Then, @Bread_Winners went on to make my case.  Last week, I tweeted that I had seen a wine on the wall at Bread Winners while brunching there.  The wine intrigued me, then I learned the label had earned a spot in a San Francisco MOMA exhibit about wine labels as art.  My tweet only mentioned Bread Winner’s (and even failed to use their correct handle).

Within a day, @Bread_Winners asked if they could help.  I explained that I had looked for and had trouble finding the wine, saying I’d just have to wait to have it there on my next visit.

Bread Winners took the initiative to help.  They contacted a liquor store near me, connected their senior wine consultant with the right wine rep, and told me I could pick up the wine there soon.  In the meantime, they invited me to come for dinner, have a glass and leave with a corked bottle.

They rocked it.  And made an advocate out of an already-fan.

The wine, by the way, is The Supernatural, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with hints of passionfruit and honeysuckle.

Bread Winners social media is handled by an undisclosed agency.

Our goal was to not only give some money to a great hospital, but also raise the prayer count on www.1millionprayers.com. Every day, Anna continues her battle and we continue to pray, with over 700,000 prayers and counting. As we approach the 1-year anniversary of launching this initiative on April 22, 2011, we hope to reach our goal of 1 million prayers for Anna.

Darah Bonham from Abolish Cancer helped kick off the Twitterthon bright and early on the morning of February 18^th. We would love to thank all the people who helped out by following @abolishcancer, retweeting the message and getting others involved in our goal. Although we started off slow in reaching 500, our momentum kept growing throughout the day. We were lucky enough to receive tweets and retweets from diverse Twitter users, including actresses like Angie Harmon, bands like Eli Young Band, and professional athletes, including Jermichael Finely and Michael Huff. We also received a lot of help (and tweets) from Anna’s sister, Patrice, and Children’s Medical Center.

Although we often use Twitter ourselves and for our clients, it was really awesome to see how this tool can be put to great use. We have been able to use technology to create a virtual prayer chain for Anna that reaches all over the world and find new ways to get our message to new audiences quickly.

We reached our goal around 7:00 PM on Friday night. The generous community of John Paul II High School, Anna’s school, also matched our donation to Children’s with a donation of their own.

Again, we are so thankful to Darah for starting this amazing movement to unite all charities, organizations and people to abolish cancer. In sixteen months, Darah has helped raise over $51,000 for cancer research just through tweeting.

We also want to thank Children’s Medical Center for continually providing expert care for Anna and all the other children battling cancer.

Thank you again to everyone who participated in our Twitterthon. We could not have reached our goal without your effort. Please keep praying and encouraging others to promise  to pray on the top left corner of her website.

Stay strong, Anna! We are still praying (and tweeting) for you!

The topics ranged from collecting local art (heyshari.com), to everything you wanted to know about redheads (@valerielm), to why you should own a dog (@dmburrows), to a compelling prison entrepreneurship program (@mikeorren), to the confessions of a Widespread Panic addict (@kacewrangler).

It made you think. It made you laugh. It was never boring. And it proved a great opportunity to connect with some interesting new people right here in our hometown.

We look forward to the next one coming this summer. Check back here or keep an eye on our tweets (@firehouseagency) for details.

The campaign let us spark conversations with Stripes customers:

And about the brand amongst their customers:

Using Lamar Outdoor’s iSpot technology, the boards were up and streaming tweets almost instantly. And just as quickly, this mashup of social and traditional media was getting attention from followers and the industry. If you’d like to hear more about the campaign, @TrippWestbrook can tell you all about it this April at the OAAA Conference in Miami. See you there.

The tool-as-strategy trap is an easy one to fall prey to. It usually involves a shiny new form of media (Newspapers! Radio! Television! Internet! Telekinesis!) and a proclamation that all previous forms of media are forthwith null and void posthaste, etc. etc. Gurus arise (often of the self-anointed variety), agencies and clients are fleeced and large segments of the populace don’t notice a thing has changed.

The current tool du jour is social media. Social media includes such things as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a bunch of other sites that promise to be different than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but really aren’t. Social media does not include such familiar anti-social media as television, radio, magazines and billboards. Because you enjoy those mediums alone, with nothing but the cold, echoing groans of your empty soul to comfort you.

Also, MySpace no longer counts as social media. It has carved a newer, niche-ier segment known as Perv-n-Indie-Band media. Also, kitties.

Companies as vast as General Electric and as tiny as the neighborhood dry cleaners are into social media, bombarding us with pleas to “like” their Facebook pages, follow them on Twitter and, as a favorite SM saying goes, “join the conversation.” Which is all well and good, assuming companies understand the difference between being on Facebook and Twitter and actually using the mediums to advance their businesses.

Because, as I may have alluded to a scant few sentences ago, social media is a tool, not a strategy. It’s like any other tool in advertising: Wield it well or be prepared to poke out an eye. Just as there is a wide gulf between great TV spots and anything starring Vince “Slap Chop” Schlomi, there’s a big difference between successful social media campaigns like Pepsi’s Refresh Project and Best Buy’s Twitter-based Twelpforce, and tossing your pizza chain’s locations up on Facebook and throwing some coupons to your 193 Twitter followers.

There are several attractive aspects to social media. First, it’s cheap to get into. Unless you’ve managed to hold onto to that TI 99/4a for the past 30 years, chances are your computer will load up Facebook and Twitter just fine. So, your initial investment comes down to time, which is often comes in the ultra-affordable form of intern-time. But that’s where too many companies and agency begin and end their foray into social media – with a young youth who either thinks he’s knows everything about social media yet knows nothing about the brand, or admits he knows nothing about either. Note the all-around lack of brand knowledge going on. So much for faking it till you make it.

Like all media, it is possible to create an effective campaign using social media alone. But, unshockingly, the best social media efforts tie into broader schemes. The best current example of this is Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign. This campaign originally launched with one thirty-second spot, a couple of fifteens and a microsite. And those spots exploded into all manner of glorious joy bits over YouTube, racking up at least 14 million views from my coworker Silver alone. Oh, and the thirty-second spot won the Grand Prix and Cannes. A nice piece of hardware, even if it stinks of mime.

Now, Old Spice and their agency, Wieden+Kennedy, could’ve kicked back, tossed out a couple more derivative spots and called it a campaign. And, in fact, they did do some more TV spots, although no one would accuse them of phoning those in. But then they did something that can really only be described as cool: They put their now über-popular character to the task of answering their fans with personalized videos. Pulling comments from multiple SM sources in real-time (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), the creative team scripted responses that TMYMCSL (actor Isaiah Mustafa) delivered in his typical, manly style. Videos were posted to YouTube and their arrival disseminated via Twitter and Facebook. They did this for two days straight, answering comments from anonymous tweeters to celebrities to Mustafa’s own daughter. In the end, they had produced over 100 clips, lit up the online world and gained even more fans for the brand. It’ll probably win some more trophies next year. And, crazy of crazies, it was all part of a strategy.

Sure beats the heck out of “Who wants a coupon?” tweets, doesn’t it?

Later,

Fox