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BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) program The Forum (@BBCTheForum) featured an interview with Dr. Robert Heath, senior lecturer in advertising at University of Bath School of Management (@BathSofM), board member of the Wharton (@wharton) global Future of Advertising project, former advertising executive who worked for some of the world’s top brands, and author of Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising (Wiley-Blackwell (@WileyNews & @WB_Business), 2012). He argues that advertising today is no longer about providing information but works more subtly through subliminal emotional meta-communication to increase consumers’ positive and enduring feelings towards the brand.

He uses approaches from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to outline his theory of the subconscious influence of advertising in its audience’s lives. In addition to looking at ads’ influence on consumers, Heath also addresses how advertising is evolving, noting especially the ethical implications of its development.

Listen to this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically and effectively communicate your brand message.

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CMO.com’s (@CMO_com) latest Guide to The Social Landscape (interactive version; pdf version), developed by 97th Floor (@chrisbennett), offers helpful analyses in the categories of
          • Customer Communication
          • Brand Exposure
          • Traffic to Your Site
          • and SEO
for the social media marketing sites of
          • Twitter
          • Facebook
          • StumbleUpon
          • Google+
          • Pinterest
          • Reddit
          • YouTube
          • SlideShare
          • Delicious
          • Digg
          • Flickr
          • LinkedIn
          • Quora
          • and Instagram.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you leverage the power of social media marketing for your branded content.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

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

The above Infographic (enlarge it) is by Fast Company (@FastCompany) in its September 2012 issue (#therules). Submit your own rule.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategize and execute social media marketing for your brand.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

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

LEGO (@LEGO_Group) turns 80 this year. To celebrate, the company produced this 17-minute cartoon about its humble origins and how it revolutionized the toy industry. 17-minutes long and it succeeded in getting 2 million views in 2 weeks. 17-minutes! And the pace of it is slow-moving, at that!

If a slow-moving 17-minute-long video can get more than 2 million views, it proves viral videos don’t need to be constrained to only 3-minutes of flash mobs or kittens!

Also see our previous blogposts, "Unlikely Videos Go Viral" and “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce creative and effective videos promoting your branded content.

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

Bottlenose (@bottlenoseapp) is a new real-time social search engine. All Things D (@allthingsd) senior editor Mike Isaac (@MikeIsaac) says:

It is essentially described as a Google for the social Web, using public API inputs from the largest social networks out there: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, as well as photo-sharing sites like Instagram. Enter a search query, and Bottlenose scans each of the networks for the most relevant, current information, depending on trends across networks and the influence of the people sharing the content.

It’s likely most relevant to marketers and social strategists who want to keep an eye on the pulse of whatever their clients follow. Without the search algorithm, the dashboard is especially close to a HootSuite-like analytics product. The free version is advertising-based — like Google — while the upgraded paid versions give better access to the Twitter firehose, along with additional feature upgrades.

Read this in full.

Bottlenose is included in our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard in the “Research” and “Monitor Your Brand” tabs. Bookmark our dashboard and use it every day.

We think lessons can be learned from watching this 8-minute ESPN (@espn) documentary video. Consider how you’d go about turning customers of your brand into the kind of people who would identify themselves with it so strongly that they’d include it in their own send-offs.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Rest in Fleece: Woolen Coffins – Innovative Market.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you effectively communicate your brand’s message to create raving fans.

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

Here’s a fun way to display the creative variety of typefaces. This Periodic Table of Typefaces by designer Cam Wilde shows the 100 most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces used throughout time. See it enlarged. A print copy is available.

Below is another version of it, promoting Just My Type, the book about “that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about.”

Also see our previous blogposts:

·         “Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve”

·         “1912 Typeface Specimen Book Now Online”

·         “The Periodic Table of Storytelling”

·         “The Periodic Table of the Books of the Bible”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content with excellence.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard to see all things book-related; especially the Editing tab.

Internet Retailer (@IR_Magazine) senior editor Zak Stambor (@ZakStamborIR) writes about the requirement of brands to properly use social media marketing.

With consumers spending so much of their time on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like, some retailers are brushing aside questions about the return on social marketing dollars. “Measuring the ROI of social media is like measuring the ROI of air conditioning,” says Lisa Gavales, Express Inc.'s chief marketing officer. “It's necessary.”

Many others agree. 76% of marketers in a recent Forrester Research Inc. survey said social networks are key elements to building their brands. Moreover, 71% said that by leveraging social media they could gain an edge on their competition.

But just routinely posting new arrivals to a Facebook page or “pinning” images to a Pinterest board won't cut it. Consumers spend time on social networks to interact with friends, not brands.

Perhaps no retailer is as all-in on social networks as Wal-Mart (WalmartLabs blog & @WalmartLabs).

Read this in full.

If Wal-Mart believes in social media marketing for its brand growth, shouldn’t you?

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help create your social media strategy.

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

Wieden + Kennedy's (@WiedenKennedy) production of the universally heartwarming “Thank you, Mom” campaign for Procter & Gamble (@ProcterGamble) originally launched for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Its messaging continues for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London with “Best Job,” a cinematic and emotional anthem. It has achieved more than 5 million views online and it won 5 Lions at Cannes last month, including golds in Film and Film Craft. Adweek (@Adweek) says:

The new spot is a beautiful testament to parents around the world who have helped their children through the grueling daily grind toward becoming an Olympic athlete.

The tagline of the online-only ad is, “The hardest job in the world is the best job in the world.”

Its new companion video spot, “Kids” (already reaching 1.7 million views), has a similar heart-tugging payout at the end:

What makes these videos so effective and viral? They’re

·         beautifully filmed, directed, and edited

·         poignant

·         emotional

·         brief

·         relevant

·         able to draw the viewer in to self-identify with the message.

In other marketing news relating to the Olympics, Marketing Land (@Marketingland) reports that Twitter and NBC have announced a new partnership centering on Twitter’s new “hashtag page” concept at twitter.com/#Olympics (distinct from the general search hashtag #olympics).

Twitter will have staff monitoring Olympic-related tweets from athletes, coaches, Olympics officials, NBC personalities and others and curating the best content surrounding the #Olympics hashtag on a single page.

NBC will promote the page and the hashtag during its on-air coverage across each of the networks providing coverage, including in primetime coverage on NBC itself.

Read this in full.

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

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce strategic viral videos, and publish and digitally market pbooks and ebooks.

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

See the SlideShare deck page.

See the report in pdf.

According to a new survey, 56% of Americans have a personal profile on a social network, up 4% from 2011. And the number of people who say they follow brands or companies online has almost doubled in the last 2 years, to 33% of those polled.

These stats are from The Social Habit 2012 study by Edison Research (@edisonresearch) (SlideShare; Blog) and Arbitron (@ArbitronInc).

See The Social Habit website (@thesocialhabit).

WCG (@WCGWorld) highlights the following from the report:

·         Social networkers check their profiles often

·         Understanding the mobile experience is critical

·         Visual content is king

·         Users of social networking sites are following brands now more than ever

·         Facebook does impact buying decisions

·         It is not all about the coupon

Read this in full.

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

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically leverage and effectively communicate your brand message using social media.

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