Who is in control of your brand?

Fascinating to see him discussing the future of Weblogs and was seen as a thought leader, and it was only a few years ago – how things have changed FAST. He now blogs here http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/

I had dinner last night with 3 people who worked in different digital agencies, each of us realised we had slightly different versions of project management at our agencies – from Agile(ish) to standard waterfall. We saw the pro’s and con’s of both and how each process could apply to different projects and clients differently.

Although, being the one who had experienced Agile (ish) I could relate to both, much more easily than they could. I realised that we do have a broad Waterfall approach to project management but in the early and late stages of the project a more Agile approach is used, which rapidly speeds up the project development.

I happened to stumble upon this Ted Talk this morning, which illustrates some really interesting principles and how they effect team success. You may have heard of the concept of the Marshmallow Challenge.

Some of the things I got out of it were…

• Having 1 plan with no trial & error was less successful
• Mixed skilled teams were more likely to succeed
• Kindergarten children naturally use Agile approach
• Kindergarten children were on average, nearly the most successful

AdAge has just posted a story discussing a big Nielsen study on Facebook advertising. The study of 800,000 people illustrated the benefits to brand recall and purchase intent. They look at the combination of Earned Media and Paid Media.

The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.

For standard paid media they found a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent, compared to a control group. And where it get’s interesting is the impact of having both Earned and Paid which resulted in an increase of recall to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

The most powerful outcome from this study was their ‘other’ finding, that purchase intent increased in similar ways.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.

And to all you digifolk, clicks only made up a small proportion of the whole picture. (Digifolk are those that have grown up in a world of focusing on click throughs, not good old fashioned reach.)

Only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them

And why’s this so important?

For years we have worked hard to get in front of our audience for 30 seconds, or half a page, with pretty profound results, reaching millions, building great brands and generating revenue. Sure now, with social media, we try to get consumers to tell each other about our message, but that’s still the same outcome – REACH.

As I’ve discussed in other posts our growing addiction to clicks is taking us away from the very valuable outcome of reaching our audience. Yes, if they click it’s great, but we all know how few do, so studies that discuss and highlight impact of digital reach – be it display, search or otherwise – on brand awareness, purchase intent and other metrics add value to our good old friend REACH. It’s not the first study of it’s kind, Nielsen released one last November – funny to see I reacted in a similar way…

Thoughts?