Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In June, the brand's premium Elit vodka line started analyzing Google Trends data to zero in on online chatter and use it to crank out stylized posts of bottles, martini glasses and recipes. For the holidays this year when searches for martinis and vodka cocktails spike, the brand is enlisting such data to inform an Instagram campaign called Elit Live Social Lab.

If a recipe for a chocolate martini is trending online, for instance, Elit's social team will whip up and post a picture of a chocolate drink within 24 hours.

Brand manager Lauren Ryan said that when it comes to which social platforms Elit prioritizes, "Instagram is first and second for me, and Facebook follows," because the visual platform is particularly conducive to targeting luxury consumers.

"If you take too much time, that conversation is over and you miss it," Ryan said. "When we saw this as a way to approach social, we knew that it would only work if we flagged these conversations and said, 'OK, we're going to tap into this today, but this is our only day.'"...

HubSpot customers have been running LinkedIn Sponsored Updates through HubSpot for almost a year now. Using these powerful social ads to get more from their content and inbound strategy.

When we first integrated LinkedIn Ads into HubSpot, we weren’t sure what to expect.

But since launch, we’ve had the opportunity to review our customer’s performance and we’re excited to share what we’ve learned.

The media constellation has become increasingly fractured. The Web produced the initial fissure, but mobile created new cracks in the landscape. Today, no single medium earns more than 45% of our media consumption.

How can you solve this problem? Social media offers a solution....

This past winter, Ace Hardware tested location-based mobile ads before and after snowstorms to pitch items like shovels and de-icers. Buoyed by the results—and underscoring how brands have begun using the weather to target on-the-go consumers—it now plans to buy mobile ads when the temperature is optimal for green thumbs to get planting, hoping they'll need the retailer’s fertilizers and other garden products.

"We want to reach folks in real time and help them deal with the weather as it's coming," said Jeff Gooding, Ace’s marketing director. "The idea of helping has traditionally been part of our brand, and it’s becoming a part of our mobile strategy."

Sensing a chance to nab more ad dollars, Twitter and The Weather Channel (TWC) last week announced an agreement centered on a new weather-based ad-targeting product. Twitter says that 60 percent of its massive audience derives from smartphones—where users will be seeing Promoted Tweets thanks to the TWC deal.

And based on certain forecasts, Taco Bell, Seamless, Delta (airlines), Farmers, Goodyear and others have fallen in line with Ace Hardware, targeting nearby consumers via mobile ad networks such as MoPub and Jumptap and—in a lot of cases—TWC's popular smartphone app....