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Interpublic’s Hill Holliday is out with a new brand research study, the Brand Edge Index, that takes a deep dive into various product categories and ranks top brands based on proprietary surveys. The first installment looks at the home appliance category and rates brands in six subsets: vacuums, dishwashers, washer machines, ranges, refrigerators, and grills. The rankings are based on 5,600 survey respondents who assessed 45 brands. Top-ranked brands included Dyson (vacuums), Bosch (dishwashers), Samsung (both washing machines and refrigerators), and Weber (grills). The report found that niche brands and disruptive brands frequently outrank longstanding first-to-market brands. Awareness doesn’t always lead to preference or advantage. In part, that’s explained by the survey finding that reliability is the most important attribute for home appliance brands....
In Trump We Trust — .com, that is.
Not your politics? Maybe check out ThrowOutTrump.com.
Actually, they're both empty websites, what you call parked domain names: bought and paid for, but not used.
More interesting is that they both belong to the same guy — Donald J. Trump.
A big hat tip to CNN, which had the idea to search for all websites registered by the Trump Organization and came back with a list of more than 3,000 — all the way back to the original DonaldJTrump.com, registered in 1997....
Hey, remember the good old days before smartphones? That golden age where you actually had to use a landline to contact friends, use paper maps and log on to a whirring desktop computer to access the Internet? Well, guess what, many of today’s young influencers and consumers of the future don’t.
In fact, even if your earliest memories of a mobile phone are a chunky Motorola, you could probably take a tip or two from the younger generation to inform your content marketing efforts. Why? Because they are the connected generation, brought up on social media and smartphone use. They will see your snake game and raise you a Pokemon or three and this is all from the age of 11.
Of course, your target audience might not fall into the teenage or early twenty-something bracket. But in a world where Eric Lassard, a boy of 12, has (amongst other ventures) launched an app, social platform and is publishing his second book, ‘From Dublin to Silicon Valley’, perhaps your business might pick up a tip or two straight out of the mouths of babes. For connecting with millennials and those that come after is the future of your business…
Adobe Digital Insights predicts 2016 online sales will be up 11% and shoppers will be out earlier than ever. 55% of US and UK retailers say Amazon will drive the majority of their holiday sales this year according to research by ChannelAdvisor and Morar Consulting. The National Retail Federation expects US consumers to spend an average of $935.58 with overall holiday sales to rise 3.6% and online sales up 7% to 10%.
What’s Walmart’s holiday sales strategy? Value, price rollbacks and features, along with Santa’s helpers at checkout. UPS expects to be busy as well, shipping more than 700 million packages during the holidays, up 16.7% from 2015. Bestblackfriday.com, says Friday’s Black Friday sales may drop by 10% in-store to$9.2 billion though online sales may reach $3 billion, up 13%....
Malls are lumbering, claustrophobic dinosaurs, while anchor stores like Macy's and Kohl's are shuttering hundreds of locations. Fresh Direct and Peapod make it easier and quicker to stock a cupboard than wading through the jam-packed neighborhood Kroger, and Amazon and eBay and Overstock sell, well, everything.
Who needs retail anymore?
In fact, 71 percent of U.S. consumers say they still prefer to buy from physical stores even if the same products are available online, according to a recent TimeTrade survey, which also found that 85 percent like to shop in stores because they say they want to "touch and feel" items before buying them.
Online shopping accounts for only about 9 percent of total consumer retail spending, according to the most recent quarterly figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. But make no mistake—everyone from retail behemoths to specialty boutiques is feeling the pressure to adapt more seamlessly to the digital world, to bring in that all-important foot traffic and to deliver an experience that consumers can get nowhere else....
A quarter life crisis is something that most people can relate to. You wake up, look around, wonder what your purpose is, and come to grips with the idea of actually becoming an adult. Most twentysomethings leave it as that and take a bit of time to wallow, soul-search, and (more often than not) commiserate with friends. Not Samantha Jayne. In her mid-20’s, Jayne was working at an ad agency when she encountered her first taste of a quarter life crisis. She wasn’t happy and needed to decide what to do about it.
Jayne had always loved writing, so she started a Tumblr and Instagram chronicling her struggles. She made up poems about her everyday ups and downs and called her blog and Instagram, “Quarter Life Poetry.” The poems she came up with are about working, shopping, her love life, student loans, and other issues relevant to millennials.
Today, the 26-year-old has over 104,000 followers on her Instagram account, and recently released a book version of her project. One of the promotional videos for the book garnered over 10 million hits on Facebook alone. It’s safe to say that Jayne knows a thing or two about how to capture the attention of millennials. She recently spoke at the NewsCred 2016 #ThinkContent Summit and shared her thoughts on how to really speak to millennials....
Do you want more people to join your LinkedIn group?
Are you looking for tips to get more exposure for your group?
LinkedIn groups are a great way to generate leads and increase influence within an engaged community.
In this article, you’ll discover five ways to quickly build a larger membership for your LinkedIn grouP....
Have you been thinking about turning your organization's communications into your version of a metropolitan newspaper newsroom? Here are some examples you should look at.
For a while, it seemed like television was being supplanted by online video as cord-cutting increased dramatically. However, it’s becoming more clear that TV and social media are perfect partners, as tweets and other social posts spike around event television. New data from Nielsen Social demonstrates how much activity surrounds broadcast TV, streaming and cable.
Twitter users are highly engaged during popular shows and live television events, both in terms of hashtags and @mentions. #SB50, the official Super Bowl hashtag, received more than 3.7 million tweets. Other live events like the #Oscars also fared very well, with 2.9 million tweets. And scripted television events scored, with #Empire generating 702,000 tweets and @kanyewest receiving 489,000 tweets during his Saturday Night Live performance.
Whether it’s online streaming, cable TV or broadcast TV, recurring series seem to have remarkable staying power on social. Empire received an average of 387,000 tweets from 95,000 authors each episode, while cable-exclusive The Walking Dead received 435,000 tweets from 150,000 authors on average....
Altspace has also just introduced technology it calls FrontRow that promises to make it possible for thousands of people to watch a performer in VR, yet feel like they’re up close no matter where they’re physically situated.
The company’s first big FrontRow showcase was when comedian Reggie Watts took the virtual stage Thursday night. But when I repeatedly tried to attend the event, I kept getting a black screen instead. Well into Watts’ one-hour performance, I finally got in, as Altspace feverishly worked in real time to fix the bugs.
Nine other avatars were visible inside this "comedy club" environment, not counting the avatar for Watts himself. Alas, the problems persisted—choppy movement, lags, poor sound.
Reggie Watts performs in AltspaceVR. (Photo: AltspaceVR)
AltspaceVR’s CEO Eric Romo concedes that the experience was “mixed.” At peak there were more than 1200 attendees, exceeding company expectations, and about ten times as many people, Romo believes, who have ever gathered before for a single VR event. It was also something of an achievement that attendees could come at it from different VR vehicles.
But then there were all the many people like me who had a heck of a time getting in....
Native Insider: Part of the challenge with "native" is that each organization has a different understanding of what it is. For the purposes of the research, what is your definition of native advertising?
Wu: In our study, we defined native advertising as sponsored content, which features content that is similar and consistent with publishers’ content and is often consumed by readers like non-sponsored content. I agree that there are also other types of native advertising, such as sponsored social media posts or sponsored hyperlinks. We focused on sponsored content because it is widely adopted by many news organizations, including very reputable ones like The New York Times.
Native Insider: Your research found that when content was identified as native advertising, readers expressed a lower opinion of the media outlet it was published in. However, the reputation of the company being promoted was not affected. Can you elaborate on this finding?
Wu: I think this was one of the most interesting findings in our study. We originally expected that both companies and media outlets would be negatively influenced. However, the media outlet was the only source that was affected. On one hand, this indicates that readers are not surprised by the sponsored content from a company, since similar covert marketing techniques have been utilized before, such as video news releases....
In this post, we’re going to review 15 marketing guides that can speed up your success.
We’ll look at the finer details of each guide, ensuring that you have a clear understanding as to how you can use each one to your advantage.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better idea of how each guide can push you down the path to reaching all of your content marketing related goals....
Do you know where to spend your social media marketing dollars? Wondering what works for other businesses? In this article you’ll discover recent insights on the efectiveness of paid social media marketing....
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Do you ever wonder why certain content and ideas become very popular while others fail to gain traction? Derek Thompson’s new book ‘Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular‘ takes an in-depth look at what makes a viral or popular product. The book doesn’t provide a secret formula for virality, however, Thompson provides a lot of detailed research on the key factors that cause content and products to become popular. Here is my take on the content marketing lessons from the book.
Looking for some great social media blogs to add to your daily reading? Here are 10 that are worth your time! Our eighth-annual social media blog contest generated hundreds of nominations. A panel of experts carefully reviewed the 20 finalists based on their content quality. Here are the top 10 social media blogs you should add to your regular reading list in 2017....
With everyone claiming to be an expert should you listen to? This list of 103 marketing thought leaders is made to help answer that question. It's also incorporated into Twitter lists so you can easily follow everyone with a single click.
Remember the days when your brand could reach its audience at scale organically using the major social media platforms? Those days are long gone. Just today, Facebook twisted the knife in the heart of organic social media reach when it announced that its news feed algorithm will place even greater emphasis on "content posted by the friends and family of users," according to a report in the New York Times. Granted, in this case it's at the expense of news media brands, but it's all part of a long-term trend. "Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest—they're not social media platforms anymore, they're advertising publishers," says David Kellis, director of PR and social media for the Clorox Co. Kellis has noticed lately that in his conversations with executives at the social platforms, they avoid the use of the word organic entirely. It's as if the non-paid social media post is a family member who went bonkers and brought shame upon the clan and must never be mentioned again. The shift in focus to paid social media content is redefining, yet again, the role of the PR professional....
The shift in focus to paid social media content is redefining, yet again, the role of the PR professional—a topic that Kellis will dive into in his opening Wake-Up Call session at PR News' Big 4 Social Media Summit, which will be held in San Francisco on Aug. 10. In a way, paid social is bringing public relations full circle.
"At least at Clorox, earned media now comes from creating social media ads that people will share," says Kellis, who leads the social media function for all of Clorox’s brands, including Hidden Valley, Clorox-branded products and Glad. "In the past, we’ve done PR around advertising in magazines and other media. That’s what we’ve come to with social. We’re doing PR to get earned media impressions from the sharing of social media ads. The earned part is critical, because we’re no longer measuring organic social campaigns—that’s completely out the window."
Wondering how to use Snapchat for your business?
Want to create deeper connections with your followers?
Snapchat can help you build an engaged following, increase loyalty, and boost your brand visibility.
In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to use Snapchat for business.
It’s an easy mistake to make.
You slap some words on your About page, wrench them apart, shovel in a bit fluff, a pinch of jargon; and give it no more thought. Because it’s not that important, right?
Not exactly.
You see, this is where so many of us get it wrong, and leak piles of cash in the process. Even though we may pay it less attention, our About page is one of our most visited - which makes it low-hanging fruit, just waiting to be plucked.
By which I mean, if your visitors aren’t captivated, bewitched, mesmerized or just plain hungry-for-more after reading your About page, you can grab yourself a hanky and wave them goodbye.
In other words, you just lost a sale.
Because your About page isn’t just about painstakingly-crafted words that make you look good. Your About page is like speed dating
Let me explain.
Hillary Clinton’s “delete your account” moment was no fluke: Her tweet heard round the world was just the most viral example of her newly aggressive effort to take the 2016 fight directly to Donald Trump on his favorite social media turf.
After a long primary campaign in which Trump has used Twitter to pump out an endless stream of taunts at rivals and gobble up news coverage, Clinton’s campaign has rolled out a strategy in recent weeks to turn the presumptive GOP nominee's own words against him — with some sly sarcasm and snark. Her barbs may appear off the cuff but are sometimes planned and edited well in advance, making the Clinton-Trump war on Twitter an extension of the contrast between their distinct political styles: staff-driven and tightly scripted versus shoot-from-the-hip, aggressive and biting.
Thursday’s skirmish represented the peak Twitter moment of the 2016 campaign so far. When Trump tweeted out an attack on President Barack Obama's endorsement of “Crooked Hillary,” her campaign responded five minutes later with “Delete your account” — a time-honored social media jibe that quickly became her most popular tweet ever, with more than 420,000 retweets and over half a million likes by Friday afternoon. (That far surpassed the traffic of Trump’s infamous “Taco Bowl” tweet from Cinco de Mayo.)
Trump waited more than two hours to tweet a response to Clinton: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up — and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”...
Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
Do you want to pay for a fresh box of golf balls or to get your nails done simply by doing what you are already doing all time time? Well, Pay Your Selfie has just what you need—an app that doles out cash for your moments of mobile narcissism.
The Chicago-based company has attracted 100,000 users since launching in September, accruing 500,000 photos from consumers, many of whom pose with brands. Here's why they selfie up with marketers: They get paid up to $1 when they upload a picture with a brand in it after Pay Your Selfie posts a request for such photos.
Unsponsored selfies—photos in which users do not snap pics with a specific product—pay just a few coins. At any rate, once their digital piggy bank (see below) gets to $20, the company will mail them a check for the amount or donate it, upon request, to their chosen charitable organization.
What's more, brands are forking over cash to Pay Your Selfie on a per-engagement basis, taking the data and utilizing the insights to inform future marketing efforts like creative for ads and packaging for products. The lion's share of the app's users are millennials, the all-important demographic marketers are trying to target....
Coupons are quickly growing as a significant component of beacon-enabled proximity marketing thanks to strong redemption rates, with brands and retailers forecast to deliver 1.6 billion coupons a year by 2020, according to a new report from Juniper Research.
The results point to how proximity marketing is gaining traction as retailers look to engage more deeply with consumers in and around their stores, prompting the volume of beacon-enabled coupons to grow quickly from the 11 million expected to be delivered in 2015. However, the research also underscores the potential danger of turning beacons into nothing more than another offer channel, which is likely to cause shoppers to lose interest.
“I would imagine that coupons will represent a key plank of any beacon-based proximity marketing strategy,” said Dr. Windsor Holden, head of forecasting and consultancy at Juniper Research as well as author of the report....
This past year, we've seen the importance of visual content emphasized by the changes that occurred across almost every major social network, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. At the same time, both video and infographics have become powerful tools for brands looking to communicate more easily with their readers.
To help you keep pace with these trends, let's take a look at some statistics that demonstrate the impact visual content has on reach, engagement, and sales....
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Awareness is not always the biggest factor driving consumers. Some ad and PR people will be crying. ;-)