Celebrities get paid all the time to endorse products via their well-followed Twitter accounts. It’s pretty good work if you can get it. All you need to do is build up a base of a few million Twitter followers and then copy and paste a tweet. That’s it. Not bad for 20 seconds of work that your publicist will likely do for you.

How much those celebrities command for their 140-character endorsements varies based on the clout of the star. Kim Kardashian reportedly makes $10,000 per tweet. Then again, she also has more than 17 million followers. Right behind her is Charlie Sheen (9.5 million followers), who  earns $9,500 per tweet. Check a more detailed list of celebrity tweet rates here.

The thing about paid tweets, however, is that some fans don’t take too kindly to their favorite star suddenly breaking character in order to shill a product. Take the recent example of comedian Michael Ian Black. When Black was paid by Dos Equis to tweet a link to the beer brand’s “Most Interesting Person” app (see above), his fans lashed out.  Read more...

Is there anything more relaxing than a good movie on DVD and delivery pizza? There probably is, but right now we can’t think of anything. Domino’s Pizza in Brazil recently tapped into the power of movie night by partnering with 10 video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

But instead of running a typical “rent two movies, get some breadsticks free” promo, the pizza chain created heat-sensitive, pizza-scented DVDs. We’ll explain …

Hundreds of discs of new releases were printed with scented, thermal ink primed to react to the heat of a DVD player. When the movie ended and the disc was ejected, the smell of pizza filled the room. The discs were also printed to look like mini pizzas, with the message: “Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino’s Pizza.”

Sure, it would have been better to target the consumer before the movie ended, but for the pure ingenuity of the effort, we give it two thumbs up.

MARKETING LESSON: Crossover marketing works, and it works even better when you use things that smell like pizza.

On Kitchen Nightmares, angry British chef Gordon Ramsay does a lot of shouting in an effort to turn hapless restaurants (and their owners) around. On last Friday’s episode, Ramsay finally met his match when the owners of Amy’s Baking Company proved so difficult to work with, he was forced to give up for the first time in the show’s 82-episode run.

After the episode aired, the couple who own the restaurant took a beating online. A flood of one-star ratings on Yelp and a scathing thread on Reddit are just two of many examples of the backlash that occurred.

But it didn’t end there. The husband and wife team fought back on their restaurant’s Facebook account with a flurry of poorly aimed insults. Buzzfeed calls it the “most epic brand meltdown on Facebook ever.” Others might consider it pure entertainment. We call it a classic example of how NOT to use social media to repair your brand’s image.

MARKETING LESSON: Depending upon how you use it (and your temper), social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

How do you let people know that your restaurant serves fresh food? You could buy a billboard adjacent to your restaurant, but a billboard serving up the same old message day in and day out for a month doesn’t exactly embody freshness, does it?

What if you hired a local graffiti artist to use that billboard as a canvas to create colorful ads about key menu items? And what if that artist redrew the billboard twice each day? Now that’s fresh.

That’s exactly what McDonald’s did to promote the fresh food offered at one of its restaurants in Warsaw, Poland. The billboard brings to mind the chalkboard-drawn menus that seem to be all the rage at trendy urban eateries. True, you might not consider McDonald’s a “trendy urban eatery,” but after seeing this billboard, you might change your mind.

MARKETING LESSON: Your brand can evoke freshness in many ways – starting with a little fresh thinking.

It’s only been around for about three-and-a-half months (launched January 24 to be exact), but Vine is already one of the most popular social media tools around.

The Twitter-owned tool, which allows users to upload six-second videos that replay on a continuous loop, boasts the #1 free iTunes app and has many marketers contemplating how they, too, can join in the fun while promoting their brand. (Think of it as a combination of the visual power of Instagram combined with the video-sharing capability of YouTube in the abbreviated format of Twitter – sort of like the GIF above.)

But before you jump right in, you might consider the following tips to help you get the most marketing bang for your six-second buck:  Read more...

• HAVE A PLAN – You might think that since it’s only a six-second clip, you don’t need to put much thought into your video. On the contrary. The short format makes it even more important to have a well-thought-out plan in place for what you want to accomplish with the video.