Tag Archive for: Survey

Study: TV users are multitasking

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choosing from images streamConsumers are multitasking and using other electronic devices like phones or tablets when watching television. This is the conclusion of a recent third annual Video Over Internet survey of 3,501 consumers in Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. It states that the majority watched video content over the Internet. Obviously the tablet is showing the biggest increase in multitasking use.

“Consumers can’t just watch TV anymore. The rise in multitasking while watching TV suggests that scheduled programming, also known as Linear TV, may be losing its appeal for sophisticated users, presenting both challenges and opportunities for broadcasters and content providers”. Francesco Venturini, Accenture’s Media & Entertainment industry group.

The key findings in a brief overview: 77% regularly use their computer while watching television (16% increase to 2012). Just 17% of people using tablets while watching TV said their activity was unrelated to the TV content they were viewing. The use of tablets is different though as it correlated more closely with what respondents were watching compared to laptops or smartphones.

The study indicates that TVs connected directly to the Internet might still remain the ideal method for buying and watching online video on a TV. However, the use of connected TV is on a decrease in the last year (36% to 31%). The study shows that consumers are still not sure about the available options for accessing online video. Just 16% indicated a preference for an online connection through a set-top box, whereas 30% responded to watch daily online content the other way.

The use of tablets during television viewing is said to have the biggest increase in the past year (from 11% to 44%). The use of local online video service providers is increasing from 37% to 40% iwth almost the similar amount of a decrease in use by global providers like Netflix and YouTube.
Still, the majority of respondents identified traditional TV broadcasters as the providers they trusted most to present video over the Internet on their TV screen.

SoDA: Digital Trends Report 2013 (Slideshare)

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SoDA (the Society of Digital Agencies) just recently presented their views and results of their annual Digital Marketing Outlook Survey. It offers some fresh insights and perspectives of how marketers might be turning their creative and technological knowledge into new concepts in their digital agencies. The report delivers thoughts around changing advertising markets, new organizational set-ups, latest technology and budget ideas for companies, brands and digital agencies in 2013. A very interesting resource…

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Study: Content Marketing is becoming big in B2B, focus is shifting…

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A recent study by Curata identified the main drivers of content marketing activities in B2B companies. The findings are based on Curata’s poll of 465 B2B marketing professionals in October 2012 from business owners, VPs of Marketing, CMOs, managers, marketing consultants and agencies.

The study explains that content marketing continues to become more and more important for B2B marketers. However, the drivers for content strategies are shifting towards thought leadership and market education.

The results show that 87% of responding B2B marketing professionals use content marketing for business goals targets (5% increase to 2011). Content marketing gets followed by SEO (67%) and event marketing (60%) as further leading channels in marketing strategies in 2012.

Further findings of the study show that although engaging customers (81%) has top priority for their content marketing efforts, thought leadership and educating the market are increasing in their importance for the business. More than half of B2B marketers (56%) state thought leadership as a key objective (13% increase to 2011). Also, educating the market (47%) increased by 3% to last year. Just 24% see SEO as a key objective (still a 5% increase to last year). Former top marketing tactics (print/TV/radio) went down from 32% to 26% this year.

Spot On!
Lead generation is still one of the key marketing goals for B2B marketers according to the survey. Most B2B marketers (82%) see driving sales and leads as their top marketing goal. Establishing thought leadership (42%), increasing brand awareness (40%), or increasing Web traffic (32%) follow in the next places. Content curation is also getting traction as the next step in content marketing. 57% of B2B marketers see it as an important evolution step. However, content curation is in it’s infancy when only 34% of curating content marketers have done it since six months or less. Quite scary I found that a staggering 43% of B2B marketers don’t measure the efficiency of their content marketing efforts. I found interesting that the topic brand advocates was not on the spot in terms of content marketing in this study.

How people see it – The state of social at work

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The technology service provider Appirio published some findings that most business people are more social personally than they are at work.

The findings show that twice as many managers are engaged in Social Media compared to the people they have in their teams. What the survey did not tell us is the reason why the people are using social platforms and features less than their managers. Are they not allowed to engage on communities at work? Are Social Media policies too much black and white? Or do they not see the benefits Social Media offers?

The positive outcome is that there is some understanding of culture and ownership of the social business as the driving factors for success. Although marketing seems to be owning the social business transformation, the question remains if this does not make space for a new position in companies like chief web officer or chief culture officer. Another question that could be raised in companies in my eyes.

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Interview: "Social Business = Creating a smarter workforce & a proven solution to business challenges"

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One-on-one interview with Ed Brill

Ed Brill is Director, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, at IBM. Brill is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM’s messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, Lotus Symphony, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Brill’s focus is on extending and growing the success of these solutions through customer engagement, partner ecosystem development, and harnessing the breadth and depth of the IBM organization.

The Strategy Web spoke with him about the relevance and future of Social Business.

Why is Social Business not only a buzzword?

Leaders in every industry are leveraging Social Business technology to disrupt their industries and create competitive advantage. They are improving productivity and unleashing innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence inside and outside their organizations. With social, they’re creating a smarter workforce and proving that social business isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a proven solution to business challenges.

According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016. According to IBM’s CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.

What does it take to make a business “social”?

Organizations have quickly learned that a Social Business is more than just having a Facebook page and a Twitter account. In a Social Business, every department in the organization has embedded social capabilities into their traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done to create business value. A Social Business utilizes social software technology to communicate with its rich ecosystem of clients, business partners and employees.

Social business is a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon transparency and trust from executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls and use of business analytics. Becoming a Social Business can help an organization deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas and innovate faster, identify expertise, enable a more effective workforce and ultimately drive its bottom line.

What does it mean to change the culture of a company?

Changing an organizations culture to embrace social must start from the top. Senior leadership must buy in and promote a culture of sharing, transparency and trust. Recent studies by IBM see this shift, today’s C-Suite recognizes the potential of social. Consider this, according to IBM’s 2012 CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. Similarly. IBM’s 2011 CIO Survey of 3,000 global leaders indicated that more than 55% of companies identified social networking as having a strategic significance to their company’s growth. And finally, 2011 IBM CMO Study reports that CMOs are using social platforms to communicate with their customers, 56 percent view it as a key communication channel. These senior leaders are the key to social business adoption and there’s a real shift occurring, social business is now a business imperative.

What role is the flexible workspace playing in the process?

Companies are able to build virtual teams out of expertise and leadership, regardless of their physical location or title on the organization chart. Today’s workforce expects to be able to share, post, update and communicate with colleagues, customers, and ecosystem using social tools to get real work done. Through those tools, employees who work remotely, use flexible “hot desks” in company offices, or open floorplans can leverage tools for instant e-meetings, video and audio tools, and embedded applications to process knowledge and activities faster and deliver more value to the organization.

What’s your advice for companies to become a “social business”?

Companies around the world are now focused on becoming Social Businesses, Forrester Research estimates that the market opportunity for social software is expected to increase 60% annually. But perhaps the most daunting part of becoming a social business is how to start the journey. That’s where creating a Social Business Agenda plays a vital role. In order to become successful in social business, an organization needs to create its own personalized Agenda that addresses the company’s culture, trust
between management and employees and the organization and its constituencies, engagement behind and outside of the firewall, risk management, and of course, measurement. The sponsorship for such an activity can be driven by leadership, lines of business, or other organizational catalyst roles.

Reasons why businesses move to the cloud

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Small companies see the trend, bigger companies are following. Evernote, Wuala, Dropbox, or SafeSync were kind of the first movers and shakers of the cloud wave. Today, more and more businesses are moving their tasks and workplaces to the cloud.

The reasons are manyfold. Sometime it is their competitors that are a step ahead, sometimes it is the smarter working trend which allows employees to work anytime, anywhere at any project. Sometimes it is an IT setup, maintenance and support factor.

More and more companies see the advantages and collected some evidence that it offers mow productivity and flexibility. The cloud solves HR flexibility problems and offers new IT opportunities and destroys IT maintenance issues concerning service and support which the infographic by Yorkshire Cloud illustrates. The main benefits that the Cloud Computing Survey Outlook under 521 IT pros saw were…

– 61% appreciate the instant scalability
– 54% found cost savings as an argument
– 53% prefer the easier management of IT

Forecasts indicate that by 2014 the use of cloud services will increase 27% from 2010. The cloud computing industry is expected to grow to 240 Billion USD by 2020.

Are you seeing your company move to the cloud?

Study Gen Y: Moving communication to social networks

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Many managers don’t believe that the next management generation might communicate differently from today. So, every proof we have could be beneficial to score here and it is necessary to obey the signs in every region in the world.

In India an increasing number of the Gen Y generation prefers to communicate via social networking platforms to stay connect with their peers. And they do it on mobile devices as their preferred tool for communication.

A recent survey called The GenY Survey 2011-12 by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) asked 12,000 high school students between 12-18 years in cities like i.e. Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune from July to December 2011. It finds that a “total of 88% respondents from metropolitan cities had a Facebook account while other platforms such as Orkut and India-based Apna Circle, Ibibo and Hi5 were more popular in small metros”.

The study states that 40% of the Gen Y’s have internet access on their mobile phones. However, television emerged as the least favorite gadget with not even 1% voting for it. An emerging trend is the use of tablets with almost 14% using these new devices, it quotes.

Some more findings of the study…
– 85% use social networking sites such as Facebook
– 84% have internet access at home
– 79% own a mobile phone
– 28% value the mobile phone their favorite gadget

Spot On!
There are already 38% of respondents in metros using Facebook or Twitter to communicate. Tweeting is now being used by one in three students according to the study, though just 1% mentioned it as their preferred site. Text and chat were said to be the preferred alternatives to voice calls with 50% of respondents in metros explaining they used SMS most frequently to communicate, 45% used instant messaging. Apart from that, they also value information technology as a career option followed by engineering and medicine.

Study shows that consumers are frustrated with online paying

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Harald Wanetschka / pixelio.de

How often do we stop our online purchasing process? How often do we not pay what is chosen to be in the basket? And how often do we leave an online shop frustrated?

In a recent study by Mastercard Worldwide conducted by Harris Interactive we acknowledge how consumers are feelings about online commerce, as well as their habits on mobile shopping. According to the report, U.S. consumers replied that one of their biggest issues is “entering payment, billing and shipping information.”

It is not surprising to anyone probably that the only other issue more annoying to online buyers is knowing still one that has not changed in 15 years: People would like to know how a product feels, fits or looks.

“Online and mobile shopping puts a host of new options at consumers’ fingertips, but the current checkout process needs improvement to fully realize the potential of these important retail channels,” Geoff Iddison, Group Executive E-Commerce and Mobile, MasterCard Worldwide

According to Iddison the study also shows that consumers want a simpler, faster way to enter account information and less time filling out forms.

The funny thing for me is that the world still wants something that does not exist (and which I have thought about inventing in the online advertising world, too): a trusted source that handles safely personal information in one place.

58% of online shoppers said they would like that easy access to information in order to simplify their online check-out experience across the Internet. Apart from that almost one out of four respondents replied they had abandoned a shopping cart before completing their online or mobile purchase. 

On the MasterCard company blog, Brian Gendron -a company spokesman- said the poll shows consumers want a simpler online payment experience. He mentions…

“Consumers still find that a lengthy checkout experience can cause frustrations, which can sometimes mean lost business for merchants when consumers fail to click ‘confirm purchase. Consumers want a simple and fast process to complete their online transactions so they can spend more time finding the exact products that they want.”

So, how about you and your online purchasing experiences? Would you say the study is correct in their findings?

Nielsen study: People trust in peoples' word of mouth

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Now, I have used this Nielsen graphic in seminars and conferences for two years and always wondered when the next study is going to be published.

Finally today, I came across the latest Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising report. And again, the results are similar to what they where back in 2009. People still don’t trust advertising. Well, let’s say… at least not as much as they trust recommendations from people they know like friends, family and peers. However, it is still somehow scary to bear in mind that people trust consumer opinions expressed online… very often without verifying who say what in which scenario and which stage of life.

According to the Nielsen findings, which surveyed over 28,000 Internet people in 56 countries, 92% of the respondents said they trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising. This equals an increase of 18% compared to 2007. Consumer opinions posted online come in at the second place of most trusted source. Of the consumers surveyed globally, 70% indicated they trust messages from online platforms. This makes up an increase by 15% in the last four years.

Publishing houses and platforms still get a lot of trust from their users. Editorial content (58%) finished in the thread place, just before branded websites (58%), and opt-in emails (50%). The traditional platforms for advertising like print, television, and radio are significantly lower from a trust point of view. The drop in value since 2009 goes down by 24%.

Spot On!
The results show the importance of content marketing carrying the truth about your company, brand or products. Openness, authenticity and transparency are still rated very high amongst your customers. They want to “know what they get”. They want to engage with you but also being told the truth if there is something bad or uncertain to say about brands and their development. And above all they want you to respond to their input. They want you to give them some attention, some feedback, some credit for the time they spend. Then you will earn their trust, and then they will share your voice.