Category: social media
“Businesses should start thinking about the web in a wholly different way and get to grips with the new “social layer” across the Internet,” was the message from both the San Francisco annual Web 2.0 Summit last week and the annual Monaco Media Forum held earlier this month.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, MySpace chief executive Mike Jones offered further insight on what this might mean for firms, arguing that “most businesses’ websites were wrong at the moment, as their organising principle was not social; it was more category-led”
He illustrated the change in outlook by giving the example of a clothes shop – “Imagine you go to a clothes shop’s website and you look up ‘shirts’, chances are you will pull up a list of shirts that the brand sells…. wouldn’t it be more interesting and valuable to know what shirts your friends or people with similar interests to you had previously bought or were thinking of buying? More »
Company Profile
Vero Moda is an international fashion brand with outlets across Europe, Scandinavia, China and the Middle East. The brand is targeted at young women, selling quality clothing reflecting the latest trends at an affordable price.
The Challenge
Vero Moda face fierce competition for the attention of young consumers in the Middle East region. The company wanted to develop a regional online strategy to help interact with their customers and build a following using social media.
The Solution
Working with Jordan based online marketing company, The Online Project, the company launched a basic Facebook Page, to build a community around their brand, and enabling the company to connect to consumers and help them to find out more about their products and clothes lines. More »
The increasing use of social-networking-services, coupled with changing demographics and work styles, will lead 20% of employees to use social media as their business communications’ hub by 2014, according to Gartner.
In a presentation to CIOs and IT executives at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010 in Cannes last week, Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner highlighted the need for businesses to pursue innovative ways of working where communications and collaboration between employee groups will be critical to business success.
“Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging and presence, creating new collaboration styles.” said Ms Basso, “however, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organisations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.” she warned. More »
Swedish Christmas classic, the Aladdin chocolate box is given a brand refresh in this innovative social media creative by agency Prime. One chocolate has to go… The campaign saw a massive re-engagement with the brand with more than 400k people voting to defend their favourite chocolate (about 5% of the Swedish population)
Result: a 26% jump in sales on the previous Christmas sales period.
Save Christmas: 4ca5f27d104ff8.74949785 from BeesAwards on Vimeo.
Nearly two thirds of the world’s leading banks do not have a consistent and comprehensive strategic approach toward social media, new research has found.
According to the report “Wealth Management and Social Media” from myprivatebanking.com, the majority of leading banks and wealth managers have failed to harness the potential of social media, resulting in no presence whatever on social media networks, or only occasional engagement in sporadic activities.
Only 40% of the banks surveyed use some type of social media such as a blog, podcast or videocasts or social bookmarking on their company websites and 19 out of 30 banks have no official Facebook presence targeted towards their customers.
Alarmingly, even the banks with the best social media strategies have little or no activities targeted towards attractive client groups such as wealth management clients. More »
A new survey has revealed that 33% of global chief corporate communications officers (CCOs) say that their company is not prepared for a social media based reputation threat – a worrying statistic as the report adds that 34% of CCOs say that their companies experienced an online reputation threat during the past 12 months.
Findings from the annual survey ‘The Rising CCO’ III, indicate that as online threats to corporate and brand reputations have increased, so too has the importance of communications officers possessing the necessary crisis management skills. 61% of CCOs currently consider crisis management skills as important, compared to only 33% in 2007.
Social media is identified as the most critical challenge as well as the greatest opportunity in the year ahead, with 54% citing social media experience as key for communications staff. Social media and blogging are expected to be the fastest-growing functions in communications departments in the next 12 months, rising from 28 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in 2010. More »
Figures from the 2010 ABA Technology Survey Report show that there has been substantial growth in corporate blogging by law firms.
The US survey reveals that 30% of large law firms had blogs, compared to 18% in the 2009 survey, indicating a clear shift in attitudes towards the value in social networks. In fact 10% of respondents “had a client retain their legal services as a result of use of online communities/social networking”.
Overall 14% of law firms of all sizes reported having blogs compared to 9% in 2009. However, the Above The Law blog notes “this data seems a little skewed downwards for small firms”, due to the probability that a large law firm with many staff is more likely to have staff members involved in maintaining a blog than a small practice. More »
According to Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report 2011, social media is most effective at achieving branding goals, such as influencing brand reputation and increasing brand awareness. Marketers have also found social media to be an effective SEO tactic for improving search engine rankings and increasing website traffic.
Although the use of social media for lead generation is increasing rapidly (see FurlongPR blog 29.9.10) social media does not currently rank as high on the B2B lead generation scale in the Marketing Sherpa survey.
The report notes this could be because “most marketers are so accustomed to using quantitative metrics to measure effectiveness that they overlook the qualitative nature of social media.” citing that, “it’s not necessarily the number of comments about your brand on an industry blog that’s important — it’s the positive or negative nature of the commentary.”
Indications are that social media is undervalued by marketers in terms of its effectiveness, due to lack of experience in new online marketing channels. The report suggests that as B2B marketers become more knowledgeable in social media practices, the effectiveness of tactics will improve. More »
Figures from Forrester show that while social media demand continues to grow, the content supplying it is on the wane.
Forrester has identified several types of social media users and found that while the numbers of ‘joiners’ and ‘spectators’ are increasing, ‘creators’ are declining.
Figures for the US show that while “Joiners” (users who maintain a profile on a social networking site and visit social networking sites at least once a month) increased 8% to 59% of online consumers, “Creators” (users who publish a blog, update Web pages, upload user-generated video, or write and post content) fell 1% to 23% of online consumers in 2010.
Significantly, the percentage of “critics” (those who post ratings and reviews, comment on various blogs, and contribute to online forums) also fell, declining to 33%, from 37% over the past year.
The findings indicate a trend worldwide showing the number of “Joiners” increasing overall, with Europe, metropolitan China, and Australia registering double-digit point growth. In Europe and metropolitan China, the numbers of “Critics” remained flat or declined. Most regional markets registered increases in “Spectators”. More »
There has been a big increase in the use of social media for online lead generation according to the Online Lead Generation Report 2010 (B2C) from Econsultancy.
66% of companies surveyed are using this channel to generate consumer leads, compared to 40% in 2009, indicating social media is the fastest growing channel for online lead generation.
While search engine optimisation remains the most popular channel for generating leads online, up by 13% to 90% this year, email marketing is the second most popular method on 83% followed by PPC on 73%. The survey also saw an increase in the use of rich media and video to generate leads online, while RSS feeds were down 2% on the previous year.
Significantly, the report demonstrates that companies generating leads online with the intention of converting them offline has increased from 70% in 2009 to 81% this year, with online lead generation responsible for an increase to 42% of total sales, up from 40% last year. More »
