iVillage is one of the first and largest communities for women online. Their decision to make the move onto new social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook was more than just a ploy to increase traffic back to their page. The brand is focused on extending its community onto these platforms in a way that creates new value for the business and unique experiences for users.

As Michele Mitchell, VP of Audience Development and Retention for iVillage explains, “For us Facebook is not simply a place for us to advertise, it’s a new platform for us to build our business and extend our community.”

Check out the new iVillage Facebook presence and stay tuned to see how we continue to help this initiative grow to become an increasingly important part of their business.

Monday’s Women’s Wear Daily put the spotlight on social media with an article featuring an interview with enter:new media president, Mark Curtis. In addition to weighing in on the e-commerce impact social media can have for fashion accessory brands, Mark was able to touch on the importance of luxury brands controlling the context of their initiatives

According to Curtis, companies going social must stay specific in their branding efforts or risk veering down-market. A firm can spend years carefully cultivating an image through print advertising and runway shows only to see its efforts undone once it posts its first tweet.

“Some luxury firms present their brand on Facebook the same way ‘Joe’s Plumbing’ does, or lets interns run their Twitter feed,” Curtis said. “Social media is such a huge opportunity for brands and every detail – whether it’s putting out a post that is off-brand or not correctly handling this frenetic conversation – can undo so much effort and investment that’s been built up for so long.”

See the full article here.

enter:new media is profiled as one of the “social media agencies to watch” in a new article by iMedia Connections’ Michael Estrin. Based on an interview with Mark Curtis, the article covers our use of “Fan Only” content on Facebook and gets Mark’s take on what requirements brand managers should keep in mind when selecting a social media agency.

The new Fan Box is essentially a free Facebook Connect widget brands can add to their existing website(s) to enable visitors to become a Facebook fan without ever actually leaving the site.

The Fan Box replaces the static  “Find us on Facebook” button and should help brands better leverage their existing site traffic to build their Facebook community. The Fan Box can even be customized to highlight recent status updates, number of fans, videos, etc.

Brands need to not only determine where to place Fan Boxes on their site(s) but which features to leverage. We are currently testing different executions to determine best practices. For example, you can see an example of our test of the Fan Box right below the real-time Twitter feed on the YMI Obsessed Blog. We are also moving quickly to implement the Fan Box into the canvas pages of certain Facebook applications.

We’ll provide an update as the real impact of this new widget comes into clearer focus.

One of the biggest developments on Facebook over the last couple of weeks has been the Facebook Username Landrush – basically a vanity URL for profiles. While this service was only available to Facebook’s top advertisers prior to June 13th, any business public profiles with over 1,000 fans can now apply. (After June 28th, usernames will be available to business public profiles with under 1,000 fans.)

The initial launch of this feature caused such a stir that it was covered on CNN, yet the big question remains – what exactly does this mean to marketers?

Our take is that these custom URLs make it substantially easier for our clients to integrate Facebook into their overall marketing mix. Once upon a time, social networks were viewed simply as another tool to drive traffic to a brand’s main web site. As Facebook’s ability to create brand value in its own right has become increasingly clear, it now makes sense for brands to use their FB presence as a major call to action across email, print, tv, radio, billboards, web, and live events…

In April, Vitamin Water broke new ground by using their Facebook Public Profile as their primary call to action for their multi million dollar campaign around Vitamin Water 10. How will you leverage your brand’s new Facebook URL?

Look for upcoming profiles on how enter:new media’s clients are fully integrating their Facebook presence into their entire marketing mix.

We are sometimes asked why we place such an emphasis on Facebook as the centerpiece for our clients’ social media strategies. In case you missed it, Nick O’Neil’s article yesterday on All Facebook does a good job of laying out some of the key reasons why Facebook Pages have thoroughly established themselves as the community platform of choice.

Interestingly, this article states that one of the few drawbacks of the platform “is that you can’t customize the design.” This too however is easily overcome with an agency like enter:new media that gives you the ability to not only promote and manage social media programs, but also to create highly customized pages and applications – all through the same team.

Look for examples of custom designed Facebook Pages from the enter:new media in upcoming posts.

It’s not just search that is losing power to the increasingly relevant social platforms. Blogs, once the most immediate source for news and real-time reporting on “what’s hot” are now facing stiff competition from the constant streaming of Twitter and Facebook. This is why you saw so many blogs this week rushing to add Facebook streaming to their distribution platform that already included RSS and Twitter feeds.

Why is this happening? Let’s take a deeper look.  Blogs first rose to power as a major challenge to mainstream media since virtually anybody could create a blog and begin to publish information in real-time to an unlimited audience. Still, you needed to “set up” the blog, build a user base, and then generate a steady flow of content a step further. With virtually no technical set up, and no pressure to publish anything more than a single phrase of content at a time, blogs are starting to look a lot like the old guard.