Digital Media

In September this year, ComScore reported that Pinterest had penetrated the top 50 list of most visited sites in the USA. Not bad for a new social network that is barely 3 years old. The same study highlights Pinterest’s explosive growth, which now equates to over 25 million unique monthly users.
Given this fast-growing user base, Pinterest is a solid choice for attracting more traffic, leads and customers to your business. But if your new Pinterest business page is missing a few critical ingredients, then you could be going nowhere fast.
Did you know that the way you set up your page – the photo you use to promote your business, the description you add to the About section, the boards you create and where you actually place them on the page – can influence your Pinterest marketing efforts?

The calendar year wouldn’t be complete without a few social media fails.

In 2012, plenty of big brands and organizations suffered serious backlashes on social networks like Twitter andFacebook for offensive tweets, questionable ad campaigns or controversial company statements. Some, like McDonald’s, attempted good-natured social media campaigns that simply took unexpected turns. Others, like StubHub’s and KitchenAid’s Twitter accounts mistakenly send out shocking tweets.

If there’s one lesson to take away from this year’s fails, it’s that brands need to be particularly careful when it comes to tying a promotion or post to a big, public event. Several of the businesses on our list were heavily criticized for posts relating to the presidential election and Hurricane Sandy, for example.

In an increasingly competitive and homogeneous marketplace, digital acquisitions provide a way in which businesses can close the gap and drive growth via new commercially attractive ventures. With a market ripe with startups, that next Facebook, Amazon or Google might just be around the corner – the question is what should businesses be looking for?

Is it a matter of looking within your marketplace, identifying potential disruptions to your business and then looking to find a solution that will avert that pending collision? Or rather broadening the search beyond traditional areas of operation, in order to leverage opportunities in new growth areas yet to boom? Whether an acquisition occurs, no doubt businesses that keep aware of these opportunities will be better poised to respond if and when their industry is disrupted.

The following infographic by Kwasi Studios provides some interesting insights about digital acquisitions between some of the most prominent businesses in the world and why they think these alliances will work.

Of particular interest is Amazon’s purchase of Kiva Systems. For those unaware, Kiva Systems has developed robot technology warehouse management system – potentially the future of supply chain and operations particularly for large multichannel retailers. In effect this alliance allows Amazon to move into a market of not only being a retailer, but supplying other retailers with this technology – stepping out its traditional role. However this is nothing new for the retailer, that has over the years monetised a variety of the technology and services it has developed.

A different example of a business perhaps looking to avert disruption, while building and innovating within its own market is Salesforce. Traditionally offering a CRM solution for sales management, the company has expanded its offering in the social media sphere with its purchase of Buddy Media. Perhaps anticipating the growth of social media within the B2B communications space, as mentioned in the article by Kwasi Studios, Salesforce is rounding out its offering to stay relevant and contemporary within its market.

What will be your approach in order to close and grow your business beyond the gap?

Do Apple lovers really “think different?” What makes those who don’t buy Apple products turn away from them? This infographic gets to the bottom of why people buy Apple products, and what keeps them from buying them. And it shows how they feel about those products once they’ve bought them.

You’ll probably agree, there’s something about buying an Apple product that makes people act differently. It could be part of that famous “reality distortion field” associated with Steve Jobs, or maybe it’s just because Apple products are actually superb. The survey behind this artwork aims to quantify that thinking, measuring the differences of opinion between Apple lovers and Apple haters.

Some of you might say there’s no reality being distorted at all, and Apple products are just far superior to its competition. At the same time, many of the 48% of U.S. adults who’ve never owned an Apple device probably don’t think Apple products are insanely great, but point to Apple aficionados as simply insane. Others in that group just plain can’t afford Apple’s expensive baubles.

What’s the truth? It wasn’t the mission of market research firm Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) to find out whether subjective opinions and feelings about Apple products were true or not. The goal was to measure the difference in thinking between those who embrace Apple products and those who don’t.

SEE ALSO: Is Apple Mapping an Alternative Universe? [SUNDAY COMICS]
Using its Ask Your Target Market research platform, AYTM Research tapped into its huge hoard of 4.5 million consumers in multiple countries to come up with the data behind this lovely infographic. Take a look at the full data set here.

If you’re having trouble understanding this unusual infographic, here’s a quick guide: On the left side are those who haven’t bought Apple products, and on the right are those who have been enveloped in Apple’s alleged reality distortion field.

What do you think? Are you trapped in Apple’s reality distortion field? Is there even such a thing?

Did you know that almost nine in ten people (86 percent) may leave a website when asked to register or create an account?

Lengthy forms and password fatigue are cited as the main issues, but there’s a simple solution: social logins. By allowing your visitors to connect via Facebook, Google and Twitter, you can dramatically increase your the user conversion rate – and experience – on your website.

This infographic from Janrain takes a closer look at the registration challenge for brands and web developers.

[Source: Socialbakers]...

Data Range: October 1, 2012 to October 31, 2012

Engagement Rate: Calculated as the average number of likes, comments and shares per post on a given day, divided by the total number of Fans for the page. It reflects the percentage of your Fan base that interacts on average with your post.

Response Time: The average time that it takes for the company to respond to user wall posts.

Response Rate: The percentage of user wall posts that get responded to by the company.

Let’s face it, we love being entertained in the comfort of our own homes whether it’s watching funny cat videos online, streaming the NFL live, watching the MLB playoffs, or viewing our favorite television shows. Although we have had more control over when we watch TV with the introduction of the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and plenty of shows now available to view online, social media and mobile technology are changing the way we watch shows. Interaction with our favorite shows or with what we see on television is making the passive couch potato a thing of the past.

ContactLab presenta un approfondimento inedito dell’E-Commerce Consumer Behaviour Report 2012 in una nuova infografica!

Come si informano gli utenti Internet italiani prima di acquistare online?

Quanti, prima di un acquisto in negozio, raccolgono informazioni online?

Quanto incidono i dispositivi mobili?

What is the secret of bars? Why do we happily pay four times as much for beer in a bar as in a store? We pay this brand premium to be with friends. The secret of bars is that they convert our quality time into cash. Like bars, social media are places where friends meet. The best social media programs also convert the consumer’s social time into a brand premium, reaching a return on investment (ROI) up to four times as high as the ROI of a TV commercial.