Status Quo of Social Media Usage among the Fortune 100
Global Social Media Checkup
View more presentations from Burson-Marsteller.
SOM zu: Online Ads Help Shoppers Save
Artikel: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007524
Ein sehr interessanter Artikel, der mal wieder Zeit, dass uns Nordamerika doch immer wieder einen Tick voraus ist. Während man in Deutschland bei Coupons vornehmlich an Payback denkt, sind Coupons in den USA schon seit vielen Jahren fest etabliert und fixer Bestandteil vieler Kaufprozesse.
Mein Tipp: Es wird auch bei uns bald viel mehr Online Ads geben die einen Mehrwert in Form von Coupons bieten. Eventuell sogar auf die persönlichen Bedürfnisse zugeschnitten.
Anderer Meinung? Her damit!
Mercedes-Benz Goes Green With its Vans
Mercedes-Benz is unveiling the prototype of a battery-powered van based on the Mercedes-Benz Vito at the informal EU Competitiveness Council meeting in San Sebastián, Spain from 7 to 9 February.
Based on the Mercedes-Benz Vito, the experimental vehicle being presented marks the start of a new era in local, zero emission mobility in the van sector. The Vito is the first van in the world to incorporate this technology ex factory, showing Daimler’s commitment to sustainable mobility.
During 2010, more than 100 Mercedes-Benz Vito vans will be delivered to 20 customers, primarily fleet operators and public institutions wishing to transport items in environmentally sensitive zones with zero emissions, including no CO2 emissions, and low noise.
The drive configuration is designed solely to run on battery power and thus dispenses with the powertrain intended for combustion engines
The electric motor delivers a peak output of 90 kW. Performance is oriented around customer requirements: an electronically limited top speed of 80 km/h is designed to meet our customers’ transportation needs in and around urban areas.
SOURCE: http://www.myvan.com/2010/02/15/battery-powered-vito/
SOM on "5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online" by Dan Schwabel
5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
Posted using ShareThis
Presented above is the link to Mashable.com where this article has been published by Dan Schwabel.
Personal branding is without a doubt becoming more important in these days. Back in the days, when people could not easily connect with each other – especially not over thousands of miles – this may have been less important.
But todays networks allow to find out almost anything about anybody at barely any cost and at any time.
Ad 1) This includes good things as well as bad things, as this article also stresses in the very first point. Thus you should do the same and from time to time check what is being said about you on the web. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Google Alerts and SocialMention certainly are good tools for that.
Ad 2) Surely, it does not hurt to reserve your brand or company’s name on as many platforms as possible. But I agree with Dan in as far as you should consider well where you join. Not every platform is adequate for every business, brand or person. In fact you can often tell which social networks a person belongs to. Xing and LinkedIn clearly are for the educated business people, while facebook used to be a US college and university student only platform. This of course has changed in the meantime. Today users come from all age groups, social classes and continents. WKW users in Germany used to be less international and less well educated than those on facebook. But this needs close monitoring as the user groups do change over time. It may well be that LinkedIn will grow stronger in Europe now that they offer country-specific pages. Facebook on the other side could definately give StudiVZ and SchuelerVZ a hard time. Users definately have to choose between networks as -just as Dan pointed out- you cannot play all games at a time. Sooner or later you will have to choose as keeping several networks or communities up to date consumes too much of your precious (online) time. The characteristics and tendencies of your peers will determine the direction.
As to reservation: you surely can reserve your name ahead of time without using it. Maybe add a link to your primary profiles so that people find you. But there is no need to maintain say 30 profiles on 30 communities. It’s wasted time.
Ad 3) Know your audience. I’ve had several discussions with friends, colleagues and clients about whether it makes sense to have special profiles for each target group / audience. But in the end, what it leads to is again additional work and thus time. My advice is: do make a difference between people you term „friends“ and those who are colleagues on a solely professional level and clients. But by this I do not mean you need to create a fb profile for friends, one for colleagues and probably an additional one for clients. Facebook at the moment is still more of a private sphere, not a place to do business (brand/company profiles such as by Jaegermeister or BMW are brands we invite into our private sphere). Thus use fb for friends, good colleagues and family and use professional communities such as Xing or LinkedIn for business contacts. If a colleague becomes a friend add him on fb as well. In general: Keep it simple.
Ad 4) Be honest and be real. If what you put on the web differs greatly from your real personality, this will come back to you in a negative way. And if you are really present on all communities your clients may wonder what you be doing all day long. Surely not working for their benefit but rather on how you want to be seen on the web.
Ad 5) This point refers to all points mentioned before. If you want to be seen as a respectful, honest and trustworthy business person, you have to be authentic. The different profiles should speak one voice, arise no questions and in total provide a nicely rounded impression of who you are and what you do. And I would like to add: No need to be too formal. This may be interpreted as artificial, false, unrealisitic and not trustworthy. Be yourself. We like to do business with people we simply like.
This also goes for SOM Marketingberatung. The best clients are those that share similar values, are honest towards their customers just fun to work with.
So, mind your Digital Brand!
Yours,
SOM Marketingberatung
The concept of free in the mobile phone market
© Sergey Eshmetov - Fotolia.com
Nokia’s announcement to give away its navigation software and maps for free came as a total surprise to all of us. Just two years ago, Nokia had paid the enormous sum of € 5.7 bn for Navteq and now it’s free? Why would Nokia do that? Pure desperation?
Indeed, many experts see this as the last big move of mobile phone giant Nokia to catch up with its competitors. Rivals such as master of innovation Apple, aggressive telecommunications giant Samsung or Research in Motion whose Blackberries have become the synonyms of business phones have been gaining market share in the last years.
But what is truly remarkable about Nokia is its talent for comebacks. Several times the giant has been labeled “out of the game”. First, when Nokia totally underestimated the strong trend towards flip-phones (all for the benefit of Samsung) and just recently the high acceptance and then consumer desire for touch screen phones such as Apple’s iPhone. Many also argue that Nokia’s OS Symbian cannot keep up with the rest. Every time industry experts pointed to missed chances of the immobile giant, Nokia found a way back to gain market share and increase sales. And every time, Nokia somehow managed to come back. One of their strengths is pure size. Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones. No other company has such a huge variety of phones on sale. What they lacked in innovative technology and design, they always compensated with size.
But what made Nokia so huge is not only quantity. From early on Nokia has been focusing on usability and intuitive usage when they designed their phones. I remember my first 5110 and later the more business-style 6210. Other than the Sagem, Motorola or Siemens, you at once understood how they work. And they were simply solid. Nokia’s OS Symbian even profited from the weaknesses of Windows Mobile. It has always been faster and more stable. Yet what the custom Windows OS could not offer, users found in specials hacks, updates, etc. What started small became an argument to buy such a phone: you could easily mod it!
While Windows tried to fight this, and Nokia was busy improving its Symbian, Apple understood what this trend meant for the business and turned the “issue” into a business model and presented an innovative phone which could be customized with numerous apps. As all the others, Nokia followed. But has been trailing far behind. But this time, Nokia turned the game upside down and instead of responding to industry actions, it made facts.
The tactical move of giving away navigation for free shook the world of the Garmins and Navigons and certinaly iPhone mother company Apple. While the entire industry was still running on Google Maps and expensive navigation software solutions, Nokia has been creating exceptional expertise in the field of navigation. Of the approximate 163 mio gps-equipped smart phones 51% are Nokia. Ovi maps are available for more than 180 countries, auto and pedestrian navigation are offered in 74 countries and in 46 languages. There is 6000 3D building views for more than 200 cities.
As convincing as this offers is to consumers, it is also a disaster for competitors. Within a day Nokia managed to depreciate entire business models. Still trailing with their own app store Ovi, giving away a valuable service such as navigation and the necessary maps for free is quite an argument for consumers. Nokia maps rock: And it opens Nokia the doors to what may become the most valuable information in the mobile phone business: the current whereabouts of each user. And thus the ability to offer products, services and much more always exactly in perfect match to the current location. The nearest pizza restaurant, car rental station, CVS, Radio BestBuy,..
Maybe in the future the concept of free will permeate the mobile phone market. You give away the phones for free knowing that people make heavy use of the applications offered and thus in the end earning more than with the sale of the phone itself. Telephone calls not included yet. The future will be data not minutes. And in order to make the most profit you have to be the one who can provide the most adequate information at the right time. This is what Nokia aims to achieve. And it values this new market at such a high price that it is willing to give away its navigation software plus the excellent map material which in 2008 has been worth more than €5billion. This reminded me of Chris Anderson’s “Free – the future of a radical price.” In his best-selling book, he named numerous companies who chose this dramatic turn and became highly successful. Let’s see if in a 2015 edition, Nokia will serve as a another perfect example of how successful the concept of “free” can be.
Sources:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Nokia-bietet-kostenloses-Kartenmaterial-und-Navi-Dienste-fuers-Handy-909803.html
Handelsblatt
Wirtschaftswoche
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Update on the current market situation, powered by Gartner Research:
Gartner 2010
Do you still believe in anonymous surfing?
the transparent user
Using a 10 years old security gap you can be identified by any webmaster. Don’t believe it?
If you are a member of Xing, facebook, StudiVZ or of any other social networking plattform, just go and give it a try: http://128.111.48.22/experiment/nwcheck.php
In their 15 page paper the four students Thorsten Holz, Gilbert Wondracek, Engin Kirda und Christopher Kruegel describe how every social network user can be identified by his unique digital fingerprint. What makes every user uniquwe is the consistency of group membership and usage in his or her favourite network – be it Xing, facebook or any other. This allows to clearly identify every single user, given he is a member in one of the social communities and given that he makes use of groups. The security hole lies in browser history which is being archived and fairly easy to access.
If you are interested in the complete details of how it works and what you can do to reduce the risk, simply download their paper: http://www.iseclab.org/papers/sonda-TR.pdf (803 kb).
The New Democracy of Social Media
Just the other day I read a statement by David Hughes, director of e-commerce at Marks & Spencer: „..the customer trusts the reviews more than the brand.“ Wow what a statement if you think about it. But what does that mean for brands? Are they becoming less important?
Brands usually serve as lighthouses. In the jungle of oversupply, businesses have to invest greatly into marketing and branding in order to make their products stand out from the rest. Usually it was like this: if your brand was not strong enough your quality was sometimes of no importance to the affluent consumer. The price tag provided the orientation. High price equals high quality. Low price must be low quality. Although strong trade brands by Aldi, WalMart, etc proved the opposite this was still a truism for many consumers.
Social media now further changes the game. A cheap DVD player may get better and more user reviews than the expensive alternative. Thus there seem to be new opportunities for economic brands: if their quality is convincing, their product features meet the consumer’s expectation and the consumer really has the impression to have made a good deal you are all set to be successful. This list sound familiar? Indeed: these are the ingredients for strong word-of-mouth. Why talk about a 200 dollar dvd player that is none the better than any other model? But if there is one model out there that offers the same features and decent quality for 100 dollars – that is something your friends might be interested in.
In the overall look, this is one manifestation of the new democracy provided by social media. You brands out there better prepare! You can no longer hide behind your brand image! Bad quality will be unveiled faster than you think with more reach than you might expect.
Tilt-shift time-lapse addiction…
I must admit: I just love this kind of videos.
Except for Deutsche Telekom, I barely know of commercials that make use of this technique, maybe also because it is hard to fit it all into 30 seconds. But the resulting videos are just amazing.
Here is another one titled „24 hours, Pavey Ark“ by Michael Moloney Studio which I saw in the Schweinshaxe Blog and wanted to share here, too:
Altimeter on understanding customers' social behavior
Understand Your Customers' Social Behaviors
View more presentations from Charlene Li.
Another very good presentation by the guys from Altimeter, found on the page of we are social
Again everyone, thanks for sharing your insights!
We will comment on it as soon as we find the time to do so!
So far, enjoy!
