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The Nielsen Global Survey on Corporate Social Responsibility, a survey of 30,000 people in 60 countries, found that 55% of respondents are willing to shell out more money for socially responsible products--but the numbers vary depending on the region.
In Asia-Pacific, 64% of consumers are willing to pay more. The numbers are similar in Latin America and the Middle East/Africa, but in North America, the percentage drops to 42%. Just 40% of Europeans report that they would pay extra.Asia-Pacific respondents are also more likely to consider purchase decisions based on packaging (specifically, whether a brand says that's socially and environmentally responsible). Again, Europeans and North Americans are least likely to do this.
Millennials are most likely to pay extra, check product packaging, and work for companies that they perceive to be sustainable, according to the survey....
The more you start restraining yourself on social media or on any platform while marketing a brand, the more breaking out of those restraints feels like an insurmountable endeavor.
Regretting mistakes may just pave a way to the doom of your business, and everlasting regret is one territory you don't want to explore.So, here's a look at the silver linings of mistakes made in social media....
While a strong brand holds a company’s promise to customers, a company’s reputation gives it credibility and the license to operate. And for consumers, that reputation plays a strong role in guiding their decisions to buy—or not buy—a company’s products. In the U.S., that role is growing, as Americans are steadily learning more about companies before they do business with them.
According to the 2014 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient™ (RQ™) report, 56 percent of Americans actively investigate corporate behavior before they open their wallets. That figure is climbing, as this year’s figure is up 6 percent from 2012. And these information seekers aren’t just learning for their own benefit. This group actively shares what it learns and seeks to influence others in the process.
Consumer sentiment about the myriad of dimensions that make up corporate reputation isn’t an easy thing to gauge, but it’s certainly something for all companies to be aware of—and influence. But it’s not simply enough to know what people think about a company or brand. After all, if consumers are turned off by a particular company, they’re certainly not going to buy its products. The good news, however, is that Americans view corporate America more positively today than they have in recent history....
The FTC announced on Thursday that it has caught ADT paying bloggers for endorsements (on blogs as well as national TV/radio) and not disclosing it.
Folks, the rules and the law on social media ethics are clear, as I’ve been sharing for years.More here.
In addition to ending the program, ADT will now be required to get a signed confirmation that a blogger has reviewed and understands their disclosure requirements — from every blogger they work with, for the next 20 years.
How awesome of a punishment is that?
Here’s another one for the bulging “Kids Are Dumb” file: it seems a Florida teenager has cost her father an $80,000 legal settlement with a single, profoundly ill-advised Facebook post.
Patrick Snay, 69, had served as headmaster at a Miami private school called Gulliver Preparatory School until 2010, when his contract wasn’t renewed. Snay sued Gulliver for age discrimination, and in November 2011, the school settled out of court with an agreement to pay Snay $80,000 in damages, $10,000 in back pay, and $60,000 in legal fees. As is often the case, one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality, with Snay and his wife promising not to tell anyone about the existence or terms of the deal.
However Snay did tell his daughter Dana, a former student at the school, who now boasted to her 1,200 closest friends on Facebook: “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Gulliver alumni saw the posts and alerted the school’s lawyers, who promptly informed Snay senior the deal was off. He had obviously violated the confidentiality clause....
These six goals can be game changers for businesses and are all attributes that can be reinforced through the strategic use of social media.
One of the most valuable aspects of a solid social media engagement strategy and online presence is having the ability to build trust with consumers.
We have been writing a lot about that recently, whether its in the financial industry, the world of healthcare, or any vertical for that matter.
Authenticity is key, and social media tools and platforms can help companies make authentic connections with their customers if they are used in the right way.
The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer (from their annual global study) is out now, and it breaks down 16 specific attributes that businesses can improve on to build trust....
...By calling social scores “Influence Scores,” companies like Klout (who’s tagline is “The Standard For Influence”) have set expectations in the market that influence can be measured with scoring algorithms. However, influence is much more complex.
By setting the wrong expectations, social scoring companies have changed how marketing and PR professionals think about influence, and how to identify it. Instead of finding influencers from a context and audience approach, marketing and PR professionals look at metrics like follower count, unique visitors, and social scores to get a glimpse on who’s “influential,” which in most cases doesn’t work – popularity doesn’t necessarily equal influence....
CEOs and executives have understood for a long time that a company’s brand is important and goes way beyond just a logo and tagline. But questions about the actual value of the brand have often relegated this vital asset to a fuzzy, feel-good, slightly nebulous item that rarely gets the executive attention it deserves.
It turns out that companies can determine how much a brand is worth. We’ve seen this most recently in the bidding war breaking out for Steinway, which is a brand that transcends time and technology. It has legendary cache, in a way that fabled brands like Kodak or Polaroid did not. We know that strong brands with good reputations have 31% better total return to shareholders than the MSCI World average....
Integrate your online profiles from social platforms into a single summary page using About Me.We’ve all got accounts on heaps of different social sites – here’s one that pulls together your wide range of accounts into a single page that is all “About Me“. Which is coincidently the name of the service. Tony Conrad – Founder of About Me Its service is a single page summary of your desired public profile, plus links to other places online where people can connect to you. Using a simple templated layout with strong graphics and use of imagery and customisable background colours, its easy to set up and create an unique, professional-looking page....
...What happens to those companies that make mistakes on a much greater scale and cost their company millions in clout or (gulp) dollars? They go down in history as the biggest marketing mistakes of our time. It's hard to move on when you're being cited as the example of what not to do, huh? We looked into the biggest mistakes from many popular brands -- but glossed over any smaller companies because we don't want to hurt the little guy ;-) Keep reading for a little entertainment, and some reminders of what you should never do to ensure you don't repeat these mistakes yourself....
Simon Dumenco deconstructs the culture of the global news conglomerate that billionaire Mike Bloomberg whimmed into being. Remember that time Bloomberg News got caught using subscriber information from Bloomberg data terminals to spy on the financial industry? Oh, right, that pretty much just happened. But conveniently for Bloomberg, a bigger journalism-related scandal -- the revelation that the Justice Department was spying on the Associated Press (a story that will haunt the Obama administration forever) -- broke, overshadowing the Bloomberg scandal. You may have missed Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler's admission and apology, titled "Holding Ourselves Accountable," that was published in the dead of the night last Monday -- at 12:11 a.m. ET. In it, he owned up to the fact that Bloomberg News reporters had access to "limited client information" for Bloomberg's financial-data-terminal business, a sibling division of the Bloomberg empire that serves more than 300,000 subscribers on Wall Street and beyond....
United Technologies is at the top of its game but recently announced big layoffs. Is this the new normal?... ... This growth was accomplished, however, without expanding its workforce much at all, and now UT believes it can continue to grow as it wants to while actually shrinking its employee base. It's planning to lay off 3000 workers this year, after shedding 4000 last year. Now, is this really anything new? After all, output has been going up and employment simultaneously going down in manufacturing around the world for several years now, and UTC is a big manufacturer. But two things strike me as potentially novel here. First, the company does a lot more than just make things in factories. As its website says, "United Technologies... is a diversified company that provides a broad range of high-technology products and services to the global aerospace and building systems industries." Servicing elevators, security systems, and so on, in other words, is a big part of what UTC does, and services have historically been very labor-intensive. That could be changing....
The Top 100 corporate brands experienced a general decline in 2012 favorability scores, according to CoreBrand, a brand consultancy and creator of the Corporate Branding Index. The company, which provides benchmarking data, insights and corporate brand valuation for more than 1,000 companies across 54 industries, on Wednesday released its Sixth Annual Top 100 BrandPower Rankings Report, which ranks 100 corporate brands in terms of market reputation and awareness. Favorability scores measure overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential. The decline indicates that in the current economic climate, consumers are evaluating corporate brands more harshly, and these brand criticisms are being amplified with the proliferation of social media and the 24-hour news cycles, says James R. Gregory, founder and CEO of CoreBrand. “Now more than ever, it is important that companies improve the quality of their messages to the marketplace and focus on rebuilding trust, according to the company,” he says....
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As marketing professionals, we often look to the trendsetters in the industry to understand how to improve upon our own efforts.
...Of the top 10 most influential brands globally, publishers like The Wall-Street Journal, Financial Times and Mashable make up half of the list, underscoring the value of content in engaging customers. Technology companies make up the second largest industry represented, with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andSalesforce.com leading the way.
What do these leaders have in common, and what can you take away from their efforts and apply to your own content marketing? Three simple practices: - They continually update users on industry news. - They release new and engaging content tailored to specific audiences. - They add their voice to relevant conversations that their audiences care about....
What goes into a good company reputation? Consistency. But having vision, and appealing to emotions, don't hurt either.
...“A company’s reputation is created through committed behaviors,” says Robert Fronk, senior vice president of Nielsen Reputation Management and Public Affairs. “It’s not something you do once," he explains.
Six in ten consumers decide not to do business with a company based on something they learned about its conduct, the study found. The companies that rank highest--including Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Whole Foods--offer transparency, honest communication, and a proactive and focused approach. Fronk says reputation is formed by six dimensions that influence consumer behavior:...
If you haven't undertaken personal branding or you haven't incorporated it into your organization's marketing strategy, you're missing out on a world of value.
...To explore this topic further, I recently collaborated with online powerhouse and fellow MarketingProfs contributor Barry Feldman of Feldman Creative to create "The Complete A to Z Guide to Personal Branding" (see the infographic) — to help people and companies dive into the wonderful world of personal branding....
Thunderhead has just published a report that delivers the results of a survey that it took to try and discover how long a customer takes to recover brand loyalty after a single bad customer experience. The top level findings indicate that consumers can take up to a year to reach the same level of brand loyalty, once they have experience a single bad interaction with a company....
It's the golden rule and the core of all communications etiquette: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything. On Tuesday, Kelly Blazek, who runs the Cleveland Job Bank, learned that lesson the hard way when her email smackdown of a young job seeker named Diana Mekota, who contacted her through LinkedIn, went viral.
"Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite," read Blazek's poison pen letter, in part. "You're welcome for your humility lesson of the year. Don't ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network."
Mekota posted the complete email on Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook, along with these comments: "Guess us twenty somethings should bow down to senior professional because clearly we have nothing to offer," and "Let's call this lady out." From there, it was like a torch thrown into a desert of parched tumbleweeds...
Everyone has a CSR plan but not everyone does it in a way that is meaningful to consumers or is good at telling people about it.
What’s the difference between a brand with purpose and a purpose-driven brand? Sounds like a subtle nuance, but according to new research, the distinction is proving ever more important, especially in an era where consumers remain skeptical and business leaders expect corporate values to translate into tangible returns.
As Edelman’s recent brandshare and Trust Barometer studies reveal, when it comes to purpose, there is a widening gap between what people expect and what many brands and organizations deliver. While 92% of consumers want to do business with companies that share their values, only 14% have faith in business or believe that brands engage them well. Additionally, 40% of consumers don’t think brands are doing enough to demonstrate their beliefs in helping the world.
40% OF CONSUMERS DON’T THINK BRANDS ARE DOING ENOUGH TO DEMONSTRATE THEIR BELIEFS IN HELPING THE WORLD.
The Reputation Institute reveals similar findings. The institute’s 2013 survey shows that while 73% percent of consumers are willing to recommend companies that stand for something meaningful, only 5% believe that companies actually deliver on their promises....
Reviews are no joke over at Yelp headquarters. The local discovery platform averages 108 million monthly unique visitors who visit the service to discover businesses and make spending choices.
Most of these visitors also take a gander at the consumer reviews left on business pages. After all, user-generated content has proven to be a big influencer in consumers’ purchasing decisions. For this reason, Yelp is expanding its review functionality to mobile devices and heating up its battle against fraudulent reviews....
Domino's and Bank of America show that having humans handling social media doesn't mean they'll act human.
Last week, Domino’s stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand’s Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote “Sorry for your bad experience” response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.
And yet the error was actually a mistake made by a human, according to Domino’s. In much the same way as Bank of America screwed up last month by having a social media team sounding a lot like robots, a Domino’s employee mistook the compliment for a complaint. The employee then, it would appear, gave the default response for social media complaints. Domino’s, to its credit, tried to regain its footing by taking it in stride. The rub with brands in social media is that they’ll need humans, who are prone to make mistakes....
Is your thought leadership strategy using research wisely? It's not about proving your intelligence to customers, but rather about moving beyond "showing off" and actually providing something of value...
According to CMI, 57 percent of marketers feel publishing original research is an effective content tactic. But let’s be frank, much of what passes for “research” is just a small cut above a Survey Monkey experiment led by your summer intern (no offense to hard-working summer interns).
Tellabs happens to do original research well. Really well. And George Stenitzer, CMO of Tellabs, did not disappoint when we asked him to talk about Tellabs’ success using original, robust original research as part of its thought leadership strategy....
There are many ways in which reputation-threatening and stakeholder relationship-threatening issues can be identified. Early identification and strategic action are key to dealing with issues successfully. So having tools in place which make it easy and intuitive for a public relations professional to identify issues are a boon for reputation protection and enhancement....
... There's something more current, like the GOP hiring a PR strategist to educate America that it is not the "stupid party." Perhaps you remember the infamous case study of "Big Tobacco" hiring top-dog lobbyists to tell Congress that smoking doesn't kill people...stupid people jonesin' for a cigarette kill themselves. And now there's this, brought to us by the National Confectioners' Association. This is the proud D.C.-based organization that is breaking open its big piggy bank to the tune of $2 million (put your pinky up to your mouth when you say that) to tell D.C. — wait for it — that candy doesn't make you fat. ...
Social media and transparency are two words that often go hand in hand. But how true is social media transparency? ... The thing is, this whole “transparency thing” in social media isn’t actually happening, because we’re essentially not allowing it to happen. There’s this unwritten rule in social media that it’s best to focus on what you can achieve versus calling out fakes and bad practices. It’s the way the social web works best, folks say. And that may be true – but then that approach also dilutes the whole transparency argument too. For example, there’s a very well-known blogger-turned-author in the U.S. that talks a lot about community and how humble he is to have one of the best. Yet the same blogger is quick to send nasty emails to people who don’t gush over his book(s)....
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![The Complete A to Z Guide to Personal Branding [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/Gcdd32Cf-fhRFx7DWkasBjl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Finally the world is changing...