The channel, which we developed and localized into 16 languages (including Arabic), was created to announce the global film contest hosted on YouTube, sponsored by Emirates Airlines and judged by Scott Free Films. On February 2nd, we’ll launch the second phase of the program in which film makers from all over the world can submit their short film for a chance to go to and have your film screened at the Venice Film Festival as well as receive a production grant of $500,000 to produce a film with Ridley Scott.

So get working on those short films cause submissions open February 2nd worldwide!

View the video announcing the contest below:

Thanks to those involved: Jonny Bradford, Fabio Sussetto, James Brannon, Kim Turley and David Tyler in London; and Craig Glennie, Troy Chafin, Jon Araquistain, and Tiffany Shelton in SF!

The infographic was launched alongside Amadeus’ latest industry report and highlights current frustrations with travel and how social and technological innovations will help create a stress free more collaborative travel experience in the future.

Users can share the statistics on twitter and Facebook so check it out here and share the travel frustrations and desires you agree with.

Beyond designed a visual and social experience to enrich the streaming of an unreleased live performance of Dark Side of the Moon from Wembley 1974 on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel. The event played every hour on the hour for seven days, allowing fans from across the world to interact using real-time social feeds, making it an unforgettable once-in-a-lifetime event for Pink Floyd fans globally. The event was designed and built to promote Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon immersion box set.

http://www.thefwa.com/shortlist/pink-floyd-the-greatest-gig-in-the-sky

Beyond is proud to present our latest project for YouTube featuring this music festival. Watch the three-day, eight stage event going on in Zilker Park, Austin, Texas live from the channel at http://www.youtube.com/aclfestival.

This project was brought to you by Tiffany, Troy, Kim, and Jonny. Great job team!

Here at Beyond, we’re always on the prowl for innovative use of digital platforms. This week, this duo of fashion-friendly novelties caught our eye:

Yesterday, British fashion chief Topshop launched its latest summer crusade to be carried out in its London, New York, Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool posts. Dubbed “Wish You Were At Topshop,” the holiday-themed campaign is rooted tech, as shoppers are called forth to create their very own digital postcard using an iPad 2 and a makeshift set. After choosing a fitting Instagram filter, customers can upload their photo creations onto Topshop’s image gallery and their personal Facebook page. Users can also ‘like’ Topshop’s Facebook gallery, which automatically enters them to win a £1,000 shopping spree. The fashion maven is the first of its kind to work with Instagram, making for a unique, original in-store experience. And thanks to complimentary print-outs of the postcards, shoppers walk away with an exclusive memento.

From 31 May to 14 June, Bauer Media’s weekly fashion book More! is handing its upcoming issue over to its 100,000+ Facebook followers. Fans will pick the cover model, choose the content of style spreads and fashion wells and write features. In addition, followers can participate in Skype meetings about content and More! will pick five fans to work in its London office to aid in the issue’s creation. At the end of the two-week extravaganza, the publication will hit newsstands on 14 June with every page having some kind of fan-created or fan-approved content. And (somehow), the mag plans to list every contributor in its masthead!

Both campaigns are evidence of fashion-focused entities making use of social media to give their devotees a more personal, tangible relationship with the brand. Stay tuned for more instances of digital utilization done well.

So we moved into our new offices a few weeks ago and only now are putting up some colour on the white walls. Too much emphasis on the beer fridge and coffee machine!

I thought I would give you all a sneaky peak of one of the graphics that Wayne our Senior Designer has created – it’s his take on the UK team and wont be up until next week. See if you can guess who’s who and give us your feedback!

We’ll pop up a picture once we have decorated the place.

The hottest ticket in East London last night was the super hyped Sneakerpedia launch. Tickets were like gold dust and there was a strict no sneaker no entry policy. The promo video proclaims that the site is ‘run by sneaker-heads for sneaker-heads’. While this is certainly true there is an interesting involvement from a certain Foot Locker who are ‘powering’ the site. First things first, how was the party? Well, it was as you would expect, lots of super sneaker junkies each trying to outdo each other with fresh colour-ways and exclusive editions. The drink was free flowing and I am sure there are a fair few Mojito based hangovers lurking in Shoreditch this morning. The funniest part was everyone trying to protect their footwear on the dance-floor as the breakers came out to play, I even saw someone change their sneakers to get involved in the throw down. Upstairs there were MacBook Pro’s available for people to play around with the platform and ask questions to the very helpful (and knowledgeable) assistants on hand.

The site itself is described as a ‘social space not a market place’. Users are encouraged to upload their sneaker collections to show off, educate, engage, share, etc. You can search the site by all manner of classification such as; stitching, lining, material, what celebrities are wearing, what the original colour-way of a specific Nike was, the list goes on. There are five stages to uploading a shoe which involve taking shots of your sneakers in a specific fashion to ensure they conform to the rules of the site. So while we wait for the site to be opened up to the world (its in beta at the present) what did I take away from last night? No it wasn’t a hangover, free sneakers or a crash course in body popping. My overriding thought was that this is a stroke of genius by Foot Locker. Not only have they created a very cool site that I am sure will be huge success, they have also developed a platform that will give them access to all their customer’s personal details and sneaker preferences. They will have an ongoing two-way communication channel and infinite touch-point as long as users stay active on the site. Very sneaky!

When looking at social media, there are both success and failure stories and there are lessons we can take from them by simply examining how success or failure was achieved. The main message, though, was that a single relationship with the right person for the demographic you are targeting can result in huge success. Spamming isn’t the answer – personal relationships and research and influencer analysis is.

I looked at the success of Old Spice and how they targeted YouTube responses to Twitterers with large Klout/influence. That way people who were most likely to have a large influencer pool got the love and that helped spread the message. I then went on to look at Moonfruit who managed to game trending hashtags and when that was pulled, PR’d that as well. CaseMate and the recession iPhone case demonstrated how a simple idea, with a single blog post by someone slightly influential could spread the messaging more efficiently than spamming the message all over wherever. I, of course, looked at the Barak Obama social media and online push to round of social media done well.

I then looked at the disasters. Some are well known, some have yet to reach infamy. McCain trying to bribe people was my first slide then I moved on to the Pepsi failure with their charity push gone bad (and always load test!). I then covered the Dr Pepper Facebook issue where they took over the status updates of a girl and published a porn reference. Habitat, a UK house wares retailer and their famous hashtag spam got its usual outing to illustrate why you should not spam. Asus then featured where they didn’t like the review the public voted for so changed the rules so a better review won the competition. I then featured Nestle and why you shouldn’t tit for tat in public on a Facebook wall. WallMart’s criminal behaviour (in the EU at least) was the penultimate example and I finished with Skittles making their home page all Twitter references of their brand. Ouch.

Budapest was a fantastic place and I discovered a beautiful town with the most amazing architecture. The conference was great and I met a lot of people and made new friends including the only person brave enough to sit next to me on the EasyJet flight. I’m looking forward to LAC!

The practical implication here is that companies need to include channel-agnostic metrics in their measurement campaigns. A lot of marketing teams are trying to wrap their head around social media measurement, and this is one case where they could learn a lesson from PR measurement. It’s been common PR practice to measure share of voice, tone of coverage, message penetration, etc., in print and broadcast media and there’s good reason to apply these to to social media as well. Using channel-agnostic metrics allows you to see the rise (or fall) of your prominence within online conversations over years, not just months. These types of metrics are also much easier to plug into marketing mix models, which require that data be tracked fairly consistently over long periods of time.

So don’t spend too much time worrying about the latest Facebook or Twitter measurement metric “standards”. If you want a measurement program that will last more than a year or two, you’ll need to find metrics that apply equally well to a wide-range of channels.

It is a sign of the times that the question was a perfectly reasonable one. If you read this month’s Wired, the front cover of which blurted “The Web is Dead,” you will understand where he was coming from. Why not just move your web presence to Facebook. If you look at the size of the audiences on Facebook for some of the biggest brands you can see that it may well make sense

There was a good piece in AdAge this week that pulled out some interesting stats. For example Coke now has 11 million fans on Facebook but just 242,000 unique visitors to its site in July (Compete data) down 42% from a year ago.

Maybe Coke is learning something because last week my wife noticed that the Vitamin Water web site (Vitamin Water is now owned by Coca Cola) no longer exists. www.vitaminwater.com takes you directly to their Facebook fan page with 1,746,875 fans.

So do you no longer need a web site?

I would argue every brand is different. It is more important to understand how and why you are trying to engage people online and then choosing the right place to do it. For example Mini has a hugely loyal base of fans but there is no way they could ever create a brand experience on Facebook in the way they have at www.minusa.com.

Facebook clearly has a number of things in its favor: it has a potential audience of 500 million, is a platform designed for engaging people and there is zero barrier to entry, particularly important for smaller businesses.

However there are some limitations to consider which will mean that a lot of brands could never go down the route of Vitamin Water. For example MiniUsa.com has created a really rich web experience which includes product configurators, awesome branded content and a shop which you just couldn’t replicate in Facebook. What’s more, you don’t own the property. You could never get the same level of analytics you could from your own property and what’s to say Facebook won’t start charging you or change the rules in other ways.

So is it time to turn off the web site. I would say that for low involvement brands the answer is much more likely to be yes. However, for high involvement brands the answer is an unequivocal no. For everyone else, it’s probably more about creating a single digital experience where each platform has its own very specific role.