COKE, LEVI'S, TIFFANY & CO & ALDO / TUMBLR, INSTAGRAM

Brands are ten a penny on Facebook and Twitter, but with Instagram and Tumblr continuing to welcome more users, brands are broadening their social horizons. Coke, Levi's, Tiffany & Co and Aldo are all amongst brands that have new projects underway.

Instagram is a photosharing application for iPhone users which was recently named by Apple as 'App Of The Year'. Its nostalgia-invoking retro filters are used by over 15 million people to capture moments of their everyday lives. Instagram conveniently integrates with other sites such as Facebook and Twitter, so that users can easily share their shots with friends, family and colleagues.

Levi's is using Instagram to find the stars of its next advertising campaign. Using the hashtag #iamlevis, people are invited to upload their photo to the site. Stars of the campaign for the next Levi's collection will be used from these entries.

Meanwhile, jewellers Tiffany & Co have created a set of custom filters for users of the photosharing site to try out as part of its whatmakeslovetrue.com digital campaign. The campaign is collecting user generated stories and has teamed up with ever-popular fashion bloggers The Sartorialist and Garance Doré to celebrate romance in a digital age. Once the filters have been downloaded from the App Store, users can take photos that mimic the effects being used by the aforementioned fashionistas and share them on Instagram.

Tumblr's recent growth has been much publicised. The site is akin to a super stripped down version of blogging platforms like Wordpress, but allows people to easily collect and share things they find on the web and is incredibly popular amongst young people. According to some enormous statistics released in September 2011, there are now 28 million Tumblrs, to which are added more than 37 million posts per day. That's 1.1bn posts per month, which attract around 12.5bn pages views. To give an idea of the service's growth trajectory, the same month, Tumblr shot past the '10 billion posts' mark. In September 2010, it was celebrating a mere one billion posts.

Coca-Cola, with its agency 360i, has recently launched its own 'tumblog', called Happiness Is where it posts 'vintage' Coca-Cola adverts along with other images curated to deliver happiness to visitors of the site. Meanwhile, Aldo, the footwear brand, recently ran a competition to find the talented Tumblr bloggers. People could submit their Tumblr to Aldorise.tumblr.com, with the winner being chosen based on the quality of their content, volume of notes, reblogs and followers, and the personality of their site. The competition was run for Aldo by New York agency Alldayeveryday. The winners receive a design consultation with the agency, a custom Tumblr theme and five reblogs by Aldo.

http://www.levistrauss.com/blogs/iamlevis
http://www.whatmakeslovetrue.com/splash/
http://aldorise.tumblr.com/
http://coca-cola.tumblr.com/ 
http://aldorise.tumblr.com

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