Digital Trends 2015 - Four · PDF file · 2015-12-02r 2015 3 Introduction This is the sixth annual Digital Trends Report prepared by Broadgate Mainland. In a departure from previous

Digital Trends 2015

2 Digital Trends 2015

3Digital Trends 2015

IntroductionThis is the sixth annual Digital Trends Report prepared by Broadgate Mainland.

In a departure from previous years we have evolved the report by inviting academic and business social and digital media commentators to assess the most important developments in the world of digital communications and how they affect corporate communications now and in the future.

One of the greatest challenges companies face is keeping up with the speed of change in social and digital media and how to adapt communications programmes accordingly.

Not every development will be suitable or necessary for companies to embrace but as this report clearly highlights, building the right foundations in terms of content, tone and style will be crucial to success.


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Page 16

Page 8Enterprise Social MediaMatt Owen, Head of Social, Econsultancy.

Page 12Digital FuturesPaul Dwyer, Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster.

Page 16How print media will use digital and social mediaJane Bird, Freelance journalist specialising in technology and regular contributor to the Financial Times and The Economist.


Executive summaryOne of the big drivers for online communications according to Professor Andy Miah, University of West of Scotland, is the capture and usage of big data. “The more data you require today, the more affective you will be at understanding the trajectories within your industry in the future.”

The use of this data and the way it helps the transition to an increasingly digital world is giving businesses the opportunity to promote themselves and their values to a much wider audience. Mariann Hardey, Durham Business School, says that a good social media campaign requires a company to create content that encourages the audience to share. The right content strategy, written with the audience in mind, will resonate with customers and will help endear the business to the audience, encouraging brand reinforcement and helping establish long-term relationships.

Digital and social media hits the spot when it’s relevant, informative and involves personalisation, conversation and inspiration. Matt Owens from Econsultancy calls for increased departmental integration between sales and marketing to communicate directly with users. He believes it is vital for communications teams to work closely with their front-line facing colleagues to develop collateral for the web that is informative, accessible and more crucially, up to date, topical and credible. According to Professor Andy Miah, if you get the content right, then an organisation’s reputational growth can translate into lead generation and significantly contribute to the bottom line.

Executive summary


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Page 20Thinking scale and niche: Business predictions for digital and social mediaMariann Hardey, Lecturer in Marketing, Durham University Business School.

Page 24What’s next for social media?Professor Andy Miah, University of West Scotland.


While the digital world opens doors, it’s no secret that with such a public platform businesses can expect to receive a level of negativity from customers and the general public that can pose a reputational threat. Monitoring tools are vital for being able to react swiftly to any criticism. If the response is managed with the right tone and not too defensively, it can provide an opportunity to engage with a wider audience.

According to Dr Paul Dwyer, University of Westminster, we are all ‘social curators’ now. Companies need to become aggregators of information, planning their websites to provide their target audiences with content relevant to their needs. The key is the ‘social’ bit not the technology.

Jane Bird, technology journalist, reminds us that we mustn’t forget those readers who often engage in debate and conversation helping to develop stories and providing valuable insights which are integral to the reputation of the brand.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in digital, with content and customer relationships taking centre stage. While advances in technology ensure that the digital world changes rapidly, the old adage that ‘content is king’ will still be around for many years to come. Mariann Hardey sums it up when she says that content, with the right tone and personality, will always be crucial to, “allow the audience to bond, relate and share.” The essence of good communications.

Executive summary


Native advertisingAs platforms strive towards monetisation, the idea that social is ‘free’ will vanish. Businesses will focus on native advertising and this will inform strategy. Distinct disciplines will be created as ‘social’ separates from ‘media’.

This has interesting implications for agencies, with community management and customer service moving in-house, they will return to their classic roles, creating more overtly commercial content.

This also raises questions about authenticity and integrity. These qualities will need to be embraced by businesses if they are to compete.

Niche networks and curated content‘Interest-focused’ networks like Instagram have become popular by doing one thing particularly well.

This will continue, driving changes in user behaviour. We’re already seeing younger users abandon Facebook for ephemeral networks and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, SnapChat and Line, whose compartmentalised functions allow users increased control over their data.

Ad budgets will be restructured to accommodate this development. As understanding of ROI evolves, this may eventually affect wider PPC spend. Networks such as Pinterest and Reddit, where discussion can be delineated by subject will continue to grow. Brands with limited resources will turn to these platforms, while Facebook and Google+ become hosting hubs for content, particularly images and micro-video.

Enterprise social media has been with us for less than a decade, but has created massive disruption, redefining the way we communicate with customers.

It has proven to be an outlier, the vanguard of a new focus in business, and marketing in particular. Where once ‘The Big Idea’ ruled, we now focus on iteration, agility, and becoming ‘customer-centric’.

When we think about digital and social media, we tend to focus on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. While these are important, they are only tools enabling businesses to deliver content and services. Their own evolution is a mirror of wider changes.

Predicting the future is always a risk, but I’d like to share my thoughts on what we can expect in the next few years.

Matt Owen, Head of Social, Econsultancy.

Enterprise Social Media


Integrated measurementThe rise of universal analytics and drive for accurate attribution will mean social becomes more measurable, though conversely returns will be more aligned to wider marketing and sales initiatives.

The push for qualified ROI will see social split by discipline, with different metrics applied to social customer service and retention, PR and advertising.

There will still be focus on ‘buzz’, but we’ll see more tailored monitoring of individual conversations and a focus on lead-generation.

Organisational changeBusinesses will focus on governance with digital training as standard, with an empowered workforce creating trust among customers. This will drive increased departmental integration as sales and marketing communicate directly with users.

Social will also take a more important role in business intelligence as product-focused teams evolve around data.

AdvocacyFinally we’ll see our efforts pay off as individual employees develop customer relationships and advocacy. Social will continue to act as the ‘glue’ between channels that provide useful, genuine customer experiences. Businesses that ‘get social right’ will be the ones that concentrate on personal interactions, rather than just being the ‘Voice Of The Brand’, and service will differentiate leaders from those paying lip-service.

With the growth of channels and networks, it will be challenging to be everywhere, so businesses will be forced to behave in a way that endears them to customers, through deep, valuable content and long-term relationships, concentrating on increasing lifetime customer value.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in digital, with content and customer relationships taking centre stage. While technology and platforms may change, I believe that this is where businesses will find real value and make big wins in the future.

Article

Avatar An image or username used to represent a person’s profile on social networks and forums.

Breadcrumbs A projection showing the exact whereabouts the user is currently on a website.


Keeping abreast of what’s happening in real time is absolutely key for managing our brand reputation. Social media is integrated into our marketing and communications activity and we use the full range of monitoring services to monitor BLP and industry news or developments. We always react swiftly – whether a reputational threat, an ideal opportunity for us to comment or make contact for a face to face meeting.

“We have a responsive website and emails are smartphone friendly. As you would expect since we work insure new constructions and developments and on building sites you don’t get looked at if you cannot work across smartphones and tablets.

Adrian Stahl, Marketing Manager, BLP Insurance

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”Our business model is the provision of high quality face to face financial advice so we have invested considerably in creating an extensive suite of apps and content that empower our partners to provide that. Wealth management is a complicated business and making content and information digital and accessible remotely and through smartphones and tablets is a natural development for us. We have an integrated content management programme that connects to Partners’ websites to allow clients access to topical information and insights from wherever they are at home, work or play.

Stephen Knight, Digital Marketing Specialist, St. James’s Place Wealth Management

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Comments



We are all curators nowCompared to the lack of digital business drive among national newspapers, the trade press has generally been considered something of a success in retaining its role as gatekeeper to a target audience.

But a look at recent data (such as the PPA’s 2014 Publishing Futures report) suggests that the logic of digital disruption has also affected trade and business publishers. The list of titles to go online-only in recent years – Accountancy Age, Personnel Today, Computing – demonstrates how far publishing models, and reading habits, have changed. In this new world of publishing, how can businesses and PRs negotiate these more complex relationships between content, journalists and audiences?

First, businesses have to deal with the on-demand world. As audiences have become used to searching for specific content on-demand, so former print publishers are becoming content aggregators. Reed Business Information, which used to publish more than a hundred print titles, now draws three quarters of its revenue from subscriptions to digital services like Business Insight. In this on-demand world audiences need findable web channels, which are content rich, well designed and search engine optimized. In-house PRs can also adopt the aggregator model – planning their websites to provide targeted audiences with on-demand access to data, news, comment and advice, video and even live streaming.

Secondly, relationships with traditional journalists will change radically. Journalism based on exclusive content will continue to make occasional, but huge, impacts– think of Nick Davies, the investigative journalist who uncovered the News of the World phone-hacking affair. But as digitisation increases the amount of content available – at an exponential rate – audiences want guidance in finding relevant, quality content and in understanding what it means. Rather than a traditional journalism, we can think of this as expert curation, a combination of the eclectic tastes of someone like the late John Peel and the penetrating insights of Robert Peston. To reach audiences who want expertly curated content, the best route for the PR is via their traditional close relationships with journalists covering similar ‘beats’.

Connections Distinct from facebook ‘friends,’ LinkedIn uses a term to donate persons that users met briefly, heard speak or know through another connection.

Paul Dwyer, Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster.

Digital Futures


Finally, much of the information we now consume comes via recommendation – links to content we receive from people we know or from people we meet via social or professional networks on social media. We can think of this process as social curation – our professional community acts as the gatekeeper, selecting and interpreting content relevant to our needs. There is every indication that audiences find this form of social curation as important a guide to content as the expert curation of the traditional journalist.

Businesses need to understand and engage with the processes of social curation in their professional networks across a range of platforms. And the key is the ‘social’ bit, not the technology. The important thing is not technical ability but the natural social skills of most PR professionals. Imagine the web as a big post-conference party, with different groups chatting about different topics. Most PRs are naturals at joining and engaging in such conversations, and often at reading the group dynamics to identify the ‘movers and shakers’. The key to a social curation strategy is engaging with social media in the same way.

Dr Paul Dwyer is a former journalist, and is a member of the Centre for Social Media Research, University of Westminster

http://www.westminster.ac.uk/csmr

ArticleBlack hat SEO Enacting unethical methods in order to receive more interest on a website, to improve website rankings, such as using doorway pages, or long lists of unnecessary keywords.

Bounce rate Term used to represent the number of people that enter a website, only to leave it again, rather than click on another page within the site.

Embed Including a video or outsourced post, to an email or website, in order to increase marketing capabilities. Often increases click-through rates (CTR).


What fuels a Tweet’s engagement?Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets

Hashtag

16%

Digit

17%

Quote

19%

Video URL

28%

Photo URL

35%

Infographic

Snapchat more popular than Twitter among US MillennialsMost popular social media apps among Americans aged 18-34 (% of smartphone users)

43.1%

75.6%

32.9%

23.8%

18.0%

17.99%

10.7%

6.3%


Comments

Media centres on company websites need to be increasingly interactive and deliver a corporate information resource not only for the media but also the public at large. Lines of audience on the web are becoming increasingly blurred and companies need to develop a content strategy to satisfy a web audience who are hungry for information. The more information you give, the more they want – it’s a virtuous circle.

“PR people are well equipped to manage the digital and social media engagement process as they are used to dealing with the media who operate on a real time basis. But they need to work closely with their marketing colleagues to develop collateral to ensure the web content is informative, accessible and up to date.

Susan Rivers, Vice President Marketing and Corporate Affairs, BNY Mellon

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The days when blanket digital advertising was an effective marketing tool are long gone. Advances in digital technologies allow marketing campaigns to be personalised down to the level of individual messages.

“Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and leave buying decisions to the very last moment. Digital marketing needs to react accordingly and ensure that data is analysed effectively to achieve the business objective.

“”Ed Luck, Sales & Marketing Director, The University of Law


Online media can offer news that is fast, customised to individual preferences, and interactive, engaging readers and experts in electronic conversation. Small wonder traditional print publications look under threat.

While print media have experienced huge retrenchments in recent years, and some have died or moved online, newsstands are still heavily stacked with publications. One reason is that, from glossy magazines to broadsheet newspapers, people enjoy the tactile feel of paper. They like being able to fold back the pages or roll up a magazine to carry.

Moreover, photos look better printed on high quality paper. People buy newspapers and magazines to keep on a coffee table, shelf or by the loo. They don’t want to bother about batteries or potential electrocution when reading in the bath.

Of course, electronic devices will improve with advances in technology, for example, pliable plastic screens and holograms. But technological progress will benefit traditional media too, with facilities such as personalisation enabling people to print newspapers or magazines customised for them on the spot.

Journalists and publishers are learning how to exploit digital and social media to their advantage. They are using websites, smartphone apps and Twitter feeds to access new audiences and promote their content. The boundaries between paper and electronic media are blurring.

While online is a great way to get to your audience quickly, it is not the ideal medium for detail and depth. Newspapers will survive by delivering well-researched background stories with better analysis and perspectives on breaking news than their digital counterparts. Liberated from the need to be first with the news, successful print publications will be more accurate, factual, and establish themselves as more trustworthy sources.

How print media will use digital and social mediaJane Bird, Freelance journalist specialising in technology and regular contributor to the Financial Times and The Economist.

Instagram An online photo sharing website, that allows you to upload photos taken on a smart phone or camera, edit them with digital filters and then post them to social media websites.


Print journalists will become better at providing content in multiple formats, video-recording interviews, putting them on YouTube, ripping the audio and sharing it through iTunes. They will post them as blogs, send them to magazines to be printed alongside associated news stories or features, and even feed the content into books or documentaries.

By exploiting technologies such as blogs, forums, email and social networks, print publications can involve readers in discussion, ideally with the author and experts quoted in the original article. Readers often contribute to developing stories and provide valuable insights.

Local newspapers will survive by building on their strengths and extending their coverage online to become more community oriented. Every town and city is different, with local content ranging from births, marriages and deaths to sports results, political activities and police arrests. Such coverage creates a market for local advertising and other ways of generating revenue, including events, sponsorship and joining forces with small and medium-sized businesses in the area.

High quality journalism is expensive, and national print media will also need to generate revenue in the digital world. One way is to give people who buy a print publication free access to the same content online. Another approach is to attract subscriptions – not easy in an environment where people have come to regard information as free. However nice the paper and clever the technology, traditional publications won’t survive if customers are not prepared to pay. Print media must rise to the challenge or die.

Article

Facetime Live video footage of users who are connected via smart phones. Used in businesses for long distance conferences.

Google Hangout An instant messaging service combined with video chat, similar to Facebook messaging. This has been used extensively by B2B brands and corporates.


Using our chief executive on social and digital media platforms has enabled us to build our company profile and give the brand a voice and personality.

Social and digital media has been a useful channel for us. Using commentary and industry insight through recent press coverage, we are able to post links which help us to communicate and celebrate our expertise and successes and engage with our clients.

Lesley Unger, Product Development, City Financial

Comments

A strong digital presence is a vital sales tool in the professional services arena as savvy companies increasingly use the web to search for suitable providers to outsource their business services.

“The majority of our direct marketing programmes are now digitally based, driving clients to our website, with a sector and sub-sector focus to make messages relevant and informative, generating strong conversion rates. We find video content receives four times more hits than text as it’s not only mobile-friendly, but provides increased engagement with the expert.

“Social media is important for general awareness and, once its starts to drive sales in the consumer sector, I expect the trend will cross over into the B2B world.

John Gibbs, Director of Marketing, Moore Stephens

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Thinking scale and niche: Business predictions for digital and social mediaMariann Hardey, Lecturer in Marketing, Durham University Business School.

How to proliferate with participationSome of the most successful social media campaigns have had a niche audience and involved those with whom content had the most impact. When it comes to the best tools for social media and digital marketing to make that impact; Communication, Connection and Engagement (CCE) are key to targeting the consumer. But for success, it is crucial to anticipate how content will allow the audience to bond, relate and share. This is not just about scale, but the relevant optimisation of content.

Today most social traffic is from mobile. Consumers are now the ‘super-sharers’, likely to be one of the 556 million global users who own a smartphone and/or tablet and access content on Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook on a daily basis. If content does not work on mobile, the guarantee is low impact and limited consumer engagement. To ensure a successful social media campaign the utilisation of share tools and targeting of social platforms should be designed to position the audience closer to content, and ultimately to encourage them to share.

In the last three years there has been a considerable shift in not only how, but who businesses should target. Social media has engaged 73% of adults in the US who have a profile on at least one SNS and to connect to 44.6 million UK adults (87%) who used the internet in the first quarter of 2014 (an increase of 1.1 million since the same period the previous year). Suddenly growth is not amongst the millenials. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reports the fastest growing proportion of social media users are women aged 30-49 years, and they also make up more than 80% of traffic on social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

Hashtag A word or unspaced phrase prefixed with a hashtag to highlight a trend. Used extensively in B2B to search for relevant posts or messages as a group.


To enhance their social media business strategy every company should implement monitoring and data-analytics tools. The key to success is comprehensive measurement. Every item of content should be analysed to understand how it spreads from initial ‘seed views’ to mature scalable ‘social impact’, and to who. The community news website BuzzFeed’s method of optimisation is based on the viral-rank rule of three - meaning they expect one story to reach three times as many people via social media. The type of delivery has importance, but it is the velocity of shares that characterises the social-web era.

The force propelling content is defined as the collective interest of consumers who think content is worth engagement. Like their supershare audience, on the social web businesses have an important voice. The clear delineation between neutral content and branded advertising has changed in tenor with ‘native advertising’ that is emerging as a convincing, but often grating force (there are numerous hi-jacked branded #hashtag campaigns on Twitter for example). Ultimately business should be cautious about irritating consumers by jamming social media and have a clear strategy that can be effectively scaled to service consumer needs.

Article

Meme A repeatedly shared image used by social media users to convey a thought, idea or joke. A typical meme contains text above and below an image; the same image can be used over and over with different text. Some B2B brands try to use Meme’s to generate leads.

Pinterest A website which enables the user to collate ideas and pictures in an organised fashion on a ‘board’. Used by businesses to share ideas or communicate key messages.


Infographic

Surrounded by screens?% of respondents* agreeing they’re “constantly looking at sceens” these days.

78%

71%

67%

64%

60%

59%

57%

49%

47%

39%

*based on a survey among 9,000 respondents aged 16-64 (18-64 in the U.S.)

China

UK

US

Brazil

Russia

Japan

Germany

South Korea

France

Spain


Native advertising Advertising that fits in with a consumer context. The advertisement follows a similar form and theme to the site on which it is placed.


Predicting the future is a risky business, but our ability to foresee what’s coming next is an important part of our capacity to plan for the future and remain competitive. This is especially challenging in the rapidly changing world of social media.

Who would have thought that Germany’s World Cup win in Brazil would draw the most social interactions ever, with 618,725 tweets a minute, or that a South Korean pop music video would become the most watched video on YouTube ever, with nearly two billion views? Who would have imagined that a simple search engine, Google, would eventually become a driver in all kinds of innovation, from autonomous vehicles to wearable technology?

However, while certainty about the future may be too much to expect, we are becoming more equipped at making sense of trends and one of the reasons for this is social media itself.

So, if you want to discover what’s next for social media, the first thing to do is make sure your company is engaged with some form of listening to keep track of developments in digital technology. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. As the volume of big data grows exponentially, the uses to which it will be put is also growing. For example, one recent project from the USA analyses past news coverage as a way of predicting future news events. The more data you acquire today, the more effective you will be at understanding trajectories within your industry in the future.

However, the reason to do this is broader than just making efficiencies or achieving competitive advantage. Listening and sharing must become central to your organisation’s values, as they are fast becoming the expectation of digital citizens. Already, today’s companies can expect individuals to complain about service failures in public via social media, rather than privately calling a customer support line. This reality requires a response that is based on values, requiring greater transparency and a demonstrable presence within the public domain that goes beyond simply marketing or brand protection.

News feed A data format that employs updated content frequently. For example on Facebook or Twitter, the news feed is updated consistently.

Selfie A picture taken of the self, usually from a smart phone in order to upload to a social media website.

What’s next for social media?Professor Andy Miah, University of West Scotland.


Article

It’s also worth considering what your business can offer for free, as an increasing amount of services have some degree of freemium model built into them. A good example of this is from the British film archive Pathé, which just released 85,000 films on YouTube, free to view. Giving something away for free is important to your customers, because they also do this; social media relies on people taking time out of their day to share something, which belongs to somebody else. So, if you are not leading by example, you can expect less love back in return from your community.

Once you have these principles in place, it’s also important to think about where innovation occurs within your social media strategy. Having the strategy alone won’t ensure that you remain competitive. Instead, rather than just invest into platforms that already have prominence, set up an informal horizon scanning group, whose job is to playfully explore new forms of social media experiences. Don’t just leave this to your marketing team; don’t just think of this as marketing.

Social media flourishes when it involves personalsation, conversation, and inspiration. Get these messages right and your reputational growth can translate into bottom line achievements. Being seen as a business with these values will go a long way to building a confident persona as an organisation and staying in touch with the latest trends.

@andymiah

Future Trends in Social Media1-5 years

• Big data becomes a core driver of mainstream news (and also market decisions).

• Mobile apps become the dominant vehicle of content consumption (make sure your website is responsive, or, even better, stop designing just websites).

• Discovery replaces search as the principle mode of obtaining information (instead of looking for something, it comes to us).

5-10 years

• Wearable technology becomes the norm and the interface with digital technology changes as a result (Google Glass is just the beginning).

• The Internet of Things becomes pervasive (for example, your refrigerator tells your supermarket provider when you are running out of food and automates delivery).

• Everything everywhere. Social media integration across all screen experiences, from cinema to health services (cloud computing becomes the dominant mode of accessing and backing up our lives).

10-15 years

• Smart cities become powered by machine learning systems (a prototype of which may be the CRISEES platform, which aggregates social media data to respond to emergencies).

• BioDigital Architecture shapes our urban world (buildings live, breathe, store, and generate power for a digital infrastructure).

• Gesture interfaces replace touch screens as the dominant mode of digital interactions.


Sentiment Refers to the attitude of user comments related to a brand in an online context. Social media monitoring often measures ‘sentiment’.


Tag cloud A visual representation for textual data. Tags may be single words or short phrases, multi coloured and different sizes (generally bigger for more importance).


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Documents

Digital Trends 2015 - Four · PDF file · 2015-12-02r 2015 3 Introduction This is the sixth annual Digital Trends Report prepared by Broadgate Mainland. In a departure from previous