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Archives for 2012

Only 1 out of 4 B2B Companies Track and Follow up on Consumer Social Media Comments

The good news is that B2C companies are catching on to the importance of tracking and following up on consumer conversations about their brands across the social web. The bad news is that not enough of them are doing it yet. The worse news is that the numbers are even lower for B2B companies.

In a recent survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C companies, eMarketer reports that Satmetrix learned 17% of B2C companies don’t track what consumers say about their brands on the social web, nor do they follow up on that feedback. Of B2B companies, 47% do not track or follow up on social media comments about their brands.

Following are some specific statistics from the study:

  • Track and follow up: B2C = 53%; B2B = 27%
  • Track only: B2C = 25%; B2B = 22%
  • Follow up only: B2C = 4%; B2B = 5%
  • None: B2C = 17%; B2B = 47%

Of companies that do track and follow up on social media content and conversations about their brands, nearly 1 out of 2 have dedicated teams in place to monitor and follow up on that feedback.

Overall, companies in the United States are tracking and following up on social media content more frequently than companies in other parts of the world. Just 31% of U.S.-based companies do not track or follow up on social media feedback from consumers. According to the study, U.K.-based companies are least likely to track or follow up on social media feedback with 38% indicating that they do neither.

Specific results by geographic region follow:

  • North America = 31% of companies do not track or follow up on social media
  • Asia = 36% of companies do not track or follow up on social media
  • Latin America = 36% of companies do not track or follow up on social media
  • Europe, Middle East, Africa = 37% do not track or follow up on social media

Given that study after study reports consumers are actively discussing brands online (both positively and negatively) and those conversations influence consumer purchasing decisions, it’s surprising that so many companies aren’t tracking and following up on social media content and conversations. Processes should already be in place, but as the Satmetrix study reveals, those processes aren’t in place yet — particularly not in B2B companies.

Are you surprised by these statistics? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: jainapoory

The Importance of Consumer Emotional Involvement in Brands

apple tattooWho says emotions don’t matter? Not brand managers. When consumers are emotionally involved in a brand, that brand has reached an important point of success. Emotional involvement in a brand leads to brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and brand guardianship that money can’t buy.

Word-of-mouth marketing by consumers who are emotionally connected to a brand is extremely powerful. Don’t believe me? Ask the marketing team at Harley Davidson or Apple. They’ll tell you how important emotional involvement in a brand is.

Of course, emotional involvement in a brand doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a brand that commits to the three steps of brand building: consistency, persistence, and restraint. It also requires the development of products or services under the brand umbrella that live up to the brand promise and meet consumers’ expectations for the brand again and again. Consumer emotions evolve over time as they experience a brand over and over. If the brand fails to live up to its promise or doesn’t meet consumer expectations, those consumers will feel let down. They’ll turn away from the brand in search of one that does meet their expectations in every interaction. In other words, they’ll seek out a brand that keeps its promise.

In that regard, consumers’ relationships with brands and emotional connections to brands work very similarly to how people’s relationships and emotional connections with each other work. If a person doesn’t meet your expectations or doesn’t keep his or her promises to you, that relationship will likely be in jeopardy. The same things happen with brands, and consumers are far less likely to give brands a second chance than they are to give other people a second chance.

It’s easier for some brands to foster emotional involvement than it is for others by nature of the types of products offered. For example, some consumers place a high value on having a sense of freedom. A brand like Harley Davidson with its product line of motorcycles lets consumers do exactly that. For other brands, creating an emotional connection requires some creativity. Apple did it by making the audience of “creative” computer users feel like a special group or “family” separate from those who use computers for spreadsheets and other less creative tasks. Developing that sense of belonging enabled Apple customers to become emotionally connected to the brand.

The point is that any brand can create experiences and opportunities for consumers to become emotionally involved in the brand, even if those opportunities are as simple as consistently meeting consumer expectations and living up to the brand promise. Sometimes, trust is all it takes to drive an emotional connection between a brand and consumers. With that in mind, building brand trust should always be a top priority for every brand.

Image: Terry Johnston

Interactive Surfaces and the Corporate Website

If only I’d realised, 100 years ago in a former existence, when I was handed HCI 101 to study (HCI=Human Computer Interface), that it could be so interesting.

I went to the final Brunch Bytes session for this season, to hear John Hardy, from HighWire at Lancaster University, talking about interactive surfaces. Yes: being able to use tables, walls, floors…any handy surface, to interact with computers, rather than the typical screen/mouse/keyboard trio of today. And maybe not just 2D flat surfaces, but the surfaces of 3D things in the future.

I know, a long, long way from the corporate website of today. But here’s the thing…

What if?

One of the central themes of his presentation was about how the tools we use dictate not only process, but also group dynamics, and even the output.

He and his colleague Chris Bull set up an interactive desk for collaborative software development. Using this desk, each could see what the other was working on, and share code, since the project was represented/displayed on the table they were working on. For instance, they could ‘pull’ a piece of code from their colleague by literally reaching out and dragging the visual representation of that code across the table into their own workspace, also demarcated on the table. The other would be peripherally aware of this while continuing to work on their own code elements – and could instantly engage in discussion across the desk if necessary.

Setting up experimental tasks using different styles of working to test this collaborative tool, they found that:

  • visual representation of actions, architecture and project status improved communication between the group
  • people wrote better quality code, faster
  • people changed how they worked in order to use the collaborative features of the tool.

The point is that being able to perceive what others were doing as they were doing it—and understanding how that might affect your own work—made a significant difference to the quality of output.

It doesn’t matter that this project revolved around programming. It would work just as well for high-level design, or for determining information architecture… maybe even content development. Perhaps for any piece of work that involves individuals on a small team, developing modular items that are interdependent and need to fit together as an internally consistent and coherent whole.

Corporate website development, anyone?

The really interesting question is whether the processes and development cycles that such things go through could be enhanced by changing the tools we use. And, of course, whether the output would be better with a different tool. Are we hindered by the 2D mindset imposed by the tools we’ve used to date; or have they been so successful because they are best fit for our mental processing?

The related question of how corporate communication might be changed in a move away from 2D screen-based/paper-based communication templates is even more interesting – and a topic for another day.

2 in 5 Online Adults Recommend Brands They Like or Follow

socialogue ipsosAround the world, adults who spend time online are actively liking, following, talking about, and recommending brands. A study by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange (Ipsos OTX) and Ipsos Global @dvisor puts some numbers to those activities.

According to the June 2012 Socialogue report from Ipsos, nearly two in five online adults worldwide (38%) have recommended a brand that they liked or followed on a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, and so on. In the United States, 35% of online adults have recommended a brand that they liked or followed on a social networking site.

These online recommendations are important to brands. The Ipsos study reports that nearly one in four people (22%) said that they have purchased a brand because a friend recommended or followed that brand online. Of course, consumers in different parts of the world are more likely to follow, like, and recommend brands online than others. Online adults in Latin America are the most likely to recommend a brand they like or follow on a social network. The Ipsos survey found the following percentages of online adults that have already recommended a brand they like or follow on a social network:

  1. Latin America = 53%
  2. Middle East and Africa = 49%
  3. BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) = 46%
  4. Asia-Pacific = 37%
  5. Europe = 32%
  6. North America = 31% (United States = 35% and Canada = 27%)

As you’d expect, not only does geography play a part in how likely people are to like, follow, and recommend brands on social networks but age, gender, and income level have an effect as well. Of the American online adult popultion, Ipsos found the following:

  • Gender: Women are more likely to recommend a brand that they like or follow online than men (41% vs. 29%).
  • Age: The younger online adult audience (35 years old and under) are more likely to make brand recommendations via social networks than the older online audience (both 36-49 year olds and 50-64 year olds). (48% vs. 37% vs. 20%)
  • Income: Online adults with higher incomes are  more likely to recommend brands they like or follow on social networks than people in lower income brackets (high income = 36% vs. medium income = 38% vs. low income = 20%).
  • Marital Status: Married people are more likely than unmarried people to recommend a brand they like or follow on a social network (38% vs. 32%).
  • Occupation: Senior decision-makers are more likely to recommend brands they like or follow on social networks than lower-level employees (44% vs. 34%).

Regardless of the industry a brand operates in or its target audience, there are people online around the world who are willing to like, follow, talk about, and recommend that brand. The key is to create content and conversations that lead to brand relationships and emotional involvement with consumers, which lead to recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing. The proof that people are willing to follow and recommend brands online is in the numbers above.

Image: Ipsos

Brands Take Notice – American Moms Are Active and Influential Online

women-brandsAmerican mothers are very active online, and they’re also very influential. They’re reading, writing, and sharing product reviews and opinions across social networks with family, friends, and strangers. Brands are often part of the online conversations happening between people around the world, but did you know how popular social media really is for American moms? A great infographic from Nielsen puts a lot of the data into perspective. Here are some highlights.

Social Networking for American Moms:

  • 3 out of 4 American moms visited Facebook during March 2012.
  • Moms are 38% more likely to follow a brand or become a fan of a brand online than the average online audience, and moms who blog are twice as likely to do so.
  • Facebook is the top social network for moms (72.5% of U.S. moms who went online visited Facebook during March 2012) vs. 14.1% of U.S. moms who went online and visited Twitter.
  • American moms are 61% more likely to visit Pinterest than the average American.
  • During March 2012, 5 million American moms visited Pinterest, which equates to one-third of the site’s unique visitors from home computers that month.

Blogging for American Moms:

  • 1 in 3 bloggers are moms.
  • Moms visit blogs more frequently than the average online population.
  • 52% of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 in the household.

E-commerce for American Moms:

  • Moms are 59% more likely to buy toys, 35% more likely to buy clothes, and 23% more likely to buy ebooks online than the average online population.

Mobile for American Moms:

  • Half of moms use social media via mobile devices vs. 37% of the online population.
  • 54% of moms own smartphones (of U.S. mobile subscribers).

Here’s what brands need to understand about American moms, and moms around much of the world. They’re spending a great deal of time online and much of that time is spent discussing and analyzing brands and products. Why wouldn’t your brand be a part of those conversations? Why shouldn’t your brand be part of those conversations? It’s hard to come up with valid arguments against spending time where your target audience clearly spends a great deal of time. Don’t you think? Next time an executive tells you that your female target audience isn’t digitally-savvy and social media or online marketing in general shouldn’t be a priority, show him or her this data and ask those two questions. The responses are likely to be very weak.

Image: Hilde Vanstraelen

Creative Brand Cross-Promotion – Toyota iQ and Google Street View

toyota iq google street viewGoogle Street View is a handy tool that lets you explore places around the world through 360-degree street-level imagery. But when Google Street View debuted in Belgium last year, there was a problem. Many streets in Belgium are too small for a car to navigate. Therefore, Google Street View had gaping holes of missing content in Belgium. Google needed to fill those gaps.

Toyota iQ is a tiny car as you can see in the above image. The Happiness Brussels agency saw an opportunity to promote the Toyota iQ while solving Google’s problem at the same time. Toyota iQs were fitted with 360-degree cameras and equipment to record the narrow streets that Google’s cars couldn’t.

A special iQ Street View website launched where consumers were asked to add streets that hadn’t been captured by Google Street View yet, and the Toyota iQ would go out and capture them. People could also view tagged streets on the iQ Street View site and sign up to test drive the Toyota iQ. The site also includes a video that shows the Google Street View and Toyota iQ story. You can watch it below.

But that’s not all. People who live on the narrow streets tagged on the iQ Street View website will be mailed special offers for the Toyota iQ. There is no doubt that the people who live on those streets are a perfectly targeted audience for the iQ.

This is a great example of out-of-the-box creative thinking that brings two strong brands together for a cross-promotional opportunity that benefits both of the participating brands and consumers. What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the Google Street View and Toyota iQ cross-promotion initiative.

Image: Toyota