What sets a good branded social media application a part from a great one are these four main components: Reach, Utility, Contextual Relevance and Engagement. Conde Nast’s latest, “Vanity Fair Hollywood” iPhone application is an excellent example of a social media app that was designed with all those components in mind… resulting in an app that is, indeed, inherently “social”.

Conde Nast partnered up with L’Oreal to create this “awards pool” social gaming tool for their Hollywood flagship magazine, Vanity Fair. But more importantly, they used this opportunity to re-purpose their editorial content into an app that’s not only useful, but newsworthy and therefore, relevant.

According to Vanity Fair, “The app allows you to match wits with your friends, tells you all you need to know about every nominee (yes, even Avatar’s sound mixer extraordinaire Christopher Boyes), and, most importantly, lets you fill out your picks and see how you stack up against the competition, envelope-by-envelope. Thanks to exclusive Vanity Fair content, you’ll be spending Hollywood’s big night bragging digitally about how right you were.”

It’s true that it could have very well been pretty much any brand in the beauty/lifestyle vertical that could have sponsored this very application i.e. “Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone app presented by [insert name here]” but, kudos to L’Oreal for stepping up and sponsoring this app – you rolled the dice, and it paid off.

It’s no secret that brands like L’Oreal are interested to play in this social media space as an early adopter. But by L’Oreal using Vanity Fair as a media partner to make the introduction for them, not only do they get to leverage off the magazine’s built-in audience, they also get to build brand credibility.

This is a great example of brilliant media partnership. If L’Oreal (or any brand) created this app on their own, it would not have worked. The media partnership with Vanity Fair was their “in” (-or, “invite”, rather) to this influencer group.

The utilitarian component combined with the user-friendly interface makes this iPhone app a great example of how a brand and media partnership can come together to create a social media tool with a purpose, successfully.

COST: Free

NAME: Vanity Fair Hollywood iPhone app

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

Now that Facebook has relaunched their new Fan Page, it means that artists can now do even more promotion on the platform.

The redesign that occurred last Wednesday (3/11) not only allow artists to create their Fan Pages to resemble Personal Profile Pages, but also the ability to include more info in a user-friendly tabulated format (i.e. one tab for band info, one for Tour dates, one tab for Merch etc) to even a Twitter-like live news-feed so fans can get up-to-date info on all the latest news. 

Facebook urges all brands to change their existing Fan Pages in the next week to give them the opportunity to customize their Fan Pages before it gets automatically changed over to the new redesigned format. But don’t fret if you don’t get a chance to… all your info on your existing Fan Page will not still be available and carry on into the new format. 

Facebook is currently approximately 175 million fans-strong -that’s 75 million more than rival Myspace’s 100 million users.