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This video ad for The Guardian (@guardian) uses the famous fairy tale of “Three Little Pigs” to paint a 21st century picture of open journalism, imagining how the story might be covered in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion.

In contrast, The New York Times (@nytimes) has created 4 videos that promote the rich experience users get when using its website.

See all The New York Times video ads.

Of the two styles above, which is the most effective? Do they properly reflect each brand message? Does each have viral potential? 

Bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

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.

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.

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.

From Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday)

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.

Infographic by Unbounce (@unbounce).

According to NielsenWire (@NielsenWire), consumer interest in blogs keeps growing. By the end of 2011, NM Incite (@nmincite), a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only 5 years earlier in 2006.

Overall, 6.7 million people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12 million write blogs using their social networks.

·         Women make up the majority of bloggers, and half of bloggers are aged 18-34

·         Bloggers are well-educated: 7 out of 10 bloggers have gone to college, a majority of whom are graduates

·         About 1 in 3 bloggers are Moms, and 52% of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 years-old in their household

·         Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in Message Boards/Forums within the last month

Read this in full.

Also see Michael Hyatt's (@MichaelHyatt) article, "4 Insights I gleaned from Building My Own Platform."

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 Social Media/WOM tab.

Here’s the latest disrupter in the education field. TED (@TEDNews & @tedtalks) curator Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) announced yesterday that “after more than a year of planning and dreaming, we're finally launching our new TED-Ed website (@TED_ED), whose goal is to offer teachers a thrilling new way to use video.”

...the goal is to allow any teacher to take a video of their choice (yes, any video on YouTube, not just ours) and make it the heart of a “lesson” that can easily be assigned in class or as homework, complete with context, follow-up questions, and further resources.

This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.

In recent years at TED, we've become enamored of a strategy we call “radical openness”: Don't try to do big things yourself. Instead empower others to do them with you.

This has served us well. Sharing TEDTalks free online has built a global community of idea seekers and spreaders. Opening up our transcripts has allowed 7500 volunteers to translate the talks into 80+ languages. And giving away the TEDx brand in the form of free licenses, has spawned more than 4000 TEDx events around the world.

So it's natural that we would look to this approach as we embark on our education initiative.

Read this in full.

Also see The Atlantic’s (@TheAtlantic) article by Megan Garber (@megangarber), “The Digital Education Revolution, Cont’d: Meet TED-Ed’s New Online Learning Platform.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you take advantage of new technology to publish and market your brand’s message.

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

Warc (@WarcEditors) reports that “young consumers in the US are growing more distinct from their older counterparts when it comes to using digital channels in the purchase process.” According to The Millennial Consumer: Debunking Stereotypes, a poll of 4,000 “millennials” (16-34 year olds) and 1,000 consumers from older cohorts by the Boston Consulting Group (@BCG_Consultant & @BCGPerspectives), 60% of the former group rated goods and services online, versus 46% of the latter cohort.

·         50% of BCG’s more youthful sample have used a mobile device to read reviews and research products while out shopping, measured against 21% for the older panel questioned.

·         53% of millennials look for information or engage with brands on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and 33% favor companies that are active on these sites. Both are 16 percentage points higher than for over-35 year olds.

·         60% of 16-34 year olds upload videos, images, and blogs, doubling the total logged by over-35 year olds.

·         59% of the first audience own a smartphone, easily surpassing the 33% of participants falling outside this age range.

·         Just 26% of millennials watch television for more than 20 hours per week, compared to 49% of more mature interviewees.

Read this in full.

Read the full report (pdf).

For an added perspective on this demographic, see USA TODAY's "Millennials Struggle with Financial Literacy."

Also see our previous blogpost, “Young ‘Millennials’ Losing Faith in Record Numbers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you market your brand to Millennials.

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