Everyone thinks content marketing is the only way to win a market.
Here’s a little story that might disprove that.
I hate naming names, but there’s a company out there which just doesn’t get content marketing.
It’s a big tech company with excellent products. But it hasn’t yet figured out that people really don’t care about products.
More and more consumers are using their mobiles for ‘showrooming’, checking prices and product information while shopping in stores.
According to JiWire’s Mobile Audience Insights Report for Q2 2013, there has been a 25% increase in the use of mobiles in retail stores, which has significant implications for retailers.
The report also looks at the use of wi-fi by smartphone users, finding that more and more are online via public wi-fi.
Google+ continues to enrich its offering with embedded SoundCloud widgets now enabled. Here at Econsultancy, and across the web, many predict that G+ will gradually become more and more prominent.
Google+ Sign-In integration was launched on SoundCloud in May, and a week or so ago, embedding was brought to G+. All you need to do is share any SoundCloud URL to your Google+ circles and the widget will appear, automatically in the post.
It will be interesting to see if any brands start hosting audio in this way. Seems a quick and easy way to direct consumers to a stash of audio content, fairly seamlessly from G+.
Let’s see how it looks, and examine some reasons for G+’s growth.
Last week we reported that Tiffany managed to achieve the highest engagement score on Facebook among the top retailers in the US.
On average it racks up almost 30,000 interactions per post, some 10,000 more than Victoria’s Secret in second place.
To find out whether it is equally popular across other social networks, here’s a look at how Tiffany & Co. uses Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Google+.
This follows on from similar posts focusing on brands such as H&M, Nike, Ikea, Coca-Cola and Starbucks…
Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo sharing site, announced the ability to upload video in June.
Now with recently announced version 4.1 anyone can upload video right from their iPhone/Android’s local storage, and the branded mobile video wars have officially launched.
Here are some of the better examples of brands doing smart marketing with Instagram video.
There’s no shortage of gurus offering up social media advice, which is why I believe there’s room in the market for an anti-guru.
I’d like to show you how to be the worst practitioner of the social arts that you can possibly be. If you follow these simple rules, you too can suck at social media.
It’s no secret that to get the most out of social brands need to be willing to respond to other users, rather than just using it to push out dull marketing messages.
However a new report from Brandwatch shows that a quarter of the world’s major brands are still using Twitter as a broadcast channel rather than bothering to actively engage with consumers.
It could be a resource issue or simply that these companies don’t see any value in using Twitter to communicate with their customers, however brands like ASOS and Nike have shown the customer service value that can be derived from social media.
Here at Econsultancy, we’ve covered the search engine Baidu on our blog before through one of our guest bloggers Eddie Choi.
With around 600 million internet users and an economy that despite the slowdown continues to strengthen, China represents a huge potential market for companies willing to invest there.
However, there are differences in best practice between search marketing in China and for the rest of the world. To cover that, we’ve just launched the Baidu Search Best Practice Guide in association with China Search International.
As a preview, here are four tips to whet your appetite…
4G capabilities, Vine, Facebook’s video for Instagram; they’ve all put online video sharing firmly on the consumer agenda.
Launched in June 2013, Rockpack is an intuitive video curation platform for iOS. With partnerships ranging from Topshop to Jamie Oliver, thousands of channels, and an advisory board consisting of heavyweights such as Stephen Fry, Jamie Byng (Canongate Books) and Sean Knapp (Ooyala), Rockpack is a company to watch.
The globally-available Rockpack platform makes it easy for people to create personalized video channels to share content, as well as to subscribe to video content from friends, influencers and celebrities.
Compatible with Facebook and Twitter, Rockpack offers premium content from vloggers and a growing number of brand partners. The company believes users will share their favorite videos through their own networks, helping to drive the discovery of relevant content through peer-to-peer curation.
Rockpack aims to change the way people discover and share videos, just as Pinterest changed image discovery and sharing. Much like consumers curate photos on Instagram and Pinterest, Rockpack will allow people to browse videos, create personalized channels by category and subscribe to channels created by friends or influencers.
As we continue to update the format of our Internet Statistics Compendium to reflect the new taxonomy of the Econsultancy site, this month we can announce the launch of a new part of our ever-growing stats bundle, The Strategy and Operations Statistics Compendium.
This document will seek to collect publicly available data and our own research on overall digital strategy, covering: spend, ROI and marketing activity trends among companies and agencies from a range of regional markets.
As well as all the regular ISC data we collect, this month we’ve added the following strategy and operations stats:
In my previous post about the world’s largest brands and their social media presence, I noticed that while tech companies dominated the stats, FMCGs were still clinging on to a couple of top spots.
With this in mind I thought I’d take a closer look at how top FMCG retailers are fairing on the world’s largest social networks.
Have you noticed that people take their smartphones everywhere? Try to have a conversation with your closest friends, and more likely than not, you will lose them at some point during the conversation, to their smartphone.
How does this behavior impact retailers? Well, for one thing, it has changed the way shoppers shop. As the Harvard Business Review reports, “Consumers no longer go shopping, they always are shopping”.
The Adobe 2013 Mobile Consumer Survey found that, approximately six out of seven mobile shoppers will use a smartphone to shop in 2013.
How is this perpetual state of shopping impacting retailers? And more importantly, how can retailers use mobile to drive sales and improve their bottom line?