Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Pinterest isn’t just for sharing photos of delicious recipes or crafts anymore. Check out this infographic to see how retailers are driving traffic to their brick and mortar locations using Pinterest....

When it comes to social media, there is an ongoing focus on driving traffic to your digital home bases and outposts such as websites, blogs, and social networks. But how about using these channels to drive traffic to your physical store?

In a recent post on Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel presents a series of data-driven Pinterest tactics that drive sales to brick and mortar retail locations. These findings are part of larger study, From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, that offers some great insight on the factors that impact consumer social purchasing decisions.

This infographic summarizes the 5 key tactics that retailers can use to help drive in-store traffic....

Social media ROI is a messy business. How do you bring some order to it? There’s no getting away from it. The higher up the sales funnel, the harder and messier it is to make decisions on measuring ROI. Social media is, like any channel (if you choose to view it as one) not perfect to measure, though far from hard to get a good handle on it, and to compare channels with channels using techniques like Google’s Multichannel funnels or social reports.

It’s the scale of choices that become complex. It’s much easier to post rationalise and retrospectively connect the dots, but not easy to plan for it – otherwise why is ‘viral’ still so remarkable in social media – and why we don’t see the experts doing amazing campaigns repeatedly.

It’s always been a challenge, attributing the value of visitors through multiple channels, social media has made that more complex. Certainly when compared to lower down the funnel the touchpoints are more measured and explicit, visitor-to-goal completion is relatively simple to monitor and quantify.IAB suggests 3:1 return on social media investment...

The research revealed that, four out of five consumers said they would be more inclined to buy a brand more often in the future after being exposed to a brand’s social media presence, while 83% of consumers exposed to social media would trial a brand’s product. ...

When debate around sheryl sandberg's 'lean in' took a negative turn, agency sparks and honey urged client to scrap key theme of upcoming effort.

When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's modern feminist manifesto "Lean In" ignited negativity, Hyatt was forced to pull the plug on a main element of its content marketing strategy, months in the works. The quick decision was based on numbers as much as gut instinct. Hyatt's agency Sparks and Honey was monitoring digital discussions surrounding a theme the young Omnicom shop had determined was a good one for the hotel chain to hook to its brand: "women having it all."

"They called me up to say it's getting a little bit dark in that space," said Dan Moriarty, director of digital strategy for Hyatt, who said the firm originally intended to include the concept of women having it all as one of the trends around which it planned to build a campaign aimed at career-minded women.

When, about two days before the activation was planned to start, Sparks and Honey showed Hyatt it had tracked 80-some negative reactions to Sandberg's book, the partners decided to scrap the theme, despite three months of planning.

Instead, they replaced it with "travel hacks," or digital tools for making the most of travel. Other trends that Sparks and Honey had isolated as appropriate to align with Hyatt this spring were also relatively innocuous: among them yoga and meditation, getting a good night's sleep and maintaining rituals while traveling....