Research, Insights and Planning

Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.

Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later.

 Dan Laninga is Marketing Manager for Cygnus, makers of wall mounted and mobile computing workstations for healthcare. He is in a niche market and located in a relatively remote part of America. To say Laninga and his company face challenges when it comes to finding leads and maintaining client engagement is like saying it gets chilly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In doing some research for an upcoming white paper on digital listening (plug!) I came across this great SlideShare presentation from Dan Rockwell that dispels commonly held myths about design research. It's a must-see for creative strategists.

A recent study has found a linkage between social media engagement and financial success and profitability. In the first study of its kind, Engagement DB has provided the marketing community with some compelling directional findings. While the study findings can not show true causality, it's very exciting to see the linkage between deep engagement within social channels and the financial performance of some of the world's leading brands. Some key findings include:

The headlines have been rife with reports of one newspaper or another ceasing publication. It’s like the elephants trumpeting the death of one of their own herd and it’s getting louder as newsies struggle to find their place and a model for profitability in the age of blogs and “free” content. But what can you learn about their demise? It’s the same lesson every business learns for better or worse: adapt or die.

WHAT: FORGE Marketing Summit (Forums on Real Growth and Education) - January 15, 2009 The event will feature five of the region’s top marketing professionals. They will demonstrate cuttingedge marketing techniques proven to help small and medium sized businesses not just survive the economic downturn but EXPAND THEIR MARKET SHARE.

Harness the social capital within your organization & leverage your agency to deepen your insights.

Thinking of moving beyond listening to online conversation around your brand to a mode of engaging with influential bloggers and participants within social communities? There’s a lot of opportunity to join the conversation these days, but prepare yourself and your organization first before jumping in.

This is an awesome case study on just how fast messages can spread through social media channels. We’ve all read about the horror stories (hello, Comcast Must Die, et. al.), but how often do you see a company, let along a HUGE company, respond correctly?

As social networking sites and tools build audiences and spread across the universe, it’s tempting for marketers (and more often, clients of marketers) to want to jump in and mix it up with their brands. As has been commented on here before, it’s hard to ignore 120 million Facebook users and upwards of 60 billion pageviews, but there are some key things to remember before joining the party.