Word-of-mouth is the top influencer for just about everything consumers do, and many social media marketers take that as an encouraging sign. After all, social media are about conversations. But, at least when it comes to video viewing, online dialogue is not as valuable as what Knowledge Networks refers to as “verbal” word-of-mouth.
Online video viewers were most likely to discover content and decide what to watch based on conversations that took place either in person or over the phone, according to the “How People Use Video Navigation” report. Traditional TV viewers were most influenced by TV ads, but verbal word-of-mouth ranked second for them as well. Social media was significantly more influential for discovering online viewing than traditional TV viewing, but still did not come close to real-life advice.
Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
“I’ll stick with e-mail — write when I want, as often (or not ) as I want, to whom I want privately. No interest in letting the world know that I overcooked the spaghetti.”
—–Don Brazier
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.
Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.
“The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks,” says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let’s start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.
Rapper Gucci Mane is using mobile to promote his new album, “The State vs. Radric Davis.”
To promote the album, m-Wise Inc. has launched an SMS campaign that Mr. Mane announced on his Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles. The album is due out Dec. 8.
“The strategy is to create the ultimate fan experience,” said Leo Giel, vice president of sales, North America at m-Wise, New York. “We wanted to create something that doesn’t resolve around an album cycle.”
The rapper is also known as Radric Davis and is CEO of So Icey Entertainment.
PASADENA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The historic Rose Bowl and Steve Clarkson’s DREAMMAKER, LLC have partnered together in a joint deal to display the billboard of the Steve Clarkson Dreammaker logo for the quarterback athletic development company. The signage debuted at the televised Washington vs U.C.L.A. football game this week, and will be part of the Dreammaker 2010 nationwide tour, which will launch at the Rose Bowl the weekend of February 26. The joint deal was culminated between the Rose Bowl’s General Manager Darryl Dunn and Premier Partnerships’ COO Jeff Marks on behalf of Clarkson this past summer. The construction of the sign was developed by the Ultimate Activation Company headed by President and CEO Kevin Elliott.
Business Wire – L-R: Hall of Famer Joe Montana; Steve Clarkson, Chairman, Dreammaker, LLC; Darryl Dunn, General Manager, Rose Bowl; Jeff …
The signage, displayed at the North End, ties in with the 2009-2010 upcoming activities at the Bowl — the remainder of the U.C.L.A. football season; New Year’s January 1 Rose Bowl game; and the BCS National Championship game on January 7. This joint venture will also be part of the overall campaign of future Dreammaker charitable endeavors for 2010.
“We’re very excited about our new association with Steve Clarkson Dreammaker, LLC and are very pleased to be associated with the Clarkson name, who for the past 20 years has been developing great young student athletes,” stated Dunn. Adds Marks, “We’re very proud and honored to have arranged this first-ever deal with the Rose Bowl, in uniting Steve Clarkson’s company with the famous venue.”
“This is another giant step in the building and branding of the Dreammaker entity,” says Clarkson. “It’s a stepping stone to the new 2010 tour, and we look forward to future activities with the Bowl.”
Considered by NFL, collegiate and high school quarterbacks to be one of the most influential quarterback developers in the sport, Clarkson has trained such NFL athletes as Ben Roethlisberger, Matt Leinart, Matt Cassell and Josh Freeman. His current college quarterbacks include Matt Barkley (USC); Jimmy Clausen (Notre Dame); Terrell Pryor (Ohio State); Jake Locker (University of Washington), amongst others.
Reposted from Emarketer.com ” Holiday Web Shoppers Hit Social Networks.”
US Internet users will be doing plenty of online research about holiday gift giving this year. Shoppers already conditioned to comparison shop, check coupon sites and look for discounts will also be heading to social networks for information—and good deals.
According to research conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation and Yesmail, 27% of online shoppers who plan to both research and buy holiday gifts online this year will look for ideas about what friends and family want on sites such as Facebook. And nearly one-half (45%) will use social networks to research items, compare prices and look for offers.
About one-fifth of online holiday buyers are specifically looking to social networks for exclusive deals or free shipping.
Deloitte found that, overall, 17% of consumers would use social media during their holiday shopping. Just over one-half of that group was ages 18 to 29.
Family Launches New Sports-Oriented Social Networking Site
LockerSpace, LLC is launching a website to create a community where users can share, learn, follow and group with others who share the love of being athletic
PHOENIX, AZ-LockerSpace is an epic, sports oriented video sharing community for the Athletically Social. This exciting new site has an innovative new video player which allows users to watch and upload high-quality videos. One of the unique features of Lockerspace is their ability to “follow” other members. This feature allows the member to track the video uploads and updates of their favorite athletes, friends, teams, trainers or schools. Soon to come is there iPhone application that will enable members to shoot videos from their iPhone into LockerSpace and make them viewable to other members on their phones.
The creators of LockerSpace,Ty Thomasson and Maureen Kerley, are the first Mother/Son team to create such a site. They have been actively involved in sports for much of their lives. Maureen, who graduated from Arizona State University, fly fishes, skies, kayaks and enjoys watching all sports. Ty’s father played professional baseball in the Major Leagues for over ten years and was fortunate enough to play in the 78” World Series. Ty played football for Chaparral High School, a team that not only won back to back AIA State Championship, but went undefeated for their entire high school term. From there Ty attended ASU and was an invited walk-on to play football, but his love of sports does not end there. He loves deep sea fishing in any ocean, skydiving whenever he can, and snowboarding in the Rockies or just being “Athletically Social”
Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones during the fourth quarter, proof positive that the App Store is a place where savvy marketers must have a presence.
Apple’s fourth-quarter profits totaled $1.67 billion—a 47 percent gain in quarterly profit—and the company achieved a 24 percent gain in revenue, sending its stock price to new highs. Whether they be branded, ad-supported, subscription-based, pay-per-download or monetized via micropayments, there are many ways to cash in on iPhone applications’ continued popularity.
“With Apple continuing to gain in the desktop as well as the mobile space, the biggest impact is, of course, to the sheer number of consumers you reach with an application,” said Scott Michaels, vice president at Atimi Software, Vancouver, BC, Canada. “However, this is a double-edged sword as producing a mediocre application will no longer reach the end user.
The Diamond District in southwestern Florida has been running mobile programs to build a database and drive consumers to its showroom.
To power its mobile initiatives, the diamond retailer tapped Adz2Mobile LLC, which in turn partners with iLoop Mobile for its technology back-end. The partners collaborated on a promotion that offered consumers the chance to text a keyword in to a short code for a chance to win a one-carat diamond, which allowed the client to build its database quickly.
“They’ve seen new faces come in the door they haven’t seen before, and they’re also keeping current customers engaged and having them come back in more often,” said Bruce Hershey II, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Adz2Mobile, Naples, FL.
“They’ve opened up a new demographic, but it’s also a way for them to keep top-of-mind awareness with their clients via the mobile phone on their hip at all times,” he said.
Generation Y females have redefined the idea of “peer group” to encompass online friends, bloggers and anonymous reviewers, according to the “Why Y Women?” report from PopSugar and Radar Research.
Looking to this expansive group of peers, rather than experts or celebrities, Gen Y women are particularly influenced by social media.
Younger women are nearly twice as likely as their Gen X counterparts to say they had discovered a new brand or product when a friend mentioned it in an online status update. They are also significantly more influenced by blogs, by both professionals and especially by “someone like me.”
At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of “The Facebook Era,” explains how social web platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are impacting businesses. She says email is slowly being replaced by social networking applications — a shift driven by young people.
The weather is cool but mobile is heating up
