Whether she’s writing about the perfect meal or the perfect pair of boots, Vanessa Choot, creator of the online lifestyle magazine Modern Mix Vancouver, often scours Vancouver looking for its most treasured local hotspots and fashion trends. If you happen to catch this proud Vancouverite on her downtime,  you’ll most likely find her playing with her new rescued Pomeranian dog, Teddy Bear!

Find out more about Vanessa in Matchstick’s latest Blogger Spotlight edition.

The Matchstick Blogger Spotlight Series shines a bright light on influential Canadian bloggers who have worked with us to co-create content. While their interests lie in different areas, one common element that shines through is their undeniable passion for engaging with readers online.

- Written by Oendrila Majumder

Matchstick Inc.

Program Coordinator

April 2012

Matchstick has an opening for a social media Program Coordinator in Toronto.

This position requires a social media savvy individual with strong organizational skills and a keen interest in social digital marketing.

The ideal candidate should possess these qualities:

- Optimal written and verbal communication skills
- Understanding of marketing within social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter)
- Excels at creative writing
- Experience with online community management
- Awareness of influencers within the Canadian blogosphere
- Very strong organizational and time management skills
- Competent with PowerPoint and Excel
- 1-2 years digital agency experience preferred
- Salary and compensation commensurate with experience

Matchstick is an independent social media marketing agency. We believe in the power of consumer word of mouth, and we bring that perspective to all of our work. Our clients are global consumer brands leveraging the power of social media in North America.

Please email resume and cover letter to pc@matchstick.ca by Monday, April 30, 2012.

The objective of Toyota’s award-winning campaign, A Glass of Water, was to make people more aware of their fuel consumption and become ecofriendly drivers.  With the help of Saatchi & Saatchi Sweden, they developed an iPhone app which simulated as a – you guessed right – glass of water. If you had to drive with a glass of water on your dashboard, you would drive smoothly and thus avoid abrupt acceleration and deceleration. This, in turn, would reduce fuel consumption by up to 10% and could lower carbon dioxide emission by 2 million tons a year!

The app recorded your driving progress: distance, time, fuel consumption and how much “water” you spilled. App users would be able to view their results instantly and learn how they could improve their driving for the future. The results were also uploaded to a microsite where you can compare against other users.

So how successful was this campaign?

During the campaign, over 70,000 people downloaded the app and it became the third most popular in the iTunes app store in its first week. In addition, more than 95,000 people have registered to take part in the challenge and have together driven over 678,000 km with the iPhone app!

The success of the campaign began a movement among Toyota and non-Toyota drivers that earned the prestigious Best Green Mixed Media Award (Integrated) from Green Awards in the UK. Smart phones are no longer just a means of a traditional telephone. They are a way of connecting with people and brands. As more people use smart phones to connect with the world, we will see brands like Toyota embrace and integrate mobile technology into their marketing campaigns.

The Creative Crush Series revisits some of the most innovative social media campaigns that have inspired us at Matchstick creatively.

Unsurprisingly, brands want in on this internet zeitgeist.

Fashion brands specifically have flocked to Tumblr hoping to connect their image driven products with the style hungry blogging community – “GIFS” is the top tag on tumblr, while “FASHION” currently sits at third.

Juicy Couture jumped on this digital trend last fall when they commissioned artists Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, the talented duo behind the popular tumblr From Me to You, to create a series of animated images promoting their new accessories line.

While Beck and Burg creations for Juicy were classified under the “GIFS” tag on Tumblr, the duo refers to their images as “cinemagraphs” – a sophisticated experimentation of the .gif format that contains cinematic qualities  while still following the soul principles of traditional photography.

The commissioned cinemagraphs appeared on Juicy Couture’s Tumblr,

along with Beck and Burg’s tumblr , and were used in banner ads on a number of popular fashion websites such as Style.com and Fashionista.com.

In terms of success, the campaign was virally shared throughout Tumblr – fitting  both the popular “GIFS” and “FASHION” tags. The image below that appeared solely on From Me To You racked up over 30,000 notes (reblogs and likes).

The cinemagraphs also drove traffic to Juicy’s ecommerce site, as each image linked to the accessories page allowing consumers to easily purchase the product featured. Although arguably the greatest triumph of the campaign was that it gave Juicy Couture, a brand still plagued by the pink velour tracksuit image, some “cool” cred with the online fashion community and presumably fashion consumers.

The Creative Crush Series revisits some of the most innovative social media campaigns that have inspired us at Matchstick creatively.

With a background in marketing and an undeniable flair for writing, it’s no surprise that Zach’s outlook on the digital world is uniquely engaging and real. His talents have been called upon for numerous social media campaigns including Ford and Mobilicity.

Learn more about Zach by reading his questionnaire below. Oh, and make sure to note his guilty pleasure – simply hilarious!

The Matchstick Blogger Spotlight Series shines a bright light on influential Canadian bloggers who have worked with us to co-create content. While their interests lie in different areas, one common element that shines through is their undeniable passion for engaging with readers online.

3½ Reasons Pinterest is More Social than Facebook

As brands struggle to engage Fans on Facebook, a relatively miniscule platform, Pinterest, has beome the darling of social media industry buzz. Matchstick hosted a social media conference last month where Pinterest was elected “word of the day” on our Twitter feed, edging out Instagram and, yes, even Facebook. Mashable stories abound; Pinterest sign-ups are skyrocketing.

For the Social Brand, is Pinterest a product of shiny new object syndrome, or is it the real deal? To answer that question, we go back to first principles of the Social Brand. To recap: Sharing of brand content by consumers creates shared media. Shared media is authentic, infinitely scalable, and the most valuable kind of media out there. In this way, the Social Brand succeeds by inspiring its fans to share its message.

Does Pinterest make it easy for a brand to inspire its fans to share?

The answer is yes, for at least three and 1/2 reasons.

First, Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking site, rather than a micro-blogging site like Twitter or Tumblr or a “social utility” as Facebook describes itself, and therefore puts little emphasis on original content creation. If you’ve signed up for Pinterest, you know that the entire focus is on “pinning’, in other words “sharing”. There is no pressure to generate your own content; Pinterest is really all about sharing others’ content (which, on a side note has raised some legal issues that Pinterest appears to have dealt with.)

Secondly, Pinterest assists in the discovery of things. Most of us find things on the Internet by searching for them using Google. Of course, we need to know what we’re looking for before we search. Consider the set-up of an old-fashioned European marketplace, where stalls and vendors stand side by side and where a market-goer can browse and discover things. That’s how Pinterest is set up. If Google were a market you’d need to present your shopping list at the door.

To continue the market metaphor, if Facebook were a market, the vendors would be limited to your friends. Because Pinterest is organized around things rather than relationships, it allows you to browse by category or interest, and to not rely on your relationships to surface things you might like to look at, share or even buy. The “discovery” model of Pinterest’s boards makes it easier for users to find a wider array of things they might wish to share, and that’s good for the Social Brand.

Thirdly, Pinterest makes it easy for brands to inspire their fans to share because it is a place where users can live in the “would” and “could”. In a previous post, I wrote that a primary reason for sharing is “self-enhancement”. Pinterest is a place where users can create a precise, stable identity that ultimately may reveal little about themselves. It’s easy to share with anyone on Pinterest because it’s easy to create a board that reflects an ideal self.

To sum up, Pinterest is visual; it encourages discovery; and it makes it easy for users to self-enhance. For these reasons Pinterest makes it easy for brands to inspire their fans to share, and it should be embraced by the Social Brand.

I’ll go half a step further, and argue that Pinterest may be more social than Facebook. If Facebook’s mission is to give “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”, then the social media giant has something to learn from Pinterest. Mark Zuckerberg recently shook the social media world by liking Friendsheet, a Facebook application that allows users to experience the look and feel of Pinterest. He may have — whether deliberately or not — indicated a future direction for Facebook.