“Social listening” — the practice of brands tuning in to what customers are saying to them and about them on social media — is a hot topic, and we’ve talked a lot about the increasing importance of brand responsiveness. While many companies are working to increase and improve their ability to address consumer questions, comments, and concerns via networks like Twitter, some brands are already way ahead of the pack when it comes to engaging their digital followers, and have made great strides of late.

According to Socialbakers, which has been measuring brand responsiveness on Twitter since the fourth quarter of 2012, companies in the finance, airline, and telecom industries dominate the Twitterverse with respect to effective and quick responses (we wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that these industries often make us want to tear our hair out, and therefore have much to gain by providing excellent customer care). While the latest stats prove that these businesses continue to lead the charge, some under-performing industries like retail have recently shown notable improvement.

In fact, every industry studied has shown at least some improvement in their Twitter response rates, demonstrating that brands are recognizing the importance of social media interactions.

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We told you on Monday about the FDA‘s investigation into foods with added caffeine, the organization’s  main concern being that the current proliferation of caffeinated foods on the market (drinks, energy shots, candy, snack mixes, etc.), may be causing people, especially children, to consume unhealthy and potentially unsafe amounts of the stimulant.

Wrigley‘s newly released Alert Energy caffeinated gum, which contains roughly 40mg of caffeine per piece, found itself in the hot seat in light of the new FDA probe. The company initially insisted that its product was intended for (and marketed to) adults, saying, “Millions of Americans consume caffeine responsibly and in moderation as part of their daily routines,” but after discussing the issue with the regulatory body, Wrigley has changed its tune.

“After discussions with the FDA, we have a greater appreciation for its concern about the proliferation of caffeine in the nation’s food supply,” Wrigley North America President Casey Keller said in a statement to the AP. “There is a need for changes in the regulatory framework to better guide the consumers and the industry about the appropriate level and use of caffeinated products.” Read more

According to a new Accenture Interactive report, Turbulence for the CMO, four in ten top marketing executives feel they are unprepared to meet their objectives due to a lack of funding and inefficient business practices. In light of these challenges, 70 percent of the executives polled believe that corporate marketing will undergo a dramatic shift within the next five years, and that in order to keep up with changing expectations and an increasingly complicated customer environment, their organizations must focus on digital marketing and analytics.

“Marketing executives are growing increasingly concerned that tight budgets and the lack of a clear strategy for implementing digital technologies are hurting their company’s ability to compete in the digital age,” said Brian Whipple, global managing director of Accenture Interactive. “There is a clear performance gap between the demands of the marketplace and the ability of marketing organizations to apply the digital technology talent required to be more effective.”

This shift in focus is translating into changes in two major areas: increased investment in digital capabilities, and improved collaboration between in-house and agency marketing and communications efforts. Here’s how the results of the survey break down regarding those two major categories:

Increased Investment in Digital Capabilities:

• 66 percent of marketing executives said they will allocate at least one quarter of their budget to digital marketing next year.
• 23 percent said that more than half of their spending will be dedicated to digital marketing.
• 48 percent said they would spend more on managing customer data.
• 40 percent will increase spending on web analytics.
• 39 percent will spend more on marketing analytics.
• Half of the executives polled said they plan to initiate an internal reorganization to become more digitally focused, while over half said they plan to hire more people with the necessary digital skills.

Improved Internal and Agency Collaboration:

• 55 percent of marketing executives said they were satisfied with the level of collaboration with their outside agencies. However, the rest of the results indicate a less positive experience.
• Only 36 percent said that their agencies execute flawlessly.
• 36 percent said that the agencies are not able to deliver what they promised.
• Only 44 percent said that agency partners help marketing executives transform their marketing organization.

This indicates that greater collaboration between in-house and agency efforts may help smooth the transition to digitally-focused marketing. Read more

Once upon a time, when a person needed a morning jump-start or a midday pick-me-up, they reached for a cup of coffee. These days, though, coffee has some serious competition; weary folks can now choose from an array of amped-up foodstuffs, including gum, concentrated energy shots, candy, and even caffeinated Cracker Jacks.

Michael Taylor, the FDA‘s deputy commissioner of foods, said that the only time the FDA explicitly approved the practice of adding caffeine to a food or drink was in the 1950s when it allowed the stimulant to be included in cola. The current prevalence of caffeine-filled foods is “beyond anything FDA envisioned,” Taylor said. “It is disturbing…We’re concerned about whether they have been adequately evaluated.”

The governing body is especially concerned when it comes to the effects of such foods on children; while kids aren’t likely to seek out a boring cup of joe, they may be more apt to grab a bag of jolt-inducing jelly beans. The American Academy of Pediatrics has linked caffeine to harmful effects on young people’s still-developing neurological and cardiovascular systems. So, while the FDA is already investigating the safety of energy drinks and energy shots (thanks to consumer reports of illness and death), the organization has decided to go a step further and look specifically at the foods’ effects on children.

Companies that manufacture and market caffeinated foods say that their products are intended for — and marketed to — adults. Wrigley, which recently released Alert Energy Gum (40 milligrams of caffeine per piece), pointed out that packages of the gum are labeled “for adult use only.” A spokesperson for the company said, “Millions of Americans consume caffeine responsibly and in moderation as part of their daily routines.”

While that may be, critics say it’s not enough for companies to say they are marketing the products to adults, who are capable of making more informed decisions about the amount of caffeine they consume, when the foods themselves are clearly attractive (and readily available) to children. In a letter to the FDA, Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said of such foods: “One serving of any of these foods isn’t likely to harm anyone. The concern is that it will be increasingly easy to consume caffeine throughout the day, sometimes unwittingly, as companies add caffeine to candies, nuts, snacks and other foods.”

In acknowledgement that the consumption of one caffeinated item may not cause adverse effects, the probe will focus on the effects of added caffeine in its totality, and whether the increasing number of caffeinated products on the market might mean more adverse health effects for children.

In recent years the movie business has used social data to connect with audiences and stepped up its reliance on quantitative data to forecast box office revenues. However, if data represented a person, that individual may get a seat at L.A.’s trendiest restaurant, but would still be seated in the back room. That was the gist of a Tribeca Film Festival Industry Talks panel on Tuesday in New York.

“There are three countervailing forces at play that we need to balance, namely the artistic creative side, technological advances and commercial considerations”, said Jason Kassin, co-founder and CEO of Film Track, a rights management company.

“Navigating the world with data points is different than it was five years ago”, added Eugene Hernandez, Film Society of Lincoln Center‘s director of digital strategy. The biggest change is the use of sentiment analysis to monitor audience reactions, though the benefits appear mixed:

• Sentiment-based date is broadly used: “Big data has become socialized”, said Bill Livek, vice chairman and CEO of entertainment measurement company Rentrak. Their customers include not only big studios, but also independent studios and distributors across the country.
• Social media monitoring yields massive, but imprecise data: Sentiment analysis measures movie reviews, ratings and audience comments. As Stacy Spikes, CEO and co-founder of theatrical subscription service MoviePass noted, “Going to the movies now is a communal experience”. Nevertheless, social media data isn’t projectable, the panelists cautioned.
• Sentiment analysis can point to the right direction, according to Christina Warren, Mashable’s senior tech analyst. “But since monitoring is mostly done by machine, it’s best to use the tool to help target audiences and markets”, she explained. Livek concurred, adding, “A social media database can drive certain activities, but not content creation.”

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Americans are fed up with the pervasive, persistent presence of bad advertising in their daily lives, and are sick of the constant interruptions to their web surfing, online shopping, and…um…their sex lives? 

InsightsOne, a company dedicated to predictive intelligence solutions enabled by big data, recently announced the findings of its 2013 Bad Ads Survey conducted online by Harris Interactive. The study found that 83% of respondents felt bad ads actually get in the way of their daily activities:

• Web surfing – 51%
• Online shopping – 37%
• Working – 20%
• Having Sex – 19%
• Sleeping – 13%

So what sort of ads are they talking about?

While we might expect email spam and junk mail to top consumers’ pet peeve lists, it turns out that almost as many Americans are annoyed by website ad spam (52%) as by email spam/sidebar ads (55%). Postal junk mail actually ranked fifth (37%), behind television ads (60%), email spam/sidebar ads, website ads, and ads on social media (37%).

The study also looked at which specific types of ads get under our skin the most:

•  Pop-up ads – 70%
• Lottery scams – 70%
• Male enhancement ads – 66%
• Emails from deceased African leaders who have left them money – 64%
• Ads for products and services they do not need – 58%
• Female enhancement ads – 54%

So what do these results actually mean for brands and companies? Read more

As a sort of farewell (for now!) to our readers, I’d like to draw upon my experience editing this site over the past nine months to leave you with a list of tips for pitching to bloggers like me. I write “bloggers” because that’s the field I know, and there are some differences between pitching to a site like PRNewser and a paper like The Wall Street Journal, even though the basics are the same. Anyway, here goes:

1. Do Some Research: I don’t mean that you have to read everything the blog in question has published over the past six months. You can probably just scan the content to get a general sense of what sorts of stories interest the blog’s editors, the tone they like to use in covering them, and the sort of audience they serve. You’d be surprised how many pitches I’ve received from people who have very obviously never read PRNewser. I don’t hold that against them, but it certainly makes me less likely to consider their stuff.

2. Get Your Contacts’ Names Right: I know you’re busy and that you’re not really too concerned when an editor leaves or joins a blog. But I’ve been here nine months, and a majority of the pitches I get are still addressed to my predecessor, Tonya. That’s not all: to this day I receive an embarrassing number of emails directed to Joe and Jason, the guys who started the blog — and it’s been almost three years since either of them worked in this office. That’s bad form, guys.

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The biggest “must read” story making its way around the web this week is New York Magazine’s profile of BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and his enviably successful approach to paid content.

To sum things up, Peretti, who also helped launch The Huffington Post, was a math student at MIT who grew fascinated with the concept of viral memes and later created BuzzFeed as a tool to identify and facilitate the spread of said memes via algorithm. His goal was to truly capture the magic behind “word of mouth” buzz (the cat GIFs and political reporting came later). Most of the Internet and quite a few of the biggest brands in the world agree that Peretti has uncovered a secret formula for creating native advertising that might just go viral. Here are some revelations from the profile:

• BuzzFeed editors work directly with marketing specialists from partner brands to create content in a “newsroom”-style environment.
• The vast majority of traffic for both BuzzFeed originals and paid posts comes from social sharing.
• The site’s most popular posts don’t go viral after a single big-name personality shares them — they’re simply picked up by several isolated individuals who share them in small groups (average nine Facebook friends) that spawn small “share” groups of their own.
• There’s a science to this. Peretti has literally devised a formula.

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Yesterday Ragan’s PR Daily published the results of a study that most PR folks will find interesting: it concerned the current state of social media teams and the changing expectations of brands/firms in the social sphere.

More than 2,000 communications professionals participated in the study, which yielded some unexpected results:

• Only 5% of companies are “very satisfied” with their social campaigns
• Most firms/brands want to measure social ROI more effectively but don’t feel like they have the time or the manpower
• The vast majority (86%) of companies measure the success of social campaigns via likes and followers, not click-through rates or sales bumps

In other words, most brands and firms still don’t feel like they’ve mastered the social equation. And while they seem keen on devoting more time and resources to getting it right, they don’t plan to expand their teams significantly this year. Click through for the full infographic:

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From charging passengers per pound to failed rebranding efforts, it’s no secret that we love following the PR trials and tribulations of the airline industry.

Air travel is critical to the personal and professional lives of the American public. So, it is important that we recognize the recognition of Virgin Airlines as the most reliable domestic airline in the United States (according to the 2013 Airline Quality Rating report).

Though many in the public see Richard Branson, the public face and private owner of Virgin Airlines, as some creepy billionaire hybrid of Mary Poppins and Andy Gibb, the brand certainly resonates with local travelers — and airlines everywhere should take note.

The Airline Quality Rating report does something very simple in measuring how successfully airlines fulfill the four most basic and pressing needs of customers: Read more