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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.

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.

According to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, 43% of American adults have purchased goods through a full week without the use of cash or coins. Only slightly more (47%) have not done so.

BBC Radio’s Business Daily looks at the cashless society. A cashless world may be more efficient, and cheaper for governments but does it make us more vulnerable to electronic fraud?

CBS News reports that Sweden is moving toward a cashless economy.

Bloomberg’s article Visions of a Cashless Society: Echoes puts the issue in historical context.

And in his Washington Post commentary, “Don’t show me the money: Why eliminating cash may be the secret to prosperity,” Dominic Basulto casts a positive opinion:

In countries that have been early to embrace the cashless society, such as the emerging nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the movement has unlocked the extraordinary economic potential of their citizens. This is borne out not just anecdotally, but also through reports from international aid organizations. As the Financial Times points out, innovations such as Kenya’s M-Pesa have actually led to the empowerment of society’s poorest members for one simple reason: In today’s mobile world, it’s much easier to get someone to use a cellphone than it is to get someone to open a bank account. The Financial Times goes on to report that, in Kenya, 15 million people use M-Pesa, resulting in over $8 billion in transactions that never would have occurred otherwise.

Although he does admit, “A cashless society is also a society where there is no longer any anonymity.”

What would this cashless shift mean for booksellers? Write your comments below.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

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.

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.

Millennials Survey Report

A growing tide of young Americans is drifting away from the religions of their childhood — and most of them are ending up in no religion at all.

According to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute (@publicreligion) and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs (@GUberkleycenter), 1 in 4 young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion. But most within this unaffiliated group — 55% — identified with a religious group when they were younger.

·         Across denominations, the net losses are uneven, with Catholics losing the highest proportion of childhood adherents — nearly 8% — followed by white mainline Protestant traditions, which lost 5%.

·         Among Catholics, whites are twice as likely as Hispanics to say they’re no longer affiliated with the church.

·         White evangelical and black denominations fare better, with a net loss of about 1%. Non-Christian groups post a modest 1% net increase in followers.

·         The only group that has significant growth between childhood and young adulthood is the unaffiliated — a jump from 11% to 25%.

·         The study also finds a morally divided generation, with 50% of respondents saying right and wrong depends on the situation and 45% believing in absolute morality.

·         An overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants (68%) say they believe some things are always wrong, compared to 49% of black Protestants, 45% of Catholics, and 35% of the unaffiliated.

Read this in full.

Read the full report (pdf).

Also see our blogpost, "US Consumer Habits Evolving."

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.

Two-thirds of the American public says religion coverage is too sensationalized in the news media — a view held by less than 30% of reporters, according to the results of a first-of-its-kind survey of both reporters and the audiences they serve by the Knight Program in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California (@USCedu) and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron (@uakron).

Less than one-fifth of journalists, or 18.9%, say they’re “very knowledgeable” about religion. Most reporters in that minority say they’re mainly familiar with their own religious traditions, not the wider array of faiths and practices, the survey showed.

“News organizations are rightly worried about creating smart business plans and developing cutting-edge technology. But they’re overlooking their most basic resource: knowledgeable reporters,” said Diane Winston (@dianewinston), Knight (@knightfdn) Chair in Media and Religion at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (@USCAnnenberg). “News consumers want more reporting on authentic religious experience and a lot less on polarizing religious politics. But reporters can’t do that if all they know about religion is what they hear in church or — ironically — what they read in the news.”

·         A majority of both the public and reporters agree the news media “does a poor job of explaining religion in society,” with 57.1% and 51.8% agreeing, respectively.

·         Both the public and reporters rank TV news lowest in the quality and quantity of religion coverage compared to other media with 28.1% of the public and 8% of reporters responding that broadcast news provides “good” religion coverage.

·         The American public sees religion in starkly polarized terms. Nearly half, or 43.6% believes religion is a source of conflict in the world, while a narrow majority, 52.6%, sees it as a fount of good. Most reporters, 56.1%, consider religion to be a mixed bag, offering both benefits and drawbacks for society. But only 3.8% of the general public shares this more circumspect angle on religion.

·         Not surprisingly, then, most reporters believe their audiences want personality-driven religion news related to specific institutions and events. But despite the aforementioned polarization, 69.7% of Americans say they’re interested in more complex coverage that looks at religious experiences and spiritual practice.

·         A strong majority of the public, 62.5%, says religion coverage is important to them, but nearly one-third of the rapidly growing cohort of those with no religious affiliation say they aren’t interested in religion coverage.

·         Christians from ethnic minorities constitute over a third of news consumers who say they’re generally very interested in the news and have a particular interest in religion. In contrast, white evangelical Protestants tend to care specifically about religion news, but less about the news in general.

Read this in full.

Read the survey results in full.

Also see online journalism resources, such as Religion News Service (@ReligionNewsNow) and the Religion Newswriters Association‘s (@ReligionReport) ReligionLink, Religion Stylebook, and Reporting on Religion: A Primer on Journalism’s Best Beat.

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 and the Religion News tabs.

The above Infographic is by Adweek (@Adweek).

According to Tapping Into Tabletomics, a new study released by Viacom (@Viacom), tablet devices have emerged as the leading second-screen alternative to television for viewing full-length episodes. The new research examines consumer behavior and emotions around the tablet user-experience, with a focus on tablets as TV and the dual-screen experience.

Today's Tablet User:

·         62% use their tablets daily.

·         Daily tablet users spend an average of 2.4 hours per day on their tablets.

·         85% of tablet use is for personal reasons versus business.

·         77% of tablet use is alone.

·         74% of tablet usage is done at home.

·         Most media activities on the tablet, such as playing games and watching TV shows, peak with the 18-24 demo.

Read the full news release.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you prepare content for tablets.

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