Brian Quinton

I’m going to climb out on a limb here and bet that there’s a large contingent of marketers out there that wish some of the more arcane social media channels would just go away. Not all, and maybe even not most. But for a not inconsiderable segment of the consumer and B-to-B marketing populations, things like Twitter, Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla are just too hard to figure out. more

A new smartphone app from Best Buy is offering to give moviegoers special insights into the upcoming animated film “Despicable Me”. But even days before the picture’s debut the app is getting some seriously divided comments—kind of a mobile version of Siskel & Ebert’s patented “thumbs up, thumbs down”. more

Obviously, we want the cool stuff we see in movies. Owning the same car, or phone, or sunglasses as the movie heroes we admire helps us imagine ourselves a bit further into the escape that movies provide, confers some of their excitement and sophistication. I’m sure the only reason the world isn’t more full of Aston Martins is that the company refused to cater to baby boomers like me by including machine guns, ejector seats and rotating license plates in the rally sport package.

But a lawsuit now being brought by the studio behind the vampire hit “Twilight” movies against an apparel manufacturer is testing how careful a brand has to be in capitalizing on movie popularity—and might break new ground on what producers can ask for as remedy for infringement. more

May 31 is Quit Facebook Day, a day when millions of users plan to vent their outrage over recent changes in Facebook’s privacy settings by completely dropping their Facebook accounts.

Well, maybe not millions. But hundreds of thousands.

Or tens of thousands.

Wait, no. According to the Web site QuitFacebookDay.com , about 4,000 people have said they’ll quit the network on Memorial Day.

They’ll be sorely missed by the other 399,996,000 of us. more

If you’re the type of person who knew that Friday, April 30, was National Hairball Awareness Day, then Feline Pine wants your attention. And they’re trying to get it by making you just a bit suspicious that your cat is plotting against you.

That’s the explanation behind a series of roadside billboards and sidewalk stencils purporting to come from a mysterious organization Cats Against Clay, and reaching a new peak in a full-page ad in the New York Times promising a struggle against some unnamed feline injustice. “Cats will have the last word,” the ad read. “Victory.”

The billboards, stencils and print ad are the leading edge of a stealth campaign for kitty litter brand Feline Pine, which bills itself as better for cats and for owners because it’s dust-, perfume- and chemical-free. And the URL in the ads leads to a Web site that seems to have angry postings from a variety of cats threatening various types of household retaliation if their “demands” are not met. more

Time is Twitter’s advantage. It’s also its Achilles heel. If you’ve got a time-restricted offer—say of discount hotel rooms if respondents book in the next six hours—Twitter’s your channel. Or if you want to float a last-minute promotion of breakfast pastries, there’s just no faster way to get a campaign up and running.

That is, as long as your biggest fans are watching their Twitter accounts within minutes of your tweet. Marketers who want to use Twitter’s real-time fire hose to get their messages out have to face the fact that for heavy Twitter users—and indeed for many average ones, depending on how many active users they follow—a marketing tweet will only stay at the top of the timeline for a short while, minutes to an hour. After that, it’s below the fold, buried under subsequent incoming messages where only the most diligent users will find and read it. more