It’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of Toyota’s third-generation Prius ads. “Harmony,” as it’s dubbed, features over a million people in costumes, who supply the landscape of which the Prius is featured.

It’s simply marketing genius.

As the behind-the-scenes footage shows, Toyota’s goal was to embrace the car, landscape, and a community of people — all in one marketing campaign. Not only does this do it effectively, but it also gives a relaxing look and feel to the commercials, and grabs the audience’s attention, as it’s something that’s unique and really that’s never been done before.

In addition, the campaign is carried out through Toyota’s mini-site for the Prius, and also with Facebook and Twitter pages. Overall, it’s a great (not to mention, effective) media marketing campaign.

Check out one of the ads from the campaign above, and check the behind-the-scenes footage here.

Companies might start a Twitter help account, that can respond to users’ questions and comments. Facebook might serve as a way to distribute coupons or spread further brand awareness. YouTube could take over giving instructions to customers who just bought a new product.

Take a case in point. When I co-started GR Grub at the beginning of August, we had no brand awareness. No one knew who we were, what we were doing, or even that we existed. When we launched our website, we needed to get the word out. Our first attack was through Facebook. We achieved over 100 followers in less than 24 hours. That number is now over 350, and includes people that neither of us know. With Twitter, we took more of a conservative measure, and that number didn’t reach 100 until last week.

Either way, to have that many fans and followers in a short amount of time can be influential to your brand’s awareness. But at the same time, the content needs to speak for itself too.

Since we’ve launched our Twitter and Facebook pages, we have consistently been posting articles from other sources regarding all types of food news. By doing this, we create a larger community, and (hopefully) some of our articles get re-posted as well.

All of it leads to one thing — better brand awareness, and more online success. By taking advantage of social networks, you’re increasing your search engine presence, and essentially drawing more visitors to your website.

The WordPress theme is a heavily coded magazine theme to fit our tastes. It features user polls, several ways to share articles, and will soon feature the ability to rank restaurants on a star system, as well as other collaborative items. In our first 24 hours online, we received over 100 followers on Facebook, and are now well over 300.

In addition to the website, I produced a logo based off of an orange and dark red color scheme that fits well with the rest of the site.

Anyways, I’d love to hear your thoughts regarding this, so go check out the website and let me know what you think! http://www.grgrub.com

Update: Be sure to follow GR Grub on Facebook and Twitter too!

Why? Look at the numbers. Google owns 67% of the global search engine market as it stands today. Combined, Yahoo! and Microsoft make up a mismal 11% of the market. Unless Google drastically changes the way they work for the worse (which I see no signs of), or if Microsoft and Yahoo! both know something that we don’t, Google will remain on top.

Sure, it’s a great marketing strategy to join forces like this. It gives Microsoft a heck of a lot more users for Bing, and gives Yahoo a better search engine than what they currently have. It makes sense for both companies. But in order to catch Google, they’ll need to do a little bit more.

I’m not sure why, but I always have a fascination with the design of wine labels. Every once in a while I’ll see one that just completely draws me in. Fresh off my trip to the amazing 2 Lads Winery in Traverse City, and with the Taste of Grand Rapids starting tonight, I thought this link was especially interesting.

The Coolist covers “30 Creative and Unusual Wine Label Designs” in their blog – http://www.thecoolist.com/amazing-wine-labels-30-creative-and-unique-wine-label-designs/

One of the biggest things I’m looking forward to is the @font-face property. Basically, I can kiss Arial and all those boring fonts goodbye, and use something that looks much nicer and appealing to each individual website. It’ll add more uniqueness, and give me the ability to have fully integrated designs.

Secondly, border image. This will allow me to showcase photos or other images with a secondary border. Squiggly lines, rainbows, you name it. You could kinda do it before, but now it’s better. And it’s all in the code.

Lastly, and maybe this is one of the biggest features out there – transparency. Web designers have used transparent GIFs or (more recently) PNGs for years, and now this will allow us to add transparency without having to look to image editing programs to achieve the effect. It’ll be a huge time-saver, and I’m placing a bet that it’ll be the most used features of CSS 3 in 2010.

So, why aren’t I and other web designers out there using these features right now? After all, the technology certainly is there. One reason really — 46% of Internet users currently aren’t able to access the features. Why? Internet Explorer. There’s ways around that, but they’re much more difficult to implement.

Despite that single drawback, I’m quite excited to see what sites start to pop up with these features enabled. Maybe it’ll even go so far as to push people away from IE once and for all! mbqzjxdf3r

But this announcement got me to thinking how Google would make their operating system different from OS X and Windows. It’s being based on Linux kernels, meaning that it already has 20+ other Linux systems to compete with. What’s going to make things better for the end user, and what is it going to look like visually?

And for the first time, I have a personal website completely coded in CSS and XHTML, and 100% validated by W3C standards. I have been doing this for quite a while now with client sites, and I’m so glad I finally made the switch with my own site.

Anyways, now to this business of what I like to call my “notebook.” Past designs have included a similar idea, but it was never really implemented well. I’m starting completely from scratch with this version, powered by a custom WordPress theme. It’ll serve as a central hub for tips and techniques of all things marketing — whether it be web design and programming or branding. In addition to this, the notebook will serve as my news board, where I’ll make occasional announcements having to do with projects I’ve been working on.

So that’s my new website. Just to give you a little taste of what’s ahead, I’m planning on relaunching the AQ STARS site sometime later this summer (you can see the mockup in my Work section). I’m also working on moving over all my past website projects to valid CSS and XHTML programming. I’ve already done this with a few clients, including the Building Bridges of Hope website.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned. If you have any ideas or suggestions on what you’d like to see this notebook become, feel free to let it be known in the comments.