Vocanic Singapore launched the Belvedere Vodka Singapore – Win Exclusive Invites app on 7^th May inviting fans to win tickets to the Audi Fashion Festival Opening Show After Party, held on 16^th May.

Belvedere Vodka Singapore will once again own the AFF Opening Show After Party and Facebook fans stand a chance to win exclusive invites. All fans need to do is to go on the Win Exclusive Invites app on Belvedere Vodka Singapore’s Facebook page and register. They stand a higher chance of winning when they successfully invite more friends to join the contest.

The party will feature French fashion powerhouse MUGLER with an appearance by the Creative Director, Nicola Formichetti. New York City based DJ trio The Misshapes and W Hotels Global Music Director Michaelangelo L’Acqua will be flying into Singapore exclusively to perform live sets throughout the night.

The Win Exclusive Invites contest is currently ongoing and will end at 9am on 15^th May.

Visit the Belvedere Vodka Singapore Facebook page to win exclusive invites now! <http://www.facebook.com/BelvedereSG>

Vocanic Singapore launched the Hennessy Artistry – It’s All About the Mix app on 25^th April that invites fans to win tickets to the Hennessy Artistry VIP party on 18^th May at The Butter Factory. Through active brand promotion within their respective social networks, fan scores are based on factors such as the individual’s social footprint and brand related activities.

The app works on the mechanics of creating a table and inviting friends to fill the spaces. Fans stand a higher chance of winning with more tables created. The app also incorporates fan acquisition.

The VIP party features DJ Lead (Japan) and MC Seebstyle (Italy). It will be held at one of Singapore’s hottest clubs, The Butter Factory.  DJ Lead’s sound mix is featured on the first landing page of the Hennessy Artistry app to give the fans a sneak peek of what to expect at the VIP party.

The Hennessy Artistry contest is ongoing and ends on 14^th May where 3 top fans will be chosen to win VIP invites, a VIP table and a bottle of Hennessy V.S.O.P at the VIP party.

Visit the Hennessy  Facebook Page to join now! <http://www.facebook.com/HennessySingapore>

In celebration of its 10th Birthday, Dorothy Perkins (part of the Wing Tai Group) wanted to reward it’s loyal customers with exclusive giveaways from 23 March – 1 April 2012.

To ensure that the prizes were awarded to the most dedicated Dorothy Perkins fans, Vocanic introduced its very first contest hosted on Pinterest. Fans were invited to Pin their favorite birthday related activities and experiences according to the Dorothy Perkin’s Birthday Board Topics.

Check out the Pinterest board here

The Pinterest initiative received over 110 entries in just 10 days of which 10 winners won a Dorothy Perkins birthday booty each.

On Instagram, a decade of dresses (10 dresses) were uploaded 10 days prior to the event to promote brand awareness.

Other campaigns were hosted on social platforms such F3’s Facebook page, where fans could win a birthday dress by coming up with the most creative name for the dress posted.

After the well-received How To Topshop QR Code campaign that saw the likes of 1000 participants in just 2 weeks, Vocanic launched a follow up QR code initiative for Wing Tai’s Fashion Steps Out campaign.

New pop up stores were set up for Miss Selfridge and Topshop, as well as one to specifically promote Wing Tai’s newest addition to their labels, Laline.

The campaign was driven at acquiring new fans and spreading brand awareness through time and store based rewards such as vouchers and giveaways.

The response received was positive, ranking 190 visits with a 42% conversion rate in the campaign duration of just 3 days.

Within merely the first week of launch, our app received over 600 registrations and doubled the average industry rate of fan engagement of 5%, with 10% of Johnnie Walker fans ‘Talking About This’.

The campaign was built to engage Johnnie Walker fans to promote the Johnnie Walker Jet Black party to their personal social networks.

The much-celebrated Johnnie Walker Jet Black party is held annually in conjunction with the Formula One™ race season. This year, our team amplifies the party buzz by creating activities that encourage fans to interact with the Johnnie Walker brand and rewarding them with Jet Black points.

Putting a twist on score based mechanics, fans can earn their way up the leader board not just by inviting their friends through functionality of the app, but also through posting and discussing the brand in social media.

Jet Black Scores are based on a combination of factors including the size of their social foot print, their influence, their brand related activity and their visibility in the local party scene.

The Jet Black competition is still ongoing and ends on 12^th April.

Visit the fanpage here to take part!

Conceptualised and created by Vocanic, We Quit’s main function is to serve as a platform for smokers and their friends to come together to support one another. Firstly, users must like our I Quit Facebook page. Then, they can create groups under the We Quit application to invite their friends to quit smoking together. Quitters can also invite non-smoking friends to become a supporter. Within their groups, they can schedule events or activities to do.

Though simple, the idea behind We Quit is that the sense of being in a community will give more encouragement and support to people.

I Quit is a campaign started by HPB and Vocanic in 2011 to motivate smokers to quit smoking. We Quit is one of the array of applications that Vocanic introduced to aid the campaign. If you are not a fan of the I Quit campaign already, simply click here and start using our We Quit application!

WPP is looking to increase its spending on Facebook advertising from around $200 million in 2011 to around $400 million in 2012, according to WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell, who made the forecast during a dual interview with Microsoft partner architect Jaron Lanier at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ “Transformation” conference in Los Angeles Tuesday morning. But Sorrell added that the question of measurement is becoming more and more pressing for social media.

Sorrell contrasted the 2012 forecast for Facebook ad spending to WPP’s predicted spending on Google, at around $2 billion, and News Corp., at around $2.5 billion. The figure reflects the growing interest in social media in general and Facebook in particular — and Sorrell paid tribute to the huge power of social media, including “the change in the balance of power to the consumers, to the people,” among an array of other “political, social and economic benefits.”

But the WPP boss also pointed to the limitations holding back social media spending. “The clients are starting to question the measurement issue,” Sorrell warned, adding:  “The area is a very sexy area, and clients have gone in almost willy-nilly, because it is fashionable to do so. The investments have reached a scale where procurement departments, finance departments are increasingly looking at those investments.”

Here Sorrell touched on the continuing debate over measuring ROI, which he said will be key to coordinating social media with other media, both traditional and digital: “There has to be someone who interprets and analyzes the balance between these channels… [and] it has to be an integrated whole.”

Towards that end, Sorrell also staked out a strong position on where responsibility for analytics should lie, at least in his own businesses: “We don’t want to stand on the shoulders of [tech providers]… The application of technology and data analytics are a core part of our strategy… [and] we want to stand on our own two feet.”

The new research is based on an analysis of the friend networks of 721m people, or slightly more than a tenth of the world’s population, who use the social network regularly. This yielded a total of 69 billion connections. After crunching the data using powerful computers, the researchers concluded that people were separated from one another by an average of just 4.74 connections (down from an average of 5.28 in a study the network conducted in 2008). To bring this to life, they cite the example of a person living in a remote part of Siberia and explain that “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend”. Looking only at links between people within the same country, the researchers conclude that folk are separated from one another by an average of just three connections.

Some observers, including people posting comments on the study’s own Facebook page, point out that some of the “friends” they have added online are complete strangers that they have linked to on Facebook simply to boost their standing in one of the many online games that the social network is perpetually touting. Yet in theory they could use the networks of these folk to reach out to other strangers around the world that they would not have met otherwise. Most, though, do not seem to bother. The researchers found that while Facebook makes it easier to connect with people anywhere on the planet, the vast majority of its users’ connections are to folk within a short distance of them. In that sense, it is still a very small world.

Qantas, Australia’s iconic airline, has illustrated this in exemplary fashion with a Twitter campaign which invited the public to heap praise on the airline’s luxury offerings in their Tweets: “Tell us what is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include the hashtag QantasLuxury.” The winning flattery would be rewarded with prizes including Qantas pajamas and a “luxury amenity kit.”

There are a couple points about the Qantas campaign which invite criticism, including the (debatable) advisability of luxury branding during an economic downturn, the appearance of poor taste in inviting consumers to tell you how great you are, and the paltry prizes for doing so, which one social media commentator described as “asinine.”

But the main error — indeed, catastrophic failing — of the campaign was that it came less than a month after a union strike which Qantas management countered with a total shutdown of the company, grounding flights and hugely inconveniencing thousands of customers who had to re-book on competing airlines.

As rivals like Virgin Australia swooped in to pick up Qantas’ business, analysts pondered whether Qantas would ever be able to recover from the strike and the high-handed management response; marketers and brand experts agreed that it would take a long time to win back the public’s trust — not to mention some fancy PR footwork, probably including advertising addressing the disruption and highlighting the airline’s renewed commitment to reliability.

However the public has yet to see any of these subtle, difficult-to-craft messages, which probably haven’t even been produced yet; instead (a day after management-union talks fell apart again) they were invited to tweet about how awesome Qantas is.

By Erik Sass