What do you get yourself when your favorite social media site has a birthday? How do you avoid turning into your dad? Is a cyborg attack inevitable? The answers to these and other titillating questions from the online marketing universe can be found right here in our list of Five Things You Might Have Missed.

1.) Appy Birthday: Did you miss Twitter’s 7th birthday this week? Don’t feel too bad about it. Something tells us the little bird got plenty of gifts. But it’s never too late to celebrate the wonder that is Twitter marketing by getting yourself a few goodies. The Wall Street Journal came up with an excellent list of must-have-apps for Twitter marketers, many of which are free!

2.) Google Glass Backlash: Oh, boy. Nothing ushers in a full-fledged attack of consumer haterade than a new and confusing bit of technology, and the much-ballyhooed Google Glass is elbows-deep in precisely that. Online campaigns wanting to “Stop the Cyborgs” and the moniker of “glasshole” have picked up press. But you can’t deny our collected interest in this yet-to-be-released piece of eye-level connected screen and camera technology. A video demonstrating Google Glass released in February has already racked up nearly 19 million YouTube views.

3.) Viva Corporate Blogging: As champions of the powerful platform that is blogging, we were thrilled to see this article from Canada’s Globe and Mail. The entry profiled how companies of all sizes can use blogging to fix PR problems, educate consumers and help spread the word about “company culture.”

4.) Find the Lookalikes: Thanks to Cynthia Boris over at Marketing Pilgrim for pointing out a nifty new Facebook marketing tool called “lookalike audiences.” The “Custom Audience” tool “lets you carve out a subset of current customers based on certain criteria. You can choose only people who live in a particular city, a certain age range, a particular gender or by interests,” writes Boris. Is this another miss from Facebook marketing or a tool worth our time? According to Boris, “What really makes this work is Facebook’s ability to scoop up and sort all types of personal data. Having a person’s zip code and age is nice, but knowing who loves dancing and who loves hockey goes a lot further in the ad world.”

5.) Dad Issues: We haven’t had a good, goofy ad campaign from Mentos in quiet sometime. So hooray for its new series of ads which begs consumers “Don’t Become Your Dad.” It’s a funny, good time that covers dad’s responses to hot tubs, riding in cars with strangers and technology.

In this fast-moving world, it just isn’t possible to read all of the interesting online marketing and social media news stories. But each week, we round up a fivesome we like to call our “Five Things You Might Have Missed” list.

1.) From Facebook to Blog: We often preach the benefits of both social media and blog marketing in these pages. Yet rarely do we see brands pull off both seemingly without effort. So we thought the blogging and Facebook efforts of Power2Switch were worthy of making the top of our list this week. The electricity company landed a coveted spot on Huffington Post, discussing its own Facebook marketing lessons. This stroke of genius in content marketing not only outlines Power2Switch’s Facebook marketing efforts, it also puts the brand in front of a huge readership.

2.) Nazi TV: Hitler and the Nazi regime aren’t exactly hilarious subjects for ads, but this spot for the National Geographic Channel is downright hilarious. The ad, which touts that the channel is now available in several dialects, features Nazis talking like teenage girls. It’s a funny and surprising spot from a brand with a fairly stuffy image.

3.) Ink You Can Drink: We like to applaud brands who think out side of the box — or, in the case of winery Casa Mariol, outside of the bottle. In order to prove that wine and business deals do indeed mix, Casa Mariol created pens with special wine-based ink. It’s a kooky idea, but just the kind of thing marketing blogs love to chat about… and low and behold, these wine pens were everywhere this week. Mission accomplished, Casa Mariol, and cheers!

4.) Two-wheel Tweeting: Keeping your eyes on the road during South by Southwest just got even tougher. Digital agency Razorfish is populating the festival with 20 bikes fully loaded with remote tweeting capabilities. The bikes tweet their location, chat about festival events and give updates on local weather, among other things. The free bikes and their whereabouts can be tracked at usemeleaveme.com during the festival.

5.) Nontroversy: Sometimes an uproar over digital advertising is so silly that it fails to be a controversy at all. Closing out our list is the hilarious hubbub over Geico’s new ad featuring its pig, Maxwell, on a date with a human woman. The conservative watchdog group One Million Moms says the spot promotes bestiality and is “repulsive and unnecessary.” Uh, okay. The ad didn’t get pulled… but thanks to the silly headlines, it’s racked up thousands of YouTube.com views.

You know your traditional and online video creation is a success when folks are still buzzing about it on Twitter and Facebook days later. Social media experts clamour for this kind of success and hope that every campaign can be a success on YouTube as well as on the major social media channels. But in reality, it takes a special, rare ad campaign to dominate all of the platforms of content marketing. And who would have guessed that just such a major success story of last Sunday’s Oscars would belong to mustard maker Grey Poupon?

Ah, yes, Grey Poupon. We all know the legendary ’80s commercials very well. “Pardon me,” says the stuffy aristocrat in the Rolls Royce to another snooty snob in another luxury car. “Do you have any Grey Poupon?” Yet the latest viral and social media hit from the company suggests that we only know half of the story. A hilarious and pitch-perfect commercial entitled “Grey Poupon: The Lost Footage” also known simply as “Pardon Me,” debuted this Sunday during the Academy Awards. The spot went on to show the hilarious car chase and showdown that happened after that infamous mustard exchange. Clever, unexpected and really funny, Grey Poupon’s ad was a hit during the awards ceremony and Twitter users buzzed about it for the rest of the evening. Wisely, Grey Poupon fully loaded a new website where folks could see the whole Dijon saga unfold. In the following days, the videos have killed on YouTube, garnering a 778,000 (and growing) views as well as major media buzz.

It helps that the commercial aired during one of the most watched events on the planet. But Grey Poupon didn’t just rest on its award show laurels to get its spot seen. By placing it prominently on all its social media channels, YouTube and its own website, Grey Poupon helped ensure that even people who missed the Oscars would be talking about it for days to come.

Hey, readers, seen any good viral commercials lately? Tell us about them in the comments section below!

Drained for online marketing ideas? Totally tapped out when it comes to new blog creation strategies? And just downright pooped trying to tweet? Well, buck up, little camper. Our weekly list of Five Things You Might Have Missed has a quintet of stories sure to inspire, entertain and delight!

1.) Tumblr To Go: Hesitating using Tumblr as your blog marketing platform because it seems so locked to the desktop and not smartphone-friendly? Think again, says Tumblr’s own CEO David Karp in an interview with Mashable last week. Karp claims that Tumblr’s total mobile domination is “going to be either later this year or early next year ’cause it’s accelerating. We’re seeing 3 times the growth on mobile vs. desktop.”

2.) Waiting Room Wonders: Here’s a neat-o idea that uses tech to transform the somewhat tedious and tiresome hospital waiting room into a fun and distracting experience for kids who would certainly want to be elsewhere. Artist Chris O’Shea turned Royal London Hospital into an interactive real-life children’s book and made us believers in rebranding something most folks think of as boring.

3.) Twitter Ads Simplified: Good news for Twitter marketers looking to branch out into Twitter-based advertising. On its official blog, the company announced, “We’ve been testing the Twitter Ads API since January with our partners, and today we’re officially launching it. Marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.”#TwitterMarketingForAll

4.) Stressed to the Max: Nivea pulled a fast one on some very stressed out German airport visitors in this hilarious and kinda cruel commercial. Striking viral video gold, the spot tricks travelers into thinking they are wanted by authorities by using newspapers with their pictures on them, news footage and airport announcements. It’s funny, primarily because it isn’t happening to you.

5.) Touch My Chromebook: We round out today’s list with the latest product announcement from Google that proves the company is serious about taking the wind out of Microsoft’s sales. The Chromebook Pixel is a touch-based laptop which could elevate Google to the big leagues. Stay tuned to see how this branding battle turns out.

Hooray! It’s Friday! To celebrate, we’ve cooked up five tasty dishes from the world of online marketing. Enjoy!

1.) Nobody Doesn’t Like Pinterest: Food — and specifically food porn — is a big reason a lot of people spend hours on Pinterest. So we think brands like Sara Lee actively participating on Pinterest is nothing short of genius. Cheesecake and dessert empire Sara Lee has filled its Pinterest boards with the kind of mouthwatering, drool-worth deserts that Pinterest users love and re-pin. For small-time food companies and indie chefs, boards like Sara Lee’s can also serve as an inspiration on how to do the Pinterest game right.

2.) Feed the Birds: What do you do when your bird sanctuary experiences a dip in attendance, threatening to leave hundreds of our feathered friends hungry? Well, if you’re World of Birds in South Africa, you make some clever billboards and signs out of birdseed. This innovative campaign got major coverage on Twitter for being so clever and, as a result, the birds didn’t go hungry and the doors stayed open. Aww!

3.) Tweet Time Travel: Last week Twitter rolled out a new feature you might have missed: the ability to search tweets more than a week old. Twitter marketers and analysts have been itching for this innovation for years, so it’s actually pretty big news. How does it work? According to an official Twitter blog post, “As we roll this out over the coming days, the tweets that you’ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total tweets ever sent. We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks to determine which tweets to show. We’ll be steadily increasing this percentage over time, and ultimately aim to surface the best content for your query. For now, enjoy your trip down memory lane!”

4.) Beckham in Beverly Hills: The recipe for instant viral success: Add one David Beckham in underwear, mix in action movie-style directing (courtesy of Guy Ritchie), pour over millions of views and enjoy!

5.) Immaturity Rules: To wrap up the list this week, we’d like to leave you with something juvenile. Never underestimate the power of sophomoric humor in your online marketing. This ad from Playtex illustrates this theory brilliantly.

Creative and memorable online video creation takes time, effort and vision. After coming up with great videos that reflect your brand’s personality and style, make sure they go the right channels — and not just your personal YouTube channel. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook should definitely help you promote video content and, of course, your own website needs a dose of video magic, too. But perhaps the most powerful place for your video campaigns to shine is on your own blog.

Every blogging-for-business tutorial touts the importance of using video content, and it isn’t difficult to see why. For starters, videos make for super-engaging and dynamic posts that require less copy. Posts with videos have proven to be the kind of thing folks forward to one another, leave comments on and generally enjoy as a break from the normal posts. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to use our own branded blogs to hold our original video content, too. In the never-ending pursuit of new blog topics, our videos are an easy and different way to provide new posts. From demos on how to use products and before-and-after videos to interviews with industry experts and network news-style business reports, videos can do everything our blogs already do. Like with your everyday written blog posts, video posts should talk about your brand and industry while entertaining and informing your readers. In other words, videos of your grandfather on a water slide probably aren’t appropriate (unless of course you’re in the water slide business).

Producing a weekly or monthly series of videos is a creative solution for both video marketing and blog marketing. Series help churn out fresh video content, and placing them on the company blog gives readers a reliable place to find them. Customer testimonials, weekly specials, “get to know” company employees and new product arrivals would all make for fun and easy to produce video series. Likewise, heavily-watched YouTube or Vimeo channels can also help promote company blogs that need more readers, too. Just a little “Click Here to Read Our Blog” button can make all the difference when it comes to getting video watchers to cross over.

‘Tis the season to ooh and aah at clever online video creation. We’re talking about Super Bowl ads — still. The fact is the Internet has made dishing about commercials from the Big Game even easier and more engaging. Every blog has opinions about which spots were the best and which ones stunk up their living rooms. Not to be left out, here’s our three favorite Super Bowl Ads along with tips on how to infuse your own videos with some of that high-end ad agency magic.

Goat 4 Sale: This Doritos spot is down right weird, a little creepy and somehow still adorable. If you missed it, the spot follows a man who buys a Doritos munching goat from a dude in a neck-brace. This new relationship quickly goes awry when the goat gobbles up his owner’s hundreds of bags of Doritos. As the owner makes his own “Goat 4 Sale” sign, the goat screams and things get spooky yet hilarious. This ad works because it’s weird and people like weird (or they at least like talking about weird). Even low-budget Internet commercials with that “WTF”-factor go viral and get folks chatting. So don’t be afraid to inject your videos with a shot of strange.

The Effect: This banned ad for SodaStream features dueling banjos and two bumbling Coke and Pepsi delivery guys. It’s funny and certainly makes the case for using SodaStream to make your own soda at home. Yet the real reason this commercial works is that it has an opinion and has gotten folks talking. CBS banned the ad, but it didn’t matter — the spot has nearly 4 million views. Online videos with strong opinions, like those with humor, get views and attention… so if your brand has something to say, say it in a video!

#SteerTheScript: Using Twitter hashtags and Jimmy Fallon, Lincoln called upon consumers to create its Super Bowl ad. Twitter users literally steered the script of the ad, and the results are funny and innovative. We love how this spot uses a combination of creativity, social media and crowd sourcing. Getting followers to engage and interact with your video to help dictate future content, answer questions and create new videos is a fabulous idea anybody with a brand and a social media following can do.

Blog marketing basics, divine live-tweeting and some heartfelt online video creation are just of a taste of what you’ll find in this week’s Five Thing You Might Have Missed. But don’t take our word for it. Dig in and find out for yourself!

1.) Popularity Mechanics: Why don’t people read your blog? What should you be blogging about? Where do you begin with blog marketing? And how do you get more folks to like what you blog about? The secrets to a popular blog are spilled in this must-read post from Inc. Aaron Arders demystifies blogging for business and does so with humor and insight.

2.) Pawnee Pinterest: The marketing folks over at the sitcom Parks and Recreation deserve a round of applause for taking a subplot involving fictional clothing store Rent-a-Swag and turning into a Pinterest phenomenon. The show has been rocking comedic Pinterest boards for a little over a year, and this latest triumph proves that pinning can be effective and hilarious.

3.) Facebook Calling: Finally: a Facebook petition we can get behind! A plaza in the Spanish city of Granada will be renamed after legendary Clash frontman Joe Strummer after 2,000 signatures collected on Facebook swayed city officials. Strummer had a long history with Granada and he even mentioned it in the iconic song “Spanish Bombs.” Spain — and even Facebook — just got a little bit cooler.

4.) Heart to Heart: Whether you love or hate that smart-talking heart-shaped puppet on the Zoosk commercial, there’s no denying that the little guy, along with his friend Liz, are a viral sensation. With over 14 million views on YouTube and slew of parodies, this is one puppet that, in one commercial, put a dating website nobody ever heard of on the branding map.

5.) Live Tweeting, Diva Style: And lastly, we’ve been snickering at the no-holds-barred tweets from icon Bette Midler for months, but the star really showed her Twitter gravitas on Monday when she live-tweeted the inauguration. Midler tweeted about being hungover, the tackiness of gum chewing and even zinged Paul Ryan. For a star like Midler, who is returning to films and Broadway, Twitter is a good way to re-introduce themselves to audiences. Yet Midler’s blunt and hilarious tweets make Twitter marketing simply divine.

I recently found myself uttering, “Relax! It’s just Twitter!” to a client who had dipped his toes into Twitter marketing and was feeling totally overwhelmed. A non-stop avalanche of RTs, hashtags, dashboards and tweeting links had left my otherwise well-educated client dumbstruck. The truth is he isn’t alone. Most people visit Twitter briefly, don’t “get it” and then write it off as ridiculous. But that would be a mistake. The platform is still a great way to keep in touch with our followers, meet new friends interested in our brand and help give us an easy SEO shot in the arm to boot. Yet some still worry that Twitter is too technical and too complicated. Nonsense! Here’s a quick tweetorial for even the most tech-challenged of Twitter virgins.

Learn the lingo: Having a hard time telling your #FF from your #RT? Take a few minutes to learn what the heck people are saying on Twitter and it’ll make your time their less confusing and more entertaining. This guide is a good place to start.

Set it and forget it: A great dashboard, whether it be TweetDeck or HootSuite, is essential for starting your Twitter journey. These handy tools allow you to schedule tweet several days in advance — even for weeks at a time. Naturally, you’ll want to engage with followers in real-time, too, but a dashboard helps take the stress out of tweeting everyday. Best of all, these dashboards take only a few minutes to download and are incredibly uncomplicated to navigate.

Say what?: “But what the !@#$ do I tweet about?” is the No. 1 question clients ask social media experts. In the spirit of keeping it simple, tweet what you know. Send the kind of tweets that represent the topics you want to talk about to your clients. Tweet what you find fascinating and chances are somebody will find it interesting, too. Photos of new products, links to industry articles and cool videos getting passed around your office make for great Twitter fodder. And don’t worry — tweeting links, videos and images is super simple thanks to Twitter’s awesome upgrades. Which brings us to our last tip…

Getting easier all the time: A faster search engine, highlighted hashtags and more precise “Who to Follow” suggestions are making Twitter incredibly user-friendly. New upgrades are being implemented regularly to make it even easier for folks of varying levels of technical prowess to get on Twitter and enjoy it for the fun and powerful marketing tool it is.

What are our favorite stories from the worlds of online marketing, social media management and digital engagement? Why, we’re so happy you asked! Here now are five recent campaigns and curiosities we think are worth another look.

1.) Q&A, Twitter style: Last week the #PowerfulAnswers hashtag from Verizon caught our eye for being a smart Twitter-based campaign that answers provocative technical and societal questions while encouraging discussion from followers. It’s Twitter marketing with heart and smarts.

2.) Market Like the Movies: How has Hollywood managed to have its biggest year ever despite declining ticket sales? A new infographic from Bit Rebels breaks down how online marketing techniques like  have truly saved the movies (and might even give your own business a few ideas).

3.) Nerd Worlds Collide: Fans of both Star Trek and the Big Bang Theory, you better sit down. Online travel czar Priceline has melted both geek cultures in one smash hit bit of online video creation. A new spot unveils Captain Kirk’s — uh, we mean The Negotiator’s — daughter, who is played by none other than Kaley Cuoco of Big Bang Theory. The result is a funny and clever viral hit with appeal that spans generations.

4.) Surgery Goes to the Dogs: “Is your dog a total dog?” asks a Sunset Boulevard billboard promoting canine plastic surgery. Gotta love Los Angeles. Thankfully, the clever campaign is actually a spoof and an ad for Comedy Central’s new sketch comedy show The Kroll Show starring comedian Steven Kroll. For added authenticity, the marketers have even set up a phony website, www.puppylift.com.

5.) Mean Tweets: And finally, we round out this week’s list with the 3rd installment of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets.” Not only does this video make for a hilarious time killer, it also says a lot about the trash we talk on Twitter.