Volkswagen's Tiny Car Comes With Glove-Box Book About Tiny Roads

The surprise of finding a unique, fun, and relevant book in the glove compartment of your new car is still a delight, even (or especially?) in this digital ebook age.

In a promotional campaign introducing Volkswagen's Up! (@vw_up & @volkswagen_up) small car to the UK, drivers get a special treat when they find The Narrow Roads of Britain, a handsomely illustrated glove-box-size book that highlights 18 of the thinnest thoroughfares in Britain, from urban tunnels to country lanes — perfect for the Up! to slip through. GPS coordinates appear on each page, along with photos by Harry Cory Wright (@Harrycorywright).

Read this in full.

The Inspiration Room (@InspirationRoom) reports on another innovative use of a printed book: "Land Rover Edible Desert Survival Guide." The agency Y&R Dubai (@yrdubai) created a book with helpful advice in the event of an emergency in the desert and used it to promote Land Rover (@LandRover) to existing owners, gave it away as a supplement to the car's manual, and made it available in sports shops.

It was made out of edible ink and paper, and it had a nutritional value close to that of a cheeseburger. 

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish your unique content for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

How the World Shops Online

MediaTel’s (@MediaTelGroup) Newsline reports on an extensive new study by payment processor WorldPay (@WorldPay_US), covering 19,000 consumers and 153 senior decision makers from global retailers. The Global Online Shopper Report identifies the online shopping habits of consumers in the UK, US, China, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Canada, Argentina, and India. Here are some highlights:

·         22% of consumers' annual expenses go toward buying goods and services online.

·         Online shopping takes up 5 hours a month.

·         95% of ecommerce purchases are conducted within the home; 54% of global consumers shop in the living room and 43% the bedroom. 5% shop in the garden and 3% in the bathroom

·         For m-commerce, 55% of time is spent using a laptop; 30% using a mobile device

·         74% of global online spending takes place between midday to midnight, with most (44%) done during the evening. Cumulatively, this helps to create an international "spending peak" of 8:40 pm — the time at which most customers are shopping online at a purely global level.

·         For "heavy spenders," (classified as those who spend 30% of disposable income online), 55% have shopped online with a mobile phone and 67% with a tablet in the past 3 months.

·         China has the largest percentage of consumers using smartphones to shop, (nearly 46%) followed by India at 40%

·         Only 9% of US shoppers use instant messaging while shopping compared to the global average of 18%

·         69% of online shoppers used credit cards; PayPal was used by 40%; debit cards by 37%. (The total is higher than 100% since shoppers can use multiple payment methods while shopping online.)

·         Amazon, the world's largest Internet retailer, was the most popular website for buying online. 43% of consumers worldwide had shopped at Amazon in the past 3 months, but in the US that number jumped to 83%. EBay came in at 33% and 45% respectively.

·         The top reason why online shoppers leave a site without paying: "Presented with unexpected costs" (56%)

Read the full report.

Also see the Harris Interactive (@HarrisInt) poll report (commissioned by Placecast (@placecast), “Not Just for Talking: Nearly 40% of US Adult Mobile Phone Owners Say Making Purchases via their Device is Important, as Phone is Seen Increasingly as a Commerce Tool” and the Nielsen (@NielsenWire) study, “How US Smartphone and Tablet Owners Use Their Devices for Shopping.”

Bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

To Keep Customers, Brick-And-Mortar Stores Look To Smartphones

NPR (@npralltech) journalist Steve Henn (@HennsEggs) reports on the mobile shopping revolution and one way store retailers can compete.

When you shop online, marketers are following your every click. But when you walk into a store they know almost nothing about you. That detailed information about in-store shoppers is exactly what retailers want. A company called Nearbuy Systems (@NearbuySystems) is using mobile technology to try to give it to merchants.

"Our challenge was, take what we already have, and most stores have — Wi-Fi and ... video for security and things — and mix those two signals together to create something that is more accurate," says Bryan Wargo, co-founder of Nearbuy Systems.

Retailers could use this technology to build apps to guide customers through their store aisles to specific products, or even deliver discounts and coupons based on where people are standing in any particular store.

Read this in full.

Bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, our (@smrsault) online dashboard designed for publishing and marketing executives.

Matching the Medium with the Message in Word-of-Mouth Marketing

According to the online business journal of the Wharton School, Knowledge@Wharton (@knowledgwharton), the latest research from two Wharton professors suggests that when it comes to creating buzz-worthy advertising campaigns, how people communicate (e.g., whether they talk face to face or over email) is a big factor in determining what they discuss. It's not as simple as blanketing the Web with pop-up ads or blasting the airwaves with commercials, they note. It's about picking the right medium for the right message.

In their paper, How Interest Shapes Word-of-Mouth over Different Channels, marketing professors Jonah Berger and Raghuram Iyengar conclude:

How interesting a product is to discuss matters more when people communicate through discontinuous channels, such as blog posts, texts, emails, and online conversations.

The professors draw a distinction between discontinuous and continuous channels. The latter include face-to-face or phone conversations in which there is an instant response. When people speak in this manner, interesting products or brands are not talked about with any more frequency than less distinctive ones because social convention demands an immediate response. “It’s awkward to have dinner with a friend in silence, or ride in a cab with a colleague without conversing, so rather than waiting to think of the most interesting thing to say, people will talk about whatever is top-of-mind to keep the conversation flowing,” they write. “It's not that people do not have enough interesting things to talk about; rather, they do not have the time to select the most interesting thing.”

By contrast, discontinuous channels allow the participant to take time to craft a good response — or no response at all. It is socially acceptable for a woman to post a link on Facebook about a new pair of shoes that caught her eye, for example, and have no one “like” it. Berger notes, “Imagine if you’re online and someone sends you something. You don’t have to reply. You’re only going to share things when they cross a certain threshold of interesting. The option of not saying anything is fine in a discontinuous conversation.”

“Practitioners often believe that products need to be interesting to be talked about, but our results suggest they are only right for certain word-of-mouth channels,” the authors note in their paper. “If the goal is to get more discussion online ... framing the product in an interesting or surprising way should help. Ads or online content that surprises people, violates expectations or evokes interest in some other manner should be more likely to be shared.”

Read this in full.

Another academic paper, What Makes Online Content Viral? by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, concludes that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone.

Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. These results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured).

Also see our previous blogpost “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you generate word-of-mouth marketing for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Social Media/Word-of-Mouth tab.

Possibilities Abound in Microsoft, Barnes & Noble Deal

Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) editorial director Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid) postulates on what the Microsoft/B&N deal could mean to book publishing:

Imagine a Windows-powered Nook Tablet (@nookBN) that breaks the iOS and Android stranglehold on the mobile device market.

Imagine turning a PowerPoint slide deck into an enhanced ebook and distributing it to a dozen e-booksellers with the press of a button.

Imagine a book discovery engine built into every version of Internet Explorer and connected to one of the world’s leading e-bookstores.

These are the dreams that book industry players were having last night as the news sunk in of a sweeping new partnership between tech giant Microsoft and the second-leading US e-bookseller, Barnes & Noble.

Read this in full.

In “B&N and Microsoft: Why It's Not About Ebooks,” Joe Wikert (@jwikert), general manager, publisher, and chair of the Tools of Change conference (@toc) says, “Success in this venture will not be measured by sales of ebooks. Microsoft should instead use this as an opportunity to create an end-to-end consumer experience that rivals Apple's and has the advertising income potential to make Google jealous.”

Read this in full.

It makes sense that B&N wants to keep improving its Nook Tablet. According to a new BISG (@BISG) study, dedicated e-readers are losing their hold, paving the way for publishers to introduce richer ebook content on multi-function tablet devices.

In another B&N development, Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) reports on GigaOM (@gigaom) that the Nook will soon be used for more than reading ebooks.

On the heels of yesterday’s news that Microsoft is investing $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college businesses, B&N CEO William Lynch says that the company plans to embed NFC (near field communication) chips into Nooks. Users could take their Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and wave it near a print book to get info on it or buy it.

That could help someone gain quick information on their Nook about a book, making it easy to go from browsing to buying. Consumers could also choose to just buy a printed book in the store with the additional information gleaned from the Nook. The model would help ensure that showrooming leads to sales through Barnes & Noble, whether users ultimately purchase a print or ebook, instead of sending them online and possibly Amazon.

Read this in full.

In these fast-changing times, contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Christian Book Award Winners for 2012

Recognizing “the absolute highest quality in Christian books based on excellence in content, literary quality, design, and impact,” the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (@ecpa) has announced the winners for the 2012 Christian Book Awards (@CBAwards & @ChristianBkExpo). Presented annually since 1978, the Christian Book Awards honor titles in 7 categories: Bibles, Bible Reference, Non-Fiction, Fiction, Children, Inspiration, and New Author.

Five finalists are selected in each category following a stringent judging process by judging panels specially selected for each category. The top scoring book in each category is named the Christian Book Award winner. The Christian Book of the Year is chosen among the finalists to represent Christian publishing's highest quality and greatest impact for 2012.

The Christian Book Award winners and Christian Book of the Year were announced at the ECPA Awards Banquet in Chicago, IL, April 30th.

ECPA also announced the winners of the Jordon Lifetime Achievement Award: Gary & Carol Johnson and John R. W. Stott.

The 2012 Christian Book of the Year
Nearing Home by Billy Graham (@BGEA) (Thomas Nelson (@ThomasNelson))

Bibles
ESV Student Study Bible (Crossway (@CrosswayBooks))

Bible Reference
Dictionary of Christian Spirituality by Glen G. Scorgie (Zondervan (@Zondervan))

Children
The Story for Children, A Storybook Bible by Max Lucado (@MaxLucado), Randy Frazee (@RandyFrazee), and Karen Davis Hill (Zonderkidz (@Zonderkidz))

Fiction
The Queen by Steven James (@sjamesauthor) (Revell (@RevellBooks) / Baker Publishing Group (@ReadBakerBooks))

New Author
Love Amid the Ashes by Mesu Andrews (@MesuAndrews) (Revell (@RevellBooks) / Baker Publishing Group (@ReadBakerBooks))

Non-Fiction
Close Enough to Hear God Breathe by Greg Paul (Thomas Nelson (@ThomasNelson))

Inspiration
The Law of Happiness by Dr. Henry Cloud (@DrHenryCloud) (Howard Books (@Howard_Books))

Also see our previous blogposts, “ECPA Announces 2012 Christian Book Award Finalists” and “2012 Christian Small Publisher Book of the Year Award Winners Announced.”

And be sure to bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, the online dashboard for publishing and marketing professionals.

2012 American Media Mom

Mothers are spending a surprising amount of their daily time with media and they’re among the earliest adopters of new technology platforms, according to Nielsen’s (@NielsenWire) and BabyCenter’s (@BabyCenter) new study.

·         The research shows an increased rate of smartphone adoption with 65% of moms navigating their busy lives on the mobile Web.

·         Mothers are 38% more likely to own an Internet TV device and 28% more likely to own a tablet.

·         1 in 4 moms talk on the phone while watching TV or are online; and they like to shuffle through social media sites while watching online video.

While the figures are new, these trends have been building for years now. Previous Nielsen studies had shown that nearly 1 in 3 bloggers are moms, with women making up the majority of bloggers in 2011. Yet, just because moms are voracious digital consumers doesn’t mean they’re easy targets for brands and advertisers. According to the BabyCenter press release, “Three in four moms say that they skip all of the ads they can while watching television content — a rate that is 20% higher than the general online population.”

For brands it would appear that mobile is the way to a busy mom’s heart as usage of mobile for product/brand recommendations has almost doubled in 2011 to 33%. With moms relying on smartphones more than ever before, brands may want to think about upping their mobile targeting ad campaigns to reach moms directly at the point of purchase.

Moms are 50% more likely to watch video online compared to the general population.

Read this in full.

Read the news release in full.

Also see our previous blogposts, “2 Out of 3 Moms Now Use Smartphones While Shopping” and “Motherhood Sends Moms to Smartphones.”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you plan your strategy to communicate your brand’s message in the most effective way.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.