We love getting involved in awesome local projects here at BFG. Right now we're helping to promote a poster art show and sale event (and so much more!) called Bandwagon.

If you are interested in cool people, posters, vinyl and/or music and live in Savannah, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Athens, Charleston or other surrounding areas, you definitely should check it out! It's the place to be on the weekend of March 3-4 in Savannah!

For more info on the event, check out the Facebook page. Bandwagon is also on Flickr and Twitter - don't miss out on the latest updates!

Hope to see you there!

If there’s one old adage that applies to social media engagement, it’s that “timing is everything.” Engagement is usually higher at certain times and identifying those times is relative to a slew of variables. When scheduling Tweets, do you often find yourself wondering if you've made it for the best time possible? Perhaps there is an easier way.

Buffer is an app that allows you to schedule posts for your social networks based on times that they have calculated as being your most engaging.

What is Buffer? from Joel Gascoigne on Vimeo.

Loading posts into Buffer is extremely easy, as the app has plug-ins for any browser. Once you've found an article or post that you’d like to share, you can let the app do the scheduling for you and send it to your Buffer feed, or you can choose to manually post it yourself. Regardless of how your posts get sent, Buffer keeps a running tab of analytics for each one. Basic (free) accounts are able to see how many clicks, retweets, and potential reach each post receives, while upgraded accounts get additional stats like @mentions and favorites.

Try it for yourself via their website, iPhone app, or Android app.

While scheduling content is convenient, it's important to remember that no substantial relationship can be built from automation. Content can certainly be enriched by...

Changes and Facebook seem to go hand in hand. In this week's Tech Tuesday segment with WSAV, I addressed the recent Open Graph expansion, which links more automated sharing between Facebook and about 60 applications. It will be interesting to see how users react to all of this frictionless sharing and whether this will take some users too far down the path of full-fledged lifecasting.

Last week, McDonald's initiated a Twitter campaign aimed at encouraging people to share their McDonald's stories on Twitter using the hashtag #McDStories. The campaign featured a promoted tweet linking to a video (see above) of a potato farmer, which was intended to encourage people to share happy tales from the Land of Mickey D's. What could possibly go wrong?

Suffice to say that the campaign backfired horribly, with the #McDStories hashtag being quickly hijacked as a public forum for airing all grievances McDonald's related. Find out more about what went wrong here and here, and check out what McDonald's social media director had to say about the whole debacle.

To many professionals in the advertising industry, free time is hard to find. In between commutes, client meetings, conference calls and constant e-mails... yeah. You get the point.

Cyril Guichard, Creative Strategist at BFG, has been exceptionally busy for the past six months. What has he been up to? Cyril and one other team member, Richard Myles, worked through nights and weekends to create a seriously successful browser-based video game called Outpost:Haven.

Just how successful has the game been so far? Outpost saw over 2.45 million plays in just 18 days. The game is currently sitting at around 100,000 plays per day, with players from all but eight countries spending over 14 minutes per session. Over 64 million aliens have been killed thus far. Impressive.

The Inspiration

Alien movies, retro games like Alien Breed (check out this cool fan re-make) and the more recent game Dead Space inspired Cyril and Richard to create Outpost. In fact, many of the 12 games Cyril has created (see them all on his blog) were inspired by games he played back in the day.

Why choose retro games for inspiration? Outside of the art, simplicity of execution and nostalgia, they came from an era where one person alone could tell a story by creating a game. "Now it takes the budget of a movie to create a modern day, 'mainstream' game. Retro games are nimble, allow for...