THE SOCIAL TIMES — Yesterday Cisco paid homage to Old Spice’s recent response campaign with their own YouTube response project, featuring ‘Ted From Accounting.’ Just like Old Spice, Cisco announced the campaign in the morning, asked people to send in tweets, and posted a number of personalized videos throughout the day. However, unlike with the Old Spice campaign, you probably had no idea anything out of the ordinary was going on yesterday. With a mere 2,750 views on 18 videos in the first 24 hours, the campaign paled in comparison to Old Spice’s 40 million plus views. So where did Cisco go wrong? Before we get into the specifics of how and why Cisco failed with their ‘Ted From Accounting’ campaign, let’s just take a quick look back at what happened yesterday, for those of you that missed it...

ADVERTISING AGE — In a study published on Monday, Forrester finds that location-based social platforms are too small for major marketers to concern themselves with. At least for now. The reasoning Forrester gives is that location-based start-ups are still too small for major marketers to take great advantage of. Regardless of its current scale, here are four reasons why at 360i we're including Foursquare and other location-based social networks in our client thinking today...

MASHABLE — For many brand managers, employees’ actions online remain a daunting, untamed frontier. The brand’s consistent, controlled message to consumers melds with internal messaging and individuals’ stories when employees take to the social web. The cautionary tales of the social web’s early days -- stories of indiscretion, mixed signals and poor communication -- have led to an increase in strict policies and careful monitoring of employee social media activities in many cases. But lately, a few savvy brands have changed their internal position about employees’ activities on the social web...

DIGITAL INFLUENCE BLOG — You’ve successfully passed through "phase 1" of your company’s social media evolution where just a few expert voices represented your brand online. Now you are handing over the keys to a larger, more representative group of speakers. How can you make sure that this proliferation increases, not fragments, your impact online? How do you prevent someone going off the reservation? Through guardrails, governance, and training (oh my!). Here’s a checklist from basic fundamental to advanced degree...

BRANDSAVANT — A recent study posted in AdAge would have you think so. The study, conducted by an agency called 360i (direct link to the data here) examined 1800 tweets and determined that only 12% of updates posted to Twitter mentioned a brand – and for most of those, the brand was Twitter itself. The implicit conclusion: no one is talking about your brand on Twitter, so brands can direct their attention elsewhere. I’m certainly not going to argue that Twitter is anywhere near as significant as other channels, and it is true that many marketers use Twitter like a big “easy button” for the Internet. Pushing it tends to give you immediate feedback, which is gratifying, but also tends to summon other marketers. I’m not willing to go completely down the road of irrelevance based upon this study, however, for one important reason...