Four leading brand marketers joined FOCi Group during the Brand Innovators Panel at digiday:SOCIAL. I had the pleasure of moderating top talent from Dial Corporation, Mattel, POM Wonderful and Publishers Clearing House. Each executive was very candid about their strategies, challenges and successes in utilizing social media within their marketing mix. As part of a series of columns, we'll recap the panel highlights. Today's insight: How Publishers Clearing House used social gaming to build its brand with a younger, hipper audience.

Josh Glantz, VP & GM of PCH Online for Publishers Clearing House explained how 2009 was a year of experimentation for Publishers Clearing House. They launched several social media initiatives, including a variety of social games, as well as two microsites: SayAndWin.com and widget-based ShareAndWin.com. 

Brandon Gutman: How did you build awareness and an audience for your digital initiatives like the casual games tournaments on PCHGames.com?

Josh Glantz: We had a three-prong process for promoting our digital properties:

• Our internal social media team and agency used digital word of mouth to drive attention to our first PCH Games tournament. 
• All consumers who come to our main PCH.com registration path for a sweepstakes entry, were given a chance to opt-into our PCHGames email program. This is especially effective when we run our TV campaigns 2-3 times/year. 
• We aggressively cross-promote across our properties. 

How are you addressing the issue with direct marketer imposters who use your actual creative to deceive the public?

This has been an issue, particularly since casual games are easy to recreate and people are less apt to pay attention to where they're clicking online if they think they're going to win something. So first, we developed our own public advocacy site and have a companion page for it on Facebook. It includes examples of fraudulent mailings that are used by scammers to collect money, personally identifiable data, etc.

We've also written articles that have appeared in consumer-facing publications like Reader's Digest. Lastly, we act aggressively to track and shut down the scammers -- since we're working so hard to build brand equity with a new generation, we can't afford to have scammers tarnish it.

Brandon Gutman is a Founding Partner of FOCi Group, a Digital Brand Management™ consultancy building and optimizing digital practices for the Fortune 500 community.  Follow Brandon on Twitter at http://twitter.com/brandongutman.