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Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

Brands OK - as long as they’re relevant Friday, November 21st, 2008

eMarketer declares that Millennials aren’t brand resistant, but “irrelevance resistant”. Reporting on the results of a Synovate study released this week, eMarketer claims 18-24-year-olds ”are not solidly opposed to brands themselves, and are willing to spread the word about the ones they like.”
When asked about their “online brand engagement” in the past month, 28% had talked about a brand on a discussion forum, 23% had put brand-related content on their IM profile, and 19% had added branded content to their homepage or social networking site.
Interestingly, the worldwide figures were similar to those in the US, with slightly higher results for favourite sites and personal start pages:

According to the report, “Respondents were most likely to pass on comedy clips (62%), followed by music clips (40%) and clips featuring friends (27%). Almost one out of 10 passed along viral advertising and marketing clips.
Meanwhile, eMarketer reports that word-of-mouth is an ever-stronger way to market to young people. A recent survey by Alloy Media+Marketing found that uni students thought word-of-mouth was the most useful type of advertising. Samples—always a bonus for students on a budget—ranked second.
Showing that students do still consider traditional media relevant, TV and magazine ads also ranked highly—higher, in fact, than online ads and sponsored Web applications.


Not the death of blogging, but a new phase Monday, November 10th, 2008

Some of the earliest proponents of blogging are moving on to other things. The Economist reports that the founder of Weblogs, Inc., one of the first blogging networks, has announced that he is giving up on blogging and going back to email to distribute his opinions. Meanwhile, the founder of Blogger, arguably the biggest blogging tool, which was bought by Google, now runs Twitter, the mobile-phone-based micro-blogging network with a 140-character limit on messages, and he says Twitter is the future.

But as the Economist report points out, “Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. Today lots of internet users do this, only they may not think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks….traditional blog pages tend increasingly to belong to conventional media organisations. Nearly every newspaper, radio and television channel now runs blogs and updates them faster than any individual blogger ever could.

“….Simultaneously, companies far outside the media industry have embraced blogging as just another business tool. They are using blogs both to get corporate messages to the public and as an internal medium for staff. Companies like Six Apart, which provides Movable Type, TypePad and other blogging tools, see firms as their most promising market.

“Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.”

In other words, blogging is now acceptable and understood widely enough to be embraced by traditional companies. Roll on the revolution!


When you can’t control ‘Whassup’ Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Like it or loathe it, Budweiser’s ‘Whassup’ campaign of a few years ago resonated throughout the world as an irritating but catchy and wildly successful way to promote the beer’s brand. Well, the Whassup guys are back, this time on YouTube, and they’re barracking for Barack Obama - and there’s nothing Budweiser or their ad agency DDB Chicago can do about it. Apparently when the ad’s creator Charles Stone III (gotta love those triple-barrelled American names - grandpa would be proud) came up with the concept, DDB licensed the concept from him for five years - an agreement which finished three years ago.

The Whassup ads first appeared in 1999, just before George Bush was elected US president, and the new video shows what’s up eight years later for the original characters - they’re fighting in Iraq, caught in a hurricane, unable to pay medical bills and attempting suicide as their stock portfolio tanks. In 2008, ‘Whassup’, is change, in the form of Obama.

I feel for Budweiser and DDB, but this is a classic example of social media at work - companies no longer have control over their brand and the way it is used. They just have to embrace it and see what the effect is on their brand and their sales. Look for more of this type of consumer power to come in the future.

You can see the ad, which has already been viewed more than 2 million times, here.


Blog conversation beats social networks Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

BuzzLogic’s Harnessing the Power of Blogs survey, released this week, shows that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks, because they create a conversation and trusted resource.

The social media analysis company and ad network engaged JupiterResearch to conduct the study with more than 2,000 US online consumers in order to uncover changing behavior around blog discovery and consumption, how blogs factor into consumer purchase decisions and the nature of blog influence on buying behavior.

According to BuzzLogic: “The results suggest frequent blog readers (defined as consumers who read blogs more than once per month) use blogs as the top online navigation tool to discover other blog content, ranking higher than general Web search or blog search. Demonstrating a 300 percent growth in monthly blog readership over the past four years, the study also confirmed blog readers are strongly influenced by blog content when it comes to purchase decisions across a number of categories, and that blogs play a key role in ushering readers to the point of an actual purchase.”

Go here to see what the media and the blogosphere are saying about this study.


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