Indian geo location based research and social marketing agency, LocoBuzz, studied user engagement across the Top 100 Global Brands on Facebook and says that it has exploded some popular myths. According to the Buzz Report, it has been noticed that big is not necessarily better. Very few brands who have around a million fans have an engagement ratio of one per cent and above which explains that people who follow big brands don't necessarily interact with them regularly, thus breaking the myth that a big Fan base results in effective brand messaging. Also, talking about a page doesn't at all reflect active engagements between consumers and the page. A Facebook Brand Page is now an integral part of most marketing strategies around the world, be it Automobile, Hospitality, Mobility, FMCG and, of course, Consumer Internet. However the success and impact of a brand campaign on Facebook is no longer defined by the number of people that 'Like' the page, but is now gauged by how interactive the brand is with people that like the page. A brand can be popular but it can't be effective on Facebook unless it engages its fans. LocoBuzz has conducted the study based on the Talking About This score available on Facebook and combining it with the engagement formula used by AllFacebook.com. The top international brands based on their high engagement scores are MTV, Disney, Youtube, Facebook and Coca Cola. The top Indian brands are Shaadi.com, Axe Angels Club, Café Coffee Day, DoCoMo, MTV India, Kingfisher, FastTrack and Vodafone ZooZoo. The study is based on data collected for the time period 4- 10 September 2012. A LocoBuzz Social Media Analytics tool was used to collate the number of likes, comments and shares that each post from each brand received over a period of seven days. This data was further used to calculate the engagement score based on the following formula provided on AllFacebook.com: LocoBuzz head social media analysis Vidyasagar Parivelli said, "The findings are astonishing! Brands that have over a 1,000,000 strong fan-base have a much lower engagement rate than we expected."A lot of brands that have a good 'Talking About This' score, do not have any real time engagement (likes, comments shares) on their page. What is even more surprising is that matrimonial brand Shaadi.com has the highest engagement rate in the world amongst all brands. With over 25 per cent engagement ratio on Facebook and seven per cent LocoBuzz engagement rate, it appears that this is one brand that has cracked the code. LocoBuzz adds that it was surprised to find an Indian brand leading the way.

In an era when many marketers are focused on tapping into social influence online, new tools for influencing offline conversations were unveiled today at Advertising Week by CBS, Nielsen, and word of mouth experts the Keller Fay Group. Marketers across the nation are seeking to find ways to maximize word of mouth about their products and services, recognizing that a recommendation from a friend, colleague or relative is the most trusted form of communications.  Many turn to social media solutions as the engine to drive their social strategies, but Ed Keller of the Keller Fay Group and Dave Poltrack of CBS released new research at a gathering of marketers at Advertising Week in New York that challenges whether this is the best way for brands to reach today's more social consumer. According to research by the Keller Fay Group: There are 15 billion brand impressions each week in the US that are created via word of mouth. 90% of these conversations are driven by offline conversations, primarily face-to-face. Television ads are the #1 touchpoint for driving these word of mouth conversations out of more than 20 measured. Primetime television viewers are prolific talkers, with viewers of top rated shows such as American Idol, Modern Family, and Two and a Half Men engaging in 700 million or more brand conversations per week.

To help marketers take better advantage of the opportunity to use television to maximize the word of mouth impact of their advertising, Keller announced a new, innovative research initiative that combines television viewing measures from Nielsen's National People Meter, the ratings currency by which all television viewing is measured in the US; with word of mouth measures from Keller Fay's TalkTrack, the only continuous research initiative that measures both offline as well as online word of mouth.  The system also includes a segmentation created by CBS and Nielsen that segments consumers based on media consumption and lifestyles, rather than demographics, and is available to all Nielsen clients.  According to Poltrack and Keller, one of the segments media trendsetters stands out for its disproportionately large role in word of mouth and a heavy reliance on paid advertising for brand conversation content."The numbers of conversations generated by the audiences of television shows is truly staggering, but these statistics are not generally familiar to most media planners because the data have not been available before. The integration of these measurement systems will allow planners for the first time to optimize their media planning with word of mouth as a strategic objective," according to Ed Keller, who is CEO of Keller Fay Group and coauthor of The Face-to-Face Book:  Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace. According to Poltrack, who is Chief Research Officer of CBS, "For some time we have known that TV far outpaced social networking sites when it comes to both reach and engagement.  Now, the Keller Fay/Nielsen fusion provides the media industry with the data it needs to usher in a new era of media planning, one that properly understands and values the social impact of television."

FMCG giant Proctor & Gamble, working with MediaCom and Yahoo!, has launched a branded-content channel, Style Factor, to reach digitally savvy women in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Like its rival Unilever, P&G is making increasing use of branded content to engage with consumers. Unilever launched its men’s branded channel, titled 'Locker room', on MSN last month, targeting busy, young, urbane males in Malaysia. Inspired by The Thread on Yahoo!, which Shine developed for P&G in the USA, the Style Factor site will offer locally produced content on celebrities, fashion, skincare, haircare and make up.“Style Factor is a site for a digitally savvy woman who is smart and discerning about engaging with brands online,” said Priyali Kamath, associate marketing director, media planning & operations of P&G Asia. Video entertainment will also be an integral part of Style Factor. Developed by Yahoo!, the video series will be hosted by local celebrities and will feature celebrity-inspired styles, fashion trends and beauty tips.“Custom content experiences offer unparalleled opportunities for marketers to engage with users in a more meaningful way, thus generating better business results for brands,” said Lars M. B. Anthonisen, director for interaction at MediaCom. “By creating customized content, P&G aims to go deeper and draw insights into how consumers engage with their brands online. We envision this to be a long term partnership, one that will be extended to other countries in the region in the future.”

Digital marketing company GETIT Infoservices has announced its association with Google India as a premier small and medium enterprises (SME) partner. As part of this partnership GETIT will cater to the strong demand for digital advertising from small and medium sized businesses and market Google Adwords product; it will develop, launch and manage digital campaigns for small and medium businesses. The Google - GETIT partnership entails the latter providing end-to-end sales and marketing solutions, as well complete implementation of digital campaigns. GETIT's key contribution in this business partnership is to provide extensive pan-India reach with its field force of more than 1,000 people across the country. The association will enable Google to attract more Indian SMEs online and help promote their businesses and provide them leads through Google's AdWords product.Sidharth Gupta, chief executive officer (CEO), GETIT Infoservices Pvt. Ltd. said , "This partnership with Google comes at a relevant time. 'We have 1,000s of SME customers across India, and we will bring to them the advantages of Google's products. In the Indian context SMEs prefer being served face-to-face, and we work closely with SMEs to bring them the best benefits of Google AdWords products, in addition to other GETIT bundles."SMEs in India contribute 45% to the industrial output and 40% to exports. They also employ 60 million people and create 1.3 million jobs every year. GETIT has about 25 years of legacy in servicing Indian SMEs with its Yellow Pages heritage. It has more than 3 million SMEs registered in it database and makes more than 1.5 million contacts with SMEs across India each year. With all this expertise, GETIT will assist Google to capitalize on SME's increasing potential.

Microsoft has turned up the volume on the marketing and advertising campaign leading up to the launch of Windows 8 later this month, with a barrage of ads that ran during NFL games today. The spot shows PCs and tablets from the likes of Acer, Lenovo and Sony, including touchscreens which are, in part, intended to make the Windows ecosystem more competitive with devices like Apple’s iPad. The ads (see the video embedded below) starts with a countdown, as if for a rocket launch, but gets stuck on the number 8. It ends by showing a young girl “painting a picture” on a PC screen, and then showing the printed result to an adult, with the tagline “Windows Reimagined.”The ads come 11 days before Microsoft is expected to officially debut Windows 8 at an event in New York, along with its Surface tablet device which, oddly enough, is not shown in the ad.It’s going to take the full buzz-generating capabilities of Microsoft and its partners to reverse the slide in the sales of PCs. Just last week, the market research firms Gartner and IDC reported that PC sales that declined by more than 8 percent from the same period a year ago. The slide in sales has been blamed in part on consumers who have held back on making PC purchases, knowing that a new version of Windows has been in the offing. But rarely in the past has a iteration of Windows significantly reignited PC sales by itself. Corporations, meanwhile, are more conservative, and tend not to buy machines with the latest version of Windows until it has been upgraded once or twice by Microsoft with a service pack or two. On top of all that, there has been the ongoing challenge of tablets like the iPad, and others running Google’s Android operating system, that have eaten into sales of PCs, particularly notebooks. Ads for those devices were also in heavy rotation during Sunday’s football games.

When Auntie Anne's, the pretzel chain, wanted to tempt moms in Atlanta shopping malls with free offers, it dished out coupons through smartphones that could be redeemed immediately for a free drink or other specials. But while the moms received the coupons on their iPhone or Android device, the power behind the campaign was not Google or Apple it was Millennial Media, a nimble six-year old independent that has grabbed the no.2 spot in mobile advertising in the United States. Google is no.1, but the flexibility of its smaller rivals is helping them catch up in a US market that is expected to triple in size to more than $20 billion in the next three years, according to market research firm Gartner. Smaller firms have the freedom to reach users who use any mobile operating system, unlike Apple, which promotes advertising on its Apple iOS platform, and Google, which handles advertising across all devices but also has its own platform, Android."Advertisers want to be able to reach the broadest population they can and in the mobile world, where the platforms are fragmented, this gives an opening to the providers who are truly platform neutral," Gartner analyst Andrew Frank said. Google held 24 percent of the US market last year, while Millennial had 17 percent and Apple 15.5 percent, according to market research firm IDC. Unlisted Jumptap held 9.5 percent, Yahoo 7.5 percent and India's InMobi 2.2. percent.Ireland-based Velti Plc, which listed in early 2011, is also chasing market share. Investors are taking notice. While Facebook has been pilloried for lacking a mobile strategy; shares of Millennial have jumped 76 percent from a low of $9 in early August. Shares of Velti have leaped 59 percent from a life low of $4.99 on July 25.Millennial, a roughly $1 billion company, is a great bet for someone looking for investments in mobile advertising, said Steven Dray, a portfolio manager at investment firm AlphaOne Capital Partners LLC."When you get to brand advertising, which is eventually going to be a huge pile of money that's going to move from traditional advertising to mobile, I think that's where Millennial and some of the smaller players could have very good success," Dray said. AlphaOne bought into Millennial after its initial public offering in March and holds about 40,000 shares in the company. Despite the run-up in their shares, the smaller firms have not run ahead of the sector. Millennial trades at 4.3 times forward 12-month sales and Velti trades at 1.3 times. While their businesses are obviously much bigger and more varied, Google trades at a multiple of 4.6 and Facebook at 6.7.As consumers increasingly surf the web on the go, advertisers are looking to ply them with targeted information about nearby restaurants, pubs, theaters, shops and salons.

As both digital media and multicultural outreach become more popular marketing techniques, US marketers are beginning to combine the two efforts. In its “2012 Multicultural Marketing and Newer Media Survey Results,” the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that this year, more than half of US marketers (60%) will spend more on new media efforts, such as social media or mobile outreach, specifically to reach multicultural segments. An additional 24% will spend the same as they did in 2011.When it comes to which customer segments these marketers are targeting, the greatest number, 88%, said they were reaching out to Hispanics. That was followed by targeting black consumers (54%), Asian consumers (37%) and LGBT consumers (11%).This focus on Hispanic consumers makes sense given that they are the most populous and fastest-growing minority group, increasing by 3.1% since 2010, according to the US Census. But even though Hispanics are growing in number, and the LGBT community in particular is growing in influence, digital budgets for multicultural outreach remain mostly on the low end. More than half of these US marketers (54%) had less than 5% of their multicultural media budget allocated to digital media platforms for 2012. However, the percentage of marketers spending more than 20% of their multicultural media budget on digital increased from 4% in 2010 to 13% in 2012.As with all budget shifts, many marketers must pull funds from other areas of marketing, and 56% of respondents told the ANA that the funds for this digital multicultural outreach were shifted from the traditional media and marketing communications budget. Additionally, 28% said they were able to increase multicultural digital budgets thanks to their incremental budget. As these two elements multicultural and digital are integrated more into overall marketing strategies, marketers will need to focus more time and resources on the technology-savvy Asian, Hispanic and black customer segments.

A billboard advertisement of a luxury watch next to a busy flyover in the city is hard to miss, especially for those who associate French fashion house Hermes mainly with clothing and accessories. As Indians loosen their purse strings ahead of Dussehra and Diwali, the two big festivals that also usher in the wedding season, an increasing number of premium and luxury watchmakers are jumping on the advertising bandwagon to cash in on the air of festivity. Chanel, a French luxe brand that has been selling watches priced upwards of 2.5 lakh in India since 2005, has put up a hoarding at the swanky T3 terminal of New Delhi airport.” The Chanel watch hoarding creates awareness, visibility and desire in an appropriate environment," Chanel India spokeswoman Marielou Phillips said, adding that it has fuelled queries about the brand's new watch collection at its boutique in the capital. India’s watch market is estimated at 4,500 crore, with the high-end and luxury time pieces accounting for about 20% of sales, or 850 crore."The idea is to establish the brand in the minds of people," said Yashovardhan Saboo, the CEO of Ethos Watch Studios, which recently started selling Hermes watches. "We will soon be displaying Hermes watches worth 80 lakh at our stores," Saboo added.