Increasing the costs of asking questions acts as a lever for successful online question-and-answer communities to manage participation and efficiency in their community. […]
How to Strengthen Online Q&A Communities
Subject: Digital Marketing
Geography Still Counts for Electronic Word of Mouth
The Internet age, some argue, heralds “the death of distance.” For example, aside from occasional utilitarian factors, such as shipping costs, geography is irrelevant to a purchasing decision. Unlike physical stores, the geographic location of online vendors is irrelevant to the consumer. Along these same lines, one might assume that geographical proximity is even less […]
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Engineer Your Social Media Content to Engage Your Customers
From General Motors to the local hair salon, every company, business and organization knows that marketing today inevitably includes social media marketing. Visibility is important: marketers will exert great effort (e.g. through search engine optimizing) to attract greater numbers of prospects and customers to their site. But what happens when customers arrive? Are they engaged […]
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Existing Customers and Home Markets Drive Growth
Growth is a top imperative for marketers, according to the latest CMO biannual survey conducted by Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in collaboration with Deloitte LLP and the American Marketing Association. Nearly 40% of the 323 CMO respondents to the survey put growth as their number one imperative, and another 30% of respondents put it […]
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CMO Survey: Value of Company Spending on Social Media
Companies spend 12% of their marketing budget on social media, which is three times more than in 2009. And this trend is only going to accelerate: marketing leaders expect that in the next five years, companies will increase social media’s slice of their marketing budgets to 20% — representing an increase of more than 70%. […]
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The Good, Bad and Ugly of Covert Marketing
The steadily declining effectiveness of traditional marketing approaches — from advertising to direct mail in the mailbox to email blasts — has been well-documented. Traditional marketing is too often equated with ‘junk mail’ or ‘spam,’ or annoyingly long commercial breaks that take you away from your favourite TV program. As explained in a recent article […]
How User Reviews Replace Advertising
The popularity of customer review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor have turned these sites into an important element of a service company’s marketing package. According to the results of an in-depth research project exploring the correlation between hotel advertising spending and TripAdvisor reviews and user ratings, many hotels are using positive reviews as a […]
Varied Effectiveness of Paid Endorsements on Social Media
One of the fastest growing facets of social media marketing is the use of paid endorsers — a fashion blogger, for example, paid by a fashion designer to post a picture of herself wearing one of the designer’s pairs of earrings. Two researchers from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a field […]
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What Influences Our Choices? What Others Prefer or What They Actually Consume
Through a series of experiments, two researchers from the University of Chicago (PhD candidate Yanping Tu, now at the University of Florida, and professor Ayelet Fishbach) revealed that the old saying of “actions speaking louder than words” might not always hold true. The experiments had participants receiving information on whether others preferred a product or had consumed […]
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Buyers of Experiential Products and Consumer Reviews
While material purchases are purchases of tangible products that one intends to keep, experiential purchases are purchases of products that must be experienced. Restaurant meals, movies, or vacations are examples of experiential purchases. While there is no official categorization of products into experiential or material, most consumers intuitively know the difference. Through an analysis of […]
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