Word of mouth is a coveted form of marketing. There is nothing like your customers talking positively about your brand, product and services. Google suggests that the value is on the Zero Moment of Truth where consumers jump online to check out a brand before purchase. The way customers buy has changed. The purchase path is no longer a funnel from awareness to sales; it is now a loop. Feedback from the brands and product experience informs repeat and new purchases.

A well-conceived live brand social campaign can encourage great reviews and recommendations. Our research shows that, while 37% will join the brand’s social networking page or profile after a live experience, 54% will recommend the brand to a friend. As well as that, 33% will write a positive review based on their experience of live events with social.

Because review and comparison sites are so popular, not to mention easy to find in the search engines, it is not surprising that consumers will consult reviews from previous customers before making a purchase. So having impromptu, positive reviews and genuine recommendations from your target audience can add untold value to a brand.

Lending more weight to our research, the Harvard Business Review states that 76% of consumers cite word of mouth as their main influence when making purchase decisions compared to traditional advertising – and that word of mouth has been found to be 10 times more effective than TV or print.

53% of consumers become aware of a live experience from a friend’s social media activity and over half (53%) are motivated to share on social because they want to connect with friends online. To take it one step further, you can use this information to actively encourage social word of mouth.

Monitor the conversations around your experience. Look for the advocates and identify influencers and fans and then actively engage with your advocates directly, give them more reasons to talk about you and your products, and even invite them to your next live experience! By doing so you are creating and encouraging brand evangelists who will ultimately do your advertising for you by word of mouth.

Download the full report and share your thoughts on live brand social with us bit.ly/LiveBrandSocial #LiveBrandSocial 

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Although Vine is still a relatively new app, it has shown that it has clout with brands and advertisers in a short period of time. Vine is a mobile app that lets you shoot six-second videos, or Vines, to share on social networking sites. With brands continuing to utilise the app, take a look at Annie’s five tips for making an amazing Vine:

1) Have a clear message

The unique aspect of Vine is the fact that you only have six seconds to make your point. Having a clear message and structure to your video is essential to making a good recording. For example Nintendo uses Vine as a teaser to preview future products to fans.

2) Tell a story

Even though you only have a short amount of time, it is possible to tell a story over Vine. For their Valentine’s day campaign Tropicana cleverly utilised Vine by showing a brief love story between oranges, finishing with a Happy Valentine’s Day message.

3) Be creative and entertaining

The whole point of Vine is to be as visual and creative as you possibly can within six seconds. Brands need to remember that if you want your Vine to have viral potential then it has to be unique and entertaining!

Look at these winning Vines from the #6SecFilms competition earlier this year for inspiration!

4) Engage Your Followers in Conversation

At its core Vine is a social media platform; this means brands should take the opportunity to get engagement from their audience. A great way to integrate Vine with social is to ask your audience a question via Twitter and then show them the answer through Vine.  For example, book retailer Simon & Schuster used Vine to engage with their fans by asking them what they were reading over the weekend.

5) Utilise the loop feature

Although this may not be a popular aspect of Vine the fact is that all videos automatically loop. The infinite loop forces you to be more creative with your video’s ending as you have to try to find a way of smoothly transitioning the ending and beginning of your video. Brands can utilise the loop feature if their brand name is mentioned in the video, garnering continued exposure.

Images courtesy of Vine

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I’ll admit it. In the early days of my first PR job I flung my press releases far and wide, hammering as many contacts as possible in the hope that somewhere, somehow, the story would stick. Did it work? No. Did I receive seething emails from journalists informing me that slinky men’s swimming tangas were ridiculous and irrelevant to their macho motorist readership. Yes.

It was my first lesson in the pitfalls of assuming that one-size-fits-all. Because journalists, much like consumers, prefer a more personal touch.

This works on a micro scale – your local grocer, optician and milkman might know you by name and know enough about your typical shopping basket to tailor their product recommendations. You probably appreciate it. On a macro, e-commerce scale, this means tracking customer journeys and capturing customer data in order to serve relevant content and offers. Do consumers appreciate it?

According to a recent infographic by Monetate, 85% of consumers are aware that brands track their online shopping behaviour, but they are also aware that this enables the brands to match content to their interests. What’s more interesting is that 75% of the consumers polled actively preferred for brands to use their personal details to improve their shopping experience. In other words, their desire for relevancy and personalisation superseded the need for privacy.

The demand, it seems, is there. But what about the return?

According to Retail Week, the fashion giant, Arcadia, incorporated personalisation software into its e-commerce platform that enabled the company to track customer behaviours and serve up recommended products personalised to each individual customer. Products based on real-time stock information guaranteeing that the products were available to purchase at that time. As a result Arcadia saw online order values increase by 67%, while 7% of e-commerce sales have been attributed to the group’s personalisation pilot.

Personalised customer service is as old as commerce. But for digital and social marketers alike, the shift from generic mail shots, all-encompassing websites and mass-market messaging to an entirely more personalised approach to consumers, is an emerging trend that looks set to firmly cement itself into the digital psyche of 2013.

Infographic courtesy of Monetate

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Rumours are plentiful that Facebook will begin to roll out a video advertising offering this summer. This would have Facebook users finding video ads popping up in their Newsfeeds, as soon as July this year. The video ads would begin playing in silent mode, until the Facebook user opts to turn on the sound, upon which the advert would recommence with volume.

It is clear why Facebook is looking to roll out this new feature; it is yet another attempt at pulling in additional advertising revenue. It also nods to Facebook’s desire to become a player within the TV advertising space, enabling brands to extend their TV campaigns to the realms of the social network.

This new advertising option would offer clear benefits to brands. According to Singh Cassidy, founder of JOYUS, ‘people are five times as likely to buy a product from a video advert than from a picture on an e-commerce site, and buy five times as often’. Furthermore, as more and more brands wisen up to the importance of using visual content on social, vying for user attention is becoming increasingly challenging. The new video advertising format would offer brands a new means of standing out from the crowd.

It is expected that Facebook’s major brand players, including Coca-Cola and Nestlé, will be the first to experiment with the new advertising format, through a series of trials. However, their introduction is expected to be a slow one; the last thing that Facebook wants is for the ads to drive away users!

Facebook, the ever-evolving beast – whatever next? Share your opinion on the latest advertising development.

Image courtesy of Foter

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Social media continues to revolutionise corporate culture. It opens up new avenues of communication, breaks down barriers between employers, employees and the public, and provides new opportunities for brands to put a human face to their image.

CEOs are no exception to this quiet revolution. Customers want to see that even the big bosses are humans with their own personalities, peculiarities and life stories. Here are two examples of CEOs using social media to communicate their personality to their employees and the general public:

T. Boone Pickens and LinkedIn

The CEO of BP Capital, T.Boone Pickens, has attracted 246,500 followers to his LinkedIn Influencer profile despite having only posted 23 updates. He writes about the economic developments of the energy market, politics as well as sharing his own personal experience of leading a multi-billion dollar business.

LinkedIn users are looking for authenticity and genuine insights into the CEO’s personality. Unsurprisingly, the most engaged post from Pickens is therefore not about his opinion on the free market approach to the energy market, and not on his views of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is in fact about his office desk!

Can there be a better case for corporate authenticity on social media?

George Colony and Twitter

The CEO of Forrester Research is not using Twitter very often – his tweet frequency averages to around 0.2 tweets per day. Despite this, he has attracted over 13,000 followers. How did he do it? Admittedly, his brand name has a role to play in the follower acquisition process but, more importantly, he engages in an authentic conversation.

Interestingly, George Colony mainly posts plain tweets. His posts contain no replies or links, which indicates that the tweets are authentic, designed purely for communication on Twitter.

His tweet distribution considerably differs to that of Richard Branson, who mainly posts links to the corporate pages of his business:

So, what have we learnt from T. Boone Pickens and George Colony? Authenticity trumps frequency and authenticity trumps impersonal corporatism. Be who you are and get out there. Social media users will recognise your honesty and your social authority will grow because of it.

You may also find this infographic on CEOs and social media thought-provoking.

Images courtesy of LinkedIn, Twitter, Twtrland

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In its bid to constantly evolve and improve the mobile experience for its billion-strong user base, Facebook has introduced a brand new feature for their Android and iOS users.

Chat Heads have recently debuted on Facebook’s mobile apps, allowing users to keep a list of conversations going on without having to switch apps.

Here is how it works: if you view one of your friend’s profiles a circular “chat head” appears. Tap the Chat Head to reply, drag them around, or flick them down to close.

This is a nice touch that adds a layer of interactivity to Facebook’s mobile offering, particularly a comic element, as you can drag individual Chat Heads onto photos (take a look at some examples from Mashable)!

If you are looking to chat on the move using the Facebook mobile app, then this is a nice touch that allows you to find out what’s happening on the News Feed while chatting, instead of having to use Facebook Chat in a separate window.

What do you think of Facebook’s new chat feature? Let us know your thoughts!

Image courtesy of Facebook

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LinkedIn has been making a sea of changes recently to its service, and a new feature unveiled this week promises to be very exciting indeed.

LinkedIn announced that their 200 million users will soon be able to mention connections and companies in conversations on the site, which has the potential to drastically improve the amount of conversations on LinkedIn and have numerous benefits to share content and ideas.

To mention your connections on LinkedIn all you need to do is type the name of a connection or a company in your status update box, or a comment field on the homepage. A list of your connections will then appear in the drop-down, so just select the relevant person. The person or company you mentioned will then receive a notification alerting them to the fact that they have been mentioned.

LinkedIn have taken a leaf out of Facebook and Twitter’s book with their mentions feature, and it gives users the possibility to target specific connections with their content and updates, as opposed to sending it out to their entire connections list.

So far users will only be able to mention users they are connected to and people they have already engaged in conversations with in groups, but the feature has the potential to increase engagement on posts on LinkedIn, so it is definitely a step in the right direction.

What do you think of LinkedIn’s new mentions feature?

Picture courtesy of Duncan Hull, Flickr under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution License

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There have been many questions raised as to the benefits of using Pinterest for business. The visual content hub is increasingly being used as a way of linking back to other, often text based content. Brands can post images on Pinterest to lead users to content on other platforms, such as their website.

Take Topman as an example, Topman uses Pinterest as a vehicle for promotion, pinning images of its products to urge consumers to visit their official site and make purchases:

Opinions on the use of Pinterest for business may soon change, with Pinterest having announced the roll out of a web based analytics tool, which will allow companies to track their Pinterest traffic. This feature will include data such as how many people have pinned from a site, the number of views each pin has, and how many users have visited a site from Pinterest. This brilliant tool is now available free for companies with a verified website. It’s an ideal way for businesses to discover what content is working for them and what they can improve on. Will the launch of this new analytic platform see a host of new businesses jumping aboard the Pinterest train?

Pinterest is focusing on building foundations to monetise this year. It is said that the web analytics tool is the first of many updates which they are aiming to reveal this year. Other updates include ‘suggestions’ for users based on what they have already added to their boards and a plan to launch international pages later this year.

We wait with interest to see what Pinterest will reveal in months to come…

Picture Courtesy of Pinterest, Red Pinterest Logo, under a creative Commons attribution – sharealike 2.0 Generic License

Picture Courtesy of Topman, Pinterest & Mashable 

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Social media networks, in particular Twitter, have been under the limelight in the past week due to an outbreak of pictures claiming to identify the two killers of James Bulger, who was murdered 20 years ago. UK police have ordered social network users to stop outing the released murderers. Before the intervention, the picture had already been retweeted 100’s of times – it allegedly showed a picture of the killer as he looks today. Although the pictures now appear to have been removed from the social media sites, they are still sparking much speculation:

@metrouk: Sharing on Twitter could land you in jail ow.ly/i3apr – And why are the #Bulger killers entitled to lifetime anonymity?

— Bobby Abedeen (@BobbyAbedeen) February 26, 2013

This is a prime example of both the power and speed of social media – within minutes an alleged picture of Venables was circulating with little the police or anyone else could do to quickly stop it. Now we hear that Twitter users who shared the picture could face a possible jail sentence!

The UK is starting to build up a track record of going after Twitter users. Many of us became aware of the do’s and don’ts of tweeting after the Lord McAlpine case. Lord McAlpine sought libel damages from Twitter users over incorrect insinuations linking him to child sex abuse. He has since dropped threatened legal action against Twitter users with fewer than 500 followers and is now concentrating on receiving £50,000 in damages from Mrs Bercow, in what is expected to be the first high court libel trial!

There are still so many social media users who are blissfully unaware of the law when it comes to posting on social media networks. We all constantly share updates, feelings and opinions on our social news feeds with little to no thought. Technology law expert, Luke Sconion said that Twitter users have felt a “safety in numbers”. However, there are now many areas where Twitter users can come unstuck.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia, Twitter Logo

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I recently read a blog post that ranked universities in the US on how well they were engaging with social media. I thought it might be interesting to look at how our UK establishments were shaping up alongside them. Traditionally speaking, social media is not something associated with red brick universities. Although UK universities might not have spawned social giants like Facebook from their dorm rooms, our universities do seem to be heavily involved in social media activity.

Whilst researching their social activity it became clear that universities were using social platforms for many of the same reasons that any other brand dabbles in social: to engage with existing fans (or students and alumni in this case), increase brand awareness and to entice potential customers.

To determine which University was most engaged in social media I looked at the Twitter follower numbers, Facebook Likes accumulated the UK’s top 20 universities as well as looking at how many other platforms they were active on.  Surprisingly, despite the age that we live in, some of these universities were still making it hard to track down their networks and some had so many it was just plain confusing.

Without further ado here are the top 3 universities by social media engagement:

Oxford

First off is Oxford. They might constantly be battling it out with Cambridge for the number one spot in the university league tables but they are coming up on top when it comes to their social media. The famous university had very active social profiles. Their Facebook Page in particular is full of fantastic photography and images, branded videos, and competitions to engage fans.

How they did it:

Clear signposting to social media from website, regular updates, engaging visual content, historical references.

Cambridge

Cambridge weighs in at number 2. Cambridge’s approach to social media shares many similarities to Oxford (heavy in the scenic photos of the city etc) but it is Cambridge’s use of other platforms such as YouTube and Flickr that really impresses. Their Facebook has a YouTube app that boasts an impressive range of Cambridge videos and their Flickr allows us to peep into Cambridge life.

How they did it:

Engaging visual content that was highly shared amongst users, excellent use of alternative platforms to Facebook and Twitter and informative, research-based posts.

Glasgow

A bit of a surprise entry, but Glasgow prove they can play with the big boys when you examine their Facebook and Twitter pages. The Scottish University’s social platforms have high fan and follower numbers as well as an impressive range of specialist Twitter pages for different departments and societies. The responses to queries on Twitter are always promptly answered and the university hosts a number of different blogs that let people explore everything from English Literature to how students are getting on when studying abroad.

How they did it:

Having a number of separate Twitter pages to host departments and societies with different interests, quick response times and an impressive range of blogs.

Images courtesy of:

The University of Oxford official facebook page – cover photos

The University of Glasgow’s official facebook page – cover photos

Public Domain Pictures, Old Building Castle Cambridge Student, Pixabay under a creative commons public domain dedication license

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