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(TrendHunter.com) Spanish photographer Yuky Lutz captured blue eyed model Anna P in this beautiful outdoor shoot. The series was inspired by the Italian western film Once Upon a Time in the West directed by Sergio…

Is the day coming when we’re going to earn raises for re-tweets?

Savvy brands like Dell, Oracle, Intel and Accenture think the future of marketing is on social media and their best advocates are their own employees, but the move to employee advocacy is raising a lot of questions: How do you properly incentivize advocacy? What should employees share on social? How will this change the content of social networks? What types of companies can actually make this work?

There’s a lot in the air with employee advocacy, and here’s my read: brands can only pull it off if employees love the company.

To understand this, first look at the reasons why companies have embraced employee advocacy and how they are structuring their programs.

The Power of Employee Advocacy and Word of Mouth

First and foremost, brands are interested in employee advocacy because it allows them to connect with an audience that would otherwise be expensive or impossible to reach. According to Liz Bullock, former director of social media at Dell and current CEO of the Social Arts & Science Institute (SASI), there is minimal overlap between an employer and its employees’ social followings. As an example, she cites Cisco, where employees had 10 times more followers than corporate accounts yet only a 2% overlap in audience.

Second, the most authoritative survey results continue to show that word-of-mouth rules over any other form of marketing. In 2013, Forrester found that 70 percent of adults online trust recommendations from friends and family, but only 15 percent trust posts from companies and brands on social. Similarly, Nielsen found that 84 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. Employee advocates can give brands credibility that they otherwise lack.

How Dell Turned Employees Into Brand Advocates

Three years ago, Dell was one of the companies that began to recognize these advantages and led the curve in employee advocacy. Dell employees go far beyond tweeting or posting brand messages–they’re answering questions, thanking customers, writing blog posts, generating sales leads, connecting with potential hires, covering events and more. Their advocacy program has certified over 10,000 employees to represent the brand on social media sites. Top advocates are personally recognized by Dell’s CMO and featured on their advocacy platform’s “Wall of Fame.”

Programs like Dell’s are designed to build thought leaders, not brand parrots. Thus, employee advocacy is not only about transforming marketing, sales and human resources, but reinventing the culture of a company. In a sense, advocacy programs formalize, channel and encourage sharing that might occur anyway. They also shift the brand identity from its logos, leadership and products to individual people as they become the face of a company.

How Your Brand Can Motivate Employees to Become Brand Advocates

However, employees aren’t going to tweet about their company if working there makes them miserable. If their marketing department is pumping out crummy content, they’re certainly not going to spam friends and risk their trust, and demoralized employees will have no motivation to connect with potential hires. Even with cash incentives or other perks, advocacy from a poor culture is going to come across forced and inauthentic.

In other words, to compete in the social advocacy arena, brands need happy employees.

So will companies make advocacy optional or required? Will they offer bonuses or other rewards? Might they rank employees by social advocacy? Will an entire workforce get paid to post?

Above all else, I think companies will focus on producing cultures that employees want to advocate for. In terms of long-term sales growth, marketing success and talent retention, that will matter far more than the fine details of each advocacy program.

If the rise of employee advocacy encourages better corporate cultures and leads to happier employees, higher quality brand content and more effective companies, let’s welcome the social workforce.

This guest article was written by Greg Shove, CEO of SocialChorus.

I like Barkley. The Kansas City agency is one of the best in the nation.

Sadly, I can’t support the agency’s current work for DQ. “At Dairy Queen, we don’t make fast food. This is fan food,” the commercials announce. Boom! Wink!

Fan food? What is that? Is that the stuff commonly called food that is readily available at concerts and baseball games?

No. According to this faux testimonial, fan food is the good stuff — particularly DQ’s crispy chicken strips basket.

“They call it whole tenderloin. I call it hashtag delicious.” Language of this sort can make grown men cry or cringe.

In related news, Burger King in Norway shed 30,000 fair-weather fans in an interesting social media promotion.

BK Norway recognized that many of its 38,000 Facebook fans weren’t real fans at all. So, the brand offered free Big Macs to identify the fast food drifters and get rid of them.

Burger King lost 30,000 followers as a result, but says its new fan base of 8,000 are more engaged and interact with the brand in a more positive way.

The post Combo Number Two: Deep Fried Fan Fiction from DQ appeared first on AdPulp.

First-party data is information collected directly and stored by website publishers, retailers and other types of companies about their site visitors or customers. Because companies with this information have a prior relationship with their customers, they are able to use this first-party data — which may include names, addresses, phone numbers, site-interaction data and information about products purchased — to communicate directly with them. First-party data is what is stored in customer-relationship-management and loyalty-program databases.

Brian Krick, head of search and biddable at Essence, a digital ad agency

“First-party data is information that you own about your customers. This information is created on systems that you own or lease, with the understanding that you the advertiser, and not the provider of the software or any other third party, have exclusive rights to that data. However, first-party data isn’t as ‘free’ as people often claim. There are costs associated with creating, maintaining, and utilizing it — costs in ad servers, CRM and web-analytics systems. It’s really about maximizing the return from that investment.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Mother Monster has created her own monster clones. That's right, Lady Gaga has created a line of life-size real dolls of herself, hand crafted in Japan, experts in all creepy, real-life doll things.

Though the replicas are not yet available for sale, they might someday be. They're currently designed for a Japanese promotion of her new album that points fans to Gaga's Japanese Facebook presence. But English speakers can watch the video where they mold and make her naked body, paint the nipples and dissect her to add a special set of musical organs that play Gaga's hit songs when you hug the doll and place your head on her chest.

The end of the video shows an eager, adoring fan doing just that, pressing his face into GagaDoll’s bosom with a look of orgasmic release. The doll is so lifelike, it's hard to tell which one is Gaga in a picture she sent out from her Twitter account (it's the middle one). It makes a lot of sense given the strong pop art connections with her new album Art Pop. I mean, you know Andy Warhol would have been all over this kind of thing.

Lorraine Bracco (she of The Sopranos and Goodfellas fame, of course) lends her familiar voice to Deutsch LA’s new holiday spot for Netflix, and predictably, makes the ad work.

In the spot, “Tree Topper,” Bracco voices the part of the smiling porcelain tree topper that has been part of the McDermott family for 34 years. Through the tree topper we see the wild antics of the McDermott boys, as well as Christmas cooking failures and Uncle Luther’s fake snow. Despite the occasional difficulties living with the McDermott family, Bracco’s tree topper enjoys when the family curls up to enjoy watching something on Netflix.

It’s not the most original of concepts, but Bracco makes it work. Her voice is not only recognizable, but dramatic and expressive. This helps make the idea of a sentient tree topper seem less ridiculous, and even imbues the character with emotion and personality. It helps make the spot not seem overly sentimental, and her delivery of the spots’ final line really brings out just the right amount of curmudgeon from Bracco’s character. While celebrity voice acting is so often an afterthought used as an easy cash-in, Deutsch LA hits the mark by casting Bracco for “Tree Topper.” Hopefully other agencies are taking notes. Credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

L’artiste suisse Fabian Oefner, nous présente ‘Disintegrating’ et ‘Hatch’, 2 projets réalisés pour la MB&F M.A.D. gallery. Un travail d’une précision incroyable, proposant des images de voitures de sport réalisées à la main, explosées et démantelées dans l’espace. Des créations impressionnantes à découvrir dans la suite.

Better than half of CMOs surveyed by The CMO Club say they’re looking to bypass media agencies in buying TV time using automated buying tech. Certainly, clients with mounds of customer data and direct-buying platforms could go direct to programmers. But should they? And how does the media agency stay relevant?

Ultimately, the data and technology supporting media will require more, not less, agency support. For one thing, you need a holistic view of brand marketing to put programmatic in the right context — how much to do, where, when and why. For another, the non-programmatic elements of media will do more to make or break brands in a world where social media is a reflex. They’re not so much impressions as conversations, where audiences committed to TV content stretch their interaction across all the screens they have.

Weaving brands into TV content and conversations is what agencies do best. They know the nuances of clients’ strategies and products. They know how all of the media work and, more importantly, work together. They know how to turn this knowledge into partnerships with networks that can give a brand a place in consumer-generated conversations. That’s why networks routinely come to agencies with creative ideas. Most importantly, agencies know how to balance this art with the science of media so clients sell more stuff. This power is the key to agencies standing taller than ever in TV.

Continue reading at AdAge.com