Fashion houses have been especially quick to jump on board the Instagram bandwagon, such as the Art of the Trench project from Burberry. The brand encouraged fans to don their trench coats and submit photos via Instagram, which were featured at artofthetrench.com alongside professional “trench coat portraits” by The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman. Those promiscuous folks at Sartorialist also teamed up with Tiffany & Co. to encourage fashionable couples in New York and Paris to document their True Love In Pictures via Instagram, as shown in the image to the right. But to really pull the whole thing together, the pair offered a special Instagram photo filter that users could apply to their lovely images.

Instagram’s aforementioned Seamlessness also makes it an ideal platform for promotions and sweepstakes, as entering can involve little more than a photo and a quick tag. Levi’s is using the service to find new faces for their 2012 brand campaign by asking folks to tag images of themselves with #iamlevis. The early results seem to be attracting quite the spectrum of participants, ranging from American Apparel-y hipsters to shirtless muscle-bound jocks. Oh, and this guy. We hope he wins.

GE is similarly tapping Instagrammers to find a “social media photographer,” a position that would require the winner to take behind-the-scenes photos at GE’s jet engine facility for sharing on sites like Instagram and Tumblr. Entrants are tasked with bringing one of GE’s four foci to life (Moving, Curing, Powering and Building) and tagging their images with #GEInspiredMe. (You can see some of the selections below). Regardless of who wins the contest, we find it particularly interesting that a brand as complicated and amorphous as GE could use this promotion to clearly and simply communicate their core areas of expertise. Moreover, like the Levi’s campaign mentioned earlier, the brand is leveraging the Collective Curation of their fans to compile a large collection of compelling images of their products and processes. These assets can subsequently be used in all kinds of smart ways in the future, even if the respective marketers don’t know exactly what that’ll be just yet. But along the way, these Instagramming brands have already developed (pun intended) a deeper engagement with their most expressive consumers.

The photo-sharing app Instagram is perhaps the most intriguing example of a platform built for Collective Curation. (Actually, it’s also a damn fine tool for establishing your brand as a Guru, but we’ll get to that later.) The app is popular among users because of its simple photo filters and incredibly easy sharing functions, but also because it implements a Twitter-like tagging system that lets the images do the talking in these conversations. For instance, The Washington Post has asked readers to document the local impacts of the recession via Instagram by tagging their photos with the #econdebate tag (a couple are shown above). The collected images spark a multifaceted and compelling debate far more effectively than a vitriolic comment section ever would. (We’ve used a similar strategy on Upshot’s own homepage to showcase what’s inspiring us – look for the filmstrip at the bottom of the window.)

But the app isn’t just simple for users. An ideal example of Seamless Tech, Instagram’s flexible platform makes it easy for marketers to compile (and curate) photo galleries into their websites, Facebook pages, or other digital properties. For instance, the band The Vaccines managed to crowdsource a music video by asking attendees at their shows to tag their Instagram pictures with #vaccinesvideo. The band selected their favorite shots and incorporated them into the video shown below. And if an indie rock outfit can pull this off, just imagine what big-time brands like GE, Starbucks, and Levi’s could do. We’ll show you in part two of this post, coming tomorrow.

In January, 2011, Starbucks launched its Mobile Card payment program available on most smartphones. SMART. No doubt you’re already on your phone at 8:30 in the morning while ordering a Grande Skinny Vanilla Latte, so it’s easy to flash your “Touch to Pay” barcode and be on your way. The app replaces your reloadable Starbucks card (while keeping your rewards intact), and you can preload it from your bank account within the same screen.

With the release of Google Wallet, users can now pay with a simple tap at Mastercard paypass terminals. For now, this is advancement only for those with Google phones…and a Citi Mastercard. But, with this technological groundbreaking device, users are also able to receive offers and store loyalty points via the app.  We’re attached to our phones, so what better way to reach us directly when we’re making a transaction.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shopkick offers rewards for simply stepping inside a store and scoping out merchandise. It displays deals and discounts close in proximity to your location. The more you peruse, the more points are earned for redemptions ranging from clothes to electronics.

While cashless-ness becomes the norm, we can only assume that consumers will rely less on the benjamins, but let’s not forget about Future Fear. A lot of emphasis is placed on convenience and practicality when we look at technological enhancements. It’s our job to find the perfect balance between convenience and trust.

What we can gather from our own shopping habits is that we rely heavily on the convenience factor, no doubt about it. We’ve become increasingly comfortable with everything being accessible through our phones. We can purchase a Groupon, find our way to Alaska and back, and even count the steps we take around the office with our smartphones.

“What? I can’t just show you the e-mail, I have to print it out?!”

As marketers, we should reach our consumers as soon as they walk into the store, making it harder not to refuse a great deal on the very same phone used to swipe and pay. It has been reported that 20% of smartphone users have compared prices while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. Additionally, 15% of smartphone users have redeemed a mobile coupon (ladies more so than gentlemen). Let’s take advantage of these time-saving, less paper-wasting social platforms that deliver instantaneous results without hassle. Smartphones aren’t going anywhere, so creating more convenient methods of in-store redemption and offers will put us ahead of the game—and the checkout line.

What will it take for YOU to go CASH-LESS?

It’s Potty Posting time! Need a refresher on the purpose of the Po

These monthly articles take a humorous, yet informative, approach to emerging cultural trends, new technologies, and innovative marketing tactics. And yes, they’re posted in the Upshot bathrooms, where we know we’ve got a captive audience. Click the image to the right for a PDF of the post and share with your network to build your Klout, duh.

You Know You Make Me Wanna Klout

To over 3500 brands, the world of online social networking is beginning to look a lot like a high school. Cliques are forming, popularity is becoming a tool, Lindsay Lohan is giving high-calorie nutrition bars to the Plastic Queen to sabotage her weight and status…

OK, maybe not that last part. But, when it comes to social media, brands are paying attention to the widening gap between those who matter online and those who don’t. By targeting the people who are most likely to influence others – the ones who inspire the most buzz with their tweets and posts – brands can maximize their reach while putting in minimal cost and effort. In essence, this online popularity contest could be the key to doing word-of-mouth marketing right, and Klout, a social metrics service, was made to do just that.

The aforementioned Plastic Queen, Regina George, owns a silver Lexus and allegedly does car commercials in Japan. She’s also teen royalty. So not only is she pretty popular, she’s also pretty influential. Now, if only there were quantifiable data to tell Mercedes how influential Regina George really is, especially on the topic of cars, so they can give her a free SL550 Roadster in the hopes that she ditches that Lexus and tweets about her new Mercedes.

“My Klout Score is so fetch, I haven’t paid for anything in months!”

Bingo. Klout is a website run by a team of digital engineers, marketers and analysts who have made it possible to quantify a person’s online influence, or ability to drive action on the internet. Taking data from a person’s social networking accounts, Klout measures True Reach (how many people someone influences), Amplification (how much that person influences them), and Network Impact (the influence of the people being influenced), with a single number between 1 and 100 as the result.

No longer is the internet democratic. No longer does everyone’s voice hold equal weight online. And far from being ashamed about being the harbinger of online social inequality, Klout is actually partnering up with thousands of brands to take advantage of it!

Brands have started using Klout to give away free stuff, “Klout Perks,” to the most popular influencers (or social networking users) in their fields and provide them with a good experience or a good product so they can tweet about it to their friends. For example, HP offered high-scoring film influencers an HP laptop pre-loaded with films from Cinequest film festival, and Audi invited top design, technology and luxury influencers to test drive their new 2011 Audi A8 at exclusive events.

Yeah, but does it work? Influencers who receive Perks aren’t required to post positive things about the brand. They’re not even required to post anything at all.

To ensure that giving away Perks will be worth a company’s expense, Klout has begun to up the demand and cool factor of a high Score and the Perks that come with it. When Spotify, a wildly popular music-streaming service, first came out in 2008, Klout gave free account access to only some of its high-scorers before Spotify was even released in the United States. In addition, some special events, like the annual after-hours shopping extravaganza, Fashion’s Night Out, require a Klout Score of over 40 points in order to attend. This not only ensures the exclusivity and coolness of the Perk, but the honor of having a high Score as well.

And it has definitely been working for a ton of brands. Like Virgin America, who offered only 120 free flights to top travel influencers, which generated over 4,600 tweets and, subsequently, led to over 7.4 million impressions and coverage in top blogs and news outlets. And, for a very small price, that’s good business.

But it hasn’t just been working for brands. While Klout’s expertise in generating buzz has been great for building brands’ reputations, it’s also been building their own. People have been putting their Score on their resume and many competitors and copycats have begun to emerge, like PeerIndex , Twitter Grader and, most recently, PeopleBrowsr’s Kred, which will up your Kred based on real-life achievements like degrees and awards.

“People have even started attaching it to their wardrobes. Ladies love it.”

And while there certainly are downsides for the people being judged on their Score, there are also downsides for brands. How does a brand do damage control when a top influencer receives a product, hates it, and blasts the company on Twitter? The best response is to turn it positive – using Klout, brands can decide which reviews they can ignore and which they need to address. 70% of companies ignore their customer complaints on Twitter, yet nearly half of Twitter complainants expect the company to read them. Plus, 83% of complainants on Twitter who have received a reply either liked or loved the fact that the company responded.  So, when a brand comes across a bad review from a top influencer, they should see it as a great PR opportunity.

While the concept of Klout is certainly proving to be integral to brand marketing, its underlying foundation is nothing new. They’ve recognized social group behaviors and separated the popular from the ordinary, but by mathematically proving the amount of a person’s popularity, Klout is able to help brands single out the people who will, hopefully, inspire action and do a good chunk of their marketing for them. And therein lies the innovation:  realizing the marketing potential of good ol’ fashioned cliquishness brought into the modern, digital age.

Want another good Klout read? Take a gander at OMG! Your Klout is Showing! posted earlier this year by Jaclyn Gordyan.

Many hotels are already offering experience-based rewards in their loyalty programs and enhanced concierge services to assist guests with discovering the world outside of the hotel. Instead of stockpiling points for a free night’s stay, members of these programs can earn cultural activities, like going backstage before a performance at the Peking Opera or spending the day with a professional bullfighter. Some loyalty programs even offer express experiences specifically designed for business travelers who may only have an hour or two to spare but who still want to go home with at least one memorable insight into the destination they visited.

Additionally, several startups have recently emerged to meet the wanderlusty needs of travelers by offering trip curation tools, local knowledge and a much-needed dose of personalization to the online trip planning process.

Launched in April, Vayable connects travelers with tour guides offering unique and intimate local experiences, like scouting Montmartre street art in Paris or visiting sample sales in NYC with a fashion insider. By allowing these independent guides to sell their local knowledge, Vayable is redefining the tour and activity segment of the travel market.

And then there’s Fortnighter, also launched this year, which provides (for a fee) made-to-order itineraries from professional travel writers based on the user’s dates of travel, interests and budget. Fortnighter brings currency, personalization and expert knowledge to the travel planning table and allows users to steer clear of the unreliability of algorithms and user reviews.

A slew of other services have also cropped up recently. All of this suggests that the travel experience marketplace is heating up, and there appears to be room for more. When looking across the dreaming, researching, booking, experiencing and sharing travel cycle, what kind of product or service can you offer that will assist travelers with collecting those sought-after experiences? How do you evoke the moments that inspire us when we travel? How do you help deliver more authentic travel experiences?

We love cheat sheets at Upshot, and make a point of creating them whenever possible. At my recent “Content Marketing Lunch-n-Learn” I closed with the following best practices. Planning a campaign, promotion, or marketing vehicle where content plays a role? The following will help keep you on course and hopefully provide some food for thought:

1. Think Long Term. How can we use this opportunity to create a marketing platform we can leverage ongoing?
2. Be Resourceful. What assets do we already own that can be repurposed, revamped or redone? Is there public data or an API (social networks, etc.) we can use? What media partnerships could be forged with brands that already have content our consumers want?
3. Stay Relevant. What can we create that consumers will find of value? What will put a smile on their face or change their lives for the better?
4. Treat it like an Investment. Marketing-related content we create or generate via our users is an investment in assets we can reuse and repurpose as our marketing efforts evolve.
5. Be Patient! Payoffs are not always immediate.
6. Fill Gaps in the Niche. What’s missing and what are people demanding?
7. Be Clever and get More Play. Appear non-competitive and offer something the big guys don’t have—done right, the competitors will link to your content!
8. Don’t half-ass it. Content marketing works—that’s why 6 out of 10 marketers increased their content marketing budgets last year. It’s only going to get more crowded and cream rises to the top.
9. Understand Your Targets. If you’re creating content for specific types of consumers, then you better understand their lifestyles. If not, hire someone who does to create the strategy.
10. Have Fun, be Creative! Content marketing is fun and an opportunity to be creative in countless ways. Embrace it!

Want this list in portable format? Download it here.

But while Ariel was busy cleaning up a mess, Mr. Beam was dumping all sorts of colors into a plain white room. The clip below shows how their blank canvas was anything but limiting, even going so far as to seemingly manipulate the textures of the items in the room (perhaps most impressively when the couch “becomes” leather at the 0:34 mark). While this example is certainly visually appealing, it also speaks to projection mapping’s ability to overcome special limitations in finite environments. After all, this clip runs through as many rooms as you’d find displayed in some department stores, all within the confines of a modest space. Does this mean that future IKEAs could fit into a crammed storefront on Milwaukee Avenue? It’s possible.

Speaking of working within limitations, it’s no secret that projection mapping requires some incredibly precise alignment between the projected elements and the surfaces on which they interact. That explains why many of the more elaborate shows are stationary displays in a single location, never to hit the road. Well, apparently that era’s over. DJ Amon Tobin recently embarked on a tour in which he’s embedded in a gigantic wall of cubes, onto which an accompanying array of intricate projections swirl, explode, grind, and shatter in rhythm with the music. (See the behind the scenes clip below.) Holy crap, it’s definitely the future.

Recently Mountain Dew’s Green Label Sound elevated brand/band pairing with the release of “When Fish Ride Bicycles,” a new full-length from Chicago hip-hop group the Cool Kids. What’s different than other brands playing in this space? Unlike Starbucks Hear Music—which is essentially a music publishing house and not necessarily a full-blown label—Green Label Sound is behaving like the real-deal: signing artists, handling distribution, PR, partnerships (read: iTunes) paid media, etc.

What can Green Label offer that traditional labels can’t? The better way to ask that question is to put it in reverse. With the state of the music industry going through its biggest shift in well, ever, record labels have become less effective at helping artists distribute their work, build fan followings, and evolve. Marketing is a major component of artist success, and Green Label relies on Cornerstone, a NY/LA based promotions agency to help run the label. By tapping into this agency resource, and genuinely committing to the artists they bring on board (imagine the bad PR if a brand-backed label treated artists poorly) Green Label Sound gives other labels a run for their money—especially considering their primary focus likely isn’t money—by promoting artists who in turn elevate the brand’s street cred.

In other words, it’s a perfect manifestation of our Brand Patronage trend for 2011. While consumer brands have played in nearly every area of media for nearly a century, I suspect we’re at the dawn of many deciding to go beyond sponsorships and carve out dedicated business units to support the creation, distribution and marketing of entertainment: whether that’s music, games, movies, apps, or books. Undoubtedly they’ll be no shortage of artists and agencies waiting to sign-up to help.

My initial non-reaction was happily short-lived, and after a few days, the friends started to trickle in (I’m at 60, to my 700 on Facebook). I finally got my chance to experience Google+, and it was pretty nifty. Nothing really blew me away immediately, but it looked pretty and it worked. Really, that right there would have been enough to wrest me away from my abusive relationship with Facebook, but there was still so much more to the experience that I hadn’t yet realized.

And then one evening, all at once, it hit me. I was writing an email in Gmail when a Google talk message popped up. It was a link to a hilarious, but somewhat family-inappropriate video, and I wanted to share it. As I moved my cursor up to open a new tab to go to Facebook, I noticed something that had slipped by me in the past weeks. There was now a little “Share” button inside of that slick gray bar that Google has quietly strewn across all of its sites recently. I pasted the link into the box and shared with everyone in my “Friends” but not “Family” circle, which meant that my ultraconservative aunt wouldn’t see it. Cool.

I went back to my chat conversation, and it wasn’t long before I got a notification of a comment on my link. I clicked on it and was pleasantly surprised to be able to read the comment in a slick little dropdown box without having to leave the site. Super cool.

I was doing pretty much everything that I do online at once, in one browser window, and it was fast, good-looking and intuitive. The integration of services was nothing short of beautiful. And that’s just barely scratching the surface.

Bye, Facebook, it’s been real.

And man, is it hilarious. In fact, this spot is so delightfully wrong that it would be totally inappropriate to post on our company blog. Yes, it’s even too indecent for Upshot. You’ve been warned… and invited, to view Kenny Powers as the new MFCEO of K-Swiss. (Yep, the MF stands for exactly what you think it does.) The tone carries over to their website, where the elements range from moronically misogynistic to stupidly xenophobic (for instance, when indicating the country from which you’re viewing the site, the options are “US” and “Who Cares”). Does K-Swiss even have a legal department?

While this campaign would catch your attention in any environment, it’s even more unexpected in a world where most marketers (understandably) seek to keep themselves and their brand out of hot water. Of course, those results are predictably unadventurous. But with the rise of the War on Whiners, brands are getting braver about being brazen. Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters recently garnered nationwide publicity thanks to an irate customer who was none too pleased about the Alamo’s strict cell phone policy. While most brands would be horrified about the release of a fuming customer’s foul-mouthed message to management, Alamo chose to upload the message to YouTube (with transcriptions, to ensure no one misses a single rambling word) as a winking validation of their phone-free theater policy. Even a manufacturer like Kraft Foods, whose brands have been built on traditional American values, is currently running campaigns with smack-talking condiments and Greek grandmothers calling women prostitutes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the crazy thing? They all seem to work. Alamo has 2.5 million hits for their video, YiaYia’s racked up 1.5 million of her own, and even MFCEO Powers has notched over 400,000 hits for an unlisted video in just 5 days. While they will certainly attract a bit of backlash from offended parties, they’re also so over-the-top that they simply can’t be taken too seriously. Paradoxically, they’re acceptable because of their reckless indecency. But in the War on Whiners, it takes more than a warning shot to beat back the critics. Sometimes, you have to drop an a-bomb filled with f-bombs to break through the clutter.