Viral Marketing has taken on a whole life of it’s own, with the ability to create microsites, campaigns and video available to everyone, that consumers are now having a hard time telling the real brand promotions from the fake. The issue is bringing the question of liability and infringement back into the spotlight, and cases like Smirnoff’s BrosIcingBros.com is another sticky example.

A drinking game website that aggregated consumer-generated photos and video of mainly men getting “iced”, or downing a bottle of Smirnoff Ice while on one knee for those not sure what it all means, went live and was quickly thought to be a viral marketing campaign made by the company in an attempt to combat declining sales. (more…)

Ever since Ashton Kutcher and media outlet, CNN raced to be the first to reach 1 million followers on Twitter, people have become more aware of the real-time marketing power and social capabilities of the micro-blogging platform. (more…)

CNN’s user-generated news community, iReport will be incorporating an interactive challenge to its reporters to take a look at the year’s milestones in areas that may have effected their own lives in a 2009 year review called 365 days in 30 seconds. (more…)

With many of the world’s leaders coming together in less than a month, at the climate change conference in Copenhagen, the digital world has seen a lot of cause marketing surrounding the subject. The Raise Your Voice campaign is a chance for the rest of the world to make their own contribution. (more…)

This week Google Inc.’s YouTube struck a deal with Time Warner Inc. to feature program clips from a range of its cable networks including CNN and the Cartoon Network. The deal promises both parties a portion of the ad revenue and brings into question the life-span of user-generated content (UGC). (more…)

Networks scrambled to keep up with developing news while continuing to cover the world’s biggest stories last week as three high profile celebrities passed away, because of all the activity many stations relied on user-generated content (UGC) to round out their stories.

The biggest news in America last week was the passing of pop superstar Michael Jackson. The singer died at the age of 50 and news of his death spread rapidly across the Internet. Many Americans first heard of his death through a social network such as Twitter. For others it was on the evening news. But even if you were among those hearing it for the first time on the evening news, you likely still saw images, video or testimonials the network took from online users. (more…)

For companies, brands, organizations and people that ever doubted the value of social networks and user-generated content (UGC) as a legitimate means of communication, the events of the last week in Iran must be an eye opening experience. Since the Iranian government has expelled almost all foreign correspondents the only news getting out of the country is being sent via social networks, namely Twitter.

What makes this particular situation different is that the content being shared on social networks is not remaining just on the social networks. Images and videos from inside Iran are being broadcast on television channels around the world – from CNN, to the BBC to CBC. (more…)

Fox News is expanding contact with its citizen journalists with the launch of uReport on its well known subsidiary, MySpace.

The uReport online presence will be a MySpace page that encourages users to tag photos and videos that tie them to specific Fox News stories. The MySpace page will be monitored by Fox News and images and video that are uploaded may appear on Fox News stations. This system is also intended to make it very easy for users to share their uploaded images with their MySpace social networks.

The strategy of developing citizen journalists for gathering news is quickly becoming the norm for all news agencies from television to print. (more…)

Facebook has announced immediate changes to the social networking website. Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, blogged about the changes and tells users to stay posted because there’s more on the way.

Profile pages that work more like a news feed will now be available for organizations, celebrities or politicians. A link in the blog Facebook shows CNN as an example of an organizations profile page. The CNN profile page will allow users to become fans of CNN and receive news updates that will appear on their existing news feed. Users will be able to follow status updates, pictures, videos and anything that CNN posts. With these specialty profiles it will now be possible to follow organizations and celebrities without going through the traditional Facebook method of requesting friends. (more…)

South Africa’s global tourism campaign, My South Africa, has won the gold award for media owners at the Internationalist Awards for Innovation in Media.

The campaign featured advertising on CNN to persuade viewers to upload videos, photos and stories that encapsulate their experiences of South Africa to the My South Africa website. (more…)