Dear Friends,

It’s been an absolutely stupendous year for us over at Invoke — an incredible time of growth and change — and we’d like to share just a few of the highlights with you!

In February, our popular invention, HootSuite won a Shorty Award for Best Application at the tender age of three months old. (More than 50,000 public nominations and votes were tweeted to determine the winners.) Then, in May, memelabs, the original contest platform got even better–we unveiled photo contesting. Built on the award-winning platform used by Fortune 500 companies, memelabs photo contests delivered a flawless user experience to clients like Cellular South and ParkLane Homes.

By summer we were thinking about drinking, so it was a perfect time to launch the Sponsor me Spring video contest with Okanagan Spring Brewery. Meanwhile, HootSuite had grown some wings, and in July we released HootSuite 2.0. Major updates coupled with a bang-on upgrade campaign saw HootSuite trend on Twitter for the first time. (Yeah, we said first.)

The heat continued into the fall, when HootSuite was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Groundswell Awards, and then picked up a Canadian New Media Award for Best use of Social Media. Invoke debuted memesuite, an agency toolkit with solutions for audio-visual delivery, contesting and client database management. Memesuite’s arsenal combines memelabs with memeserver, a robust professional video server, and minimeme, a turnkey contest solution with rapid deployment and client-friendly CMS.

In October, Invoke teamed up with Vision Critical to kick off a social marketing campaign — and subsequently saw a 200% increase in site traffic in November. We were also honoured to be the social marketing agency of choice for the Vancouver International Film Festival, which saw a massive increase in ticket sales over last year.

The rains of November arrived just as our moustaches sprouted. Memelabs hosted the official Movember video contest, in support of men’s health research. Around the same time, Old Navy’s One in a Million memelabs campaign inspired communities to give back to their local charities.

HootSuite celebrated its first birthday by morphing from Twitter client into social media dashboard, and rolling out the much anticipated HootSuite iPhone application. The team was thrilled to be honoured as Best Twitter Application in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. As if all this weren’t enough, Invoke announced a new product in development, Vidrollr, an online conversation space — expect more about this hot property in the New Year.

If you’re still with us, thank you for reading. We can’t wait to see what 2010 brings!

The results are in! HootSuite has won Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Award for Best Twitter App. We’re incredibly honoured by the vote of confidence Twitter users have shown us through the OWAs.

This award is a crowning achievement that caps off a whirlwind year for us. HootSuite has also won Shorty and Canadian New Media Awards, and was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Groundswell Awards.

A year after launching, HootSuite has become the most used Twitter web client after Twitter itself. In November, HootSuite also added Facebook and LinkedIn functionality. This month, we’ve released our iPhone app to much fanfare. Through all this, our goal is to be your go-to professional social media dashboard.

Thank you to Mashable for hosting this award, to everybody who voted for us, and to users such as yourselves for inspiring us to make the Best Twitter App!

Last week, one of our babies, HootSuite, won a prestigious Canadian New Media Award for Best Social Media Application — exactly one year and two days after we launched. We were up against some stiff competition: a collaboration between Rip: A Remix Manifesto and Open Source Cinema which allowed users to edit and remix the now famous NFB film, and KWAD9 and their interactive content portal for French Canadian youth.

Two days later, ReadWriteWeb declared HootSuite as one of the Top 10 International Products of 2009. HootSuite received recognition as a “Twitter app [that] does it all.” Prior to this, ReadWriteWeb named HootSuite as one of their Top 10 apps for small business success.

HootSuite is also a finalist in Mashable’s Open Web Awards for the category of Best Twitter App. We are thrilled with the support we have received from the tech world, and we encourage you to continue voting for HootSuite.

Thank you to fans of Invoke and to the HootSuite community for your recognition, your continued feedback, and inspiring our vision to create the best social media dashboard possible.

For nine years, the Canadian New Media Awards have recognized and celebrated the accomplishments of the nation’s digital media movers and shakers. We’re happy to announce that CNMA has selected Invoke Media as a finalist in its Best Use of Social Media category. Invoke Media is being recognized for creating the Twitter client Hootsuite, which has been a runaway social media success since its launch in December 2008.

The honour falls closely on the heels of Invoke Media being selected as a finalist for the prestigious Groundswell Awards, in recognition of the social media campaign we ran for the HootSuite 2.0 launch. Hosted by the internationally recognized technology and market research company, Forrester Research Inc, the Groundswell awards recognize the most outstanding social technology applications with a unique focus on business performance. We were in good company and we salute our fellow finalists, including but not limited to the Bank of America, Adobe, and MasterCard.

A big thank you to Forrester Research and the Canadian New Media Awards for recognizing the strides Invoke Media has taken in social media over the past year.

Invoke is increasingly recognized as one of Canada’s top interactive agencies. In the past few years, we have shifted our focus into becoming a social media agency, both offering social media marketing services and developing some of the world’s best social media applications. Two of our products are currently ranked in the top ten of the PEER1 Canada Startup Index.

No surprise then that one of them, HootSuite, was honoured with the Judge’s Choice trophy at LPV8 in Vancouver last week.

While we’re very proud, there’s no time to rest on our laurels. We’re building two new social media applications, and continue to dream up and deploy effective social media marketing campaigns for an international array of clients. Stay tuned for exciting news soon.