The Economist newspaper plans to triple its number of fans on Facebook, and gain an eight-fold increase in followers on Twitter.  All within 6 months!  All with a marketing budget of “tens of thousands of pounds”.

The “core” of this strategy is to make the Economist more “social”.  Facebook will help acquire new readers, and develop “a deeper level of engagement” with existing one.  The Economist already has 180,000 fans on Facebook, and a mere 90,000 followers on Twitter – on which they plan to be “a lot more active”.

Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com, in which the Financial Times owns a 50% stake, stated that “people aren’t accustomed to being charged for conversations”

In the Financial Times of August 28th 2009 there was a page on advertising: “Out of the box.”  The centre piece of this article was about advertising using augmented reality (AR).

Apparently augmented reality is one of the latest technologies for capturing your consumers imagination.  “It’s about creating buzz …”,  says Chris Jenkins of Tribal DDB.

Want to try it?

You’ll need a computer with a webcam, an internet connection, and Adobe Flash 9 or higher.  Print off the following document.  Go to http://www.ft.com/ar, and show the camera the image on the page you printed off – you should see a three dimensional “augmented” image …

OK,  a bit geeky!  But, good fun.