Corporate Eye

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Archives for April 2011

Which Brands are Engaging Fans on Facebook Pages?

A new study of over 200 million Facebook page fans conducted by Visibli reveals some interesting findings about how well brands are engaging consumers on the most popular social networking site.

Some of the highlights from the study tell us:

  • Audi Facebook Page fans are highly engaged. The only other brand to rank in the top 5 Facebook pages with a minimum of 100,000 “likes” ranked by Visibli is American Airlines. See the chart below for details.
  • Celebrity Facebook pages are the most active and their audiences are the most engaged. In fact, engagement increases as celebrity Facebook pages grow. The exact opposite is true of brand Facebook pages.
  • Celebrity Facebook pages get twice as many “likes” as brand and media organization Facebook pages get.
  • Media organizations get 2 and a half times as many comments on their Facebook pages than celebrities get and 5 times more than brands get.
  • Half of the “likes” on posts published on Facebook pages happen within the first hour and 20 minutes after the post is published. 80% happen within the first seven hours and 95% happen within the first 22 hours after the post is published.

What can brands learn from this study? First, media organizations are doing a better job of encouraging Facebook page fans to publish comments and join the conversation than brands are. Furthermore, Audi and American Airlines are two branded Facebook pages to review and determine how you can implement similar strategies into your own brand Facebook pages to boost engagement.  Finally, it’s easy to spend less time on your brand’s Facebook page as the audience gets bigger and bigger simply because you’re no longer publishing and interacting in an effort to build your fan base. However, you can’t let your Facebook activities slide just because your audience is growing organically. The online audience is fickle. If you’re not providing fresh and interesting content and conversations, they’ll replace your brand with another in the blink of an eye. Don’t let them get away.

Getting fans to like your Facebook page is only the first step. Once you have them listening, you have to give them meaningful information that they’ll want to share and talk about. That’s how Facebook pages become a successful indirect marketing tool and can help build your brand, business and bottom-line.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts about brand Facebook page engagement.

Image: Visibli

Planning Your CSR Content Strategy

It’s one of those big givens in life: if you’ve bought flat packed furniture, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS before you even think about picking up a screwdriver.

In fact, make sure there are instructions for understanding the instructions before you even buy that corner shelving unit which looks oh-so-lovely in the promotional picture.

And also, be prepared to count.  Count all the screws, widgets and little plastic bits in and out of their bags.  Get a ruler, so that you know exactly which ones are the 4mm and which the 4.5 mm long ones.

Finally, never EVER assemble on a carpet. EVER.  No matter how short the pile you’ll lose a bit, guaranteed.

Now that you’ve completed all those steps, you may think about getting your screwdriver.

Putting together a CSR website can be a little like putting together one of these confounded flat pack thingamabobs.

It seems so easy and the standards are pretty clear.  But in the end it can be soooo fiddly and time consuming (not to mention frustrating!) that you have an epiphany about why professional services exist in the first place.

One such professional service is iCrossing, one of the world’s largest digital marketing agencies and part of the Hearst Corporation.  Their UK offices have published an ebook titled ‘How to plan a content strategy’ and it may be worth taking note of. [Read more…] about Planning Your CSR Content Strategy

Foreign Brands Hold Strong in China

China is a hot spot for brands around the world as more and more companies focus on the huge audience of consumers there. For example, just last month I was interviewed about how the Playboy brand can position itself for future success in Asia, particularly in China, based on my research about the brand in my book Building Brand Value the Playboy Way. You can read that interview and article in English on AsiaOne.com. It’s an interesting read.

Now, research from marketing consultancy R3 reveals that consumers in China are more open to foreign brands than you might think. Every three months, R3 conducts research in 10 cities in China among an audience of 15-40 year old respondents. These people rate brands based on three factors: preference (within a brand’s category), engagement (if the brand is correctly linked with a celebrity or media asset), and values (if the brand has strong values and associations with consumers).

During the first quarter of 2011, 19 of the top 50 brands in China were not from local companies (according to the 10,500 study respondents). While China Mobile, owner of the largest mobile network in the world, ranked at the top of the overall list, it didn’t take the top spot for the engagement rating. That top spot went to BBK, an electronics company in China.

BBK’s enagement rating was closely trailed by Nike’s engagement rating. Why does the athletic-wear company rank so high in China? As Sunny Chen, Senior Researcher for R3, explains, Nike “leads for strong engagement and association with stars and media in China.” Consumers in China like brands that are associated with popular celebrities and media properties. They’re also spending more time on popular social sites in China such as Q-Zone and shopping sites like Taobao, according to R3’s research. Social media has the ability to reach Chinese consumers faster than traditional media, and those consumers are actively looking for information from brands.

Which brands are engaging consumers in China? The top 10 as ranked in Q1 2011 are listed below. You can find the rest in the complete list from R3.

  1. China Mobile
  2. Nokia
  3. Nike
  4. Apple
  5. LiNing
  6. Lenovo
  7. KFC
  8. Mengnlu
  9. Sony
  10. Coca-Cola

There is a new world of opportunity for brands to connect with new consumers in the China market. Is your brand there yet? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

Corporate Eye Summary April 16, 2011

  • Addressing the Corporate Website
    Wouldn’t you want to keep all roads open to your website? I visit many corporate websites a week, and am frequently surprised when brought up short by an error message, or by ending up somewhere unexpected, requiring me to rethink my route to the website. Usually it’s a browser error message: Oops! We couldn’t find […]


  • 4 Ways Content Builds Brands
    Content marketing works. I’ve seen it work first-hand for businesses and individuals. In fact, I wouldn’t have a successful business and 8 business books published by leading publishers (including the upcoming Content Marketing for Dummies) if content marketing didn’t work. But how do you actually use content to build a brand? Keep reading to learn […]


  • Measurement without Telling Anyone – Germany | CSR Around the World
    / CC-BY-SA


  • Research Offers Tips for Better Facebook Brand Marketing Results
    Research from Buddy Media released this month and reported by eMarketer offers insight into how to increase engagement with Facebook users. The study provides interesting statistics for brand managers based on when, what and how to publish content on the most popular social networking site in the world. According to a small study, the highest […]


  • Automated web reporting | Changing the nature of CSR
    So GRI 3.1 has been released.  I’ve been so excited by this development it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get around to actually looking at what the changes are.  Yep, that excited. Actually, it’s a bit more than that.  a) I was busy on other things, and b) there are other far more […]


2010 Online Ad Revenues Jump to $26 Billion in the United States

If there was any question as to whether or not online advertising is doing well, a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) gives the answer. In 2010, online ad revenues in the United States grew by an impressive 15% to $26 billion. Clearly, online advertising is a key component of brand marketing plans that shows no signs of slowing down.

The biggest winner in the online advertising realm during 2010 was sponsorships, which according to the IAB and PWC report, grew 88% over 2009 and included an incredible 142% increase in just the fourth quarter of 2010. However, sponsorships make up a very small part of overall online ad revenue. Search advertising holds the top spot at over $12 billion for 2010 (a 12% increase over 2009). Display advertising (including banner ads, display ads, and rich media) takes the number two spot and grew 24% over 2009 to $10 billion in 2010. Digital video advertising jumped by 40% in 2010.

The 2009 and 2010 ad revenue by format data from the report is provided below:

The IAB and PWC conduct this research semi-annually, and the 2010 data report marks the fifth year in a row that annual online advertising revenue has grown. The new report also includes mobile ad revenue in the United States for the first time. With 2010 mobile ad revenue estimated to be between $550 and $650 million, we can expect to see those numbers skyrocket in the 2011 report.

Another interesting finding in the IAB and PWC report relates to the increased focus on performance-based advertising, which made up 62% of online ad revenue in 2010 (up from 59% in 2009) versus impression-based advertising at just 33% (down from 37% in 2009) and hybrid at just 5% (up from 4% in 2009).

Online advertising is growing for a number of reasons. First, customers are spending more time online than ever before. Second, there is a lot of unsold display advertising inventory out there so pricing is attractive to advertisers. Third, there are a lot of opportunities available for advertisers to seize in the “less popular” ad formats such as digital video, sponsorships, and mobile. These advertising opportunities aren’t already taken, so there is still time to make your brand stand out from the crowd in mobile advertising or online video advertising.

What do you think about the current state and future of online advertising? Which online advertising formats do you plan on investing in to advertise your brand in 2011 and 2012? Leave a comment and share your opinion.

Addressing the Corporate Website

Wouldn’t you want to keep all roads open to your website?

I visit many corporate websites a week, and am frequently surprised when brought up short by an error message, or by ending up somewhere unexpected, requiring me to rethink my route to the website.

Usually it’s a browser error message:

Oops! We couldn’t find companyname.com. Did you mean www.companyname.com?

Well, of course I did!

Sometimes it’s an unfriendly server message in bright red: Server Application Unavailable

Occasionally I see an unassuming text-only message saying ‘I am sorry – please call us on 01234 567890 if you keep seeing this message’. Unexpected enough to raise an eyebrow if it is a major listed company I’m trying to reach…

And I have seen a redirect to a completely different company. Now that is unnerving.

You might think this was a tiny problem, and not one that affected big companies: you’d be wrong. In a quick scan of FTSE 100 companies this morning, I ended up at a roadblock in over 15% of cases by not putting www. in front of the company domain name.

This matters because it is one more block in the road to your website, and these routes should be swept clean and made welcoming…

There’s one simple thing you can do to avoid putting this particular roadblock up for your visitors, and that is to make sure that whether they type www.yourcompanyname.com or simply yourcompanyname.com, they end up at the same place.

Go on, try it: type in your domain name without the www, and see what happens.

If you end up at your home page, that’s great. But if you end up somewhere unexpected, have a word with your web team: see if they can redirect all your traffic to the same place.