Adobe's Global Digital Advertising Update Sees Increase in Social Engagement and Mobile Traffic

Adobe has released their Q3 2012 Global Digital Index Report, which analyzes and reports the findings on social engagement and paid searches.

Adobe is pretty focused on the customer experience. The provider of digital marketing solutions conducts a lot of research into trends in its industry. In August we saw research pointing to the growth of mobile for online shopping.

Now we dig deeper into the what's happening in the digital advertising industry today and where it is headed next year. The data in this report (Q3 2012 Digital Advertising Update) came from over 260 billion impressions for 338 companies and the activity of 70 million fans — taken from Adobe AdLens and Adobe Social.

Search Trends

Web traffic has started to shift in more of mobile route with the increase of smartphones and tablets. At the same time, search spend is also increasing in the US, UK and Germany, despite a bad economy, demonstrating how important search still is in the marketers arsenal of advertising tools.

ROI and Spend

• Searches and ROI has been growing in the U.K, U.S and Germany over the past year. In the US search spend was up by 11 percent, and ROI improved by 26 percent. In the UK and Germany spend was up by 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively, YoY.
• The percentages that were related to specific search engines in the last quarter didn’t change much. Bing/Yahoo! increased by one per cent, while Google declined by one per cent.

Click Volume and CPC

• Click volume had a surge of activity over the last quarter. Google, which was down in the last quarter has slowly been improving. Their average for this quarter was up 21 percent YoY, while Bing/Yahoo decreased to 11 percent YoY.
• Google CPCs were down 10% YoY, and the report points to the increase in mobile clicks as part of the reason for this.

Mobile Devices

Overall search spend has increased across all devices, but conversion rates, CPCs and ROI varies widely. Conversion rates vary by device and OS, with iOS nearly double those of Android. This supports the idea that marketers need to organize their search spend differently across devices.

Social Engagement

Facebook has become a key source for companies to spread their brand. According to the advertising update, engagement, which is defined as likes, comments and shares, on the social network grew about 896 percent YOY. It was determined that increased engagement is partly a result of platform updates (specifically Timeline), new metrics for acquisition and engagement, and more effective social marketing. 

Forecasting Search

Adobe is expecting search to have a strong retail season, with a prediction of 15-20% growth in both the US and Europe. It also expects CPCs to increase due to the holiday season and to Google Shopping transitioning to a paid model. Paid search clicks are also expected to continue to increase from mobile devices (smartphone or tablet). And finally, expect that Facebook advertising will grow.

Report Conclusions

• Social Engagement is becoming a key and valuable tool that should be used when marketing a product to a general or specific audience.
• Search should also continue to be part of the marketing tool set as it continues to grow, especially on mobile devices.
• Marketers should spend time forming a plan on how to make search spend part of their tool set, as it is becoming important to digital marketing. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jive Software to Drive Engagement with Badgeville Game Mechanics

Jive Software has announced the integration of Badgeville game mechanics into its social collaboration platform, an effort to increase engagement and adoption among those using the system on a daily basis.

It's not that Jive isn't so appealing to people, but by offering rewards for sharing information, for example, companies have another tool to make new workflows a bit less painful to introduce.

Rewards and Reputations

Simple psychology tells us people like to be acknowledged for the work they do. They like knowing the work they do matters. Game mechanics or gaming principles give people instant feedback and rewards for performing desired behaviors. With Badgeville's system of leader boards, levels, achievements and of course badges, Jive Software customers have an inventive way to make collaborating a bit more interesting.

Rewards for filling out a personal profile are a popular gamification technique.

Jive Integrates Box File Sharing

Jive also announced a new Box file sharing feature called Box Embed. It gives access in Jive to Box features via an API. Box files can be up and downloaded from Jive, documents can sync across both systems and there is also a cross system search feature. Social collaboration always becomes much more productive with document sharing abilities, and with Box, a powerful ally is added to an already impressive Jive system.

Gartner researchers again pointed to Jive as a leader in Social Software for the Workplace in early October. Jive ecosystem and vision for social were cited as strengths.

Two of the newest social tools Jive showed off before this week were its intelligent activity streams and Jive Anywhere integration. Both of these features kicked off during the summer, and they are no doubt part of why Gartner continues to rate Jive so high. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Livefyre Debuts StreamHub Engagement Management System

Livefyre has announced a new engagement management system called StreamHub, and it takes the company's interactive commenting system to a deeper level, with more features and control.

StreamHub will be available to existing Livefyre customers right away, and for publishers especially, the new features should help drive traffic, increase social interactions about their company and generally make those websites even more interactive. 

Conversations Across Networks

Livefyre already integrates social media into its commenting system, but StreamHub adds an engagement dashboard for customizing layouts and tailoring the conversation by categories like topic or location.

By making it easy for people to link social media to comments, conversations can go back and forth across networks and mobile devices. StreamHub has two main components; Core and Curate. Core is the bulk of the system, and once that is set up, customers can opt for the Curate feature. StreamHub Core adds the engagement dashboard, and the ability to easily filter content to tailor a website with the kinds of ideas that build engaging relationships.

Here's how the dashboard works:

StreamHub expands a website's reach, and with Curate, can even pull in content from around the Web.

Engaging Comments and Liveblogging

Through Twitter's API and RSS, content from around the Web can be pulled into a liveblog, chat or comment stream with Curate. Using hashtags or @ mentions, anything relating to the topic at hand can be gathered from the Web to be used on the host website. 

Livefyre is working on doing the same thing with Facebook, although that feature is not ready yet. The company did not give any hints about other social networks this feature could extend to, but it sounds like it holds bigger potential. 

Curate has real potential to make more personalized online experiences.

One unique way Curate changes liveblogging is the ability to reply to individual posts. Say you are watching the iPhone 5 launch, and a stream of images is going by. With StreamHub, it's not necessary to reply to the whole event, but instead only the images you find relevant. Those comments can be tagged, and followed and replied to just like in a more static page. 

What social platform would be complete without analytics? StreamHub can create customized reports and is compatible with Google Analytics or Omniture. Tell us in the comments if you are an avid commenter and if you think you would like to have your social media integrated like in StreamHub.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Granicus Helps Grow Citizen Participation with New Features

It’s not often the words transparency and citizen engagement are used in the same sentence, but they are essential elements if you really want to innovate and evolve your community into taking meaningful action. Which is why the folks at Granicus announced new features aimed at empowering its Citizen Participation Suite users to better collect and analyze feedback from their community.

Making Cloud-Based Government a Viable Option

For the past few years, Granicus has made the case for cloud computing at the government level. With cloud computing, they argued, government agencies can defer costs, improve productivity and increase collaboration. Furthermore, with their platform, Granicus provides the cloud-based government transparency tools necessary to spearhead community innovation.

Whether it’s thanks to the Obama Administration’s push for transparent government, or better availability and scalability of cloud software, there’s been a growing interest in online community collaboration within the government sector. Public agencies want to have more in-depth and meaningful dialogues with their citizens online, but traditional social media isn’t solving this problem.

Citizen Participation Thrives on Transparency

The new features in Granicus’ Citizen Participation Suite are focused on bringing together the right combination of crowdsourcing and other civic engagement tools with the aim of making social collaboration work for government. The new features are designed to help government staff members facilitate more productive discussions with members of the public, including:

Discussion Analytics — Users can analyze public feedback with tools like geo-coding, word tags and demographic filters, which can help government agencies understand where community feedback is coming from and what topics mean the most to them. In turn, these insights can help drive better government decisions and actions.

Projects - The new projects feature combines three powerful community engagement tools into a simple package for community planners allowing governments to educate their community about upcoming projects and allow for public input online through idea forums, discussions, and surveys — all for a single project.

Granicus lets residents submit ideas for community improvement. Citizens can vote, comment and share other ideas, helping local governments prioritize what’s most important.

eComment — Granicus also upgraded the usability and design of its flagship citizen participation tool called eComment. Now, Citizen Participation Suite users have an easier way to solicit participation in their public meetings using a “Feedback” widget on their website. This widget simplifies participation by allowing citizens to comment on upcoming meeting agenda items electronically before the meeting, through video or text, instead of attending the meeting in person. Current eComment users will have access to these upgrades for free.

eComment provides an easy way to add voices to the democratic process and makes participation in public meetings convenient.

A Civic Action

By combining Granicus’ public engagement tools into a single solution, governments of any size are empowered to streamline community collaboration workflows, simplifying how agencies manage and measure large volumes of citizen requests and inquiries related to projects, plans and public meeting agenda items.

At a time when the need for more public works are confronted by a need for a reduction in government spending, tools like Granicus’ Citizen Participation Suite help give citizens a voice and a chance to take civic action.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com