Social Currency. Where Brands meet Dynamic Context.

Mai 2nd, 2010 • 1 comment Brands, Social, Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Brands, Business, Report, Reports, Research, Social, Social Business Design, Social Currency, Strategy, Study, Trends, Vivaldi, World

One of the really good studies about brands and their social environments has just been published jointly by NYC think tank Vivaldi Partners and Professor Johann Füller (University Innsbruck) in cooperation with Lightspeed Research.

The report ‘Social Currency’ asks what a brand’s social currency is, and what it takes to build and nurture it. And, the report indeed brings a couple of crucial things across – it defines the buzzy term Social Currency and attributes success metrics for brands here.

Defining Social Currency

So what is Social Currency and why is it important? From the report’s perspective it is the contextual sum of experiences users can have in relation and interaction with a brand. And a brand’s social currency is bound to a dynamic process that we call reality.

Social Currency is the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand as part of their everyday social life at home or at work. (…) It is neither a product feature, nor a communications or PR campaign that is completely managed by any one company. From this perspective, social currency is a far more delicate asset to build, nurture and maintain than is brand equity.

Social currency represents a shared asset of consumers and company-owned brands. It originates from interaction between customers and consumers. And it is the material a brand’s success will be fundamentally influenced by…

1. Across categories and brands, 53% of consumers’ brand loyalty can be explained by social currency
2. Users of brands with high social currency show a significantly higher willingness to pay a price premium (correlation=0.73)

The study’s explanatory strength does not only lie in these results – it is remarkable as it tries to define what social currency is made of. Since the research assumes that social currency is crucial for brands to create customer loyalty it consequently also reveals its components. No, a brand does not necessarily have to access all levers – this varies in regard to which industry and brand is involved…

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The social workspace. Keep on tweeting, peeps.

November 11th, 2009 • Work
Tags: Reports, Study, Tools, Trends, We like, Work, World

Okay, good news for all you guys twittering and facebooking while you work. Personal surfing/tweting/networking while at work does not mean you’re ineffective (yeah, you knew that already).

Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says. “Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.” (via University of Melbourne)

Plus, as an article of Harvard Business Magazin explains:

• Millennials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media: They network 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate pervasive connectivity. As an accenture survey points out the use of various technologies such as instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook and RSS feeds is crucial to how they do their jobs. One participant said “I need to access my Facebook in order to do my job.” Has blocking Facebook today become the equivalent of denying an employee access to a phone at work 40 years ago or email 20 years ago?
• Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce. Enterprise 2.0 solutions, networking and real time interaction with customers and partners becomes more and more essential. Blocking the access to Social Media sites while leveraging such tools is a contradiction. Global cooperation tools have increased access to experts in the company, reduced the cycle time from discovery of new products to launch of new products, and increased employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace.

Heaven or Hell. That’s where you go when you live in Germany.

Oktober 21st, 2009 • 1 comment Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Funny, Germany, Leo Burnett, Study

It may be a little bit off topic but I found this experimental research pretty funny. My friends from Leo Burnett Frankfurt have tried to find out in which part of Germany you are most likely to go to hell. They tried to combine research data from institutions such as the Federal Police on theft and violent crimes in Germany and combined it with the concept which we call “The 7 deadly Sins”.

Red = Going to hell!
Yellow = Purgatory (Fegefeuer) at least!
Gray = Not sinning, but also not being angelic!
Green = Angelic behavior = Going to heaven!

It may look ugly and it’s not completely representative but it’s funny as hell.