Number of Fortune 500 Firms That Blog Nearly Doubled in Four Years

Posted by: Neil James // September 24th, 2012

Is it safe to retire the myth that blogging is the domain of basement-squatting KIPPERS? It might just be. According to new research from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 28 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate facing blogs. That figure is up from 16 percent in 2008. Dartmouth’s research reported that telecommunications, commercial banking, utilities and specialty retailing outpaced all other industries with respect to blog adoption, while forest and paper products, trucking and waste management lagged behind. Dartmouth also reported that three-quarters of Fortune 500 firms have corporate Twitter accounts and two-thirds are on Facebook.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Twitter Brings “Banner Image” to Profile Pages, Makes Upgrades to Mobile Apps

Posted by: Matthew Bick // September 19th, 2012

Similar to Facebook’s upgrade to Timeline several months ago, Twitter has now brought a “banner image” feature to all profile pages.  For brands and regular users, this puts a greater emphasis on truly integrating aesthetics and design in general into social media.  The new creative real estate that Twitter has provided, just like Facebook before it, appears indicative of a general trend in social media; to make social spaces easy for individuals to customize, allowing them to visually define themselves or their social persona.

Before Timeline, the vast majority of social media was very difficult to truly aesthetically customize — profile pictures could be changed, personal information could be edited, but appearance in general was either not changeable at all, or the changeable area was on the periphery of a profile page.  In 2012, Facebook and Twitter have both taken strides to change that, making design an even more integral part of the social media experience.

Twitter also completely redesigned its entire app suite, with new versions becoming available for all major mobile operating systems.  The new app looks significantly different than its predecessor, but it does appear to shift the mobile interface much closer to the main online user interface.  In the previous version, links or images embedded in Tweets would slide open on the right side of the app.  In the new app,  Tweets are expanded with one tap, and the links/images/videos open in their own full-screen window, very similar to the way Facebook’s app now opens the same content.  Visually, the app now features a much smaller option bar on the left side of the screen, with navigation having the same options as the Twitter web interface (home, connect, discover, and “me”).

Mashable and others have guides on the new space’s specifications.  Some key information includes:

  1. Maximum image size is 1252 x 626 pixels, although the platform does drastically shrink that size for profile display
  2. The banner image loads behind a user’s profile picture
  3. The white profile information text does not appear to allow color changes to mesh with the new banner image

@MatthewBick

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92 Percent of Consumers Trust Peer Recommendations – 47 Percent Trust TV

Posted by: Neil James // September 17th, 2012

It’s politics season, which means for the next few months, most marketing will be an exercise in contortion rather than clarity. It’s no surprise therefore, that  the amount of trust consumers place in varying means of persuasion swing wildly from one to the next. A new survey by Nielsen on trust in advertising finds that peer recommendations (trusted by 92 percent) and consumer opinions posted online (trusted by 70 percent) rank as most reliable among global consumers. Interestingly, television rates as the most trusted of paid media sources (trusted by 47 percent), followed by magazine ads and outdoor advertising. What’s considered the least trustworthy? Banner ads, both conventional and mobile, are only trusted by 33 percent, while text ads on mobile phones are trusted by fewer than three in 10.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Only One Third of Senior Marketers See Social Media as “Not Integral”

Posted by: Neil James // September 10th, 2012

Senior marketers don’t get to where they’re at by ignoring a changing world. Even those skeptical of social media see that Facebook has nearly a billion active monthly users and figure there’s probably a place for Mr. Zuckerberg’s website in their marketing plan.

Perhaps that’s why, according to a new report from Econsultancy, 73 percent of senior marketers in companies with annual revenues under $150 million (and 66 percent whose company’s revenues exceed $150 mil) view social media as integral to their marketing strategies. Why is social media such a critical component? Econsultancy found that 64 percent of senior marketers believed one of social media’s top roles was as a branding and awareness channel. Sixty-nine percent of marketers reported that social media has a measurable impact on web analytics and PR efforts as well.

@NeilAndrewJames

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Do You Have To Be Under 25 To Be a Social Media Community Manager?

Posted by: Neil James // September 6th, 2012

Like all other members of the human race, I have not yet managed to obtain immortality and escape the curse of aging. But despite my youthful vows that I would never lose touch with the bleeding edge of culture like my parents’ generation did, my grasp of it somehow slipped away. I constantly find myself returning to Acronym Finder to decipher a seemingly random arrangement of letters sent to me by a junior staffer. Websites that end in anything other than dot-com, dot-net or dot-org are viewed with skepticism and mistrust. And this One Direction outfit passes as legitimate music? Please.

I’m not the only one out there conscious of their cultural mortality. One of the consequences of the perceived disconnect between how my generation sees the world compared to millennials has been the rise of the notion that anybody over 35 is fighting a biologically uphill battle if they have aspirations (or the charged responsibility) of managing a corporate social media presence. After all, today’s youth have never known a world where technology and communication were unbundled – they are truly the only sherpas capable of navigating the ever shifting terrain of digital communications.

That you can’t possibly function as a social media manager without the blessings of youth is a myth in need of serious debunking according to a new article by Dan Wilkerson for Marketing Pilgrim, How Old Should Your Social Media Manager Be? Wilkerson astutely notes that generational familiarity with technology is far less important than the demonstrated ability to manage customer service workflow and appropriately defuse crisis situations.

Wilkerson is careful to point out that while you don’t need to be young to be a community manager, the wisdom of ages is not an accurate predictor of whether an individual will flame out. Although the examples of interns who have publicly embarrassed their employers on Facebook and Twitter are well documented, the stewards of the highly visible N-Control and Kenneth Cole social media missteps were committed by more seasoned, polished marketers.

@NeilAndrewJames

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How Much Do Your TV Spots Influence Search Activity?

Posted by: Neil James // September 4th, 2012

Few marketing activities are celebrated and scrutinized more than the TV spot, and rightly so due to their high cost. But a criminally overlooked component of a television campaign’s performance is its impact on search engine traffic. Do more people search for your brand as a result of seeing your commercial? Do they do it right away, or is their latency to any spikes in activity?

A new study by Sterling Brands and Ipsos studied this very topic and found something very interesting, yet intuitive at the same time – the rise in smartphone adoption is bridging the gap between Google and the 30 second spot. According to the study, more than one in five smartphone searches were prompted as a result of television. Seventeen percent of searches were attributable to a specific commercial!

@NeilAndrewJames

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eMarketer Finds Search Marketing Critical, Undervalued in Brand Campaigns

Posted by: Matthew Bick // August 22nd, 2012

Sure, the words “search marketing” don’t necessarily conjure up the enticing Mad Men-esque images many associate with big branding campaigns, but as eMarketer found recently, search is both critical to campaign success and vastly undervalued.

Citing a study by Weber Shandwick from November 2011, eMarketer shows that an enormous percentage of the market is influenced by information living on the internet – 83% indicating they are influenced by online reviews and 81% reporting that online search results themselves influence them.  eMarketer also mentions a study from Outbrain as it writes, “to get consumers to see branded content, search is key. Once companies invest in content marketing, nearly 78% of brand and agency marketers used paid search and almost 69% used organic search optimization to increase the target audience’s awareness of branded content, according to a January 2012 study.”

eMarketer sums up search’s value succinctly: “Brands need search—and not just paid ads and higher organic rankings—to help them achieve their overall marketing goals, and they need to connect all their search activities to their overall branding campaigns.”

@MatthewBick

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Neurology Key to Social Media Success

Posted by: Matthew Bick // August 20th, 2012

Neuroscience is, for the most part, a relatively new exploration for advertisers.  However, Caroline Winnett of Digiday recently posted an article describing how neuroscience can help in the race to make social media efforts more successful.

Winnett’s article discusses how the brain takes subconscious “cues” and cites The Red Cross as one of the best Facebook pages in terms of its apparent neurological potency.  According to her article, “While Facebook has a proscribed format, page owners can limit the number of images and text on the initial page to make it less taxing on cognitive resources. The Red Cross achieves this through an uncluttered design. It uses an emotionally ambiguous face for its main photo, which makes users compelled to decipher the intent behind the expression, appealing to the survival nature of our brains. “

As the advertising industry realized quickly after investing in social media, a short and easily-digestible message is key in this medium.  Winnett confirms this as well: “In neuroscience, the term is “processing fluency,” meaning the ease with which our minds can receive and process stimuli. Complex commercial messages in a social media setting can serve to turn the brain off, because the mind perceives the amount of effort expended may not be worth any potential reward received.”

As science’s understanding of the human brain continues to increase, so too will the potential to use this new knowledge to find better ways to reach out to potential consumers.  Exciting times, indeed!

@MatthewBick

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Combating Retail “Showrooming”

Posted by: Matthew Bick // August 15th, 2012

The internet and mobile communications have done wonders for commerce and for many individual industries, but the retail sector is growing increasingly frustrated by a trend known as “showrooming.”  Shoppers will go to traditional, physical store locations to look at and test products, then either buy them online or seek out the cheapest retail outlet nearby to make their final purchase.  It’s a phenomenon that has been having major impacts for big-box technology retailers, most recently Best Buy.

However, recent research covered by eMarketer indicates that there might be hope for retailers stuck in this cycle.  eMarketer cites Cisco research from late 2011 and Deloitte research from March 2012 indicating that shoppers who begin their purchase process by via mobile research are actually 14% more likely to make an in-store purchase.  Deloitte’s research in particular indicated that 72% of shoppers who used a smartphone while in-store on their last store visit actually completed their purchase process while at the brick and mortar store.

Deloitte’s research also indicated that, according to the eMarketer article, “the in-store conversion rate for shoppers who used a retailer’s own app or site was 20% higher than for those who used an app belonging to another business, such as an aggregator like shopkick.”  This would certainly seem to indicate that retailers putting effort into creating streamlined, information-rich, user-friendly apps to act as companions throughout the buying process may help stem the “showrooming” tide that many real-world retailers are experiencing today.

@MatthewBick

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