It's no surprise that with Twitter hitting 100 million active users this month, Facebook already clocking 750 million active accounts and the meteoric rise in the last 12 months of the likes of Foursquare (10 million and counting) and Instagram (7 million) to name but a few, every marketing director wants a piece of social media action right now.
The amount of live marketing briefs for social media work is increasing exponentially year-on-year; and so is the quality of work. The first Social Media Campaigns Hall of Fame was launched last summer and one year on the latest list has been unveiled today. Showcasing 50 more brilliant campaigns from around the world, innovation abounds. Here's ten favourites from the latest top 50. Read the full list is here.
1. Tippex's Campaign is a Whitewash
The clever people at Tippex devised a campaign on YouTube that went truly viral. Using a simple annotation function on a recorded video of a bear and a man in the woods, viewers could choose what happened next. With a number of pre-recorded endings and the novelty of being able to 'change' a YouTube video, the campaign was an instant hit and has had more than 17 million views.
2. Motoring On - Local Motors
Local Motors has taken the concept of crowdsourcing and really developed it (and cars in the process). The company, which operates by using a collective of designers and engineers, offers the public the chance to have a truly bespoke car. Elements of the car are decided by the commissioner and the community, with final designs (which are copyrighted under the 'Creative Commons' protocol) then turned into reality in the company's micro-factories located across the US. Watch out big manufacturers - car crowdsourcing could be the future of motoring.
3. Read Ayn Rand
Nick Newcomen went a little further than most literary fans when he spent a month driving more than 12,000 miles to inscribe his message "Read Ayn Rand" on a vast swathe of US land. Using a GPS tracking device as a "pen", Newcomen took about 10 days to complete each word, turning on his GPS logger when he wanted to write and turning it off between letters, videoing himself at landmarks along the route for documentation. He drove 12,328 miles in total, across 30 American states, inputting the data once he was finished into Google Earth to create the world's largest book advertisement.
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4. Moby: Destroyed
Musician Moby took the album stream to a whole new level when he launched a microsite to premiere his new album, Destroyed, that ties in Soundcloud and Instagram. The site merges music and images into one interactive experience. Upon visiting the site, tracks from the disc begin playing.
The site also contained a map of the world littered with pins. When a visitor clicked on a pin Moby's photos from around the world were displayed. Fans also added their own images to the map by snapping pictures on Instagram and adding the tag #destroyed.
5. Sweet Tweets for Sweet Treats - Belling
When cooker manufacturer Belling asked their social media agency to engage with people who cook (rather than people who heat up food) the result was Tweet Pie: The World's Shortest Recipe Book. A collection of 50 recipes - each recipe condensed into a single tweet - crowdsourced through Twitter. The book's illustrations were themselves crowdsourced and the winning designs chosen by public vote on Belling's Facebook page. Belling printed and sold the book, with every penny going to food charity FoodCycle.