All of your posts, shares and ‘Likes’ tell a story. What’s yours saying?
Consider this: anyone, strangers included, can tell a great deal about you via your digital footprint; that is, the trail you leave behind as you share updates, post pictures or check into places. It’s likely that you’re broadcasting what you look like, where you work, where you’ve been, who you know, what you like to do, and of course, your views on a variety of topics.
As the amount of information continues to pile up online, your digital footprint can either help or hurt your personal brand and your business.
I’ve seen business owners and personal contacts tarnish their reputations with a few words or a few clicks, not realizing the full power of the digital world. Every picture you post, every status you like, every update you send is essentially announcing to the world who you are, permanently.
Over the past two days alone, I’ve witnessed two pretty major gaffes take place in my network – both of which were unfortunate and completely avoidable. In the first instance, a business owner publicly called someone out on Facebook in regards to a personal issue, complete with profanity. In the second incident, a professional who works for a major energy company ‘Liked’ what could be considered an inappropriate public photo. The action showed up on the feed of everyone who followed them.
Think for a moment of the repercussions. Before I do business with or consider hiring anyone, the first thing I do is find their social media profiles and find out what they’re all about. Do you swear? Stop. Are you overly negative or regularly posting inappropriate things? Don’t do it. Published words, and any online actions for that matter, can easily be misinterpreted, so be careful about how you may be coming across online. Whether it’s the language you use or the tone of what you are saying, every word you type, every action you take online is essentially what you are broadcasting publicly, and permanently.
At the same time, you still want to have a presence. So avoiding the social space entirely can backfire too. Many companies, including my own, use search engines and social media to dig up information all potential candidates. What are we looking for? We’re hunting down information to potentially validate your resume, to find out if you walk your talk and to learn more about you, as a person. Also, when I’m looking to use the services of another business, especially a business which is tied to a personal brand (as today they essentially all are) I do the same thing. I expect and know that potential clients of mine do the same when trying to find out more about my business.
It’s critical now, more-so than ever, to educate our employees, colleagues and especially children, that what they say or do online is permanent. It can be a great opportunity for you to build your brand or prove to be the easiest method of self-destruction. Maybe it’s time to do a personal digital analysis on yourself? You may be surprised looking from the perspective of an outsider.
Lisa Ostrikoff, Special to The Globe and Mail
via All of your posts, shares and ‘Likes’ tell a story: what does yours say? – The Globe and Mail.
- Published in Lisa Ostrikoff - The Globe And Mail, Social Media Video
Online video gains viewers. TV’s losses mount.
As online video gains viewers, cable TV’s losses mount. While 60% of US internet users surveyed told AYTM Market Research that they still had a cable TV subscription in May 2013, another 23% said they had a subscription in the past, but not any longer.
Consumers’ inclination to watch cable and network TV as it airs is declining fast, while consuming video on non-TV devices and watching over-the-top (OTT) content are increasingly becoming regular activities.
In a March 2013 survey, Leichtman Research Group found that 27% of US adults watched videos on non-TV devices every day and more than half of respondents did so on a weekly basis.
Online video and streaming is also bumping up the connected TV and OTT market. The Leichtman study found that in 2013, 44% of US households had at least one TV set connected to the internet, up from 38% in 2012. And as more TVs are connected digitally, online video viewing is rising quickly. This year, one-third of US adults surveyed reported watching OTT content daily (nearly double what it was 2 years ago) and 59% said they did so weekly.
YouTube and Netflix are big drivers of the movement to digital and OTT viewing. AYTM found that 29% of US internet users surveyed watched YouTube videos at least daily in May, and more than half of respondents did so more than once a week. Netflix has also seen a big bump in its subscriptions and use. In 2013, according to Leichtman, 22% of US consumers surveyed said they streamed Netflix weekly—more than five times as many as watched content via Netflix in 2010.
These trends are all pointing in the same direction: Traditional TV viewing is on the wane, and online video is rising fast. But this does not mean that TV’s role in the media ecosystem is totally diminished. As TV manufacturers and networks offer more dynamic viewing options, the nature of how and what US consumers watch on TV will continue to change.
AYTM additionally found that that over half of cable TV viewers said they watched less than half of the channels available via their subscription, and an overwhelming 74% said they would prefer to choose individual channels rather than paying for a whole bundle. As cable and network TV providers strategize how to keep consumers tuned in, all options are on the table.
Digital Ad Effectiveness Improves, Ad Dollars Following
When it comes to digital advertising, we often spend our time pouring over data in order to create planning, modeling, targeting and buying efficiencies. It’s very easy to get caught up in the process when, in the end, all anyone wants to know is “did it actually work?”
TV has historically controlled the lion’s share of ad budgets, primarily because we have several decades of effectiveness research proving that the medium is very good at driving brand equity and in-market sales lift.
Digital media continues to scrap and claw for those TV dollars, in large part, because we’re still in the early phases of proving out the value of the channel. That said, as digital becomes increasingly effective at demonstrating quantifiable results and as video ad inventory grows, we’re witnessing a clear paradigm shift that is putting it in the same conversation as TV.
Digital ad campaigns drive both brand and sales lift. The methods of evaluating the delivery and performance of campaigns are rapidly improving as we consider three aspects of measurement: ad viewability, branding lift, and sales lift.
Ad Viewability Improves Accuracy of Effectiveness Measurement
The topic of digital ad viewability has been a hot one over the past year. With roughly 50 percent of ads never have an opportunity to be seen by a consumer, it’s easy to understand why.
The industry’s move towards a viewable impression standard is significant for a couple of reasons:
It puts digital advertising on a level playing field with TV in that both are now based on the same ‘opportunity-to-see’ standard. These common parameters can certainly help facilitate the flow of dollars toward digital.
The use of viewable impressions can dramatically improve effectiveness research. When campaigns are evaluated on a served impression basis, the reported lift metrics are diluted by all of the impressions that were delivered but never seen and therefore had no ability to influence consumer behavior. Evaluating campaigns on a viewable impression basis promises to give viewable ads the credit they actually deserve in driving performance.
Branding Lift Metrics Provide Useful Benchmarks for Digital
Branding advertising, which accounts for 70 percent of all traditional advertising, has traditionally relied on a variety of brand-related post-exposure success metrics, such as:
Unaided brand recall.
Aided brand recall.
Brand favorability.
Brand trust.
Likelihood of visitation to the online/offline store.
Likelihood of purchase.
Likelihood to recommend.
These metrics are very useful in showing changes in how consumers’ thoughts, feelings and emotions toward a brand, and they often correlate with lifts in in-market sales. Of all campaign evaluation metrics, these have tended to be the easiest and most cost-effective to collect from a research standpoint.
These metrics are also useful because there are years and years of industry norms collected around these metrics, which gives historical perspective and the ability to benchmark. These metrics have withstood the test of time, and in cases where assessing actual sales is not a reality, they have served as a strong surrogate for this metric of success.
Sales Lift Measurement Leveraging Big Data for Improved Insights
Quantifying in-store (or online) sales lift is perhaps the most direct, and therefore valuable, metric for marketers.
Over the years, the digital ad industry has had the ability to tie campaign exposure to in-store sales through the use of anonymized database matching between online panels and household-level sales databases (e.g. supermarket loyalty cards). While this clever application has helped close the loop between exposure and sales, sample size constraints can sometimes get in the way of performing more granular analysis.
However, new applications that integrate big data sources into traditional effectiveness measurement has opened the door to substantially increased sample sizes, which not only improves the statistical reliability of the reported results, but also opens up new avenues of analysis.
As you can imagine, many marketers salivate at the possibilities of being able to have a scalable and repeatable methods for quantifying how well digital ads drive sales.
Better Effectiveness Measurement Can Drive Dollars to Digital
These recent innovations in digital advertising measurement are changing the way we think about effectiveness. Proper assignment of credit for digital ad campaigns plus improved granularity of analysis means a better gauge of results. A significantly improved ability to prove the impact of digital advertising means that branding ad dollars can be expected to continue to shift to the Internet.
- Published in Video Advertising