Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

If the idea of grown adults playing an online virtual farming game (and often shelling out real cash to do so) doesn’t surprise you, then check out FarmVille’s newest neighbor: Lady Gaga. Yup, the Pop Princess of Weird has partnered with online social gaming wizards Zynga to bring you the future of cross marketing. And it hurts so good.

Author, Speaker, and Twist Image President Mitch Joel, the so-called “Rock Star of Digital Marketing”, gave the keynote at Radian6′s Social Media 2011 Conference in Boston, MA. You can watch the full 50 minute Ustream keynote here, but below I have taken some notes from it that I found particularly interesting.

“I believe whats presently happening in business and social media and how people are connecting is fundamentally changing everything we know about business.”

Bryan Eisenberg, Managing Partner at Eisenberg Holding was the second presenter at yesterday’s “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. He held the one of two 45 minute time slots with “The Future Shopper, How Offline is the New Online”. It was a great presentation on how the convergence of communications, logistics, and financial technology continues to evolve to reduce the friction in the customers’ buying process.

As part of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, Pew conducts regular surveys to gather information on who is interacting on the web, how people are accessing it, and what they are doing when they are there. As 2010 draws to a close, we have looked at Generations Online in 2010 – Statistics and Twitter Statistics and Info on Usage in 2010. In this article we will review more data from Pew on people’s activities online.

The fine researchers at Pew Internet and American Life have released their findings on what differently-aged internet users are doing online. “There are still notable differences by generation in online activities, but the dominance of the Millennial generation that we documented in our first “Generations” report in 2009 has slipped in many activities.” This is good news for marketers trying to reach older customers online who are quickly embracing (and even surpassing their younger cohorts) online life.

Facebook is looking to encourage user check-ins through their Places feature by providing brick and mortar stores with a new (and currently free) viral marketing opportunity through “Deals”. Deals allows you to create special deals on Facebook through a claimed Facebook Place – meaning you have to have claimed a Place to begin with. It can be managed through your Fan Page, and there are different types of deals you can create based on your needs. Read on for a visual walk through on how to create a Deal.

A new social marketing tool was launched over the Thanksgiving holiday – just in time for the shopping frenzy that is the Holiday season. And as today is “Cyber Monday”, (or the monday after “Black Friday”) I thought it would be a good time to do a write up to introduce you to the fledgling site and clever tool that is GoPromoIt.com.

Last week, Google launched the Beta version of “In-Page Analytics” – a visual aid that sits on top of your website to give context to the data that regular Google Analytics provides. Google Analytics is a great tool for webmasters to track traffic to their website, what users are doing on the site, and what people are clicking on.

While perusing the Captico Twitter feed this morning, I ran across a tweet about a pocket projector being promoted by our friend @bullseyevideo (actually 3 tweets… but that just means he really wants it, right?). And since pocket projectors are AWESOME, and shwag is usually free (also called: swag, schwag; its the stuff companies hand out at trade shows with their brand name on it) I decided to investigate.

Today I came across the latest third-party attempt to monetize Twitter for advertisers. Innovative Thunder marketers Christian Behrendt and Leif Abraham have set up what appears to be a very consumer friendly way of utilizing your sphere of influence on social networks to snag free stuff. You just have to spam your friends.