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In a Digital Economy, Marketing is the Business Glue

July 19, 2017 No Comments

Only 12% of marketing organizations are ‘extremely satisfied’ with current outcomes realized as direct result of their company’s marketing investments, this according to the latest STATE of MARKETING 2017 research. Harvard Business Review study found that only 15% of marketing and sales organizations have the right talent, processes and tools to perform at the highest level.

To learn more about high performing marketing organizations, Ray Wang and I invited one of the top chief marketing officers (CMO), and digital business transformation thought leaders, in the world to our weekly show DisrupTV.

Joanne Moretti is the SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Jabil, and General Manager at Radius Design. Moretti has a universal reputation of driving transformational business outcomes by focusing on developing and cultivating a customer focused culture of innovation, superior quality, agility, sustainability and scale. Moretti has spent 30 years in the high tech and software industry and today proudly servers on the Executive Leadership team at Jabil, a U.S. based design, manufacturing and supply chain services company with 180,000 employees and $18.4 billion in annual revenues.

Radius Design is an innovation and development firm organized to help companies define a strategic path to success and then realize it through superior, user-inspired design and execution. Moretti is the GM at Radius Design, responsible for managing the design firm to drive high value growth for Jabil’s shareholders. Prior to Jabil, Moretti was the VP/Chief Marketing Officer of Dell’s Software division. Before Dell Joanne was the first VP and Dean of the award winning HP Sales University. Moretti is an industry thought leader and is frequently quoted and featured in numerous industry and media publications. Moretti is also a Six Sigma Master and a brilliant follow on Twitter at @JoannMoretti. Her Twitter bio reads: “Advocate for women in STEM and generally helping customers leverage technology as a weapon of mass disruption.”

Joanne Moretti, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Jabil and General Manager Radius Design

Moretti spoke to us about the humility of Jabil and their past tendency to not publicly market their incredible global design, manufacturing and supply chain services. Today, Jabil is helping companies around the globe shift from being only product companies to Internet-connected products and services companies. Jabil guides companies develop purposeful innovation, building products and services that fuel growth and customer advocacy through digital business transformation. Today, Jabil is helping companies develop internet connected products, capable of collecting and analyzing data to help identify new business model innovation and improved service delivery opportunities.

Today, the most valuable companies in the world are software and data companies. Every business is trying to become a software business.

In a Digital Economy, Marketing is About Effective Communication and Connections

In the digital economy, one of the most important roles of marketing in business is to be the glue, according to Moretti. Marketing is bringing the parts of the organizations together to drive digital transformation. Digital marketing is not digital business, it is so much more. Communications about change management, both internally and externally, is a key function for marketers. Organizational change – people, process, tools and ultimately culture – requires a clear understanding of the mission.

Moretti advises CMOs to recognize the importance of being a communicator and connector. Marketing is the most important mission critical success factor to drive change. Being the communication vehicle, the glue, and the function that helps drive alignment is the most important role of marketing, according to Moretti.

Early Customer Conversations Accelerates Concepts to Commercialization

Radius Design is the tip of the spear with Jabil. So many customers come to Jabil to determine what to build and why. Moretti shared with us a customer case study around oral hygiene with a company called Onvi. Onvi collaboration with Radius delivered innovation for oral healthcare, using a connected brush that helps create new business model innovation, while improving the quality of health. Moretti also shared with us the possibilities of using virtual reality in retail. Moretti advises companies to design for manufacturing and scale. She also strongly emphasizes the importance of pricing – the wrong pricing model can kill a product or service.

The Unprecedented Velocity (Speed and Direction) of Innovation Requires Innovative Marketing

Moretti spoke to us about urbanization and the need for smart cities and improved healthcare infrastructure – by 2020, 80% of global human population will be in cities. According to Moretti, the aging population will grow the human population to over 8 billion by 2025 – driving the need for businesses to improve service delivery through personalization, immediacy and intelligent products and services. Technologies like cloud, mobility, big data, artificial intelligence, IoT and VR/AR will disrupt existing companies and drive creation of new business models. Combination of technologies like AI and CRM platform will drive and grow economies to a tune of $1.1 trillion more revenue and 2 million new jobs. Companies are fighting to stay relevant by working with Radius Design and Jabil to identify new ways to compete in the age of the connected customer.

We You are a Dog, Don’t Try to Be a Cat

Moretti advises companies to digitize what you do best – for Jabil, that’s supply chain management. Do what you do really well, and close adjacency, and invest your talent and investment to further improve true differentiation of your company. Keep doing what you’re good at, and continue to build on adjacencies.

There is definitely transformational design and innovation nirvana at Jabil and Radius Design. Moretti and her team work closely with companies to develop leading-edge capabilities that are designed for manufacture-ability and scale. She is also marketing the capabilities of one of the most successful design, manufacturing and supply chain services company in the world with Jabil and Radius Design. Moretti is pioneer CMO and a design and innovation expert. She is doing an incredible job of guiding companies, helping them bring concepts to commercialization in record time. To learn more, please watch our video conversation with Joanne Moretti.

By Vala Afshar

Sourced from HUFFPOST

In News

Email marketing up 83% since 2015 as B2B marketing grows by 200%

July 18, 2017 No Comments

By Laurie Fullerton

Never underestimate the power of email – a cornerstone for both traditional marketing and consumer-facing market strategies that has seen an 83% growth in B2B and B2C markets since 2015.

According to new research released by Salesforce, who polled 3,500 global marketing leaders, at either a manger level or higher position for its fourth annual State of Marketing report, email experienced the largest surge in consumer-facing marketing programs, with email use by B2C marketers rising 106%. This surge indicates that marketers may be testing new channels in conjunction with proven ones to find combinations that work for their consumers. Marketers also report higher levels of awareness, engagement, and acquisition when combining email with additional marketing channels according to Salesforce.

The Salesforce report also found that video advertising has experienced the largest two-year growth in B2B marketing, with video use growing 204%. Email was the second-highest advertising channel in growth for B2C marketers, but trailed video advertising’s growth of 141%.

Video advertising was closely followed by SMS/text messaging, a channel that grew 197% in the B2B market. B2B email marketing, on the other hand, has only grown 56% since 2015.

A marked trend among high-performing marketers is that they are 12.8 times more likely to combine marketing efforts across channels such as email, mobile, and social. On average, marketing leaders today say that 34% of their budget is spent on channels they didn’t know existed five years ago and they expect that to reach 40% by 2019.

The reports also suggests that about half (51%) of the emails are identical messages to what they have broadcast in other channels. This is considered to be a missed opportunity for most marketers who may not be evolving fast enough between email and other channels based on customer behaviors or actions.

Additionally, 51% of respondents said their emails contain the same messages as other marketing channels, while 29% of email messages evolve across channels and customer actions.

As in previous report iterations, Salesforce analyzed the differences between self-identifying high-performing and low-performing marketers.

By Laurie Fullerton

Sourced from THE DRUM

In News

How to Grow a Premium Brand Without Killing its Soul

July 13, 2017 No Comments

Managers of premium brands face a perennial dilemma. How do you grow a premium brand without killing its soul?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A unique brand cachet attracts its core high-price-paying customers. But what happens when you seek to expand sales to the masses by offering lower prices? In recent years, outlet stores located hours away from glitzy shopping districts have sprung up everywhere. They are selling off-season and lower-tier merchandise at a fraction of regular retail prices. They have become significant sources of revenues.

The conventional wisdom is that relying on revenues from outlet stores can destroy the brand’s prestige over time. But according to a forthcoming study in the journal Marketing Science, outlet stores may actually help improve the brand’s cachet.

The study, “Why outlet stores exist: averting cannibalisation in product line extensions,” was authored by Donald Ngwe of Harvard Business School.

Ngwe analysed five years of customer sales data covering over 16 million customers and 27 million transactions from a major high-end fashion firm with hundreds of regular and outlet stores around the country. He found that the brand’s core customers are picky about wanting the latest products and are willing to pay premium prices, but are unwilling to travel very far to buy the brand.

In contrast, the larger mass of customers who aspire to consume this brand, but are price sensitive, are not only willing to travel the long distances to outlet stores, but are also not very picky in their tastes for the latest products and willing to tolerate lower quality. Therefore outlet stores expand revenues with limited cannibalisation of revenues from the core high paying customer base.

Taking into account this strong negative correlation between taste for quality and new products and willingness to travel for shopping among the core and mass segments, Ngwe modelled the firm’s product introductions in regular and outlet stores. He found two key results. First, the availability of outlets for selling older products to mass consumers means that firms can take more risk and introduce more new products at faster rates at its regular stores. Second, as outlet stores absorb the customer base of price-conscious customers who need less service, the firm can invest in greater service at regular stores. New product introduction at regular stores increases by as much as 16 percent. Ngwe said, “Here is the kicker. Even as outlet stores generate significant revenues from the masses, they help the brand increase its cachet among its core customers through more new products and higher service.”

The conventional wisdom that outlet stores can be detrimental to a premium brand’s health arises from failing to recognise the positive spillovers from outlet stores on regular retail stores. Ngwe noted, “For the brand we studied, there is little cannibalisation of regular store revenues by outlet stores. Moreover, outlet stores have positive spillovers in terms of higher service and more frequent new products in regular stores. So the net effect of outlet stores is to increase brand cachet.”

However, Ngwe cautioned, “Critical to our conclusion is that core customers would not shop at outlet stores due to their aversion to traveling long distances. This may not be true for customers of other brands, particularly lower end ones. Also, pure online brands cannot use travel distances to separate their core and mass customer segments. Online premium brands will need to find other means to differentiate their upscale and mass offerings.”

The complete paper is available here.

In News

31 Simple Marketing Cheat Sheets For Business Owners That Don’t Understand Marketing

July 13, 2017 No Comments

By John Rampton.

Marketing your business can be tough, and it helps to have excellent resources to keep you up-to-date and effective.

This list covers 31 of my favourite guides, checklists and cheat sheets that cover the basics of marketing: everything from SEO, to email marketing, to social media, to blogging. Add your favourite cheat sheets in the comments at the end of the post!

1. The Ultimate List Of 53 Blog Post Ideas For Content Marketers

An infographic listing 53 types of blog posts you can use to inspire your next post. Ideas include lists, how-to’s, case studies, rants, interviews and many more.

2. The Keyword Research Cheat Sheet

What types of keywords should you be targeting? Which tools should you use? What types of sites should you try to compete with? This excellent cheat sheet from the folks at Penguin SEM answers all these questions and more.

3. Social Media Marketing Checklist

You know you need to be using social media, but you’re not exactly sure how or why. This checklist will help you define your target audience and then figure out exactly what you should be sharing on various platforms.

4. SEO Best Practices For Blogs

You know SEO is important if you want your blog posts to rank in the search engines. But where do you even start? This infographic outlines the six most important elements you need to include if you want your posts to rank.

5. 101 Copywriting Do’s & Dont’s

Not everyone is a natural-born writer. This comprehensive list tells you exactly how to write content that gets engagement and helps you accomplish your goals.

6. Website Pre & Post Launch Checklist

Do you have a brand new site you’re eager to launch? Not sure what you need to do, and in what order? This simple checklist will help you figure out what needs to happen and when. Includes guidance on content, social media, analytics, optimization and much more.

7. The Ideal Length Of Everything Online

Ever wonder exactly how long your tweets, blog posts and subject lines should be? This infographic tells you the optimal length you should aim for if you want your content to succeed.

8. A 50-Point Checklist For Creating The Ultimate Landing Page

Landing pages are essential for converting visitors into customers or email subscribers. This comprehensive checklist lets you check off all the elements you need to keep in mind when creating your own landing pages.

9. Best Practices For On-Page Optimization

You know it’s important to use keywords in your content, but may not know exactly how. This downloadable guide from Marketo will walk you through exactly how to find, use and track your keywords most effectively.

10. Copywriting Cheat Sheet

Did you know writing for the web, for email and for social media all require slightly different strategies? This cheat sheet from Vertical Response outlines best practices when writing for a variety of different marketing channels and platforms.

11. 140 Web Buttons & Calls-To-Action

This free, downloadable file from Hubspot includes seven sets of buttons you can use on your website. Bonus: The download also comes with a guide on how to write effective copy and calls to action for your landing pages.

12. How To Use Facebook For Business: 25 Facebook Marketing Tips & Tricks

Most business owners use Facebook for their marketing, but may not totally understand how to use it effectively. This cheat sheet will show you how to set up a Facebook page and use it to drive traffic and leads for your business.

13. The Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet

Ever wonder why some posts, memes or videos go viral, while others flop? This cheat sheet from Kissmetrics outlines seven ways to give your content the best chance of going viral.

14. Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet gives a brief overview of some of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy. Includes info on marketing to produce more sales, how to cut your marketing budget without losing customers and how to boost results using creativity.

15. Link Building Tactics – The Complete List

Link building can be a time-consuming process, but it helps to have pretty much all the most effective strategies in one place. This comprehensive guide covers dozens of link building strategies, while also letting you know a) how long each one takes, b) what competencies you need in order to do them, and c) the value of each link.

16. How To Create East, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing Personas

Creating personas allows you to understand exactly who needs your product, and how you’re going to market it to them. This comprehensive guide from the Content Marketing Institute will walk you through all the whys and hows of creating and using personas in your marketing.

17. A Complete Checklist For Social Media Managers

This checklist breaks down social media tasks into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks. It’s the actual checklist used by Sprout Social’s social media manager Darryl Villacorta, so you know it will be good!

18. How To Get More Likes On Facebook

Do you struggle with growing your Facebook page? This infographic from Kissmetrics covers the most effective strategies for increasing likes, comments and engagement on your page.

19. 10 Strategic Mistakes On Twitter

Sometimes the best way to figure out how to do something right is to understand what you’re doing wrong. This infographic gives a visual representation of the most common mistakes you could be making that are sabotaging your efforts on Twitter.

20. Digital Marketing Cheat Sheet

Ever hear terms like “CTR”, metadata, sitemap or “AIDA” and wonder what on earth they mean? This cheat sheet does a pretty good job of defining some of the most common words and phrases you’ll encounter in the online marketing world.

21. The Beginner’s Guide To SEO

This comprehensive guide, written by myself and marketing guru Jayson DeMers, covers everything you ever wanted to know about SEO. From doing keyword research, to link building, to what to do when things go wrong – this guide has it all.

22. The Beginner’s Guide To Online Marketing

Another beginner’s guide, this one provides an overview of everything you need to know about digital marketing. Grab a cup of coffee before you dig into this one…it’s going to take a while!

23. A Complete Guide To Local SEO

If you have a local business, you might have noticed you need to use some slightly different SEO strategies. Following the techniques in this guide will ensure your local business gets found in the search engines by customers looking for what you have to offer.

24. The Definitive Guide To Engaging Email Marketing

This 150+ page downloadable guide covers everything from how to keep your emails engaging, to the latest research on subject lines, to how to choose an email marketing service.

25. 8 Secrets To Writing Faster Blog Posts

Who doesn’t want to save time when it comes to writing blog posts? These eight tips are actually pretty spot-on in describing how to be efficient when it comes to writing for your blog.

26. The Best Content Marketing Checklist To Make You More Successful

This checklist lives up to its name. In fact, it’s not just one checklist, but thirteen. Includes the Keyword Research Checklist, Email Marketing Checklist, Landing Page Checklist, and ten others.

27. 12 Things To Do After You’ve Written A New Blog Post

Ever get frustrated by the lack of traffic and engagement you get from your blog posts? This list gives practical tips for promoting your posts so they get in front of the largest audience possible.

28. The 2016 Sensible Social Media Checklist For Businesses

Written in 2016, but still very much applicable in 2017, this checklist covers how to find your target audience and how to engage with them on each of the major social media platforms.

29. The 10 Commandments Of Using Pinterest For Business

Think Pinterest isn’t the right platform for your business? Think again. This simple cheat sheet will walk you through the ten most important strategies almost any business can use to get leads and sales through Pinterest.

30. Marketing Metrics That Matter Cheat Sheet

Do you ever get confused as to which metrics are important for your business? Bounce rates, open rates, unique visitors, re-tweets – which ones actually matter most? This cheat sheet covers all the most common metrics you should be tracking.

31. The Instagram Cheat Sheet

Wondering how, when and why you should post to Instagram? Look no further. This guide provides a great, visual overview of best practices for using Instagram for your business.

By John Rampton.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Now There is an Awards Ceremony for Micro-Influencers

July 12, 2017 No Comments

New awards ceremony honours influencers based on engagement, authenticity and creativity.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Okay so we here in Ireland are not yet at the stage where we are awarding micro-influencers. But in the U.S., they certainly are, and we could learn a lot from our fellow marketers across the Atlantic.

Marketing company #HASHOFF, which helps marketers connect their products with micro-influencers, have held a competition for the most impressive micro-influencers.

The winners and the work they do can be found on the #HASHOFF’s website.

According to a recent #HASHOFF study, the majority of influencers (52%) on the platform spend up to 3 hours creating posts. Said Joel Wright, President of #HASHOFF, “Micro-influencer marketing is a powerful medium for consumer engagement, and we wanted to honour the incredible creators we’ve partnered with to help brands spread their message authentically on these platforms. Influencers spend hours carefully crafting each post to ensure that brand integration is as authentic as possible. These are highly talented individuals and it is important for us to highlight their content and give them the recognition they deserve.”

The #HASHOFFS Award Winners:

Overall Category, the winner is Chase McNary for his post for Bud Light.

Engagement: In this post, Chase created an original song for Bud Light and the Broncos, which drove 121K views and engagement rates nearly 4X industry norms.
Authenticity: Pulling off a home-brewed jingle for a product is something worth commending. The best creators invest a great amount of effort into creating content for their audiences.
Creativity: Chase is someone who truly loves the beer. Great influencers are not actors but rather share their lives and the things they love on a daily basis. What they like matters to their followers.

Video Category, the winner is Priscilla Gonzalez for her post for Estrella Jalisco.

Engagement: Averaging about 90K engagements per post, Priscilla’s boomerang for Estrella Jalisco absolutely crushed her average, with over 275K engagements, because it resonated so authentically with her audience.
Authenticity: Priscilla has a large Hispanic following in Los Angeles, so posting about a Mexican beer and event in Los Angeles was the perfect fit.
Creativity: Priscilla’s excitement to be attending the event comes through in this boomerang for Estrella Jalisco.

Food & Beverage Category, the winners are Lily & Chloe Clem for their post for Pizza Hut.

Engagement: Averaging 30K engagements per post is no small feat. Lily and Chloe have built an authentic and engaged fan base with content revolving around their everyday lives.
Authenticity: What kid doesn’t like pizza and video games? While looking for influencers with a family friendly fan base, it was obvious Lily and Chloe’s account was perfect for Pizza Hut and XBOX.
Creativity: Showing true excitement about a product is a large part of the creative process. Lily and Chloe’s enthusiasm shines through in every post.

Sports Category, the winner is Dale Brisby for his post for Busch.

Engagement: Dale received some of the highest engagements for this Busch campaign. This post received 10% higher than the normal average for video posts at the time of this campaign.
Authenticity: His audience is the exact audience that Busch was looking for this campaign – working class, and small town.
Creativity: This campaign was perfect in terms of timing. Dale had just finished a remodel of his basement so a video about that opening for his friends was perfect.

Event Category, the winner is Michele Gonzalez for her post for Poland Springs.

Engagement: Showing support and enthusiasm for the activities and products you love can do wonders for engagement metrics. Michele’s followers responded positively to her post about the Brooklyn Half Marathon where she and her friend set a personal best time.
Authenticity: Tapping into a specific interest, like running, helps build an authentic, genuine audience. Michele’s followers are interested in running and athletics which was key in securing the right influencer for the Brooklyn Half Marathon collaboration with Poland Springs.
Creativity: Being creative while engaging in an event or activity can be a challenge. Michele thought hard about the type of pictures she would capture at the event as well as the copy needed to support this campaign ahead of time. The product was both creative and well planned.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Category, the winner is Nick Coolridge for his post for PowerBar.

Engagement: Nick has a dedicated following across multiple social channels, making him the go-to influencer for those with an interest in movement artistry.
Authenticity: Nick is conscious about the products he consumes as his career and ambitions are predicated on his ability to perform. Nick was a natural fit for PowerBar as he personifies the major marketing pillars: active, works out in the outdoors, cares about quality supplements and snacks.
Creativity: Nick takes his creativity to a new level each time for brands. Most often he will be upside down in one way or another-a common theme throughout his posts.

Entertainment Category, the winner is Gabby David for her post for LiveNation.

Engagement: Gabby’s custom video created for Live Nation received nearly twice as many engagements as an average daily post received the following week on her account.
Authenticity: Gabby has a gift for inserting branded content in a highly authentic manner. For the Live Nation campaign, she created content that both appeared organic to her followers while, at the same time, conveying the brand’s messaging.
Creativity: Gabby was able to incorporate the premise of the show she was promoting by creating her own version of the show. This allowed her community specific insight into what they can expect when attending the show.

#HASHOFF is a pioneer of micro-influencer marketing for brands of all sizes and across all industries, with more than 150,000 influencers opted into the platform worldwide. The company say their algorithms combine keywords, geography, interest and past campaign performance to identify and activate the best micro-influencers for each brand in any given moment. “By sourcing authentic influencers to create and distribute organic content on a brand’s behalf, #HASHOFF helps brands create more meaningful relationships with consumers and drive brand engagement metrics that vastly outperform those of traditional social media marketing.”

In News

Now Available…The First Mobile Marketing Chatbot That Knows Your Return On Ad Spend

July 11, 2017 No Comments

Tunebot provides mobile marketers with an automated tool for interacting with their advertising spend data.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Marketing company TUNE has announced the release of tunebot, the first chatbot built specifically for the mobile marketing industry. Tunebot, available within the team messaging service Slack, is designed to enable TUNE customers to quickly and easily interact with marketing and advertising data such as quickly looking up reports or calculating return on ad spend.

For example: Tunebot: Show me app installs in May, by day:

By logging into the Multiverse product, TUNE customers can setup tunebot and then ask it to return specific results, graphs and charts that highlight key metrics like the cost per click on Google Adwords, the number of app installs by day, or over time, revenue per impression, as well as return on ad spend. Enabling tunebot is as simple as authorising TUNE for your Slack team and then logging into Multiverse directly within Slack. More information about how to enable tunebot can be found here.

Says Jennifer Crook, Marketing Manager, Revl, “We integrated tunebot with Slack to give us quick updates on our daily performance without the need to check the platform manually. I can check volumes and CPI by channel or platform just by typing to tunebot in Slack, which saves us time and allows us to make optimisations faster.”

Says Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE, “We believe all marketing should be measured and judged on performance. To be most effective, marketers also need access to measurement and performance in different forms, depending on what they need to know. The first of its kind, tunebot adds a new layer of quick access to KPIs or partner performance by simply asking a question. I’m really excited to see how marketers use tunebot. It will continue to evolve quickly the more requests it receives, so please start using it and sending your feedback!”

For marketers, understanding the link between return on advertising spend (ROAS) and bottom-line results are vital to dialling up a winning mobile marketing strategy.

The people at TUNE say that their bot can integrate ad spend data from more than 150 ad partners together with attribution data in one unified system. Included within the TUNE Marketing Console, Multiverse is a marketer’s system of choice for tracking and reconciling ad spend, installs revenue and ROAS.

In News

Small Businesses Say Getting Fans and Followers on Social Media is a Struggle

July 10, 2017 No Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Canadian company Little Dragon Media recently surveyed 500 small business owners and asked: “What part of your company’s digital marketing do you struggle with the most?” The survey discovered that “Getting fans and followers on social media” was the most popular response, overthrowing SEO.

Female business owners struggle with social media, while their male counterparts struggle with SEO more.

“The results were a bit surprising to me,” states Amine Rahal, CEO of Little Dragon Media. “When we launched the survey, I assumed that most businesses would choose SEO as being the hardest, since it can take years to rank high organically on search engines, especially in competitive niches.”

“Ranking high on search engines” was the second most popular option, measuring at 26.2%. Blogging came in third at 19.4%.

Reputation management swept in fourth swallowing up 13.4% of the survey pie, and “Finding a trustworthy agency to help us” came in last place measuring at 11%, suggesting that this was a non-issue for many businesses.

Social media marketing’s lead over SEO signals that small business owners today highly value social media community development. They also show signs of struggle in efforts to figure out how to get the best results when compared to SEO, an established digital marketing service which is now also influenced by social media community development.

According to Rahal, survey results show how social media has swept into the forefront of the overall digital marketing landscape.

Says survey moderator Monica Guan, “In the current digital era, having a strong social media presence and ranking on Google are the best and low-cost ways to reach your local audience. Just by the fact that business owners are struggling with these aspects show that they do realise the importance of these factors to their business, but may not have the know-how to succeed in these areas.”

55.7% female small business owners report social media community development being the most difficult struggle when compared to their male counterparts who reported at 44.3%.

Guan says, “Female business owners may care more for the social media of their business and sees it as a priority that needs to be improved on. This shows that not only do many business owners require more education about how to use their social media and gain more fans and followers, but more education to male business owners on the importance of social media to their business.”

The full survey is here.

In News

Positive Emotions Are More Contagious Than Negative Ones on Twitter

July 7, 2017 No Comments

Sharing happy news with your Twitter followers? Odds are, they’re more likely to share it than a negative post according to a recent study.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An analysis of 3,800 randomly chosen Twitter users found that emotions spread virally through Twitter feeds – with positive emotions far more likely to spread than negative ones.

“What you tweet and share on social media outlets matters. Often, you’re not just expressing yourself – you’re influencing others,” said Emilio Ferrara, lead author of the study and a computer scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. Ferrara collaborated with Zeyao Yang of Indiana University.

Ferrara and Yang used an algorithm that measures the emotional value of tweets, rating them as positive, negative or neutral. They compared the sentiment of a user’s tweet to the ratio of the sentiments of all of the tweets that appeared in that user’s feed during the hour before. Higher-than-average numbers of positive tweets in the feed were associated with the production of positive tweets, and higher-than-average numbers of negative tweets were associated with the production of negative tweets.

About 20 percent of Twitter users were deemed highly susceptible to what the researchers described as “emotional contagion” – with more than half of their tweets affected. Those users were four times more likely to be affected by positive tweets than negative ones.

Those least likely to be affected by emotional contagion were still a little less than twice as likely to be affected by positive tweets as negative ones. Over all users, regardless of susceptibility, positive emotions were found to be more contagious than negative emotions.

The study builds on decades of research demonstrating first that emotions can be spread through person-to-person contacts, and now finding that they can spread through online interactions as well.

Facebook drew criticism last year for attempting to demonstrate a similar effect by tweaking 700,000 users’ news feeds. Unlike that experiment, Ferrara and Yang did not manipulate what Twitter users were experiencing – rather, they simply observed what was already happening and analysed it.

So what does that mean for marketers? Positive news tweets are more likely to go viral than negative tweets…especially if they contain positive emotions! Get that smiley emoji ready for lauch!

In News

Social Media Data Crunching Contains Pitfalls for Marketers

July 5, 2017 No Comments

Researchers urged to hone methods for mining social-media data, or investment in marketing will be wasted.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A growing number of people, from marketers to academic researchers, are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behaviour. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market.

But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets. This is according to computer scientists at McGill University and Carnegie Mellon University.

Such erroneous results can have huge implications on data gleaned from social media. A lot of marketing investment could be placed in the wrong areas.

The challenges involved in using data mined from social media include:

Different social media platforms attract different users – Pinterest, for example, is dominated by females aged 25-34 – yet researchers rarely correct for the distorted picture these populations can produce.
Publicly available data feeds used in social media research don’t always provide an accurate representation of the platform’s overall data – and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams.
The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured. For instance, on Facebook the absence of a “dislike” button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive “likes.”
Large numbers of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behaviour.
Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics, and events, making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are. For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65% accuracy for typical users – even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90% accuracy.

Many of these problems have well-known solutions from other fields such as epidemiology, statistics, and machine learning. The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they’re actually analysing when working with social media data.

Social scientists have honed their techniques and standards to deal with this sort of challenge before. Says Derek Ruths, an assistant professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science, “The infamous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline of 1948 stemmed from telephone surveys that under-sampled Truman supporters in the general population. Rather than permanently discrediting the practice of polling, that glaring error led to today’s more sophisticated techniques, higher standards, and more accurate polls. Now, we’re poised at a similar technological inflection point. By tackling the issues we face, we’ll be able to realise the tremendous potential for good promised by social media-based research.”

In News

@Millennials Wary of #Twitter

July 4, 2017 No Comments

As marketers, we must be aware that Millennials are low on trust when reading the medium.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study indicates young adults have a healthy mistrust of the information they read on Twitter.

Nearly anyone can start a Twitter account and post 140 characters of information at a time, bogus or not, a fact the study’s participants seemed to grasp. This is according to Kimberly Fenn, assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University.

“Our findings suggest young people are somewhat wary of information that comes from Twitter,” said Fenn. “It’s a good sign.”

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the first to examine social media and false memory. Participants were college students from the so-called Millennial Generation. Twitter, with 230 million users, is most popular among people in their teens and 20s.

Fenn and MSU colleagues showed 74 undergraduates a series of images on a computer that depicted a story of a man robbing a car. False information about the story was then presented in a scrolling text feed that bore a high resemblance to Twitter or in a feed from a more traditional online source.

The researchers tested whether the students integrated the bogus information into their minds, which psychologists call false memory. The results showed that when the participants read the “Twitter” feed, they were much less likely to form false memories about the story.

Fenn said the students were more mistrustful of the Twitter feed than they were of the more traditional feed.

“We propose young adults are taking into account the medium of the message when integrating information into memory,” Fenn said.