BuzzFeed Teams with GE, Ad Week 50, Three Stages of Social

The Content Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today:

BuzzFeed and GE Team Up, Take Users Back to the Future

Nostalgia for a time that (really) never existed is here in a big way.

GE’s new campaign on BuzzFeed “The BuzzFeed Time Machine,” lets users pick their favorite decade, providing the news, and pop culture of the era in BuzzFeed-style with a retro GE ad from the same decade.

There’s also an app where users can upload and old and new picture of the same person to compare how they’ve changed over the years. GE is even offering retro interaction on the social front with Instagram where users can share images of their fave old appliances.

Who can resist a refrigerator designed to match a car from the same year? Ad Age asks.

The Ad Week 50

Ad Week counts down the top 50 unsung power players of technology, marketing and media — visionaries who make their companies thrive, but might not be household names.

In Ad Week’s own words: “Here you’ll find buyers and sellers, publishers and editors, programmers and showrunners, account people, recruiters, designers and digirati —even a VP of cookies (Kraft Foods’ Lisa Mann, at No. 12).”

Why PR Alone Shouldn’t Own Social

Mashable outlines the three stages of social integration for companies. In other words, how to take social media from just a marketing tool to a tactic embraced by every part of the corporate culture.

The article breaks the process down into three easy steps: channel development, streamlining, and finally, and then the “most evolved stage of social media adoption,” the move to make social native.

Are Brands Just at the Beginning of Their Journey?

Forrester CMO David Cooperstein wants to “reacquaints the brand with the business strategy.”

He write on Forbes.com that though brand power was lost in the past decade of digital experience, it’s time for a comeback.

Why Hasn’t Your App Taken Off?

It’s a common problem for many developers. You design in app, it’s approved by Apple and then it seems to disappear.

The Washington Post has tips on how to get your app on users’ radar. The first thing: a good marketing plan.

“The marketing plan, including knowing your own competition, has to be built and implemented before you even launch an app,” the Post reports.