Winter is coming! Social media marketing re-imagined as Game of Thrones.

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SXSW is full of entrepreneurs, hipsters, geeks and Big Business. Here is how three brands are promoting themselves in Austin.

Oreo takes its Instagram campaign on the road to SXSW.

American Airlines is another of the big …

When it comes to creating content that becomes contagious, it’s the message not the messenger that matters.

Facebook challenged us years ago to think of our current surroundings and report back to our networks in short bursts of information. I am feeling ___. I am doing ___. I like ___. These were the posts that defined us minute by minute. Twitter too got us conditioned to report on what we were seeing/hearing/tasting/reading at any given moment. Again text and hyperlinks was the preferred communications currency.

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One year ago, we published the inaugural Social Media Sustainability Index, a trawl through 287 major companies in North America and Europe to identify who was using social media tools and thinking to communicate sustainability. …

It may just be that the Newsfeed, and not the fanpage, is the most valuable real estate on Facebook for marketers. So says new research jointly produced by Facebook and comScore that shows Facebook users are 40-150 more times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than they are by going to the fanpage. And, thanks to the power of the Newsfeed there’s a new way to calculate your potential social media reach.

That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

PayPal UK launched an effort last week to boost its social media presence through a giveaway contest dangling free iPad 2′s. Its message: love us and we might award you with this must-have baby. Can boosting social followers through bribes be a genuine lure? More importantly, does it work?

Promoted tweets aren’t just for big brands anymore, it’s now becoming clear. StylePage.com, a month-old Silicon Valley based start-up for all things fashion, tapped Twitter to build some launch buzz and pad its community membership as it aims to take on the top names in online fashion. A big challenge for vertical social networks like Stylepage is building a critical mass of users at the outset. Could Twitter get it off the ground?

For a good 500 years, spanning the 12th to 17th centuries, the Republic of Venice was the world power of maritime trade, with an influence that spanned Europe, Africa and the Far East. Its influence today is greatly reduced, but it’s still a fitting venue to discuss the future of the digital economy as we’ve been doing at the Digital Economy Forum.