ChasNote

In a recent post on The MomSpeak, a site featuring editorial content from several parenting bloggers and sponsored exclusively by P&G’s LUVs brand, Liz Gumbinner of CoolMomPicks offers tips on stylish accessorizing, even after having kids. Among them:

“Rule of thumb for jewelry: If you wouldn’t have worn it before kids, don’t wear it now. There’s plenty of truly great keepsake jewelry out there. And those teething necklaces that claim to look just like stylish necklaces? They don’t. Really. One exception: Momma’s Jewels, whose sterling teething pendants are fantastic.”

The folks at Momma’s Jewels took notice, and featured the quote (along with a link) in their customer newsletter. Must be nice for P&G to have other companies shouldering some of their advertising load!

(Credits: Tiff Liu at Mediavest along with Matt Trotta, Nicole Cook, Leona Laurie and Jana Hartz at FM.)

From among thousands of entries, the top picks in several categories have been announced. Here’s the winner in the “band reference” category:

The music blogger at EW can’t make it to Outside Lands this weekend, so here’s what she asks of her readers:

“what if all of YOU covered the festival for me? If you’re planning on hitting the shows this weekend, there is a very cool content tool being launched by a company called CrowdFire that will allow you to upload content for all to see: digital photos, videos, recordings, blog posts, anything that you capture in Golden Gate Park this weekend. So before heading out to the grounds, why not join the site? Then you can visit the CrowdFire Pavilion while on site, upload your stuff, remix the content of others, and play around with what looks like some slightly confusing but ultimately pretty nifty technology.”

From Ad Age:

“This weekend, as thousands of people gather and five dozen bands perform over three straight days at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, tech and media entrepreneur John Battelle hopes to create a different kind of performance, a mash-up of the thousands of camera-phone pictures, hand-held digital-video recordings, blog posts and Twitter “tweets” generated at the event.”

A bunch of new interactive features and contests beef up the CrowdFire experience. More here.

That’s the advice of David Armano in a column for Ad Age:

“we have to ask ourselves why formats like blogs, social networks and other manifestations of emerging digital media have become so popular. Blogs look nothing like microsites. But what they have in common is the delivery. Web pages — pages that can be bookmarked and e-mailed, among other things. And they offer niche content, lots of links and, of course, the ability for people to talk back. Long-form content is the new design language — I have become a convert. Debating the above-the-fold argument is a moot point — we should start channeling our energy into debating how we can provide VALUE to users who are clearly getting it elsewhere. I propose that we breathe new life into the microsite format by fundamentally rethinking it.”

From Joe’s column in MediaPost:

“If I click on a paid link or banner for Nike shoes and make a purchase profiting Nike by $10, to say that the click on that link is worth up to $10 is stupid. Before I ever clicked on that link I have had so many brand interactions and product perceptions, from peer suggestions to celebrity endorsements, I couldn’t count them all even if I wanted to. It could even have been those interactions that caused the click.

“….it’s the product of a broken system and an addiction to Google’s amazingly efficient direct response model. But too many dollars fighting for clicks at the bottom of the funnel is causing artificially inflated pricing for those clicks. Thus, there is a real opportunity to move up the funnel online and achieve spectacular results for marketers (especially in social media).”

Right on, Joe.

Quietly leaked two weeks ago, the news that Justin Nesci has joined FM as SVP Sales & Marketing is official. Here’s coverage at MediaPost, PaidContent and ClickZ.

Welcome aboard, Justin!

Here’s a music-festival montage set to Snoopy’s theme music. Mash-up credit goes to my colleague Matt Jessell.