APAC

Social media monetisation is a major concern among Asian marketers: new report

For the second year running, Econsultancy has published a freely available trends briefing about digital trends in South-East Asia, based on the Digital Cream Singapore event for senior client-side digital marketers held in November last year.

Digital Cream Singapore 2013 brought together more than 120 B2B and B2C in-house marketers from around the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) region and beyond to discuss best practice and common challenges in digital marketing, and learn from each other.

Delegates discussed a wide range of topics, ranging from managing and making sense of audience and customer data, increasing personalisation and loyalty, to using video marketing and cross-channel marketing.

Do big retailers need to create social value to succeed?

The high street debate is one that attracts much comment on the Econsultancy blog.

Feelings run high when it comes to ensuring the survival of stores in our towns. The situation has yet to crystallise, though it’s clear there are business models that aren’t best suited to bricks and mortar any more. 

Alongside the trend towards experiential retail (shops doing more than simply selling stuff that consumers can buy cheaper online), a trend towards creating social value in the community may be emerging. 

High street vacancy rates are steady in the UK at 14% in 2013 and independent stores such as cafes are on the increase. Part of the reason for this is social and local. 

Most of us still value our retail centres as places to take a ‘humanity bath’, meeting people outside of the office, the church/mosque/synagogue and your neighbourhood. 

But what else can big retailers do to engender a closer community? Does every store have to get involved? What about digital technology, can it play a part at a community level?

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has released a report detailing the business case for socially aware retail. The report includes the results of six months of research with three ASDA stores. 

Whilst most of the findings are relevant mainly for larger focal points, chiefly supermarkets, here’s what I gleaned…

20 stunning examples of minimal mobile UI design

Some of the best web and mobile app designs have a very limited colour range. Two or three colours can be more than enough, and I find that a restrained approach to colour works especially well on de-cluttered interfaces. 

The use of colour in design is a bit like great music, where balance, contrast, restraint and dissonance all come into play. I picked out monochrome and hypercolour as two of my 18 web design trends for 2014, but perhaps trichromatic design is where it’s really at?  

Baidu’s Zeitgeist 2013: stats and trends

Last month we looked at 2013’s UK edition of Google’s Zeitgeist which always proves an interesting overview of the most popular trends in our search behaviour over the year.

But as China gears up to celebrate the start of its new year, let’s turn to Baidu to see how search habits in the east might compare.

These stats and trends, as well as a wealth of Christmas ecommerce data can be found in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.

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