Instagram is in a bit of a pickle. After backtracking on its “brands can co-opt users’ photos and use them in promo campaigns” deal, Facebook‘s hottest “food porn” property has hit a few bumps in creating new “sponsored” revenue streams. Brands, of course, are all anxious to advertise themselves on a forum that inspires more than 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments every second.

What have they done? According to AdAge, they’ve started making their own commercials to run on the feeds of their celebrity “ambassadors”. Here, for example, is an ad obviously created by Pepsi but posted as just another picture on Beyoncé‘s account:

319,000 is a whole lotta likes.

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Calm down, everyone: Facebook will not provide you with a shiny blue smartphone. What it will do is take over the phone you’d planned to buy next month. Today’s Zuckerberg press conference served as the launch of the new “Facebook Home”, a sort of app cluster that will dominate a specially designed HTC Android phone. Facebook doesn’t want to create your mobile phone — it wants to become your mobile phone. Zuck called Home “the best version of Facebook there is”, and the company debuted this promo spot:

Looks…cool. But what does it mean?

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Does your company prohibit you from accessing Facebook, Twitter and/or YouTube at work? Quite a few do, citing the ability of cute animal videos and status updates to distract employees from the work at hand. But according to the biggest story making the rounds this morning, their concerns may be misplaced. In fact, the study in question suggests that a company’s most “connected” employees may be its most productive!

Don’t get too excited yet — the research, conducted by data analytics firm Evolv, involved approximately 40,000 call center employees whose responsibilities range from sales to customer service, so it didn’t cover the whole business spectrum. But here’s the interesting thing: the employees who counted themselves as members of more than five social networks were also the most valuable! They had, on average, better close ratios for sales and more efficient customer service records based on time per call.

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So it’s the 21st century, and lots of brands want the public to know that they’re invested in the most powerful social movements of the day — be they environmental, ethical, or cultural. We also know that audience engagement is often the most important element of a successful social media-powered PR campaign. Social@Ogilvy recently conducted a study and published a white paper on the phenomenon, and we had a chance to talk to the firm’s “Global MD” John Bell about its conclusions.

What inspired you to conduct this study?

Our original motivation came from working with major brands on the idea of creating a movement around a major issue that both coincides with business goals and serves the larger social good. The Pepsi Refresh project, for example, not only benefited the company but also the communities that received funding. The “members project” from American Express was similar.

We’ve been designing big social programs for a while, but when considering the word “movement” we asked: how big is big — especially when the idea is centered around a brand?

What were the study’s parameters?

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Remember when the SEC threatened to put the smack down on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings for revealing in a Facebook post that his company had achieved a record one billion hours of video streamed in a single month? The organization claimed that he was revealing confidential business info in order to bump up his company’s stock prices, but they’re totally cool with it now.

The organization laid out some new guidelines for CEOs who want to be more active on social media (a course strongly recommended by Leslie-Gaines Ross of Weber Shandwick).

There’s nothing too crazy here — just a realization that the rules regarding business disclosures need to take a step into the 21st century.

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After the Oreo team’s big social media win dominated the post-Super Bowl buzz, a whole lot of people who had never used the phrase “real-time marketing” before started throwing it around like a hot potato.

The point is that pretty much any business whose description includes the words “firm” or “agency” now needs to claim that it has “real-time marketing capabilities” in order to win the interest of big-name clients. McCann Erickson, for example, named its new social media-only division “McCann Always On”. The “RTM” phrase doesn’t just apply to agencies that label themselves “ad” or “marketing”, either — PR wants to “own” social media too, remember?

The problem is that the whole phenomenon just isn’t that simple — and it’s not too terribly revolutionary either. Explaining that to clients, however, may be a bit of a challenge.

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A while ago we posted on how Facebook‘s newfangled “graph search” setup could help PR pros and marketers more effectively push their clients’ content to the general public and conduct market research. But here’s something we never thought about: what if graph search could double as a media contact database?

We recently spoke to Peter Axtman of Sunshine Sachs to learn how he used graph search to score a big PR win for a client with a very specific target audience.

Axtman was working to promote a client called Playground Sessions, an instructional app-maker that is “like Rosetta Stone for piano”. Axtman told us that, though the client had received some “mainstream tech coverage“, he “wanted to talk to niche piano publications” that might appeal more explicitly to the client’s target audience — people interested in learning to play piano or improve their form without in-person training.

So he turned to graph search with surprising (and encouraging) results.

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Yesterday we posted on Weber Shandwick‘s new unit Mediaco, which will focus on creating and distributing content for clients. Today we had the chance to talk to Jason Wellcome, the Weber digital EVP who will run the new unit, on exactly what his teams do — and what this development means for the PR industry.

Here’s the firm’s promo video:

In our conversation, Wellcome gave us a little more detail on the strategy and its implications:

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Everybody loved the recent back-and-forth between Kit Kat and Oreo on Twitter, and we’re fond of the “is it an April Fool’s joke or not” concept behind Scope‘s new “bacon mouthwash” campaign. But this little interaction between Charmin (which we love) and Scope on Twitter today shows that sometimes tweeting really is like yelling into the vortex — there’s no one listening on the other end.

.@scopemouthwash We see a trend here.Get on it, Scope! #ScopeBacon #mmmmBacon

— Charmin(@Charmin) March 28, 2013

Our point isn’t to criticize either of these accounts, which are great (Charmin, for example, does potty humor quite well). It’s just to show that social media is an ever-evolving experiment and that social teams and clients can’t expect every single tweet to be a big hit. There’s plenty of room to test the waters as long as you stay on-brand — and therein lies the challenge.

Here’s the bacon mouthwash video for fun:

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Here’s an interesting case study in crowdsourced social media branding: Weight Watchers, which faced some PR challenges when its spokeswoman Jessica Simpson got pregnant in the middle of her contract, found its newest celebrity backer via Twitter search!

The company’s social media team noticed that comedienne Ana Gasteyer had been tweeting about her weight loss experience and brought her feed to executives’ attention. They quickly moved in to secure her as a spokesperson — and now she’s created a series of TV and online ads set to debut this month. We can see why they’d be interested after reading tweets like these:

Hey @weightwatchers Volunteered to churn butter at Pioneer Day/30 min Sat How many #activitypoints? Need tocover 11flapjacks/8 biscuits

— Ana Gasteyer (@AnaGasteyer) January 12, 2013

Hey @weightwatchers I binged on Children’s Gummy Vites can it be my cheat day?

— Ana Gasteyer (@AnaGasteyer) December 10, 2012

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