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Hi everyone,

The topic of this week was diffusion and social influence. An interesting article that I found was discussing how to measure social influence. I will summarize the important aspects of this article for you guys. Social influence as said in the article is very important for people to see how much people can be affected by others through emotions, opinion and behaviors. Social influence can be divided in three levels. The first one is compliance through persuasion (when one agrees with the other and adopt an attitude based on another person’s beliefs but keeps this belief private). The second one is identification (when someone is influenced by another person who is liked and respected, e.g. celebrities). And the third one is internalization (when people believe another person’s opinions but choose to agree either publicly or privately). As a result of this broad extent of social influence where people can either publicly or privately comply, it becomes very difficult to accurately gauge social influence using just one single tool.

They give 5 possible tools to help measure social influence, but I will explain only one of them. TwentyFeet is a tool that gives you a quick overview of your activities, by extracting data from your personal Facebook and Twitter account from over a period of time and presenting this in a graph form (see below).

TwentyFeet also makes your data more manageable and easy to understand by pointing out significant differences. What they mean with significant differences is when the number of friends, followers, mentions, retweets or comments increases or decreases considerably. So it definitely can give you an in-depth information about your social influence. I want to encourage you guys with this post, to seek more info about this topic, and maybe also measure your social influence so far with the possible tools available out there.

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Hello everyone,

The topic of last week was engaging costumers and prosumers. I will be giving you some insight of the 3 articles related to this topic. Then I will share with you guys the 2 examples that I’ve chosen.

As you already know prosumer is a word derived from a combination of two words, production and consumer. Where customers become part of a production, where they create or co-create something for personal need/use or for sale. Engaging costumers on the other hand is according to Advertising Research Foundation “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context” (ARF, 2008).

The first article was Co-creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective, written by Zwaas (2010).  In this article co-creation was the topic at hand and how this has a major force in the marketplace and that the activities of consumers drive or support the producers’ business models. Other aspects discussed in the article were virtual communities (VC) that are the primary locus of collective contribution to co-creation.

The second article is Online social interaction: A natural experiment on word of mouth versus observational learning written by Chen et al (2011). The main focus of this article was the influence consumers tend to receive from their social interactions with others, where opinion or word of mouth (WOM) and others actions or observational learning (OL) may lead them to decide “differently” when they make a purchase. The experiment the authors created and showed in the article was so they can examine three issues regarding the two types of social interaction, thus OL and WOM. They first examined their differential impact on product sales and furthermore their lifetime effect and interaction effect. The result will be elaborated in my poster presentation

The last article is Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. In this article the writers Giamanco and Gregoire try to explain the importance of social media and emphasizing that companies are not leveraging enough from social media itself. According to business.com, 55% of buyers turn to social media when they’re searching for information. This staggering numbers must be enough for companies to realize where their customers and buyers are and what they are doing.

The 2 examples that I will be comparing for you guys is Ponoko and eMachineshop. 2 “different” making systems, but in the end they both focus on the same thing; they let prosumers design what they want, need or may benefit of.

In my poster presentation I will give my opinion on the 3 articles, also an insight of my 2 examples.  Besides I will give some strengths and weaknesses and also comparison between the 2 examples. So I hope you guys are still interested in this topic.

Take care!

Zwass, V. 2010. Co-Creation: Toward a taxonomy and an integrated research perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 15(1) 11-48.

Chen, Y., Wang, Q., and Xie, J. 2011. Online social interactions: A natural experiment on word of mouth versus observational learning. Journal of Marketing Research 48(2) 238-254.

Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93.

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Hello everyone,

The topic for this week is about online social networks, so once again I’ve started a search around this topic of social media. As many of you guys already know, there are more than 300 social media networks out there for everyone to reach, connect and entertain them self. Most of you guys share, tweet, like and post things you have bought, done or are currently doing. And you might think that only your friends who you have allowed to see your page etc is watching and following you. But you are definitely wrong.

In a recent court case, Aegon a Dutch insurance who through hyves and google had discover that an insured client was not a vegetable, but was able to climb the alpe d’huez. For those who don’t know alpe d’huez is a ski resort at 1,860 to 3,330 meters. It is a mountain pasture in the central French Alps, in the commune of huez. The result of this was that Aegon was able to recover their payments. So my question is, are YOU watching the world or is the world watching you??

Another case was of a road worker who was paving a road, and than suddenly the bucket of a crane hit him and since then was declared “incapacitated”. And the insurance agreed an amount based on a minimum insurance of € 110.000, due to the road worker lost income.

Aegon again started a research conducted through hyves and google and the research has shown that the road worker was from 2005 till 2009 annually participating in the amstel Curacao race (a cycling race of 80 km), had skied in Austria and also had climbed alpe d’huez. Result of this was that a court demanded the insured road worker to re-pay hefty sums to the insurer aegon. So, placed online data have thus ensured that the insurer, its claim for repayment of advances made ​​was been able to be substantiated.

My conclusion is that we all must be careful of what we post, tweet or comment, especially when we are doing things we are not suppose to. LOL. Be aware and careful because not only you are watching the world but the world is also watching you!

Take care

Stephanie

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Hello dear classmates,

Referring to the topic of digital marketing and advertising, I’ve stumbled upon an article about multiple screen-advertising implemented by Microsoft Advertising. Today’s consumers increasingly engage with media at different times and on different platforms, time shifting TV consumption, embracing online video and gaming, and accessing the web on mobile phones. This method/solution of multi-screen advertising allows campaigns to reach their target audiences, whenever and wherever they are.

What Microsoft Advertising offers, is a unique way of advertisement by using high-quality MSN media brands, the social media of Windows live and the extended reach and targeting of the Microsoft media network on a computer. For the mobile part they use Microsoft’s mobile advertising network, including MSN mobile and Windows live mobile. And finally they use the advantage of the social experience of Xbox in-game advertising and Xbox live on a TV screen to promote a product.

The article indicated that in 2010 there was more than 19 million multi-screen consumers in Europe alone. A figure that has doubled in the last year. An interesting example that I’ve found, was from McDonald Monopoly Reload campaign.

After having a very successful campaign with Monopoly in previous campaigns, McDonald wanted an advertising strategy so that they can reach their target audience by engaging a large-scale of youth in and across multiple platforms. What they also wanted was to drive traffic to the McDonald Monopoly Reload web and mobile sites and most important; to drive customers into their restaurants.

As an solution for the request McDonald had for the Monopoly campaign, Microsoft Advertising developed a multi-screen display campaign including a combination of customized MSN homepage takeover with online display advertising through MSN and Windows Live, mobile banner ads on Windows live Hotmail mobile and Windows live Messenger mobile to reach smartphone users in the target audience, and MSN mobile banner ads targeting iphone users.

Hence, the result of this multiple screen campaign for McDonald have shown that the online campaign delivered 182, 850 clicks from PCs and over 45,000 clicks from mobile phones (three times higher than the industry average for a campaign). And also the MSN Homepage takeover delivered a click-through rate of 42% higher than the industry average. Quite amazing numbers I must say…

So what was clear in the article is that by extending ads to PC, mobile and also TV screens, multi-screen advertising is now an essential strategy for improving reach, frequency and effectiveness among many. Don’t you think that we must use this method more often now a day, instead of focusing only on one social network or device??

Stephanie

Source:

Forrester Research Inc, European Technographics Benchmark Survey Q2 2010

Microsoft Advertising, What’s on their screens. What’s on their minds: Reaching and engaging the multi-screen consumer 2010.

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After reading the article of Rigby “the future of shopping”, my interest in mobile commerce was piqued when I’ve read that “By 2014 almost every mobile phone in the United States will be a smartphone connected to the internet, and an estimated 40% of Americans will use tablets such as ipad”. I cannot yet imagine that some day soon, every single mobile phone will be a smartphone connected to the internet, even though I own a blackberry bold myself, and can’t quiet imagine my life without it.

Maybe I’m small minded but I can’t picture my grandma on my blackberry messenger list asking me how my day was nor telling me she’s buying stuff on her BB.

Forrester Research has released a report projecting that U.S. mobile commerce is on its way to reach $31 billion by 2016, growing at a 39% compound rate. But the report says that mobile commerce is only expected to be 7% of overall eCommerce sales by 2016 and only 1% of general retail sales.

This year alone, mobile commerce sales are expected to reach $10 billion as more consumers use their smartphones to make purchases. And they think that by improving mobile security more consumers will feel comfortable inputting financial  data into phones.

While they expect that mobile commerce sales will grow up to almost 40% each year for the next five years, I think the numbers are still small overall (7% of web sales penetration by 2016). Why is the percentage so small you may ask, after the prediction that almost every mobile phone in the United States will be a smartphone connected to the internet in 2014? Aren’t smartphones changing the way we consume web content anyways?

There is some interesting information I’ve found that I want to share with you guys. Some facts we must consider to understand why this number is so small even though smartphones are taking over the world.

Some data that I’ve read on Forrester indicated that most tablet owners also own smartphones, and many of those people naturally prefer to shop on the device that has the larger screen when given the choice. That doesn’t mean that the smartphone was not used in the process of seeking for an ideal product or comparing price. So using their iPad for a purchase doesn’t help the mCommerce numbers.

The second factor we need to consider is that when consumers do use their mobile phones in a retail context, it is to look up product information as they are in the midst of researching products in a physical store, or to compare prices, which often leads to a customer demanding a price match, which naturally won’t surface in any mCommerce figures.

So my question is, will mCommerce be just a helping hand for eCommerce? Or will it grow to its potential and become in the 5 to 7 years ahead the number one way of online shopping?

What do you think?

Please share your thoughts with us

Stephanie Sille