A new study released by Webpaint and the Altimeter Group on the use of Social Media channels by brands has come to a surprising conclusion:

“While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.”(Engagement db Report 2009)

The study evaluated each brand by not only the number of channels they engaged with but how deeply they were able to interact with their audience through them. Each brand was classified into four engagement profiles:

Mavens: Brands that engage with seven or more social networking channels and show high depth scores

Butterflies: Brands that similarly run on a high number of social media networks but their audience engagement is shallow.

Selectives: Brands running on fewer social media channels but show greater depth on their key focus channels.

Wallflowers: Brands that show both lower presence and depth in their engagement with Social Media.

Of the rankings Mavens Starbucks, Dell and eBay achieved the highest scores followed by Google because of the way there were able to tie in Social Media initiatives with their larger scale marketing strategies.

Overall Mavens showed the most growth in the last twelve months in Revenue and Gross Margin compared to the other engagement profiles. The study also provides Best Practices Case Studies on Starbucks, Toyota, Dell and SAP.

Webpaint and Altimeter Group have also launched an accompanying website that lets companies index their own social media use for further research. You can read the full report here.

The release of Office 2010 has been confirmed by Microsoft and to start generating some early PR buzz around the new edition they have invited Dennis Liu, infamous You Tuber from Traffik Film Works to create their promo video.

The result is a cyber-crime thriller style movie teaser about the government on the hunt to find a rogue font released by a hacker that has the ability to hypnotize readers into agreement. It even mentions ex Microsoft assistant ‘Clippy’ the animated paperclip that would sit that the bottom of the Office application screens with helpful hints.

My last post was also on the campaign around IE7 featuring ex Superman Dean Cane suggesting the beginnings of a trend in the tech software sector around marketing. Both of these campaigns take a humorous approach, and combine both tech language with more broad appeal for the mass audience.

Back to the Office 2010 product however, there is no real mention of any technical detail on the Office movie teaser but you can sign up to be on the waiting list to go to the technical prevew next year.