The Council research team is pleased to introduce you to our shiny new Mobile Marketing Resource Center.  We’re especially pleased with the launch, because we’ve had our research teams in India, Europe and North America focused on scouring the planet for the best mobile marketing executions and resources.

Consider this your virtual tour.  If you’re an MLC member, we invite you to click through to the various sections of the resource center, and download to your heart’s content.

You’ll find four sections in the resource center (for now—more to come in the coming months as we continue our research). Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Between crowded malls, prices varying by location, or, just not knowing where to find a product—shopping can be a headache.

The good news is, with the increasing number of mobile users, and explosion of smartphone apps, consumers can use their phones to ease their shopping woes.

What makes a great mobile shopping app? Aside from easing the customer’s life, they also deepen the brand (e.g., decreasing customers’ transaction efforts), and scale quickly (e.g., integrating social propellants)—attributes that marketers should aim to provide with their mobile executions to make them stick.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the best mobile shopping apps out there: Read More »

Here’s a little brain candy idea for where and how to focus word-of-mouth efforts in the B2B services space. It’s based on some findings from our ongoing B2B buying center survey research, as well as questions we’re getting from members about how best to use LinkedIn (see also this recent blog post that includes advice directly from the folks at LinkedIn on using that platform for lead gen).

Here’s the idea: equip your account managers to approach a select set of customers to write LinkedIn recommendations about successfully-mitigated risks. Read More »

For our major B2C research initiative this year, we’re looking into changing consumer purchase processes. So much has changed in the b2c world – economic downturn, increasing options, new information and influence sources – that we had to believe the way people buy has changed as well.

We’ll be talking a lot more about our findings at our executive meeting series and webinar series starting this summer, but we certainly have found some surprising things, a few of which we’ll talk about here.

First off – the purchase funnel is dead, or at least a lot less common than we think it is. Read More »

By Whitney Satin

One of the major themes evolving in both the B2C and B2B spaces this year has to do with the role of influencers in facilitating customer movement through the thing formerly known as the purchase funnel (see Karen’s post on how this concept is now outdated).  Learning how to influence the influencer, increasingly through the use of social media, was a key topic at SXSW, and the earliest results of our own B2B customer research show that leveraging online word of mouth earlier in the buying process can be a crucial part of “unsticking” potentially stalled deals.

Of course, not all social channels operate in the same way.  Information flows differently across Youtube than it does across a peer-to-peer online community than it does across the blogosphere. Media communications researcher Harold Lasswell stated more than a half decade ago that the challenge is to understand “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect”; in today’s world with an even greater number of channels at our finger tips, understanding the patterns of information flow proves essential. Read More »

Humanitarian and disaster-aid organizations – like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders – establish big media presences across traditional and digital/social channels in the wake of events like those in Japan in the last few weeks. They do it for a lot of reasons – to solicit funds for the recovery efforts, to reassure people worried about similar disasters in their communities, and to inspire brand awareness and ongoing support in the months and years after the immediate crisis. Read More »

(this is a guest post from Jonathan Grieb of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communicators and public relations professionals)

When crises like the events in Japan strike, corporations play a number of vital roles in helping society to respond effectively.   We, as large organizations, are an important social network that helps authorities account for those most affected.  We are a communications channel to provide critical emergency instructions to affected areas.  We are a trusted source of information in a cluttered environment.  Our resources provide the technology, supplies, and expertise to support immediate relief.  Our employees and foundations donate significant aid funds.  Our early statements shape policy discussions to minimize future disasters.  And, lastly, our collective response efforts ensure global economic continuity and minimize collateral damage. Read More »

As consumer marketing becomes more about customer participation and experiences, “launch and leave” campaign-oriented sites are becoming a thing of the past. One SxSW panel (with speakers from Skype and two agencies) offered tips for moving towards “always on” marketing.  Here are the biggest takeaways for platform creation and community management: Read More »

Here at South by Southwest, there’s been a lot of talk of influencers and how to engage them.  A group that gets far less attention are the lurkers – the community members who don’t actively participate.  They’re easy to forget because they’re not vocal. And they’re often dismissed because they don’t contribute valuable content, answer other customers’ questions, or advocate your products on the community.

But one SxSW talk took a different angle, claiming that lurkers are in fact your most important community members. Read More »

One of the most talked about events at South by Southwest this year was the opening keynote on “The Game Layer” by Seth Priebatsch, CEO at SCVNGR, a location-based service company.

“The last decade was the decade of the social layer,” says Seth. It was all about connections – as epitomized by Facebook.  The next decade will add a “game layer” to everything we do.  This layer will transform everyday activities into games designed to encourage certain behaviors. This isn’t just about Angry Birds or Farmville; it’s about understanding what motivates us and then tweaking the rules and rewards of the “game” accordingly. The social layer, combined with location-based technologies, laid the groundwork for communal games between groups of otherwise unconnected individuals. Seth thinks this has the potential for ten times more impact than social media – and he makes a good case for it. Read More »