Willingness to experiment is a key to success with digital and social media. Sure, there are emerging fundamentals, which (surprise!) mirror closely those of all media. Chief among these is the principle that people respond when something breaks from the center of the bell curve and delivers the unexpected.

Our own Facebook ads—a nice collection of them reside here—have been thusly treated as an experiment. We’ve been lucky enough to receive a good deal of press for our efforts, and now we’ve been named a finalist in the OMMA Awards for Online Advertising Creativity. Specifically, in the “creative use of facebook” category. Other OMMA finalists include the likes of Google, Disney, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, DreamWorks, Volkswagen, HBO, JetBlue and several other big companies my mother has heard of.

Our agency is humbled and honored to be mentioned in the same show as these brands. Winners will be announced in September in New York. Thanks to everyone for playing along with us.

Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman.Kulash’s thoughts apply outside of the music industry. How’s your business model holding up? Are you prepared to alter how you self-promote? Can you change how you operate and still make the cash register ring? Something to think about as we begin 2011.

Note: if you haven’t heard of OK Go, see “YouTube.” If you haven’t heard of YouTube, see “the Internet.” If you haven’t heard of the Internet, see “Al Gore.” And so on.

Our pals and sometimes partners-in-awesomeness, Struck/Axiom, recently helped Gatorade with its new social media command center.

The mission-control-like room features large screens with various social media visualizations, such that Gatorade marketing pros can monitor real time conversations not only related to the brand but its competition, sports nutrition, athletes and other popular culture topics its consumers care about. Here’s a YouTube clip overview.

Carla Hassan, Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, says the goal of this project is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.”

What Hassan is really talking about is an unprecedented level of brand engagement. Brands by their very nature are participatory. After all, brands are merely the aggregate of consumer perceptions, and these perceptions are shaped by consumers’ interactions or participation with a given brand.

The difference today is that people have social media which acts as an amplifier. Anyone can be a media source and build an audience. Smart brands understand that and embrace engagement.

Congrats to Struck/Axiom and Gatorade.

I don’t have an iPad yet. Reason one: Apple develops product in market. So an improved iPad will be out in a few months and will cost less. Reason two: I can’t figure out where it fits into my digital life. I have a MacBook. I have an iPhone. Why do I need an iPad?

That being said, Apple sold about 700,000 units yesterday when the device made its debut. So a few people, who presumably have laptops and smartphones, felt the device serves some purpose.

From the half dozen reviews I’ve read, iPad isn’t any good at making stuff. But it could change the way we consume stuff: books, magazines, newspapers, music, TV, movies, photos, the web and email.

There’s something innately attractive about the tactile nature of the iPhone and now the iPad. That, along with incredible industrial design and user interface. WSJ technology guru, Walt Mossberg, points out:

It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.

No question, media consumption will continue to evolve. And people who make media content, including advertisers, had better pay attention.

Just a heads up.

UPDATE Monday 4/5: Adweek ponders the iPad this morning. As does AdAge. Both good reads.

A small crew of Red Square kids hit San Francisco this week, and among other business, we had the good fortune to attend and participate in the 4A’s Transformation 2010 Conference. No question communications is experiencing a renaissance, as Arianna Huffington stated on the first day of the conference, “we are living in the golden age of engagement.”

Nick Brien, soon to be head of McCann Worldgroup, gave a great presentation that I feel sums up where we stand as an industry. Bottom line: it’s still about the big marketing idea, but we’re going to have to become more adept at executing concepts across multiple emerging platforms.

I’ll share more thoughts and take-aways from our meetings soon. Oddly, no one from Rice-a-Roni spoke at the conference.

Our COO, Scott Rye, reads Esquire. That and books about boats and wars and stuff.

So I’m looking forward to seeing the December issue in his office. It’s seems that the magazine has decided to get its augmented reality on. Read more about it here.

Does this signal a new way forward for print? Is it cost prohibitive to produce? What will Scott think?

Tough questions on a Thursday night.

Our friends at New Uniform Design pointed us to this video on social media, and as they say, it’s a “fairly dramatic but powerful message about social media.”

I’ve emailed the video’s creator, Erik Qualman, to find out the source of the statistics.

Establishing an agency viewpoint on social media has only led us back to a core fundamental of great advertising: you are going to be more successful if you utilize media in concert with an idea or concept that engages, entertains, provokes or generally creates an emotional connection.

Most advertising isn’t liked because it doesn’t give the consumer credit for having intelligence. This goes for traditional media and nontraditional media. Being on the radio to simply be on the radio is okay. Being on Twitter to simply be on Twitter is okay too. To be successful, you’ve got to bring an idea to the table.

For Zea Restaurants’ latest campaign, our creative is simple: their take-out is so good, you’ll find any excuse to order. So on Twitter we’ve created a feed that offers humorous, daily excuses not to cook. Rather than reeling off menu items and prices (Zea’s food is a great value), we’ve chosen to entertain and deliver the value message implicitly. And who doesn’t have the daily, mental tug-of-war over cooking or not cooking?

The bottom line is social media is still media. It’s another channel to your consumer, albeit a two-way (or multi-way) conversational channel to your consumer. You don’t like having conversations with boring people or salesmen, do you? Then don’t talk like that in your advertising, traditional or otherwise. Instead, treat your consumers like people. Entertain them, enlighten them, emotionally connect with them, and they’ll become more than your consumers. They’ll become fans.

So the world has gone social media crazy. When Oprah got in on the action last week, Twitter had officially arrived on main street. (For the record, @redsquareagency was here before Oprah.)

With Web 2.0 widely adopted, old media like print, newspaper, outdoor and broadcast are suffering. Some more than others of course. But we feel like the death of “old,” traditional media is greatly exaggerated. The old media that learns to adapt to the nature of new media will thrive.

It’s about conversation and timeliness.

Social media is a conversation. Brands, like people, have the opportunity to interact with their friends (or fans or followers or whatever you want to call them) and engage unlike ever before. The result is awesome brand loyalty. You don’t just eat Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is your buddy. You hang out online with Pizza Hut.

Timeliness cannot be overstated. This is where old media, especially newspapers, are behind the eight ball. The news cycle, buzz cycle, fame cycle is real time now. (In fact, Google searches are even becoming obsolete due to real-time search on Twitter Search.)

In the midst of the “Ashton Kutcher/CNN race to 1 million Twitter followers” pop culture moment last week, Lamar Outdoor Advertising showed all of old media how to play ball. They took part in the conversation. “Follow Ashton Kutcher.” Okay then. That’s how Lamar rolls. Team Kutcher. Beyond joining the discussion, they demonstrated agility and that they could mix it up in real time. Lamar had the board up in nearly 1,200 locations nationwide within hours. We love it.

Here’s our prediction: soon again, new media and old media will just be called “media.” Only smarter and faster.