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From: World Advertising Research Center

Consumer electronics giants like Panasonic, Samsung and Sony are incorporating social media elements into their products, indicating an integration between the online and offline worlds.

Facebook, which boasts over 500 million members, has attracted particular attention among manufacturers hoping to engage shoppers in new ways. The web 2.0 specialist launched Open Platform in 2007. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief tech nology officer, suggested the ultimate intention was to place this system at the “core” of various activities.

“The platform makes the Facebook experience more meaningful ,” he told the Wall
Street Journal. According to Taylor, many operators had been slow to embraced the potential such a service affords.

“There’s a big disparity between the really deep social interactions we have in the physical world and what is going on online and with consumer electronics,” he said.
“There’s a really big opportunity for innovative companies to build a social experience into their products.”

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Panasonic unveiled a “personalisable” TV set enabling viewers to browse Facebook and Twitter while enjoying broadcast content. This gadget also lets users participate in multiplayer games on the web and provides access to Skype, You Tube, eBay and Napster.

TV viewing has become a different experience

Watching TV has become a very different kind of experience,” said Merwayh Mereby, vp, Panasonic North America. “Once TV was only something passive, now it is evolving rapidly to become a much more engaged experience giving more power to the viewer with the remote control.”

Elsewhere, Samsung Techwin, a unit fo the Korean firm, has built a “next-generation” baby monitor aimed at “tech-savvy” families. This appliance allows parents to share audio and video footage of their children with friends using Facebook and Twitter via a memory card.

“The babyview devices showcase Samsung’s commitment to putting the most advanced technology in the hands of parents,” said Mike Palazzolo, Samsung Techwin America’s vp, sales and marketing, consumer products.

Earlier this month, Polaroid leveraged a high-profile tie-up with pop star Lady Gaga to promote its latest camera that lets photographers spread pictures on social sites. Scott Hardy, the group’s president, argued the Polaroid Grey Label “embodies the Polaroid brand” and offers an “injection of future-looking fashion”.

“It represents Polaroid innovation for the new generation, one in which there are no limitations to sharing creativity through photogarphy, both physical and digital”, he said.

Nook can loan books to your Facebook contacts

Further products utilizing parallel technology include Barnes and Noble’s Color handheld e-reader , enabling customers to “loan” books to Facebook contacts.

Hewlett-Packard’s ePrintCenter and Microsoft’s motion-sensor gaming tool Kinect also employ such models.

Similarly, Sony’s Bloggie HD mobile camera is linked to the company’s Personal Space internet service, alongside You Tube, Flikr, Facebook and Google’s Picasa. “We wanted to make these devices fun and different while still delivering a high quality product,” said Andy Bubala, director of the camcorder business, Sony Electronics.

Some organizations are tapping into their own branded properties, as shown by Nike allying with geo-location pioneer TomTom in developing the Nike+SportWatch. This can connect to the Nike Plus Web community, which 4m members and hosts a range of data, possible routes and other information.

“With more than 150m runs logged since its launch in 2006, Nikeplus.com captures the pulse of the running world every day,” said Stefan Olander, vp at Nike Digital Sport.

From: e-Marketer

Going beyond the Facebook fan page

Retailers are exploring a new frontier in social commerce as they go beyond simply offering Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for their customers to follow.

Fueling this trend is web retailers’ quick adoption of social sign-on, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site. Social sign-on gives retailers access to rich profile information for targeting customers.

“Bringing Facebook profile data into retail sites makes sense because it influences consumers when they are close to conversion,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report “Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences.” “In contrast, many consumers on Facebook are mainly socializing with friends and further removed from making purchase decisions.”

Over half of online retailers who responded to an August 2010 survey by Gigya, a provider of social sign-on applications, had either implemented the feature or planned to add it in the near future.

Increased engagement hit 84%

The Gigya study highlighted the benefits that online retailers and media-entertainment publishers derive from offering social sign-on. At the top of the list were increased engagement (84%) and richer profile information for targeting product recommendations, emails, promotions and coupons (80%).

“Social networks like Facebook are a hub of information about people’s likes and interests,” said Grau. “When consumers give a retailer permission to access their personal data on Facebook, the merchant sees not only what those people have written in their profiles but also the content they have ‘liked’ on other sites.”

A separate study outlined just some of the data available from various sites—not counting other information, like which products, news articles and content on third-party sites they link to in status updates.

Retailers must also be careful about delivering personalized recommendations and targeted ads. These could make consumers feel that their online privacy is being invaded and create a backlash, which is already a perennial problem for social networks like Facebook.

To see data charts and full story, got to e-Marketer.com
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From: World Advertising Research Center

Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in America, figures from Experian Hitwise show. The research firm reported that Facebook received 8.9% of all online visits in the US between January and November 2010.

Google fell to second on 7.2%, followed by Yahoo Mail on 3.5%, Yahoo’s main portal on 3.3% and YouTube on 2.7%. At the parent company level, Google’s portfolio – including Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps – took 9.6% of visits, helping it stay in front of Facebook on this metric.

More broadly, the ten leading individual web properties – also housing MSN, MySpace, Windows Live Mail and Bing – accounted for 33% of activity during the opening 11 months of last year, up 12% on 2009.Facebook climbed from third in the 2009 rankings and ninth in 2008, and enjoys a particularly impressive dwell time among members, Experian Hitwise suggested.

Indeed, the Palo Alto-based platform delivered approximately 25% of page views in November 2010. “This is the most transformational shift in the history of the internet,” Lou Kerner, a social media analyst at Wedbush Securities, argued. “We’re moving from a Google-centric web to a people-centric web.”

Mapping out what exists in the world

Such a perspective essentially ties up with the vision outlined by Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, when speaking recently to Time Magazine, which recognised him as its latest “Person of the Year. “We’re trying to map out what exists in the world,” he said. “In the world, there’s trust. I think as humans we fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have around us.”

“So at its core, what we’re trying to do is map out all of those trust relationships, which you can call, colloquially, most of the time, friendships.”

Based on analysis of the top 1,000 search terms entered across America in 2010, Experian Hitwise also stated that Facebook led the charts on this measure, boasting a 2.1% share. Alongside the actual name of the site, “facebook login” resided in second place, “facebook.com” claimed sixth and “www.facebook.com” made ninth, with the four expressions responsible for a collective 3.5% proportion of queries.

While the Web 2.0 pioneer may increasingly be a rival to Google, Heather Dougherty, director of research at Experian Hitwise, believes an interesting balance is emerging between the two brands. “They continue to sort of work together as well as compete,” she said. “They’re kind of a funny ‘frenemy.’”

Also Ran

Elsewhere in the search table, Google’s YouTube occupied third on 1.1%, ahead of classifieds hub Craigslist and News Corp’s MySpace. Internet auction giant eBay came in seventh, beating Yahoo in eighth, and Mapquest completed the top ten.

New additions into the group of the 50 entries utilised with the greatest frequency included Netflix, Verizon Wireless, ESPN, Wells Fargo and Hulu, according to Experian Hitwise. Overall, however, social networking “dominated” this selection of terms, as relevant words and phrases generated 4.2% of searches.

Looking forward, Zuckerberg predicted Facebook’s influence could grow more pervasive as business models change in the coming five years. “Most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work,” he said.

Data sourced from Washington Post, Time, Experian Hitwise; additional content by Warc staff, 03 January 2011

By Lisa E. Phillips, Senior Analyst, e-Marketer

There are only so many hours per day that consumers can spend watching TV, reading newspapers and surfing the internet. But as marketers may suspect, the time devoted to media is undergoing some not-so-subtle changes.

eMarketer recently conducted a meta-analysis of data from dozens of research firms using a variety of methodologies. The result is a series of estimates of how much time consumers spend with all major media, regardless of multitasking or simultaneous usage, from 2008 to 2010. The estimates apply to average media usage of the general public, not solely to the users of each medium.

The average time spent with all major media combined increased from about 10.6 hours in 2008 to 11 hours in 2010, according to eMarketer. TV and video (not including online video) captured the lion’s share of all media time, about 40% each year. The internet’s share of media time increased over the same period, from 21.5% to 23.5%, as did mobile’s share, from 5% to 7.5%. The share of time spent with magazines and newspapers fluctuated between 10% and 7.5%, while radio and all other media—video games, movies in theaters and outdoor media—declined.

To account for multitasking, an hour spent watching TV and surfing the internet was counted as 1 hour for TV plus 1 hour for internet use. Also, use of each medium is discrete: Time spent listening to the radio does not include streaming stations from the internet, for example.

In 2010, consumers spent an average of 4 hours and 24 minutes each day watching TV and video, while being online for 2 hours and 35 minutes. Mobile devices received an average of 50 minutes’ worth of attention every day—the same amount of time allotted to newspapers and magazines combined. eMarketer expects that time spent with mobile devices will continue to increase, most likely taking time away from print media.

Mobile devices time rising fastest

In fact, time spent with mobile devices is rising faster than all other media. In 2010, consumers spent 28.2% more time with mobile devices, which covers all mobile activities on all mobile devices. That gain was even higher than the 21.9% growth in 2009. Time spent on the internet showed moderate but steady gains, at more than 6% each year since 2008. All other major media posted declines: TV and video lost 1.1% in 2010, while magazines and newspapers lost 9.1 each. However, as consumers continue to consume more media every day, those losses are not immediately significant.

Marketers need to pay attention to these trends as they project budgets and develop marketing strategies for the coming year—and years. Mobile devices will claim more and more media time per day, while TV, print and radio will slowly lose ground to digital media. Those trends have been most apparent with print media in recent years, but are now beginning to show up in TV and radio usage as well.

From e-marketer.com

Word-of-mouth may not translate to loyalty.

Social media is a hot topic in marketing circles, but many consumers are also discussing the trend, which accounts for nearly 23% of time spent online in the US, according to Nielsen.

An April 2010 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the Online Publishers Association (OPA) found that social media sites were the most talked-about on the web, ahead of portals and top media sites that are members of the OPA in discussions on a wide variety of channels.

All those conversations, whether in person, via email, on the phone or elsewhere on the web, however, don’t make social site visitors loyal—internet users expressed the least loyalty for such properties, compared with portals or OPA member sites. They were also most likely to say social sites were not a very good fit for their information and entertainment needs.

The OPA’s findings are in line with the annual customer satisfaction report from ForeSee Results that found Facebook among the most disliked sites on the web after its many disagreements with its own user community and several privacy debacles.

According to the OPA, negative feelings about social sites may also apply to the brands that advertise there. Only 8% of internet users felt social media site advertisers were reputable, compared with a 21% average for content sites. They also felt advertising on social sites was less relevant and the companies that did so were less respected.

The answer for brands is to continue a greater focus on non-advertising marketing activities, engaging on the social media user’s terms. And marketers should remember that while loyalty to individual social properties may be low and site users dissatisfied, the activities that have come to define social media— connecting with friends and family and sharing information and content with a trusted group—will remain important in the lives of millions of internet users and continue to provide avenues for brand engagement.

For compete data charts and story, go to e-marketer.com

Twitter, the microblogging service, is expanding the range of options it makes available to brands, having received positive feedback regarding its initial activity in this area.

Walt Disney, the entertainment group, has signed up to the social network’s latest marketing tool, @earlybird, which allows users to access deals and discounts for a limited period of time.

As part of the communications strategy supporting its film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Disney is offering two tickets for the price of one via Twitter.

In return for its investment, the company will see its paid-for post retweeted on a regular basis via the earlybird feed, which has rapidly secured over 50,000 followers.

The link contained in Disney’s tweet directs netizens to a dedicated section of its Fandango site, where they then enter a special code.

Any offer hosted on @earlybird must be exclusive to Twitter, which is hoping to roll out regional and other targeted deals in the future.

Toy Story 3 to be featured on Twitter homepage

Disney’s Pixar studio has also previously paid for Toy Story 3 to feature as a trending topic on Twitter’s homepage.

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it planned to build advertising models which reflected existing habits among its audience.

“We’re trying to make sure our ad platform is organic to how people are already using Twitter,” he said. “There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing. So far it’s working.”

‘The man your man could smell like’

Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice recently ran a Promoted Trend tied to its campaign “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, an effort that has achieved considerable viral traction across the web.

Virgin America, Bravo and Red Bull were just some of the firms that had joined the Promoted Tweet scheme by the time it first went live, and most participants have reported promising results.

Costelo suggested the fact many corporations established a presence on Twitter prior to these developments means they have learned to interact with consumers rather than simply repurposing search ads from Google.

“If we tried to monetize at day one, you’d see people cutting and pasting their Adwords ads and getting no followers,” he said.

Coke Tweets pay off

Coca-Cola, the soft drinks giant, generated impressive figures from employing Promoted Tweets and Topics during the World Cup, when it sponsored the conversation surrounding a match between England and the US.

According to Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president for global interactive marketing, this approach yielded 86 million impressions in 24 hours.

It also delivered an “engagement rate” of 6%, which can be measured against the corresponding total of well under 1% in terms of the number of people that generally click on other forms of online ads.

“The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time,” said Kruse. “It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great.”

Kruse added that Coca-Cola decided to utilise Promoted Trends as soon as it saw the opportunities they would provide.

“We get a lot of first looks and we jumped on that one immediately. It is the perfect example of us wanting to learn in this space,” she said.

“We didn’t know how it would work out but we wanted to learn in that space … It could have completely flopped.”

From World Advertising Research Center

36% of small businesses look to step up with Twitter and Facebook.

Small businesses are confident about their ability to weather the recession, with more than one-half saying they have either fully recovered or will do so by the end of 2010, and nearly three-quarters claiming they will drive recovery in the overall economy, according to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” from FedEx Office and Ketchum.

To that end, almost two in five small-business owners reported they would be growing their businesses with social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. That was up from less than one-quarter who planned to up their game with social in 2009 and made social media the only tactic to increase in importance since last year.

About 42% of small-business owners said they would increase spending on advertising and marketing this year overall.

“Small businesses are definitely getting it right when it comes to identifying and investing in the tools that will help them bounce back from a difficult period,” said Randy Scarborough, vice president of marketing for FedEx Office, in a statement.

E-mail marketing solutions firm Constant Contact likewise found small businesses optimistic about their economic prospects in 2010, with 70% expecting to grow this year. Website and e-mail marketing were a bigger priority than social media, but Facebook was considered important by more than one-half of respondents.

More than one-quarter said blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter were other key tools for marketing their business.

For complete data charts and story, go to e-marketer.com

But financial services firms must effectively market value, convenience and security

For consumers, mobile banking is about convenience: the ability to check account balances, pay bills and transfer funds from a device they take with them everywhere. For financial institutions, it is a means to deepen customer relationships, streamline operations and cut costs.

Several forecasts predict that by 2015, 50% or more of US mobile users will be conducting transactions from their mobile devices.

“The ubiquity of these devices offers banks an opportunity to connect with customers outside the online channel, including those who are always on the go as well as the underbanked and unbanked consumers who lack consistent Internet access,” said Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Mobile Banking: Financial Services Firms Look to Cash In.”

Estimates of mobile banking adoption vary widely, although it appears to be growing at a good pace. For example, studies conducted in 2009 by Mercatus, Mintel Comperemedia and Experian Simmons put the usage rate between 7% and 11%.

However, in a January 2010 survey by Luth Research for the Mobile Marketing Association, mobile banking usage was 17% among the overall US population and 19% among mobile phone users. A March 2010 study by OnePoll for mobile billing and message delivery firm mBlox uncovered a 25% usage rate among US mobile phone users.

Research among smartphone users reveals much more extensive mobile banking adoption. Data Innovation’s January 2010 “Mobile Money Study” found that nearly 70% of smartphone users had accessed mobile banking, payment or financial services in the past three months.

“Smartphone users are more likely to engage with a bank’s Website or mobile application, but it is important to provide services, such as SMS banking, that engage the larger population of non-smartphone users,” said Mr. Elkin. “SMS reaches a wider audience than the mobile Web or applications, including the significant number of mobile users who have yet to trade up to smartphones.”

For complete data tables to e-marketer.com
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Missed opportunities for some marketers

From e-Marketer.com

Despite social media marketing’s popularity, business-to-business (B2B) companies are still fairly new to it. According to a survey from Business.com, 73% of B2B respondents have less than two years of social media marketing experience.

March 2010 research from marketing automation firm Genius.com and BtoB magazine found that about one-half of business-oriented marketers are staying away from social tools such as blogging and Twitter. Facebook was more popular, with nearly three-fifths participating, and business-focused social network LinkedIn was used by three-quarters of B2B marketers.

Both business-oriented social networks and general social networks offer B2B companies a variety of opportunities. They can improve communication between customers, prospects and suppliers; aid collaboration between business partners; help with product development; and identify leads.

B2B companies also have an advantage when using social media because they tend to focus on goals and results, such as leads, that visibly affect their bottom line. Business.com found in 2009 that those B2B marketers who do use social media tend to do so more extensively than their business-to-consumer counterparts.

Those with at least one profile were more likely to manage a presence on several sites than the general B2B respondents to the Genius.com survey, and were more likely than B2C companies to measure their social success.

“While recent studies have shown that up to 90 percent of consumers are using social media to make their purchasing decisions, B2B marketers seem to be out of step and are using these tools much less frequently,” said the Genius.com report.