If you’ve seen the infographic detailing the history of content marketing, you’ll see that as early as 1895, brands like John Deere were producing magazines that featured high quality content aimed at the interests of their target demographic. And, while producing in-depth travel guides may not have seemed like an obvious choice for a tire company, Michelin established their brand in part with their Michelin Guides starting at the turn of the century.

In recent years, there have been a few companies who have taken content marketing to the next level through their digital efforts. Hubspot, a marketing software product, has focused a huge amount of time and energy building out a useful blog, which covers a wide variety of marketing topics aimed at their target demographic.

In this same vein, Mindjet, a company that makes collaborative tools and work management software, has a blog called Conspire, which focuses on a breadth of topics ranging from agile business to collaborative work techniques to productivity to mind mapping and more.

Sitting on a wealth of terrific content, that helped build their brand, establish their thought leadership and reach potential customers without overtly selling anything, Mindjet decided to create a custom branded mobile application to showcase all of this terrific content.

This mobile application serves as a digital magazine of their content (a modern day version of John Deere’s Farrow Magazine of the 1890s), and is completely separate from their product’s mobile application.

Built on the Postano Mobile platform, the Conspire app updates automatically with dynamic content from the blog RSS and social feeds and features articles about collaboration, data visualization, and the practice of agile business and marketing. This way, the app updates with continually fresh content as Mindjet’s team continues to publish great new engaging content for their audience.

Here are 3 advantages to creating custom mobile applications with your brand’s content:

1. Encourage deeper engagement with your content

While responsive design has a huge benefit to marketers, an incredible mobile reading experience is so much more than simply making your content fit on a smaller screen. Mobile is a new medium, and creating custom way for readers to interact with that content is essential to getting your readers to engage with that content.

By creating a custom mobile application (like with the Postano Mobile platform), aside from providing a more enjoyable reading experience, your readers tend to view more pages, and spend far more time with your content compared with other websites that were built with click and scroll in mind.

2. Display ads and easily add calls to action

Another added benefit to creating a branded mobile application with dynamic content is the ability to naturally show full-screen ads and/or call-to-action widgets. So, for instance, in between your full-screen articles, you can sneak in a white paper download CTA or a newsletter sign-up request without interrupting the experience.

3. Deliver dynamic content consumers crave

According to a Fourth Source survey, 73% of respondents said they would opt to download a free app associated with a brand over a non-branded, paid-for application – a statistic that demonstrates the value branded content holds for consumers. It also demonstrates the need for brands to keep their consumers’ content needs by feeding dynamic, fresh content into their mobile apps. .

In contrast to optimizing an existing web property, customized mobile assets are all about building a stand-alone content experience a user can only access through a smartphone or a tablet device.

Many brands are using this tactic to curate diverse content assets from around the web into a single, compelling mobile product. It’s a surefire way to give readers a valuable reading experience, while at the same time unifying all your efforts (like aggregating and curating all your social feeds, video, and blog content – rolled up into one awesome experience). This can driver users them to discover more content they otherwise might have missed.

Here’s what Facebook is recommending to marketers on best practices for using hashtags:

• If you are already using hashtags in an advertising campaign through other channels, you can amplify these campaigns by including your hashtags in Facebook advertising. The same creative best practices on Facebook still apply – compelling copy and photography that is in the brand voice works best.
• Any hashtags that you use on other platforms that are connected to your Facebook Page will be automatically clickable and searchable on Facebook.
• Like other Facebook marketing tools, hashtags allow you to join and drive the conversations happening about your business. We recommend you search for and view real-time public conversations and test strategies to drive those conversations using hashtags. 
• Hashtags do not impact your distribution or engagement in News Feed on either desktop or mobile. We recommend you continue to focus on your existing campaigns to drive your most important business objectives.

Facebook is attempting to become more relevant in the advertising world (in last year’s Super Bowl, Twitter hashtags were mentioned in 50% of the ads, while Facebook was only mentioned in 8%) as well as become a platform that’s more relevant in surfacing and being a destination for important public conversations based on topics.

The move could also have huge implications on SEO. In the past, a Google search for a brand’s hashtag would most often surface a Twitter link in the top of the results. With Facebook unrolling hashtags, now that search might surface a Facebook post.

More importantly, as hashtags have become a more integrated into marketing campaigns by brands – being used on much more than just Twitter and Instagram and appearing in television commercials, in-store displays and more – brands will now be able to expand these campaigns to Facebook as well. In the last year, we’ve seen more and more of these great campaigns (read “6 Cross-Platform Hashtag Makreting  Campaigns”) and now brands have the opportunity to capture engagement and activity on Facebook as well.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “Like other Facebook marketing tools, hashtags allow you to join and drive the conversations happening about your business…We recommend you search for and view real-time public conversations and test strategies to drive those conversations using hashtags.”

Instagram and User-Generated Content

Remember when Facebook shelled out $1B for Instagram last year? Well, now an Instagram picture with hashtags with it will have hashtags enabled on Facebook — though clicking a hashtag should still find only matching Facebook content, not Instagram content.

As we’ve written extensively before, many brands have discovered the brand-building power of integrating user-generated content into their websites and marketing campaigns. With consumer-generated content (based on hashtags) becoming key in running successful campaigns, the ability for Facebook to aggregate and curate this kind of content will change how marketers.

>>Stay tuned for more tips, tricks and examples of brands taking advantage of Facebook hashtags.

The question many marketers have been asking is: Does a campaign become more credible and authentic once the consumer is involved?

It seems the resounding answer has been yes.

Many of today’s marketers working for top brands realize the need to provide tools for the consumer to take action and participate in their campaigns. It’s not enough to simply promote your own message and creative, you have to get your target consumers to also contribute their content, thoughts and ideas to the campaign in order for it to be truly successful.

Eliciting Consumers to Participate in Campaigns

And as incorporating social content into all aspects of marketing campaigns (read my post on cross-platform hashtag campaigns) has become unquestionable, digital marketing has evolved into a customer-led conversation. The fact is, consumers are more likely to believe the review or endorsement of another consumer over a brand-released marketing message.

As a result, it has become more important than ever for brands to listen to online conversation and continually monitor what people are posting and saying about their brand. However, simply listening is no longer enough. As I write in “How Social Media Marketing Has Changed in the Last 5 Years,” businesses have been rethinking how to incorporate social into every part of their operations – and have been finding creative ways to incorporate user-generated content into their marketing efforts. Has

Knowing the consumer dialogue, and then participating in that dialogue, is crucial in today’s digital and social landscape. If a brand chooses not to listen or participate, they can’t prevent or even contain the kind of reputational crisis that an unaddressed, negative social discussion can create.

To quote from the Modern Marketing Manifesto first published by Econsultancy and Marketing Week in April: “We believe the internet has forced transparency upon brands and businesses. Brands no longer control the message, consumers do.”

Amplifying Messaging Through Direct Consumer Interactions

Last year, Levi Strauss used social media to offer location-specific deals. In one instance, direct interactions with just 400 consumers led 1,600 people to turn up at the company’s stores— an example of social media’s powerful word-of-mouth effect.

It’s essential to keep in mind that amplifying your marketing  involves designing your marketing activities to have an inherently social motivator that inspires broader engagement and sharing.

This means much more than planning a marketing campaign and then thinking that “let’s do something social.” In today’s marketing landscape, simply uploading a television commercial to YouTube is not enough.

Designing consumer-led and driven campaigns that are inherently social means that the core concepts for campaigns must invite customers to share and participate in an experience. This provides the opportunity for the consumer to extend the campaign by joining a conversation with the brand, product, fellow users, and other enthusiasts. By offering experiences that customers WANT to participate in, brands have the opportunity to greatly expand the reach of their own marketing efforts.

Nine West has seen the benefit of using consumer-driven content in retail experiences as a way to drive sales and conversion at the point of sale. Using Postano Retail, Nine West aggregates, curates and displays consumer content at their flagship retail location in New York City. The Nine West team has said that allowing shoppers to see consumer content of people wearing the products in the “real world” helps shoppers envision how they may wear a pair of shoes and has inspired purchases and encourage future social participation.

Becoming a Participatory Brand – Using Brand Monitoring to Power Marketing Decisions

As we wrote in “Using Fan-Generated Content to Fuel Sports Marketing Campaigns,” many major sports teams have been among the first brands to realize the value in using consumer-generated media in their marketing efforts.

With some of the most engaged and passionate brand advocates (fans), sports franchises from the collegiate to professional level have created social media command centers to listen to and re-use fan content.

For example, the University of Oregon Ducks used Postano Monitoring to power their interactive, fan-centered social media hub, called the Quack Cave.

Another sports related company, Gatorade, has been working towards a goal of becoming the “largest participatory brand in the world.”Gatorade created a Chicago-based “war room” in its marketing department to monitor the brand in real-time across social media.

Gatorade has custom-built dashboards and run sentiment analyses around product and campaign launches. Every day, all of this feedback is integrated into products and marketing. Since the war room’s creation, the average traffic to Gatorade’s online properties, the length of visitor interactions, and viral sharing from campaigns have all more than doubled.

Brand monitoring—even just visualizing what’s said online about your products and services—should be a default social-media function and should take place constantly. Even without engaging consumers directly, companies can glean insights from an effective monitoring program that informs everything from product design to marketing and provides advance warning of potentially negative publicity.

That being said, there are already many forward-thinking brands who have already jumped on the Vine bandwagon, and are doing some very cool, creative and innovative work on there. This is also why we were happy to announce last month that you can now integrate Vine into Postano.

Here’s a look at some of the most creative brands on Vine:

1. Lowes

You might not think a major home improvement store chain would be the ideal candidate for creating must-watch 6 second videos, but Lowes has embraced the Vine platform and created a series of Vines that focus on home improvement and life hack tips using the hashtag “lowesfixinsix.” By using stop-motion animation, Lowes shows customers how to do everything from get out a stubborn screw using a rubber band, to keep a rug from sliding, to how to properly hang a shelf.

2. Urban Outfitters

We’ve written before about how fashion brands are often some of the most innovative when it comes to their marketing and social media campaigns (read Instagram and the Fashion Industry), and many of the same brands who were early adopters of Pinterest and Instagram are now also embracing Vine as part of their marketing strategies.

Urban Outfitters’ Millennial demographic is also a perfect fit for Vine, and they have used the platform extensively to showcase themed videos about products, collaborations (like one they did with Pabst Blue Ribbon), and even dog videos to keep their audience engaged.

 

3. General Electric

Perhaps another surprising company doing creative work on Vine, General Electric has created some truly inspiring videos as part of their “six second science” in order to showcase the company as a forward-thinking, innovative and science-based brand and company.

While the videos don’t often directly promote GE’s own products, they are engaging, popular and have gained the company followers, fans and plenty of shares.

4. Kate Spade

Yet another fashion brand, Kate Spade has inventively used Vine to not only showcase their own products, but also give brand fans sneak peaks and behind the scenes content that they crave. In addition to weekly posts showing off their own products and different ways to wear their latest fashions, Kate Spade also offers their fans peaks at upcoming campaigns not yet released to the mainstream media.

5. Brooklyn Nets

We’ve written before about how the sports industry and social media go hand-in-hand. With so many die-hard and loyal team (read: brand) fans and advocates who crave content (and produce it themselves), it makes perfect sense to use the power of social media to help propel marketing for sports teams, whether that be at the collegiate or professional level.

The Brooklyn Nets are using Vine to show glimpses of game winning, warm ups, their athletes, and amazing plays.

Read more about sports marketing and social media:

• How Social Media is Changing Sports Marketing
• Using Fan-Generated Content to Fuel Sports Marketing Campaigns
• Sports and Social Media

6. A&W Restaurants

A&W launched a campaign this spring starring their mascot, Rooty The Great Root Bear, to introduce their restaurant chain’s new Polar Swirls ice-cream. The campaign featured Rooty performing a series of “magic tricks.”

The campaign launch of Vine also helped to bring back the Rooty mascot, who had disappeared from much of A&W’s marketing in recent years, and he has been used on Vine and other social platforms to help launch new products and hopefully connect to brands.

7. Mail Chimp

It’s a little more challenging for B2B companies to get creative on Vine and connect with their potential customers, while remaining entertaining.  Mail Chimp has achieved this through posting entertaining videos, while just including a little something branded in the Vines.

MailChimp shows off their sense of humor, which they also express through their blogs and other social channels, and created their own memem combining their mascot and office dog Maddie standing on things.

Poster visualization on display next to Webvisions registration area

At Postano, we had a problem we wanted to solve. We wanted to create a new visualization format for events and retail that transformed Tweets into a more premium reading experience. We wanted the visualization to display only one Tweet at a time within a format that was both modern and attractive. After looking at various sources of inspiration, we fell in love with the classic letterpress poster format.

After collecting many examples on Pinterest, we set about selecting a dozen or so styles we really liked as reference designs. There were characteristics that were common among all the examples.

1. Portrait format. Posters are portrait. Most displays are hung or oriented landscape. This new visualization would need to formatted for the portrait display.
2. Typography had to be beautiful. On a letterpress poster, it is the typography that makes it work. Using a great looking font along with the correct line spacing and treatment were key.
3. Joining words needed breaks. We noticed that words like “the” and “and” were typically ornamented with stylized breaks, lines, and elements. This helped the readability of the poster by breaking up the content into phrases.
4. Subtle backgrounds. The backgrounds needed to be minimal but still have enough texture to create depth or character.
5. The Twitter Developer Display Requirements. When Twitter introduced the new requirements last year, they informed all partners how Tweets should be formatted and displayed for reuse. These requirements were surprising because they were much stricter than any other social network had expressed before about formatting posts. These requirements are more like a strict style guide, which is usually intended for logo treatment rather than a typical developer guideline. We needed to create our new visual design, creating the illusion of a letterpress poster, while still complying with the Developer Display Requirements.

The team got to work, and after many iterations, we are happy to introduce the new Postano Poster visualization. We were fortunate enough to launch it at Webvisions, partnering with WebInk for the great looking fonts and Planar for the 70″ gorgeous flat panel display.

The Poster stopped traffic and became a centerpiece of discussion at the conference. Reactions included “How did you make my Tweet look so good?” and “This can’t be live. Are those really live Tweets?“.

Notice the special treatment of the characters "THE" and "&"

Beautiful fonts from WebInk

HTML5 lets us set the letters on a diagonal and add an extrusion effect

Attendees would often take photos of the Tweets in this new format

Screen capture of one of the posters featuring photo blurred in background

Poster visualization adds a nice element to the Postano display wall

If you have an upcoming event or would like a permanent display in your retail location featuring our new Postano Poster visualization, contact us today.

Guess also used Postano displays at several Guess retail locations around the U.S. and on the Guess website as a social hub for the campaign. Fan reaction was incredible and helped to truly tie together the events, retail locations and the website in a social and dynamic way.

Here’s a deeper look at how Guess used Postano to help power the campaign:

#GuessRocks at SXSW

At SXSW in Austin this year, Guess hosted a pool party where they had multiple screens projecting animated Postano visualizations, featuring aggregated the hashtag #GuessRocks.

The team at Guess also partnered with popular fashion blogger Natalie Suarez of @NatalieOffDuty to share her fashion adventures at SXSW. Her content was then displayed alongside the other SXSW and #GuessRocks social content.

>>Find out more about Postano for Events

#GuessRocks at Coachella

Guess hosted another 2-day pool party the first weekend of Coachella, called #GuessHotel. Guess Postano to aggregate and curate social posts from several different networks which featured the hashtags #GuessRocks and #GuessEyewear, which were both campaigns the company focused on promoting during the course of the popular music festival.

>>Find out more about Postano for Events

Postano Hub

Guess created Postano Hub on their website, which aggregated content from a variety of social networks with the hashtag #GuessRocks. That content was then curated by the team, displaying the best and most engaging content on the site.  The engaging website display shows updated content from fans of the clothing, on the very same website where costumers can browse the collection and shop on the website.

Postano Retail

The same animated Postano event displays were also used at multiple flagship retail locations (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Toronto) for the festival clothing line in-store launch events.

The events aimed to debut the new collection to press and influencers who had been invited to attend. Based on the location of the events, Guess also partnered with various magazines and fashion enterprises to promote the new line of clothing.

Postanos was used to display aggregated and curated content with the  #GuessRocks hashtag, and the displays were then placed in strategic locations in the store, flanked by models wearing the clothes from the line.

Here’s a little of what’s coming up and what the Postano Team has been up to:

Ignite Portland

On Thursday, May 16, a few of our team members attended Ignite in Portland, where there were Postano displays showing social content with the hashtag #IgnoteTAO before the event, at intermission and after the show.

If you’re not sure what Ignite is, it’s a “high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by local people who have an burning idea and the guts to get onstage and share their personal and professional passions.”

Ignite events aim to be quick, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, and global.

Webvisions Portland

Postano is proud to announce that we’ll be working with Webvisions to power social displays on multiple screens around the conference in Portland next week.

WebVisions  is a conference taking place in Portland, Barcelona, Chicago, and New York and aims to explore the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy. Since 2001, Webvisions has built a loyal audience of designers, developers and industry leaders.

If you are attending the conference, keep an eye out for the Postano displays around the event. We’ll also be showcasing a new display option in the registration area.

>>Learn more about the event

 

Stumptown 40 

Co-founded by Postano’s own Ryan Parr, the Stumptown 40 starts with a block of wood, four wheels and four axles, and ends Wednesday, May 22nd in a 100-car, gravity- and alcohol-fueled single-elimination race.

This is the world famous Adult Pine Wood Derby that started it all. Postano will be on display throughout the event to show results of the races and the social activity surrounding the event.

>>Come see the race on Wednesday, May 22 at Spirit of 77 in Portland

Party at Postano Headquarters

On Thursday, May 23, Postano will be hosting a party in our offices. Join VCs, startups and the tech community in an unveiling of Greater Portland’s powerful new tool to help companies expand and locate to the Portland region, plus see our demo of our latest innovations, including our massive social visualization wall.

Here are more details about the event:

Launchpad! A VC, Startup and Tech Party

Thursday, May 23 at Postano HQ

6:30pm – Drinks, food and networking

7:15pm – Launch of Greater Portland’s new application

7:40pm – Hang out with VCs and Startups from throughout the Western U.S., and explore and interact with Postano’s new visualization wall.

9:30pm – Party wraps

>>Learn more and/or register for the event

Newsletter

We  sent out our Postano newsletter last week, announcing some very cool new updates and features to the Postano Platform.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t fret, you can read all about the amazing things we’ve been up to here.

The vast networks of people who participate on various social platforms has made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about products and companies. As you’d imagine, this emergence of consumer-to-consumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace – and become an essential piece of the marketing puzzle for brands.

As I’ve written before, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, which is why finding unique ways to leverage these consumer conversations into marketing strategies is essential and integrating user-generated content is an important component of brand building.

Unlike traditional marketing communications, where brands and marketing managers had a high degree of control, today’s marketers have to learn how to best leverage and shape consumer discussions and generated media. In recent months, more and more brands have realized the power in using consumer-generated media from social networks to help power their campaigns (read “5 Best Social Media Campaigns with User-Generated Content”).

The power of sourcing user-generated content has not been lost on many of the major brands and agencies. In last year’s Super Bowl, half of the national advertisements mentioned a Twitter hashtag in the ad (encouraging viewers to participate in the conversation well after the ad aired).

In fact, many major brands are not only incorporating consumer content into their websites, billboards and television commercials, but are also using it on ecommerce pages and in retail displays.

Here are some examples of innovative brands using consumer-generated media to help propel their marketing campaigns, drive awareness and increase sales:

Keen – Letting Consumers to Fuel a Campaign

Keen and their agency North was recently nominated for a SoMe Award for their campaign for Worldwide Recess Day.  The campaign encouraged people to take 10 minutes to get outside and move, and aimed to amplify awareness of the Keen brand and social media channels, as well as drive traffic and sales through their website.

Keen encouraged people to upload photos and tweets with the hashtag #Take10, and then aggregated all of that social content on a hub page using Postano.

By asking their consumers to participate in the campaign, it had a much wider reaching effect, gaining exposure through the networks of existing fans and followers. The campaign was a huge success, which included gaining Keen 20,000 new Instagram followers and 3.5 new Pinterest followers.

Gerber – Bringing Consumer-Generated Content to Life on a Website

Mixing premium content with user-generated content and social experiences on owned sites is an increasingly crucial part of an integrated marketing approach.

Doing so also helps you establish your brand. As Frank Strong writes in “Why Content Marketing is the New Branding,” brands are built over time by “third-party validation communicated through third-party content.” A brand is not built based around logo or advertising or taglines, but rather by what OTHER people say about your product or services. Bringing this concept to a company website seems like a natural evolution.

As we see more and more brands rolling out innovative hashtag campaigns and asking for their consumers to participate in their marketing campaigns, we’ll also see more brands integrating the conversation back into their websites and owned properties.

This includes Gerber, a knife company, which asks it’s fans to tweet and Instagram photos with the hashtag #HelloTrouble, which they then aggregate, curate and display on their website using Postano Hub.

Nine West  - Bringing Consumer-Generated Content to the Retail Environment

Incorporating social and consumer-generated media as part of the customer experience in the retail environment is also a growing trend. It has been well-documented that social media is a powerful influencer in consumer decision making. Combining this into one cohesive strategy can not only enforce branding and enrich the overall shopping experience, but can also drive revenue and sales.

Today, more and more retailers are beginning to recognize and reap the benefits of using digital displays as part of an effort to cultivate in-store retail experiences. Users are still interacting with digital media via their mobile devices while taking part in the shopping experience. These touch points offer lower-funnel access to consumers for brands in close proximity to the purchase decision.

With more and more retailers and brands extending their consumer messaging through social and digital channels, combining mobile, social and digital signage into the retail experience a natural evolution.

Nine West has integrated social media and digital displays as a primary part of the shopping experience at their flagship location on Lexington Avenue in New York City. (See photos of the retail displays).

Nine West’s social displays, which feature consumer-generated imagery, help give shoppers context around their products. For example, it allows shoppers to see ideas from other consumers on HOW to wear the same shoes they are shopping for in the store. Seeing the shoes on fellow consumers displayed and paired with outfits alongside the item in-store helps inspire shoppers, drive engagement and increase sales.

As I wrote previously in “Brands as Publishers and How It’s Changing Marketing,” many major brands’ marketing departments are churning out incredible amounts of content in order to connect with customers and amplify their messages – a concept that has grown in popularity only in recent years.

Major brands and organizations are also using social media as a key component of their marketing strategies. Social networking platforms are used to source user-generated content for campaigns, spread messaging and content, and engage brand communities and consumers.

In fact, according to Ogilvy’s 2012 Social Media Study, while only 15% of B2B marketers reported using social media in 2007, by 2012 91% of those marketers reported using social media as part of their marketing strategy.

Here’s a closer look at how exactly social media marketing has changed and how more and more marketing and advertising campaigns are integrating social as a key component:

Consumers are Engaging with Brands  - And Fueling Their Campaigns

As consumers, we’re now in an era where we engage with big name brands like Zappos, almost as if it is the mom-and-pop shop down the street.

Companies see the value in this one-on-one interaction with their customers who, in turn, can become their biggest brand advocates.  Not only does this allow brands to resolve issues quickly and effectively with a single customer, but it also sets a precedent with other “listeners” that the brand cares. This can go a long way in cultivating your brand.

More big brands are also sourcing user-generated content to help fuel their own campaigns. More big companies have embraced the concept that a brand is defined by what people say about you when you’re not in the room – and incorporated that concept into their marketing.

Keen Footwear and their agency North was recently nominated for a SoMe Award for their Worldwide Recess Day, in which the footwear company asked their fans to share how they were taking time to move via the hastag #Take10. The tweets, Instagram photos and status updates were then aggregated using Postano and became the hub page for the campaign – which helped gain Keen 20k new Instagram followers, 3.5 million followers on Pinterest and more.

Empowering Employees as Brand Advocates

Often a company’s best brand advocates are the very same people who are working for them. However, many companies have failed to realize the potential marketing power in enabling their own employees to act as brand advocates.

Let’s think about it. Even if a company has only 10 employees, if each of those employees has just 250 contacts through a social media network, that company has 2,500 direct connections through their staff to potential customers and new recruits.

That means a mid-sized business of 300 would have 75,000 direct social media connections between their employees and the rest of the world. Then think about a major brand like Coca Cola, who employs 146,200 people and spends almost $3 billion every year on advertising . Think about how much Coca Cola could amplify their marketing messages and spread their campaigns were they to fully utilize their staffs’ own social media networks.

A recent Mashable article, “5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns,” gave another good example of a company using their employees’ social media to drive results:

Incept, a Canton, Ohio-based call center, was making cold calls to recruit blood donors. But, they knew people weren’t sitting at home, waiting for a blood drive phone call, so they needed to turn to other channels to connect with potential donors. They turned to social media, creating Twitter accounts for their employees, as well as a blog and Facebook Page. Since training and empowering their employees to post content, interact and build networks, Incept has reduced average monthly turnover from almost 20% monthly to 8% per month, creating an annual direct cost savings of nearly $200,000. Additionally, Sam Falletta, president and chief results officer, says Incept has picked up two new clients from relationships that began on Facebook.

Almost All Businesses Are Becoming Social

Before marketing became social, the rest of the business didn’t have to revolve around what was happening in the marketing department. Ilana Rabinowitz wrote in her article “9 Ways Your Business Needs to Change to Become Social,” that the entire business needs to rethink its way of operating to incorporate social into their entire operation.

Every kind of business from your local neighborhood restaurant to major corporations have embraced using social media as a connect to consumers and potential customers.

Purchasing Decisions Increasingly Influenced by Social Media and Blogs

It’s been well documented that attention spans are shorter.  Attention marketing is where there is hope.  You can’t just be providing a wonderful product anymore. You have to use your platform as a business to make your consumers’ lives more meaningful.  That’s a tall order for any marketing department.

In addition, consumers don’t see themselves as the targets that marketing people have traditionally seen them as. They see themselves as people with innumerable options. SproutSocial recently reported that 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions – which means that companies MUST present themselves well on social in hopes of attracting new customers.

Social Media Has Altered the Sales Funnel

Let’s be honest – social media and digital marketing has turned the traditional sales funnel on its head. The Internet has completely broken the sales funnel beyond repair. The standard, linear path which many purchases used to follow has been replaced by a vast, complex, interconnected web of interest, desire, clickthroughs, brand awareness and user engagement.

Here are some stats to support this:

• 70% of the B2B buying process in a complex sale is already complete BEFORE prospects are willing to engage with a sales person.

• B2B Sales and Lead generation are no longer simply about the relationship between prospects and sales reps. They’re about your brand assets, thought leadership and emotions built from the vast amount of the info that prospects now have access to thanks to social media, mobile and the web.

• 78% say digital and word of mouth is most trustworthy source of info (Ogilvy 2012 social media study)

• 37% of B2B buyers use social for perspective to help them make purchasing decisions

So what does this all mean? That social media marketing is way more than just letting your intern run a Facebook page – it’s now become an essential sales tool capable of driving revenue and purchasing decisions in every kind of business.

You can choose to either automatically include Vines to your Postano, or moderate for a more curated experience. The six-second videos will also play automatically in any of the Postano platform options, whether it be a social hub, event display, mobile app or retail display. Vines can also be integrated with content from the thirteen other social networks we support including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Vines with the hashtag #bulldog in Postano

Ever since Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app last October (before it even launched) and then launched the app in January, our team has been eager to add Vine as the 14^th social network supported by the Postano platform.

Vine hit the number one spot for downloaded free apps in the U.S. back in April, and has continued to grow in popularity since then.

Many major companies and brands like General Electric, Urban Outfitters, Neimen Marcus and the Booklyn Nets have already come up with innovative and creative ways to use Vine as part of their social media marketing strategies and campaigns (read Media Bistro’s post, “10 of the Best Brands on Vine”).