Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

A recent study found that 40% of Millennials (people born between 1985 and 1990) who Like brands on Facebook did so because they wanted to publicly display their support – in other words, they used brand advocacy as a form of self-expression.

Often times, when marketers talk about the consumer rationale behind fanning or following on social networks, they use the words “value exchange,” meaning information, entertainment and other forms of social currency. While these things are in fact important, research shows that a substantial number of consumers will engage with brands online as a way of showcasing their own brand affinity. In some sense, these digital brand affiliations have become part of the way a person relays their personality to others – much like wearing an Abercrombie t-shirt might do the same in the “real world.”

What’s more eMarketer notes that brand preference is a top personal identifier for young people online – beside identifiers like religion or ethnicity.

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Photo: Telegraph.co.uk

On Monday November 15, Facebook announced a new messaging system which integrates e-mail, IM and SMS but does not call itself an “e-mail” program. The new system is based on three principles: seamless messaging, conversation history and social inbox.

Seamless Messaging
@Facebook.com e-mail addresses allow users to communicate as normal via Facebook, but also allow users to converse with people outside of Facebook through e-mail or text messaging. The seamless messaging integration enables users to house all of their conversations in a central location regardless of the preferred method of communication.

Facebook users send 4 billion messages per day, the majority being one-to-one messages among friends. The design of the new messaging system promotes quick and informal conversations among friends. Facebook messages do not include subject lines, cc or bcc functions and can be sent by simply pressing “enter,” much like the Facebook chat function.

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Video: RockMelt overview

RockMelt is a fitting name for the new web browser that is rolling out this week. It will be hard to get anyone to use it, and the hype will disappear overnight. I haven’t seen such an apt moniker for a product since I watched the show “Bored to Death.”

The browser already racked up $9.9 million in funding, with much of that coming from the firm of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. Built using Google’s Chromium and thus fully interoperable with Google’s Chrome browser extensions, RockMelt feels like what would happen if Facebook launched a web browser. Users can easily access their friends’ Facebook posts, along with Twitter updates, blog posts and other social content, directly from the frame of the browser. It’s heavily built around Facebook though, as users must enter their Facebook login to get on the wait list for access to the browser, and in the process one must give various permissions to RockMelt.

Head on over to the Ad Age DigitalNext blog to read David’s review of the much-hyped search browser RockMelt.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that its mobile services, used by more than a third of the social network’s audience, are getting some major upgrades. While users and app developers will appreciate a new way to stay signed in to any participating application, marketers will be especially interested in Deals tied in with Facebook Places.

With more than 200 million people now using Facebook’s mobile services, there should be no doubt whatsoever that mobile social media is mainstream. The reach is there, and increasingly so are the marketing opportunities. Read 360i’s latest report to learn what’s new with Facebook mobile, how the Deals feature will work and what the main implications are for marketers.

360i POV on Facebook Places Deals & Mobile Updates

What do you think of Facebook’s latest mobile enhancements? Let us know in the comments below.

Image via CNET

Twitter followed through on one of its promises earlier this year, delivering ads within users’ tweet streams. That means users will see ads without searching for them, marking an important step in expanding the reach of Promoted Tweets. At least for now, most users won’t notice a thing, and most marketers will remain on the sidelines.

Promoted Tweets will only appear for users of HootSuite, one of the more popular third-party Twitter clients that’s one of the best for managing multiple accounts in one place. With over 900,000 users, that’s a decent testing ground for Twitter. What’s not clear is how active those users are. For instance, if you scan 360i’s Twitter feed, you’ll find most tweets are published by TweetDeck with occasional posts from HootSuite mixed in. If accounts like 360i’s are included in the total, it means the number people who will be exposed to in-stream tweets is significantly smaller.

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Since the joint announcement a few weeks ago, I’ve been returning to Bing Search daily, hoping to get a glimpse of the new Facebook integration. I’m normally a Google user, yet the idea of taking my friends along with me during search discovery just seems natural, if not logical.  And, while I’m probably the exception and not the rule, most of my real relationships are also solidified on Facebook. As Facebook continues growing user adoption rates, a mirroring effect of our real and digitized social lives is becoming analogous for many online users.

With this latest Bing rollout, our digitized Facebook friends will support Bing Search as we do keyword queries. I envision three of my good buddies hovering over my shoulder at home, pointing, debating and telling me which links might look interesting on a search results page. Maybe they see a web URL they’ve already visited or have Liked themselves. Now, in this virtual scenario produced by Bing and Facebook, my buddies are probably less of a distraction to my ears (or stress levels), and more so a subtle support group for my search and discovery process within Bing.

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Marla Aaron of the IAB recently interviewed Sarah Hofstetter, SVP of Emerging Media & Brand Strategy at 360i. Below we’ve pulled out some key parts of the discussion, but you can view the entire Q&A above or on the IAB website (which has many more great videos).

[Marla Aaron/IAB]:What comprises successful, multiplatform, integrated programs?

[Sarah Hofstetter]: It starts with the way you approach marketing in general. If you’re thinking of everything as a set of tactics then you’re never going to get to that multiplatform integrated experience. The earlier you plan from an integrated perspective and think about digital – because digital really is that connective tissue – then the more successful those multiplatform programs will be.

[IAB]: You just released the Mobile Marketing Playbook and last year you released a Social Marketing Playbook. Why mobile now?

[SH]: We looked at the numbers; there’s more than 90 percent penetration of mobile phones among Americans over 13. The purpose of the playbook was to provide some marketing structure around how to plan for mobile in the context of overall communications planning.

[IAB]: A number of people I’ve talked to said they don’t like when people share on social networks what they had for breakfast, what they had for lunch – the banality of life. Where do you fall in that scale?

[SH]: I think the banality of social media is actually what makes it most interesting. Social media discussions and online chatter are really a reflection of what goes on in your daily activity. For marketers, the banality of it is a phenomenal reflection of the concept that the Internet is the world’s largest focus group. I do care what you had for breakfast because I’m responsible for marketing bacon, and I’m responsible for marketing cream cheese and I’m responsible for figuring out how often people have those conversations because that’s what’s going to give me the insight to figure out how to connect better with them.