I was asked to call out some examples of those using digital innovation well. It’s very easy to say Dell are making money via Twitter and the new Old Spice videos are viral winners but here’s half a dozen less-heralded examples that might tickle your marketing fancy:

Company: Disney

Category: Social Media promotions

What: Toy Story 3 created the world’s first promoted trend on Twitter along with a Facebook app that allowed visitors to pre-order tickets and then share info with friends to arrange group viewings.

Result: increased the likelihood of impulse purchases and the social aspect made group planning that much easier. Was the highest grossing movie of 2010.

Company: Orabrush (a tongue cleaner that solves bad breath)

Category: Online video (direct selling)

What: Marketing started with a video shot at a pool hall for about $500 getting over 13 million views. There’s now a weekly installment for Orabrush’s YouTube channel, Curebadbreath.

Result: sold $1 million worth of brushes (at $5 a time) through YouTube. Four pharmacy chains, including Boots will be carrying the product.

Almost 40,000 people have subscribed to get e-mail updates every time Orabrush posts a new video, making it the seventh most-subscribed channel on YouTube.

Company: Daily Candy

Category: Location-based mobile marketing

What: DailyCandy Stylish Alerts uses geofencing technology to notify application users when they approach locations recently written about by the DailyCandy editorial team.

Result: news on events, gatherings and style as you walk around NY. First to market with such innovation.

Company: Gatorade’s Mission Control

Category: Social Media

What: Tweets of encouragement to high-school athletes before big games and responses to Facebook queries.

Mission Control aggregates and weighs real-time opinions. It gives more importance to mentions made by loyal fans, people with a lot of followers, or people whose opinions tend to get picked up.

Result: Pepsi’s cash cow became ubiquitous (and uncool). Mission control was set to reverse the sales’ slide. Gatorade sales rose 7% in the second quarter and 2.4% for the first half of the year.

Company: Kogi Korean BBQ

Category: Mobile marketing on Twitter

What: Korean take out food that moves around LA. The places are announced on Twitter @kogibbq and the chef is now winning awards.

Result: Business grown to five trucks inside two years. A gaggle of great PR including Time magazine. 90,000+ Twitter followers looking for Korean food.

Company: BMW

Category: Mobile marketing via MMS

What: the campaign was timed, targeted to individual consumers, and highly personalised to recent BMW purchases who would need winter tyres fitted.

They sent the MMS on the first snow day of winter with an image of the users model, in their colour with their rims and the recommended tyre for winter use. They also included a link to a mobile site allowing customers to experiment with the tyre simulator before making a purchase.

Result: 30% conversion from message to purchase and $45 million in new business.

I attended Doug Richard’s School for Startups recently. The title is a bit of a misnomer as the day had nothing specifically to do with starting a business, but it did have plenty of action points for marketing.

The day was fast-paced with lecture-style talks from Mr Richard and three colleagues. Let’s be honest, you go to see the formidable Doug Richard in action and he opened the sessions with a broad talk about business and how little we actually control. See him in action here.

I was immediately stunned about how intelligent this [former] Dragon is. He reminded me of an economics lecturer I had who could tell what day of the week you were born on within about three seconds of knowing your date of birth (he’d run a cunning formula in his head).

The 120 or so business folk were scared to answer DR’s open questions for fear of engaging this razor sharp mind. You really do need your A game if you’re going to talk business with this guy, even your own business. A chap in the audience volunteered to describe his own organisation. Big mistake. DR took his ‘elevator pitch,’ highlighted several inadequacies and spat it back at the business owner with such flare that everyone else was writing it down thinking they’d plagiarise it for themselves.

But Richard’s cohort found that uber-sharp standard a tough act to follow. They gave us a social media-is-great talk with the obligatory Will it Blend video. We had a pay per click is-the-quickest-win talk complete with incomprehensibly small screen shots. Finally we had an ecommerce-is-the-place-to-be talk from an ex-Amazon exec.

I’m sure these chaps are great in their own right, but they’d been asked to cut their usual one day training sessions down to an hour or so and you felt they’d done it on the train that morning. Then again, it was government funded social enterprise (free entry) so I certainly couldn’t say I’d overpaid.

They had 120 or so small and micro businesses in the room and they broad stroked most areas. Granted, there is never going to be time in such bootcamps for massive details, but not one of the team had researched a company in attendance and come with examples of how they could improve what they were already doing online.

For me, social media is about authenticity and credibility and I don’t think SMEs new to the arena would’ve heard that message. They could’ve demonstrated more of the beauty of listening; of how to monitor the conversation and engage without stalking.

They could’ve run us through existing clients and demonstrated how their real-world social, PPC and on-page ecommerce work had resulted in X% growth this year for their architect, or bakery, or gym (you get the idea).

The standard for these online training sessions/bootcamps is rarely going to catapult your marketing endeavours, but I have to say these guys did let out several nuggets amongst some pretty awful PowerPoint.

Bravo to Doug Richard for undertaking this philanthropic project. Bravo to his team for willing to give away insight (without charge). And bravo to the local authorities for saying yes.

If you get the chance, please do go – I promise seeing DR’s business mind in action is as an inspiring an afternoon as you can get without involving an Olympic athlete or a war hero.

News Corp’s readership numbers are on the up since they introduced their paywall last July. Surely that’s all good news?

The Times and The Sunday Times has grown from 50,000 monthly digital subscribers in October to 79,000 at the end of February. They seem to have brushed under the carpet the fact that the growth rate is slowing. They also lost 90% of visits the moment the paywall was cemented but that was expected by all.

However, volume isn’t the same as value because revenues are less online per customer due to their aggressive pricing strategy and smaller variable costs (another 1,000 iPad subs cost virtually zero to deliver, greatly less than a 1,000 physical papers).

It’s a bit disappointing that these figures aren’t broken down across all platforms but the papers say digital is digital regardless of your hardware so we can’t glean who’s using on Kindle, iPhone etc.

But the most surprising and impressive number is that churn is just 1%. 99% of subscribers in month one, stayed and paid for month two. Wow, talk about sticky.

This is interesting stuff. Tablets are having their 15 minutes of fame and The Times et al will only help reinforce that. Horse versus car; email versus letter; telephone versus telegram; paper versus digital news. All have an obvious ending but the sting in the tail sees all these publishers frantically trying to work out how to monetise their digital content. The world is watching.

Read the Guardian for a (free) great take on the numbers. You’ve got a savvy business mind, what do you think is the correct model?

Silicon Valley can get carried away with the Angry Birds’ Series A round of investment and Apple’s iAds, but Denmark are giving us a great example of digital innovation helping the man on the street right now.

From 1^st April the Danes will be able to text a number that will reply to the phone with a code. This code can be written on envelopes to be dispatched around the country. Users will be charged for the text and the value of the stamp.

No more trawling through your bottom draw for a dog-eared stamp. No frantic will-the-post-office-be-open drives around the estate. Just a simple text and scribble onto an envelope. Genius.

It’s yet another convenient incremental innovation that sees ‘phones become an ever-increasing staple of our society’s functionality. The ONS seems wise to this as its spring clean of shopping items that determine inflation now includes smartphones and app downloads. Indicators indeed.

Do you like business books that inspire you to move into action, or books that break down what someone did in their business? If it’s the former then this month has seen a couple of excellent releases for you:

Gary Vaynerchuk is a hustler. His second book, The Thank You Economy is out this week. Gary took his father’s wine store turnover from $4m to $69m inside 5 years. He hustled. He expanded. He served. He innovated. He grew. He succeeded. This guy is someone you should hook into.

Seth Godin has released a short 70-odd page book called, Poke The Box. It’s about starting things, kicking off and shipping. Like so many of his short pieces he’s asking you to DO something.

A third beauty that I haven’t got ‘round to yet is Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination from Hugh MacLeod. It’s also his second release and another offering insight into an Internet and marketing powerhouse.

Enjoy (and then DO something).

The Internet has only really been around for the masses since Microsoft brought us Windows 95 and the ever-present Internet Explorer. But over 15 years on, digital and digital marketing still remains a bolt on for many businesses that should really know better.

I’m always amazed when strong marketers tell me their marketing director (not HR or finance director) doesn’t know anything about digital or ‘The Web.’ This leaves the marketing managers or their assistants to direct any digital impact the firm achieves.

I mean, where the hell have they been for the past decade and a half, writing Yellow Pages ads?

This digital-is-an-extra-component mindset is the equivalent to the outdoor toilet. For decades the home toilet lived in the back garden. It was an outhouse; an extra to the main building. Of course, modernisation took place and toilets thankfully now live a lot closer to the bedroom.

Directors who think marketing is a whole load of ‘stuff’ plus a bit of digital on the side are dinosaurs. There’s a sea change coming thanks to digital TV and smartphones that beggars belief compared to what we have today, and these dinosaurs need to get on the bandwagon.

Not seeing digital as an integral part of your marketing and communications is as antiquated as an outdoor loo. Quaint, but terribly ineffective for all concerned.

Answers.com sold this week for $127m. This coupled with the growing buzz around Quora, highlights the fact that Q&A sites are the poster-boy targets on the web. Added to that firestorm is Mahalo giving up on human powered search and pivoting to answers. Although it looks like they’re going for ‘how to’ queries more than actual answers to live questions.

We’ve seen plenty of mediocrity from Yahoo! Answers but are question sites about to get good answers? Aardvark, Stack Overflow and others argue that quality is possible if you ask the right community. A specialist community. But doesn’t that take us down a narrow forum-type road rather than the broad majority who only use the top search engines?

Monetising Q&A doesn’t look overly simple – banner ads would likely score awful click through rates. And I can’t help but feel it’s a bit like fighting over the crumbs left over from Google’s table. What happens when Google wants to clear house? That’s my question.

Neil Thompson is the MD of Microsoft UK and Ireland and I recently saw him speak about his 18 years in innovation.

He ran through his career in one of the world’s most influential companies; from exaggerating his skills at his job interview to today’s cutting edge.

It was a walk down memory lane for many in the audience as he spoke of launching Windows 3, MS Dos 6 and the original Office suite. Windows 95 was a landmark for them and getting the Rolling Stones to soundtrack the advertising was a game changer, taking the conversation from the PC box to the software inside it. They also sponsored the Sunday Times for a day by taking over all the advertising which, “cost us another gazillion pounds.”

It’s easy to forget the Internet barely existed before Windows 95 and the Internet Explorer browser. We really are at the foot of the mountain as far as the Internet is concerned. At the time, Netscape had the browser to use with over 95% market share. 95% to zero inside, what, five years? There’s a lesson for any monopoly.

He also shared a pretty widely held hypothesis: the future is in the cloud and it’s viewed across multiscreens. MS categorise three groups of hardware sitting beneath the cloud, all sharing data:

1) Phones and consumer electronic devices
2) PCs
3) TVs

“Imagine watching a film at home and pausing it to leave the house. You jump on a train 10 minutes later and press play on your phone and continue right where you left off,” said the man from Microsoft.

There was plenty of fun while the audience played with a Kinect but one of the most powerful lines of the night was saying how MS go all in when they bet on strategy. Neil reminded us that if Windows 95 hadn’t paid off, the company would have imploded. When they bet, they bet big.

Stan Slap’s book, Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers (affiliate link) draws on his experience at Microsoft (among other companies). It was half way down my reading wish list but Neil’s passion for his product and his company has pushed it towards the top – I want to know more about the people and the tactics employed over the years.

I posted previously about how I saw the web unfolding in 2010. One of my pointers was about on-site search and how bad it is in general. I recommended that the big players team up with the search engines to get it right.

Well, Google beat me to the deadline and launched its Google Commerce search offering toward the end of 2009, not 2010. I’ll be really interested to see who takes this on and how the technology (and partnership) affects their sites.

At $50,000+, it costs more than most SMEs would have in their site development budgets and I’m not sure the M&Ss or Nexts of the world would ever really incorporate it, but what a great plug in.

A lot has been made of Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board. The short version: he’s also CEO of Google and these two tech giants are really starting to cross swords.

While Google are undoubtedly an increasing ‘problem’ for Apple, I think most reports are in danger of missing the elephant in the room: Nokia. They have a 40% market share of the world’s mobile handset market. They produce a phone every 13 seconds, with around 1.1 billion customers today, and they are well and truly on a charge.

Nokia are unquestionably number one – larger than their top three rivals combined – yet they were accused of being asleep at the wheel when it came to the iPhone. Enter the Nokia N900 Smartbook, launched this week with, “Computer-grade performance in a handset” and Flash support (not yet available on the iPhone).

Microsoft’s mobile version of the Office suite, currently only available on Windows mobile devices, is soon to be available on Nokia handsets. And Microsoft and Nokia plan on developing several mobile apps together.

Apple fans have consumed rumours about Mr Jobs producing a tablet computer for several years but it’s yet to materialise. Enter Nokia’s booklet. Add to this momentum the fact they appear to be teaming up with music rather than dictate to the industry. Dave Stewart (50% of the Eurythmics group) is a change agent and big fettler in the Nokia world of the future.

Nokia are a capable chameleon. They’ve reinvented themselves from a paper and rubber manufacturer to an electronic giant turning over $70 billion. So when they say, “we will quickly be the world’s biggest entertainment media network.” we should really pay attention.

Their aptitude, coupled with some audacious strategic alliances may yet see CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo pull off a Finnish coup d’état.