A short summary of digital marketing news

Some (international) internet and e-commerce news from the past week, including some reports and a social media monitoring checklist.

Tripadvisor and Belgium hotels

Belgium hotel owners hate customers


The Belgium hotel federation wants to limit tripadvisor reviews. This is the other way around. Partly there is something to say about their criticism. But why don't they see the chances and opportunities the reviews can bring them? Be creative. Make sure your guests write at Tripadvisor, sent out after stay email marketing communication to remind all the guests to leave reviews, print out the reviews and put them in a guestbook at the lobby. People who are satisfied will react and negative reviews will be less in this case. But above all, make your guests feel comfortable and happy.

Webinar

IBM has an interesting webinar (recorded) about the changing consumer behavior. It is in English (landing page in Dutch)

Social media monitoring checklist

I created a social media monitoring tool requirements checklist. It is not a complete list for every company or brand, but it might be useful for some people. You can find it here.

You can only use the maximum power with these social monitoring tools when you can integrate it with your CRM, so you can identify (social) influencers, brand ambassadors and get the most out of your customer centric strategy. By the way The difference between influencers and brand ambassadors are explained in this infographic. Integrated social media monitoring tools will be one of the key instruments of marketers and customer service employees/management for now and the near future.

Facebook

Facebook is testing a feature for targeting page posts. At Facebook it is all about the engagement factor. How to interact with your audience. You have to keep interacting. With this option, you will be able to communicate more specific with your fans, and therefore also the engagement factor can increase. If you are communicating more relevant the engagement will be higher. But the downside is, that you need even more unique content. More work for the social media content managers.

I have added a few new digital marketing infographics to my pinterest board. Infographics about responsive webdesign, twitter intensity per city (and it turns out that Jakarta and Tokyo are the city's with the most active twitter activity). The speed of social media and much more.

Reports

And if you feel bored during the weekend. Experian has released (a while ago) a 154 pages digital marketing trends and benchmark report. A real nice and extensive report. Read about the "customer obsession". Many marketers and companies, still find it very difficult to understand that through the use of social media and internet, listening to customers and adapting your company's strategy because of this, is something that really should be in the centre of the marketing and organisation strategy. Most people complain at twitter (or other social media sites) to have companies learn from their mistake. Making a mistake is not a problem, it is how you deal with it. A recent study from Yougov, confirms this.
Make sure you make your CRM social!

Unfortunately I could not find the report, but the Japanese (and now international) e-commerce giant Rakuten, released a report about national shopping habits. Very interesting to see the differences in shopping behavior between countries. E-commerce facts describes a few differences in this article. In the US , the Uk and Germany, the monday shopping peak is still there, while the french peak at wednessday.

Burson-Marsteller Acia Pacific often has nice reports and studys. Recently they published their annual social media checkup 2012. One of the trends they spotted is that video content is on the rise, and it rises fast. It surprises me that it took so long, but video and interactive video is really exploding at the moment. Also a trend Burson-Marsteller reports is that companies are adapting new social media platforms faster then before. Google plus pages for business, for example is expanding rapidly. Companies are getting used to social media in general and are adapting their organisations towards working with social media. The system stays the same, the platforms may differ. With this view it is easy to test or adapt new platforms. Be aware that you might need specific content for specific platforms.
By adapting fast to new social platforms you can get a competitor advantage.

At the end of the presentation regional insights are given about global social media usage.

Burson-Marstellers report at slideshare:

Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-Up 2012 from Burson-Marsteller

Connected vending machines

Meanwhile in Japan, you can even earn loyalty points with vending machines. And as the author of the article describes, expect to get loyalty points at parking meters as well :)
That would be fun.Upsell at parking metres: If you pay an extra euro, you can stay 40 minutes longer and receive 250 parking meter loyalty points. Share this at facebook :)

Deeper integration social in search engines

Microsoft expanded the integration of facebook in Bing. If you ask a question in Bing, you get the possibility to ask the same question to friends who are most likely to help you also with this question.

Very interesting and further integration of social in SEO will def. change the SEO strategy's around the world. Interesting to watch how google will react, with Google Plus that still has a far lower user and usage percentage then facebook has.