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On SocialTimes (@SocialTimes), Megan O'Neill (@maoneill) says, “Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective kinds of marketing when it comes to influencing purchase decisions.” The following Infographic from WOMMA (@WOMMA) and Column Five Media (@columnfive) takes a look at just how important and effective word of mouth marketing is, online and off.

Enlarge the Infographic.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you engage your consumers so they mention your brand often in their social networks – online and offline.

According to a new survey of social consumers, marketers who create highly sharable online content – video, audio, and photos consumers want to share with friends and colleagues – significantly boost their brand’s online presence and are more likely to increase sales.

The Science of Sharing study, conducted by M Booth (@MBoothPR) and Beyond (@beyond), two communications agencies in the Next Fifteen (@Next_Fifteen) global network, examined US consumer engagement with products online across a dozen brand categories. According to the data:

·         more than half of consumers (53%) say they interact with brands on Facebook

·         4 in 10 (42%) have written a product review online

·         a third (33%) have written an online post about a product.

·         1 in 5 consumers are “high sharers” and are 3 times more likely to make a product recommendation online. They tend to be younger, brand loyal, own multiple Internet devices and are conducting online research that requires minimal emotional or monetary investment.

·         “Low sharers” tend to be older, put a premium on quality, are less brand loyal, and are researching products online that cost more and involve more consideration.

When it comes to influencing consumer decision making, search is the most powerful online gateway (seo is a vital marketing element) followed by digital word of mouth and recommendations made by friends and family. The most common products that people recommend online are from the beauty, electronics, fashion, and music categories.

Read the news release in full.

Read the whitepaper (pdf).

See the Infographic (pdf).

See the Infographic (gif).

See the SlideShare presentation.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you reach your brand’s digital consumer.

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.”

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.

In The New York Times (@nytimes) Janet Maslin reviews Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield (@simongarfield), saying, “This is a smart, funny, accessible book that does for typography what Lynne Truss’ best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation: made it noticeable for people who had no idea they were interested in such things.”

Knowledge of fonts is essential to advertising, book publishing, professions (like law) that require thoughtfully chosen stationery and any written work that can be done on a home computer. Personal computers are the main reason that font fandom and do-it-yourself design have snowballed in the last two decades. Had Steven Jobs not taken a shine to calligraphy as a college student and decided to include a choice of fonts in computer software, we might not be having this conversation.

Mr. Garfield’s book overlaps with Gary Hustwit’s (@gary_hustwit) 2007 documentary Helvetica, which concentrated entirely on a single, unstoppably popular typeface. Is global proliferation of the very Swiss, clean, antiseptic Helvetica a welcome phenomenon, or is Helvetica the weedy, unstoppable kudzu of the design world? Mr. Garfield takes a somewhat jaundiced view of Helvetica mania, but he hardly limits himself to one narrow school of fontificating. A full look at font history, aesthetics, science, and philosophy could fill an encyclopedia, but Just My Type is an excellent gloss. Mr. Garfield has put together a lot of good stories and questions about font subtleties and font-lovers’ fanaticism.

Just My Type covers phenomena including how the fonts on road signs are tested for legibility and what the fonts used by various political campaigns subliminally communicate about candidates. It explains relatively arcane matters like kerning (the science of spacing letters)....And if it does nothing else Just My Type will make it impossible for you to look at logos, road signs, airports, magazines, and advertisements indifferently any longer.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault help you in the page and cover designs of your books. And stay informed about publishing best practices with the SomersaultNOW dashboard, such as the content in the Editing and Innovation tabs.

How does a medical facility in the middle of nowhere become so well known and respected that world leaders want to be consumers of it? According to Lee Aase (@LeeAase), director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, word-of-mouth (WOM) fueled by social media is the driving force. Watch (1 and 2) his relaxed case-study presentation from a few years ago and adapt his success principles (see the above pyramid) to advance your brand.

Let Somersault help you achieve success.

Brandchannel (@brandchannelhub) writes, “If any brand name seems to be loved by all who come in contact with it, it's Moleskine (@moleskine). This 14-year-old Italian iconic brand became known for a simple notebook.” It goes on to explain how Moleskine encourages consumer generated media to help foster its brand.

It isn’t just the brand’s positioning that makes it so special — it is the manner in which the company nurtures and interacts with its fiercely loyal fans and retailers.

Marco Beghin, president of Moleskine America, told The New York Times (@nytimes), “We let our fans speak for themselves.”

Fans are only too happy to share their stories. They post sketches on Moleskine's Facebook page, which has attracted almost 90,000 followers, and they make videos (favorited on Moleskine's channel) demonstrating how much fans love the brand. They also attend special events around the globe organized by Moleskine, such as a recent ‘sketching event’ at Bloomingdale’s in New York. Shoppers could stop and make sketches of a model using Moleskine pencils and notebooks.

This product has always been considered a platform and a culture product. A tool for self-expression."

Read this in full.

Watch this video to see how a person who loves the Moleskine concept hacks that same idea into Bibles: Moleskine Bibles (@MoleskineBible)

But also read how a raving fan can be lost, in Michael Hyatt’s (@MichaelHyatt) “Why I Ditched My Moleskine Journal.”

Experiential Marketing and its role in an integrated marketing strategy is the featured topic of the July/August issue of Admap. Editor Colin Grimshaw (@colin_admap) says experiential marketing “connects audiences with the authentic nature of a brand through participation in personally relevant, credible and memorable encounters. Whereas traditional marketing has focused on mass communication using rational, left-brain directed persuasion, experiential marketing focuses on making a personalised connection using emotional, right-brain directed involvement.”

In her article, The Consistent Brand Experience, Liz Bigham (@lizbigham), SVP Marketing for Jack Morton Worldwide (@jackmorton) says, “There are myriad touchpoints for consumers to engage with your brand. It’s essential that these experiences deliver a consistent brand perception.” She offers 5 lessons in achieving brand consistency in the brand experience space:

1. Your brand is a verb, not a noun (a promise delivered — ‘do’ vs ‘tell’)

2. Decide that your brand is worth the investment

3. Owned media matters more (and often costs less) than other media

4. People and behavior are fundamental to the brand experience

5. Consumers don't distinguish between online and experiential, so neither should you

Read this in full.