You heard right. Pump Energy Food is twittering that it's giving away free muffins and cookies at its 23rd and Park location. The offer goes from 9 to 3, so you don't have to run out right this minute. Alan Wolk, Creative Strategist, The Toad Stool, pointed to Pump Energy as an example of a "hyperlocal" social media marketing, where small businesses develop strong followings by using Twitter, Facebook or blogs to connect with existing customers and bring in new ones. He also mentioned Naked Pizza in New Orleans, which has gotten a lot of attention for taking the same …

Mitchell told conferencegoers they have to be willing to open themselves up to being made fun of in social media. "Not many people say great things. Snarkiness rules the day." As part of the t-shirt campaing, he pointed out that people were also allowed to make shirts with comments post on the site, like CNN WTF. He suddenly got worried and wondered if he'd created a social marketing Frankenstein. CNN's CMO assured him everything was cool b/c the t-shirt site was driving traffic and generating buzz.

CNN let people create their own t-shirts online customized with more offbeat CNN headlines like "World's Oldest Person Credits Bacon". The idea was to let people celeberate sharing a moment together, according to CNN's Mitchell. Among the most popular t-shirt headlines were tied to Obama's electiong, e.g. "Obama lifts a hand raises a nation". The effort spawned Flickr groups which in turn led to trade media and then the general media including New York magazines and other outlets. "We had a viral hit on our hands," said Mitchell. By allowing people to customize their own t-shirts, they wound up wearing …

Andy Mitchell, CNN's digital marketing guy, revealed that the network had initially tried launch a Facebook Connect integration for the vice presidential debates in the 2008 election, dubbed Debate the Debates, that would let people discuss the debates on Facebook in real-time, but technical hurdles prevented them from launching the initiaitive. It wouldn't be until the Inauguration that CNN was able to make the Facebook Connection work, allowing people to watch CNN and share thoughts and comments on the event via Facebook, which turned out to be a big success for network and generated a slew of publicity. Of course, …

Shawn Gold is following me now, and it's making me a little anxious, because there's not a whole lot for him to see. Gold, who is something of a guru when it comes to social media (he was CMO at MySpace.com before venturing out on his own, soon-to-be-disclosed, social media enterprise), is the latest of the 174 people who've begun following me on my Twitter account. Gold is adding to my guilt. Not because I'm half Jewish, but because with each new follower, I feel compelled to tweet something -- but I don't. I don't for a lot of …

Rhapsodizing on the need to look beyond the "last click" for conversion attribution, Microsoft director of advertising tools and technology Harrison Magun stressed the importance of understanding time-to-convert across different industry sectors online. How far back should you look? It depends on the category. Looking at Atlas data, he points out that for a photo, real estate or music site the avg. time to convert is 25 days; auto sites, 7 days; telecom or finance or shopping sites, 2 weeks. "So, if you're setting a two-week cookie window and I'm a photo site, there wont be anything to attribute," he …

What a surprise. Asked by moderator Nick Gould about what technologies work online, John Vincent, CEO of Eyewondery, which specializes in powering rich media and video ads, suggested rich media and video. Sure-fire sell-through. If so, how come display CPMs have taken a tumble. Are rich media ads recession-proof?