News Update – Best of the Day

The new report Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia shows that 95% of companies have tried Social Media and 40% didn’t really get it. The main findings on tactical use can be taked in this picture…: Facebook. Twitter an Youtube rule.

Marketers and PR people often ask what are the mian pitfalls in B2B blogging. Jeremy Victor has put together a 10-point list which I do fully support…

In the morning I was talking of the revival of the print ad if used with social or mobile elements. AXA insurance just brought it to life the idea with the ned of an iPhone.

Nielsen study: iPad users open for ads

When the the iPad certainly was introduced by Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs it was said to be “a truly magical and revolutionary product.” This week I have bought an iPad myself and have tried to understand what the tablet is capable as a mobile business device. I cannot really say it failed. And a new study by Nielsen asking 5.000 mobile users shows us how the iPad is delivering businesses from the perspective of a new ad platform.

The Nielsen findings from their new “Connected Devices Playbook” suggest that the iPad owners are more open and responsive to advertising than mobile users of other devices – even those of the iPhone. The study shows that iPad users are more likely to buy products after being introduced to ads. And 60% of the respondents of users across the iPad, iPhone and all other connected devices responded they were “OK with advertising if it means I can access content for free.”

The magic formula for making ads for iPad users effective are interactive features: 45% of iPad owners said they were more likely to click on ads that included multimedia than 26% of iPhone subscribers and 27% of other connected device owners. Isn’t this perfect news for the launch of Apple’s iAd platform?

What makes marketers even more happy is that iPad users indicate that they buy a product via their mobile device because of an ad. 24% of iPad users made an in-store purchase compared to 10% of those who use other devices. It seems that the iPad and other mobile devices might offer a helping hand as a revenue driver to all retailers or shop-owners. Nevertheless, we might ask the question whether this is as of the new product and the hype around it, or if this will last in the future. The final question could be how Apple will change their single app sales strategy to make the use of the iPad more cost-friendly for users.

So, who is the typical iPad user? The Nielsen study says they tend to be younger and more male than users of other devices like users of the Acer Aspire One, the Kindle, the iPhone, iPod touch or the Sony PlayStation Portable. 65% of iPad users were male and under the age of 35.

Spot On!
Sometimes it is funny when you read these studies and remember your own shopping experience. Some weeks ago, when the iPad was not even available I remember a 45 year old posh women rushing into the Apple shop. She did not even realize that the sales guy next to me was explaining the benefits of an iPad to me. She just asked when the iPad will be available, got her answer and rushed out with the same urgency she came in. The sales guy was shaking his head that day, saying some of our clients are weird. When you think about how eager she was to buy the product, I can understand that advertising is still effective… not only on an iPad.

News Update – Best of the Day

What are good case studies for viral productions? A question, I get asked quite frequently. Please find the link to a selection by AdAge which I would also recommend.

The recruiting business will have changed in 2020. Job Boards have to improve their services and social media could be one solution for it. HR managers should be looking at this list of 10 excellent innovations.

Managers think about how to use LinkedIn effectively. This video gives some advice by Mark Perl and Louis Gray on how to leverage social marketing and networking with LinkedIn.

Social Media study on digital natives released by Volkswagen and MTV

The new international study “MePublic – A Global Study on Social Media Youth” by Volkswagen and MTV Networks presents some interesting insight into media use and value ethics in the group of 14-to 29-year-olds (digital natives). No surprise that they will respond to one of the findings: Young people want to see networking apps extend to the car… and Volkswagen already works on that app.

“With just under 500,000 fans on Facebook and over ten million visitors on YouTube since the company profile was set up at the end of 2008, Volkswagen already has one of the largest fan communities in the automotive industry. And together with our fans we are breaking new ground in the social web – as confirmed by the recent “App my Ride” competition where we gave prizes to the best developments for applications in car infotainment systems.” Luca de Meo, Group Marketing Head, Volkswagen AG.

The findings show the intensive use of new media and their commitment to brands by digital natives…
- 58% spend time on social networks on a daily basis
- 50% follow product recommendations in social networks
- 43% post their favorite brands on the social web

And the digital natives are well equipped to have best possible access to the new media.
- 94% have a mobile phone
- 92% have a TV set
- 75% an MP3 player

Obviously, there a country-specific differences as the “MePublic” the study lays open. In Japan 40% of the young people primarily use mobile access to their social network which already can be compared with some outlook on the mobile future. 57% of US digital natives use online sources prior to buying a car. In Japan it is only 38% as the young people tend to seek advice direct from the dealer.

The study “MePublic” states six user types based on criteria such as frequency of use, motivation and goal. Amongst those the characters for a “pro-social” world are i.e…
- Mediacs: most active and demanding, technically literate, strongly committed, always looking for something new
- Crewsers: social networks = place to meet up with friends
- Funatics: spectators = like to observe, but are not very active themselves

Spot On!
Generally speaking, the study shows that social networks have been added to digital natives perception of mobility. They want to be available when the are driving. When 60% of the 14-to 29-year-olds are convinced that the significance of mobile social networks will increase over the coming years, it speaks a clear language. If you fear the digital natives are “tweeting and driving”, Volkswagen takes the fear of you: “The driver’s safety remains the top priority.” This nice PR message comes along with the ambitious word about their next iPhone app called “Dieter App”. “The planned application assumes the role of the co-pilot and loyal companion and is in line with the wish for a personalized vehicle expressed by the young people”.

Is this a new approach to humanize a brand perception? Installation of apps that appear like human charaters? What do you think about the study findings?

B2B study: Content tactics marketers are using

Content in the B2B space continues to be… king. Especially since Social Media conquers the interest of users and consumers, companies have to establish a good content strategy in order to attract the interest of their audience properly.

Junta42 and MarketingProfs, supported by American Business Media and the Business Marketing Association, made a research with over 1,100 North American B2B marketers from different industries and company sizes to understand their thoughts and trends on content topics. The study “B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” is probably the most representative survey about content marketing in the business-to-business (B2B) space for now.

Most companies know the importance of content marketing and make use of it as much as possible. Nine out of 10 organizations market with content. These marketers are using eight content tactics on average. The most popular tactics are social media (excluding blogs) (79%), articles (78%), in-person events (62%) and eNewsletters (61%).

The budgets for content marketing rise. The responding B2B marketers allocate almost 26% of their overall marketing budgets to content marketing initiatives and programs. A good portion, 51% of B2B marketers, plan to increase their spending in content marketing over the next 12 months.

Still, there is no real understanding of how to measure the effectivness of the different tactics. The “confidence gap” is quite large.

Of the 79% of B2B marketers who challenge social media, just 31% of marketers think they use this tactics effectively.

The full study can be downloaded here.

Spot On!
It could be interesting to know who you think produces the most relevant content for the B2B space. Is it the publishers, bloggers, or already the companies themselves with their PR departments? And who will it be in the future? Looking forward to your statements…

News Update – Best of the Day

Every marketer is looking for the key to Facebook success. A study by Vitrue, a social media marketing agency, reveales a secret… which is not a secret in my eyes anymore. As we know it from the email marketing era: Couponing and savings are driving engagement. Images and photos outperformed video and text by 22% and 54% in terms of engagement. Text received 63% more engagement than video when it came to Vitrue’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. On quick serve restaurant (QSR) brands images got 136% more engagement than video and 182% more than text.

How are books looking like in the future? This is defintely a neat idea on how the future of massive text work could be looking like…

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Social Media is about fans. Football as well. Just look at the power of fans in the stadium. Not virtual! Real! In paper and print!

The idea of the non-privacy generation

The talk around Google Street View seems to be never ending by the elder generations. Parents get upset that Big Brother visions have become reality, grand parents see geo-data services as a threat well known from the times when war was a child of their past. When people think about the potential of the latest social web technology opportunities they fear that foreigners or even neighbour’s interest might make those spy out their privacy. 

Not so the younger generation it seems. It handles data exchange cooler, or more naive? Privacy data protection worries the younger generation less. Although they won’t leave or share their passwords online which a survey showed this year. Do they really understand that Google Street View is just taking photos of a street that is not interactive, or cannot be zoomed in like the Google Maps version?  

Young people love to log in on Facebook Places. By updating their status they make available the place they have stayed to all of their friends. They do social badging on mayorships via Foursquare. Or they use location-based marketing bargains offrered through services like Groupon. Privacy topics are not interesting to them – although there are reasons for cyber-bulling threats out there.

On a flight last week I had a very interesting discussion with some teacher from a university. The woman I was talking provided the following thesis… 

“There is a new generation on the rise. This young generation can be called the non-privacy generation. It does is not afraid of having somebody chasing them in the virtual or offline world. Or obeying them whereever they go. Or finding out secrets about their privacy. They just enjoy the opportunities that the social web has to offer. Networking and exchanging data. Sharing ratings and reviews on purchases or events. Exploring the future…”

Well, obviously there is some value and a lot of truth in this statement. In our conversation we came across other platforms. She asked why nobody has ever talked about Bing Maps. A platform that takes advantage of pictures by Blom. A company you have probably not even heard of yet, right? They offer pictures of a cross-view of buildings, making backside views of gardens available to everyone. Connected with phone book data, it becomes a great privacy data source – not only for marketers.

The non-privacy generation even uses platforms like Openstreetmap, and thus competes with the Google Street View model. They take pictures with their GPS-enabled iPhones or smartphones and share them on the platform.  Other platforms could be mentioned like Gigapan, a panorama photography – patchwork of tiny pictures put together giving most exact insights in areas. Or even Apple mobiles could be mentioned that in a 12-hour-period tell the head-quarter the position of Wifi hot spots and mobile masts. And Vodafone above all shares their users’ activity data with TOMTOM to improve traffic forecasts as they say.

Is the non-privacy generation not aware of what they are doing to their future? Are we heading away from an age of Big Brother visions? Of old-fashioned fears where people have been chased by the “unknown but realistic” bad, or anything similar to it?

Looking forward what you think about this view on the non-privacy generation…

News Update – Best of the Day

There are days, when you get to know so many cool, funny and interesting videos that you just want to share them asap with the world. Have a look…

Product Testing is a challenge (for a company and the testers). If you make a viral of it, the brand and the message will be spread in seconds. Well done Sony Ericsson…

Male Version

Female Version

Branding in the Sky? Possible! Look at the latest project of the ice-hockey team of theHamburg Freezers.

dmexco 2010 – Flashback in Tweets & Quotes

The main message of the dmexco 2010 can be concluded as follows…

Marketers have to face the fast dynamics of a changing advertising industry. The new topics they will be tackling in the future are predictive behavioral targeting, multiscreen targeting, augmented reality as well as mobile device advertising and … of course Social Media.

Facing the social web challenge, this means marketers have to look for conversation with their clients, whilst still being authentic, honest, human, friendly, open, conversational, responsive. Business relevant topics are not meant to cross their minds such as contact management and generation, quantitative ROI measurement or sales-driven aspects – and I am not even talking of lead nurturing. At least from a social media user-perspective…

Respect to all marketeers who can make this challenge happen in the future!

My flashback…?
Doing the co-moderation of the conference program was a very exhiting and interesting job. It gave me the opportunity to talk to great marketers (Sidney Mock, Spil Games and Manish Mehta, Dell Inc.), real thought-leaders of the Internet industry (Russell Buckley, AdMob Inc. and Tom Bedecarrè, AKQA) and just fabulous web personalities (Harry Huj, Pepsico Investment and Dean Donaldson, Mediamind).

As there was not much time to look around the halls and the booths, I would like to summarize the event with the 10 tweets and quotes that represent the value, the mood and the atmosphere of dmexco from my perspective.

Future
1. dmexco 2010: The vision of the leaders http://bit.ly/bRyrlQ via @MkDirecto

Augmented Reality
2. Never heard of “augmented reality”? Check out the Museum of London case study http://bit.ly/aucZ4Y via Kaizenadv

iPad
3. Study #iPad Effects: “80 per cent use the iPad predominantly at home” #dmexco #research (translated) via tomorrowfocus

Gaming
4. Sidney Mock, Spil Games, counts 650 million online gamers worldwide via dmexco (More gamers than Facebook users…).

China
5. Harry Hui (Pepsico): “Los consumidores chinos se mueven a otro ritmo”. http://bit.ly/czFA8x via lpittol85

Social Media
6. Great interview with @ManishatDell (my boss) about the value of social media for #dell from the dmexco conf. http://bit.ly/9pjxaF via DennisMSmith

Facebook
7. Joanna Shields: “Marketing develops from a one night stand towards constant connection and ongoing conversations.” #dmexco #Facebook via dmexco

Mobility
8. Dean Donaldson shows the relativity of the mobile progress, reading out a SMS he received during the Mobile Debate. It tells him how expensive roaming is and explains how ISPs limit mobile opportunities like in the AOL age some years ago.

Future Media
9. The future of the media is mobile. Shame *none* of the world’s design/PR agencies have realised: http://cot.ag/dolCIO via Adam Westbrook

Summary
10. Tom Bedecarré, #AKQA, is excited about #dmexco: “What a high energy event with so many people!” via dmexco

Spot On!
After sharing my view, I would appreciate to get your ideas and thoughts. What did you think of dmexco 2010? How did you like the conference program or the debate hall concept? What was positive and negative? Did any of you use the blogger lounge? If so, what did you like or miss? Looking forward to your feedback…

PS: Next dmexco?: Cologne, September, 21. and 22, 2011 !

Foto Credits: Horizont

Social Media: Internal, external or who to use?

Internal or external resources, agencies, consultants or publishers? Many companies still give the responsibility for social media to the hands of the existing marketing and communications teams. A new study by the public relations agency MS&L and PR Week shows that companies leave it to these teams to handle the activities. Only 5% said they outcource the social media planning and execution to external agency partners.

It is still interesting to see which companies are addressed to get the responsible for their social media activities…
- 21% direct marketing agencies
- 20% ad agencies
- 17% digital agencies
- 16% PR agencies
- 12% media buying and planning agencies

In the online survey with 262 marketers taking part, 47% of those with social media programs handle social media activities using in-house resources. Some companies are hiring their expertise: 13% stated additional staff was recruited to handle the conversations.

Most companies understand the impact for business. The reason why companies make it a business critical topic becomes clear when 79% agree social media management and reacting in real-time to customer needs is a competitive advantage. 26% encourage their employees to share social media input for the company’s benefit. The effect on R&D is in between the lines of the result that 33% of companies have changed their products or marketing efforts based on feedback they’ve gathered from social media.

Interestingly enough Social Media education comes from…? Kids (26%)! – Coming in as third important source after internal discussions (46%) and vendor sponsored conferenes and webinars (33%), says the report. This result actually comes at the same time as a study by Nielsen Norman Group that comes to a similar conclusion. Kids are not even 10 years old to tell us more about the Internet than we might know but still get confused by advertising if it is directed towards them.

Spot On!
Social Web experts argue the aspect of a cultural shift – handling social media is a challenge for the whole company and all departments – be it HR, R&D, Sales, PR, Marketing or Customer Service. If we look at who is responsible when the social media business is outsourced, it becomes obvious that traditional agencies are the leading edge of the social media activities. Sometimes, I am asking myself, if companies like business consultants (whole company approach), strategy consultants (business model apporach) or even publishers (experts in audience building) could not be a better partner for making social media strategy work.

Curious to listen what your ideas about that might be…

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