It is the job of marketing professionals to identify the communities where our customers, peers and other influencers communicate with each other. This is how we build relationships and establish social capital. Social networks are magnets for marketers, but the people who define each online community are often reticent to their attempts to connect especially where the purpose is seen to be 'corporate'.

Connecting therefore is not just about marketing. It fuses marketing, service, sociology, psychology, creativity and sales. Importantly it also necessitates a level of personalisation, and a genuine and humanised approach, that makes it difficult for traditional marketing techniques to be successful.

This, of course, makes it very hard for corporates. The organisation of work is still centred around a product or a service, something to be sold. Social media however is defined by people, the communities they join, and the cultures and behaviours that manifest themselves in these communities. This is not a new development and has forever been a cornerstone for human development interaction.

The Conversation Prism

So what can be done? On their blog Brian Solis and Jessica Thomas have put forward a concept called The Conversation Prism. The Conversation Prism is a tool to help organisations visualise and map the shifting landscape of social networks and micro communities.

How can organisations learn to participate? Employees are a company's first community. Right now they tend to manage the flow of information through their internal social networks in the same way they manage the technology installed on each employees computer. Companies can, and will, get ahead when they learn to educate, engage with, and empower the natural grass roots communities that form within them. The Conversation Prism can help this process.

For more please click through to Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas original article.

Choosing the right colour for your brand, logo, website or other marketing material is a process with much more substance than you might think. Colour psychology is based on the principle that colour can carry specific meaning, evaluated often intuitively, by the person seeing it. This evaluation in turn influences an individual’s behaviour. The psychology of 6 key colours is set out below.

Psychology of Black

Black is the colour of authority and power, stability and strength. Black clothes make people appear thinner. It's a sombre colour sometimes associated with evil (the cowboy in the black hat) and grieving. Black is a colour that evokes strong emotions that can overwhelm. Proficiency of use is often needed for a successful result.

Psychology of White

White is associated with purity (wedding dresses); cleanliness (doctors in white coats) and safety. It is also used to project the absence of colour, or neutrality. Like black, white works well with most colours and is often complimented by an accent of colour for emphasis.

Psychology of Grey

Grey is most associated with the practical, timeless, middle-of-the-road, solid things in life. Too much gray leads to feeling mostly nothing; but a bit of gray will add that rock solid feeling to your product. Some shades of gray are associated with old age and depression.

Psychology of Red

If you want to draw attention, use red. It is often where the eye looks first. Red is the colour of energy. It's associated with movement and excitement. Wearing red clothes makes you appear more noticeable. Red is not a colour to over use but a spot of red in just the right place can leave an immeasurable impression depending on intention (lipstick is red for a reason!).

Psychology of Blue

Ask people their favourite colour and a clear majority will say blue. Much of the world is blue (skies, seas). Blue is generally seen as calming though some shades can be cold and uncaring. Over the ages blue has become associated with security, dependability, wisdom and loyalty (note how many Banks and Financial Services companies are blue).

Psychology of Green

The colour of nature, growth and money. A calming colour that's very pleasing to the senses. Hospitals use light green rooms because they are found to be calming to patients. It is also the colour associated with envy, good luck, generosity and fertility.

Most of the above will probably intuitively make sense. Easy done? Well the challenge for a designer, and where you will pay your money, is in understanding how the combinations of multiple primary, secondary and tertiary colours on your website, will impact visitors. Just the 6 colours above, and there are obviously many more to choose from, have 46,656 possible different permutations!!! However while 46,656 possible permutations sounds like there is a virtually unlimited colour palette to choose from I will leave you with this thought from Wired Magazine almost 10 years ago.

Companies spend millions trying to differentiate from others. Yet a quick look at the logos of major corporations reveals that in colour as in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. The result is an ever more frantic competition for the best neighbourhood.

While the fortunes of these corporates have shifted dramatically over the past decade and new players have emerged the psychology of colour has remained a bastion. Facebook and Pinterest are just a couple of recent players competing for the same valuable real estate created by the psychology of colour.

Here is an infographic from Microsoft Tag highlighting the rise of Mobile Marketing. These statistics make clear the marketing power of Mobile, with mobile internet users set to surpass desktop internet users by 2015.

The graphic also illustrates the significance of the Smart TV market; 86% of mobile internet users are using their devices while watching TV.

Do you know which of your marketing programs are working and which ones aren’t? There are still a considerable number of marketers that continue to struggle with marketing measurement—despite the abundance of tools to help track success.

The infographic below from ifbyphone has some useful information to help start planning your own measurement initiatives for 2012.

Here is an smart little infographic from AddThis on their 5th birthday to visualise user behaviour around social media sharing trends of content across the social web.

Highlighted under the "When do people share?" headline; the most active time of the week is 9:30am and the most active day of the week is Wednesday, but perhaps the most important statistic is the percentage of clicks within the first day - 75%. Something to think about when posting or sending your next social communication piece!

Australia compares well with APAC nieghbours

In a recent tweet I made reference to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who stated “mobile is not another channel, it’s the channel”.

Here are some of the statistics...