This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

When we look at examples of successful social media engagement, we can identify several distinct stages through which a campaign tends to move – a trajectory which will be of obvious relevance for any marketers hoping to optimise their strategies in this area.

Step 1: Socialising promotional activity

Word of mouth is a tremendously potent force when it comes to spreading information about promotional activity; as our chart demonstrates, the majority of consumers in the UK freely admit that they enjoy talking to friends and family members about particularly good deals or discounts they’ve managed to obtain (nVision Research). Read more »

This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

During the relatively short period of time for which they have been in existence, social media platforms have exerted an intense pressure on our industries. And given the whistle-stop speed with which a message or meme can now be transmitted across groups of friends – and, in the process, potentially transform a market overnight – marketers are increasingly focusing their energy on monetising this new platform. In a way there is an amusing touch of Magic Nostalgic about this – word of mouth is after all the oldest form of marketing.

In this post, however, I want to go deeper into the subject and look at how social media platforms have fundamentally altered the way in which we communicate with our peers – as well as how this has imbued word-of-mouth with a renewed sense of potency.

In the past, if I wanted to check up on a friend, send my parents a message or ask my brother for his recommendations about which mobile phone I should buy, I had to contact them directly. Read more »

This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

To say that the future of social media belongs to the mobile will come as no surprise to most. But it is unusual to find such a significant area of opportunity gift-wrapped in inevitability; after all, there is no retro in mobile communications – the upgrade cycle is built into pay monthly contracts. OFCOM’s Communications Market Overview report last year announced that 74% of handsets sold as part of pay monthly contracts were smartphones and, each time we get to the end of our contract, we inevitably move up to the next generation of handset. This endless sequence of upgrades is driving the increased use of the mobile internet too – at the end of last year, nVision Research told us that 27% of the UK population were using the mobile web at least once a month. By 2015 this will increase to 53% and will top 70% among the under-35s. Read more »

This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

The power of social networking – and the important position it has come to play in so many of our lives – has given rise to an entirely new discipline within marketing: that of the influencer.

To quantify consumers’ online influence, we created an index using our nVision Global research and then used it to gain an insight into who these people really are. First, we looked at how closely a selection of variables correlated with two statements: “People often come to me for advice in general” and “I’m always telling friends/family about new products and services I’ve discovered”. The variables in question included key factors like the propensity to share links on social networking websites, the size of personal friendship networks, willingness to talk about brands, self-perception of influence and strength of attitudes towards word-of-mouth.  By conducting several stages of factor analysis, people were then categorised as low/medium/high in terms of their influence. [Creative Commons image by Felipe Bachomo]

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This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

Social media is addictive: as soon as we engage with it, it starts dominating our communication habits. Indeed, as part of the quantitative and qualitative research which we undertake in 21 markets across the globe for our nVision Global service, we found that – in every single country – the majority of people using social media were doing so on a daily basis.

In the past, many commentators viewed this as a sign that it would emerge as a direct competitor to traditional media – and television in particular – in terms of time use. In reality though, our other activities have not been cannibalised; rather, our viewing habits have evolved to incorporate this new channel. Read more »

This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

The interesting thing about using networks as a way of looking at society is that they are fundamentally different from previous sociological models. This means that they can lead to new insights and powerful new ways of describing individuals and social change – as well as uncovering information about groups of consumers that might otherwise be invisible.  Take the below photo of a not-so-recent family gathering, for example.

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