Lay’s is kicking off a nationwide experiential tour featuring the company’s potato farmers.

The six-city tour that kicked off in NYC on July 26, is designed to bring a rural farm experience to city-based consumers via a mobile greenhouse. Visitors can see plants that result in Lay’s potato chip ingredients as well as meet a Lay’s potato farmer. Additionally, Lay’s will give away 8,000 basil plants to visitor and will donate plants to local community gardens at the end of each stop. And of course, Lay’s potato chips will be sampled!

PR efforts, Facebook and Twitter will drive consumer awareness for the tour. Consumers will also be able to track the mobile greenhouse using the “Chip Tracker” on the brand’s website.

Source: Marketing Daily

As part of Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign, the brand wanted to highlight the ridiculousness of wasting so much time on social networks and decided to get people to waste time in parks instead. This led to “Facepark”, described as a “stupid idea that might save the world. But probably won’t”.

For one day, Diesel created an analogue version of Facebook, called Facepark - effectively a mini festival in a park in Berlin. The brand created cardboard cut out profiles, which users could frame their faces with, just like on the real social networks. They could fill in a box with their “status” and also write comments on the cardboard and some of their friends. People could become friends with others by attaching their name to a friend’s cardboard profile. Cardboard stands complete with actors were created for fan groups or applications such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, which people could then comment upon using stickers. They could add “like” stickers to people, groups and comments.

Watch Video/See photos: www.creamglobal.com/17798/22523/diesel-facepark-

Source: Cream

Patrón Tequila has released a Facebook application that lets fans attempt to perfect their own cocktail recipe.

The application is a virtual Patrón Cocktail Lab, and if your recipe submission wins one of the monthly cocktail challenges, you’ll get free entry into Patrón events. Better yet, your cocktail will become an official, Patrón-recognized drink.

The first cocktail challenge is “Patrón Margarita, Deconstructed” and tasks users to try their hand at re-envisioning the classic margarita recipe. Recipe submissions are published to the Facebook app, where other users can vote for the submission using the “Like” button.

Patrón has also included expert “mixologists” in the cocktail experiment; they’ll be providing their professional advice and tips to participants.

Source: Mashable

It seems that social media is consuming more of our lives with every day that passes. In fact, as many as one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before they get to the bathroom.

So are young women addicted to Facebook? Here are some interesting stats to help you decide:

• 57% of women age 18-34 say they talk to people online more than face-to-face
• 39% admit they are addicted to Facebook
• 21% check Facebook in the middle of the night
• 58% use Facebook to keep tabs on “frenemies”
• 49% believe its okay to keep tabs on their boyfriend by having access to account…
• …91% don’t think its acceptable to break up over Facebook

It’s a race to 10 million fans for this unlikely pairing.  Facebook publicists have said that on Thursday that the pop star and the president are neck-and-neck in the race to become the first living person with more than 10 million fans on the social networking site.

As of early Friday, Obama was in the lead, with 9,058,881 fans. Lady Gaga trailed behind with 9,023,966.

Both of them were more than 4 million fans behind the No. 1 individual, Michael Jackson, who had 13,285,811. The singer died a year ago.

So, who are you going to friend? Lady Gaga or President Obama??

Source: CNN.com

Launched today, in an effort to generate donations for a nonprofit encouraging healthier, locally sourced school meals, Chipotle’s “No Junk” campaign, is asking people to forward their junk emails to nojunk@chipotlejunk.com.

For every 100,000 junk emails received (up to 500,000), Chipotle will donate $10,00 to The Lunch Box,a new initiative from the F3: Food Family Farming Foundation that will offer 100,000 schools nationwide (32 million children) recipes and other tools for implementing healthy, whole foods-based, economical meal programs.

The campaign, which is live thru August (or until maximum emails are received), ties in with Chipotle’s “Food with Integrity” brand promise - its commitment to using premium-quality ingredients from sources that are more sustainable than any other national restaurant chain.

To drive awareness and participation, Chipotle will run banners ads as well as leverage Facebook.

So what are you waiting for?! Send your spam to nojunk@chipotlejunk.com!

Source: Marketing Daily

Kodak has just friended Facebook, and it has a status update for you.

Kodak’s newest photo-printing kiosks allow users to print photos from their Facebook pages and other online photo services.

Soon, you’ll be able to log into your Facebook account at Kodak’s retail photo-printing kiosks in stores like CVS and Target to print photos. You also will be able to gain access to Picasa and Kodak Gallery online albums, as well as take advantage of a couple of useful new editing features.

To log into Facebook, tap in your standard user name and password using the touch-screen display. The kiosk connects to your account and displays only photos, no wall or status updates. Your photos are organized by albums; touch an individual photo to add it to your print request, tap more, check out and they print.

I don’t print pictures as often as I used to (before digital cameras!) but this will definitely make it much easier. Look out for these starting in September.

Source: New York Times

Start your engines racers! Mini is challenging the Porsche 911 Camera S to a race in two weeks against its Cooper S model. Mini has started a Facebook campaign to promote the hype of the possible race which now has over 100,000fans. Porsche has not committed to the race but is taking it under serious consideration. Mini has even gone as far as calling at Porsche in a full page spread in The New York Times(see image on right).

Porsche is one of the most well-known luxury car manufactures and has an incredible racing record. People are hoping that the incentive of adding one more win to their record will convince Porsche to participate.  Porsche 911 Camera S would be favored to win due to is extremely more powerful engine which has some people questioning Mini’s motives. This would bring much attention to both car manufacturers and could possibly benefit both companies.

Source: adfreak.com

A mass exodus for Facebook is planned with a formal revolt - Quit Facebook Day.

The purpose of the site is to encourage those “sick of Facebook’s lack of respect for your data” to quit the social networking site. Users can “commit to quit” with their Twitter handle or name and join the others publicly pledging to do so in unison.

The delete-your-Facebook movement — scheduled for May 31 — has yet to attract too many pledges (as of right now only 146 people), but with anti-Facebook sentiment on the rise that could change in the near future. In fact, yesterday Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land noticed that “how do i delete my facebook account” is now one of the top Google suggestions when typing “how do i …” in the search box.

The company Vitrue is hoping to shed some light on the subject of Facebook fan page values with a new tool that evaluates the earned media worth of brands’ Facebook pages.

If you buy into the social media specialist’s underlying thesis — and even Vitrue concedes it’s not capturing the entire picture — the popular Starbucks Facebook page is worth $20.7 million.

Starbucks boasts nearly 8 million “likes”. When calculating based on an earned media CPM value of $5, that number yields a $20.7 million annual page value.

Coke, with its 5.5 million likes, has an annual page value of $4.6 million, based on this system.

Skittles, which has 4.4 million likes, is worth $7.7 million, per Vitrue.

Vitrue\’s Social Page Evaluator calculations are based on more than adding up brand connections and assigning proxy values. The measurements take into account the number of posts and interactions, since both directly impact the likelihood of a brand getting broadcast into newsfeeds, along with an “engagement multiplier” Vitrue created. That means brands with smaller fan bases can actually have more valuable communities. The Skittles page, with nearly 1 million fewer connections, is valued above Coke’s based on the greater frequency of posts — 27 in the past month vs. nine for the cola giant.

Though the default is $5, the tool allows users to adjust the earned media number. Making such adjustments can exponentially increase the estimated overall value of brand pages. It’s up to marketers to determine what comparable impressions would cost in paid media, said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue.

So what’s your brands’ page worth?

To read more visit: brandweek.com