We get excited when we get a chance to ahead forward with our full-service clients and strategize on the trends and tools that that will shape the coming year. Recently we gave some general ideas on how to create a social marketing plan for 2012. Today we’ll build on that and share some of the insight and best practices we’ve been developing with our premium clients.

As always, to go deeper on how each of these concepts can be integrated into your plans for next year, simply contact us. Without further ado, here are three important trends to bank on in 2012:

Go Mobile: Mobile continues to be adopted heavily as a research and purchasing tool by savvy consumers, accounting for 14% of all Black Friday traffic by some reports. Marketers should view it as a core tenet of 2012 planning. Stay ahead of the curve in 2012 and interact with your on-the-go audience in fun and unique ways. Utilize check-ins, instant offers or coupons to engage your audience in real-time. Think about using QR codes, which are underused and often misunderstood; when used properly they can help drive consumer behavior and can be a great compliment to a promotion such as a sweepstakes. Go beyond the web and reach customers in person or through print ads that utilize QR codes to drive consumers to your website, social channels, or a dedicated microsite.

Go Cross-Platform: Cross-channel promotions are becoming more essential than ever, as Google+ and other platforms continue to grow in popularity and cater to different user types and behaviors. The most social brands on the web are already experimenting with Google+ to find ways to authentically interact with their audience on this emerging platform. Google already announced that promotions cannot be hosted on the social network, surprising many brands that look to promotions to grow their audiences and interact with their fans. Instead, brands can use dedicated microsites, promoted and linked from their Google+ pages like they already do with Twitter sweepstakes, as the hub of a promotion geared toward their Google+ audiences. Microsites are the perfect way to allow engagement for users from their preferred networks, while controlling the visual branding, sharing tools and features.

Get In the Cloud: You know about the cloud, but you thought it was just for storage, security or distributed processing? It’s time to take your marketing into the cloud, too. Proactive brand marketers, already investing resources to engage audiences across social channels, think of their marketing as an always-on service targeted across a vast network of consumers, rather than a series of one-off campaigns and promotions. They use technology partners to deliver on-demand marketing utilities, ranging from promotions to branded apps to powerful back-end management and metrics dashboard.

You can start integrating the cloud by licensing a Software-as-a-Service tool (such as the Votigo Platform for creating audience engaging apps across all social platforms) or by tapping into a powerful API which your own developers can use to build out the social marketing apps that your need to take your audience to the next level.

Mobile…cross-platform…cloud.  Three technology trends in a grander context, and three critical components of your 2012 plan.  Check back here often, sign up to hear from us, or follow us on Twitter for frequent updates, offers, and examples of great executions.

We are constantly advocating that marketers should be platform agnostic and run their branded marketing and promotions across any channel where they may find their audience. Facebook continues to be a great centerpiece for any campaign, but there is great value in extending (or in some cases, dedicating) a campaign to other platforms- from standalone microsites to Twitter and Google+ to, of course, mobile.

We have had lots of fun working with our clients over the past few years on innovative campaigns that use mobile to tap into audiences on the go. The Champs Sports: We Know Game Scratch and Win is an example of a premium solution that lives on Facebook but has a dedicated mobile landing page (ChampsScratchandWin) and is generating a lot of buzz.

For Votigo Platform users, you may have also noticed that, not long after launching our first set of contest and promotions apps for Facebook, we followed up immediately with microsite and mobile publishing features. For no additional cost, marketers can publish their Facebook contest or Sweepstakes to a dedicated microsite AND to a dedicated mobile site, where their audience can enter.

So while we prepare some additional resources for this incredibly important new feature, here are 3 quick tips on how to make the most of it:

1) Publish it! Once you are finished designing your Contest or Sweeps, click “Publish.” Publish it to Facebook if you want. But then click “Publish” for Mobile (and for Microsite, too.) You can also snag the URL for each, to be used for spreading the word.

2) Cross post it. You are probably already using multiple channels to tell your audience about the promotion (if not, check out this post). Don’t be shy about sending a Tweet or adding a Facebook post geared straight toward mobile viewers- especially if you know that your audience is highly mobile. For example, if you Tweet once about the contest, tweet again soon after something like, “Mobile audience: you, too, can enter our contest straight from your mobile phone by clicking here.”

3) Email it. Whether in a dedicated email blast- with a subject line the specifically mentions the chance to enter a competition from a mobile and win- or just in your standard email marketing to your customer audience, call out the mobile contest or sweeps entry.

4) Advertise it: Google AdWords and other advertising networks offer incredible flexibility in targeting pay-per-click ad campaigns to mobile users. Take advantage of that and set up a mobile-only campaign with a clear call-to-action (Enter our contest from your mobile!) that directs to the mobile page.

5) Set up a custom URL and redirect: Depending on which ways you’ll promote your campaign, you can set up a dedicated web address for the mobile promotion (see Champs example above) and redirect it to the mobile URL provided in the platform. You could even use a URL shortener that allows you to set up custom URLs and simply redirects while offering additional metrics.

So don’t just publish a promotion to Facebook.  Take it mobile and make sure your mobile audience knows about it.

We’re often asked for “the key” to success in social media marketing and promotions. It’s a complex answer and there isn’t a single key but a series of essential steps, from building the foundation of an active audience across social platforms, through aligning an incentive that fits your brand and the promotion. We have written and tweeted and spoken about all of the above and we mean it when we say: don’t skip a step (and we’re happy to help).

But there is one element of a great promotion that is easy enough to overlook, to disastrous consequences.

You have to tell people about it.

To kickstart the viral effect, to draw the critical early adopters, to cultivate the Godinian Sneezers (or the Gladwellian Mavens) who influence their networks to pay attention, you have to promote the promotion.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools to spread the word. You can tell your existing social media audience by:

1) Post messages and updates about it on your Facebook page (and make sure to “Like” it yourself)
2) Tweet about it
3) Post about it on your company’s LinkedIn profile page, and on the status updates of your individual employees
4) Post about on Google+ (and make sure to “+1″ it from your own account)
5) Create a video about it and post it on YouTube
6) Write a blog post about it on your corporate blog
7) Announce it in your email marketing messages, newsletters and even the footer of day-to-day emails
8 ) Tell your clients about it directly
9) Post signage about it in stores
10) Broadcast a consistent message about it in your traditional media (radio, TV, print) advertising
11) Point PPC ads from AdWords to the promotion home page
12) Set up a display advertising campaign on Facebook and AdWords
13) Contact industry associations to message their members about it
14) Tell influential bloggers and Twitterers about it
15) Put out a press release about it

Check out how GORE-TEX updates its Facebook audience on the “YOUR-STORY - OUR GEAR” contest currently running on its Facebook page.

It’s a simple blend of old and new tactics for spreading the word, but you might be surprised by how many brands fail to lay the groundwork of their promotion from the beginning.

Also, a few quick nuts and bolts. Any time you promote your promotion, you should:

1) Include a link directly to the website, mobile landing page, YouTube channel or Facebook tab where the contest or sweepstakes is live
2) Use simple calls-to-action, such as “Tell your friends about our contest…”
3) Be responsive to users who reply, comment or re-post your messages

While you can’t always expect a glut of entries at the beginning of a campaign, if you tap into the cross-channel reach of all of the social and traditional media channels above, you can expect the viral effect to kick in and generate awareness and participation. You’ll increase your “Likes” and expand your overall social media audience, collect a great opt-in mailing list of potential customers, and (for UGC contests) inspire great content that you can use for future branding.

What strategies have been most effective for you in promoting your own branded promotions?

If your business sells anything to anyone, there are some stats of interest within this week’s early returns on Cyber Monday 2011. IBM and eBay reported $1.25B in total Cyber Monday sales (29% more than on Black Friday), and found that more than 6% of consumers shopped online via mobile. Over half a percent of cyber buyers came from social channels- mostly Facebook. All bigger numbers than years past.

What does this all mean for brand marketers? Consumers are as responsive to great deals as ever. They are spending. And they are using their digital tools- especially the social and mobile combo- to find and buy great deals.

So with these seasonal trends in mind, how are you planning your 2012 social media marketing and promotions?

To do this annual planning exercise justice in an explosive growth channel like social media, you’d want to know what the trends are heading into the year, what consumers are responding to, and what may be resonating best by December 2012- the next Black Friday. Even amid this year’s holiday season, agencies and planners are deep into planning the next cycle.

A few things to consider:

1) What is your planning cycle based upon? Is it seasons? Or calendar milestones (like Black Friday?) Or is it geared toward new product launches?

2) What is the internal turnaround time for launching a marketing campaign for your brand? From setting a campaign strategy to budgeting to getting everyone internally on board to designing key ad units and graphics, how long does it take to pull off a big idea?

3) Follow the huge trends: mobile, including mobile access but also check-ins, instant offers and coupons, QR codes and everything else mobile can do. And, cross-platform in general. Facebook continues to be a tremendous anchor for your social strategy, but don’t neglect the other platforms that are great for different reasons.

4) Allow time to get great outside guidance on best practices for your promotion or campaign. From coming up with the big ideas to filling in all the fundamentals- prizes, fulfillment, legal, complying with all social channels’ promotional guidelines- to executing under a short or extended timeframe, it pays to have a third party partner.

What are your goals for the year in terms of social media marketing and promotions, and what cross-channel campaigns and big ideas are going to get you there?

When it comes to creating a winning social media promotion it’s all in the details, and no detail is too small. One seemingly small detail that can have a huge impact on the success of your campaign is the use of a custom graphic. When you create your own campaign with our new self-serve tool, you have the option of uploading a custom graphic into your header. You’ll want to take advantage of this feature, as it can help generate more entries and ultimately more fans for your Facebook page.

So, what makes a great graphic? The best graphics include your campaign details in a clean and straightforward design. This allows fans to get a general idea of what’s required to enter your promotion and what they have a chance to win, quickly and without having to read rules and details.
Here are a few ideas for creating a winning graphic:

1. List the steps required to enter your promotion so that people can see how easy it is to win
2. List the prizes at stake to get your fans excited
3. Take advantage of the space. You can upload large graphics with a maximum width of 520 pixels and a maximum height of 900 pixels

Create a great graphic and you’re well on your way to a successful promotion that grows your audience and engages your fans. Need more ideas for creating a winning promotion? Here are 5 tips for making your contest a success.

It may seem like a no-brainer to connect your social media promotion to an event. That’s because events have, built-in, some of the most important components of a successful, audience-building, awareness-generating social media promotion:

1) The definitive, time-sensitive attention of an audience
2) An easy-to-integrate theme
3) And often a logical prize that goes perfectly with the occasion (tickets, access, a timely discount or gift)

Sporting events…concerts…product launches…conferences and conventions…even social media milestones (”Our 1,000,000th Follower!”)…these are all great events that savvy marketers effectively tie their promotions to.

Holidays- and the frenzied weeks that precede them- may be the single best sort of event to serve as a promotional anchor.

This week we read that Americans will spend close to $7B on Halloween by October 31- or 18% more than we did last year. Not surprisingly, recent use of our newly-launched self-service platform reflects a HUGE emphasis on Halloween promotion. Seemingly every other sweepstakes launched over the past week is Halloween-themed, from ticket giveaways for haunted houses to best dog costume photo contests. Some of these contests have engaged hundreds of entries almost immediately. And some great ones have come out of our full-services, like this costume contest from The Children’s Place.

So as a social media marketer, what do you turn your attention to once the Halloween rush subsides on Tuesday?

Holiday retail. While the holiday bonanza official kicks off in the wee hours of Black Friday, Nov. 25, when throngs of Early Bird shoppers line up for morning-after-Thanksgiving specials to OFFICIALLY launch the retail spree that runs through Christmas Eve and, really, New Year’s, the reality is that holiday commerce is already underway.

Votigo clients are well on their way to an impressive variety of contests, sweepstakes, mobile promotions (including check-in and coupon-based giveaways) and much more. Some are keeping it simple: a Facebook photo contest asking fans to submit a snapshot of them demonstrating their need for / favorite use of / funny drawing of a newly launched product or holiday favorite gift item.

Others will get more sophisticated with a cross-platform campaign that first captures audience attention on Facebook OR Twitter and a branded microsite, then drives them to a store for a chance at a mobile instant win or a coupon offer, and finally invites users to spread the word for additional votes (for a photo contest) or sweepstakes entries. These strategies work especially well for retailers, from mom-and-pop shops to national chains.

So even though it’s nearly All Hallow’s Eve- and that means Black Friday is a mere month away- there is still time to create your own promotion in our self-service tool or call our full-service team to get started on a premium promotion.

Earlier this week Votigo officially announced the launch of self-service access to our social media promotions platform. We’ve been asked, with our background of providing full-service, flexible, cross-platform social media promotions for major brands since launching our first promotion for Victoria’s Secret PINK in early 2007, why launch a self-service platform now?

We strongly believe that brand marketers, and technology providers like us, are just scratching the surface in the realm of social media marketing and promotions. Think about it: Facebook has only been open to brands for a few years; Twitter for about the same short time and YouTube a bit longer. And even though a lot of the other social tools we frequently provide- like interactive microsites and user-generated content galleries- have been in use longer for 10 years or more, that’s no time in the big picture of marketing, where promotions (like contests and sweepstakes and offers) have proven effective over the course of decades.

As many social media marketers know, Facebook recently announced a big time offer to small businesses, hoping to greatly expand the already 9.2M small businesses who already use the platform. To us, that is another sign there is a world of businesses that are essentially just getting started when it comes to marketing and promotions on Facebook and other social networks.

So we built a do-it-yourself platform that we could offer to all the businesses who couldn’t yet make the budget and time commitment of our full-service offerings (even though we now have full-service tools starting at $2,500.) We designed it with small- and especially mid-sized businesses in mind and set out to get great feedback from our early users and so far the feedback- and the promotions launched- are impressive.

One of the cool, unexpected things that has happened when we started inviting beta users to try the platform, and showcasing it at different events for the past few months, is seeing bigger brands, like Brooks Running, and even start-ups start using the platform, in addition to the small- and mid-sized businesses for whom it was designed. They have shown us what they need in enterprise editions of our self-service platform, whether it’s the ability to sanction promotions at local (retail) levels within corporate brand standards, or to launch various promotions for different brands within their portfolio, or in an agency context, to launch promotions for multiple clients. Some major brands will use the platform simply to launch friction-free promotions between their bigger, more integrated campaigns.

And of course you can still tap into Votigo’s full-service solutions when your needs include promotions across social channels (beyond Facebook), advanced features, flexible design and tight timelines.

Our self-service platform completes our full spectrum of service levels, apps and features, and we’re excited that it allows us to serve a whole new set of brands and businesses.

Since we wrote about an Upfront Mentality for social media promotions almost two months ago, we have fielded lots of inquiries on the best tools and features for designing promotions that activate your customer audiences in the back-to-school bonanza that unfolds between now and early September.

With that, here are 3 quick strategies for back-to-school photo contests, video contests, sweepstakes, and other promotions that will help drive business for retailers, technology and gadget companies, consumer products brands and other companies looking to capitalize on the seasonal rush.

1) Align the Incentive:  Always a best practice, it is equally important when launching a promotion to an audience that is pressed for time- parents outfitting their children for the first day of school- to create an incentive that helps them check something off their list.  Coupons or discounts, free school supplies, hardware and software, and shopping sprees are traditional staples.  If your audience is a college-age demographic, nothing goes further then a stack of cash that will help them pare down their school debt.

2) Target Parents, but Engage Teens

Moms and dads typically wield the purchasing power, so ultimately the promotion needs to activate them.  But don’t leave the end user out of the equation.  Branded contests can also engage style- and social media-savvy teens by catering to their taste or by curating photos or videos of their personal style.  Writes AOL DailyFinance’s Barbara Thau,  both Sears and JC Penney are featuring real-word teens in their digital campaigns this season.

3) Tie It Together: Mobile and the In-Store Experience:

Two-thirds of parents will use their smartphones, reports Jaclyn Allard of IndependentRetailer.com, in the process of spending their average $600+ back-to-school budget in the coming month.

What’s more, according to a June PriceGrabber survey, 95% of back-to-school shoppers will be looking for some kind of promotion, and 69% will use the web to comparison shop and deal-hunt.  Yet as our best retail brand clients routinely demonstrate, great social media promotions for retailers are also effective in driving traffic to the store.
What does it mean?  A cross-channel social media strategy can activate consumers by finding them online, offering an incentive to visit your store, and motivating them to expand their shopping list once there. Mobile is a huge part of that.

Here are some examples of audience-engaging components to a killer back-to-school retail promotion that starts with social media, includes mobile and ends at the checkout counter:

• Launch a photo or video contest on a microsite and includes a contest application on your Facebook brand page.  Participants submit visuals of their favorite back-to-school outfits or their outdated wardrobes, or illustrate their need for new gadgets, software or supplies.  They get a coupon just for entering- as does anyone who simply registers to comment and vote- and a chance for a grand prize
• Visitors to the store- coupon in hand or not- can check in via Facebook or Foursquare, or snap a picture of a QR code with their mobile reader, for a chance at an instant win- a coupon or free merchandise
• Finally, store visitors can upload a photo or video to a mobile contest landing page as they try on their new attire or demo the latest gear.   Anyone who uploads a photo gets an instant coupon, and an entry into a sweepstakes for a grand prize- a shopping spree or a big-ticket prize

Lots of ideas…but is there still time?  Yes- barely- since the same PriceGrabber survey reports that back-to-school shopping is happening primarily in August.  So enjoy this food for thought and contact Votigo if we can be of assistance.

You’ve made the commitment to launch a photo contest or video contest to engage your customer audience on social channels. It’s a great idea since it clearly addresses the question: what do I do with my Facebook and social media following?

But all user generated content contests are not cut from the same cloth. Some work tremendously- relative to the goals of the sponsor. And some probably flop- though we’re unfamiliar with that variety.

There are a lot of factors involved. But while we’ve recently shared our thoughts on Why Social Media Contests Work and, earlier, simply How To Do Social Media, we’ll continue on the theme and get closer to our sweet spot. Today’s lesson, polled from our full-service client team: 3 Features that Push a Social Media Contest to Success.

1) Geotargeting: Localize the User Experience

Big brands are gravitating toward a localized content experience on Facebook, mobile and beyond, writes Lauren Fisher at SimplyZesty.

Or as Dave Williams, Bling Media CEO, wrote recently on Ad Age:

“Localized creative is effective at generating awareness and ultimately driving people into stores, building higher order value, and powering transactions. Think of it like the Sunday circular that runs in the newspaper every week. Instead of buying ads in the paper, brands can push weekly specials out to localized audiences, and do so far more efficiently with mass reach and frequency.”

The social media promotion feature that solves this: Geotargeting. Say you’re a retailer, restaurant or service provider and you want to talk to customers based on proximity to your retail locations. Either through Profile information (on Facebook) or by asking for a zip code, geotargeting allows you to promote events (store openings), offer coupons or even customize contest parameters and prizes at the local level.”

2) Voter Incentive: Removing Barriers to Participate

Everyone creates content on the internet right? Actually not: as Forrester Research reported last autumn (via ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez), fewer than a quarter of the internet audience are Creators of social content.

It’s true that in nearly a year since the Forrester study was released, new forums for publishing social content abound. Not just Google+, Quora, Tumblr and the other surging social networks, but also apps like Instagr.am and services like Spotify are empowering users with even more opportunity to publish content (like stylized photos and personal playlists) to the social web.

Still, content creation is a barrier for some would-be participants of a photo or video contest. So on the one hand, a significant chunk of your brand’s audience are Creators. They are in the habit of creating content for the web, and they have more tools than ever to do so. That user generated content will lead to authentic engagement, viral brand storytelling among your customers, and a repository of content (video, images, words) to be repurposed for future use (with permission). Many contest sponsors would be thrilled with that result.

But on the other, you can generate far greater participation in the contest if you also remove the Creator barrier from participation.

A Voter Incentive does just that. This feature layers a sweepstakes, in which anyone who votes, or comments, or shares a submission, is eligible to win a prize, on top of the contest. Rewarded for participating, voters who haven’t submitted content still have incentive to check back daily or weekly, see the latest entries, cast a vote, spread the word again, and most importantly for you, reconnect with the brand.

Check out ABSA’s My Team, My Passion photo and video contest, which promotes the Currie Cup- South Africa’s premier rugby competition- and is sponsored by one of the nation’s largest banks. ABSA’s contest is perfect example of a well-staged user generated content contest- especially because the winning video will air during the Currie Cup Final, but also because the Voter Incentive awards weekly prizes to voters.

3) The Viral Incentive: A Round Trip to Spreading the Word

This refer-a-friend feature is critical for creating the word-of-mouth effect that is typically a goal for any social media contest. In essence, the contest participant gains additional entries to a sweepstakes each time someone they invite registers, votes or otherwise participates in the contest. It is a simple and powerful form of referral marketing and it virtually ensures word-of-mouth will happen.

You’re investing in a social media promotion- a great step to engaging and expanding your pool of potential customers and advocates across digital channels. Don’t forget about the details- those premium features that broaden participation, personalize the experience and trigger word-of-mouth.