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 […]
Read More… from Geography Still Counts for Electronic Word of Mouth
Most major firms have online brand communities to reinforce their connections with customers and increase their reputation, brand patronage and customer spending. These online communities offer satisfied customers the ability to easily and widely spread positive word of mouth about the company. However, online brand communities offer dissatisfied customers the same ability to spread negative […]
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 […]
Read More… from Engineer Your Social Media Content to Engage Your Customers
Business-to-business (B2B) companies differ from business-to-consumer (B2C) companies in many ways. B2B company products are often more complex and require greater lead times to produce, there are fewer customers, and because of the complexity of the products, the relationship between customers and suppliers are closer and more personal. For many in B2B industries, these differences […]
Read More… from B2B Companies Far Behind on Social Media Strategies
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%. […]
Read More… from CMO Survey: Value of Company Spending on Social Media
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Varied Effectiveness of Paid Endorsements on Social Media
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 […]
Read More… from What Influences Our Choices? What Others Prefer or What They Actually Consume
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 […]
Read More… from Buyers of Experiential Products and Consumer Reviews
With the dominant, almost overwhelming impact that social media has on just about any function of a business, it’s easy to forget that social media is barely a decade old. The vast majority of today’s leaders built most of their careers before anyone had even conceived of Facebook or Twitter. As a result, leaders must […]
Read More… from Six Skills for the Social Media-Literate Leader
