VENTUREBEAT — "Customer co-creation," the practice of allowing customers to "build their own" products, is gaining quite a bit of traction among US online retailers. For example, custom messenger-bag maker Rickshaw Bagworks lets each customer design their own bag before it is made to order, and sportswear vendor Shortomatic lets shoppers upload images and overlay them on a pair of custom-designed swim trunks. Many e-commerce leaders -- Nike, Dell.com, and Blue Nile, for example -- have begun combining customer co-creation with social media tools to let customers share what they’ve created across social networks...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Nike recently used Facebook to unveil a new 3-minute soccer ad spot that contains some of the world’s biggest soccer stars to help promote their brand going into next month’s FIFA World Cup. The ad premiered on the Nike Football Facebook page and is dubbed Write The Future -- it follows the fate of of a few of soccer’s greats and what may or may not happen to them based on pivotal moments on the pitch. According to a recent New York Times post, the ad buy is among the largest in Facebook’s history...

NEW COMM BIZ — In the old days, when you launched a digital campaign you built a microsite with it’s own custom domain name. Now brands are opting for tabs on Facebook Pages but what do you do about domain names? Launching a social media campaign across multiple social networks is seriously a pain point for marketers. There is no way to manage all of the sites and the conversations started across those sites in one central place. The only solution is to use brute force and throw people at it. It’s also challenging because the sites don’t play nice together. Some tools out there are emerging to make this easier and sites like Posterous help but there is no good, let alone great, solution yet and the new Nike campaign shows some of the challenges that exist. Today I noticed something different by Nike...

MEDIAPOST — I own a Tiger Woods golf hat, with his trademark "TW" front and center. I can't wear the hat out these days. I have never experienced anything like it with brand apparel. I wore the hat out once since the fateful day everything hit the fan for Tiger, and the awkward conversations it started were almost comical, especially with my wife. I mean they could have been taping an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Most conversations ended with "yeah, I know. I don't have any other golf hats. It's sunny out." Needless to say, I now have a new hat...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — What makes a great viral video? This is a problem I’ve been coming up against recently, especially as there’s always the simple risk that when trying to do anything viral: it will either work or it won’t. This is something I’m going to try and explore across a couple of blog posts in the next month or so, as the subject is so huge and complex, but a good starting point seems to be to showcase some of the best examples of viral advertising that currently exist...