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As more businesses realize the value of interactive website
features and social media techniques, DelMonte, makers of Meow Mix cat food, has recently debuted a new interactive website and a game show to promote its new Wholesome Goodness line of cat food.

The website features interactive games called Cat Capades, which allows players to use their “house cat” instincts to overcome household obstacles and challenges.

“We know that cat parents feel a kinship with their cats,
and it’s not uncommon for them to ‘know”
what’s going on their heads—what they think and
feel,” Alison Olsson, account executive for Agency.com,
said in a recent email to DMNews. “We knew this would be
especially fun for cat lovers, because they are familiar with
many of the cat behaviors highlighted in the games.”

Social media strategies are being employed by many companies in
the hopes to reach an increasingly Internet savvy and Internet
based audience. Cereal companies, like General Mills, have
offerings similar to the Meow Mix Site, including an interactive
avatar-based town called Millsbury, which is designed to provide
a place for children to share avatars and items with other
Internet users in their demographics.

Based on trends in Internet usage and social media prevalence
and popularity, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the
websites of the future as increasingly more interactive and
geared toward specific interests and demographics.

September 15, 2008— In the wake of the recent hit-and-run tragedy in Boulder, Colorado, which claimed the life of three-year-old Marten Kudlis comes the highly criticized decision by the Rocky Mountain News to cover the child’s funeral using the popular social media networking site, Twitter.

While Twitter has been used to cover speeches and news stories on an as-they-happen basis, this incident marks the first time that the site has been used by the mainstream media to report a funeral in real time.

“Coffin lowered into the ground,” one post, or “tweet” from the Kudlis funeral reads, followed by “family members shovel dirt onto the grave.”

Critics stress that it isn’t the use of the social media networking site by News reporter Berny Morson  that has them upset, but rather what they feel is extreme insensitivity to the Kudlis family and Boulder community as a whole and that any live coverage of a funeral like this would be just as intrusive.

Neither Mr. Morson nor the Rocky Mountain News were available for comment at press time.