marketing

Internet Properties: No Longer an American Monopoly

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing Communications , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The amount of translated content is also showing big-time growth.

languageAccording to an analysis by venture capitalist and Internet industry specialist Mary Meeker, in 2013 nine of the ten top global Internet properties were U.S.-based.

For the record, they were as follows (in order of ranking):

  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo
  • Wikipedia
  • Amazon
  • Ask
  • Glam Media
  • Apple

Only China-based Tencent cracked the Top Ten from outside the United States — and it just barely made it in as #10 in the rankings.

And yet … the same Top 10 Internet properties had nearly 80% of their users located outside America.

With such a disparity between broad-based Internet usage and concentrated Internet ownership, the picture was bound to change.

And boy, has it changed quickly:  Barely a year later — as of March 2014 — the Top 10 listing now contains just six American-based companies.

Ask, Glam Media and Apple have all fallen off the list, replaced by three more China-based properties:  Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu.

Paralleling this trend is another one:  a sharp increase in the degree to which businesses are providing content in multiple languages.

For websites that offer some form of translated content, half of them are offering it in at least six languages.  That’s double the number of languages that were being offered a year earlier.

And for a quarter of these firms, translated content is available in 15 or more languages.

What are the most popular languages besides English?  Spanish, French, Italian and German are popular — not a great surprise there.  But other languages that are becoming more prevalent include Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

In fact, the average volume of translated content has ballooned nearly 90% within just the past year.

The growing accuracy of computer-based translation modules — including surprisingly good performance in “idiomatic” language — is certainly helping the process along.

Moreover, when a major site like Facebook reports that its user base in France grew from 1.4 million to 2.4 million within just three months of offering its French-language site, it’s just more proof that the world may be getting smaller … but native language still remains a key to maximizing business success.

It’s one more reminder that for any company which hopes to compete in a transnational world, offering content in other languages isn’t just an option, but a necessity in order to build and maintain a strategic advantage.

Genericide: The Biggest Threat to Trademarks

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , , , , , , , , ,

brandingWhen reading articles or promotional copy about certain brands, the extensive use of footnotes plus “®” designations dangling off of words like ornaments on a tree look clunky and can be a real distraction.

But there are important reasons for companies to police and protect their brand equity … because if you spend some time snooping around the English language, you’ll find any number of words that began life as trademarked terms but became “genericized” over time.

Trademark lawyers refer to this progression as “genericide.”  And there are a surprising number of high-profile examples they can cite.

Recently, business writer and editor Mary Beth Quirk compiled a list of once-trademarked brand terms that have become victims of genericide, and she published her findings in the Consumerist, an e-zine put out by Consumer Reports.

Among the trade names she highlights that have “gone generic” are these:

Aspirin — Originally registered by German firm Bayer, aspirin’s trademark was confiscated by the U.S. government in the wake of World War I. Considering the massive headache Germany would unleash on the world barely 20 years later, perhaps this aggressive move wasn’t the best course of action!

Dry Ice — Believe it or not, this was actually a trademarked term, dating from 1925.  To nearly everyone, it sounds so much better than “solid CO2.”  The clearly preferred “dry ice” descriptor everyone uses is probably why the company lost its trademark by 1932.

Escalator — Registered in 1900 by Otis Elevator, the company lost its trademark when the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office determined that Otis had used it as a descriptive term — even in its own patent applications.

Heroin — This was yet another Bayer trademark.  It seems strange that heroin started out life as an actual branded product … but there we are.  Presumably, these days Bayer is happy that its company is no longer associated with such a problematic substance.

Laundromat — This term started out as a General Electric trademark back in 1940, issued for the first wall-mounted washing machine.  GE failed to renew its registration after the 1950s.

Linoleum — Here’s an example of a brand name that had already entered the generic lexicon before the manufacturing firm even attempted to register it.  Coined in the mid-1860s, the company’s efforts to register the flooring name were to fail just a decade later.

Thermos — This trademark was established in the early 1900s as a more pleasing way to describe a “vacuum flask.”  After too much loosey-goosey use of the term, the USPTO pronounced it genericized in 1963.

Trampoline — It appears that this term, coined by inventors George Nissen and Larry Griswold in 1936, was never officially registered.  The real generic descriptor is “rebound tumbler,” but “trampoline” sounds so much more effective to me.  Everyone else seemed to think so, too, leading to its ineligibility for trademark status.

ZIP Code — An acronym for “Zone Improvement System,” the ZIP code began life in the mid-1970s as a service mark of the U.S. Postal Service, but the registration was never renewed.  I guess the USPTO chose not to notify its sister agency of the renewal — not their business to do so even among friends and colleagues, evidently.

The next bit of interesting information in Quirk’s article is her listing of brand names that remain trademarked to this day — even though some of them seem to epitomize the essence of generic terminology.

Quirk concurs in the view that these terms may be on life support as proprietary names, noting that they are “trademarks who need to watch their backs” because of how pervasive they are in everyday language usage.  Among the terms she cites are these:

  • Adrenalin® (owned by Park-Davis)
  • AstroTurf® (Monsanto)
  • Band-Aid® (Johnson & Johnson)
  • Bubble Wrap® (Sealed Air)
  • Crock-Pot® (Sunbeam)
  • Dumpster® (Dempster Brothers)
  • Fiberglas® (Owens Corning)
  • Frisbee® (Wham-O)
  • Hula Hoop® (Wham-O)
  • Jet Ski® (Kawasaki)
  • Kleenex® (Kimberly-Clark)
  • Lava Lamp® (Mathmos)
  • Mace® (Mace Security International)
  • Memory Stick® (Sony
  • Ping Pong® (Parker Brothers)
  • Plexiglas® (Rohm & Haas)
  • Popsicle® (Good Humor-Breyers)
  • Q-Tips® (Unilever)
  • Realtor® (National Association of Realtors)
  • Stetson® (John B. Stetson Company)
  • Styrofoam® (Dow Chemical)
  • Taser® (Taser Systems)
  • Teflon® (DuPont)

Thinking along these lines, do other trade names come to mind that could be in danger of losing their trademark status?  If you can think of any, please share your nominations with other readers here.

The most respected brands in 2014: Who’s up … who’s down.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Marketing Communications , , , , , , ,

Brand imageIn recent years, there’s been more press than ever about “brand respect.”  Building on this interest, brand strategy firm CoreBrand decided to use historical survey data to attempt to determine the sentiment behind the world’s best-known brands.

CoreBrand uses proprietary Corporate Branding Index data – 23 years’ worth – that it has been compiling through consumer surveys covering nearly 1,000 of most famous brands.

CoreBrand’s 2014 Brand Respect Study covers the 100 brands (limited to publicly traded companies) in the CBI that chart the highest levels of market familiarity among all of the brands tracked.

CoreBrand’s scoring mechanism is pretty straightforward:  Brands with the highest familiarity and favorability are defined as “most respected,” while brands that have high familiarity but low favorability levels are the “least respected.”

For the record, here are the most respected brands as determined from the 2014 CoreBrand research:

  • #1:  Coca-Cola – the most respected
  • #2:  PepsiCo
  • #3:  Hershey
  • #4:  Bayer
  • #5:  Johnson & Johnson
  • #6:  Harley-Davidson
  • #7:  IBM
  • #8:  Apple
  • #9:  Kellogg
  • #10:  General Electric

In comparing 2014’s results to the previous year, Coke and Pepsi remain at the top of the heap – although they traded places from one year to the next.  Moreover, both brands’ favorability scores declined slightly – perhaps due to the burgeoning “better for you” foods movement that seems to be souring some consumers on soft drinks and related beverages.

New on the “Top Ten” most-respected listing this year are IBM, Apple and GE.

At the other end of the scale, these ten brands came up as the ones that are the least respected – with Delta Airlines earning the Booby Prize as “the worst of the worst”:

  • #1:  Delta Airlines – the least respected
  • #2:  H&R Block
  • #3:  Big Lots
  • #4:  Denny’s
  • #5:  Best Buy
  • #6:  Rite Aid
  • #7:  J.C. Penney
  • #8:  Capital One Financial
  • #9:  Family Dollar Stores
  • #10:  Sprint Nextel

While it’s certainly no fun to be on the “least respected” list, two of the brands – Denny’s and Family Dollar — have actually seen their scores improve significantly this year compared to last.  So at least they’re headed in the right direction.

Two other brands – Philip Morris and Foot Locker – have gone off the list.  In the case of Foot Locker, it’s because its brand favorability ratings have improved significantly enough to lift them off the list.

For Philip Morris, the reason is far more mundane:  it’s simply because its familiarity level has deteriorated so much, the brand no longer even qualifies to be part of the annual CoreBrand Brand Respect evaluation.

And finally … we come to Delta Airlines.  It’s the air carrier everyone loves to hate — and it’s dead last in the brand respect rankings.

There’s some consolation for Delta, though:  The only two other U.S.-based air carriers that qualify for inclusion in the study based on their familiarity levels (United and American) also score on the low end, although they (just) miss being on the “least respected list.”

Evidently, the airlines in general could benefit from earning more brand respect.  Good luck with that.

Charting Social Media’s “Maturity Continuum”

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary , , , , , , , ,

Social Media lineupAs social media has crept more and more into the fabric of life for so many people, it’s only natural that social scientists and marketers are thinking about the wider implications.

One of these thinkers is someone whose viewpoints I respect a good deal.  Social media and online/search über-strategist Gord Hotchkiss has come up with a way of looking at social media vehicles that he dubs the “Maturity Continuum.”

According to Hotchkiss, the Maturity Continuum is made up of four levels of increasing social media “stickiness” — meaning how relevant and important the social platforms are to people’s daily lives and routines.

Specifically, these four levels are:

The Fad Phase — This is when people start using a social media platform because it’s the bright shiny thing … and “everyone else” in their circle is doing so, too.  This dynamic is commonly found among early adopters — you know, the folks who try out new things because … they’re new.

Gord Hotchkiss
Gord Hotchkiss

Of course, early adopters don’t necessarily stick around.  A new social platform has to have some sort of “there there” – to deliver some measure of functional benefit – or else it won’t keep fad users around for long.

Also important at this early stage is the aspect of uniqueness and novelty — which is always important among this group of people who tend to be higher on the ego and narcissism scale.

Making a Statement — If a social platform makes it through the pure novelty gauntlet, it continues to be used because it makes a statement about the user.  In the case of social media, it’s often as much about the technology as it is the functionality.

Thinking about a platform like FourSquare, here you have social tool that’s probably at this level of maturity.  With FourSquare, there may be a few utilitarian reasons for using it — getting vouchers or other “free stuff” from restaurants and bars — but it’s probably a lot more about “making that statement.”

A Useful Tool — At this point on the Maturity Continuum, here’s where a social platform breaks into a more practical realm.  Going beyond the novelty and ego aspects, users find that the platform is a highly beneficial tool from a functionality standpoint — perhaps better than any other one out there for facilitating certain activities.

Thinking about a social platform like LinkedIn in this context, it’s easy to see how that particular one has done so well.

A Platform of Choice — This is the highest level of social media maturity, where users engage — and continue to engage — with a social platform because they have become so familiar with it.

At this level, it becomes quite a challenge to dislodge a social platform, even if “newer, better” choices come along.  Once social habits have become established and a large critical mass of users is established, it can be very difficult to change the behavior.

Facebook is “Exhibit A” in this regard:  Despite near-weekly reports of issues and controversies about the platform, people continue to hang in there with it.

Thinking about other social platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, SnapChat and Pinterest, it’s interesting to speculate on where they currently fall on the “maturity meter.”

I’d venture to say that YouTube has made it to the highest level … SnapChat is still residing in the early “fad” stage … while Pinterest and Instagram are transitioning between “making a statement” and being “a useful tool.”

Where Twitter resides … is anyone’s guess.  I for one am still wondering just how Twitter fits into the greater scheme of social — and how truly “consequential” it is in the fabric of most people’s social lives.

What are your perspectives on the Maturity Continuum in social media?  If you have opinions one way or the other about the long-term staying power of certain platforms, please share them with other readers here.

Business Bust? Lead Nurturing Efforts Coming Up Short

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Marketing Communications, Sales , , , , , , , , , ,

e-mail lead nurturing not effectiveWhen it comes to e-mail lead nurturing in the business world, it turns out there’s a whole lot of mediocrity — or worse — going on.

In discussions with my company’s clients, it seems that most of them are dissatisfied with what they consider, at best, only “middling” engagement levels that they’re achieving on their e-nurturing campaigns.

On top of that, many of them suspect that they’re underperforming their counterparts in the market.

I don’t think that’s the case.  Since we work with a variety of clients and thus hear about the results from a group of firms, not just one or two, we can see that most everyone is in the same boat.

Even so, it’s anecdotal evidence rather than statistically quantifiable data.

But now we have the results from a new B-to-B survey conducted by Bizo and Oracle Eloqua … and what they’ve found is that many companies are struggling like most everyone else when it comes to developing comprehensive lead nurturing programs that perform well.

This survey of ~500 B-to-B marketing executives revealed that nearly 95% of all companies have some form of lead nurturing program in place.   But having such a program in place doesn’t mean it’s all that effective.

How challenged are these marketers?  Consider these key findings from the research:

  • Nearly 80% of respondents report that their e-mail open rates don’t exceed 20% on average.
  • ~45% report that only 1% to 4% of known contacts develop into marketing-qualified leads.
  • Only ~5% of buyers on business websites are willing to provide detailed information on a “gated” contact offer form.

The implications of these findings are varied:

  • E-mail databases that are built from website visits tend to have significant omissions (and errors) regarding contact information.
  •  Only a smallish fraction of e-mail subscribers are reading the e-mails they receive … and by definition, no anonymous prospects are, either.
  • Because e-mail marketing relies on having access to prospects’ e-mail addresses, the e-marketing approach provides no opportunity to engage with a potentially much larger audience of customers who may be in the market for a company’s products and services at any given point in time.

The chances are likely, too, that those prospects are visiting relevant websites.  We know this because Forrester Research reports that the typical B-to-B buyer’s “journey” is nearly complete by the time he or she contacts a vendor’s sales department.

With so much useful information so available online, websites is where research can occur without have to deal with pesky sales personnel until “the time is right.”

It’s also why, despite the well-known negative aspects and limitations of web display advertising, nearly half of the respondents in the Bizo/Oracle Eloqua survey feel that online display advertising plays a role in attracting anonymous prospects and nurturing those leads through the sales funnel.

But marketers are also showing interest in multi-channel nurturing, and are receptive to adopting techniques that support the ability to nurture known and anonymous prospects without using e-mail.  Those tactics will probably the next new wave in lead nurturing practices going forward … provided people know where they can access the tools to make it happen.

More details on the Bizo/Oracle report can be found via this link.

Tough Nut: Shoehorning Social Media Practices into an Existing Corporate Culture

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary , , , , ,

managing social mediaIn late May 2014, Business Insider published an article about the processes by which corporations and their brands plan and manage their social media efforts.

It elicited derision and snorts of laughter in response.

Why?  For starters, the story sported this irreverent headline:  “We Got a Look Inside the 45-day Planning Process that Goes Into Creating a Single Corporate Tweet.”

And inside the article, it was revealed that it took the four-person agency team that handles the social media program for the Président Cheese brand 45 days to take a single tweet from conception to published reality.

For the record, here is the tweet as it finally appeared on Twitter:

President Cheese tweet

On the one hand, it seems patently ridiculous that a single tweet should take so long to germinate, come to fruition and be published.  At that pace, the Président Cheese brand is going to be left in the dust.

[To add further insult, the social media accounts in question had only ~100 Twitter followers and ~220 Facebook likes at the time.]

But let’s look more closely.  The tweet is recommending serving camembert cheese at room temperature for better flavor, rather than straight out of the refrigerator.

It’s a mild enough suggestion … but it has potential negative implications concerning food safety — or at least the perception of such.

When one is a brand sold nationally, such considerations aren’t merely theoretical; a simple tweet can be turned into a cudgel to beat over the head of the brand in the case of a lawsuit over food sanitation.

Considered in those terms, it no longer seems quite so strange that it took the MarComm agency so many days to go from ideation through the review-and-approval process to get to publication.

And the four agency people involved?  They’re the team assigned to the brand’s social media account, and the full group’s involvement was a single meeting to discuss the upcoming month’s social media topics.

It turns out that “planned” topics represent about one-third of the Président Cheese activity on social media platforms; the rest of the postings are done on the fly, responding to customer chatter, answering questions or weighing in on other comments, and responding to food trend news or other developments that tie in with the world of food, hospitality and entertaining.

So, like so many other factors in the business world and in life, the 45-day tweet isn’t a black-and-white issue of failure; it’s shades of gray.

Now that we’ve seen both sides of the coin, I think it’s still legitimate to question the length of time and the amount of energy required to post a single tweet.

Several ways to correct this come to mind.  One is for brands to stay away from any topics that might expose them to the risk of public relations problems or potential legal repercussions.

But in a world where brands are competing against an endless crowd of other social posters … that seems like a pretty sure ticket to irrelevance and social media oblivion.

At the same time, any MarComm agency or in-house social media department needs to adhere to some practical standards of vetting so that some ill-conceived post doesn’t blow up in the company’s face.

The sweet spot — or at least the proper balance between interest, efficiency and prudence — would be creating a streamlined client approval process involving only one or two people (plus backups) who are sufficiently attuned to the brand’s market position and the best ways to advance it and protect it.

Oh, and the team assigned to the responsibility needs to be available 24/7 for vetting purposes (hence the need for backup personnel who are at-the-ready).

It may be a pesky responsibility, but in the “always-on” world of marketing today, it’s really the only way to go if one wishes to participate on the interactive playing field.

The alternative is a tweet that takes weeks to be published … and I doubt anyone is ever going to be satisfied with that.

Amazon’s (Somewhat) Surprising Shopping Stats

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Sales, Social Commentary , , , , , , , , ,

Shoppin on AmazonOver the years, Amazon has branched out greatly from its original focus on books and other media to offer all sorts of other merchandise.

In fact, these days people can buy pretty much anything on Amazon — assuming it’s legal.

Even so, I was somewhat surprised to read the tea leaves on some new findings released by Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.  This research firm surveyed ~1,100 Amazon customers, asking them about their most recent purchases on Amazon.

Categorizing the responses by type of merchandise, CIRP found that books are no longer the most popular products sold on Amazon.

Instead, pride of place now goes to top-ranked electronics products, with ~33% of the survey respondents reporting that those types of products were their most recent purchase on the site.

Books still maintain their high ranking; the category comes in second at ~20% of respondents.  (Incidentally, approximately one-third of those book purchases are e-books.)

Amazon’s Fresh service, which delivers groceries within 24 hours of ordering, has been operating in select West Coast cities for some time now — and it appears that the company has latched onto a winning formula.

In fact, the grocery category ranked third in the survey.

This surprised me:  Call me old school, but I still prefer to select my fresh meats and produce on my own, instead of relying on some anonymous “picker” to do it for me.

What were the bottom three merchandise categories found in the CIRP survey?  Sports-related purchases were low  … and music purchases were lower still (about half of them being music downloads, by the way).

Dead last is the automotive category.  No real surprise here, I don’t think.

Personally, I don’t know anyone who would feel comfortable purchasing a car online.  And since the vast majority of consumers don’t work on their cars either, it seems natural that most of them will continue to rely on their repair shops to procure the replacement parts and consumables they need for servicing their vehicles.

If you have particular merchandise you like to buy through Amazon — or if there is something really unusual that you’ve purchased from the site, please share your experiences with other readers here.

Companies Continue to Increase their Investment in Social Media

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

InvestmentSocial media may have its share of nettlesome issues … but that doesn’t mean companies aren’t spending more effort and energy on these platforms.

To illustrate, a new online survey of ~1,060 business owners, senior management personnel and social strategists that was conducted in April 2014 by Social Media Marketing University finds that a clear majority of companies are investing more time and/or dollar resources on social media as compared to a year ago.

And three-fourths feel that this investment is worth it.

Here are some of the SMMU survey’s key findings:

  • ~74% of companies are devoting more time to social media.
  • ~54% are spending more dollars on social media.
  • Nearly 70% are managing four or more social profiles.

The most significant expenditures for social media programs fall into these four categories:

  • Compensation of in-house staff: ~37% of all social media program expenditures
  • Social media advertising: ~18% of program expenditures
  • Compensation of external staff: ~10% of expenditures
  • Content development: ~7% of expenditures

According to the SMMU survey, smaller businesses – those with fewer than 50 employees – face the biggest challenge in terms of the increased time and cost commitments to social media.

As SMMU Principal John Souza puts it:

“Because many small businesses don’t have the skill-set or the staff to properly manage social media, they are outsourcing their social, or spending an excessive amount of time on tasks as they learn social by trial-and-error.”

Not surprisingly, having some focused training on the “how-to” of social media can make a pretty big difference in the effectiveness of the people charged with planning and carrying out a company’s social media program.

The question is how many businesses actually feel the need for such training, seeing as how some of the recent press about social platforms hasn’t been all that positive.

The answer, based on my own personal interaction with numerous small and medium-sized firms is … not very many of them.

Twitter: The social platform that’s less important today than it was yesterday.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Twitter losing lusterTwitter hasn’t mattered to very many people for a very long time.

Of course, for some it hasn’t mattered even from its inception. But when we start reading about Twitter’s most avid users and how they’ve begun to drift away from using the social platform like they’ve done in the past … you know that more than just the atmospherics are changing.

A case in point about this evolution is an article that was published in late April by The Atlantic titled “A Eulogy for Twitter.”

The article’s authors, Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer, begin their piece by writing:

“We’ve been trying to figure out the moment Twitter turned, retracing tweets to see whether there was something specific that soured the platform.  

“Something is wrong on Twitter. And people are noticing. Or at least, the kind of people we hang around with on Twitter are noticing … audience-obsessed, curious, newsy … The thing is, its users are less active than they once were. Twitter says these changes reflect a more streamlined experience, but we have a different theory: Twitter is entering its twilight.”

Those are strong words. But the authors back up their assertions by noting that while people may still be using Twitter, many of them are no longer “hanging out” there. And that’s because there’s less “there there” to sustain once highly-engaged Twitter users.

The perceptions of Twitter’s value have been changing because of three key precepts which are now being proven out as “fictions,” according to LaFrance and Meyer.

What are those “fictions”?

  • The belief that other people in the “Twitterverse” are actually paying attention — or at least that a decent portion of one’s followers are seeing the tweets. 
  • The belief that competent and compelling tweeting will increase a person’s Twitter follower base. 
  • The confidence of knowing that there is a useful potential audience beyond current followers, so that the time and energy spent on the platform will pay dividends. 

None of these premises has turned out to be correct in the long-haul. Instead, the following stark realities fly in the face of all the hope (or hype):

  • Twitter is positively stuffed with “spam” accounts. In fact, the median number of followers for a Twitter account is … exactly one. Even if a few of those accounts are actually “legit,” of what value are they to anyone? 
  • Twitter’s year-over-year growth rate has fallen significantly since 2011.

And here’s another clear indication of how Twitter has morphed into something quite different from its original character. Today, Twitter is more likely to be merely a place to promote content published someplace else in cyberspace, simply providing quick links over to that content.

Whereas in the past, journalists and celebs and others were posting statements and opinions — and replying to or retweeting the posts of others — now it’s more likely to be canned promotion and little more.

… Which sets up a downward spiral, because followers aren’t seeing anything particularly new or interesting that they’re not already encountering elsewhere. So interest wanes … leading to reduced participation … leading to even less consideration of Twitter’s “worth” as a social platform.

This phenomenon of “professionalized accounts” means little more than being a bulletin board of scheduled tweets and broadcast links, resulting in collective yawns all over the place.

Of course, there’s one aspect of Twitter than continues its joyride unabated: hate speech and profanity. But that’s the sort of content many people would just as soon avoid encountering.

LaFrance and Meyer conclude that the world may have “outgrown” Twitter. They’re not happy by that turn of events, writing:

“For a platform that was once so special, it would be sad and a little condescending to conclude that Twitter is simply something we’ve outgrown. After all, the platform has always been shaped by the people who congregate there. So if it’s no longer any fun, surely we’re at least partly to blame.”

The authors go on to note:

“Twitter has done for social publishing what AOL did for e-mail. But nobody has AOL accounts anymore … [Today,] Twitter feels closed off — choked — in a way that makes us want to explore somewhere else for a while.”

It may not be time for Twitter’s eulogy. But there are many who don’t see much of a second act for the social platform, either.

By the way … where are those “somewhere elses” in social media that LaFrance and Meyer allude to? Try Snapchat, Instagram … even LinkedIn.  That’s where the interesting action is happening these days.

Less is less? What’s happening with customer loyalty programs.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Marketing Communications, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

CustomersWhen it comes to customer loyalty programs, here’s a sobering statistic: Only about 15% of consumers redeem loyalty rewards.

This finding comes from a report by Forrester Research, based on results from an in-depth survey it conducted last fall of 50 member companies of Loyalty360, a major loyalty marketing association.

What Forrester found is that fewer than half of the surveyed companies’ customers are enrolled in their loyalty programs. And of those customers, only about 35% of them are actually redeeming their loyalty awards.

Hence the 15% “effective” participation rate.

At first blush, the paltry participation makes one wonder what all the fuss is about when it comes to loyalty marketing.  But more than half of the companies surveyed by Forrester reported that they view their loyalty program as a strategic priority, not merely a marketing afterthought..

Clearly, there seems to be a bit of a “disconnect” between those lofty aims and the not-so-airborne reality. The question is how companies can encourage greater participation in their loyalty programs, thereby using them to improve consumer brand loyalty in addition to retaining customers over time.

Forrester offered several recommendations in its report:

1. Use advances in analytics to act on customer insights, rather than just relying on the purchase transactional history of loyalty program members. 

2. Balance the “reward mix” with personalized offers that present rewards program customers with unique experiences that are different from simply offering “more of the same.” (In many cases, offering discounts on more of the same merchandise a customer has already purchased won’t qualify as anything particularly special.) 

3. Break out from the traditional e-mail/web portal/call center communication vehicles to embrace more social media channels featuring two-way interaction. (Surprisingly, only about half of Forrester’s survey respondents reported that social media is an important part of their loyalty programs’ methods of communication.)

Speaking personally, I’m not particularly surprised at the relatively low engagement levels reported in this study. Many companies and brands have reached out to me over the years with offers to join loyalty programs, using various incentives – often purchase discounts or sign-on points as an incentive for joining.

apathyFor me, it’s a matter of “time” and “mindshare” as to which of these programs qualify for my participation. If a brand isn’t that important to me in terms of how I live my daily life, it – and its loyalty program – isn’t ever going to be big on my radar screen.

I suspect there are quite a few other consumers like me. But if you have different take, leave a comment and share your perspective with other readers.