Minnov8

Several items hit the radar today worthy of posting and a few from discussion at this morning’s enjoyable and informative Social Media Breakfast:

• Brandweek had an interesting article about an initiative at General Mills called MyBlogSpark (from @garykoelling):

Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

• Social Media Return on Investment (ROI) with spreadsheet (from @sbendt)

• Social Media: The Five Year Forecast from CRM.com

• Jason DeRusha from WCCO TV continues to explore ways to connect with viewers using his JasonCam

• @timelliott enjoyed watching Twitter in Real Life (the video from CollegeHumor) below: