InSites Blog

Consumers are increasingly conscious of the information they place on social networking sites. 81% indicate that they think twice before posting something, while 79% have become more selective in choosing and accepting ‘friends’. 74% give thought to which pictures they place online and which ones they do not.

In spite of the more cautious attitude, 87% indicate that their online identity strongly corresponds to their offline identity. 13% of consumers however admit to using a different persona online than who they are in reality. The study by InSites Consulting also shows that 23% of users feel they can more easily express their emotions via social media than in real life.

“Our study clearly shows that consumers are becoming more mature in their use of social media. Users can be themselves, though do so in a conscious manner. A form of online etiquette will increasingly be developed in an organic way by consumers themselves.” notes Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner.

These are conclusions of our Social Media Around the World Study among 2,800 internet users in 14 countries.

On April 27-28-29, Amsterdam (NL) welcomes speakers and companies from Europe and the US to discuss the future of the web at The Next Web Conference.

Tom De Ruyck (Senior R&D Manager) and Dado Van Peteghem (Senior Research Consultant) visited this conference in 2009 and are now eager to attend again.

Tom was invited today as one of the speakers for the Pecha Kucha presentations on Tuesday April 27. He will be presenting The time is NOW.

Want to find out more about the conference? Visit http://thenextweb.com.

26% of social media users access these websites via their mobile phones. Asia and North America are frontrunners in this. Southern Europe is still somewhat behind to the rest of the world in this area. These are the results of a global study carried out by InSites Consulting in 14 countries among 2,800 respondents.

Mobile users are intensive users
Surfers who consult social media via their mobiles log in an average of three times per day. The average for people without mobile access is 1.5 times per day. Mobile users are also more active when it comes to sending messages, uploading photos and becoming fans of brands.

“As a result of mobile internet, consumers can immediately share their opinions with their network, which increases the spontaneity of these messages. Expectations for the growth of mobile internet are positive, which means the use of social media will increase even more over the coming years,” says Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting.

55% has no or limited access to social media at work

Over half of consumers have no, or limited access, to social media at work. Consumers in North & South America and Australia in particular face these limitations. Consumers in Eastern Europe and Asia have the fewest limitations.

“Companies who exclude their commercial people from social media are effectively cutting off their teams from consumers. Companies that do so are sending the message that they are not interested in having a relationship with consumers” says Steven Van Belleghem.

Together with Tim Duhamel, CEO of InSites Consulting, I’m responsible for our MC DC (“Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected”) report. The report deals with 17 challenges that digital media marketers are currently facing. The study is carried out in 16 European countries in a partnership with IAB Europe and is representative for the respective Internet populations, aged 15 and older.

Based upon the MC DC research, I would like to share some key insights.

First of all, it is clear that the consumer today is different than the consumer a few years ago. The rise of social media changed the way consumers interact with each other, but also what they expect from brands. Consumers want the interactions with brands and not only in terms of forwarding advertising campaigns (the viral aspect), but also having the ability to voice their opinion on a discussion board / social media fan page (to a lower extent) where the brand and other customers are present. Besides that, they want to be involved in the creation of new products / ads (mainly to give feedback). So there are many opportunities for brands nowadays to strengthen their brand-customer relationship.

Next to this, we see that more and more people are connected 24/7. The usage intensity of the Internet has increased throughout the years and the Internet has become a mass media channel (soon to overtake TV – if it not already happened in some younger target groups). The rise of the mobile Internet will only speed up that trend and I truly believe one day we will all be connected (be it with a smartphone, be it with laptop, be it with another device). The boundaries between personal and professional lives will fade (as is already the case with ourselves and modern marketers in general).

Finally, the rise of social media has redefined ‘privacy’ to a certain extent. If you would have asked people a few years back to share their experiences online about their dinner yesterday, a movie they had seen… they would have said “No Way”. Today, a part of the e-mail inbox has gone public, but people are very much aware of the consequences in terms of privacy. Today’s surfers have a self-protecting behaviour (using antivirus software, firewalls, being careful to publish something online…) which I think is nothing more than common sense because the Internet still has its dark “websides”. That’s the reason why cloud services are still not that popular today: most people have privacy concerns, have their doubts about security in putting their data online… all of which need to be addressed via communication and by illustrating the reliability of these services (RAAS – reliability as a service).

For example, in January last year bookmarking service Ma.gnolia announced that they had lost all the data due to data corruption. In March last year VC-backed online backup and storage provider Carbonite has lost data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe and in September 2009 Gmail was out for a couple of hours (Sep 09).

For more information on the MC DC, please visit our website (http://mcdc.insites.eu) or contact me.

72% of Internet users are part of at least one social network, which translates to 940 million users worldwide. These are the results of a global study among 2,800 Internet users. Eastern Europe and Asia are the regions with the lowest use (4 out of 10), while South America has the highest usage in terms of percentage (95%). Globally, Facebook remains the most popular online platform (51% use Facebook), followed by MySpace (20%) and Twitter (17%).

72% are members of two social network sites
The majority of surfers are members of two or more social network sites; this usually entails two sites used for private purposes. 16% are members of a professional network, of which LinkedIn is the most popular.

“It is becoming difficult for new social sites to recruit members. The majority of surfers are happy with their current situation and do not want to become members of a new platform. Furthermore, they do not intend to reduce their use of their current sites. There is therefore a certain degree of stability in this market,” explains Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting.

Twice per day and 195 friends
Users of social media log in on average twice per day. On professional sites this percentage is significantly lower, where the average is nine times per month. Different types of users exist: there are those who log in often though rarely write anything themselves and mainly observe others (14%). There is another group of 26% who frequently log in and write something every time they do.

The average social media user has 195 friends, in which South America is highest with an average of 360 friends, followed by Portugal with 236 friends and the United States with 200 friends.

Unfriending is a popular activity
58% of social media users have unfriended a friend. South American users are highest in this category too – 81% have removed people from their social network.

Check out the full report!

Getting up early is not my favorite start of the day, but for the WARC Conference on Advertising Performance I was happy to make an exception and that’s how I ended up in my car at 5.45 AM, heading to Lille Europe to take the Eurostar to London. Exactly 15 hours later, I was back where I started – home. But I brought some insights, inspiration and great stories back with me. If you keep an eye on InSites’ activities, you will sooner or later find out where the inspiration took us, but right now I already want to share some insights and some great stories.

Insights

• Emotions are the best predictor of advertising performance. The only problem is that there does not seem to be a consensus yet on how to measure emotions.
• Great advertising (and great marketing for that matter) requires a model of how humans work rather than a model of how advertising works. Fortunately, at InSites Consulting, we use both.
• Advertising always works. A report from Deutsche Bank revealed that any company that spends money on advertising & promotion, shows a better financial result compared to companies who don’t.
• Consistency in advertising works.
• If a viral movie has not gone euh… viral within 8 weeks, it will probably never do.

Stories

• During the first World War, British prime minister Kitchener was the first to use the power of advertising. The posters he used to recruit for the army might seem pretty straightforward now, but they had a tremendous impact. Kitchener expected to recruit 300.000 young men in 6 months. However, with the poster campaign he managed to recruit 750.000 young men in 3 weeks. Why? First of all, there was little or no other advertising at that time. But more importantly, there was a common need to defend the country – the message was relevant to the nation!
• In Korea, Turkey and Serbia, there is a countdown system that shows car drivers when the traffic lights will turn green. Because of this simple call for patience, the number of accidents due to ignoring red lights has decreased substantially. The Koreans were really thorough in testing this: they also experimented with a green signal to have drivers stop instead of a red light. Not very successful.
• Paul Graham had a great metaphor to convince his clients to use social media. Imagine you have a party coming up and you really want people to think you are a funny guy. So months in advance you start making this great billboard, with shiny colors, laughing faces and a clear message: “I am funny”. Now on the night of the party, you go stand in the middle of the room, holding up your billboard for an hour and then leaving home, excited to see the results of your post-test the day after. Wouldn’t you have a better chance to reach your objective if you work the room, go have a chat with people, tell some jokes and have a good time? Great story, but I am wondering if some advertisers might think: “I will put up a big screen in the room and play a hilarious commercial. That will do the trick.”
• Just adding “Drink Coca-Cola” instead of “Coca-Cola” on the Coke fridges all over the world, resulted in a sales increase of 20%. Apparently, it sometimes is that obvious.
• In the ‘90ies, Felix cat food was a rather new brand challenging market leader Whiskas. In one year, Felix only had one campaign that they kept running, consistently showing the same cartoon with the Felix cat (who is probably called Felix), while Whiskas launched 10 different campaigns, one for each innovation they launched. The ad spending of Felix was only half of the ad spending of Whiskas. Nevertheless, in that year, Felix became the new market leader and left Whiskas with a lot of things to think about. Consistency in advertising being one of them.

And to end with, a great quote from Sir Chris Powell, who has decades of experience in advertising: “Make it good in the first place, rather than measuring your failures.” It won’t surprise that we have some good solutions to help you with that

The web is changing our business so fast and fundamentally that some pessimists say we’re witnessing the end of the industry. It’s true that traditional advertising is no longer working, and most advertisers have been left behind by the rapid changes in recent years. And it’s true that’s a serious challenge for the profession. But InSites Consulting provides an answer to that challenge with Steven Van Bellghem‘s book, The Conversation Manager.

The book was launched last week in Belgium at an event that attracted 400 eager marketers looking for solutions. Presentations, videos and pictures are online. Still looking for more? Take the Conversation Manager test and discover our Wall of Fame.

Next up on the agenda is the book launch in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) on Thursday 18 March 2010. Registrations are still open so make sure to reserve your seat!

Yesterday I attended the second edition of the Webvertising Forum, an event for all those who are interested in digital marketing. So as you would expect, the audience was mostly made up of advertisers and digital agencies.

First to present, was Patrick Marcke from IAB Belgium, who said a few words about the internet population and how online advertising budgets are evolving. Most graphs and insights used, were taken from the MC DC study, an extensive internet study which InSites Consulting conducted in partnership with IAB Europe. (http://mcdc.insites.eu) So, from my point of view, that was a very good start to the day

The forum went on to give a good overview of which digital marketing methods are out there and offered the possibility to do some networking over a cup of coffee and a copious lunch buffet. Miech Rolly from The Parking Lot presented the case study of Pearle, focusing on the fun aspect and the efficient way of using Twitter & Facebook for recruitment of actors/models and the promotion of the campaign. You can still check out the campaign on http://www.thesteamyroom.be and you’ll know exactly what I mean by ‘the fun aspect’.

Guy Makmel, Managing Director at Easyconcepts presented a technology, which acts on user intent to dynamically construct the content of an ad. This way, the ads that are shown to you on a certain site, are determined by certain semantic or behavioral factors. Applications for this technology are mostly on e-commerce sites, travel sites, etc. And the main advantage of it, is that conversion and thus ROI are very easy to measure.

David Warszawski from TradeTracker gave his view on performance based advertising with affiliate marketing and Bruno Van de Moortel from Medialogue spoke about crowdsourcing, giving some nice examples of how you can outsource content creation ànd even ad creation to your own audience.

A very interesting presentation came from Isabelle Driege from the digital agency Emakina. Without using research figures as such, she still threw some interesting digits around, speaking about 2.0, the 360° approach, but most importantly the 365 day conversation that marketers need to have with consumers. She explained that it is not so much about your brand site, as your brand presence. A brand needs to create a positive experience for consumers on all touchpoints, be they pre-sale or post-sale. Only by using a good mix of digital channels to market your products or services, can you achieve that. The main take-away for the marketer in this presentation: “it’s all in the mix”.

Kris Hoet from Duval Guillaume also spoke about touchpoints, focusing a bit more on creative ways to create new kinds of touchpoints, which take full advantage of our current 2.0 situation. Last presentation of the day was a duo presentation by Philippe Belpaire and Michel Tubbax from Roularta Media Group. It made me think of a short poem from “Poems on the underground”, that starts with the phrase “Not much cricket in Hamlet, I overheard a man say.” and ending with “To be honest, I like it that way, the absence of cricket is fine. But should you prefer work that includes it, please note that now, there’s some cricket in mine.” And well yesterday, I noted, that there was some “offline” in the presentation of Philippe and Michel… With this audience, it doesn’t seem very straight forward to mention your offline work and mostly focus on content. But it has to be said, they made a very convincing case. The new partnerships that they have with brands are inspiring. They allow the brand to contribute to the content and get visibility in return, but in a very subtle and natural way.

For me personally, the presentation on Online Educational Marketing by Geert Coppens from Instruxion was the most interesting. It’s a method that responds to the need of the consumers, rather than of the advertiser, by creating an online learning experience for the consumer before he or she is redirected to the page of the advertiser. Basically, the idea is that e.g. the bluetooth feature on a mobile phone becomes more appealing, if you give an animated explanation about what it is and what it can do for you, before prompting people to go ahead an buy it. Check out more examples on http://www.animatedexplanations.com/. What strikes me, is that this is a way of advertising that really responds to the insight that we need to start communicating differently with our consumers, ànd that web 2.0 offers limitless possibilities to do exactly that. It may not be the best way to pitch it, but I would say finally, you no longer need ‘sex’ to sell your product

Yesterday evening, at the annual Merit Awards Night, we were happy to see how Boondoggle won the award for “Agency of the Year”. This communication agency has been a great partner for us in developing our conversation research tools & philosophy and obviously, they have been a great partner to their clients as well. Smart campaigns, creative thinking… if there was one agency that was literally everywhere in 2009, it definitely was Boondoggle as Bart Lombaerts from Media Marketing Magazine stated.

We could not agree more, so sincerely: kudos to Boondoggle! Check out their campaigns here and definitely check out our personal favorite, the movie they made after winning five “gold” lions in Cannes!

Every marketer has a few old fashioned marketing books somewhere in a box or a cupboard. We’re offering you a chance to recycle them and get a FREE copy of Steven Van Belleghem’s latest book The Conversation Manager in return.

Here’s how in three easy steps:

1. Bring your old marketing books to the Stichting Marketing Conference on 4 or 5 December 2009 in ICC Ghent
2. Throw your old books in one of the big ‘InSites Consulting’ rubbish bins (look out for the recycling logo)
3. We’ll give you a voucher you can exchange for Steven’s book when it’s published in February

Hope to see you at our booth at the Stichting Marketing Conference. The conversation revolution’s here!