Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The term “dark social” is kicked around every so often by marketers. But what is it, how does it affect your brand, and how you can measure it?

Messaging apps continue to be on the rise with no end in sight, and they come with a bunch of new opportunities for marketers. The prize: billions of active monthly users, including coveted millennial and Generation Z consumers. The four most popular messaging apps already have more monthly active users than the four major social networks. According to a recent estimate, 16 percent of the world’s population is using Whatsapp.

The marketing potential is endless. AI-based technologies are bridging the gap between users and brands on a one-to-one basis, offering bots for ordering pizza and settling customer service questions in private.

There are great examples on how brands are leveraging this, but the age of messenger communication also comes with a new set of challenges that already have an impact on your brand. The question is: How big is that impact, and how are brands supposed to measure it?...

Think back to the best shopping experience you ever had. Chances are it involved a well-informed and upbeat salesperson who engaged with you, asked about your needs and guided you through the purchase. You left knowing you made the right decision.

This kind of conversation-driven sale—high on empathy and knowledge, low on price and haggling—has long been a staple of successful retail loyalty. It focuses on understanding the needs of consumers and delivering an exceptional experience. But in today’s continually upended shopping environment, that conversation between seller and buyer is as likely to take place with an AI-driven bot as it is with a friendly associate.

Welcome to the age of conversational commerce.

Coined by Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, the term “conversational commerce” refers to the ability of a digital tool to interact with a consumer using natural language. Combining rich interfaces and AI, retail brands are using tools like virtual assistants and chatbots to scale relevant, personal and helpful interactions with their customers. And the timing couldn’t be better for an industry that needs to tip the scale back to providing a great shopping experience....

No one, it seems, has come up with a good way to harness all the videos, photos and tweets that budding creators post every day on YouTube, or the Facebook media juggernaut, or its smaller Snap-pier rivals.

Stepping into the breach is Social Native, a company with a fresh $8 million in financing and a well-pedigreed executive team that’s hoping to give brands a way to use social images and messaging as a more effective advertising channel.It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that was able to draw in SoftBank Capital to finance the company’s planned investment in an algorithmically based tool that identifies prolific social media users whose content meets certain standards.

“Early on, we human audited creators to understand content quality & eventually built an AI algorithm to better understand & predict content quality,” wrote Bhaji Illuminati, the company’s chief marketing officer, in an email. “Over time, creators are vetted via participation in the marketplace, as content is rated & repurposed by brands as creator value increases.”...

For many brands, the substance that’s all the rage with tweens is a recipe for revenue, with the likes of Michaels, Elmer’s and McCormick & Co. all benefiting from the trend.It started quietly last summer, when social media watchers began buzzing about it. Tweens had struck on a recipe for a mucilaginous, stomach-turning substance and were posting videos of themselves playing with it.

The slime trend had hit.In fact, slime’s now bigger than ever. Devotees of the glutinous gunk—easy to make by combining glue, water and borax—have posted some 2.8 million images and videos of the stuff on Instagram. Search “slime” on YouTube, and you’ll get 11.9 million results.

Which is (mostly) good fun for kids who, to many parents’ delight, have actually found something analog to do. But slime’s biggest impact isn’t on kids at all: It’s on the bottom lines of brands that sell or make the ingredients for it....

Q: What kind of content should a local business develop?

A: The kind that converts!

Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate:

There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to.

Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web....

“When you tell people you work at National Geographic, you get incredible reactions. It’s revered, trusted, and stands for quality. And, they’ve been at the content game for close to 130 years,” she says.

On the other hand, Cress says her role feels more like being at the helm of a one-year old company.

“National Geographic Partners is a joint venture between 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society. We’re like a well funded startup, working on reinventing and reinvigorating the brand,” she says.

But with so much history to rely upon, however, the brand is hardly resting on its laurels. Instead, it’s continuing to push the boundaries of innovation and technology, just like it did back when Alexander Graham Bell was the president of the National Geographic Society. He was the one to make the then-controversial decision to start including photography in the magazine, something that was considered to be a lowbrow, tabloid way to sell magazines....

The inbound movement has always been about one thing: being relevant and truly helpful to your audience.

This approach shouldn't change, but as technology and internal company relationships change, marketers and salespeople must learn how to adapt to better serve their customers.

To better understand how our relationships with consumers and coworkers are changing, we collected data from more than 6,300 marketers and salespeople from around the globe, which we've compiled in the 2017 State of Inbound report. It examines the relationship between company leadership and employees, details on collaboration between marketing and sales teams, and a look at what the industry’s foremost marketers are adding to their strategy in the coming year....

In 2017, the industry's love affair with Instagram isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Digiday recently checked in with a number of fashion and beauty social media insiders at SXSW's Decoded Fashion and Create & Cultivate events, confirming that Instagram remains a top priority in their digital marketing strategies.

"Instagram is always a priority for us," Rosi Sanchez, a social media strategist at Fossil, told Digiday. "We have more reach and a larger new follower group there, so it leads to more conversions. Until we get to 1.5 million or 2 million followers, it’s going to be our number one priority."

Fossil isn't alone. Social media strategists from more established brands like L’Oréal USA, Shopbop, and Murad also indicated that Instagram was their top social media priority for the foreseeable future.

Brands from any industry looking to level up their visual storytelling chops should keep a close eye on fashion brands for inspiration. To help get you started, we've compiled a list of 15 fashion accounts -- both big and small -- who are crushing the Instagram game. Take a look below, and start planning your next big Instagram push. For a deeper dive on how to build a presence on Instagram, check out our complete guide to Instagram marketing. 

The fourth edition of Street Fight’s Local Merchant Report, based on a survey of small business owners and decision makers, launched today. The data shows a continued movement to social media as a preferred marketing tactic among local merchants. They deem it their most effective tactic, so they’re increasing their spending.

Analysis of the survey suggests that would-be marketing suppliers can help them integrate social with their own site and email campaigns, as well as assisting them with reputation management and reviews.

Street Fight surveyed over 250 local merchants on their marketing and e-commerce usage, effectiveness, and challenges. The digital marketing usage trend is consistent with what we’ve seen in previous years’ surveys. Social usage is up slightly from last year, and email marketing retains its number two spot. That’s at the expense of print: newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising are each down by almost half.

Those patterns will only get more pronounced. Over 40% of local merchants we surveyed said they would increase their social media spending. Email and local sites will see increases, according to 35% of those polled....

“Will artificial intelligence replace marketers in the near future?” This is the compelling question posted by Loren McDonald of IBM Watson Marketing.

Think about all the structured, repetitive and rules based tasks you might do on a regular basis as part of your job as a marketer.

They are all open to being completed by an AI service. Not only could they be completed by a computer, but they could be done faster and with fewer errors. That could free marketers up to spend time on managing even more programs without additional staff.

Now, if you’re wondering what roles and tasks are at risk, Loren shared this list:

- Easily repeatable

- Data-centric

- Tasks that improve with learning

- Rules drive tasks

- Reporting

- Customer and segment analysis

- Campaign automation

- Media buying

- Campaign testing...