We’ve found many of our clients are baffled by the ever growing array of social media offerings and are not quite sure which ones they should be integrating into their marketing efforts – “Should we tweet?” “Facebook or LinkedIn, or both?” “What’s a Pinterest, and why do I care?”

In an effort to simplify and define what makes one different from another we offer the following:

Twitter – I’m eating #sushi.
Texting – I <3 sushi
Facebook – I Like sushi.
YouTube – Here I am eating sushi.
LinkedIn – My skills include sushi eating.
Spotify – Now listening to “Sushi & the Banshees”
Pinterest – Here’s a nice sushi recipe.
WordPress- I blog about sushi.
Tumblr – I’m a college student who likes sushi.
Flickr – Here’s some pix I shot of sushi.
Cloob – I’m an Iranian who likes sushi.
G+ – I’m a Google employee who eats sushi.

We hope this helps with your social media strategy in 2012!

I’ve always enjoyed the drive up through the North Georgia Mountains. So I welcomed the opportunity to present our capabilities to a prospective new client located in historic Habersham County. In fact, it was an historic mountain water springhouse that was the catalyst for my visit.

Built in the early 1800s by slaves, the springhouse most recently had served as the source of Blue Ridge Mountain Spring Water. A long time client of Bigelow Advertising. After 25 years of successful bottled water operations throughout metro Atlanta, Blue Ridge sold to competitor Crystal Springs, who promptly shut down the bottling operations.

The original owners of the property, the Lovell family, then reacquired the springhouse and decided to put it back to work. They had been using the cool, clear natural spring water in the family’s distillation business for nearly 150 years. In fact, when the Lovell boys ceased distilling operations in 1964 they were flat-bedding over a quarter million bottles of sour mash clear corn spirits throughout the South. These historic tidbits, and a whole lot more, were told during a classic Southern seven course lunch at the home of Carlos Lovell in Clarksville.

Now in his 80s, Carlos had spent the last 30 years developing property throughout Habersham County. Now that he had “been there and done that” he wanted to get back into the distilling business. Enlisting his daughter Carlene to handle the permits, licensing and myriad of details that come with such an endeavor, they set to work building Ivy Mountain Distillery in Mount Airy. By the time 800 new American oak barrels arrived at the distillery in August, operations had commenced. First up was Apple Brandy, followed by sour mash corn whiskey.

After dessert, we set aside our sweet tea to sample some of the famed last batch of 1964. I think I said something as profound as “Wow!” Carlos claims the secret is in the water. Personally, I think that 150 years of family heritage counts for something. The package design we created attempts to capture that sense of history, time and place.

We’re pretty excited that a new product Bigelow Advertising helped create has finally hit the shelves in Georgia. New Mini Wines are imported by client and partner Prism Wine from the South of France and come in three different varietals – a red, a white, and a rose’. The red is 100% Merlot while the white is comprised of 50% Sauvignon Blanc grapes and 50% Viognier grapes. The rose’ is a Cinsault based wine.

Targeting young women, Mini wines are light in alcohol and in calories, with each wine having a typical alcoholic volume around 11% and containing approximately 87 calories per glass (120 ml). This is approximately 25% fewer calories than found in a typical glass of wine. The lower alcohol and sugar levels are achieved naturally in the vineyards. We’re just getting started with the promotional activities so keep an eye out and a wine glass handy.

Wow. This kind of brand piracy wouldn’t last 15 minutes in the West. I just had to “re-blog” this from Ellen Shapiro’s blog at Imprint. Interesting article on counterfeit packaging. “Counterfeiters avail themselves of excellent scanning and printing technology; they put the care into it because for them it’s like printing money.”

Read more: The Ultimate Brand Extension? — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers

Courtney Alexis Stodden has nothing on us. And we certainly wouldn’t be the first 26 year old to go under the knife for a little cosmetic surgery. But just as the shoemaker’s children run around barefoot, we here at Bigelow have been talking about updating our web site for well over two years. And I guess that’s a good thing. Letting the “paying work” take the front burner is pretty typical in any business.

First of all, we wanted to perform a little nip and a tuck to our way too long URL address: bigelowadvertising.com. Now you can find us at the shorter and sleeker bigelow.co URL address. Those of you prone to habit need not worry. Typing in the longer bigelowadvertising.com will still get you where you want to be.

Other than that, our main objective was to create an online presence that genuinely reflects the personality of the company. Easier said than done.

“Just what does this company stand for?” We discovered that what’s so intuitive for us to do with your brand was a real challenge when it came to defining our own. It was apparent early on that the new web site wasn’t going to be a simple exercise of just freshening up the graphic design.

In the end we decided that we should let our work, our actual output, define us. After all, it’s what we do. And it shows how we think and hints at the process we take to get to a final advertising answer.

We also wanted a web site that was easy to update, navigate and keep fresh with the latest news and views of the ad industry.

Then, just like that 26 year old celebrity, we started looking over the rest of ourselves a little more critically. “Maybe a little brand augmentation in the trademark area?” suggested some staffers. After all the old logo had been around for over a decade. And the business has changed.

The new Bigelow Advertising logotype is meant to reflect that change. The recession literally knocked our serifs off, leaving a trimmer, “digital age” sans serif font. The tri-square, tri-color icon visualizes our strategic and integrated approach- whether that be through traditional advertising or guerilla tactics and social media- all applied with laser-like focus to the objective at hand. Growing your business.

So I guess we have a lot of new news.

New logo. New web address. New web site. And a new attitude. We hope you like our new look.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” seems to be Mark Zuckerberg’s latest working philosophy. And thank God. Many of us here in Agencyland have been wondering when they’d take up Google’s good example and actually start to work with us.

“When it comes to creativity and brands and the advertising world, there’s nobody better from a strategic perspective and creative perspective than the agency community,” says Blake Chandlee, VP Global Agency Relations at Facebook.

Thanks Blake! We’ve had to be creative in order to work with those postage-stamp sized ad units Facebook has been offering us over the last couple years. These mini-billboards, with their 7 – 11 word limit, are admittedly some of the most targetable ad units in the biz. And that alone almost makes up for their serious lack of real estate to communicate a message other than “click here.”

Facebook has become a behemoth with 500 million users. To put that into perspective, some of the largest TV networks reach only 98 million households. And the average Facebook user has 130 friends. That’s a lot of potential for word-of-mouth advertising. Undoubtedly the most effective form in our industry.

Facebook has hired Leo Burnett Chicago to create a new ad unit where advertisers will be able to ask users questions. The user response then will show up in the user’s news feed.

I guess the objective was to find a replacement for all those Farmville and Mafia Wars updates that we all came to love?

I ask who in their right mind would want their poll responses published on their Facebook homepage? Aren’t the current “like” postings embarassing enough?

Am I the only one who finds himself scrubbing his Facebook page clean of these weak moment clicks. “Tom likes so and so,” equals “Tom has too much time on his hands and spends way too much time on Facebook.”

The other big news in Saturday’s news release was that Facebook users will be able to click to “like” an ad, answer questions in a poll, respond to an event ad, accept free product samples and watch videos.

In other words, all the same stuff advertisers and users can do right now, given a little creativity and an understanding of the medium. So why wait the two months while the new ad units are being tested with big brands like Hallmark, Sealy, Walgreens and Ronald McDonald House Charities? We’d be happy to help you introduce your brand to those 500 million Facebook users today.

Bigelow Advertising turned 26 years old today. We’re now officially older than some of the employees. I never would have predicted that on that cool, damp morning at 1447 Peachtree Street on April 1st, 1985.

While a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. The biggest changes occurred in technology (and directly related to that, the media arena.) In the creation of print (as well as in other related traditional mediums) there’s simply fewer people between the idea and it’s final execution. And there’s fewer people looking at print.

And that’s because there’s far more interesting, immediate and interactive places to get information these days. From smart phone apps to mobile text sites, online video to the Internet in general, there’s simply more places than ever to run (and track) messages.

It’s not called the Information Age for nothing. Ads are now placed with pinpoint accuracy. Chances are that if your web surfing habits include visiting wind surfing and organic food-related web sites, you’re looking at wind surfing and organic food-related ads on the right side of your Facebook profile.

But ad placement is only part of a successful formula. The thing that hasn’t changed is that for an ad to be effective it still has to cut through the clutter and connect emotionally. Digital may have changed the way we physically create advertising, and even where we see advertising, but it hasn’t changed how we make advertising work.

Before the AFLAC duck came along, Gilbert Gottfried’s career was veering towards “The Hollywood Squares.” Now after a couple ill-timed, politically incorrect tweets the voice of the duck has been fired.

I imagine the duck can’t be far behind. AFLAC won’t be able to replace Gottfried without evoking the persona of the comedian and his trademark loud (and obnoxious) voice. That or the duck gets struck dumb and loses it’s signature “AFLAC!” squawk in the next series of spots.

The issue of intellectual property rights and celebrities isn't new to the world of advertising. Musician/actor Tom Waits has been successful a number of times in defending his “brand” when it was borrowed by advertisers. First in 1993 when Frito Lay used a parody of one of his songs to sell chips and most recently against GM. After Waits declined an offer to voice over a TV spot the automotive manufacturer hired a sound-alike and proceeded anyway.

It seems that putting celebrities in the brand business has always been a slippery slope. For both the brand and sometimes the celebrity. A few well-known examples include:

James Garner was selling beef–until he had a widely publicized heart attack and resulting triple bypass.

Tennis star Martina Hingis was an endorser for an Italian sneaker and tennis-gear company until she sued them, claiming the shoes were the cause of her injuries.

Michael Vick was a Nike athlete until he was convicted of dog fighting. Which, of course could’ve been worst if he was working for Purina.

After all, celebrities are human. And they just might do something that will embarrass your branding program. Like tweet tsunami jokes in the midst of a real tragedy.

I was making my way down Piedmont Way in this morning’s rush hour traffic when I spotted the bright yellow and, er, pork-pink colored Oscar Mayer Weinermobile pulling into the Disco Kroger parking lot. I couldn’t help but smile. (But then that jingle started running through my head and I almost missed my turn.)

With all the talk about the changes Web 2.0 has brought to marketing and advertising in 2011 it’s reassuring to see that some of the better brands are still practicing what I call the original “social media” – promotions, events, sampling and sweepstakes. Where brands reach out to their customers in real space and time. And usually attract new ones in the process.

In fact, it’s no surprise that the new social media seems to work best when coupled with these so-called traditional approaches of sales promotion.

Racking up “Likes” on Facebook may be one thing, but sending actual customers with coupons gripped tight in their fists into the Kroger is another.

Social media isn’t going to replace solid marketing and customer engagement anytime soon. But when done properly they certainly can work wonders together.