Toyota's Torrance, Calif.-based U.S. sales arm is hoping, with a more emotional positioning, to appeal to younger baby boomers (40- to-60-year-olds) with a just-launched campaign for its large sedan, the Avalon. And the new version of the car, which Toyota first showed in New York last April, also evinces Toyota's effort to change its game in terms of vehicle design -- especially important now that quality represents table-stakes and almost every automaker has raised that game. The new effort for the car, which was designed at Toyota's Calty studio in SoCal, and its design studio in Michigan, puts the reliability and quality message on the back burner and leads with an emotional appeal. The focus: how designers and engineers pulled the Avalon -- whose look evinces Toyota's new design -- out of the void. The campaign, via Saatchi & Saatchi L.A., includes two TV ads, one of which shows the Avalon emerging from an inky vapor -- intended as a metaphor for the design “formula” -- as the camera caresses the car’s design elements. The ads are on network and cable television shows such as "Top Chef," "Rizzoli & Isles," "Royal Pains" and "Modern Family." The marketing campaign also delivers on the new “Let’s Go Places” brand theme launched in the fourth quarter. The major focus is on digital, with Web films on YouTube and Toyota.com, plus partnerships with Pandora, Hulu, Trip Advisor, CNET and Food Network. Scalability is part of the digital strategy, with the campaign optimized for Web, mobile and tablets like Kindle Fire, iPad and iPhone platforms. Another critical component is search-engine optimization to make it easy for consumers to go from big-screen message to little-screen engagement, per Colin Morisako, advertising and planning manager for Toyota. Awareness is a major issue for the car. Morisako tells Marketing Daily that about 50% of the target demo knows Avalon. "It's a target we have never spoken to," he says, adding that the screen-agnostic digital strategy is intended to help cure that. "We studied the media habits of this target, and found they are very receptive to advertising on second screens; they are watching TV with their tablets in their laps, and whatever intrigues them sends them online to learn more." Current owners are around 67 years old, the oldest demographic in Toyota's lineup. "What has excited me about this is that it speaks to me, and I'm in the wheelhouse for this campaign," says Morisako. He says the brand did a handraiser program last year and got more than 100,000 people interested, and the average age was in the 50s. "We are generating interest with the right people." Morisako explains that demographic research also had a social anthropology vector that found that young boomers switch screens as fast as younger consumers. "We sat with folks in their homes and were able to see how they interacted with their televisions: when they are captivated by a spot they go immediately online and research it. So we want to make that process easy." //
Brand marketers take for granted that most consumers know the ins and outs of social media and search engines, but a study released Wednesday reveals that this is untrue. Some 70% of adults online know how to post to a Facebook wall, but only 54% understand how Facebook generates revenue. It may seem incidental, but a better understanding would produce higher engagement and conversion rates. Men demonstrate a higher understanding of Facebook's monetization strategies at 57%, versus women at 51%, according to findings from The Search Agency and Harris Interactive's study "2012 Online User Behavior and Engagement," which analyzes consumer behavior and knowledge around social networks and search engines. The findings can help marketers create better strategies to interact with potential and existing customers. For example, more online men -- 37% -- know the character length of a tweet, compared with 27% of women. When it comes to Pinterest, 48% of women know what it means to "pin" something online, compared with 42% of men. When asked how search engines make money, nearly 29% of survey respondents believe brands pay annual dues for use, while 20% believe that users pay for premium search features. More than one-third of U.S. online adults believe search engines sell users' personal data to marketers About 22% of survey respondents click on paid-search ads, but results show behavioral variations by region and age. Breaking down clicks by U.S. region shows 29% in the South, 20% in the Northeast, 19% in the West, and 17% in the Midwest. Millennials are nearly twice as likely to click on search engine ads compared with their older counterparts. About 30% of Americans ages 18-34 indicate they click on search engine ads, which is nearly double the rate of Americans age 35+ at 18%. Just more than three-quarters of the U.S. online population realizes that advertising is a source of income for search engines. A little more than 2,000 adults participated between Aug. 14 and 16, 2012 in the online U.S. survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of The Search Agency. //
Coke Zero was clearly well-prepared to cap off its long college football marketing season by scoring with Crimson Tide fans. Immediately following the team’s 42-14 defeat of Notre Dame in the BCS National Championship game on Monday night, Coke Zero ran a TV ad saluting University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. In the ad, Coke Zero and the coach’s wife, Terry Saban, salute “what’s possible” through her narration of moments from the coach’s life in which he overcame the odds to achieve things that others said he couldn’t do. “They said he couldn’t marry the head majorette from the rival high school…they said he couldn’t make ends meet as a graduate assistant coach…they said he couldn’t lead Alabama to our first national championship in 18 years…and they said he couldn’t win three titles in four years,” she says. “He said: ‘It’s possible.’” The theme connection: “Throughout his life and career, Coach Saban has shown what’s possible. Coke Zero, which made it possible to ‘Enjoy Everything’ by combining Real Coke Taste and Zero Calories, salutes that spirit,” said Andy McMillin, VP, Coca-Cola Trademark, Coca-Cola North America. Coca-Cola is also reminding Crimson Tide fans of its past links with the coach and the University of Alabama. For instance, the company’s PR on the TV spot notes that as a child, Saban “used to stock the Coca-Cola cooler at his father’s service station,” and that he drove a Coca-Cola truck to earn extra income while he was a graduate assistant at Kent State (hence the “couldn’t make ends meet” mention in the ad, which is accompanied by a shot of a Coca-Cola truck). Coke also mentions that Saban has participated in local Coca-Cola marketing activities since joining Alabama in 2007, that the company supports his Nick’s Kids Foundation, the brand’s history of custom marketing programs for Crimson Tide fans, and other ties to the university over the past seven decades. Following its premiere on ESPN, the 30-second TV spot is also airing on local stations across Alabama. It’s also posted on YouTube, CokeZero.com and MyCokeRewards.com, with links to Facebook, Twitter, Alabama fan Web sites and other digital and social media. Coke Zero will also salute the University of Alabama’s championship with locally available commemorative packaging and other local activities and communications. The ad was created by Atlanta-based MELT, a marketing agency that helps Coke Zero develop sports and college programs. //
Wonderful Pistachios will run its first Super Bowl ad this year, a 30-second spot featuring South Korean pop-music sensation Psy (Park Jae-sang), of “Gangnam Style” fame. The spot, to air in the game’s third quarter, will also mark the first time that Psy (whose “Gangnam Style” video was the first to break 1 billion views on YouTube) has been seen in a U.S. TV ad. Wonderful Pistachios originally planned to run two different, 15-second ads, but changed its strategy because the Psy creative, directed by Grammy Award-winning director Mathew Cullen, was so compelling that “we decided that it needed and deserved 30 seconds,” Marc Seguin, VP of marketing for the brand’s privately-held parent company, Paramount Farms, tells Marketing Daily. The spot’s creative, which isn’t being previewed prior to the game, takes the brand’s long-running, seemingly ubiquitous “Get Crackin’” campaign to new levels, says Seguin, who reports that Paramount Farms has invested more than $100 million in that campaign in the four years that it’s been running. After the Super Bowl, the Psy spot will continue to air on cable channels and primetime television, and will be viewable on the brand’s Get Crackin’ site and its YouTube site. Also, “behind-the-scenes” footage from the shoot will be released online, says Seguin. The Super Bowl presence is also being supported by social media. One effort, launched on Jan. 9, is a Facebook-based sweepstakes in which fans who upload a picture of how they “Get Crackin' Gangnam Style” earn chances to win a 12-month lease of a 2013 Mercedes Benz SLK 250 -- the same model driven by Psy. The brand also has reached out to YouTube “stars” (creators of videos that have drawn exceptionally high numbers of views), encouraging them to create parodies of its Psy ad once it’s been aired on the Super Bowl, reports Seguin. In addition, Wonderful Pistachios will be throwing a “huge” event in New Orleans during the activities surrounding the Super Bowl, he says. Importantly, the brand also will be expanding the substantial in-store promotions and merchandising efforts that it’s already been doing each year around the Super Bowl. Starting this month, Wonderful Pistachios will have free-standing displays tied into its Super Bowl ad in about 50,000 stores (compared to about 10,000 stores for a typical promotion for the brand), with its largest-selling stores featuring two to four displays in various locations, and others featuring multiple displays, according to Seguin. Wherever possible, those displays will be near high-traffic store-entry areas or checkouts. Ads + In-Store Strategy: Brand’s Winning Formula Wonderful Pistachios’ in-store strategy, combined with its investment in advertising, is the formula behind the brand’s remarkable growth since launching five years ago, Seguin confirms. As CPGmatters recently reported, the retail strategy includes aggressive, ongoing merchandising and frequent special displays/promotions (sold and coordinated by a standing national field force of 135 merchandisers), which complement the brand’s core in-store strategy of being nearly exclusively located/sold on a regular basis in the produce departments of traditional supermarkets, rather than in center-store aisles. Being located in produce (a strategy that was successful for POM Wonderful, another brand owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick through their Roll Global holding company) gives Wonderful Pistachios more than one advantage. First, produce is a department that (unlike some center aisles) is visited by nearly every grocery shopper, notes Seguin. Also, consumer demand for healthier snacks continues to grow, and consumers tend to look for healthier fruit, vegetable and nut snacks in the produce department, he points out. “The key is that consumers see our ads, then ‘bump into’ the product when they’re in the store,” he says. The Super Bowl ad -- and the intensified merchandising promotion around it -- is the next logical step for Wonderful Pistachios, says Seguin, who reports that it’s now the #1 snack-nut brand, having seen its dollar sales grow by 20% to 30% annually for the past several years. He also confirms that CPGmatters’ estimate of about $400 million per year in sales for the brand is in the ballpark, adding: “We expect to go well beyond that this year.” In fact, he confirms that the brand is “very confident” that it can break into the top 10-selling products in the $12-billion-plus salty snacks category, traditionally dominated by Frito-Lay brands, as noted by CPGmatters. Beyond the Super Bowl, Wonderful Pistachios will continue to release new “Get Crackin’” TV spots in 2013, including a spot tied to a new partnership that will soon be announced, Seguin says.
Toyota's Torrance, Calif.-based U.S. sales arm is hoping, with a more emotional positioning, to appeal to younger baby boomers (40- to-60-year-olds) with a just-launched campaign for its large sedan, the Avalon. And the new version of the car, which Toyota first showed in New York last April, also evinces Toyota's effort to change its game in terms of vehicle design -- especially important now that quality represents table-stakes and almost every automaker has raised that game. The new effort for the car, which was designed at Toyota's Calty studio in SoCal, and its design studio in Michigan, puts the reliability and quality message on the back burner and leads with an emotional appeal. The focus: how designers and engineers pulled the Avalon -- whose look evinces Toyota's new design -- out of the void. The campaign, via Saatchi & Saatchi L.A., includes two TV ads, one of which shows the Avalon emerging from an inky vapor -- intended as a metaphor for the design “formula” -- as the camera caresses the car’s design elements. The ads are on network and cable television shows such as "Top Chef," "Rizzoli & Isles," "Royal Pains" and "Modern Family." The marketing campaign also delivers on the new “Let’s Go Places” brand theme launched in the fourth quarter. The major focus is on digital, with Web films on YouTube and Toyota.com, plus partnerships with Pandora, Hulu, Trip Advisor, CNET and Food Network. Scalability is part of the digital strategy, with the campaign optimized for Web, mobile and tablets like Kindle Fire, iPad and iPhone platforms. Another critical component is search-engine optimization to make it easy for consumers to go from big-screen message to little-screen engagement, per Colin Morisako, advertising and planning manager for Toyota. Awareness is a major issue for the car. Morisako tells Marketing Daily that about 50% of the target demo knows Avalon. "It's a target we have never spoken to," he says, adding that the screen-agnostic digital strategy is intended to help cure that. "We studied the media habits of this target, and found they are very receptive to advertising on second screens; they are watching TV with their tablets in their laps, and whatever intrigues them sends them online to learn more." Current owners are around 67 years old, the oldest demographic in Toyota's lineup. "What has excited me about this is that it speaks to me, and I'm in the wheelhouse for this campaign," says Morisako. He says the brand did a handraiser program last year and got more than 100,000 people interested, and the average age was in the 50s. "We are generating interest with the right people." Morisako explains that demographic research also had a social anthropology vector that found that young boomers switch screens as fast as younger consumers. "We sat with folks in their homes and were able to see how they interacted with their televisions: when they are captivated by a spot they go immediately online and research it. So we want to make that process easy." //
Brand marketers take for granted that most consumers know the ins and outs of social media and search engines, but a study released Wednesday reveals that this is untrue. Some 70% of adults online know how to post to a Facebook wall, but only 54% understand how Facebook generates revenue. It may seem incidental, but a better understanding would produce higher engagement and conversion rates. Men demonstrate a higher understanding of Facebook's monetization strategies at 57%, versus women at 51%, according to findings from The Search Agency and Harris Interactive's study "2012 Online User Behavior and Engagement," which analyzes consumer behavior and knowledge around social networks and search engines. The findings can help marketers create better strategies to interact with potential and existing customers. For example, more online men -- 37% -- know the character length of a tweet, compared with 27% of women. When it comes to Pinterest, 48% of women know what it means to "pin" something online, compared with 42% of men. When asked how search engines make money, nearly 29% of survey respondents believe brands pay annual dues for use, while 20% believe that users pay for premium search features. More than one-third of U.S. online adults believe search engines sell users' personal data to marketers About 22% of survey respondents click on paid-search ads, but results show behavioral variations by region and age. Breaking down clicks by U.S. region shows 29% in the South, 20% in the Northeast, 19% in the West, and 17% in the Midwest. Millennials are nearly twice as likely to click on search engine ads compared with their older counterparts. About 30% of Americans ages 18-34 indicate they click on search engine ads, which is nearly double the rate of Americans age 35+ at 18%. Just more than three-quarters of the U.S. online population realizes that advertising is a source of income for search engines. A little more than 2,000 adults participated between Aug. 14 and 16, 2012 in the online U.S. survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of The Search Agency. //
Coke Zero was clearly well-prepared to cap off its long college football marketing season by scoring with Crimson Tide fans. Immediately following the team’s 42-14 defeat of Notre Dame in the BCS National Championship game on Monday night, Coke Zero ran a TV ad saluting University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. In the ad, Coke Zero and the coach’s wife, Terry Saban, salute “what’s possible” through her narration of moments from the coach’s life in which he overcame the odds to achieve things that others said he couldn’t do. “They said he couldn’t marry the head majorette from the rival high school…they said he couldn’t make ends meet as a graduate assistant coach…they said he couldn’t lead Alabama to our first national championship in 18 years…and they said he couldn’t win three titles in four years,” she says. “He said: ‘It’s possible.’” The theme connection: “Throughout his life and career, Coach Saban has shown what’s possible. Coke Zero, which made it possible to ‘Enjoy Everything’ by combining Real Coke Taste and Zero Calories, salutes that spirit,” said Andy McMillin, VP, Coca-Cola Trademark, Coca-Cola North America. Coca-Cola is also reminding Crimson Tide fans of its past links with the coach and the University of Alabama. For instance, the company’s PR on the TV spot notes that as a child, Saban “used to stock the Coca-Cola cooler at his father’s service station,” and that he drove a Coca-Cola truck to earn extra income while he was a graduate assistant at Kent State (hence the “couldn’t make ends meet” mention in the ad, which is accompanied by a shot of a Coca-Cola truck). Coke also mentions that Saban has participated in local Coca-Cola marketing activities since joining Alabama in 2007, that the company supports his Nick’s Kids Foundation, the brand’s history of custom marketing programs for Crimson Tide fans, and other ties to the university over the past seven decades. Following its premiere on ESPN, the 30-second TV spot is also airing on local stations across Alabama. It’s also posted on YouTube, CokeZero.com and MyCokeRewards.com, with links to Facebook, Twitter, Alabama fan Web sites and other digital and social media. Coke Zero will also salute the University of Alabama’s championship with locally available commemorative packaging and other local activities and communications. The ad was created by Atlanta-based MELT, a marketing agency that helps Coke Zero develop sports and college programs. //
Wonderful Pistachios will run its first Super Bowl ad this year, a 30-second spot featuring South Korean pop-music sensation Psy (Park Jae-sang), of “Gangnam Style” fame. The spot, to air in the game’s third quarter, will also mark the first time that Psy (whose “Gangnam Style” video was the first to break 1 billion views on YouTube) has been seen in a U.S. TV ad. Wonderful Pistachios originally planned to run two different, 15-second ads, but changed its strategy because the Psy creative, directed by Grammy Award-winning director Mathew Cullen, was so compelling that “we decided that it needed and deserved 30 seconds,” Marc Seguin, VP of marketing for the brand’s privately-held parent company, Paramount Farms, tells Marketing Daily. The spot’s creative, which isn’t being previewed prior to the game, takes the brand’s long-running, seemingly ubiquitous “Get Crackin’” campaign to new levels, says Seguin, who reports that Paramount Farms has invested more than $100 million in that campaign in the four years that it’s been running. After the Super Bowl, the Psy spot will continue to air on cable channels and primetime television, and will be viewable on the brand’s Get Crackin’ site and its YouTube site. Also, “behind-the-scenes” footage from the shoot will be released online, says Seguin. The Super Bowl presence is also being supported by social media. One effort, launched on Jan. 9, is a Facebook-based sweepstakes in which fans who upload a picture of how they “Get Crackin' Gangnam Style” earn chances to win a 12-month lease of a 2013 Mercedes Benz SLK 250 -- the same model driven by Psy. The brand also has reached out to YouTube “stars” (creators of videos that have drawn exceptionally high numbers of views), encouraging them to create parodies of its Psy ad once it’s been aired on the Super Bowl, reports Seguin. In addition, Wonderful Pistachios will be throwing a “huge” event in New Orleans during the activities surrounding the Super Bowl, he says. Importantly, the brand also will be expanding the substantial in-store promotions and merchandising efforts that it’s already been doing each year around the Super Bowl. Starting this month, Wonderful Pistachios will have free-standing displays tied into its Super Bowl ad in about 50,000 stores (compared to about 10,000 stores for a typical promotion for the brand), with its largest-selling stores featuring two to four displays in various locations, and others featuring multiple displays, according to Seguin. Wherever possible, those displays will be near high-traffic store-entry areas or checkouts. Ads + In-Store Strategy: Brand’s Winning Formula Wonderful Pistachios’ in-store strategy, combined with its investment in advertising, is the formula behind the brand’s remarkable growth since launching five years ago, Seguin confirms. As CPGmatters recently reported, the retail strategy includes aggressive, ongoing merchandising and frequent special displays/promotions (sold and coordinated by a standing national field force of 135 merchandisers), which complement the brand’s core in-store strategy of being nearly exclusively located/sold on a regular basis in the produce departments of traditional supermarkets, rather than in center-store aisles. Being located in produce (a strategy that was successful for POM Wonderful, another brand owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick through their Roll Global holding company) gives Wonderful Pistachios more than one advantage. First, produce is a department that (unlike some center aisles) is visited by nearly every grocery shopper, notes Seguin. Also, consumer demand for healthier snacks continues to grow, and consumers tend to look for healthier fruit, vegetable and nut snacks in the produce department, he points out. “The key is that consumers see our ads, then ‘bump into’ the product when they’re in the store,” he says. The Super Bowl ad -- and the intensified merchandising promotion around it -- is the next logical step for Wonderful Pistachios, says Seguin, who reports that it’s now the #1 snack-nut brand, having seen its dollar sales grow by 20% to 30% annually for the past several years. He also confirms that CPGmatters’ estimate of about $400 million per year in sales for the brand is in the ballpark, adding: “We expect to go well beyond that this year.” In fact, he confirms that the brand is “very confident” that it can break into the top 10-selling products in the $12-billion-plus salty snacks category, traditionally dominated by Frito-Lay brands, as noted by CPGmatters. Beyond the Super Bowl, Wonderful Pistachios will continue to release new “Get Crackin’” TV spots in 2013, including a spot tied to a new partnership that will soon be announced, Seguin says.
Content discovery has come a long way from the days of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Time was, your average Internet user discovered new content through hierarchical guides and link aggregators, like the early versions of Yahoo and AOL. Then came the search engine model, and with it algorithm iterations with cuddly names like Panda and Penguin. But a funny thing happened on the way to the algorithm zoo. The rise of Facebook and Twitter has presented publishers with a third strategy for reaching consumers: social referrals. Social traffic is not a new phenomenon – consumers have been sharing Web content and URLs with their friends and colleagues via email since the first Mosaic browser was released in 1993. What has changed is the way that social media sites structure and amplify a person’s network connections. That New Yorker article URL you emailed to 10 friends back in 2005 would today be posted to your 500 friends on Facebook and 1,000 Twitter followers. And as the Likes, Shares, and Retweets pile up, the reach and traffic impacts get magnified. That’s a revolution in how consumers are now discovering publisher content. How far how have we come? The Atlantic recently reported statistics that measured social sources as 18% of total referral traffic across a basket of premium publisher sites. Search represented 22% of referral traffic. With the growth of social media continuing unabated, 2013 could shape up as the first year when social outstrips search as the most important channel for consumers discovering publisher content. For certain publications, including The Atlantic, social traffic already far exceeds search in importance. Recent moves by Google will only accelerate this trend. One of the reasons search has remained the dominant traffic referral source for publishers is the feedback loop created by analyzing the keywords that readers search prior to clicking on a link on the results page. Editorial and analytics teams use this data to help understand topics that resonate with their readership. However, Google’s recent shift to encrypt search keywords for a significant fraction of search referrals means that publishers will no longer be able to rely on this insight. As the quantity of search keyword data continues to decline – and as the quality of social analytics continues to improve – it’s not hard to imagine a tipping point occurring in 2013 where much of the time and resources currently spent against SEO will transition over to optimizing social channels. A major wildcard impacting the relative importance of social traffic vs. search is the steady growth in mobile content consumption. Specifically, will mobile devices expand the overall amount of sharing and search behavior, or simply cannibalize existing desktop behavior? comScore’s November 2012 search query report showed volumes declining by over 6% vs. October 2011 on desktops. While those declines are being offset by growth in mobile search volumes, the trend is clear: Consumers are substituting desktop queries with mobile queries. On the other hand, social network usage on mobile devices continues to explode, even as desktop-based usage also increases. Per a recent study by Nielsen, time spent on social media increased by 68% YOY on mobile devices vs. a 24% increase on desktops. What does all this mean for publishers? With trends for social media usage surpassing search, 2013 is shaping up as a seminal year when social networks begin to edge out search algorithms as a more important source of user traffic. Publishers need to invest in understanding what content is being shared the most, as well as what types of articles drive the most referral traffic, to keep growing their user base and engagement levels.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Etsy, Instagram -- we refer to sites like these as social. Yet YouTube, despite its massive popularity, doesn’t make it into that category very often -- presumably because it’s video-based. Similarly, despite being the world’s second largest search engine, it’s infrequently discussed as part of the SEO ecosystem. But the utility and social profile of YouTube specifically, and digital video in general, are about to get a big boost -- largely due to a variety of second-generation tools that have been a long time coming. In the coming year, these tools will serve to reinvigorate digital video as a primary social platform. Why Video’s Not Social – Yet In a recent piece for NPR, Neda Ulaby explained the “quartering of the half-life” of video memes and viral videos –- basically a shrinking in the duration of popularity. Ulaby’s explanation was rooted in the proliferation of devices and access and, in part, volume. But a more critical part of the explanation is the lack of fresh social products for digital video, especially when compared to the available tools for other social content. Videos are relatively easy to share, but they don’t get nearly the same rates of social interaction that still images do. It’s partly due to length, partly due to audio (most people don’t listen to a full video in public), and partly because it’s often unclear why a video was shared with you. Still, videos are viewed frequently. And in my last piece, I stressed how useful they can be as a brand response on social channels. So what keeps us from thinking of them as inherently social? Because, despite all of their potential, they kind of aren’t. Specific comments on a video are hard to make or explain without being able to indicate precisely what you’re referencing. And generic comments like “this is a good video” don’t really add value to the experience -- nor do they really encourage anyone to watch them. Services like Yelp have more experiential comments than YouTube. The New Social Tools for Video The good news is that we’re starting to see new tools and networks emerge that add meaningful, intuitive, and simple social functionality to what is otherwise a static social experience. These tools will make watching, sharing, and talking about digital video a more interesting and useful experience. For instance, some companies are changing the way videos are aggregated or collected, grouped, modified, and shared. A company called Burst.It has an app with a closed-circuit system that is built with bubbles –- something like Google Plus’ circles. It can automatically, or manually, aggregate content for a unique group – -say, wedding attendees at a certain table. Or, with scale, everyone at the Jay Z show at SXSW. Or, more broadly, everyone at or watching the Super Bowl. Another company called Hapyak is beginning to layer on some highly intuitive engagement tools to existing videos. The original video upload remains intact and is played from its original source. But the toolkit is a layer that allows you to personalize and customize the video with your own insights, and then share it with whoever you’d like, whether it’s privately one-to-one or publicly one-to-many. You can draw on the video, slow it down, pause it, insert a text box – and you don’t need any lessons on how to do it, because it’s very user-friendly. These tools, and others either available now or coming soon, will move video from a more passive experience to one that is more interactive, shared, and truly social. To which I say: It’s about time.
Social media marketers have to be part journalist, part advertiser. In an age of "brands as publishers," it's often more important to embrace the journalist than the advertiser side. After all, your tweet, post or article is competing with the friends, news sites, entertainers, publications and brands that your audience is also following. The following are five tips gleaned from nearly 20 years of writing for newspapers, magazines, blogs and brands. 1) Read, read, read. I could expand this list to 10 tips and make tips 1-5 just "read." It definitely goes without saying that reading makes your writing better. But reading a variety of different sources all helps spur ideas for your own content. Always be reading a book. Read a few different types of magazines a month. Don't just rely on your Twitter feed. While it's important to read from these different media it's also extremely important to read on a variety of subjects. Don't just read about social media. Or business. Read about a hobby of yours. Read about psychology or sociology, about the history of your industry. Read about the policy decisions of your local government. Read. Read often. Read variety. 2) Know AP style. There are a few major writing style books, like the “Chicago Manual of Style” and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. But the granddaddy of them all is the Associated Press Stylebook -- also known the "the journalist's bible." It's the rulebook for proper language in journalistic writing and it is what your audience is used to from reading newspapers, magazines and a lot of blogs. AP Style teaches you things like: there is no such thing as "first annual." Instead, you should always say "inaugural." It also teaches you to (almost) always spell out one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine, but start using numbers for 10 and higher. Buy an AP Stylebook, read through it and check off the first two tips on this list. 3) Find the story not being told. Your "Pin It To Win It" promotion is not unique. Neither is your Follow Friday tweet. And, almost every brand has let their Facebook followers be "the first to know" about something. There definitely doesn't need to be another general bio of your CEO on the company blog. Find a unique angle. Find the story not being told. Are you in the airline industry? Show some graphics about what the different positions of the light sticks mean for the people directing the planes. In the alcohol industry? Explain the science behind how beer goes funky. Make office furniture? Do an interview with a doctor to learn how to prevent carpal tunnel. Finding the story not being told means finding tangents. It's the equivalent of getting lost on a small backcountry road -- you need to allow yourself to meander in order to find what others haven't. Then you tell people about the find. 4) Learn to edit your own work. I have a deep appreciation for some of the great editors I've had over the years. However, as social media marketers, we don't always have the luxury or time for someone to edit our work. So, you better be able to edit it yourself. Some tricks that often do the job: • Read each paragraph backwards: Many people get caught in the flow of their writing and start to skim instead of edit. In a four-sentence paragraph, read the fourth, then third, then second, then first sentences. This will help you focus on each individual sentence, instead of the flow. • Don't ignore the squiggly lines: Microsoft Word provides red and green squiggly lines under what you type for a reason: they mean something is wrong. Fix it. • Set it aside: Write. Then step away and do something else -- preferably for a day. It's amazing how different what you wrote looks after you've stepped away. • Know your most common mistakes: You always use "it's" when you should use "its” -- or write "over" when you should write "more than." There are probably three to five mistakes your brain is wired to make for some reason. Know what they are. Do a pass of your writing looking for ONLY those words and those mistakes. 5) Make it about a person or a number. Readers love to read about a person, not people. There can be more than one person you write about, but don't write about a group of people. Let your readers get to know each person you are writing about, instead of writing generalities about a group of people. If you don't have a person to write about, find a good number. Readers love data. Like Tip #3, find the number only your company knows: how long something takes, how many of something was made, how much of something was donated. Have fun with the numbers by comparing it to something odd or abstract. "Our company makes enough jelly beans a day to fill the stomachs of 769 African elephants." For both the person or the data, it's all about the details.
According to a new study by HubSpot about the impact on social media engagement using visuals in social content, photos on Facebook Pages received 53% more Likes than the average post, while photo posts attracted 104% more comments than the average post. The study evaluated 8,800 Facebook posts from B2B and B2C companies comparing Likes-per-photo to overall average Likes-per-post. Facebook Photos Generate Higher Engagement Than Average PostEngagementAverage Post (Link, Text & Photo)Photo Post Likes only 53% Comments 104% HubSpot, October 2012 (B2B & B2C Companies) The report notes that Facebook users are uploading approximately 300 million photos to Facebook per day, up 20% from earlier in 2012. Even usage of Instagram, purchased by Facebook in April of 2012, increased 1,179% in six months. The study seeks to determine if a business, catering to this trend in visual content, have a positive impact on crucial engagement metrics, including Facebook Likes, comments, and link clicks. This percentage difference is substantial, emphasizing an opportunity for businesses to use photos and images as a means to increase Likes and comments, and thus EdgeRank. (EdgeRank is Facebook's visibility algorithm based on users' interaction with your Facebook Page content.) Boosts in Likes helps increase EdgeRank, which can then cause a page's content to appear in News Feeds more often, increasing visibility, according to the report. Most Engaging Facebook PostsPost% Engaging Photo 85% Link 7 Status 5 Video 3% Source: HubSpot, November 2012 Top Industries by Engagement RateIndustryEngagement Rate Automotive 0.273% Fashion 0.189 Beauty 0.187 FMGC 0.173 Airlines 0.172 Source: HubSpot, November 2012 Photo posts garner more attention from Facebook users, but marketers care more about how their social network usage is affecting specific business goals such as generating website traffic. The study looked at HubSpot's Facebook posts from October 2012 and found that these photo posts received 84% more link clicks than text and link posts. Marketers who are using interesting images to their advantage can increase traffic to their websites with an included link, says the report. The report suggests that this conclusion might challenge initial theories that using text-only posts could be a better Facebook strategy for businesses, versus the contradicting argument is that Facebook surfaces text-only posts in News Feeds more often than photos. While this study does not discredit that theory, it could prove, says the report, that using photos to generate more Likes and clicks would justify an increased focus on images. For additional information from HubSpot, please visit here.