Online Real Estate Technology

Over the next several years, social media spending will become a bigger percentage of companies’ overall marketing budgets. Yet CMOs report there are still challenges when it comes to integrating social media into their overall business strategies.

The American Marketing Association and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business surveyed more than 400 top marketers for the February 2011 CMO Survey. They reported that over the next 12 months, social media spending will jump to 9.8% of marketing budgets, up from the current level of 5.6%. In the next five years, that percentage will increase to 18.1%.

Service companies are planning the biggest increases, as both B2B and B2C service companies have a higher percentage of their budgets set aside for social media than their product-focused counterparts. They also plan to have bigger percentages looking ahead both 12 months and five years.

This is a remarkable difference from the August 2010 CMO Survey, when service companies were decreasing spending and future projections of spending, while product companies were seeing increases. In this survey, the results are flipped, with service companies seeing increases and product companies seeing decreases.

Social media is no longer brand new, and many product companies have been experimenting in the space for some time. The current challenge for companies is to figure out the balance of marketing that works for them, and that includes a focus on product development and traditional advertising. Service companies are also realizing they must be on the cutting edge to gain clients, which includes being savvy when it comes to social media.

Yet while these CMOs are setting aside more of their budgets for social media, they are still working on integrating this newer form of communication into overall business and marketing strategies.

CMOs are more confident in the integration of social media into marketing strategies, as 10.5% feel social media is very effectively integrated into those efforts. But when it comes to companies’ overall business strategies, 25% of CMO respondents said social media is not effectively integrated at all.

As social media becomes a bigger budget line item, CMOs and their companies must face the challenge of integrating it into overall business and marketing strategies. Not only is it more cost-effective to incorporate social media into marketing and overall strategies, but it also makes marketing more effective overall.

View the original article here

Email remains the top choice for marketing communications among all age groups

 

The latest death knell for email was sounded by data in comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report, which noted a decline in time spent with web-based email among all US internet users under 55. Users ages 12 to 17, who have been most likely to drop email in favor of other online communications like social networking, had the steepest decline in usage, down 59%.

But web-based email checked at a desktop computer is only one slice of all email communications, and email represents an overwhelmingly important communications channel.

According to research from customer relationship marketing agency Merkle, 87% of internet users checked personal email daily in 2010, a number that has changed little since 2007. Among those with a separate email account for commercial email, 60% checked daily, down just 1 percentage point since 2008.

Further, social media usage is hardly taking away from email. Rather, social media users are significantly more likely than other internet users to check their email four or more times per day, and less likely to check infrequently.

Mobile access is also encouraging email users to check more often. More than half (55%) of those surveyed who had an internet-enabled mobile phone checked their personal email using their phone, and nearly two-thirds of mobile email users checked their account at least once a day.

There is some evidence that personal communications are shifting away from email, though. Messages from friends and family are taking up a smaller share of all time spent with email, while the share spent with commercial emails is rising. And the proportion of respondents spending at least 20 minutes per week with email from friends and family fell from 71% in 2009 to 66% in 2010.

But email is still a major method of communicating for the vast majority of internet users. Across all age groups, it was the top choice for receiving commercial communications. Most respondents preferred the phone for personal communication, but email was the most important online channel for communicating with friends and family among every age group except 18- to 29-year-olds, a demographic for whom email was tied with social networks.

The Harcourts property franchise will team up with rural services business Landmark in a bid to challenge the dominance of the Elders real estate brand.

The deal, announced yesterday, will cover both companies’ regional and rural real estate operations by April in the joint venture, Landmark Harcourts.

The new business will include some of Harcourts’ 280 Australian offices and Landmark’s 125 rural real estate branches and is expected to turn over some $20 billion in property sales a year.

The existing Landmark real estate business will be rebranded as a part of an equal-party joint venture that will be ”integrated into the greater Harcourts family,” Harcourts Australasian head Bryan Thomson said.

Since its formation in New Zealand in 1888, Harcourts has established a network of 640 real estate franchises in Australia, Indonesia, South Africa and China.

Landmark’s rural services business operates from 400 locations in Australia.

The new business will incorporate the companies’ rural and regional operations and leave Harcourts’ metropolitan business unchanged.

Story by Simon Johanson www.smh.com.au

When looking at industry segment, marketers appear most conservative about spending, where agencies appear most op¬timistic. Agencies (14%) are more likely than marketers (10%) to say expected marketing expenditure will greatly increase (25% or more) during the next 12 months. Marketers are more likely than others (32%, compared to 21% of marketing service professionals and 18% of agencies) to say they plan to maintain overall marketing expenditure during the next 12 months.

Three-fourths of those surveyed estimate their social/digital marketing expenditure will increase during the next year, with one-fourth overall projecting it will increase greatly (25% or more). Alterian says the estimated growth above and beyond overall marketing expenditure projection is indicative that social/digital marketing will drive general marketing growth in the coming year.

MSPs are more likely than others to say they plan to maintain overall social/digital media expenditure during the next 12 months. They are less likely than others to say they plan to slightly increase (5-25%) social/digital media expenditure in the next year. Again, agencies maintain the most optimistic outlook and are more likely than others to say expected social/digital media expenditure will greatly increase (25% or more) in the next 12 months.

When it comes to audience engagement on company websites, only a small number (11%) tailor each visitor’s experience. With one third using their site as a corporate brochure and more than half (55%) concentrating on offers and campaigns, the large majority do not focus on any kind of individualized company or brand experience based on each customer’s needs and/or information. When it comes to websites, this indicates a mass marketing strategy is still the norm, as opposed to personalization.

Moderately ahead of the pack, agencies are less likely than others to say a client website’s main focus is to serve as a corporate brochure. Alterian analysis indicates that perhaps due to the nature of their business, agencies tend to be more advanced along the engagement maturity model. As consumers begin to expect more from their brand experiences and interactions, other industry segments will be obliged to catch up.

Results of the recent Aberdeen Group report “”Predictive Analytics – Driving Sales with Customer Insights” indicate that top performing marketing organizations are more likely to have access to different types of customer data. Dividing respondents into best-in-class (top 20% aggregate performance) and all others (including industry average with middle 50% industry performance and laggard with bottom 30% industry performance), the study shows that 77% of best-in-class organizations have access to all customer transactional data, compared to only 58% of other organizations.

In addition, 64% of best-in-class organizations have access to customer behavior data, compared to 53% of other organizations. Similar discrepancies exist in levels of access to internal unstructured data (55% compared to 39%) and external unstructured data (41% compared to 26%).

Aberdeen advises that access to customer data enables sales-enhancing activities such as modeling lifetime customer value, market segmentation, and prioritizing inbound sales leads.

About the Data:This survey of 1,462 global marketing professionals was conducted from October 9, 2010 to December 17, 2010, both online and offline.

View the original article here

Marketing trends—especially in digital—are motivating brands to be more interactive and engaged with their customers. Rather than pushing out interruptive messages that targets will ignore or find annoying, many are working to create marketing experiences that appeal to customers as individuals. And they know if they neglect to do so their brand could be at risk.

In an Alterian survey of marketing professionals, nearly three-quarters said they or their clients tried to create personalized customer experiences through email, the top channel for doing so. Direct mail, website and social media fell far behind but nearly even with each other in the 53% to 59% range.

Notably, less than 9% of respondents said they did not use any of the cited channels for a personalized customer experience. While marketers may not use every channel at their disposal to do so, they recognize the importance of personalization.

Asked specifically about email, a plurality of respondents said they segment their audience and send different messages based on the segmentation. The second-most-popular response, however, was blast emails with basic personalization—which is often not enough to appeal to recipients. Only about half as many said they delivered truly personalized email marketing messages based on individual preferences.

Based on their usage of digital channels for personalized and interactive marketing, most respondents felt their brands could be at risk because of a lack of customer engagement. A majority of that group claimed to be taking action based on problems they had already recognized, but some still did not know where to start. Less than a quarter reported they were fully engaged.

View the original article here

Australia experienced one of the strongest housing markets in the world during 2010, new research shows.

But likely interest rate hikes will slow the market in 2011, the Global Real Estate Trends report predicts.

The report, released by Canada’s Scotiabank, tracked the housing markets in 12 advanced economies throughout 2010.

Home prices increased in Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

They remained flat in Germany and the United States, and fell in Ireland, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Australia led the pack, thanks to relatively-low unemployment and tight housing supply.

But interest rate hikes and a cut to the first homeowners grant slowed a "red-hot" property market in 2010 to some degree, the report said.

Economist Adrienne Warren anticipates the Reserve Bank of Australia will lift interest rates by an additional 75 basis points in 2011.

Australia’s close trade ties with Asia and resource wealth would continue to underpin a solid pace of domestic activity.

"Higher interest rates will worsen already strained affordability," Ms Warren said in a statement.

Canada’s market also fared well, but was "one of the most volatile" expected to be tempered by more moderate employment and income growth in 2011.

The UK property market staged a strong early-year recovery while Germany’s decade-long housing slump also came to an end.

But it was a different story in Spain, Ireland and Italy, where the market continues to fall.

Japan’s two-decade long property slump continued in 2010, and is expected to slump further in 2011 on the back of a weaker economy.

The surprise result came from the US where the housing market stabilised.

That trend is expected to continue, with the report predicting the US Federal Reserve to maintain its record-low 0.25 per cent rate through the end of 2011.

Source: www.ninemsn.com.au

Next year, marketers will need to rethink their approach to advertising and marketing and intensify their focus on creating magnetic content that will naturally attract consumers, rather than relying solely on the interruption model of advertising, which consumers are responding to less and less. Think pull vs. push.

Magnetic content can include anything created on behalf of a brand—be it an ad, YouTube video, online game, Facebook page, Twitter promo or mobile app—that consumers genuinely want to engage with and pass along to others. This content entertains, amuses, informs, serves a function or satisfies a consumer need. It’s welcome instead of annoying or interruptive.

Marketers, especially those working in social media, have seen the proven value of branded content, sometimes also referred to as “earned media.” Nearly three-quarters of US companies with a social media strategy used such content in their campaigns, making it the most common type of content used, according to a June 2010 study by King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42.

Creating effective, breakthrough advertising has always been a challenge for marketers, as well as for the agencies charged with the task. But the classic interruption-disruption model of advertising is moribund. Marketers should ask themselves five questions about the magnetic content they are seeking to create to determine whether it will be truly attractive to their audience:

Is the content unique? Is the content useful? Is the content well executed? Is the content fun? Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?

Marketers should base their magnetic content ideas on well-researched customer behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles. This entails altering your emphasis in marketing from “selling product” to identifying and solving a consumer need or want that transcends or complements the physical product or service you are selling. Ask yourself this critical question: Besides your product, what can you do for the consumer?

View the original article here

Combined advertising and promotional spending will hit $38 billion by 2015, roughly 440% more than the $7 billion projected for 2010, according to a new white paper from Borrell Associates.

Breaking the combined social network marketing spending stream into advertising and promotional streams, “The Social Networking Explosion: Ad Revenue Outlook” projects that $5 billion of total $7 billion (about 71%) social network marketing spending in 2010 will consist of promotional expenditures.

From 2010 to 2015, social network promotional spending will grow about 380%. In 2011, it will grow 40% to $7 billion, and then slow down to about 14% growth in 2012, totaling $8 billion, However, social network promotional spending will then double to $16 billion in 2013, and continue rapid growth the next year, increasing 31% to $21 billion before slowing again with 12.5% growth to $24 billion in 2015.

Although Borrell data shows social network advertising spending will remain at lower levels than promotional spending through the next five years, the total growth rate will be an even higher 600%.

In 2011, social network ad spending will grow 200%, from $2 billion to $6 billion, putting it on close to an even keel with promotional spending. Ad spending will remain close to promotional spending in 2012, rising almost 17% to $7 billion.

However, in 2013, ad spending will once again lag behind promotional spending, growing a very healthy 43% to $10 billion. Growth will then continue at a still impressive 20% pace to $12 billion in 2014 and 17% pace to $14 billion in 2015.

Borrell analysis indicates the rapidly growing marketing spend in social networking is fueled by wildly climbing consumer use of social networking services. The paper cites data from comScore which says Facebook alone had more than 100 million unique visitors in the US last December, out of 400 million registered users worldwide.

The average Facebook visitor came to the site 27 times during that month, almost once a day. As of the end of 2009, one hour in every nine spent online was spent on a social network site. More than two-thirds of the nation’s largest businesses recruit new employees through social networks, and 13% more plan to start this year.

Asked to rate various technology tools on a scale of 1 to 7 (7 meaning extremely important and 1 not important at all), the average respondent to a recent Gartner study rated social networking tools at slightly more than 4. Social networking only ranked ahead of four other tools, all of which have a social media aspect: wikis, social tagging/bookmarking, web feeds and blogs.

Email was clearly ranked as most important, with an average score near 7. The only other tool to receive an average score of more than 6 was group calendars/scheduling. The top five tools were rounded out by web conferencing, team workspaces, and simple end-user tools.

View the original article here

The man credited with inventing the internet has lashed out at Facebook and other social networking sites saying they are moving the web away from its founding principles.

In an essay in Scientific American magazine, Tim Berners-Lee says social networking sites are tightly controlling the information put on there by users meaning the internet’s being split into fragmented islands.

Berners-Lee said there is a chance Facebook could become so big that it could limit innovation.

Source: www.ninemsn.com.au

Facebook has moved one step closer in its efforts to trademark the word "face", after receiving the green light from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The Office has issued a notice of allowance to the social networking juggernaut, allowing the company to own the word after paying a fee, the NY Post reported.

The trademark will allow Facebook to challenge any of the 89,000 websites using the word "face" in their domain name.

The trademark would cover "telecommunication services, namely providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars".

A Facebook spokesperson would not reveal why an exemption was given to cars.

Several companies are considered to be in the sights of Facebook’s legal department, including Apple over its video conferencing service Facetime and a pornography website called Faceporn.

Facebook has also sued websites Teachbook, Placebook and Lamebook in order to protect the social network’s identity.

Facebook has already been successful in trademarking the words "Like" and "Wall".

Source: ninemsn.com.au