The BTL Life

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button.

Just imagine the impact on your brand's Facebook centered marketing strategy if you have more "hates" than "likes" on your brand's timeline.

When the original Like button was announced, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction there would be over 1 billion Likes across the web in just the first 24 hours. Sources at Facebook say Mark is estimating 2 billion Hates on the first day. Facebook studies have shown the sad fact that people hate things on the Internet more than they like things. There’s also an internal debate on whether the new button should be called “Hate” or “Dislike.”

Since the tiny Like button makes up such a huge part of Facebook’s revenue, the introduction of the Hate button could raise Facebook’s valuation further ahead of the IPO.

If FB decides to add the button, then personally I think "dislike" has a better ring to it than "hate".

Read more about the possibilities of hate button here

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Saving Abandoned Brand Mobile Apps.

There’s a graveyard of brand apps that were a little more than a flash in the pan in terms of repeat usage from consumers. And the reason for this is simple. The majority of brand apps serve little or no utility at all to users.

The key, unsurprisingly, is making apps that are based more on long-term utility rather than campaign one-offs. The tradeoff is that true brand platforms require a mix of departments while most brand apps originate from marketing departments and are geared to specific campaigns.

“Utility apps have broken the path for the app world,” said Yvonne Caravia, chief experience officer for Mobients, a mobile design and strategy agency. “People who are on the go want to get stuff done quickly, and having a branded app that provides some sort of utility is a good way to get them coming back over and over again.

A study by Localytics found that just one i n four mobile apps are never used again after being downloaded. The same study also found that 26 percent of apps aren’t used more than once.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

5 + 1 Huge Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore

"Digital marketing is a discipline in flux", says Jonathan Gardner. We face an onslaught of shiny new technologies and platforms that promise to “change everything.” Marketers are creating similarly breathless headlines, proclaiming the next revolutionary devices/apps/social networks.

Yet, even smart marketers don’t know what changes the future will bring; but they do need to be aware that their industry is changing every day. For instance, to reach consumers marketers need to be increasingly mobile, engaging, relevant and aware of the contexts in which we currently operate.

Here are five digital marketing trends as identified by Jonathan Gardner:

1. Location Services

2. New Ad Formats

3. User-Generated Curation

4. Advertise by Format

5. Integrated Marketing

Read more on these trends here. Would love to add Hybrid Retailing as the 6th trend, wherein there is a seamless integration of the ZMOT and the FMOT, specifically with the use of mobile devices.

Deals May Get You in the Door, but They Won't Build Relationships.

2010 & 2011 were all about "deals". Everyone chased the "new & shiny objects" However, there is an increasing concern on the value of the "deal customers". Marketers have avidly sought social-media fans in recent years, often using deals or sweepstakes to boost numbers. But are they really attracting the right people?

Data from social-media analytics firm Colligent suggest many brands have attracted lots of deal seekers. And while these consumers may be profitable, they're not the most-effective brand advocates, according to some analysts and social-media executives.

Brands that build fan bases using sweepstakes "end up with a very difficult time trying to get those fans to engage," said Justin Kistner, director of social products at analytics firm WebTrends. "They were never with your brand in the first place. They just wanted a chance to win that iPad," he said. "We call it garbage fans."

Twitter now is even touting its relative lack of deal-seekers among brand followers as a selling point vs. Facebook.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Understanding Frictionless Sharing

The term frictionless sharing refers to one’s online activity on his or her social network and connected personal profiles being automatically shared without having to click a button. Anticipating a potential decline of social button usage, Facebook launched frictionless sharing so that the volume of content on Facebook would continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Frictionless sharing potentially eliminates the need of social buttons as a way to share content with social network connections. When end users approve frictionless sharing applications, all media consumption is automatically posted to their profiles for the world to see.

Many companies like Spotify, The Washington Post, and The Guardian have already adopted frictionless sharing, and we can expect more companies to do the same as people grow tired of clicking multiple buttons to share content across their social networks. While frictionless model continues to be controversial – especially around the invasive quality of its functionality – some reports suggest that many people have come to accept information sharing as the price one pays to participate in social networking. However, it’s only a matter of time before the passive sharing of content causes too many privacy violations to be ignored – forcing more people to question the need to “pay a price” at all.