What does PepsiCo believe in even more than Beyonce? The answer might be crowdsourcing.

Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show served as the main kickoff to its huge investment in the globally popular entertainer with a concert that some felt usurped the game itself. But the walkup to her much-anticipated performance used a highly populist approach that underscored PepsiCo-Frito Lay's faith in the crowd as much as any pop star.

The bulk of the ad, produced by NYC-based Mekanism, featured a lightning-fast succession of Pepsi enthusiasts culled from more than 120,000 photos submitted to the brand via New York-based Olapic and Crowdtwist. Olapic collected and curated the pictures while CrowdTwist rewarded uploads through a point-based platform. Mekanism, as TIME puts it, took that material in a bid to manufacture "viral on demand" for the Pepsi brand.Continue reading...

The Curiosity Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) captured the rover's descent to the surface of the Red Planet, as it survived a potentially perilous landing dubbed the 'seven minutes of terror,' capping a decade of work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (more commonly known as JPL) in California.

The world was watching as Curiosity, NASA's latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed at 10:32 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 near the foot of a three-mile tall mountain inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter.

First-person updates on NASA's official @MarsCuriosity Twitter account include the historic touchdown tweet — "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL” — which has been retweeted to date more than 71,000 times.Continue reading...

The Armani is looking to engage fans with a Twitter-based dialogue. Using the hashtag #ArmaniTweetTalks, "a series of open discussions taking place entirely on Twitter," the discussion launched June 1st with the topic: "China: The New Fashion Superpower," to coincide with the label's "One Night Only in Beijing" show.

Guests on the tweet team who mingled with the public included Angelica Cheung, editorial director of Vogue China, Susie Bubble of the Style Bubble blog, Federico Marchetti, founder and CEO of YOOX Group, Hung Huang, TV commentator and blogger, and fashion critic Godfrey Deeny.

Armani Tweet Talks add to The Armani Group's robust social media portfolio that already includes 68,000 Twitter followers, 3.1 million Facebook fans and 1064 Instagram followers in addition to its YouTube channel.Continue reading...

With Facebook’s historic IPO upon us — with a valuation of $104 billion, it's the third highest IPO for a U.S. company, after General Motors and Visa, and it's now worth more than McDonald's, Citigroup and Amazon — the social network's employees have a few challenges ahead beyond how to spend the vast sums of money heading their way.

For a start, Facebook must keep improving the site to better engage users. New research from Attensity, for example, shows that the new Facebook Timeline is a turn-off for many, representing a high risk of customer churn unless the design is improved, even though. One article, titled “Sure Facebook has 900 million users, but its engagement is smoked by these other sites,” argues that “total users is not the only measure of success for a social network.”Continue reading...

From the Nike FuelBand to its limited-edition "Back to the Future" Air Mag shoe, Nike new product releases always grab attention and cause some serious hubbub, particularly on social media. Now you can leverage your social savvy to guarantee you get that new release.

According to NikeBlog.com, “Looking to finally put an end to the mayhem that accompanies around-the-block lines and campouts for highly-anticipated releases, Nike is introducing a new Twitter RSVP system for all company stores. The goal being to get shoes claimed and spoken for as soon as they release — at a random time on the release date — while also banning line-ups outside the store.”

Given the brand's next hot new shoe — the Jordan 12 ( Air Jordan XII ‘Playoffs') — Twitter must be seeing a lot of sign-ups this week. The US-only move engages customers with each local store's official Twitter feed, while using dedicated hashtags and Twitter's offline "direct message" function keeps the reservations process from clogging up users' Twitter timelines.Continue reading...

Klout is wooing marketers and brand fans with the launch of Brand Squads, the social media site's equivalent of brand topic pages. The concept, a bid to engage fans around branded hubs, is now in beta with Red Bull as the launch partner.Continue reading...

Klout is wooing marketers and brand fans with the launch of Brand Squads, the social media site's equivalent of brand topic pages. The concept, a bid to engage fans around branded hubs, is now in beta with Red Bull as the launch partner.Continue reading...

Brands are ‘pinning’ it on Pinterest with increasing savvy, and although the site doesn’t carry advertising or sponsored content, publishers and brands are quickly getting hip to how to leverage the social thirst for sharing images to drive awareness and traffic to their own digital touchpoints.

With estimates of 18.7 million unique visitors in March, (according to comScore), “Pinterest has a message for the media: a picture is worth a thousand words," notes today's New York Times, or given Twitter's 140-character message limit, "about seven Twitter posts.”

Whole Foods, West Elm, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Gilt Home,  L.L.Bean, and even the National Pork Board are all early Pinterest adopters in what comScore VP Andrew Lipsman calls “the rise of the visual Web.” As he comments to the Times, “Pinterest is creating sort of a meritocracy of what’s visually appealing. Brands are scrambling and trying to figure it out. They know it’s going to be big, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to use it.” Well, they're starting to figure it out.Continue reading...