ATTENTIO BLOG — My god, its sexy. Gatorade (part of the Pepsi empire) have a beautiful social media command centre. It’s in Chicago and has a bunch of screens (6 main screens) and room for 5 analysts or community managers. Now I love this stuff. It’s a visual metaphor of social media monitoring and easier to sell internally. "Look Brad, you can see how the brand is performing and respond immediately and there are loads of screens." Now with all sales, the size of investment is what counts, i.e. will this generate a return commensurate with our spend? Well lets see?...

MEDIA BULLSEYE — Pepsi dropped Super Bowl advertising in favor of social media, and this week Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream was rumored to replace more traditional marketing with social media. According to published reports in the U.K., the Vermont-based company known for unique flavors like Cherry Garcia as well as their philanthropic work was opting to drop their e-mail marketing campaign and instead use Twitter and Facebook to reach out to their customers. In fact, they were only dropping e-mail in the United Kingdom, according to the @CherryGarcia account on Twitter...

MEDIAPOST — What do senior management executives at CPG companies and retailers think about corporate social media strategies? Top executives were probed on this topic, along with many others, as part of the research for a just-released 2010 Grocery Manufacturers Association / PricewaterhouseCoopers financial performance report -- and the insights gleaned are more specific and practical than marketers might imagine. The executives are clearly giving serious thought to social media and its implications. Many expressed keen awareness of the pressing need for a well-honed social media strategy that harnesses the positive power of social media, effectively addresses/turns around potential negatives, and includes ROI measurement...

CLICKZ — Foursquare is hands-down the leader of the location-based/geo-social marketing space when it comes to hype. But other services are making their marks among both brands and users. In fact, three of the five location-based services briefed below have more users than Foursquare, which has roughly 1 million. Like Foursquare, most utilize the mobile "check in" system, while rewarding users for registering an arrival at a store, restaurant, or another kind of business. Though, the services are being leveraged in different ways by brand partners. Here are snapshots of recent campaigns by name brands on five prominent location-based platforms not named Foursquare...

MASHABLE — In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing. The company recently created the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters, a room that sits in the middle of the marketing department and could best be thought of as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media...