Thanks to everyone who attended this morning's webinar, "The Marketer's Guide to Taking Your Website Mobile". We had some great questions, and a very passionate presenter in Sagar Jani from Station X.

Here are some highlights from the webinar:

• The growth of mobile adoption (devices and web consumption) continues to exceed the predictions made by industry analysts.
• North Americans spend 2.7 hours a day socializing on their phones (Microsoft Tag, 2011), and that doesn't even include other daily activities that users combine with mobile, including watching TV, waiting in line, etc.
• Users are demanding, and expect mobile web experiences to match that of the desktop, particularly with quick loading times.
• The "debate" between apps and mobile websites isn't really a debate at all: apps have their own unique advantages, but they should in no way replace a mobile website, which is an absolute essential for both B2B and B2C companies.
• Some best practices for your mobile web presence include:
  • Loading speed - should be quick
  • Simple navigation
  • Forms should be easy to complete
  • Accessibility is key

If you'd like to know more, check out the full webinar here.

Thanks again to everyone for attending, and stay tuned for details on the next webinar on February 21!

Although many people today associate digital "community" with a customer-facing space, B2B communities are also an integral part of social media. After all, businesses are comprised of (you guessed it), people.

Maria Ogneva, the Head of Community at Yammer, has pulled together the following 10 best practices for managing a B2B community. Has your organization followed all of these tips?

    1.  Know When to Create Your Own

Before jumping on the wagon, so to speak, you need to ask yourself what your objectives are. If you want to take a prominent role in certain industry discussions, for example, it might be best to join an existing group rather than start a brand new one.

     2.  Have a Vision

What's your purpose of starting a B2B community? Will it facilitate dialogue between customers, or will it serve as an industry best practices forum? Once you have settled on your objectives, it will be much easier to determine how best to achieve them.

    3.  Guide Them

Again, depending on your objectives (back to #2), you need to set guidelines for membership in your community. You may opt to have an open community, or a closed, invite-only one. 

    4.  Understand Your Members

Again, it cannot be stressed enough that B2B communities are made up of people, each with their own goals, needs and pain points. People don't buy just products, they buy solutions to problems, so if you can appeal to the basic need for success, belonging and gratification, your community will be that much more engaging.

    5.  Designate Roles

With the case of a very large community, it can be very productive to empower certain contributors to take on the role of moderators. Not only will it add to the sense of collectivity, it will also make your role less complicated!

    6.  Publish the "Rules of the Road"

Make it very clear from the get-go what the purpose of the community is, and further, what behaviours are encouraged and discouraged. 

    7.  How to Measure Success? Decide.

Here we go, back to #2. Depending on your goals, there can be different metrics for tracking the success of your community. Growth and the amount of active users are two metrics, but there are more. The better aligned the metrics are to your business, the better. For example, if your business offers a software solution, and the purpose of your community is to better educate your customers via best practices, you would ideally see fewer support tickets and higher renewal rates as a result of the community.  

    8.  Assign a Community Manager

Although you want to be transparent in the "rules of the road", and encourage people to participate, it's always good to have a community manager, even just for the purposes of accountability.

    9.  Build Internal Process to Support the Community

A thriving community can provide some incredible insight to your business, so be sure to establish a process, among the right departments, to harness that dialogue.

    10.  Success - Share It!

One of the easiest ways to overcome a business problem is to see how others in similar situations have achieved success. Think of this as a "case study" mentality - not only do people love sharing their wins, they can be very inspiring for others facing similar problems.

In the following video, Michael Stelzner from SocialMediaExaminer.com interviews C.C Chapman, the co-author of the acclaimed book, Content Rules. In this interview, C.C explains how businesses can use content marketing can help to build trust and relationships with customers.


sme_cc_chapman_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

Highlights:

• Content marketing is actually not new, but marketers have recently discovered how valuable it can be.
• When you're creating content, forget about those that fall outside of your target market, and keep focused on the ones that do.
• Content marketing is all about good storytelling - look to "experts" and customers to act as contributors. 
• With the rise of mobile and interactive, content will become more and more focused on "real time".

On Tuesday, Facebook annnounced that their Timeline profile would now be available to users worldwide. Although it's currently available only for personal profile pages, many have predicted that brand pages will soon follow.

Some have argued that the move will inevitably "revolutionize" brand pages. Christine Campbell, program manager for SEO and Social Media at Resolute Digital explains: "The brand pages as they are now on Facebook are boring, [are] mostly text, and make successful user interaction difficult. Timeline's focus on images and telling a true story will really help most brands get a better page out of the service."

Some businesses and brands might benefit directly from the potential change than others, namely those that offer tangible products that lend themselves to "scrapbooking" or gallery-style visual representation. Those without tangible products won't be left in the dust, though - brands can get more attention by creating apps that users would be able to feature quite prominently on their profile pages. Ultimately, Timeline puts an emphasis on photos and visuals, so those brands that can leverage this would see the most success. Larger, established fashion/lifestyle brands are a prime example, as they would be able to provide a visual narrative of their company history, from its launch all the way to milestone events over the years. These options are more difficult to represent in traditional brand pages.

The projected change hasn't received a uniform welcome, though, and drawbacks to timeline for brands have also been identified. On a basic level, users who have become accustomed to traditional brand pages may not take as warmly to the transition to Timeline. In addition, analyst Alison Kimszal from DefinedLogic sees the interference that Timeline might have with current Facebook apps as problematic.

If Timeline is eventually opened up to businesses, it will become necessary to evaluate whether or not the new layout will provide real value to your customers. Relevant content will still reign, so the opportunity lies in deciding how best to present that content in meaningful, engaging ways, working with (not against) the channel's evolution.

Move over, essential home utilities. A recent study conducted by iYogi Insights (a research initiative that explores the integration of technology into consumers' daily lives) has shown that spending on technology, which includes devices, online services, Internet connectivity and multimedia entertainment, has now surpassed utility costs for a majority of consumers. 63% of the study's respondents spend almost 35% more on technology than gas and electricity bills.

What the research reveals is that staying connected is quickly climbing up the ladder of "basic" needs for today's consumers. Case in point? Of the study's participants, it was discovered that an average family of 3 or more owns 10-11 Internet-enabled devices. Unsurprisingly, researchers have predicted that consumers' dependency on technology, as demonstrated through studies such as these, will only continue to skyrocket in years to come.

The infographic below captures the key findings from the study:

This is a guest post from Sagar Jani, Digital Strategist at Station X Communications. If you find this post useful, be sure to register for Marqui's free live webinar, The Marketer's Guide to Taking Your Website Mobile, on Tuesday January 31 @ 10:30-11:30AM PST.  Click here to check out the details and reserve your spot.

If you can take away one key message from this blog post, let it be this: 

It's not that mobile web "will" be hugely important. It already is.

This is the point I try to drive home to those marketers who think they have time to wait and "see how it goes" before trying to build a proper mobile web presence. The time for delay has long passed.

ComScore, for one, has indicated in 2011 that of the roughly 5 billion mobile phones in the world, 25% are already smartphones. In North America, that number is already approaching 50%.

This one's my favourite: North Americans currently spend almost 3 hours per day on their mobile device, according to Microsoft Tag. That's approximately 1/3 of the time we spend sleeping each day!

There is a huge disconnect, however, between these numbers and the majority of average companies' web marketing activities. A whopping 70% of companies have not optimized their website for the growing number of mobile consumers. Research has also shown that 84% fail to design emails for viewing on a mobile device.

These numbers are usually surprising for many of the marketers I work with. If you realize the potential of mobile, but haven't quite articulated a proper strategy yet, you still can. Studies have shown that 80% of users would visit websites more frequently on their mobile devices if those websites were quick-to-load and reliable.

If you're eager to get your mobile web strategy off the ground, join me in Marqui's live webinar, The Marketer's Guide to Taking Your Website Mobile, which is taking place on Tuesday, January 31 @ 10:30-11:30AM PST. Click here for more info, and to register. We hope to see you all there!

For journalists, bloggers and techies 
alike, this week has passed in a
whirlwind of headlines covering
the controversy surrounding SOPA, the
proposed anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. Some of the powerful language used to characterize the dispute? Protest, blackout, fear and censorship, to name but a few. Some of the bill's opponents, namely Mashable's editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff, have declared that the passing of SOPA, if it were to occur, would be a regression into the "Dark Ages".

A bold statement indeed, but his sentiment is shared by many who see this bill, along with PIPA, (Protect Intellectual Property Act) as an attempt to drastically alter the internet, reverting back to the days of one-way content distribution (remember that good 'ol Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM?). Others have taken a less apocalyptic stance, but most agree that if passed, this legislation would radically change the face of the internet and content sharing.

What is SOPA?

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is designed to target and penalize online copyright infringement. The part of the legislation that is deemed to be most threatening is not just the penalty against individual offenders, but the shutting down of those sites that provide "tools" for copyright infringement to take place, as well as the removal of such sites in search engine results.

What does that mean? If the bill is passed, any website "directed" towards U.S users that is seen to violate copyright laws will be targeted and shut down. What's more, any site that relies heavily on user-generated content will be at some form of risk, which includes Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter... the list goes on.

Protests

Wednesday's blackout protest intended to raise awareness of the issue beyond the technology community, and tens of thousands of websites took part, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Cheezburger and WordPress. Check out some of the other participating websites here.

Although Facebook and Google couldn't risk full-scale blackouts, they found their own ways to announce their opposition. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to comment, "We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet." Google took action by changing its homepage in the U.S, encouraging visitors to sign a petition against SOPA and PIPA, and they have already received 7 million signatures.

Meanwhile, a backlash campaign has also been launched in the U.S by Creative America, an organization representing leading entertainment unions and media companies in support of the bills. The campaign included a banner ad in New York's Time Square that offered suggestions on what to do during an internet blackout, including reading, listening to music or watching a movie.

What's Next?

It's difficult to know what will happen leading up to the Senate vote on PIPA on January 24th. However, a wave of further blackouts has been predicted and Wikipedia, for one, has announced that "We're not done yet."

What are your thoughts on SOPA? Is this really a death to content sharing as we know it in the U.S? If you're curious to get a sense of some of the other perspectives on the matter, check out this "Viewpoints" piece from BBC News and let us know what you think!

Privacy in the digital age...an oxymoron for
some, a heated debate for most. The following
webinar from eMarketer is incredibly effective in outlining different perspectives around the digital privacy issue, while also the exploring the ways in which marketers and advertisers can address these concerns.

Here are some highlights, but be sure to check out the full slidecast on Slideshare:

Factors Driving the Privacy Debate

Trust. Control. Transparency. These are just a few of the buzzwords that have surrounded the privacy debate over the past few years, with control of consumer data remaining central to that debate. As eMarketer research in 2011 has uncovered, 79% of female consumers in the U.S agree that online companies have access and control over too much of their personal information, with male consumers following at 74%. Of concern to many is the inability to determine who can collect and share your data, along with the inability to dictate how or how long that data can be used.

Adding to this dispute are the differing ideas around how transparent companies should be in their data collection. Some have even made the argument that the problem of privacy is now outdated, as our very concept of privacy has evolved with the pervasiveness of digital technologies.

Consumer Concerns

eMarketer research has found that privacy concerns vary according to age, with non-millennial respondents (those 30+) having stronger concerns around hackers, Facebook privacy, targeted web ads, search engine tracking, etc. Consumers are also found to have contradictory viewpoints in their attitude towards privacy, which adds a layer of complexity to the issue. For example, an August 2011 eMarketer survey found that 37% of respondents are very suspicious of targeted ads, while 41% are also frustrated when shown ads that don't apply to them. In addition, there seems to be a disconnect between consumers' apprehension over privacy and a general unwillingness to actively manage their own privacy settings.

The Role of Mobile and Social Media

Also inherent in the debate is the role that mobile plays in amplifying consumers' fears around privacy. For example, in a February 2011 eMarketer study, 38% (the biggest segment) of respondents indicated that privacy was their primary concern when accessing mobile apps. Often thought of as a personal device, many mobile users are uncomfortable with location tracking, along with ad-supported apps that have built-in data collection. For many mobile users, it's the fear of unsolicited use of data (on a device that follows you just about everywhere!) that is most disconcerting. Marketers too find the deployment of mobile ads to be a challenge, with privacy issues being at the top of the list.

Social media adds another layer to the debate. Most survey respondents have expressed some level of concern about privacy on Facebook, for instance, as regular changes in Facebook's privacy settings are difficult to manage and keep track of.

Government Regulations

The contention over who should be regulating user privacy is a whole other debate, but interestingly, eMarketer's research has found that most users feel that individuals should be wholly responsible for protecting their own privacy, as opposed to government legislation or independent privacy certification organizations. Research ultimately discovered that few users (only 9%) actually trust government regulation enough to protect their privacy in this area.

Solutions for Advertisers and Marketers

Some ways in which the ad industry is addressing these challenges? Transparency and trade-offs, providing something of value in exchange for data, are two prime examples. Other methods, including those which place more onus on the user, include privacy policy pages, the Digital Advertising Alliance's "Advertising Option" icon, opt-outs, and "do-not-track" headers.

However, about 1/3 of users indicated that data collection is justified when receiving something of value for free, and are more likely to interact with companies that employ this kind of value exchange. Marketers are starting to catch onto this wave, and rewards have proven to be an effective incentive for sharing personal data.

To close off, we'd like to share a couple of concluding quotes from the slidecast:

•  Danah Boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research: "The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It's a battle over choice and informed consent."
•  Chris Babel, CEO of TRUSTe: "How do you make the jump from seeing self-regulation as a threat to ad targeting to viewing consumer choice as a brand enhancer?"

Click here to check out the full slidecast. We highly recommend it as a complement to your 2012 marketing thought leadership resources.

This is a guest post from Sagar Jani, Digital Strategist at Station X Communications.

Google's recent algorithm updates, which fully integrate and prioritize Google + into its search results, have spurred a wave of debate and criticism, and it’s quite clear that the search engine giant is losing out in the arena of public opinion. No stranger to controversy, however, Google has made other questionable moves in the past, including Google Wave or the Buzz for example. They have also been involved in suspect deals, including one where they profited from online Canadian pharmacies running illegal ads, a deal which proved to be a $500 million mistake.
 
Despite this, Google’s core business, the search engine responsible for the majority of its revenue and traffic, has remained largely secure. However, Bing has been plugging away over time, becoming the number 2 search engine, and this recent move has inadvertently helped Bing gain popularity.

The reception to this change has been all but warm: Gizmodo has labeled Bing as the better of the 2 search engines, and Dave Winer at Scripting News stated that "Google's search is getting cluttered with pointless crap", concluding that he’ll stay with Bing as long as it continues to outperform Google.

Google has indicated that this change will deliver more personalized results, but some have seen these results skewed more towards Google services than anything else (Google+, Picasa, YouTube, for instance). Take the following scenario: when you search for a restaurant, you're now presented with Google Plus results before Yelp results, where there are generally a large number of useful restaurant reviews. As you can imagine, this doesn't strike a positive chord with many users. Adding to this discontent, SearchEngineland has compiled several damaging examples of the ways in which Google's new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. 

Of course, Google has an incredibly strong global brand presence, with millions of loyal followers, and it remains to be seen what kind of effect these changes will have on the mass of searchers. With two more influential Web sites moving over to Bing's side this week, others may follow. Microsoft might be pulling its "build a competitor, then wait for the rivals to crumble" strategy as it did with Netscape, AOL,  and Sony. We will keep a close eye on the ComScore search reports over next few months, when we can fully assess the impact of Google’s recent move. In the meantime, Microsoft adCenter may see an upswing in popularity, as it already displays ads to 30% of the market.

Can we call 2012 the year of digital? eMarketer
has predicted a 14.4% increase in U.S. online ad
spending over the next year, and there are
undoubtedly a wave of changes in store for
marketers. As the year progresses, though, it's always worthwhile to remain grounded in those best practices that have seen us through 2011, as captured in a recent Mashable article. Here are the highlights, or the resolutions we find to be most essential for 2012:

1. Relevancy

Today's consumers are more time-constrained, demanding and in control than ever, and this continues to pose a challenge to marketers. The upside is that the days of marketing to the so-called "cherry picker" are fading - customers are placing higher priority on value versus price alone, which provides a great opportunity for both B2B and B2C businesses to redefine their brand USP.

2. Context and Content - Two Sides of the Same Coin

You can have all the technological flash you want - a shiny, beautiful ad, for example, goes nowhere without solid, resonant content in it. Similarly, you can develop engaging content, but if you aren't engaging your target market in the channels they're participating in, you've wasted your effort.

3. Data Quality over Quantity

Sophisticated measurement tools are making data collection more fruitful than ever, making it easier for marketers to test their marketing efforts and make the most out of their digital footprint in the future.

4. Channels Have Adapted, and So Can You

It's no longer enough just to be present on social media channels. Brands and businesses have developed new ways to take their social media initiatives to a whole new level, delivering content to their customers in hyper-relevant contexts. Consider, for example, Best Buy's “Twelpforce,” a Twitter-based help desk, which stands as a perfect example of using social media for multiple functions, including customer support, streamlining call centre costs, PR and marketing.

Some have lauded it as the
hottest" new social network, and
although it hasn't yet received widespread popularity as Facebook, Twitter or Google+, Pinterest has seen an immense amount of growth  in followers over the past year, and was found to be one of the top 10 social networks by Mashable.

For those who may not know too much about it: Pinterest is a place to share images of interest. Once you upload an image, it becomes known as a Pin, which you can then place on themed boards of your creation. From polka-dot balloons to breakfast pancakes to bridal dresses, the sky's the limit when it comes to board topics, and you can follow others based on similar interests. One thing to note about Pinterest is that you have to be invited to the network.

It's more than just a repository for "cool" images, though. As Mashable research has found, some businesses have discovered intriguing ways to engage with their customers via Pinterest. Check out some of them below:

1. Contests

For B2C companies, something as simple as a photo contest can really boost engagement with your customers. One idea: for a clothing store, the contest can consist of submitting photos of your best outfits from a particular retailer.

2. New Product Approval

Since Pinterest's popularity is still rising, it's an ideal platform to gather customer intelligence around new products (think of it as an incredibly cost-effective, and highly social, focus group).

3.  Showcase Brand Identity

For those organizations that may not have products, Pinterest can allow you to weave your brand story through images. A brilliant example: a mayoral candidate can illustrate their philanthropic, socially-responsible initiatives through a specific Pinterest Board.

To read more, check out the full article. Are there any other Pinterest tips and tricks that you've found useful? Post them here!