Here’s a stat from the KellerFay Group in the US about where word of mouth marketing conversations take place.   And it turns out 90% don’t take place on the Internet.  Oh nos! Time to get back to having promo staff doing stunts and giving away freebies on street corners.

The PR Squared blog says that this should serve as a wake-up call that online approaches are only ever an “ADDITIVE, not a REPLACEMENT for their “traditional” approaches.”

Though I know PR Squared certainly doesn’t fall into this camp, for social media sceptics this will be a bit of a “see! see! told you so!” argument.  It reminds me of a former colleague who used to dismiss social media marketing with “it’s all smoke and mirrors” and “you still need a good idea.”

Er…well yes, yes and yes.  Online marketing campaigns should very much work in tandem with other marketing disciplines, see a previous post on the need to combine TV and online for one example. Surely that should be self evident?

Naturally we talk about brands all the time (60x a week according to KellerFay) , and tend to do so in our normal day to day lives when not glued to a computer screens.  Similarly, most “new” news is still broken by what’s considered to be traditional media – check out this stat from Pew Research earlier in the year.

Where online channels do however come into their own is in amplifying and rapidly spreading messages.

For example, Twitter stories can become front page newspaper ones in as little as four hours.   And a separate study by Harris shows that Americans under 35 trust social media recommendations over newspaper ones….and far above celebrity ones.   Finally, people who are most active on Twitter are also the ones who are most likely to post ratings and reviews, comment on news and upload articles to share.

(via Lauren Fernandez)

Image – Kit Cowan

Related articles by Zemanta

• Marketing Doesn’t ONLY Happen Online (pr-squared.com)
• Going Deeper into Word of Mouth Marketing (brandautopsy.typepad.com)
• 5 Key Benefits of Monitoring Your Client’s Brand on Social Media (mashable.com)

Some stats out from Nielsen (via Marketing Charts) show that North Americans and Europeans are less enthusiastic adopters of mobile video than web users in other parts of the world.

If 100 is the global average, then the European Union scores 55, while North America comes out even worse at 45.   Compare that to Asia Pacific at 145 and the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan (why that combo?) at 136.

Why is this significant?  Because using mobile video is the tipping point at which people switch from their laptop or PC being their primary Internet device, to their mobile.

This is according to a study by Transpera a year ago, which showed that 62% of mobile video users use their mobile/cellphones to browse the Internet more than they use their computers.

Perhaps one reason for the North America and European figures could be down to increased data capping, with both AT&T in the US and the major UK operators having called time on unlimited mobile data.  If so, pricing is having a real impact on consumer behaviour and online habits.

Meanwhile in Japan, Softbank still allows unlimited data for its iPhone4 plans.   And with the Middle East being quick on the mobile video uptake, UAE telecoms company DU has an unlimited data plan with a ‘fair use’ policy of a whopping 10gb.   Compare that to the fair use policy of Orange in the UK of…750mb.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Marketing Data RoundUp: LinkedIn the top tool for marketers (marketingvox.com)
• Mobile Payment Market Forecasts 2010-2014 for North America, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa (pindebit.blogspot.com)
• Mobile Broadband Predicted To Reach 1 Billion Connections (informationweek.com)

While there are questions about the ability of Facebook to grow in future, Comscore has found that Twitter use has more than doubled over the past year.   Comscore’s stats (via Marketing Charts) also confirm the on-going trend of Twitter becoming less of an a US dominated, or even anglophone network.

While Twitter growth in North America was a respectable 22% from June 2009 to June 2010, in Europe it was 106%, in Asia Pacific 243% and Latin America 305%.  Overall, North American unique visitors counted for 27% of the 92.8 million unique visitors.

Though we’re not exactly comparing like with like, it is still useful to look at the Sysomos research from January, which showed the US accounting for 50% of Twitter’s user base.

Surprisingly, the countries with the highest % of Twitter penetration as a proportion of each country’s Internet population are Indonesia (20.8%), Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%).    Comscore says that Venezuela’s Twitter enthusiasm can directly be traced to Hugo Chavez setting up an account.  By comparison, Twitter penetration in the US was 11.9%, while in the UK  it was 10.9%
Mobiles drive Twitter use
Comscore says that Twitter’s growth in the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy is driven by Smartphone users.

This chimes in with an article posted up on GigaOm on Friday, showing that at weekends in particular, Twitter use from mobiles jumps – showing that people are still using the network when away from their desks and integrating into their online lives.

In his article Om Malilk talks about a study done by New York based SocialFlow, which looked at one (client) Twitter account with 500k followers.  On Saturdays, the % of clicks from mobile devices hits a peak at 41%.

Of course, 93 million global unique users, does not mean the same as 93 million regular users.  There is still the research from RJ Metrics showing that 83% of Twitter accounts are dormant every month, and that a base of committed users (often active in other social media / media channels) make up for the majority of activity.

Though the growth rates are certainly impressive, there’s as yet no new evidence that Twitter’s churn rates have significantly improved, with the service hitting real mainstream web adoption.

Related articles by Zemanta

• comScore Twitter Worldwide Report: Indonesia, Brazil and Venezuela Score Top Growth (pamil-visions.net)
• Twitter Use Taking Off In Many Foreign Markets (webpronews.com)
• June Twitter visitors nearly 93 million (newstatesman.com)

Perhaps no big surprise – the Pew Internet & American Life Project says that young adults (the under 30s) use mobile data apps the most by a fairly large margin.

However, the same Pew study (via Marketing Charts) shows that this gap is narrowing. It seems that all age groups now like taking photos with their cameras – 93% of 18 to 29 year olds but also 67% of 50-64 year olds.

Pew’s research also shows that the biggest growth rate when it comes to the use of mobile data applications on smart phones comes from the 30-49 year old audience – the audience that’s actually most likely to be issued a smartphone for work, or to have the money to buy that iPhone4 outright.

One in five (20%) 30-49 year olds will watch a video on their phones compared to 40% of the under 30s.

Mobile video use is in fact a significant figure to look out for.

Last year a study by Transpera found that significant use of mobile video is usually a sign that someone is ‘graduating’ from using their laptop or PC to their mobile phone as their primary Internet device.

Gays and Lesbians are social media leaders
Another study that caught my eye from Marketing Charts today, was the fact that Gays and Lesbians are significantly more likely to be social media participants than the general population – at least in the US where Harris conducted the study to find out.

While 25% of heterosexual Americans read news blogs, among gay and lesbian adults that figure jumps to 36%.

Meanwhile, 29% of gay and lesbians read an entertainment blog every day, compared to 16% of heterosexuals. When it comes to readership of blogs overall, 54% of gays and lesbians read them, the figure for adults overall is 40%.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Survey: Gays More Frequent Social Networkers (foxnews.com)
• Study: Gay And Lesbian Adults Are More Avid Blog Readers, Social Network Users (techcrunch.com)
• Gay people ‘more likely to join Facebook and Twitter’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Or at least that’s what the majority of (US) 18-34 year old’s say according to the National Retail Federation and BIGresearch (via Marketing Charts).   51.4% now want Internet access on their mobile / cell phones, up from 44.6% in October 2009.

However, while it stands to reason that Generation Y now expects the ability to be online on the go, it is worth looking at the stat for 35-54 year olds.   Almost half (47%) now want to access the Mobile Internet – less than a year ago in October 2009 that statistic was just over 1/3.

Indeed, back in March metrics firm Nielsen found that 36% of mobile social network use is done by 35-54 year olds, 34% by 25-34 year olds and 16% by 18-24 year olds.  As I said in a post at the time, it could well be that many people aged 35+ are supplied a Smartphone as part of their jobs and so get introduced to it as a consumer tool by using it for business first.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Samsung touts new tablet, smartphones (news.cnet.com)
• Nielsen: Social media use increased by 24 percent (sfgate.com)
• Shock: Students using mobile phones to cheat (mobilecrunch.com)

Kirk LaPointe’s media blog points us towards this report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which takes a look at news consumption in the United States.

Bearing in mind that the whole death of print trend is arguably more advanced in the US than in the UK or Australia, it’s worth a look.   Key points:

• The young are least likely to be regular news consumers.  35% of 18-29 year olds follow the news all or most of the time.   For people aged 65+ that rises to 70%

• However, it’s impossible to blank out the news completely and 99% of Americans do admit to getting news, at least casually in some shape or form.   Local (78%) and national (73%) TV leads, followed by the Internet (61%).   By contrast, 50% read a local paper, 54% listen to the radio, while 17% read a ‘national’ newspaper (the latter stat would be different in say the UK, due to the stronger position of national newspapers)

• News is also consumed across several channels simultaneously, 46% of Americans use between four of the six news platforms

The report also looks at Internet news consumption in more detail.    Less than four in ten (38%) Americans rely solely on news from offline sources, the majority (59%) rely on both on and offline sources, while 2% only get their news online.   It’s worth remembering however that ‘offline’ includes TV and radio as well as print.

Tying into some of the stats mentioned above, the research found that online news consumers were by and large both better educated and younger than the average.    So, the median age of all news consumers was 58, but for people who get their news online it was 40.

Finally, and this is a stat we mentioned in the recent ‘Rabbit Feed’ (our weekly newsletter over at Rabbit), news is now much more of a social phenomenon.   Three quarters (75%) of adults that get their news online say they get it forwarded to them through email or social media.

And it works in a virtuous circle.   News gets forwarded online via social media from people who at the same time deepen their engagement with the news.  97% of American social network users read the news online, and 51% of that 97% get news forwarded onto them via friends on places like Facebook on a typical day.

Strengthening the role of Twitter as a network that has influence and importance beyond its 10-15 million worldwide active user base, it’s also worth noting that the study found that 99% of Twitter users are online news consumers.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Internet changes news consumption landscape (news.cnet.com)
• Pew report: We get our news everywhere (trueslant.com)

A study published by two academics from Oregon State University and Eastern Washington University (via Science Daily) found that when people watch ‘graphic’ and ‘intense’ war news on TV, they are less likely to remember the ads that follow.

Keven Malkewitz and Damon Aiken showed 396 students five minutes of war news from Iraq followed by two 30 second ad spots.   The cycle was then repeated again for the students’ viewing pleasure – more war footage and then more ads.   The ads had all been aired during US nightly news broadcasts and featured large brand names.

If the news items featured ‘strong intensity’ the students were less likely to remember the ads.   The definition of intensity meant words such as ‘suicide’ and ‘explosive’ being used, along with shock images of bodies and amputees.

A previous study confirms much the same – at the end of 2008 Experian found that news programmes, magazines or websites were becoming less effective in terms of getting brand or ad messages across, with consumers simply not being in the ‘buy’ frame of mind when there’s a constant drum beat of doom being thrown at them.

Though in Experian’s study, news media scored highly on ‘social interaction’ (you talk about what you see), it didn’t provide all important ‘time out’ factor.  As a result, 28% of consumers were influenced by ad messages they saw in the news media, compared to 40% for other media.   In other words, if there’s a war or global recession on, put those remaining marketing pounds or dollars into entertainment or lifestyle media!

There is a twist to the study done by Keven Malkewitz and Damon Aiken though: When viewers were shown war news defined as ‘less intense’ (just a bit of shooting here and there?), people who were war supporters often did remember the ads, with anti war viewers still not remembering them.

Guess for some brands, those ad buys on Fox News really is money well spent after all.

Image – Dunechaser

Related articles by Zemanta

• Intense war news reduces ability to remember ads (scienceblog.com)
• The Hurt Locker And The Oscars, Ctd (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

Two charts from the current Economist special report on social networking. First of all, according to Nielsen, “measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy.”

By comparison, Americans spent on average six hours a month on social networks in October, almost 3x as much as in October 2007.

Secondly, a chart that again confirms the dominance of Facebook as being for social media what Google is for search. The other day I mentioned a Reuters article questioning whether Facebook was achieving technological ‘lock-in’, becoming a default that’s difficult to shift.

As well as Google, Reuters actually compared Facebook with the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard – introduced in the 1870s as the default for keyboards, and not the best or most logical solution out there but simply the one that stuck.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Australians world’s biggest users of social media (mumbrella.com.au)
• Blame Canada: Facebook Being Probed Over Privacy – Again (gigaom.com)
• Gangster Prisoner ‘Issued Facebook Threats’ (news.sky.com)
• Time Spent on Social Networks Increases by 82% in 2009 (rotorblog.com)
• The social network juggernaut rolls on (theequitykicker.com)

A Harris Research / AdWeek poll (via Marketing Charts) in the US puts some data onto a growing trend – the graying print newspaper market.

Among all Americans 43% still read a paper every day, a figure that is higher than I thought it would be.

However once you break it down into age groups a different picture emerges.   Among the over 55s, 2/3 still read their morning (or afternoon) paper.   For 35-44 year olds that’s down to just over a third (36%) while for 18-34 year olds it’s not even a quarter (23%).

I tried to find similar stats for the UK, and even two years ago according to a Parliamentary committee, 45% (so less than half) of the UK population read one of the national papers every day, with readership among 25-34 year olds falling by more compared to 18-24 year olds (40% to 37%).  Meanwhile the decline among the over 65s was only 3%.

In other words both the US and UK stats show that among seniors the daily paper is a habit.   The question obviously is, will it die out with them?

On the RAAK blog, Wessel van Rensburg has put the long term decline of the UK newspaper market into perspective.  In 1951, 48 million people lived in the UK while today there are 60+ million, an increase of 25%.   Yet, even while the population has increased, newspaper circulations have gone down by 30%.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How long can print newspapers last? (newsosaur.blogspot.com)
• Elderly Take Over! (stephenkinsella.net)
• Poll: Most won’t pay to read newspapers online (news.cnet.com)

Nothing to do with statistics this…or even lies…but this project by US design student Alex Cornell (found via Josh Spear) astounded me.   As his class assignment to reinvigorate a dying or defunct brand, Alex chose Playboy.

Not an obvious choice perhaps as Playboy isn’t dead, but Alex took it on as he felt it had become just another crass men’s mag indistinguishable from other borderline top-shelf titles.

By comparison 30 or 40 years ago, at least in the States, the magazine prided itself (along with its obvious, and some would say dubious, selling point) on a certain amount of intelligence in its writing style – hence the classic and knowing line “I read it for the articles.”

Alex took that line and made it the focus of his repositioning, that it would move away from the sometimes trashy men’s mag genre and focus purely on words – articles – and no pictures.

Though it’s a hypothetical exercise I’m not convinced turning Playboy into Monocle would work entirely in the way he envisages it.  Yet – the visual identity, use of the classic phrase and the replacement of the bunny with the sly fox was, I think brilliant.   Radical thinking a lot of brands could use but most would shy away from.

If he’s not got one already, give that man a job!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Industry Moves: Playboy Reorg Promotes Vaickus To President; Digital Head Stephen Adds Print Duties (paidcontent.org)