There is one Facebook page that all marketers fear (or should fear). Being featured on it can plunge a sometimes unsuspecting brand into a serious industry reputation problem.
Welcome to the Condescending Corporate Brand Page: loved, hated and completely unapologetic.
I mentioned the testing of banner ads in my post on Google’s search UI changes yesterday, but such a big change deserves more attention.
In a nutshell, Google is testing banner ads on branded searches for 30 different advertisers, including Virgin America and Crate & Barrel.
I’ve rounded up the views of several search marketers on the tests being carried out by Google…
Lately, it’s difficult to be heard above the constant screaming negativity towards Apple’s latest operating system.
Heck, I’m guilty of joining the chorus too, this is a piece I wrote on this blog last week: Five user experience problems with iOS7. It’s a fair summation of the problems with iOS7, in fact it only scrapes the surface according the comments underneath it.
As Marc Shillum (featured in this post about Apple and the key to consistent marketing experience) stated recently, what we perceive to be the product, the iPhone, is in fact “an ongoing service relationship with a company that is delivered through software we have little control over”.
Basically the operating system is the product, not the phone. No wonder there’s so much outcry when Apple tweaks its operating system, or as with iOS7, completely rewrites it.
So in order to inject some positivity into the conversation, and to provide much needed balance, here’s a list of brilliant things about iOS7.
Competitor analysis is an excellent way for businesses to map out their fledgling social strategy or give existing social channels a shot in the arm.
After all it pays to learn from the best and the beauty of social is that a huge amount of useful data is publicly available.
It does take time and a bit of skill to mine that data, but luckily there are a number of free tools available to automate at least part of the process.
To this end, I’ve come up with a six stage plan that will at least get your business on the road to completing a competitor analysis on Twitter, which will help to identify the influencers within your industry and the type of content that drives relevant conversations.
This morning I was on London’s Regent Street, so I thought I’d promenade up and down (from Oxford Circus, South to Piccadilly Circus) and check which of the mega brands here acknowledge their digital presence in window displays.
That’s just the shop window, I didn’t go into the store (incidently, West End stores have been slow to adopt in-store tech). In this instance I just wanted to see who pointed online from their front of store merchandising.
I was quite surprised. Some were good, and some were simple and clear. Others were token, and plenty didn’t mention online at all.
Pinterest users follow an average of 9.3 retailers, while Pinterest shoppers in the USA are also spending on average between $140-$180 per order, compared to the $60-$80 Facebook and Twitter shoppers are spending.
The business case for investing in Pinterest is well past the tipping point. With over 70m global users, Pinterest is now the third most popular social network, and there are claims that Pinterest, in many cases, drives more sales than Facebook.
So what can your business do to engage with this rich seam of potential customers?
While the iPhone which provides half of Apple’s revenue is its foundation, the iPad is its bellwether for growth.
Gartner has upwardly revised its growth projections for tables to a whopping 54% this year, against an 11% drop in PC sales. This makes it no surprise that Apple has set its course in this direction.
As Willie Sutton answered when he was asked why he robbed banks, the answer is obvious, its where the money is.
But it goes further than retail. The iPad is a gateway to incremental media, software sales and services purchases. There are 170m of them in circulation, and Apple is moving to gain new users and upgrade its installed base.
And along the way gain increased wallet and mindshare while depositioning its rivals.
Just about every marketer in every company wants to be more agile and more innovative.
The accelerated rate of change in markets, technology development and associated consumer behaviours is challenging every business to reinvent how they originate, commercialise and scale ideas.
In reaction to the growing demand for insight into how organisations are responding to this challenge, Econsultancy has conducted research into how companies are deploying agile thinking, processes and techniques in the service of continuous innovation and the rapid development of new products and services.
The result, our new Digital Transformation: Agility and Innovation Best Practice Guide, sheds new light on what is perhaps nothing less than a watershed moment.
It looks at how companies are beginning to more broadly adopt agile principles beyond real-time marketing and agile development processes within technology teams, and starting to transform the fundamental way in which they work.
Google is continually tweaking its user interface, often most noticeably on search results pages, desktop and mobile.
What motivates these changes? Is every change Google makes motivated by profit, or is this a case of constantly improving the user experience? Or perhaps both?
Here, I’ll look at some recent UI changes to search results on mobile and desktop. Please suggest any I may have missed.
Consumer use of smartphones and tablets incorporates a range of different activities and behaviours, including search, email, social and the mobile web.
And a new survey has found that businesses are responding to this by developing their capabilities over a range of mobile channels.
When asked which mobile channels they plan on using during the next 12 months just over half (55%) said apps, followed by mobile advertising (51%), optimised emails (50%) and tablet-specific sites (50%).
Mobile search and commerce were also cited by precisely half (50%) of client-side respondents.
As I write this energy supplier nPower is currently in the midst of a mini-Twitter storm following announcements of an 11% price hike about to hit consumers, but the backlash is nothing compared to the furious storm that hit British Gas last week following a similar price increase.
So what made British Gas the subject of so much fury, and how could they have handled the situation better?
Chipotle’s recent financial results have revealed a successful third quarter of 2013 as compared to the third quarter of 2012, with revenue increased 18.0% to $826.9 million.
With the notorious scarecrow ad (and downloadable song and game and all round worthy cause) released on September 12th, it’s conceivable that the last three weeks have played a part in the strong financial performance.
The scarecrow video was released solely online, and has been viewed 7m times on YouTube. There’s a nice responsive microsite for the ad and game, too. ‘As an incentive for players to complete the game, Chipotle is providing food rewards redeemable at any of its U.S., Canada and UK locations.’
Never has a scarecrow started such debate. You can watch the ad below, and the delicious Funny Or Die parody.