How Social Media Impacts Ecommerce

While social media is impacting almost every area of business, it's effects on ecommerce is staggering. U.S. consumers will spend $327 BILLION in 2016?! Amazing. Check out more data in this infographic from mobstac. 

Facebook Ads vs. Google Display Network

The Branding Process in Videos

One of the most misunderstood terms in business is also one of the most important. A brand is much more than a logo. Find out what it is and how to create it in this series of videos by various brand experts.







1. "The New Normal"

Summary:

1. This is branding:

• Find common topics that people care about
• What practices or methods stimulate/excite people around these topics?
• Have authenticity

     2. 7 Steps to New Normal Branding

• Assume nothing
• Empathize with your "customers,"
• Advocate for something
• Invest in relationships with your customers
• Curate for different audiences
• Be a teacher
• CARE! Apply action to a societal problem

2. History and Meaning of Branding


 3. Apple's Brand and the "Think Different" Campaign


4. The Brand Platform: Personality and Pillars


5. What are your brand channels?


6. The Brand Execution

Hope you enjoyed and learned something! If you're a small business, join our small business forum on LinkedIn to share ideas and learn from other businesses.

Tracking Social Media ROI

Infographic by KISSmetrics



Need help with your own social media marketing? Let the social pros at Chromatic Solutions manage your strategy. Your brand will love being social!

7 Social Media Analytic Dashboards

Read time: 3 minutes

We're hearing a lot about "big data" these days. It's a trend that big companies have the resources to utilize, but what about data analytics for small business? How do they tap in to "small data" in order to leverage big results? 

1. Google Analytics is the most widely used dashboard because of its all-encompassing data capabilities (and free cost). GA bridges the gap between social data and data from your other web properties, as it allows you to track website traffic and conversions to and from your various social accounts. Multi-channel funnels allow you to see the percentage of conversions that come from your social accounts and other sources. Plus, the experiments toolset allows you to test methods of traffic-driving and calls-to-action.

2. Brandwatch monitors conversations that involve your brand across all social media platforms. You set up a project that relates to your company, a product, or a topic. Your dashboard then monitors volume of mentions, which platform the mentions come from, and overall consumer sentiment. Demographic indicators can break down the conversations by gender, device, job title, and geographic location. Starts at $800/month.


3. Hootsuite is a comprehensive service allows you to control and analyze all of your accounts on one dashboard. Schedule posts uniformly across platforms, then customize the data a plethora of ways. Hootsuite pulls data from Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Google+ pages, Twitter profiles, as well as your custom data criteria, and allows you to print attractive and understandable reports. The free version allows up to five profiles and a limited analytic capability, and the Pro version starts at $8.99/month.

Buffer's Dashboard

4. Buffer is basically Hootsuite. For a comparison of the two services, check out this post. Buffer starts at $10/month and ranges up to $250/month for large business needs.

5. SproutSocial is much like Hootsuite and Buffer, where it includes scheduling, analytics dashboards, and team collaboration. But Sprout provides a CRM capability, so you can edit contact info, and target specific customers for campaigns. The analytics dashboards are designed to be easy to read and easy to present, complete with custom branding and data export features. Standard accounts start at $39/month, and premium is $99/month.

6. Radian6 is the analysis platform for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can monitor conversations by keywords, topics, and mentions. The dashboard then analyzes trends and allows keyword comparisons, demographics sorting and influencer profiles.

7. Moz Analytics provides a comprehensive dashboard for all inbound marketing tactics, and their effects on your SEO. It combines (and segments) data from your social, search, content, and brand channels, then gives you actionable insight into which areas you can improve and how to actually do it. Starts at $99/month.

So there you have it, 7 ways to monitor social data for your business. Of course, all of this can be quite time consuming, (our shameless plug) which is why you should hire someone to do it for you, like us! 

Visual Design Trends for 2014

The Process of Branding: Naming

When trying to create an identity for a product or brand, the naming process is one of the first things most people think of. They also think that it's one of the easiest steps. But it takes more than a five-minute brainstorm session. Much, much more. Here, brand teacher Sasha Strauss (@SashaStrauss) outlines an effective and exhaustive naming strategy.

Five Worst Super Bowl Ads

#Brandbowl watchers and ad geeks must have been as disappointed as Broncos fans at the sorry crop of commercials to smack America's eyeballs this year. Really, I cannot believe millions of dollars went into the production of these "ideas."

Anyway, there were a few that were good ads, including Tim Tebow's T-Mobile spot. But here is our list of the worst.

5. "Cool Twist"

Sweet graphics, Bud Light. Oh, and nice caps.

4.  "Wings"

There's only one word I associate with this ad: "gross."

3. "A Better Web Awaits"

Squarespace went out of their way to tell us how creepy and chaotic the web is, but didn't really highlight the simplicity and cleanliness of their own product.

2. "Need for Speed Movie"

I was like, "Oh, Aaron Paul!...Wow that looks terrible."

1. "The Right Music"

Ellen, like my mother, is the last person I want associated with Beats Audio. She deserved a better spot to showcase her humor instead of her dance moves. Right music, wrong endorsement. 

Axe Super Bowl Ad is Turning Heads

This ad from Axe diverts from the usual "girls can't resist it" shtick. 

Axe chooses a universal theme here, and employs a clever plot twist to make this spot memorable. 

A Raggae Song That Explains the 2013 Stock Market

Read Time: 3 minutes

(From FastCoDesign.com)

We've all been told that 2013 brought us a stronger economy, but if you aren’t an economist or a serious investor, it’s likely your eyes glaze over at things like S&P 500 gains. You may have missed, then, that the 500 largest publicly traded companies have had a banner year, starting at 1462 points on Jan 2, 2012, and reaching 1840 as of December 30th.

Still bored by all the money talk? Okay, here’s a better way to process that information: CNNMoney’s Market Music, by Edlundart’s Bård Edlund (the same guy behind Dow Piano), is the 2013 stock market translated into a catchy reggae beat. 

“The main thing to listen for is the melody line on top, played by a synth that starts out as a bass instrument and ends up as bright, clear, digital tones,” Bård Edlund explains to Co.Design. “That melody line reflects the closing numbers for each day, and you can hear gaps in the melody on weekends and holidays, helping to create variation in the melodic structure.”

Aside from a few blips here and there, that core melody line goes up and up and up--so high that, as Edlund said, he was forced to switch its instrumentation from a bass to a synth in order to accurately portray the vast range of change. By November, what started as a lulling baseline climbs so high that you may want to cover your ears--until you remember that ear-ringing chime is the sound of money.

Yes, a critic might say the song gets a little shrill, but those high pitches add a lot of meaning to what might otherwise be meaningless stock figures. What’s a 400 point gain to the S&P 500 mean? Is that a lot or a little? That ear-piercing melody intrinsically tells you that, yes, it’s a lot.

That said, while there’s certainly a purpose behind Edlund’s score, he’s not sold that his own creation is “particularly useful.” Instead, he sees Market Music as a “fun data art project,” less about depicting hard data with 100% clarity than luring the public to explore charts through the chillaxing wave of a reggae beat.

“Both seeing and hearing it rise and rise and rise in this drawn out way, it's almost a meditative way of being inside the chart,” Edlund writes. “I find with some of these audio projects that I do, that bordering on boredom is kind of good--the fact that it goes on for a while actually provides some immersion, if you let it.”

Indeed, as punk rock or death metal, Market Music just wouldn’t be the same. There is something about that wave of casual offbeats that signals there's no rush--an outlook that's known well to any tourist who’s experienced “island time”--and it beckons you to keep listening, with an infectious melody that sticks with you even after you’ve left your computer and forgotten about the visualization.

“I have listened to this thing a lot of times during its creation, and as strange as it may sound, I go around humming certain sequences by now (I think August is my favorite "verse"),” Edlund writes. “So while it's hardly catchy on the level of a Rihanna song, it *is* possible to bop your head to it…”