly enough, had a 15% over-allocation to print.

Yahoo moved money to channels promising more unique audiences rather than overlapping and areas providing high additional reach rather than low. And of course, all of this was examined with regard to CPM. Here’s how the campaign cash was re-allocated:

Moving funding from the overinvested categories to several underinvested channels produced the greatest improvement in all key metrics and maximizing reach also maximized other important metrics. Re-allocations (Yahoo’s “Smarter Mix”) boosted reach from 92.2% to 95.5% for the credit card campaign; 98.2% to 99.1% for the retail campaign; 89.3% to 93.5% for the auto campaign; and from 86.5% to 86.7% for the CPG campaign.

The boost in gross ratings points (GRPs) was most impressive in the credit card and auto campaigns:

The real takeaway from the Foursquare campaign was the fast-food giant’s willingness to dive into bold social marketing endeavors. The fast food giant has already toyed with social gaming via the Sesame Seed Bakery and Dairy Farm on Zynga’s FarmVille, but now it’s going for gusto with an event coinciding with the launch of its 2010 Monopoly Game.

You know, there’s nothing quite like fast food from the farm. Will the McDonald’s event let you grow your own french fries? How about fry them in animal fat leftover when you slice a couple hundred quarter-pounders from a cow?

No, during the one-day event, brought to virtual life by appssavvy and the Chicago office of OMD, FarmVille users will be able to visit Mickey D’s farm and help grow tomatoes and mustard seeds. (N Lending a (virtual) green thumb is awarded with McCafe Consumables (they can’t even call it food anymore!) that allow users to tend their farms at twice the speed, and a McDonald’s hot air balloon. What the balloon is powered by, I dunno — if this was Taco Bell, that would be another story…

Companies, especially in the CPG arena, are experimenting more with FarmVille branding — in July, General Mills’ Cascadian Farms introduced branded organic blueberries for the virtual farmer who will only grow virtual organic products. Frankly, I’m all about using pesticides and growth hormones on my virtual farm — how else could I grow tomacco?