We unveiled the first edition of the Future of Sharing with you this past February during Social Media Week, including a sample of our initial findings.

Now, for the first time, the complete whitepaper is available for download!

This study was conducted in order to take a deeper link into these four questions:

• Where are consumers sharing and why?
• What types of content are shared most?
• How are consumer’s lifestyles and surrounding environments impacting sharing and their interactions with brands?
• Why are consumers sharing certain content; i.e. what are the current/future trends in what makes content share-worthy?

Find the answers, along with insights from industry leaders, and recommendations for the future in the full document.

To download the PDF, visit this link (right-click “Save As” or “Save Link As”)  or check out the whitepapers section on the right-hand side of Bynd.com

Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts with us below!

The shift of consumers increasingly going online to exchange opinions and consume information has reshaped the purchase journey for many of the products they buy. Instead of picking up a camera magazine or visiting a store and making decisions based on talking to the person helping them in the shop, a camera buyer is more likely to search online to find other people’s opinions in camera forums or user review sites to help make their choices. In the chart below is a representation of the purchase journey, taken from our model, which shows the digital touchpoints that are becoming critical in that journey.

These interactions between consumer and digital touch points in the journey, generate massive amounts of data.  We believe that there is a large amount of value that can be unlocked from this data in terms of understanding motivations, trends, and behavior of the people that matter most to brands – their customers and prospects. Marketers are still spending a large amount of their research budgets on traditional methods to understand their customers (online surveys are not exactly much of a radical departure from traditional methods, so they don’t count). This is changing, and it will complement rather than replace traditional research.

Systematic and methodologically rigid harvesting of social conversations and behavioral data is in the process of legitimizing this amongst a few leading brands (a few of which we are working with currently).  And as consumers start to understand that brands actually are paying attention to what they want, it will create a stronger incentive to share, as it will ultimately benefit those consumers. This is why taking social media monitoring several steps beyond the very basic volumetric and sentiment metrics that is broadly in use today is something we are very excited about.We believe that the path to this requires sound methodologies based on established research techniques and an understanding of consumer behavior theory.

Analyzing organic conversations also has several advantages over traditional market research:

• You remove the bias that can occur when incentives are paid
• You are observing conversations as they would happen naturally (or organically, as some call it), rather than in a situation where the consumer is aware that their opinion is being measured
• You are more likely to discover insights that you weren’t looking for
• You are measuring perceptions that may have a bigger influence on others than other consumer perceptions (because they appear online)

To provide these insights to clients, we segment people into groups of shared affinity by defining the Interest Graphs that bring them together online. This unlocks value by understanding consumer data, motivations, trends, and behavior associated with these shared affinities so that brands can tailor their marketing accordingly. Before we explore the interest graph however, we must understand how applying consumer insights from social conversations is relevant to marketing on a whole.

Our clients are using our social media-based Consumer Insights analysis to complement traditional market research through a more real-time, scalable, and yet exploratory approach. This is used in a variety of applications:

Product Launch Preparation

• Discover and quantify consumer motivators and inhibitors to adoption, emotional response, language use, message resonance, perceived competitor positioning

Product Development

• Discover and quantify perceived likes/dislikes, as well as desired features

Creative/Campaign Development

• Gain insight into how a brand connects with audiences and the emotions and language audiences use around it

Campaign Optimisation

• Discover what content & messages audiences respond to, for messaging development & channel optimisation; understand target audience behaviours, buzz/earned media generated

We’ve created an “inflowgraphic” to illustrate the overall structure of our process. While this model is heavily adapted and specially structured to the unique needs of each of our clients, the thinking visualized below informs everything we do.

• What they search for (on Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, etc.)
• What they follow (on Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Tumblr, Quora, etc)
• What they express (as blog posts, tweets, pins, stashes, statuses, reviews, pictures, conversations, etc.)

Analyzing these conversations and interest graphs helps us to understand needs, motivations, emotions, frustrations, and goals for target user segments. Through these methods, we can help inform brand strategy, brings businesses closer to creating meaningful conversations and experiences for their audiences.

The channel features content produced by 4 Vloggers (video bloggers) – each of which won a competition to have this opportunity and will now use the platform to offer insights into fashion and beauty within Brazil via short and engaging videos.

We chose to produce a custom-built carousel to house the videos in order to offer a unique, clean and seamless means of navigation through the material as the volume of content increases during the campaign. 

Beyond are thrilled to be building on our previous Youtube projects within Brazil such as our yearly coverage of Carnaval.

During 2011 alone, Brazil’s Internet population grew by 16% (comScore) with IAB Brazil estimating a total Brazilian online audience at more than 81m people (aged 16+).

The digital landscape here is fluctuating at a great pace. In comparison to markets where similar changes have been on-going for the past 10 years, you can’t help but notice that it seems like, for Brazil, everything is happening at once – an exciting time for a country which will be hosting the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games in 2014.

After about an hour the time came to announce the top flight awards, beginning with best start-up. Beyond’s name was read out as the winner which prompted the team in attendance to storm the stage and accept the award en masse before posing for a very rowdy photo (which I am sure will follow at some point this week). The final three awards passed in a blur and before long the champagne was flowing as the house band kicked off the party which continued well into the night.

Judges for the award were from Twitter, P&G, Expedia, BrandAlley, Marketing Magazine as well as the larger agencies. They highlighted our “innovative approach to digital” and our growth rate (new business and client growth), as the key factors in winning the award.

Agency of the year next year then….

Best Start Up Award

As almost everyone knows, Google is the main engine of discovery for people looking to find things on the web. Sometimes it is called upon to answer questions such as “am I pregnant” “what colour is the sky” “what is the best rock band ever” or “what is the answer to life, the universe and everything?”

When a site is removed for any reason, it often has a huge impact on that business.  I was seeing reports of domains and businesses that had been around for over a year, two years, suddenly dropped from the search rankings altogether.  This initial experience seems to be related to what some saw as Google banning IPs where a site had been naughty.  This isn’t the first time Google has taken this kind of action but as it affected many on shared hosting, it affected more sites that this kind of adjustment had previously.  JonMu in the Google support forums helped a number of people recover but many more remain stranded in oblivion.

The other thing that happened was something that may be linked to an upsurge in notices that were sent out about “unnatural links”. These notices were sent to a number of people around the UK and US who had been detected through placement of lower quality links to have been trying to ‘game the system’. As many websites know, placing a link just to affect rankings is against Google’s TOS and so if they detect that activity they will penalise and it seems this has happened.

The people who admitted to being affected seemed to have a particularly similar set of circumstances. Not all of these apply all of the time and sometimes there were other factors but broadly making generalisations that won’t be true in all cases, the factors seemed to be:
They were new domains
They had a lot of forum post links
They had a number of blogroll links
They were buying links
They were spinning articles

Now, I have come out in the past and said “if you buy links, don’t be stupid”. Buying links should send some traffic to the site. I’d like to believe that if I have selected a place to buy a link from that I’m getting traffic from the link. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t but I always like to think that if I’m paying for that space I’m getting something out of it and that is relevant traffic. We called that advertising back in the day and that’s the way I’ve always wanted to approach it. I also remember when links were the only way to find another relevant site. I’d like to think that I (mostly) stick to that old ethos.

In this new Google-dominated world where we are subject to a monopoly who owns the rights to make a change and vanish our sites from discoverability and therefore force us out of business, we all have to go back to basics. If your business has been outsourcing link building, make sure you’ve checked your Google Webmaster Tools messages, you know what techniques are being used and have MajesticSEO installed on your site. Google rules business right now and making sure you have read their canon and heed the words delivered to you on your own personal flaming tablet Webmaster Tools control panel as well as staying informed is important.

By looking at a number of examples in addition to American Express’ Open, we have identified 10 Steps to Building a Successful Editorial Destination for B2B Brands:

1. Editorial Voice: Have a clear editorial policy and voice that is grounded in the content that the audience cares about
2. Brand Independence: Separate the editorial from the brand and don’t let the brand marketing people near the content
3. Recruit Authors: Recruiting authors who have their own readerships will help drive your audience
4. Cross Promote: Set up and establish relationships with publishers to cross promote content
5. Content Strategy: Ensure you have the right mix of simple hints and tips to indpeth articles depending on the needs of the audience
6. Long term: Establishing a successful property needs time, so if you don’t want to give it at least 12 months don’t bother
7. Search equity: A key part of attracting an audience is to plan the content around the search terms that are relevant for the audience you are trying to reach
8. Distribution is Key: Investment in paid media (as well as earned and owned media) is key to building an audience
9. Professional editor: Magazines are successful because they are run by professional editors. A brand property is no different.
10. Emotional Connection: Just because you have a business audience doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun and appeal to the consumer within

If we look at the reasons for the success of Open Forum, we can see how they adopted some of these principles in creating such a successful property:

• By working with Federated Media, very early on they established a coterie of established authors who didn’t just create compelling content but who cross-promoted the destination on their own publishing sites all of which already had an established audience
• American Express relinquished editorial control to a third party and allowed the content to cover any aspect of a running a small and medium business regardless of whether it related to American Express’ business directly
• Because of the editorial integrity of the content, American Express built up a trust with its readership enabling the site to be closely coupled to the American Express brand. This in turn made it easy for readers to move very quickly from awareness or consideration to purchase (i.e. signing up for a credit card)
• The Open brand (as it is now called – not Open Forum) has now become a marketing platform for American Express. For example, it is the umbrella under which American Express now publishes studies in support of small and medium businesses
• The editorial policy and voice is very in sync with its readership. Small and medium business owners don’t consider themselves SMEs nor do they have time to read in depth articles about business. Instead they are defined more by their location and their industry and want practical actionable hints and tips. This is exactly what the editorial policy serves up
• American Express invested heavily in paid media across a huge range of related titles to build its audience which is now paying dividends

Finding other examples of business to business brands that have done a good job of transforming themselves into a publisher isn’t easy. I don’t think it is a coincidence that another company that has gone down this route is Intuit, with its blog. In many ways it is a direct replica of Open but without the “big name” authors to drive its readership and syndicate content. It also hasn’t made any attempt to distance the destination from the Intuit brand by creating a secondary platform.

One of the things that both American Express and Intuit have in common is that they are both targeting buyers within SMEs who behave as much like consumers as they do businesses, which is probably one of the reasons these two brands are early adopters in the B2B space following the early examples found in the B2C world.

But what about brands outside of the SME space that have attempted to establish an editorial destination? A couple of other examples I have come across are Citrix and Adobe. I think both of these examples have important elements from which we can learn.

While Citrix sells its products and services to businesses, this site is not targeting the IT buyer, but the ultimate benefactor of the technology by focusing on the application of the technology in creating a better lifestyle. What’s more, I like the way that Citrix has established this destination as part of a strategy to insert itself (and own) a conversation about a different way of working that is a huge driver in the adoption of its technology.

Adobe’s approach in targeting CMO’s has been to create a heavyweight resource for by aggregating articles and reports from a wide range of established publications, blogs and research institutes as well as commissioning content from its own stable of contributors. Given the senior nature of the target audience, Adobe has done a  great job of leveraging existing content to create a valuable resource. Some of te content is only available to subscribers, thereby driving greater brand awareness and consideration with the reader.

The final example is one which we can learn from in a different way. Salesforce has set up a destination. As you can see it is only very loosely tied to Salesforce (perhaps for good reason). The look and feel of it is off putting from the outset. It looks like the content has been taken straight from a brochure rather  than being any attempt to create an editorial destination with real integrity and authority.

There is no doubt that Tom Foremski’s prediction all those years ago is going to happen. It has just taken a long time to make its way into the B2B world. While the actual execution behind creating these sites is not difficult, the biggest obstacle is the overall attitude of the organization to having a property that is not pumping out uni-directional product marketing messages. Only when an organization can mentally wrap its head around a new type of content marketing can it hope to replicate the success of American Express’ Open.

A funny thing happens as you begin to get attached to a new social platform– you become mighty persnickety about how other people are using it.

Lovers of crafts, recipes, and good photography on Pinterest have all run into the same pet peeves: some Pinner who credits “Google Image Search”, a link that leads to an outdated or general page instead of the individual post, and so on.

More recently, I’ve been seeing Pinners of my own kind, fellow community managers and social media enthusiasts, making different kinds of mistakes repeatedly on my new favorite service when trying to promote their own sites.

We can’t always control how other people Pin our content, but we can always set a good example and encourage others to follow suit.

What’s important to remember is that unlike most other bookmarking sites, where users can expect to read a paragraph of summary text accompanied by a vague stock photo, Pinterest is all about the instant pleasure of seeing something and knowing exactly what it is.

Example: The reason that bacon cinnamon rolls get repinned 20x more than your “10 Ten Ways to Convert Likes into Customers” post is that it just plain looks better! When I look at a delicious picture of a finished dessert, I get the idea that this may be a pretty good recipe. With bland “tech-y” stock photo or even just a screenshot of your Facebook page, I get no ideas at all.

Yum!

Yuck.

Season your blog post Pin with one juicy, visual morsel of information– a preview of strategies to follow or an interesting mnemonic device. Give me a reason to wonder what’s next, not just wonder what it is.

Another problem I see with many self-promoters is a lack of tag and board organization. Pinterest’s search functionality is limited as it is: don’t make it harder on yourself by leaving a description such as “Some cool factoids” when you want people interested about Facebook metrics to Repin you. That said, if I see your Email Marketing post lurking around while I’m searching for cabbage recipes, I’m likely to skip over it as well. The best recipe and beauty Pins are hashtagged and/or titled with all you need to know.

Lastly, and this goes without saying, even if you’ve got a great thumbnail and tantalizing description, if your original post is junk (or worse, just a placeholder that leads to more confusing material) I’m definitely not going to want to Follow you, let alone Pin your material. Craft bloggers and chefs are bound by the fact that they’re trying to teach their readers, and if their readers are unable to reproduce the right results, well, you get something like this blog: http://craftfail.com/

In short:

• Be visual!
• Be specific!
• Be useful!

And you’ll be on your way to successful Pinning!

What are your top pet peeves when it comes to Pinning? Tell us in the comments! Plus, don’t forget to Follow Beyond on Pinterest!

The web is full of knowledge, inspiration and techniques that we use in our projects, but sometimes is that is not enough. Reading a blog post or a book conveys a message but inspiration can also come from the way a message is conveyed by someone in person.

This is why we, like many in our industry, attend events, meet-ups and conferences. Events like London Web Standards and Future Of Web Design give us a chance to meet and learn from the leaders of our digital world.

Going to an event like these is incredibly useful and inspiring. Being taught by a thought leader directly at an event feels like attending a complete web development or design course in only few hours. You also have the added benefit of meeting and discussing interesting topics with other similar people from different environments. We enjoy sharing thoughts about future technologies, trends and projects and to be more conscious about what we do every day.

These conferences are useful not only for you and your team but also for your entire company. After the event you have the chance to share your learnings with your colleagues and productively use that knowledge on projects.

There are so many good conferences around the world, many of which are accessible and free. Here are some of our favourites:

• London Web Standards
• Future Of Web Design
• Brooklyn Beta
• Build
• New Adventures In Web Design
• Frontend
• Valio Con
• An Event Apart
• dConstruct
• Ampersand

If you want to meet us and discuss all things digital, let us know.
We will be at Future Of Web Design London in May.

There are some great examples of dynamic and interactive, visualisations:

Trends in higher education - clear, concise with traditional infographic aesthetic.

Political Climate

Bloomberg

One of the issues with standard delivery is that by the time the graphic is produced the data is out of date. However, the development costs and accessibility issues of producing a dynamic, content managed infographic are in reality often unworthy of its lifespan. This becomes increasingly relevant with information ‘Snacking’ in the mobile and tablet market and through social media channels.

Relevant, up to date data, combined with effective, attractive data visualisation for the consumer or industry market is the holy grail.

Combining cross browser compatible svg libraries such as Raphaël with innovative data delivery you can push the boundaries of beautiful interactive graphics that will look as good on your desktop as on your tablet or smartphone.

Here are a few examples from Raphaël, imagine the potential with a great design team at your disposal…
Gears
Circles

Not only will these graphics look fantastic on any device or machine, print to any size you want, create a pdf, these vector graphic will never lose quality. With techniques developed here at Beyond these graphic can even be translated straight from an Illustrator file into Raphaël and manipulated from there.

Keeping the data up to date can be implemented through Google docs or any spreadsheet data source, no CMS or server side technology required, simply update the source and save. This facilitates a self sustaining, up-dateable infographic, without the need for an expensive content management system.

This has so many uses, not only to feed your Twitter stream or blog, but presenting data in a visual, communicative way as easily as updating a spreadsheet.

Promise.