Advercation = Advertising + Education

In this new frontier of social media marketing, some brands know how to harness what’s out there. Others are like lost puppies nipping at every mailman that walks by for potentially encroaching on their brand’s territory.

Under Armour is a brand that gets it.

A few months ago I wrote a post on my agency site (iStrategyLabs), about a Facebook Page experiment I was conducting. I secured a number of branded Facebook Pages, and sat back silently watching the fan bases grow.

In my post, I said:

If you’re a brand manager for any of the above, just drop me a line and I’ll coordinate with Facebook to hand you over control of the page. This exercise was not built in order to squat on these pages permanently and it would be silly to delete them at the end of this as the fan base would be disbanded by that action doing more harm than good in my opinion.

So, I got an email from Nate an Interactive Art Director at Under Armour, and he appreciated my brand evangelism and willingness to hand over the fan base (~1200 or so fans). I did so, and Under Armour was kind enough to send me a bag full of sweet gear. You can join their page here.

So, thank you Nate/Under Armour. I look forward to seeing more great campaign from you guys. I shall remain one of your loyal brand evangelists.

I use lots of web apps. I build them for clients, I try them for fun, and use them for getting stuff done in life in general.

Most of them though I’ll log into once, poke around, and then never come back to. Some become an integral part of my daily life (twitter, facebook, workstreamr, etc.).

And it’s really not often that a new web app comes along that joins this revered list. Well, I think another just did: TokBox.

In a nut shell, TokBox lets you send video voice mails and have unlimited participant video conference calls (I got up to about 13 people simultaneously today). Oh, and it’s entirely browser based, free, and embedable.

Today Leora and I were chatting and I enjoyed the ease of initiating a video call by her just clicking on my tokbox link (http://www.tokbox.com/corbett3000):

I then threw my link over to Leslie on google chat so that she could call me…once she did, hit the ‘merge call’ button and she joined our video chat:

We then tried out the Conference Call function, and you can see below we’ve got 5 video conference users (Zvi and Sam joined) and one voice only (our friend didn’t have a camera). You’re able to join a conference call by simple clicking a link…you can see ours to the left of the headshots below.

Then a few of us tweeted the conference link and a bunch of people showed up (the black boxes/voice only are people configuring their cameras):

Tokbox is in beta at the moment, and I’m happily providing feedback as an ‘interested user’, so if you’ve used the tool and have something to say, please leave a comment here!