This is the second and final part of a post based upon an article from the Network for Business Sustainability. The article addressed seven aspects of business companies need to demonstrate that they have addresses. Part 1 can be read here.
[Read more…] about 7 Sections for a CSR Website | Part 2 of 2
In another effort to lure brands to Facebook as a marketing tool, select brands can now see their fans’ other likes. So far, only big-budget, “priority accounts,” have been given access to this highly coveted data, and Tim Peterson of Adweek reports that agencies and their clients had to visit a Facebook office in order to get access to it. In other words, this is a feature that Facebook is still guarding closely.
Enabling brands to see the other pages, brands, television shows, bands, and so on that fans of their own Facebook Pages like is just one more useful component of behavioral targeting that brands want desperately. Using tools like Wisdom, Infinigraph, and Relevvant, brands can access some of this data already, and advertisers can use tools like SocialCode and Wildfire to make better decisions to drive maximum results. However, incorporating access to all of the data directly through Facebook will surely be popular among brands and advertisers.
Of course, the reaction from Facebook members might not be as positive, since Facebook is so often attacked for revealing too much private information about users to organizations that are willing to pay for it.
Social data is valuable, and Facebook is sitting on a massive amount of highly-personalized social data. Facebook knows this. It holds the power, and only time will tell if this new feature will expand to more brands in the future. The number of ways that brands can use this data to provide relevant offers to existing customers, meaningful offers to new customers, and co-sponsored offers to both audiences are vast, and creative brands will undoubtedly launch innovative and effective marketing initiatives using this data in the near future.
Think about how your brand could use data, which shows everything your brand’s Facebook fans like. Having access to that information would enable you to launch timelier offers and better targeted offers. Most importantly, this data could make a significant difference in generating positive marketing ROI.
What do you think?
Image: Denis Dervisevic
In academia, professors almost never express something in clear understandable prose when a jargon filled expression can be used. Hence, the title of today’s post. Pareto Principle is the fancy name academics give to the 80/20 rule; that is, that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes, or to put it another way, the few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are of little consequence.
This comes into play in investor relations in two important ways. First, almost every investor relations department I know works with constrained budgets and limited staffs. As a result, they need to be efficient with their time and effort. (My personal theory for this is that IR usually reports to the Chief Financial Officer and not the V. P. of Marketing, but that a topic for another day.) Second, most companies today are 70% – 80% owned by institutional investors, and it is within this group that the 80/20 rule has effect. Plainly put, 80 percent of the shares in a company are usually held by the top 20 percent (or less) of the institutional shareholders. Therefore, in order to efficiently reach the maximum number of shares in your investor relations efforts, you need to give first priority to the top 20 percent of your institutional shareholders.
As an example, and in order to put some numbers on this theory, let’s say that a large company has 500 institutional shareholders and 100,000,000 shares outstanding. A typical investor relations staff cannot reach out and be in contact with 500 investors every quarter. There is usually not enough personnel and budget to get the job done. However, the 80/20 rule tells you that of the 500 institutional investors, 100 investors will control 80,000,000 of the 100,000,000 shares. One hundred investors is a much more manageable number for investor relations departments to stay in contact with.
It’s a simple marketing principle: Take care of your best customers. This is not to say that you violate disclosure practices in prioritizing your shareholders. Material, nonpublic information should always be released to all shareholders at the same time. Rather, these large investors should never be disappointed because you failed to regularly communicate with them regarding normal, nonmaterial voluntary disclosures. A good investor relations department will have standards for how often these shareholders should be “touched” and a tracking system to make sure they are being met.
When people talk about brands on Twitter, stock prices move. This high positive correlation between stock performance and volume of Twitter mentions of a brand was just one finding in The Conversation Index Volume 5 research study from Bazaarvoice.
The study analyzed 26 million tweets with each mentioning at least one of 13 brands from the BrandZ Global 100 Brands list: Adidas, Clinique, Colgate, Gillette, Hugo Boss, Nike, Pampers, Pepsi, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, Intel, Tesco, and Sony. Next, the data was compared to over 8,000 television and radio mentions, 17 months of stock price data, over 18 months of Google search data, and 270,000 pieces of consumer-generated content from online reviews — all for those same 13 brands.
Key findings from the study include:
Bottom-line, brand mentions on Twitter are valuable, but they differ from other types of brand mentions simply because people use Twitter differently than they use other social channels. As I’ve written many times on Corporate Eye, a fully-integrated marketing plan that leverages traditional marketing tactics and new media marketing tactics (including Twitter and other social channels) is the most powerful and successful.
What do you think about the Bazaarvoice Conversation Index findings? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on Twitter marketing and the value of brand mentions for your company.
Image: Bernard Goldbach
Two years ago the Danish government published a set of guidelines on green advertising claims. It said
Environmental or ethical claims in marketing should .. be correct and precise and exaggerations as to the company’s or the product’s ethical qualities or positive effects should be prohibited
Now the US too has issued tighter guidelines.
This month the Federal Trade Commission reissued its Green Guides for the first time since 1998. These lay out the standards expected to be followed by advertisers in the US and go into far greater depth than the Danish guidelines.
Furthermore websites are mentioned specifically in a number of places in the guidelines as examples, so it is clear that these guidelines apply to online marketing as well as any other form.
Businesses from other countries therefore need to be acutely aware that their websites may fall foul of these much tighter guidelines, especially if they’re targeting the US market.
So without further ado, here’s a brief run down of the new rules:
Siegel & Gale’s 2012 Global Brand Simplicity Index ranks the simplest and most complex brands in the world and reports not just the rankings but also points of complexity and simplicity that affect people’s lives and their perceptions of brands. For example, did you know that consumers are willing to pay billions more for simpler brand experiences? That’s just one finding from the report.
In all, the index surveyed 6,067 consumers in seven countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America to identify their perceptions of 125 brands in 25 industries.
Key findings from the survey and corresponding report include:
The brands that consumers ranked as simplest globally are:
The brands that ranked at the bottom of the list making them the most complex globally are:
The full index report is available here and includes more data as well as rankings for specific countries and regions such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, India, and the Middle East.
Image: Siegel & Gale
