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24 Reasons Social Trends Are Driving Leading Brands to Modernize

By Peter Getman
Principal and CEO
If you think about it, the primary driver of impactful marketing is capitalizing on how we communicate with one another as human beings.  And because that communication system has changed so drastically, it only makes sense that brands must follow suit.

We took a look at the full breath of how social media is amplifying brands at unprecedented levels. Here are 24 social media statistics and trends that are causing modern brand managers to rethink how they allocate marketing dollars to best reach out to consumers.

  1. The average Facebook user has 138 friends and 50% of users check their Facebook news feed daily. Therefore, we assume each Facebook share can influence an average of 65 consumers (Facebook) simply by deciding to “like” a piece of content.
  2. 68% of Facebook users “share” a product they like, which means each unique share can lead to roughly 44 more users being exposed to the product (Facebook)
  3. Fans of a brand spend $71.84 more per year than non-fans (Syncapse.com)
  4. Fans of a brand are 21% more likely to continue using a product. (Syncapse.com)
  5. Fans of a brand are 41% more likely to recommend a product. (Syncapse.com)
  6. Fans cost 15% less to convert to repeat customers than non-fans (TBGdigital.com)
  7. Fans enable social advertising, which creates a virtuous cycle of organic word-of-mouth
  8. The Internet has grown 14% since 2009 (Internetworldstats.com)
  9. There are 152 million bloggers whose reach is staggering (Blogpulse.com)
  10. 77% of consumers would use information from blogs to influence their purchasing decisions
  11. 175 million people log on to Facebook every 24 hours (Facebook)
  12. 65 million of the 175 million logging on to Facebook each day are doing so with a mobile device
  13. There are 30 billion Facebook shares per month (Facebook)
  14. Twitter marketing jumped from 3% of companies to 49% in 2009 (Econsultancy.com)
  15. 84% of internet users view videos online (Comscore.com)
  16. There are 2 billion videos watch daily on YouTube (YouTube.com)
  17. The number of people using Facebook would equate to it being the 3rd largest country in the world
  18. Google+ is the fastest growing social medium ever, being the fastest to 10 million, fastest to 25 million, etc. In fact, it took Google+ only 24 days to reach 20 million users, vs. Twitter: 1035 days, and Facebook: 1152 days.
  19. $3.08 billion will be spent to advertise on social networking sites in 2011, a 55% increase over 2010
  20. 53% of people on Twitter recommend companies or their product in Tweets
  21. 43% of all consumers are social media fans or followers of a brand
  22. There are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook
  23. A brand’s recall, based upon the rule of seven, determines that on average, a person must be exposed to a traditional ad 7 times before purchasing a product, however, 34% of users are likely to use a product immediately, if someone in their social media sphere of influence recommends it (i.e. word of mouth recommendations / sharing).  This represents a 66% reduction in cost.
  24. A recent survey states consumers are willing to spend 9.7% more on a brand that provides good customer service (StellaService.com). Social media enhances the ability to deliver rapid customer service, while allowing other consumers to witness the positive experience.

Is your brand modernizing to take advantage of these trends?

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Peter Getman 10.18.2011 @ 6:54 pm Comments Off

Is Your Business Ready to Modernize Your Brand?

By Peter Getman
Principal and CEO

If you haven’t yet, then “We’re starting TODAY” is the only right answer.

When was the last time you were compelled to modernize your brand’s marketing? When the World Wide Web was born? Remember your first website? Was it a KILLER website? Probably not … for most brands it took five generations of websites to meet expectations if they are even considered met today.

I remember when we built the first five websites for dozens of brands.

Each time, we got to do so because we identified new delivery mechanisms, mediums and digital practices that our client’s competitors had not yet discovered. If we hadn’t been ahead of the curve, their competitor’s agency would have been.

We’ve always been early. MicroArts Creative Agency purchased New Hampshire’s first Mac workstation for $14,000 in 1989. MicroArts.com must be one of the older URLs in New Hampshire having gone live in March of 1995. Our curiosity fuels our ability to consistently help our clients capitalize on the next big trend in brand marketing (hint).

So when did companies start getting websites right? It certainly wasn’t early. In the old days it was simply one-way communication from your brand to its target consumer cultures. The only way these consumers could find your site was if you specifically begged them visit as part of your advertising. Google wasn’t born yet and SEO was far from being an acronym anyone understood. It shouldn’t have been so hard to get it right. Right?

Heck, most eventually figured out how to work within the confines of enabling technologies. After a number of years we somehow pried the web site keys from the chief technology officer and chief information officer and turned them over to the chief marketing officer. This took place after an odd period when software programmers were forced to take on the role of website designers. And finally – following the stress of WAY too many go-live dates missed – the actual content on the website was properly funded and resources (plural) were allocated. Remember when the marketing director started writing the copy for a site, the week before the launch date? It was probably the most writing they had done since they completed English 101 as a college freshman.

You get the point. For most, it was a sh*t show that went on for WAY too long.

This wasn’t the time for technology, websites or marketing to evolve to meet business needs. It was the time when businesses needed to evolve to accommodate the new world of digital marketing. Websites had become the front door of their business. Open 24/7/365, it’s where the first stories were told and where customer purchasing decision were initiated.

CEOs hear me, WE’VE MOVED THE FRONT DOOR!

In fact … there are millions of them.
And many of these doors come with “opinions” built in them.

Your front door(s) is still where the first stories are told, but it now takes place on the social mediums where your consumers observe, learn, share, socialize, inspire, react, like, love and buy. It is your consumers who will be initiating most of the stories and leading the conversation. The consumers are influencing one another at an unprecedented rate and writing a new chapter in marketing history.

With all this change in our business, comes opportunity. So may the best brand win and I believe they will.

I think it’s awesome.

Modernizing can truly be at the core of your brand’s next differentiation strategy.

So start here:

  1. Reallocate your 2011 budget significantly for 2012.
  2. Start the agency review process next week.
  3. Hire an agency that has the experience to guide the transformation of your business from the bottom-up to sync with escalating consumer expectations of your brand’s communications.

Which agency?

  • If not the MicroArts team, hire the right agency. **
  • Hire an agency out in front that has the experience to guide YOUR BUSINESS TO BE READY.
  • Hire an agency with a reputation for teaching you. ***
  • Hire an agency with a proven creative process disciplined by best practice principles for every modern marketing discipline they offer.
  • Hire an agency to lead the integration of all marketing with a hub laced with social media amplification.
  • Hire an agency with a team that wants to kick the living snot out of your competition.

Almost lastly, to my fortune 5000 friends and brand managers – you need to update your brand book right now. Your brand’s voice in social media (SoMe) is the new first three chapters of your brand book. Your brand will soon be “handled” by a 100 times more people than ever before and therefore the guide to do so must mature into a dynamic, living, breathing section of your brand book.

It’s the next generation brand book that guides your brand’s voice in social media with the protocol and methodology to scale with confidence to the demands of your modernized consumer.

Three years ago, I challenged myself with this vision and encourage you not to wait five generations to get it right.

PS: Hiring the college intern to do social media is a really stupid idea. It’s the voice of your brand and it’s VITAL that they are trained to communicate and amplify it.

** Our clients are growing fast, so we’ve grown to support them. At the moment, we only have room for one new client that is ready to modernize and thus position itself for fast growth.
*** If you only have your thumb on it, you need more thumbs. It won’t be long before your competitors have dozens of employees, trained and ready to seed, join and inspire conversations where your customers are making decisions today.

Be sure to check out Part II of this post here:
24 Reasons Social Trends Are Driving Leading Brands to Modernize

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Peter Getman 10.14.2011 @ 7:18 pm 2 Comments

I can’t hear you

By Peter Lee Getman
CEO

It is time for your brand to get emotional.

Consumers are emotional creatures. Their decision to buy one brand over another is more visceral than cerebral. They want to feel like they are making purchasing decisions that align with and better their lives.

So exactly why is it that so many brands are barraging consumer’s minds with gobs of feature/benefits messaging? Why not simply entice me with one primary reason to buy that simplifies my decision?

These questions surfaced recently when I researched pet food brands and realized that the vast majority have a lot to say but fail to appeal to that which makes us human – our emotions. It’s frustrating that big brand packaging is riddled with strategic messaging and positioning tactics. It’s a buckshot approach to branding that makes products less distinct, overly complicated and ultimately less understandable to consumers.

(psst: It appears that pet food brand managers are more concerned with what category the retail buyer considers them in ¾ as opposed to “the single unique reason why I’ll just have to buy it for my dog.”)

Position your brand to resonate with a single correlating emotion. It’s about aligning your brand with what your target demographic WANTS to feel or ASPIRES to be. Brand to a single aspiration to feel better, healthier, safer, sexier, tougher, cleaner, smoother, happier, thinner, richer, smarter or faster.

If you tell a brand’s story that captures your consumer’s feelings, you’ll naturally stand out on the shelf as the right fit for them. It’s the emotional ROI a brand promises the consumer before they buy.

It’s vital to introduce this story with the brand’s Why-to-Buy statement (WTB) – a single clear, concise and memorable statement that your consumer can read on your packaging when standing in the middle of the store aisle up to six feet away.

How you tell this story to the consumer is often referred to as the “big idea”.

The idea must first be capable of cutting through the noise of competing brands and capture the attention of time-challenged consumers. It must also resonate enough to convince them to try your brand’s new promise of value rather than buy their known and preferred brand, which is often sitting right next to your brand on the shelf.

Out of 17 brands I reviewed at this show, only 5 brands use strategy that capitalizes on these best-practice brand principles.

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Peter Getman 10.11.2011 @ 5:20 pm 1 Comment

4 Reasons Why Brands Will “Like” the New Facebook®

Devon Dawson
Content Specialist

You’ve probably heard the hype, right? Smelled the unmistakable scent of Silicon Valley anticipation in the air? The tizzy started at the F8 Developer’s Conference in September, when Facebook® (the social media behemoth with over 800 million active users worldwide––you’ve probably heard of them) announced it was going in a different direction. Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised the newest site upgrades would re-think and redefine how people use the Internet. Those are pretty bold proclamations, but are they worth this much fuss?

Well… yeah. Don’t worry, we’ll explain why.

One of the additions introduced during this rollout is called Timeline. This feature will now allow Facebook® users to curate what information is shared, and essentially control the way the social media world views them as a person. By creating dynamic and distinctive custom pages, the social network believes users will be better able to tell the story of who they really are to their community at large, leaving a much more unique digital footprint.

The other new way Facebook® plans to share information is with its Ticker feature. This addition will update less static data from its users –– including minute details like what they ate for breakfast, what they are currently working on in the office, etc. –– and tell the story of users’ more trivial activity; or as Zuckerberg aptly coined, “a lightweight stream of everything that’s going on around you.” The social network even partnered with companies like Spotify®, Hulu®, and Netflix® to give its users updates of the songs their friends are listening to, shows and movies they’re watching, etc.

The easiest way to distinguish between the two may be to consider Timeline as the big picture vision of a user’s social media persona, whereas Ticker will track more mundane, day-to-day activity. Both of these features, however, will play equally pertinent roles for future branding and marketing campaigns!

How, you ask?

Authentic Demographics

Well for starters, as more and more users refine their profiles with Timeline, the Facebook® landscape will slowly settle into self-defined demographics (the new look of a profile is shown below). Users will be able to easily augment their profile so it reflects how they perceive themselves, which in turn gives marketers the opportunity to learn what people truly like and dislike.

Just think: a quick glance at a person’s profile will now establish if a user views himself or herself as a passionate but realistic careerist, a stay-at-home parent, a pet-loving artist, so on and so forth. Moreover, this information won’t be determined by conventional means, but by the people themselves. No more hoping surveys, focus groups, cryptic university data, computer generated algorithms, or old stereotypes of the industry will tell you what a demographic really cares about. Timeline has the potential to turn intimate, consumer communication into low hanging fruit for everyone!

Photo Courtesy of Facebook.com

Genuine Storytelling

Being able to tell a compelling, authentic narrative with Timeline isn’t just relegated to users either. Often the hardest aspect of starting a brand campaign is conveying its foundational beginning, and its aspirational mission. Now your Facebook® profile will take care of that. Naturally. So your humble origins and growth will be tracked by fans, and create a relatable launching point for wherever your success takes you. What’s not to like about that?

Speaking of “Likes”, these expanding options also include a widening user vocabulary. Ambiguous words will be eschewed for more expressive terms that will help you dial into a specific audience.

Instant Gratification

Don’t be fooled by Ticker’s “lightweight” descriptor either; it too will revolutionize the way consumers are targeted. With the torrent of information it provides, marketers will get real time responses to campaigns they launch, and can adjust according to the desires of the very people they’re aiming for. Users will have more information at their disposal too, and since Facebook® promises to control the noise-to-content ratio, things like “Shares” will have added value.

App Potential

While the new format may force brands to leverage themselves a bit differently, the opportunity for innovative app integration (some examples below) has grown exponentially. Having a stellar digital arts team means you can find different ways to share your product with consumers, who can then share that information with their friends and family. Or the random people from high school that have friended them.

Photo Courtesy of Facebook.com

What advice, then, do we have for brands out there: Be smart. Be aware. Be proactive.

Treat those like a mantra.

Ostensibly, both Timeline and Ticker mean you will have a better grasp of whom you’re speaking to, and given a bigger megaphone to get your message heard. The new Facebook® will be a social platform in which all the things its users do, no matter how small, will be recorded and shared. You’ll have to think creatively and re-imagine how your brand can become integrated with your customer’s social identity––successful brands will be the ones that incorporate their products seamlessly in the lives of their customers.

Yet understanding what motivates purchases or turns people away from your product will be easier than ever before, with genuine data and analytics being produced (literally) every second of every day. Use what it is around you to help grow your brand into what you want it to be. Go out and intelligently find and isolate your market, but do so with thoughtfulness and sincerity. And finally, be the real people you are! Just because Facebook® users have greater options to tune you in, doesn’t mean they won’t just as quickly tune you out.

So you’re right, Mr. Zuckerberg, these are pretty powerful feature additions. And Facebook® may very well change the way everyone uses the Internet. Again. But still no “Dislike” button? Damn. You can’t win them all.

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MicroArts Creative Agency 9.30.2011 @ 6:34 pm Comments Off

Is Your Brand Only A Click Away?

By Taylor Luke
Senior Designer
Illustration of people using mobile devices

Eat, Sleep, Breath, Tweet.
A study last year found that the average young American spends nearly every waking hour online. Whether they are on their computer, iPad, smart phone, TV, gaming system, or other device, they are constantly connected.

Many parents might panic at the idea of pale, bleary-eyed kids sitting in the dark brainwashed by media when they hear this statistic… but the older crowd is no less accustomed to having internet access whenever we want it. Who hasn’t–at some point–pulled out their tablet PC on a bus ride to catch up on the news, checked in through a location-aware app at their favorite restaurant, or (gasp) taken their phone with them into the bathroom?

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said there is no need for concern. Constant access to media is unavoidable, and is “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.” Basically, if you are a parent: get over it… And if you have a brand: make sure everything you do to market your brand has a way to interact for these constantly-connected consumers!

Even the most traditional media can become interactive. For example, billboards have turned into an interactive game for McDonald’s. As a promotion in Stockholm, the fast food chain has created a product-themed arcade game on a massive digital billboard. Passersby can go to a website (http://picknplay.se/) from their phone to connect directly to the billboard and play the game live projected for everyone in the area to see. If they beat the 30-second challenge, their phone automatically is sent a digital coupon for a free McDonald’s treat.

Packaging has turned into a social media success for the SpecialK cereal box. They are using the entire real-estate on the back of their package for a “What will you gain when you lose?” interactive promotion. Consumers write a word in the branded word bubble design on the back of each box, take a picture of themselves with that word and upload it to the brand’s Facebook page.

Even a local letterpress studio I recently visited is using their 19th century printing machine to print a QR code pointed to their website on takeaways for customers who leave the store. Ironic? Perhaps. Effective? Definitely.

It’s time to connect.
More and more brands are finding creative ways to make their printed materials transcend their traditional confines. How can you transform your offline media into an opportunity for more interaction?

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Taylor Luke 6.16.2011 @ 6:24 pm Comments Off

Mobile Marketing: Strong Numbers, Stronger Results

By: Walter Elly, Senior Director; Emerging Technology

There are some new numbers on mobile out from Google that are pretty compelling from a marketing perspective. 1 in 3 cellphone carrying Americans are smart phone owners. That’s nearly 70 million people (up 13% from last quarter). But what are those 70 million doing on their phones and what is the marketing potential for that group?

A recent study by Google reveals that in 2011 the opportunities marketing is high on mobile, take a look at their video that tells the tale:

Some highlights:

  • 81% browse the Internet, 77% search, 68% use an app, and 48% watch videos on their smartphone.
  • 90% of smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.)
  • 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer

That’s tens of millions of people who are taking valuable actions related to brands because of their smartphones. Is your brand up to speed on the mobile internet? With these kind of numbers it better be, because consumers are seeing it on mobile every day, whether you’re ready or not.

If you’re already up to speed then Google has more good news for you – mobile advertising is effective, very effective:

  • 82% notice mobile ads, especially mobile display ads and a third notice mobile search ads
  • Half of those who see a mobile ad take action (with 49% of that group making a purchase and 35% visiting a website)

Those kinds of rates are incredible, especially when compared to the numbers associated with display ads (where for example, click-through rates are just 0.2% on average).

Is your brand taking advantage of these numbers? It’s time you go mobile and get results. MicroArts can help, drop us a line if you’d like to learn more.

[Opening paragraph data source: comScore]

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michaleencraig 5.12.2011 @ 12:00 am 2 Comments

Do You Know What Your Website Looks Like on an iPad?

By Michaleen Craig, Developer

It’s been a year since the initial launch of the iPad and a month since the launch of the iPad 2. The tablet revolution is here and it’s here to stay.

If your website uses Flash (for video, messaging, eye candy) then I hope you’ve thought about what your iPad users are seeing in lieu of Flash. Steve Jobs does not mince his words when he tells us that Adobe’s Flash application will not be integrated with iPad.

Do you care about iPad users?
Who are tablet users? Techies, moms, college kids, toddlers in the back seat? In my opinion, tablet users are a passive audience who are casually observing the web. They are most likely: watching videos on YouTube; checking in on Facebook; reading the day’s news.

Who is the audience for your website? What are the chances that they are dialing up your site from a tablet? If you think even 10% of your site’s audience is coming to your site from a tablet, you should be seriously thinking about WHAT they see when they get there!

Does your site need Flash?
What purpose does Flash serve on your site?

I often tell people that one of the best parts of my job is that it is constantly evolving. New technologies bring new challenges. Make sure that your brand evolves, too!

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MicroArts Creative Agency 5.10.2011 @ 1:01 am Comments Off