digitalNow

It's no secret that different colors evoke different emotions in us, and that marketers have been taking advantage of this for years. 

But which colors spur which emotions? 

Perhaps most notably, it is said that red stimulates the appetite. That's why the color is so prevalent with national food chains like McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC, Wendy's, Popeye's and Chipotle. 

Blue, meanwhile, is the color most preferred by men, and corporations often use it because it is thought to be productive and not invasive. 

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226791#ixzz2UB0ZFIEA

Other trends that Uberflip noticed in the digital content readership include the growth of mobile content consumption and the focus on content being shareable.

Mobile content consumption makes up one-fifth of global traffic. (Desktop traffic continues declining steadily.) Case in point, in February 2013, 21% of visits were from mobile devices, while just three years earlier, only 1.6% of visits were. The number keeps growing with every year
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Companies that better weathered the storm operated more transparently, allowing staff to provide solutions and participate in brainstorming sessions. Stewart recalls how one Interaction Associates client, a 100-plus-person professional-services firm that had struggled with layoffs in the past, had to make changes because it wasn't meeting its revenue goals. "They got the entire company in a room and said, 'Here's our problem, and here's a list of everything we could do. How would you prioritize this list?'" Stewart says. 

By including the entire company in the discussion, everyone understood the plan of action, and all shared in the responsibility for executing it. "The impact was amazing," she says. "They didn't lose anybody." 

Sign up for Google Alerts. Getting updates on your competitions' activity online is absolutely free via Google Alerts, and it couldn't be easier to set up. Just insert your competitors' names into the search query and select what results you want to be notified of -- including news, blogs, video and discussion. You can have those notifications sent to you as they happen, every day or weekly.

2. Connect with competitors on social media. "Like" and "follow" your competition on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels. Make sure you track both the brand and its key leaders to get a sense of what they are doing. For example, as a restaurant owner, you may want to follow the names of restaurants you compete with as well as the chefs and restaurateurs to get a full picture of their activity.

The idea is to initially convert people from other messaging and texting platforms, then give them the ability to post to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram securely, without their data being stored--and one day to facilitate private e-mails and phone calls. Unlike rival service Snapchat, which is aimed at teens and college students, Wickr promotes more serious use; it's a popular choice among doctors, politicians, freedom fighters, hackers and journalists. "Here in the States, the self-destructing part is what's driving people, but around the world, it's popular in high-tension areas. We have thousands of users in Russia and China, and they're logging more and more time on it every day," Sell says. "We believe ephemeral data is the future, and some day every app will have it."

And surely many a politician busted by incriminating photographs wishes that future had come a little bit sooner.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226680#ixzz2UAyQzaDF

Among survey respondents who recalled social media prompts in advertising, digital ads (61%) and television ads (59%) were the most effective at driving interaction with a brand’s social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These were followed by print ads (52%), radio ads (42%) and outdoor ads (39%).

Branding matters for small businesses because it provides shorthand symbols representing a combination of tangible and intangible elements that give you a super power – the power to affect peoples’ feelings in a certain way. Once your brand is established, prospects, customers and the public quickly recognize your firm and emotionally respond to your message. Therefore you need to determine your brand attributes and consistently use them everywhere to build trust.

12. Guest blog—Like baseball, in the guest blog profession, you have major and minor leagues and levels within. It’s unrealistic to think you can’t publish a thing or two online and then get published by the New York Times.

However, if you’re paying close attention to your industry (please tell me  you are) and know which publishers have the most powerful voices, you should think big. I recommend you think of the path to the top as a ladder and climb it like so:

• Blog brilliantly—First rung: your blog. Establish super high standards and meet them. Publish a minimum of 10 articles before you begin submitting work to high traffic sites.
• Go where there are no gates—Today, every smart website host recognizes the need to publish regularly, so many accept contributions from outsiders with no or low standards. Of course, you shouldn’t have no or low standards, but you should take advantage of the opportunity to publish your pieces at ungated blogs/online magazines. (Scribd.com is always happy to have you.)
• Apply yourself—The next rung on your ascent will be to apply to the sites you really want to be on. Often, an application system is in place for you to submit samples of your work and answer basic questions about your qualifications. Pursue these opportunities and you’ll surprise yourself.

Globally, due to automation and robotics, 3-5 million jobs exist. 300,000 people are estimated to already be employed in industrial robotics, with 45,000 more jobs to be added by 2018. To learn more about all this and how neuroscientists in Switzerland believe they can rebuild the human brain, neuron by neuron

What kinds of things can we do to shift from leadership to stewardship?

Stewardship asks us to be deeply accountable for the outcomes within our organizations without trying to control others or trying to take care of them. It requires a redistribution of power and privilege, moving choice and resources closer to the edges of the organization. Here are some examples of the kinds of things leaders can do to become stewards:

• Give choice to people at the edge as much as possible.
• Meet in a circle, not auditoriums. Circles allow people to see and talk with each other. Auditoriums are for people to be talked at.

 Mobile and tablet searches increased roughly 20% from March 2012 to December 2012 according to the comScore research. Tablets have experienced a steeper growth curve than smartphones.  This means that businesses must have a presence on these devices to ensure that their target audience can find them when they’re looking.

So how do you ensure that your company is positioned to avoid digital blunders, as well as build and maintain a strong reputation with your customers? First, study how big brands like Target and American Airlines interact with their customers online. Next, build a plan for monitoring your online presence and engaging with your customers
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Social media delivered the highest quality users in ad campaigns during the first quarter of 2013, performing 65% better than the industry overall and 33% better than the next best channel, according to a recent report by Aggregate Knowledge.

Coming off the high season of 4Q12, portals had the lowest cost of any channel in 1Q13—performing 2.5X better than the indexed industry average.

Below, additional findings from the Global Media Intelligence Report, which compared the cost, reach, influence customer engagement levels of various digital media channels:

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2013/10793/social-media-delivers-highest-quality-users-in-ad-campaigns#ixzz2UAzTTYXZ

Ask your product managers to answer one simple question

What are your customers able to do differently or better because of your product/service?

Simple question, right? What you're after here is a frontline understanding of what your staff is solving for customers, not what you're selling.

Because customers buy absence of pain or a desire fulfilled rather than products or services, all of your operating decisions (and your performance outcomes) flow from focused execution on the answer to this key question.

If your product managers can't answer this question fairly quickly, the chances that your company will exceed your performance goals are very low.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10774/four-outside-the-box-ideas-to-better-understand-customer-experience#ixzz2UAz6MRbL

If forced to only select only one social media platform to market on, 49% of marketers would pick Facebook, followed by LinkedIn at 16%, according to a recent survey by SocialMedia Examiner.

YouTube holds the top spot for future plans, with 69% of marketers saying that they plan to increase their use this year. Podcasting could also see significant growth—while only 5% of marketers are currently podcasting, 24% plan on increasing their activities in 2013.

Here are just some of the content-specific KPIs we are starting to track:

• Content throughput: Publishing volume and rate
• Content engagement: Views and comments across all channels
• Content dispersion: Likes, Shares, Tweets, +1s, Pins, etc.
• Content connection: Number of content interactions in the sales cycle
• Search lift: Keyword rankings
• Traffic: Across all properties (Web, social, etc.)
• Content conversions: New subscribers, leads generated
• Content value: Rough measure of revenue expectation from each content post

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10775/how-to-gauge-the-power-and-value-of-your-content-marketing#ixzz2UAyAMOQs

Ride a growing wave. If you specialize in a flat, stable industry, there won’t be much room for upward mobility. But if you pick a growing field, then everyone will be clamoring for your expertise. “I knew tech was going to be increasingly important in my lifetime, so I focused on it early,” says Scoble, who started by writing a technology column for the San Jose State University newspaper, parlayed it into “a job at a programming magazine no one knew about,” and then continued to build his portfolio.

1. Thou shalt listen to the social media conversation. Social media is a multi-directional communication. This means that everyone who participates on these platforms engages in multiple conversations with one or more people both concurrently and with a lag. No one person or organization owns the conversation. Actionable Marketing Tip:Consider how your communications may be received before you rush to respond. If a comment or mention gets you emotional, take a time out to ensure that you don’t say something that may be misconstrued.

 impact of your posts is known almost instantaneously, and you can adjust the next one to provide an even greater return.

But it’s so easy to get overwhelmed by numbers. It almost feels like the new binary; we used to speak to computers in 1s and 0s, and now we have thousands of numbers with which to communicate our social media successes or failures.

So how do you know which measures to pay attention to, and which ones are more vanity stats? You know, vanity stats: the numbers that you rattle off when someone asks what impact your efforts are having on their bottom line — we’ve all done it! But while those numbers can feel good, here’s what you really need to be paying attention to.

Over one-fifth of global traffic now comes from digital content consumption at the expense of our declining interest in turning on the Desktop (desktop traffic continues to decline steadily).

The only thing that really needs to be reorganized in the 21st Century is the way organizations think about what really creates their value.  The successful organization of the future will be organized around value creation that comes from the hearts and minds of people, human capital. Whether formal or informal every organization needs structural and strategic capital designed to support human capital that creates value which sustains relationship capital. Take out, diminish or destroy human capital and there is no need for structural or strategic capital because there are no relationships to build capital to support.