somersault

According to a report by Warc (@WarcEditors), over 90% of major brand owners are now using social media; and believe social media has yet to yield tangible revenues.

The report is based on research by Booz & Co (@BoozCompany) and Buddy Media (@BuddyMedia) of executives from 100 companies. The study focuses on social capability priorities, key areas for investment, the evolving role of partners, and major issues related to organization, talent, and metrics that companies are confronting through social media.

·         Marketing departments are primarily responsible for social media efforts.

·         94% of firms list Facebook among their top three social priorities, followed by Twitter (77%), YouTube (42%), blogs and branded platforms (25% each), LinkedIn (13%), and location-based tools like Foursquare (8%).

·         94% think adapting and reacting quickly is essential to social media success.

·         93% think having an internal “owner” and “champion” for social media is vital.

·         Advertising and promotions are the main use for sites like Facebook and Twitter (96%), ahead of the 88% using them for PR, 75% for customer service and 56% for market research.

·         40% of companies employ social media for sales purposes; 46% think they deliver purchases and meaningful leads.

·         90% tie social media benefits to brand building, 88% stimulating buzz, 81% securing consumer insights, and 78% to enhanced marketing effectiveness.

·         Only 38% say their CEOs have this issue on his or her personal agenda.

Read the research report.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) guide your brand’s social media strategy. And use the SomersaultNOW dashboard to stay current on news and resources related to social media marketing.

Video production has become a vital and necessary skill for book publishers because of the Web’s culture that elevates video to the top caliber on the attractiveness meter. If publishers are going to appeal to the Millennial generation to read books, video is going to have to be used.

On Publishing Perspectives (@pubperspectives), Steve Stockman (@SteveStockman), the author of How to Shoot a Video That Doesn’t Suck, offers ten basic tips for novices in book world videomaking:

1. Think in shots (create motion, don’t press play and let it run endlessly)

2. Treat Your Video Camera Like a Still Camera

3. Don’t Shoot Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes (close-ups, faces, reactions)

4. Use an External Mic

5. The Rubbermaid Rule (don’t overestimate the length of your video; if you think 10 minutes, 3 minutes is better)

6. Two Words Guaranteed to Take Your Video Viral: Naked Celebrity (if you don’t have that, there’s no guarantee, so make the best video possible for your book’s audience)

7. Take Video Seriously (ie. invest in it, train staff to do it right, or hire the pros…)

8. Treat Your Author Like a Star (avoid bad lighting, poor sound quality and don’t use video that doesn’t make them look like a rock star…)

9. Tell a Story (beginning, middle and end…)

10. The Book Brain and the Video Brain are Different Brains

Read this in full.

Also see, "Surveying the Good and Bad in Book Trailers."

Here’s a video spot that reflects the fun J of our Somersault (@smrsault) brand. Adweek (@Adweek) writes

To introduce its new Twirl Bites candy, Cadbury (@Cadbury_UK) wanted an uplifting and magical TV spot that would bring the joy of twirling to life. Fallon (@wearefallon) had the ambitious idea of creating an immense whirligig made of fans, gears, propellers, and little spinning worlds all interconnecting, rotating joyously, and exploding with pyrotechnics at the end. The creatives considered CGI, but decided it should be built from scratch, and its gleeful movements captured in camera. “When you create something for real, the imperfections are what make it charming,” says art director Rick Gayton. And imperfections they got. The finished spot — the Twirl brand's first TV ad in 15 years — is grand, infectious, and an impressive feat of engineering. But very little went as planned in the production.

Read this in full.

In Business 2 Community (@B2Community), Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess) writes, “In the future, a brand’s success may depend on whether it’s perceived as having a social purpose.”

Customers are no longer satisfied with just lodging complaints or casting opinions. Instead, they’re voting with their social capital and turning away from companies that fail to listen and respond.

In this rapidly changing landscape, marketers are challenged to humanize their brands and seize opportunities to engage customers across a multiplicity of touch-points and social media channels. With the rise of social media, the consumer is able to drive the conversation with or without the brand’s input. Only brands that are authentic and transparent will succeed.

Here are some of the accelerants she lists and explains how they’ll transform brands into the future:

1. Engaging

2. Relevant

3. Accountable

4. Collaborative

5. Voice

6. Creative and innovative

7. Purpose driven

8. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

9. Simplicity

10. Reflective

11. Your Culture is Your Brand

12. Listen

13. Brand Advocates

14. Millennial bonding

15. Crowdsourcing 2.0

16. Mobile

Read this in full.

The latest Nielsen (@NielsenWire) report (pdf) shows that social media’s popularity continues to grow, connecting people with just about everything they watch and buy.

·         60% percent of people who use three or more digital means of research for product purchases learn about a specific brand or retailer from a social networking site.

·         Social networks and blogs took 22.5% of Internet usage time in May 2011, beating online games' 9.8%, email's 7.6%, portals' 4.5%, video and films' 4.4% and search's 4%.

·         US Web users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook during the month, beating out Yahoo's 17.2 billion minutes, Google's 12.5 billion minutes, YouTube's 9.5 billion minutes, eBay's 4.5 billion minutes, and Apple's 4.3 billion minutes.

·         Facebook received 140 million unique visitors in May, with 62% of page views on the site attributable to females; 50 million individuals accessed Blogger; 23.6 million went to Twitter.

·         Blogging provider Wordpress attracted 22.4 million people, trailed by MySpace with 19.3 million, LinkedIn with 17.8 million, and Tumblr, another blog hosting platform, with 11.9 million.

·         53% of "active" social networkers currently follow a brand.

·         Year over year growth of people accessing social networks via mobile rose 62%: 46.5 million people visiting Facebook, 11.5 million for Twitter, 6 million LinkedIn, and 4 million MySpace.

·         In all, 97% of members access social networks on a computer, 37% employ mobile phones, 3% deploy a games console or iPad, and 2% leverage Web-enabled TV sets and ereaders.

·         About 30% of consumers value being able to use social networks on their phone.

·         A further 21% liked scanning barcodes with a handset, 20% cited making payments, 16% prioritized "check-in" services such as Foursquare and 13% enjoyed giving feedback to companies.

·         67% of smartphone owners had downloaded gaming apps, 65% selected equivalent weather-related tools, 60% utilized applications from social networks, and 55% used navigation and search facilities.

·         17.8 million women watch video on social networks, versus 13.6 million men.

Read the report in full (pdf).

Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”

MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant) says many marketers are not using 2-dimensional mobile barcodes properly.

Though they’re mainstream in countries like Japan, QR codes are still fairly new to most US consumers. If you just slap a QR code on the back of a catalog and don’t explain what it is, why it's there, how to read it – and include a backup URL in case the user scans it and comes up with an error – it may not gain any traction.

And if the QR code does not direct to a site that can be rendered on a mobile device, making it hard for the user to navigate with ease, the user is going to close the mobile browser and not come back.

Read this in full and see case studies cited.

Let Somersault help you set your entire mobile marketing strategy. And be sure to use our mobile site.

Radio-Info.com (@radio_info) says, “Teens today are the most digitally connected generation we have ever seen.” A study just released by Nielsen (@NielsenWire) on teen media usage offers the following insight.

Teens:

·         Are the Heaviest Mobile Video Viewers

·         Are More Receptive to Mobile Advertising than their Elders

·         Out-Text All Other Age Groups

·         Talk Less on the Phone: Besides

·         Grew Up in the Age of Social Media—and It Shows

·         Watch Less TV than the General Population:

·         Spend Less Time on their Computers

Radio-Info says, “Based on this research and other key findings from recent studies on teen consumers, here are four considerations for marketers aspiring to reach teens today:

1. Speak in bullet points.

2. Don’t be “just another ad.”

3. Stand Out

4. Think Multi-Platform

Read this in full.

Here’s an example of a video production that tugs at your heart without using words. It visually sells the sizzle while selling the steak. At its conclusion, you want to learn more about the World Wildlife Fund (@World_Wildlife). That’s effective marketing.

Let Somersault help you achieve success.

According to research by Cone (@ConeLLC), 89% of US adults see the Web as a trustworthy source of information to verify offline recommendations of goods and services and 85% go online after being recommended a product to aid the decision-making process; 85% also say their purchase intent rises when they discover complimentary feedback.

“Consumers want reassurance before opening their purse strings, and personal recommendations alone are just not enough to guarantee a purchase," says Mike Hollywood, Cone's director, new media.

Read the Warc report in full.

Read the Cone summary.

Read the Cone report (pdf).

On Publishing Perspectives (@pubperspectives) Hannah Johnson (@HannahSJohnson) writes, “Over the past year or so, gamification (also called game mechanics, serious games, and funware) has become a mainstream technique that marketers rely on to drive more traffic to their websites, to increase content consumption, and to encourage user participation. Have you ever taken a poll or survey on a company’s website? Have you ever signed up for a newsletter for a chance to win a prize? ….All of these are examples of gamification, and you can expect to see a lot more of this in the near future.”

She continues

For publishers who are experimenting with enhanced content, maintaining author websites and creating consumer-facing websites, adding game mechanics can be a great way to get readers to engage with the content.

Johnson includes a TED video of game researcher Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) who says 3 billion hours a week are currently spent playing online games. She lists 4 attributes gamers want to be associated with:

1.    Urgent Optimism

2.    Social Fabric

3.    Blissful Productivity

4.    Epic Meaning

Read this article in full and watch the video.

Also see Econsultancy’s (@Econsultancy) “Gamification: Is everything a game?” which says this type of marketing is about “motivations, reward, and aligning ambitions between the business and the people they want to engage.”

Another article to read is BizReport’s (@BizReport) “How to incorporate gamification into your strategy.”

Gamification even extends to journalism. See Ken Doctor's (@kdoctor) article on The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University (@niemanlab), "The newsonomics of gamification - and civilization."