The 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing Blog

Half of Facebook users use mobile September 5, 2012 – 11:03 am				Damjan Dano

Recently, the social stats platform SocialBackers shared some insights into how many people use Facebook via their mobile version and their mobile apps… the number is (not) suprising at all… it’s 543 million users, almost 57% of the total number of users.

The research shows that the highest number of mobile visits come from an Android based phones, while the iOS based iPhone and iPad make total of 25% (19% iPhone and 6% iPad).

North Americans are the most frequent mobile users on this social network, 161,7 million users from this continent like and share content daily on Facebook through their mobile devices.

On second place is Asia with around 134,2 million users and third in number of visits is Europe with 120,7 million.

So clearly mobile usage and visits from mobile devices on the web are trending….  perfect time to invest in a mobile-friendly website.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Content Marketing (Pillar 1), Interactive Marketing, Mobile (Pillar 7), Mobile Applications, Small Business, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: digital marketing agency, facebook mobile, facebook stats, Mobile (Pillar 7), mobile apps, mobile usage, social media agency, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), social networking

The Psychology behind Social Networking August 31, 2012 – 12:39 pm				Damjan Dano

This interesting infographic published by Psychology Degree covers an interesting topic: the psychology of social networking – going over various data related to the most popular social network, Facebook with few bits of Twitter.

For example, did you know that 1 out of every 9 people on Earth are on Facebook and that 9 out of 10 US internet users use social media?

It’s interesting to know that 1 of 5 minutes spent online is on a social networking website?

Talking about user generated content (UGC), I’m sure that you are not aware that in a minute all social media users produce over 694,980 Facebook status updates or 532,080 tweets… that’s a lot of thoughts… .

Wondering why people add and keep on adding friends on Facebook? Besides the personal connection, 60% of friends are added because of mutual friends and 29% based on the profile picture appearance.

Also, did you know that we are obsessed with ourselves? More then 80% of our posts are about ourselves… (which makes sense since the personal nature of social media, but it’s a dramatic statement )

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Interactive Marketing, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: marketing psychology, social media agency, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), social media psychology, social media statistics, social media stats, social networking, social networks

Women Entrepreneurs #2: Debbi Fields – “I love chocolate” entrepreneur! August 31, 2012 – 11:54 am				Cristiana

“I knew I loved making cookies and every time I did, I made people happy. That was my business plan”

Debbi Fields is the Founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies. small business started in 1977 in Palo Alto, California as Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chippery. The name of the company changed because it started diversifying the products. The company grosses over $300 million from over 1000 outlets in 9 countries.

At age 20 Debbi managed to get a loan. The first day was not encouraging at all… at least at the beginning, because Debbi had to wait a couple of hours inside the shop for sales. Since there were no customers, Debbi decided to assemble a couple of cookies into a nice package and offered samples to people who were passing-by. Fortunately, by the end of the first day, she got $75 in sales.

As the business grew, Debbi started establishing a special relationship with her loyal customers: coffee and cookies were ready when they arrived. Her receipt for success was very easy: make people feel they are special.

The company has enjoyed a tremendous level of success and in present has 5,000 employees. Besides the business itself, Debbi took the time to publish a cook book entitled, “I Love Chocolate”. She is currently involved into the company’s operations management, new product development, public relations and of course, brand name management.

Debbi had been cultivating her entrepreneurial spirit since she was at the age of 13 when she received her first paycheck from a job with the Oakland A’s baseball organization. She found that “real” ingredients such as butter, vanilla, and real chocolate made for “real” cookies.

A couple of business lessons that should be learned from Debbi’s business journey are related to the customer shopping experience and… the name of her venture itself. In other words, not only was Debbie focused on making sure her customers felt important but she branded her company with care from the beginning. Therefore, she changed the name of the company early on to include a broader range of cookies; so the impact seriously increased.

Posted by Cristiana
Posted in Content Marketing (Pillar 1), eCommerce, Interactive Marketing, Public Relations | No Comments »
Tags: chocolate, CRM (Pillar 5), customer analytics, customer experience, customer relationship, women entrepreneurs

Facebook is rolling out new features and marketers are rolling their eyes August 22, 2012 – 5:52 pm				Damjan Dano

Today the largest social network made few updates to their Open Graph platform… it allowed users to tag their friends in 3rd party apps like social games (ex: FarmVille) and geo-location apps (ex: FourSquare)… it also announced that sponsored links will be shown in user’s searches on Facebook.com.

Now your friends can tag you on 3rd party apps and you will receieve the notifications about the tag – via a Mention or Action method.

The difference between these two is outlined below:

This feature will not be added by default, users will give permissions for tagging to the apps, the same way they do now when they want to interact with some app. (tip: If you currently have some active apps on your profile, in order to use this you’ll need to renew the permissions, you can do that with  going to Account settings > Apps).

The second update marks a direct poke from Facebook to Google (maybe because of this Google is running around crazy), and will allow businesses to bid for user’s query in the search box and results page like shown in the image below:

While the tagging feature update is clearly a long awaited and requested from the 3rd party app providers and many users, the second feature update is clearly a shot to make the shareholders happy and to bump the price of current low-performing stock on the market.

Most likely the first feature will be accepted very well by the users, and the second one will likely be highly ignored with very low click-throughs as most of the current sidebar ads on Facebook. I have trouble figuring out why Facebook – platform that has tons of data and behavior patterns for all of us, still can’t figure out how to make money and how to properly integrate semantic marketing and targeting, but are copying some old-school concepts.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Business News, Content Marketing (Pillar 1), Digital Media (Pillar 4), eCommerce, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Online PR, Pay Per Click (PPC), Public Relations, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: Digital Media (Pillar 4), facebook, Facebook marketing, foursquare, google, Internet Marketing, search marketing, semantics marketing, Social Marketing, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6), social networks, tagging, tags

Google buys print ad to advertise online ad!? August 21, 2012 – 10:25 am				Damjan Dano

Google’s marketing team made another move that spiked a lot of controversy and conversations about online vs. offline advertising all over the net. Last week, Google bought an print ad space in the Canada’s Globe and Mail and National Post in order to advertise their online search ads:

With this ad purchase, Google is trying to show that print ads don’t really work and that their online AdWords platform is much more efficient…. but did Google really made the right move with buying this ad space and putting that ad copy there?

Many journalists, bloggers and media folks are making fun of the search giant’s move, claiming that with this Google actually demonstrated the value of print ads. Or maybe Google’s marketing department just wanted to poke at its direct competition and just spike a controversy. As Engadget states, the “universe has yet to implode.”

What do you make of Google’s ad?

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Content Marketing (Pillar 1), Digital Media (Pillar 4), Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Online PR, Public Relations, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: Digital Media (Pillar 4), google, google advertising, internet advertising, Marketing, online marketing, search marketing, SEM, SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Flash step aside, HTML 5 is taking over August 15, 2012 – 5:17 pm				Damjan Dano

Flash vs. HTML 5

Many of you have heard about HTML 5 as “the future of the internet”, “the most hyped technology update in the past couple years that is yet to come”… but how many of you are aware that HTML 5 is already taking over the game?

As of today, the 15th of August, Adobe is officially abandoning the support of Flash on all Android phones (version 4.0 and up) because of HTML 5… About a month ago in their official announcement, Adobe stated that HTML 5 is the “best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms” and that they will be shifting their Flash support exclusively for the PC platform.

For those of you who are not familiar with the subject, HTML 5 can be used as an alternative to Adobe Flash. Both of them have functionalities that support playing multimedia files within webages, they both use integrated SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and vector graphics. And even though the two technologies are not in direct competition and both have their own purpose, there are some specific cases that their features overlap, such as the mobile video area.

What Steve Jobs envisioned couple years ago it seems that it came through. He was known as a strong promoter of the HTML 5, same as Google, they made a decision to encode all of the videos on their YouTube platform in HTML 5, which was the right thing to do in order to offer content faster and better. With this, and today’s big news from Adobe, we can freely expect “invasion” of HTML 5 on multiple platforms.

And even though HTML 5 is not 100% ready, but the most popular browsers already support many of the HTML 5 tags and bits, and for those browsers that don’t really support it (yes Internet Explorer, we are looking at you!) HTML 5 functionalities can be easily supported with JavaScript replications…

With today’s announcement, we mark one small step for Adobe, but a giant leap for HTML 5.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in 7 Pillars of Digital Marketing, Content Marketing (Pillar 1), Digital Media (Pillar 4), Flash, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Mobile (Pillar 7), Mobile Applications, UX & Website Design (Pillar 2), Video Production, web 2.0, web development | No Comments »
Tags: adobe flash, flash vs html5, google, html 5, html5, steve jobs, YouTube

It’s Good to Give: Meet Noble June 27, 2012 – 4:49 pm				Cristiana

For over a decade, Milk-Bone has been supporting the Canine Assistants Organization. A portion of every purchase helps raise and train service-dogs for those in need.

This corporate relationship has been transformed – from a less-conspicuous partnership whose impact was not often felt, into a successful Facebook campaign. “It’s Good to Give.” The goal of this social campaign was to find a way for dog lovers to take personal interest in the Canine Assistants Service Training Program.

The Facebook campaign allowed users to see the impact of each Milk Bone purchase made. They received a firsthand look at CAO’s dog upbringing, training, progress, etc. The campaign was almost an instant success. A national TV commercial followed; spreading the word about the program. This coincided with a web documentary on the Golden Retriever Noble and his instructor Chris.

When Noble graduated, the company allowed fans to celebrate with Noble. Celebrations began by asking Facebook users to pitch in and help Noble get 3 special graduation gifts. All that was required was a “Like”. The campaign’s success allowed Milk Bone to take it one step further and offered photo albums of fan selection pictures on Lulu.com

Milk Bone then asked fans to change their profile pictures with a “Today I’m Noble” Avatar. The response was overwhelming and brought significant awareness to the project. A ‘Congratulations’ video was made for Noble using photos tagged of Facebook users and their dogs, wishing Noble luck.

Noble not only helps people in need, but helped bring awareness to the program that continues to grow at a rapid pace. With over 1 billion impressions; the campaign drove the interest of PBS. The ratings of the PBS special were 30% higher than the national average rating for a PBS prime-time show. These further drove donations, volunteer applications, and service dog requests to record levels.

Canine Assistants’ web traffic increased over 800% in the first month, averaging 100 more visits per day thereafter and added over 300 donors to their database. Milk-Bone’s share grew from 36% to 38% in a little over 4 months and private label share decreased from 25% to 23% during the same period.

Posted by Cristiana
Posted in blog, Interactive Marketing, Online PR, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: facebook, fb advertising, milk bone, noble, social media, social media campaign

#FoxAtPlanetaTerra May 21, 2012 – 5:11 pm				Cristiana

Social Media plays an important role in marketing – from outreach and raising a company’s voice, to enhancing the brand and as a CRM tool. Once only a digital marketing experiment, social media has become an integral part of any marketing campaign – both traditional and digital.

Online platforms such as Twitter put larger brands in direct connection with consumers, and can take advantage of their instantaneousness aspects of that particular network. Granted the content is interesting and original, this can create an almost immediate buzz.

Volkswagon is a used Twitter and Google Maps to market Planeta Terra, a highly popular music festival based in San Paolo, Brazil. As sponsors of the event, it was in Volkswagon’s best interest to garner a large amount of attention for the festival and looked at the cost-effective Social Media as a medium to do so. Volkswagon had high hopes of the younger audience of Pleneta Terra being responsive to their new, Fox car model.

Tickets were spread throughout 10 different locations in Sao Paolo. Volkswagon’s custom platform allowed users to easily see a Google map of the entire city. Users were asked to include #foxatplanetaterra in any tweet they wrote. The more they tweeted, the more the map zoomed in and the closer the user got to the tickets. The first to arrive were given two free tickets. After the prize is claimed, the race started all over again.

The approach can easily be SPAMMY – but nevertheless, the campaign saw a high volume of user partcipation and was considered highly successful. Practically, Volkswagen was able to get the word out on both the festival and the new Fox model. Even those that did not attend the event were curious about the contest and further investigated with enthusiasm.

Posted by Cristiana
Posted in blog, Interactive Marketing, Mobile Applications, Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | 1 Comment »
Tags: planeta terra, smm, socail media marketing, social media, twitter

Project Re:Brief – Redefining online marketing March 19, 2012 – 11:21 am				Damjan Dano

Project Re:Brief is Google’s latest initiative to expand the reach and awareness of digital marketing through re-adapting couple of the most epic marketing campaigns in the history of advertising for the new, modern audience that spends enormous amounts of time online and is constantly connected thanks to the latest gadgets and technology.

As Google states on the project’s website, internet advertising turns 18 years-old this year, but even after two decades of existence and constant innovation, digital ads are used simply to inform more than they’re being used to connect, engage and entertain.

Taking Coca Cola’s “Hilltop“, Volvo’s “Drive it like you hate it“, Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and Avis’ “We try harder” campaigns, Google’s team of experts will try to re-imagine these iconic campaigns for the digital age.

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Business News, Interactive Marketing, Public Relations, SEO / Search Engine Optimization (Pillar 3), Social Media Marketing (Pillar 6) | No Comments »
Tags: Advertising, brief, digital ads, digital advertising, digital marketing, digital media, google, Internet Marketing, Marketing, online ads, re:brief

Drowning in e-mail? You’re not alone. February 14, 2012 – 7:41 pm				Damjan Dano

Another awesome infographic on the topic of e-mail communication, developed by the Boomerang for Gmail tool that helps you schedule an email to be sent later.

The infographic shares insights from 5 million analyzed e-mails and explains that the average e-mail user received 147 messages every day, and spends around 2 hours on e-mail daily. Which is a lot of time!

Many other interesting details worth reading are included in this graphic:

Couple months ago I’ve read an interesting and controversial article in the news about a former French finance minister, now CEO of Atos Origin, one of the largest IT companies in France, who gave it’s employees 18 months to adapt a practice of not communicating via e-mail.

After the deadline, the company will only communicate via phone, IM chat and in person communication.

The decision by the executive Tiery Breton was made after analyzing over 200 company e-mails and concluding that only 10% of the e-mails are valid and useful, while the rest are distraction. They also concluded that employees are spending from 5-20 hrs a week only on e-mails,

What’s your opinion on this topic? It’s certainly an interesting discussion. How do you handle e-mail?

Posted by Damjan Dano
Posted in Blog Marketing, Business News, eCommerce, Email Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Online PR | No Comments »
Tags: best time to e-mail, drowning in e-mail, e-mail, e-mail response rate, marketing comm, marketing communication, sending e-mails, when to send e-mail