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We recently introduced our new brand film, which showcased how Percolate serves as a system of record for marketing for a global organization. In the film, we created a fictional music technology brand, Notes, to illustrate how marketing teams use our platform to plan, coordinate, and execute amazing campaigns.

Today, we’re excited to take a closer look at how world-class brands are using a system of record to power their marketing teams. This is how our clients GE, Chobani, and Blue Bottle Coffee use Percolate to build brand awareness, drive revenue, and make better decisions.

GE – Global Planning, Brand Governance, and Asset Management

General Electric has a 130-year heritage of innovation and their 300,000 employees operate in over 150 countries around the world. For Katrina Craigwell, Head of Global Digital Programming, making sure that all of GE’s teams are on the same page from a planning and brand voice perspective.

As she told us, GE “didn’t have a content marketing operating system before Percolate. We’ve been on a great journey over the last three years, moving past just, ‘We have to be producing content to tell our story,’ but ‘How do you think about programming a brand message over five to ten channels and programming that experience in consistent ways across ten or sixteen major markets?'”

For GE, the content planner gives teams visibility into global marketing priorities, resulting in greater alignment on marketing messages and brand voice. In addition, GE uses Percolate not just to centralize marketing assets alongside a suite of creation tools, but also share those materials and briefs with GE marketers around the globe.

Learn more about our partnership with GE.

Chobani – Collaboration, Customer Service, Consistency

When Jessica Lauria, Director of Brand Communications at Chobani sat down with us, she explained how her lean team, consisting of only two social strategists, was able to keep a consistent brand voice across different product lines, markets, and audiences. From planning, to content creation, to customer service, Percolate has allowed Chobani to work efficiently and collaborate seamlessly across teams.

For Jessica, Percolate’s monitoring capabilities has had huge impact on customer loyalty. Not only is social listening affecting the content Chobani is creating, it has opened up the opportunity deliver even better customer service. Chobani’s Customer Loyalty team, based in upstate New York, prides themselves on their ability to respond to customers within an hour. Recognizing the brand’s opportunity, Jessica notes, “We need a platform that we communicate to them, so that our outreach comes from one unified voice so Percolate is helping us be one community and one voice within that platform.”

Learn more about our partnership with Chobani.

Blue Bottle Coffee – Scalability and Mobile

As a former Blue Bottle Coffee barista, Byard Duncan, now Communications Manager, is a a one-man communications team in a rapidly growing company. He recognized that the great moments happening in all their cafes could be captured to tell the Blue Bottle story in a more authentic way In his words, “the biggest challenge to [me] is storytelling across expanding geographies.” Byard relies Percolate to tap into content being created by customers and employees across cafes in five locations, in two countries.

Percolate’s suite of mobile apps make it easy Byard to tell the Blue Bottle story as it happens. With Photographer, retail store managers can capture great moments that occur in the store, like guests playing with their dogs, and easily share them with Byard. Guests also often share photos themselves of their time at Blue Bottle, which he can request permission to use via our Fanbranded tool. This authentic content from guests is a powerful complement to more polished media Byard receives from his design team. Additionally, Byard is able to single-handedly listen and respond to customers across geographies in real time through the Community Manager App and Monitoring tool, magnifying what Blue Bottle is all about: deliciousness, hospitality, and sustainability.

Learn more about our partnership with Blue Bottle Coffee.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1yfjT83

Visionary marketers lead with brands and bold ideas. But linking today’s complex customer journey to a unified brand narrative is a true challenge, even for marketing leaders at the world’s largest companies. Social and mobile have fundamentally redefined the channels and tactics marketers rely on, requiring them to create and deliver better messages in more places faster than ever before.

Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with key clients like Unilever, GE and MasterCard to develop a new marketing platform designed for the scale and speed of modern media — a technology system of record that unifies a brand’s story, people and data, worldwide. Percolate now centralizes the entire marketing department to reduce costs, accelerate productivity and deliver a consistent, cross-channel customer experience.

Today, we’re excited to share this new global Percolate, the System of Record for Marketing that includes:

1. Global Marketing Planner. The new planner is the first collaborative, cross-channel calendar that fully integrates with Percolate’s content inspiration, creation and distribution capabilities. The planner is specifically designed to streamline multi-team collaboration across the enterprise, allowing global marketers to plan campaigns alongside local counterparts, or schedule media buys and social hashtags right next to TV spots.

2. Global Distribution. Percolate now publishes to destinations that include Weibo, mobile devices, websites, blogs and digital asset management systems (DAMs), and can be configured to publish to any marketing channel, organic or paid, supported by a customizable content approval system on web and mobile.

3. Global Analytics. Global analytics lets teams segment or group performance data by team, channel or brand theme, accelerating the feedback loop between global decision makers and local market implementation.

4. Global Media Library. When one marketing team adds or creates images, videos or other files in Percolate, they are immediately shared globally so other marketing teams with the appropriate permissions can use and customize them in their own work.

Welcome to a new set of possibilities for global marketing orchestration — a system where ideas, teams and technology work together in perfect harmony.

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Note from Noah: I’ve been trying to blog more recently and posted this over on my personal blog. Felt like something I could expand on and post here so I’m going for it.

Strategy, like innovation and lots of other business buzzwords, seems to mean less the more it’s mentioned. I thought this definition, from Lawrence Freedman (who I’ve never heard of) via Martin Weigel’s blog is a nice one:

Strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns… The inherent unpredictability of human affairs, due to the chance events as well as the efforts of opponents and the missteps of friends, provides strategy with its challenge and drama. Strategy is often expected to start with a description of a desired end state, but in practice there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance. Instead, the process evolves through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated or hoped for, requiring a reappraisal and modification of the original strategy, including ultimate objectives. The picture of strategy… is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point and not the end point.”

This fits with a thought I have had lately around how strategy is really about building algorithms (rules) that help drive optimal outcomes in decisions. Basically you’ve identified what you ultimately want to accomplish and strategy is how you drive towards that. The challenge, as outlined here, is that nothing’s ever quite as neat and tidy as we might hope. So rather than talking about strategy as a blueprint (or similar), which suggests everything is in its perfect place down to the millimeter, it’s better to think about it as an algorithm that helps you make the right decision as you traverse whatever landscape you happen to encounter. Algorithms are nothing more than a set of rules applied to any information or situation, which takes into account what you understand about the data and tries to find the best answer according to the ideas/ideals the programmer has set forth.

There are lots of interesting implications for this, but I think two of them are particularly useful to discuss here.

What does it mean for marketing?

For marketers, I think the idea of strategy as algorithm can be most easily translated to thinking about building blocks. The job of a marketing is ultimately about driving growth for the organization and the question they try to answer with strategy is “What combination of audience, channels, business objectives, and brand pillars will deliver the best end result?”

Essentially each of these building block intersections carries with it a specific set of instructions on how the brand should behave/communicate. Put more simply: If you’re talking to moms on Facebook with the objective of driving them to store then we know our brand pillar around product effectiveness is the best to design a campaign around. The challenge with this way of thinking, of course, is that brands communicate across an ever-increasing set of audiences and channels and so the combinations are nearly endless. This precisely describes a complex system and we know that the best way to work within a system like that is to have a simple set of rules that govern how the brand behaves. Anything more would be a fool’s game.

What does it mean for culture?

At Percolate we talk about culture as the internal manifestation of brands (more about this in a future blog post). One of the things I talk about with everyone who starts here is that the reason we believe in investing in the culture of the company is that culture is how we teach people to make on-brand decisions. Basically, as the company grows we know we need to distribute out decision-making as much as possible. The goal, of course, is for the decisions people make to be good ones in the eyes of the brand. The way we make sure of that is by ensuring that everyone has a clear understanding of the values of the company.

Just like the marketing example, this is about identifying the end goal (our vision is to create software that helps build the best brands in the world) and creating a simple set of rules that help guide the decision-making that will happen along the way to achieving that objective. While we have spent a lot of time articulating the values and cultural underpinnings, the next step we’re going through now is to try to further codify them down to a simple set of statements and questions that people can ask themselves when they’re faced with a decision. Essentially we’re trying to build the Percolate values algorithm.

What’s the conclusion?

Really I’m terrible at conclusions, but people tell me I need them, so I’ll take a shot. When people talk about strategy, at least in any sort of complex system (aka the real world), you should think about how you create a simple set of rules to guide decision-making instead of an airtight plan to follow. The realities of the universe dictate that strategies need to be flexible, not rigid, and I like thinking of them as an algorithm: a framework anyone can follow to ensure (or come as close to ensuring as possible) that what their doing is on-brand and aligned to the objectives and vision of the organization.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1uIcjfS

In July, we held Transition, our inaugural industry conference on how technology is transforming marketing, the enterprise, and the world. Several hundred marketers came to hear from leaders at GE, Unilever, Digiday and other great organizations. One of the key themes from the event was how technology has completely transformed the marketing industry and the marketing department. It’s no less true for our own team at Percolate.

Today we’ll take a closer look at some of the people, processes, and practices of Marketing, one of the company’s most wide-ranging and diverse departments.

A Full-Stack creative Team

In December 2013, Marketing was a barebones team of three. In less than one year, we’ve grown to four times that size, and built out a robust department of marketers with a range of expertise: content, design, social, sales, product, and engineering. Today, we operate within three divisions — brand communications, growth, and product marketing — with support from a dedicated team of communication designers and marketing engineers.

“We’ve essentially built a full-stack creative team,” said Chris Bolman, director of Growth, “and have the ability and autonomy to run our own projects and experiments.”

One example of such an experiment is the Percolate Content Marketing RFP. After noticing that Percolate was receiving requests for proposals (RFPs) that had antiquated software requirements, the Marketing team worked with industry experts to release an open-source RFP that outlined the features of a modern marketing platform. The project, which had an editorial byline in Digiday, has been a source of new leads, a valuable conversation piece for sellers, and a signal to industry that Percolate is always thinking ahead about the future of marketing.

For Michele Byrne, a Communications Designer, the opportunity to collaborate and create a wide array of exceptional products is what makes this job special. She’s designed everything from pages of Percolate.com, to research reports, to the brand identity for Session, an event series at the intersection of creativity and technology. “I love that I can touch so many different pieces. Session isn’t just a logo, it’s a poster, pins, coasters, she said.

“Plus,” she asked, “how often do you get to make a branded wraparound for an entire truck?” referring to the #TSOR Coffee Truck that made stops all around Manhattan in early November this year.

“For marketing to have engineers makes sense for an organization with technology at the heart,” said Sean Connolly, a Marketing Engineer. Previously a web developer at several news startups, Sean and the marketing engineering team works on a variety of projects, from the public facing website, the blog, the Marketing Library, to specialized pages and the demo. Because the engineers sits right with the designers and the rest of the Marketing, code, pixels, and copy move quickly and new products get out the door sooner.

A 21st Century Media Organization

“I think two things make our Marketing department unique,” said Percolate Co-Founder James Gross, “On one hand, we are a very product-led team. I don’t know of a single marketing team that has three dedicated engineers and four communication designers. On the other hand, we’re building a new category, the system of record for marketing, and that means creating a twenty-first century media organization.”

While our blog has been a key channel since Percolate’s earliest days, our recent redesign underscores how serious we are about delivering compelling content to our audiences. For us, that means bringing insightful research, tactical advice, and thought leadership to senior marketers, IT leaders, and community managers. With our blog readership up more than 400% since March, we’re on a great trajectory — but we’ve still got a lot more to do.

Of course, as a media organization, we publish far more than just blog content. When I joined Percolate, I had primarily been a consumer marketer, with fairly limited experience in enterprise marketing. In less than a year, I’ve had the opportunity to ship an extensive case study of one of our biggest clients, lead several co-marketed webinars, produce a variety of research reports, and a variety of additional creative campaigns. I’m excited by the challenge of taking on a new audience, format, or approach with each project I work on, knowing that expectations for quality and performance are constantly being raised.

MORE AUDIENCES THAN EVER

“Something I like a lot is sitting at the intersection of sales and client solutions,” said Kim Solow, Product Marketing Associate. “I get to take the best from both worlds: learning about and understanding the intricacies of the product, but also how to position the product for the sales team.”

Sales, of course, is a key stakeholder for Marketing. From sales collateral, to scripts and training material, to continuous updates to our demo, Marketing keeps our eye on how we always give our sellers and account managers a stronger position as they have conversations with prospects and clients about working with Percolate.

In the essay that accompanied the Transition conference, we made the point that marketing had an opportunity to “win market share” inside the organization — meaning expanding the responsibility and strategic importance of the department. This means going beyond external communications and looking at internal comms as well.

From producing a daily digest of must-read industry news, to explaining how a partnership should be positioned to clients and prospects, to curating social content that delights staff and potential employees, our team is actively involved in guiding how staff think about and talk about Percolate as a whole.

After two years as staff writer at Sesame Workshop, Graydon Gordian joined Percolate in February as Community Manager. While his focus started in social channels, his responsibilities quickly expanded a few months later when he was asked to take the lead on the Transition conference. Despite never having produced an event of this size and scope, he rose to the occasion and was promoted to Communications Manager upon the successful completion of the conference.

“To succeed in our team, I think you need to have an entrepreneurial spirit.” said Gordian. “You need to be the kind of person who looks at something and says, ‘this is good, but it could be great.'”

Marketing is still a relatively young department inside of Percolate, and it will continue to evolve as the company grows. But one thing is certain, it will continue to require brilliant people who are willing to think creatively, work collaboratively, and never, ever, settle.

Our team is on the lookout for great Community Managers, Content Marketing Managers, and Marketing Associates. If you’d like to join our team, get in touch.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1xVaUtF

At Percolate, we listen carefully to the challenges of our clients. For instance, how do you maintain brand consistency while still addressing audiences in local markets in a relevant way? How to go beyond social and make marketing teams effective at collaborating across markets?

When you take a step back, the problem facing marketers isn’t just figuring out a multi-market, on-brand, social strategy, it’s figuring out the whole marketing organization. Marketing departments today are all too often limited by their own structures to keep up. So what does a world-class marketing organization look like in 2015? We outlined seven organizational attributes that will offer competitive advantages in coming years ahead.

1. Business and IT strategies fundamentally support each other

The IT function is no longer about resolving issues on PCs, it’s now an integral part of building a business. Benedict Evans argued this in his presentation at Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead event. Let’s look at Amazon. Amazon isn’t a technology company, in the true sense of a business that sells software or other IT services. It’s a retailer that leverages technology as its core competitive advantage. Since its inception, Amazon has invested its earnings into technology making it one of the top 10 fastest growing global companies companies.

While Amazon provides a good example of how technology can help drive growth, Many CMOs and CIOs are not seeing eye to eye on the importance of technological integration. Accenture found that 40% of CMOs don’t see their IT department as moving fast enough, while 25% of IT executives see marketing executive as lacking foresight for technological innovation and need.

That kind of disconnect must be repaired. IT can’t just be a support function. It has to be fully integrated into planning and strategy.

2. There’s a marketing-tech leader that champions business-IT integration

So how does marketing and IT come together? It needs the people and the structure behind it. A Head of Marketing Technology or equivalent role is a relatively new position, but is quickly becoming one of the most important roles at companies. Some of the worlds biggest and most respected brands have identified the need for C-suite executives to take on marketing technology. These positions sit at the nexus of IT, data analytics, digital strategy, and marketing. A 2014 Gartner study discovered that 70% of Fortune 500 companies have Chief Marketing Technologist or equivalent leadership role, however where that role sits within organizations varies.

They are responsible for organizing a cross-functional mobility team between IT and business organizations. Their objective is to pilot relevant hardware and software innovations that offer improved consumer and employee digital-physical experiences. Babs Rangaiah, Unilever’s VP of Global Media Innovation & Ventures summed up what this role is all about when he said, “streamlining and unifying customer technology touch points is also the biggest priority for senior marketing technologists.”

3. Marketing organizations use data and analytics to put customers at the center

One of the primary ways that IT and business strategy can support one another is through the use of data and analytics to put customers at the heart of the business. What does that mean? Instead of thinking in terms of geographic markets, or channels, businesses use technology to understand and fulfill customer needs at the right time and in the right way.

One of the best examples we’ve seen of analytics, data, and operations spanning and influencing marketing from end to end is Tesco. As one of the world’s largest retailers, Tesco has spent decades extracting insights from customer buying trends and incorporating those insights into upstream operations. They leveraged their customer loyalty card program to extract customer purchasing insights and then applied them to a total redesign of internal operational processes, most notably the supply chain. Instead of looking at sales alone, Tesco was able to bring in decades of sales, demographic, even weather data to test scenarios, then pilot and test new ideas, and ultimately make quick decisions on cross-functional strategies to lower the risk of stock outs at stores.

But to accomplish what Tesco accomplished, a marketing organization has to create accountability for the direction, funding, and governance of analytics. It comes down to establishing who is charged with realizing the vision for analytics and where the budget comes from.

4. A centralized core system aligns the brand and information

More data about daily operations could improve business outcomes, ensure consistency, and reduce unnecessary redundancy. Ultimately it can speak directly to a customer’s individual needs and unify their experience across all touchpoints. But all that information can’t just float in space. It has to be consistent and accessible across the organization. One great example comes from our long-time client, GE. When they came to us, their marketing teams were all using separate platforms to create and publish content, leading to major inefficiencies and an overall lack of transparency. Now with 10 lines of business and 16 markets on one platform, they can move faster, stay aligned, and be more effective. Today, there are nearly 400 users from GE using Percolate and all marching in the same direction.

That said, despite the recognized need from marketers that these technologies require integration, the data indicates that successful connections are still too rare and difficult to implement.

Centralized and integrated systems unify customer experience, which again, will be the priority for marketers, which brings us to our next point.

5. Marketing and sales are aligned to provide a consistent customer experience

Particularly since so much of customer journey is online now and happens pre-sale, there are now even more touchpoints that a marketing organization must monitor. No longer can marketing simply hand over pile of “hot leads” without context. Neither can sales afford to reach out to prospects without knowing their prior interactions with a brand. A CRM system that integrates with customer service or with an inventory management system will create more intelligent feedback. It will create consistency and efficiency all the way along the customers experience with the brand.

A recent Forrester survey showed that 18% of companies have problems with their CRM strategy. 40% of those companies cited inadequate deployment methodologies, 25% said it was because of poorly defined business requirements, and another 18% believed that it just wasn’t achieving organizational alignment on objectives.

Marketing organizations should be collaborating with customer-facing business units to capture the types of edge decisions they often make. It starts with defining and prioritizing the ways in which consumers engage with products or services and the locations where they engage. A real-time data analytics infrastructure to support the data velocity and insight needs of digital-physical projects will be at the center of creating a coherent customer experience.

6. The digital and physical are also aligned to provide a consistent customer experience

The customer experience doesn’t begin and end in a brick-and-mortar store anymore. The customer experience is constant and fluid especially now with prevalence of mobile connectivity the world over. Recall our Tesco example. By integrating data, analytics, and operations into the sales and marketing cycle, Tesco managed to close the loop on how they fulfill demand. They have connected physical supply with demand via a data analytics gathered digitally.

This idea of connecting the digital and physical in the business model not only increases values to customers, but it has serious bottom-line impact. The Internet of Things too important to ignore. GE overhauled its sensors in hardware systems so that they now connect to a cloud-based software platform. The technology allows GE create new revenue that is linked to performance improvement, bringing in an additional $800 million in incremental income in 2013 and an expected $1 billion this year.

This kind of data intelligence demands a completely new approach to traditional analytics, which places a broader swath of requirements on supporting teams. Marketing organizations must draw on a broader set of analytics skills to be applied across multiple stakeholders and channels in scalable process-driven ways. This applies to how companies interact with agencies now too.

7. Agencies, whether specialist or generalists, are closely aligned with the global brand

It used to be that one agency could meet all the advertising needs of an organization, but that’s not the case anymore. Agencies are specialists now and the threat of fragmentation is real.

Some of the world’s largest brands are looking for ways of reducing their roster of agencies. Kraft’s recent reduction of agencies is due largely to the need for better alignment with the brand. Johnson & Johnson’s changed up their agencies to better respond to the global brand’s needs. Now a majority of companies just want to have their agencies in-house. The Association of National Advertisers conducted a survey in 2013 that showed 56% of companies now have in-house agencies (that’s a 16% increase from 2008).

While marketing needs today do require specialized agencies to manage a robust multi-channel approach, it is important to to bring together all these parts and find ways to lead with brands and not channels or technologies.

–

The shift to digital is blurring the lines between marketing, sales, operations, and IT. Marketing organizations are increasingly carrying revenue responsibilities, affecting reporting lines and incentive systems. And more and more of the world’s best brands are bringing marketing functions under a combined marketing and IT directive. The marketing organization of 2015 has to be prepared for it.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1y0dRYv

In the advertising world, many would point to the night of February 3rd, 2013 as the moment real-time marketing crossed over from marketing tactic to marketing buzzword. In the middle of a second half Super Bowl matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers, a power outage caused a partial blackout for more than 22 minutes. While play was stopped, Oreo — working alongside agencies Wieden + Kennedy, Mediavest, Weber Shandwick and 360i — sent out a tweet that made social media history — and simultaneously gave way to one of social advertising’s biggest cliches yet: the real-time marketing hit.

Power out? No problem. http://ift.tt/XjFdCA

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Overnight, dozens of consumer brands dove head first into social TV war rooms, while agencies flocked to real-time publishing platforms and programs. The race for social response speed was on, even though not everyone involved necessarily knew the right direction to the finish line.

The Evolution of Always-on Marketing

Although social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace had been around since the early 2000’s, it wasn’t until 2009 (when Facebook introduced Company Pages) that brands began to take a serious interest in incorporating social publishing as an important part of their marketing strategy.

Around this time, media audiences also began using Twitter to discuss their favorite TV shows, interacting directly with the show’s account and the stars themselves. Because new media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offered brands round-the-clock audience access — a relative novelty compared to the traditional, finite TV spot — marketers could publish content to fans more frequently. This distribution approach — and a newfound ability to enter trending conversations — marked the beginning of ‘always-on-marketing’ (AOM).

Alway-on-marketing is not bombarding customers with more content at a greater speed than ever before. AOM is – to paraphrase Ben Wilcox, head of data and technology at Havas EHS – “anticipatory, hinging upon a deep understanding of consumer behavior, providing something in advance of a consumer wanting it.” AOM is provided within a context (time, place, location, emotion) that enables the consumer to simply engage with the product or services.

By the time Oreo published their “dunk in the dark” tweet, the concept of AOM had been fully embraced by marketers looking to ride trending topics by being more real-time. And while agency war rooms were common during major live events well before Oreo’s ‘tweet heard round the world,’ Mondelez’s defining Super Bowl XLVII moment pushed the AOM community into a frenzy trying to replicate Oreo’s Super Bowl successes. For the next year, a host of marketers focused on speed and response-marketing, occasionally losing sight of the value their brand could bring to the conversation.

Is Always-on Already Over?

Much has been said of the death of organic reach. I won’t go further into it, except to say that the consistent, precipitous decline of organic reach — particularly on Facebook — continues to diminish the value of being the fastest to publish, or the most frequent. Instead, successful AOM, to varying degrees of real-time, has now become a function of who can respond the best and keep the conversation going in a valuable way.

Two great examples of AOM come to mind. The Barclays Pingit project allows anyone, regardless of whether they are a Barclays customer or not, to send mobile payments to friends and family for free. Since its launch in 2012, the mobile app has become the largest customer acquisition channel for Barclays, and demonstrates the power of a service-driven and product-based AOM approach. Barclays’ Pingit mobile payments app is available to customers anytime, anywhere – and customers want it because it creates real value.

The Share a Coke campaign, another example of strong AOM, printed the first names of more than a million people on Coca-Cola cans and bottles across the U.S. alone. The idea was to get consumers to buy Coke not just for themselves, but for their friends and family. The mass-personalization effort worked so well that the campaign actually reversed a decade-long decline in Coke sales in the U.S. With its iconic design, the Share a Coke campaign hits home what good AOM really is: visually compelling, personalized, and targeted marketing.

What these campaigns tell us as marketers is that on its own, sending more messages across more channels to more people with greater speed is not what’s valuable. The message itself, the quality of the creative and the quality of the response is what people care about.

What Does the Future of Always-on Marketing Look Like?

The time of AOM defined by speed and volume is over. But this is never what consumers really wanted anyway. Great AOM, creating thoughtful, interesting content that adds value to the conversation is the future we’re building towards.

What other trends are we seeing in the evolution of AOM, and where are we headed in 2015? We recently interviewed a group of senior agency professionals at BBDO, Group SJR, and Ogilvy to learn how top agencies are handling the demands of AOM in the post-organic era of social marketing.

Agency Takeaway: Consider adapting your brand campaigns to a variety of situations to publish relevant and on-brand messages.

Hey @luis16suarez. Next time you're hungry just grab a Snickers. #worldcup #luissuarez #EatASNICKERS http://ift.tt/1nD49Tc— SNICKERS® (@SNICKERS) June 24, 2014

“With the Luis Suarez tweet for Snickers, what made it work so well was that it was inspired by the core idea behind the Snickers brand, which is that “you’re not you when you’re hungry.” Using this core concept as a jumping-off point allowed the teams to very quickly produce a piece of real-time content that was both true to the brand and relevant to the trending conversation.” — Daniel Charness, Digital Strategist, BBDO

If speed for speed’s sake is no longer effective in driving engagement, what are brands to do? Daniel Charness, Digital Strategist at BBDO recommends returning to a fundamental of marketing: the campaign. Looking at how Snickers has leveraged their, “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign should give brands plenty of inspiration as they seek to bring spontaneity to their marketing.

Agency Takeaway: “Middleweight” content can be a powerful tactic for brands who have the editorial resources and distribution channels to produce quality articles on a regular basis.

“My thesis is that most brands don’t do middleweight content, and yet is is one of the key drivers for success of brands. I think people were taught as brands to be disruptors and be campaign focused. Instead, today’s world is seamlessness – in other words there are 365 days of disruption.” — Alex Jutkowitz, Managing Partner, Group SJR

Alex Jutkowitz, managing partner at Group SJR, wants brands to create more “middleweight content” in 2015. Content pieces like blog posts and contributed articles are easier to produce than “heavier” content like whitepapers and research reports, and have a longer half-life than “lightweight” social content. By investing in middleweight content, brands get the best of both worlds.

Conclusion

The brand of AOM that defined itself by speed and volume is over. And that’s probably a good thing, because AOM was never really about bombarding your customers with messaging anyway.

Great AOM, which is characterized by being thoughtful, relevant, and interesting and hinged upon a deep understanding of consumer behavior patterns and provided in the right context (emotional, time, location, and place) is alive and well.

Download our latest report, “The Evolution of Always-On Marketing” and learn what the top executives at some the most iconic agencies in the world are saying about AOM in 2015.

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Each year, Crain’s publishes a list of the “Best Places to Work” in New York City. The list is based on a two-part assessment including 1) anonymous internal surveys conducted within the company as well as an audit of the firm’s employer benefits and policies. Ultimately their goal is to create a workplace “where employees are collegial, inspired by their work, empowered to take initiative and get credit where credit is due”. We’re of course honored to have Percolate be on that list both in 2013 and in 2014.

As a company, we’re ultimately motivated by our mission — to create the system of record for marketing. We know that a great culture and environment can attract and retain the people we need to achieve that mission.

That’s also why, early on, we created Clubs @ Percolate. Clubs are a way for team members to share personal interests, learn new things, and form stronger, more diverse, and multi-dimensional relationships with each other. And having work friendships matter more than you might think.

A study of 80,000 managers from The Gallup Organization found that people who report that they “have a best friend at work” were over 20% more likely to say that they valued the company mission, that they had an opportunity to do what they do best at work, and over 40% more likely to have earned recognition for their work in the last seven days.

Since we last wrote about clubs a year ago, we’ve added new clubs, changed leaders, and continued to value it as a core part of working at Percolate. We made a short film that illustrates exactly what clubs mean for us and you can find it below.

Do you have clubs at your workplace? We’d love to hear about it. Tweet us at @percolate!

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I recently had a chance to spend six days in China, visiting the megacity of Shanghai as well as my hometown Suzhou, which, while smaller, still contains as many people as Los Angeles (~5M). China is an important market for every company that builds global brands, and knowing your audience is a critical component of any marketing campaign. Most of us are familiar with the basics — that China has a fast-growing rich and upper middle class, that consumers are both price sensitive and yet brand conscious, and that it’s a nation undergoing transformation through the power of choice.

Still, there’s nothing like going somewhere and experiencing it for yourself. Below are a few observations, insights, and anecdotes I’ve identified about the lives of Chinese consumers that I hope marketers find valuable as they plan to take on the Chinese market.

A World of Fashion

This was one of the first things to hit me when I landed. Both in Shanghai and Suzhou, I saw a wider variety of hairstyles and outfits on both men and women than I had seen in the past. Leather skirts, chunky clogs, bright colors, slim fit button-ups, hipster glasses, red and blonde dyed hair — the stylish young adults of China would fit right in on the streets of SoHo, where Percolate’s New York offices are located. Published at the height of the hot Shanghai summer, this WWD slideshow gives you a sense of how Chinese Millennials are approaching their sartorial sensibilities, rivaling the fashion sense of any global city with a decidedly strong influence from Western brands.

The Prevalence of Overseas Shoppers

To get the western-looking style, Chinese consumers are looking outside of China for those brands. For students, frequent travelers, and people who can’t find regular employment, becoming a waihai daiguo – an overseas personal shopper is a viable means of making a living. These buyers can earn upwards of $6,000 USD a month by purchasing luxury goods and electronics in the United States and other nations, then bringing them back to China without declaring the goods in customs, thus evading the substantial taxes China charges on such purchases. After admiring a friend’s leather jacket by Calvin Klein, he told me he used a personal shopper to buy it for about $1,000 USD, including the markup his shopper tacked on. It’s nice work if you can get it, but risky as the government cracks down on such activity.

Marriage Means a Ring … and a House

Marriage is an expensive proposition anywhere, but especially in China. Men are expected to own a house/apartment or be in a position to purchase a permanent residence soon after the wedding. Renting is frowned upon as it suggests you aren’t in a strong financial position and thus not marriage material.

Of course, the rising cost of real estate means that parents of the groom have to get involved in the buying of the home, and that young couples often live farther towards the outer parts of a city. I saw this to be true with many of my friends and family. Bloomberg reported earlier last month that only 6% of couples eligible to now have second children under the new “two child policy” have actually applied to have that second child — driven in part by the enormous costs associated with raising a child (specifically a son) through marriage.

The dispersion of families changes old rhythms and traditions: children are farther away from their parents, driving new schedules and methods of communication.

Everyone’s on WeChat

Pretty straightforward: everyone I met seemed to be using WeChat (the Chinese version of the app (微信) is pronounced “way-shin”). People use the app for both 1-to-1 messages and group messages, in personal and professional settings. My cousin works in the QA division of a mobile phone manufacturer, and he has a WeChat group at work for sharing photos and discussing problems they see on the factory floor. These anecdotes align with the numbers: Tencent announced over 438M active users on WeChat in August of 2014 — rivaling WhatsApp’s 500M users worldwide.

An Entirely Different Web

While not new, I re-encountered one of my least favorite parts of China: the Golden Shield Project, also known informally as the Great Firewall of China. This has a profound impact on my internet activity: everything from Google is blocked — from the search engine itself to Gmail, Maps, Drive, etc. Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote, even the NYTimes. Yelp is nonexistent. Instagram is mostly blocked but I was able to squeeze through enough packets to post photos of my trip. Bing became a passable alternative for me, though for about 82% of Chinese consumers, Baidu is the search engine of choice. Instead of Amazon, unsurprisingly, I heard a lot about Alibaba, including their recent sales record of $9.4 billion in a single 24 hour period. The bottom line is that Chinese consumers use a very different Internet than consumers many other parts of the world.

Xiaomi, Huawei and Android

Most of the phones I saw, either in the subway, on the street or close up were Android device. Still, Apple was definitely in play, particularly with wealthier consumers. I was thrilled when my cousin, a banker, pulled out his iPhone during a family reunion as we were able to easily share photos via Airdrop, a blessing when I didn’t have a data plan in China. While Samsung is in terms of the Chinese brands, Huawei was seen as a low-cost option, while Xiaomi was considered a more middle-of-the-road purchase. With a little under half of the Chinese population owning a smartphone, the battle for supremacy is far from other as hundreds of millions more consumers will purchase a smartphone in the next decade.

For marketers, the Chinese consumer represents an enormous market and yet a vexing proposition of how to reach and engage in the most effective way.

— The biggest takeaway here is that channels of communication differ from market to market. Marketing at a global scale isn’t simply repeating the same messages into the same . You need to adapt your message and where you share it.

— Additionally, it’s clear that while Chinese consumers are aligned to global brand campaigns in many verticals (high-end retail, electronics) local culture, traditions, and circumstance still play a key role in purchasing decisions.

— Finally, the most exciting point here is that the opportunity is bigger than ever. Through the power and visibility of brands in global media, consumer tastes can be shaped across the planet.

And if you get a chance to visit Shanghai, there’s a great dumpling and noodle shop between Middle Jianxi Road and Jijiang Road that you have to check out.

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We live in amazing times. In 15 years the Internet has reached a level of penetration in U.S. households that took the telephone nearly 50. More than 3 billion people are online, and we’re well on our way to doubling that figure in 5 years. The number of mobile, global social channels increases every year.

So how do marketers keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of social networks and tailored messaging needs of each platform? We thought about it within the framework of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation, which defines how innovation spreads. Rogers’ argument is that new technology is adopted in different phases by five different groups. First the innovators start using the technology, then the second group, early adopters, buy in. Third, the early majority group follows the early adopters’ lead. Fourth, the late majority becomes aware of and starts using the technology, until finally only a laggard group is left over to slowly round out the adoption curve. Rogers’ concepts around the adoption of new products and technology have become cornerstones in business and economics – and have heavily influenced modern writers like Malcolm Gladwell and his book, The Tipping Point.

Although the initial text was published more than 50 years ago, Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation is more relevant to marketers than ever before. Understanding the psychological process potential customers go through when deciding whether to purchase a new product can be an important way to differentiate your product or service from the competition.

We’ve adapted Rogers’ phases of adoption into 4 actionable steps for how you can speak to customers. After all, it’s not only important to understand how your customer buys, but how the messaging should change at each stage of the buying cycle to win the war for attention, consideration and action.

Step 1: Knowledge

Knowledge comes from exposure. In the fight for attention, having a message that reaches its target, establishes credibility, provides relevant and timely information, and offers value to the recipient is critical. How often do you need a message to reach its target? And what’s the right structure?

Research on short-term and working memory have determined human memory works in “chunks.” Humans are also able to store and process different sized chunks for different types of media. For example, the average human’s immediate short-term memory can store around seven digits or five words per chunk before we’re likely to start forgetting things about it. While there are many factors that determine how easy or hard it is to remember something, like whether the contents are words known to the person or not (“lexical status”), cognitive psychology professor Nelson Cowan found in the 2001 study “The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity” that the average person can remember four chunks — separate bits of content — at a time.

Interestingly, if this is true and the average person can remember 4 chunks of 5 words at a time, that means someone can only remember roughly 90 characters (65%) of a 140 character tweet at any given moment (assuming chunks can be additive), or small snippets of four different tweets or social posts, given that the average length of a word in the English language is 4.5.

In terms of exposure frequency and impression capping, the right amount is a hotly contested debate. For one, the optimal level will vary based on time (exposures per day, week, month, etc.), media type, consumer context, existing product familiarity and a host of other factors. Nonetheless, analysis of 38 different advertisers by the Microsoft Advertising Institute found a clear drop-off in conversion effectiveness after 10 impressions to the same subject. Ultimately, however, individual advertiser results — even ones in the same category — varied widely, with the optimal number of ad exposures likely more than one and less than ten, but difficult to pinpoint with more precision.

Nonetheless, this research lends scientific support to the idea that controlled, repetitive exposure to short-form content (tweets, grams, etc.) is an effective strategy for building brand recall and moving potential customers down the adoption curve toward consideration and [re-]purchase. While this framework relies on some assumptions that still haven’t been fully proven out, it’s generally news for all us social marketers out there.

Step 2: Persuasion

Research in the cognitive sciences tells us that persuasion requires authority, likability, and social proof. User-generated content (UGC) can be a powerful marketing tool to establish credibility and make customers aware that others, just like them, are using and love your product. One study shows millennials trust UGC as much as professional reviews, and UGC content is 20% more influential when it comes to purchasing and 35% more memorable than other types of media. When engaging in conversations with customers online, make sure your brand is human, likable and approachable, but also confident in your offering.

Step 3: Decision and Implementation

Up to this point, a message can be convincing, but nevertheless fail. 47% of first mover innovations don’t move at all, and companies offering something new often have an uphill battle in front of them as they build out a consumer need category that didn’t exist previously. 90 million wearable devices will ship in 2014, but Forrester Research expects 90% of them will fail. Despite availability and emerging technical capability, wearables aren’t mainstream because they haven’t found product-market fit.

Why aren’t more smart watches selling? Marketing and psychology professor Robert Cialdini provides a helpful framework, arguing that people buy things based on six factors:

1. Reciprocity. We buy something because we feel like we’ve gained so much value and enrichment from the seller. This factor is a central tenet of inbound and content marketing. 2. Commitment & Consistency. We buy something because we feel committed to a brand and/or product (we bought once), or we feel buying helps us achieve a consistency we aspire for (i.e., we want to be healthy so we buy more organic foods, or we want to cultivate a specific image so we buy clothes and accessories that align with that identity). 3. Liking. All other things equal we’re more likely to buy something if we like or feel a connection to the seller we’re buying from. Better customer relationships drive more purchases. 4. Authority. We’re more likely to buy or be influenced by an established expert or a brand we associate as a category leader. 5. Social Proof. All other things equal, we’re more likely to buy if we see people we know — particularly if we admire and respect them — buying too. According to a Forrester Research survey, 70% of adults in the U.S. trust their friends’ and families’ opinions of brand, compared to only 10% who trusted messaging directly from the brand. This principle is what makes UGC such an effective form of content marketing. 6. Scarcity. The scarcer and rarer something is, the more value we naturally attribute to it (and the more likely we are to ring the cash register on it).

Clearly, smart watches and other wearables haven’t adequately satisfied these buying triggers — they haven’t enriched buyers enough, they haven’t become sticky, habit-forming products and they haven’t established enough social proof to drive consumer momentum.

An effective, integrated product marketing strategy generates and captures reciprocity, commitment and consistency, liking, authority and social proof, and adequately capitalizes on scarcity (or the perception a product is premium and desirable).

Step 4: Confirmation

Once a customer commits, he or she often looks around to see who else bought too, and may turn to social to identify and connect with a brand or product-based community. In fact, people’s social desire to connect around their favorite products is so strong it recently gave rise to Product Hunt, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup community for sharing, reviewing and discussing new technology products. By actively cultivating and communicating with existing buyer communities, successful brands like Shinola can also use existing customers to generate social proof that captures new customers, moving further along the adoption curve for its product.

By thinking about where different communities of customers or prospects sit relative to adopting your product, then developing messaging and experiences tailored to help them at that step in their decision-making process, you’ll be in a better place to move your target audience down the path to purchase.

Rogers would be proud.

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Video continues to win over both marketers and consumers, offering a rich medium to attract, educate, delight and increasingly convert viewers into customers. YouTube is already the world’s second largest social network and search engine, while the mainstream crossover of micro-video from Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, Kik, MixBit and animated GIFs was one of the defining content trends of 2014. Mobile devices and tablets already represent more than 25% of all online viewership, share which is expected to reach 50% or more within the next three years

But as we approach 2015, online video is still a media landscape dominated by user-generated content, music videos and media companies, despite significant effort and investment by brands. It’s time for marketers to step up their content game. For one, research has found when consumers have a good branded video experience they’re 39% more likely to research a featured brand or product more, 36% more likely to tell a friend and 19% more likely to share other content from that brand. But more importantly, there are three emerging trends in video that have the potential to dramatically impact marketers’ results — and ROI — on social and other channels:

1. YouTube will take a cue from Pinterest and become an e-commerce referral engine. YouTube’s beta test of Video Interactivity Templates (interactive branded overlay cards that appear in the upper-lefthand corner of a playing video) is another sign the network is working to give video viewers the ability to buy products directly from YouTube. As YouTube deploys these capabilities, it will emerge as a major social commerce referral alternative to Pinterest and Facebook. Amazon will also deploy more embedded video call-to-actions, but in a closed loop system that refers traffic and sales back to itself.

Recent data from an AOL Platforms study on paid and organic advertising already indicates YouTube has a greater effect on consumers’ purchasing decisions than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+. After tracking 500 million clicks and 15 million website conversions during early 2014, the report authors determined YouTube is the most influential social network for introducing new products (the first funnel stage in a customer’s path to purchase) and driving sales (the last step of the funnel). YouTube is also the most likely to convert users into buyers based on video ads alone, where purchasers had no exposure to a product on other social channels. The introduction of direct conversion cards inside YouTube will further strengthen the social network’s standing as an e-commerce purchase generator in 2015.

2. Shareable video becomes more of a science (while still preserving the art). Big brands and agencies are increasingly using biometrics like eye movement and skin conductance to measure how much viewers will like and share their videos. This type of data-driven approach helped fine-tune Budweiser’s Super Bowl XLVIII hit “Puppy Love,” a spot with 53 million views and a 97% positive sentiment rate on YouTube. But even if you’re not a top global advertisers like Anheuser-Busch InBev, hyper-targeted, promoted dark social posts are letting marketers experiment with different video approaches and edits in order to perfect their audience appeal.

3. Autoplay will challenge pre-roll as a social video format, further blurring the lines between content and ads. YouTube remains the go-to platform for online video, but new autoplay video ad offerings from Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr will force more branded video to stand on its own entertainment value, rather than as an ad placed before a different desired piece of content. Instagram’s new 15-second autoplay spots, first released in October 2014, already have buy in from Disney, Activision, Lancome, Banana Republic and CW, offering segmented audience targeting by age, gender and country. Similarly, Tumblr’s video units have launced with creative from Lexus, Unilever’s Axe, Universal Pictures, JCPenney Hulu and CW, with the ability to target by gender, location and user interest.

Overall, data capture from newer approaches to creative testing alongside better, deeper audience data from platforms like Facebook and YouTube will enable brands and agencies to deliver targeted, personalized and objectively better video experiences for customers in 2015. Video will also more directly influence customer purchasing, as YouTube — as well as video newcomers like Facebook and Twitter — seek to position video as a full-funnel media format that drives conversions.

As marketers, social and mobile will provide us with an amazing opportunity to be more effective and relevant with our video storytelling in the new year. Let’s not squander it.

To learn more about the most important trends in video marketing we’re paying attention to heading into 2015, download our latest report, “Essential Video Marketing Trends for 2015.”

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In October we hosted our first Session, a new event series for the growing community of people who are passionate about the ways technology is transforming the creative process. The evening was both fun and thoughtful, which is why we’re so excited to announce our next Session.

The next Session, entitled “Audio Video Interleave,” is all about the amazing ways technology is transforming how we create and distribute video. Brands like Honda and Beats are utilizing technology and the new distribution channels they have created in fresh and compelling ways, and we’re excited for speakers from our partner Tongal to help us explore the subject. Tongal is the world’s first studio on-demand. Tongal’s global network of writers, directors and filmmakers produce scaleable custom high quality video content at a fraction of the speed and cost associated with traditional production methods.

The evening is sponsored by Tumblr, who also happens to be doing some pretty cool stuff with online video content. We’ll be listening, learning and celebrating from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 20 at Le Poisson Rouge, located at 158 Bleecker St., near the corner of Bleecker and Thompson. We’d love for you to join us, so please RSVP.

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At Percolate, we take food pretty seriously. From employee lunches to a pantry brimming with fresh fruit and snacks, we’re constantly fueling up so we can bring you more innovative marketing software. If you’re in NYC this week you might also see the #TSORtruck driving around Manhattan giving away coffee.

But even Team Percolate can’t always satisfy its nutrition needs inside the office (though some of us certainly try) – and when we’re on the go it’s great to pick up a meal here and there at our favorite restaurants. As part of our love for food — combined with a healthy dose of marketing curiosity — we decided to analyze what food and restaurant brands are doing on Facebook to share some helpful advice, trends and data with you.

This study analyzed pages from the 1,000 most popular restaurant brands on Facebook. Our analysis was global in scope, ranging from major retail chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks to local favorites like In-and-Out Burger and Mr. Sushi.

Global Benchmarks

To start, the data shows that the largest restaurant brands have truly gone global. McDonald’s has 65 country-specific Facebook pages among the top 1,000 global restaurant pages, while Yum! Brands boasts 49 for KFC and another 38 for Pizza Hut.

Operating at that social scale clearly creates content and brand management challenges. As global brand footprint and complexity increases, a brand’s social team is increasingly likely to use multiple publishing tools and workflows to post content. 75% of brands analyzed publish to Facebook from 3 or more tools [note: tools excludes native posting but can include paid posts created in Power Editor], and 10% of social teams publish from 7 or more different tools.

Interestingly, content publishing volume negatively correlates to the number of different tools a page’s social team uses to post, suggesting that — as one might expect — a decentralized publishing and approval process reduces content marketing productivity, both locally and globally.

Content Benchmarks

Turning to content, Facebook post performance data in the restaurant category clearly shows social audiences want visual content. On average, posts with images generate 140% more comments, 1,676% more likes and 1,395% more shares than text and/or text plus link only status posts. Similarly, video also clearly outperforms non-visual content. The biggest user of video among restaurant brands on Facebook is McDonald’s. 31% of McDonald’s U.S. page posts in the past three months included a video, and video was also featured in 26% of posts on McDonald’s Latino, one of the brand’s multi-cultural pages.

Interestingly, on average, images perform better than videos for restaurant brands in terms of overall post engagement rate (the percentage of audience interaction with the content relative to the page’s total number of followers). However, video posts generate 170% more shares than image posts.

Nonetheless, given the relative time and cost required to create video versus static imagery, for top-level brand awareness purposes high-quality photographs seems to provide the better return on advertising (ROA) for restaurant brands on Facebook. Of the top 20 best performing posts by engagement rate and sentiment from restaurant brand pages in the United States, 19 out of 20 were image posts, compared to only one video post among the top performers. Internationally (ex-U.S.), 17 of the top 20 performing posts were images and three were video posts.

What else can we learn from the best performing content? For U.S. audiences, based on our analysis, the top-performing visual content consistently displays five key characteristics:

(1) Center-focused (the periphery of the image is blurred).

(2) High saturation images that create a strong visual contrast between the menu item(s) in focus and the place-setting background.

(3) A savory food item is highlighted.

(4) The post image showcases texture, like a crunchy french fry or bread crumb.

(5) The post uses a single, topical hashtag.

With adult casual dining audiences, food and wine pairings also perform very strong. Both of the below posts from The Capital Grille’s Facebook page were major out-performers, generating 923% (left) and 1,488% (right) more post shares than category average.

In addition to The Capital Grille, another restaurant group that’s consistently mastered content-customer fit on Facebook is San Antonio, Texas-based Church’s Chicken. In addition to delivering the most engaging video for U.S. fans by a restaurant brand on the platform in the past three months, by most top-line metrics Church’s Chicken is Facebook’s top content marketer in its category relative to the size of its page following.

Similar to The Capital Grille, Church’s best performing content showcases savory, center-focused menu items with high photo saturation. As the complexity of Church’s imagery increases with added text or more abstract messaging (and the farther it strays topically from showcasing Church’s food) however, the lower its relative engagement rate. For Church’s, its product is also its best content.

Outside the U.S., different local and regional markets have different content consumption behaviors and preferences. For example, in contrast to U.S. Facebook users who respond best to focused, single menu item highlights with little or no text, social audiences in Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and The Philippines respond best to bright promotional images that display a large variety of menu items alongside coupons and discount offers.

Tactical Benchmarks

As competition among marketers for Facebook newsfeed inventory has increased, the platform has steadily (and publicly) reduced average audience reach for organic page posts. To compensate, social teams are increasingly relying on paid amplification for content reach. Among restaurant brands, Starbucks is particularly active in paid, with 29% of its main page posts coming from Facebook’s Power Editor. Other international Starbucks teams are also employing a similar approach to audience-testing content with paid then seeding it onto their local page as a flagship campaign post.

In terms of expanding audience reach, the approach is clearly effective for brands with the media budget to execute it. Across the 1,000 most popular restaurant pages on Facebook, brands that used Power Editor to target and amplify content generated a weighted average 344% higher engagement rate per post than brands not using Power Editor for features like custom audiences and lookalike targeting. It’s also helped make Starbucks the 9th most followed brand page on Facebook (and 2nd most followed brand in its category, trailing only McDonald’s).

Overall, our first exploration of public Facebook marketing stats was highly informative (and also made your author kind of hungry). In particular, it validated three important trends in content marketing we’ve emphasized over the past year, namely, (1) social audiences love great visuals, (2) global brands need to localize and tailor their marketing messages for different cultures and consumer demographics, and (3) if you make great content, you should pay to promote it. Lastly, if you enjoyed this article and want to see us tackle a different category like travel or financial services, tweet to @Percolate with your request and we’ll do our best to cover your favorite industry in our next installment.

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With a name like Percolate, it’s no secret that we love coffee. We’ve been blogging about coffee since the earliest days of the company. We ask every DesignTalk speaker what their favorite coffee shop in the city is. We even tipped our hat to our favorite morning beverage when we named our new open source Android library.

So when we thought about something fun we could do to surprise and delight the city that our now global company was founded in, coffee naturally came to mind. Obviously our clients and partners are always welcome to swing by the office and have an espresso, but we figured it’d be more fun for everyone if we brought the coffee to them.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of the #TSORtruck, Percolate’s first ever mobile coffee station. We’ll be traveling around New York over the next two weeks delivering delicious coffee to the hard-working people who call New York home. Why did we name it the #TSORtruck? Well, as the creators of The System of Record for marketing, it just felt right.

If you’re walking around town this week and happen to see a big, orange truck parked on the side of street, stop by and have a cup of coffee on us. As everyone who stops by our New York office is reminded, it’ll be great to see you.

If you want the truck to come by your office, you and your colleagues should tweet or Instagram using the hashtag #TSORtruck between today and this Friday. The NYC office that mentions #TSORtruck the most throughout the week will get a visit from the System of Record Truck the following week. We’ll also visit the office of one randomly selected runner-up who mentions us. So even if you work at a small office, give the #TSORtruck a shout-out on Twitter or Instagram and we may stop by. If you’re not in NYC, we won’t be able to visit you over the next two weeks… but never say never.

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As the global middle class grows from 1.8 billion to 5 billion by 2030, a brand’s moment in the world spotlight can be as close as one particularly good or bad tweet. In an increasingly interconnected digital economy, brands, even regional ones, are thinking more and more about reach and consistency in international terms.

But while global brand consistency is undoubtedly a beneficial strategy and position of market strength, the reality is “thinking globally while acting locally” creates persistent challenges for global marketing executives across their org structures, agency relationships and technical infrastructure. These challenges are also frequently compounded by decentralized, market-by-market budgets, which can slow the adoption of centralized governance systems and weaken global campaign authority. From the local market perspective, global teams may be seen as out of touch, trying to apply a one-size-fits-all messaging model that doesn’t speak to local consumer needs and cultural realities. Back when Proctor & Gamble first started selling Pampers diapers in Japan, the brand used an image of a stork delivering a baby on the packaging. While the packaging was effective in the U.S., sales slumped with Japanese moms and dads until the company discovered Japanese customers were concerned and confused by the stork. The story of a stork bringing babies to parents didn’t exist in Japanese culture.

So how are forward-thinking global brands balancing local, multi-channel relevance with global storytelling, thematic consistency and economies of scale? Our research and client work highlights five strategic pillars for successfully localizing global marketing campaigns and empowering local marketing autonomy within a global framework:

1. Humanize the global brand with a vision and mission that inspires (and translates in) local markets. Successful global brands capture and convey universal insights that attract customers and inspire employees. Ikea’s brand mission is to “create a better everyday life for people,” while Intel’s is “delight… customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.”

By positioning the brand behind a core mission to solve important human needs, then fulfilling on that mission, brands can transcend cultural differences to provide their markets with truths that convey meaning across language barriers.

Diageo’s iconic Johnnie Walker campaign started with an understanding that people around the world, regardless of culture or nationality, want to advance in their lives. This universal motivation unlocked both a global brand positioning and a campaign slogan: “Keep Walking.”

With this truth providing an overarching brand framework for the voice and look of Johnnie Walker and agency BBH’s campaign, “Keep Walking” was then localized across 120 countries, using culturally relevant quotes like Laozi’s “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” to connect with consumers in markets like China. Using more than 100 different quotes from all over the world, Johnnie Walker kept the thematic momentum behind “Keep Walking” going for over 13 years, increasing sales by 94% and transforming its business into a globally recognized whiskey brand.

While marketing used to be about creating myths, today it is about finding truths

Marc Mathieu, SVP of Marketing @ Unilever

2. Re-org for global-local alignment and relationship-building. To revitalize its marketing organization for better global-local success, GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer health care division reorganized their marketing in the late 2000’s to closely partner globally-focused brand marketing teams with country general managers tasked with local innovation and resource management. Peter Kirby, GSK’s VP, global marketing excellence, also consolidated the brand’s agency relationships to have more of its brands work more closely with agencies like Grey and TBWA that GSK’s marketing leadership felt had better multi-market communications positioning. The changes spurred an 11% increase in sales, while improving in-country marketing innovation.

3. Shorten the feedback loop between local and global. Coca-Cola sells nearly 2 billion servings of its beverages daily. To systematize sales at such scale, Coca-Cola relies on a vast supply chain of localized partners who manufacture, package, merchandise and distribute its products, supported by its global and regional marketing operations and Bottling Investments Group division.

To improve global-local marketing alignment and scale local successes more quickly, former CMO Joe Tripodi and successor Marcos de Quinto have both focused efforts on shortening the feedback loop between local market insights and global messaging. When Coca-Cola sales spiked in Australia during an Ogilvy campaign that let customers send their friends a Coke with their first name on the label, the brand acted quickly, using its global charter model to successfully re-deploy the “Share a Coke” campaign in 30 additional countries.

“[We] don’t believe that an idea has to come from the U.S. or London,” remarked Tripodi on how Coca-Cola keeps its marketing relevant in over 200 different countries. “We encourage our agencies to let the best idea win, no matter the geography.” The best ideas are then adapted and distributed to local regions and marketings, enabling what Coca-Cola Chairman-CEO Muhtar Kent calls marketing that is felt “in every country that we operate in large or small.”

4. Streamline content access and guidelines. Although this principle seems intuitive, making it as easy as possible for local teams to access a rich library of global assets and brand guidelines goes a long way to improving global-local brand alignment and visual consistency. By using Percolate as a single, central technology for asset management, image editing and content approval across dozens of different local markets, Unilever captured major efficiencies and economies of scale in its marketing operations, leading to an estimated reduction in average cost per social post by 20 percent in 18 months.

5. Focus on driving adoption of global systems and processes. Global-local marketing efficiencies accelerate when a company’s marketers speak one marketing language, track the same agreed-upon metrics, centralize core technologies and learn from internal successes and failures. To reinforce such activity, marketing leaders need to invest in making employee-training programs for key technology implementations and processes more thorough and consistent. At Unilever, “brand calibration” sessions are organized for each market to ensure teams are producing content that’s locally relevant, on-brand, and in line with global standards for image quality. Internal Unilever and local agency teams also complete integrated training curriculums on Percolate and other critical marketing processes, then the results are measured with tests, surveys and quarterly check-in meetings.

Today more than ever, brands can and must realign their marketing for a global stage that features a diverse mix of local performance demands. By systematizing global frameworks, truths, guidelines and tools, then creating a common marketing vocabulary between global and local teams, marketing leaders can craft global messages that make customers feel at home — no matter what language they’re delivered in.

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Recently, Diego and I flew out to Chicago to attend Under Consideration’s Brand New Conference. The conference, centered around branding, was packed with two days of awesome, and inspiring designers.

“Never press the back button. Always move forward.” – Jonathan Lee

Jonathan Lee works on the UXA team at Google which is “focused on developing a unified design framework in direct collaboration with Google’s product design teams.” Rather than focusing on specific projects, they work to push Google’s design throughout the company, a recent example is Material Design.

During his talk, Lee made a comment I found really interesting. He said, “Never press the back button. Always move forward.” He was referring specifically to the recent Google iO conference when he was asked to be in charge of the remote during a group presentation. Lee was informed right before the presentation that he had to be careful not to move through the slides too quickly as he wouldn’t be able to go back. They had disabled the back button.

Even though in this case it was simply flipping through slides, he said that it spoke to Google’s larger goal to evolve with everything they do. And you know what? They’re right. We have to constantly move forward to be ahead of the game and be successful in any industry.

This value is something we take seriously at Percolate. For example, during employee onboarding, Noah, our co-founder and CEO, sits with every employee and walks them through the history of the company and core values. One of these values is “don’t be nostalgic.” The idea is that things are constantly changing and in order to be a leader in our industry we have to always look forward and build the product our clients are going to want and need.

“Look for opportunities when there are none.” – Sebastian Padilla

When Sebastian Padilla presented, he was hilarious and authentic. He brought us back to when he and a couple of friends decided to start a design firm called Anagrama in Monterrey, Mexico. At the time of starting the company, Monterrey was a very industrial city with little design culture or demand for design services. They knew it was risky but went for it anyway.

Instead of moving to a bigger city, they made Monterrey work for them. At first the only projects Anagrama could land were catalogs for manufacturing factories. Over time, they noticed their industrial clients actually had a direct connection to something that could lead to opportunities that they were more attracted to. Their clients had “rich wives who were very bored” and who were starting their own pastry shops, cafes, clothing stores and hair salons. By focusing on working with these new small businesses, Anagrama was able to work on design projects that was more their style.

Anagrama has created a lot of great work and it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t created the opportunity for themselves. It goes to show that you can’t just wait for the work, you have to be proactive and go for it.

“We try to take commodity products and turn them into something more interesting.” – Björn Kussofsky

Björn Kussofsky is CEO and Co-Founder of the Swedish design studio, Stockholm Design Lab. I’ve been a big fan of SDL for a while and had been looking forward to listening to Bjorn speak. SDL’s most well-known work is the suite of packaging they designed for Ikea furniture, then later followed by the packaging design for Ikea’s food products. Bjorn spoke about SDL’s goal to turn products that typically have mundane package design into something witty and intriguing.

Another example of this was SDL’s redesign of batteries for Askul. What I like about this battery design is that they don’t follow the cliche conventions that other brands lean on; slogans about power, lightning bolt iconography and bright color banding. Instead, they have create a more modern look and feel, and added function to the design using large numbers to communicate battery type.

This is a good outlook to have in mind when designing things that at first may seem dull, or uninteresting. Not every project is the most gripping, unless you make it exciting. You have to have fun with it. This can come from putting together a well formed creative brief to inspire designers, or a team’s ambition to go above and beyond.

The beautiful thing about a design conference is that you’re guaranteed to walk away inspired. Diego and I heard about new processes from designers, saw inspiring presentations, and met with leaders in the design field. We left Chicago fired up to design awesome stuff.

You can read the full conference recap and watch videos here.

Next year the conference is back in NYC. Let’s go.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1FJbj4B

One of the great promises of the web was that it would revolutionize the way we bought things. In 1994, the very first Internet-driven purchase was made – a Sting album on compact audio disk (remember those?). By 2004, American were spending $74B annually on online purchases, Today, US e-commerce sales predicted to top $300B, representing over 400% growth over the last decade.

The holiday season is always a big opportunity for retailers to close business, and this season will be e-commerce’s biggest yet, with some estimates looking at a 16% growth from Q4 of last year to top $100M. What’s driving all of this change? Changing consumer behavior, to be sure, but behavior facilitated and driven primarily by technology.

IT’S NEVER BEEN EASIER TO START AN E-COMMERCE STORE

Through companies like Shopify, Etsy, eBay, and Amazon anyone can start an online store. Shopify alone has over 100,000 customers selling tens of millions of items and Etsy reached well over $1B in annual sales in 2013. These platforms are designed to be incredibly easy to use and allow even non-tech savvy retailers to start selling online.

BRICK & MORTAR STORES ARE FULLY ONLINE

Of course, major retailers are a huge driver of e-commerce’s growth and in 2014, they’re more serious about it than ever. After years of development, fashion retailer H&M finally launched a U.S. e-commerce site last year. Meanwhile, department stores like Macy’s (a Percolate client) have been developing ever more sophisticated e-commerce offerings, investing $170M to build an order fulfillment center specifically for online shoppers.

CUSTOMIZATION AND PERSONALIZATION

Successful retailers are leveraging technology to not just facilitate purchases, but understand consumer behavior and develop customized strategies for increasing order size and lifetime value with in a data-driven approach. Custora is a leading e-commerce analytics platform that helps brands like Ann Taylor Loft, Guess?, and Etsy use predictive analytics to find high value customers and keep them coming back. Learn more about their approach in our special presentation on the email and social strategies of e-commerce leaders.

GLOBAL GROWTH

E-Commerce’s rise is not simply contained to the United States. China has already surpassed the U.S. as the largest e-commerce market, reaching $296B in sales in 2013, over 13% more than Americans. The growing global middle class is set to reach 5 billion by 2030 and they’re getting online quickly. With their increasingly sizable disposable income, their appetite for online shopping grows.

MOBILE PURCHASES

Finally, it is nearly impossible to overstate the impact of mobile on e-commerce. In 2014, the majority of web traffic to the top 9 US retailers comes from mobile according to comScore. Not only are mobile purchases rising faster that desktop purchases, but major social networks like Facebook and Twitter are driven by mobile usage. Both channels are experimenting with “Buy Buttons” that will make in-feed purchases frictionless and push for increased transactions and sales growth.

For retail and e-commerce brands, the future is full of exciting opportunities for growth for the teams that understand what’s happening. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, join our upcoming webinar on the social and email strategies of e-commerce leaders.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1taPsxz

Today, 50% of enterprise technology investment outside of IT is estimated to come from marketing. And as marketing executives and agencies continue to adopt a “campaign plus sustain” model, marketing’s role as a technology buyer and integrator has become more important than ever. Channels are faster and more diverse, teams need to manage and respond to greater volumes of data, dialogue and documents, and customers are demanding more value for their attention. In this environment, software is no longer just the business infrastructure that stores leads or triggers emails; technology has become a driving force behind strategy, content creation, brand identity and creativity. Implementing the wrong software can compound existing problems for workflow-challenged teams, forcing economic and technical buyers to evaluate not only features, but also a vendors’s flexibility, stability, capacity to scale, and API openness.

This week’s new Forrester Research report by Ryan Skinner, “Build The Case For Content Marketing On Efficiency, Differentiation, And Granular Metrics,” makes an even stronger case for why CMOs and Digital VPs need to consolidate social, email and other channels into a “single system story” to capture operating efficiencies, brand differentiation and a better multi-touch customer experience. With a centralized marketing technology stack, executives can build roadmaps and processes that connect ideas, communications and customer experience data so each informs the other.

Overall, Forrester highlights three key business benefits from moving to a more centralized marketing architecture:

1. Better resource efficiency and team alignment

By centralizing scattered content marketing activities across different teams, marketing leaders can enforce more consistency and data integrity around a shared strategic vision and brand voice. The social media team should store their artwork and resources in the same system as the blog editorial team, just as it makes sense for creative and media agencies to collaborate in one tool with a shared calendar, asset library and analytics. This reduces duplicate work, improves knowledge and content transfer across different groups and regions, and reduces unnecessary budget spend on narrow point solutions. By transforming a marketing organization from a producer and project manager of many ad hoc projects to a single content marketing unit, marketing leaders can generate major cost savings, as our global work with Unilever has proven.

2. Systematic content marketers create better customer experiences

People look for content that appeals to them and fulfills a need. Whether that need is entertainment or education, research shows consumers evaluate content based on objective quality far more than whether or not it was created by a brand. When marketing can build a consolidated and highly personalized view of how a customer experiences its offerings across mobile, web, retail, email and social, it allows the brand to deliver that customer more relevant, helpful content day-to-day and throughout their buying journey. However, this level of unified, cross-channel customer insight isn’t possible without a central marketing system of record, where your analytics sync with your CRM, and your creatives can act on the same data as your SEO manager.

The benefits of centralized technology extend to paid media as well. As Forrester notes, “marketers who move with the trend toward pull-based experiences [also] achieve better results from their media spending.” A standardized, streamlined system for producing and planning exceptional creative is the foundation of effective advertising.

3. Content marketing scale creates ROI

Content marketing is an economies of scale game where brands don’t have the luxury of short-changing quantity or quality. Whether you measure the success of your content marketing in terms of social following, shopping cart conversions, leads, app installs or another metric, a key long-term priority should be developing an audience that provides consistent distribution and commercial benefit relative to the marginal cost of supplying them new content. According to Hubspot, companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 500% more website traffic than companies that don’t blog, while best-in-class content and inbound marketing organizations save over $14 dollars on every new customer acquired. Get your audience to scale, fine tune the conversion engine and the ROI will come.

Scale is, again, a place where technology and process standardization play a key role. Centralized technology provides automation, efficiency and consistency, exactly what marketing leaders need to see efforts become more global, multi-channel and systematic. With the right technology in place, marketers and agencies can focus on their art while the system supports the science.

Recently, Julie Fleischer, Kraft’s Head of Content, Data, and Media noted her brand sees four times better return on investment from content marketing than targeted advertising at a scale of 1.1 billion annual impressions. In another example, General Electric’s social video sendup of a classic TV infommercial starring Jeff Goldblum earned over 700,000 views in its first 48 hours on YouTube, while the light bulb the video was promoting sold out on Home Depot’s site in three days. Rather than spending money on paid distribution, GE just produced a genuinely entertaining video and let viewers do the rest.

A traditional marketing organization might hope to hit that type of marketing home run once or twice. An organization like GE that systematizes its marketing efforts with centralized technology considers that level of performance the new standard.

from The Percolate Blog http://ift.tt/1w8ci8M

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