Psychological salary… Social shopping sites… Bar-goers remember ads… Shoppers don’t just stick to online

• Psychological salary
• Social shopping sites
• Bar-goers remember ads
• Shoppers don’t just stick to online

Psychological salary

Can’t afford to give your staff a pay rise? Boost their egos instead with a significant sounding title. A recent survey by recruiters Korn Ferry International found that nearly half of newly promoted executives kept the same responsibilities despite a fancy new title. And the trend is creating a new hierarchy in organisations because everyone is the boss of someone else.

Part of this is due to the skill shortage, reports BOSS magazine. Before, everyone just wanted to be promoted up the food chain. Now, says the magazine, people are looking for functional recognition so they can move on if they have to.

So if you do succumb to the current fad and give your staff fancy titles, it could well result in them getting a better job with more pay somewhere else!

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Social shopping sites

Social shopping – a combination of social networking, product reviews and online buying – is on the rise, according to the online networking gurus at Mashable. Here are their top five best new social shopping sites:

1. Crowdstorm: A social shopping service using product buzz in the blogosphere to help you find what to buy.
2. Etsy: Like a more innovative eBay, Etsy is the place to look for unique handmade art, jewellery and other creative items.
3. Zebo: A simple site made for lists of what you already own, not what you want. You can even input pictures, YouTube videos, and MySpace slideshows into your lists.
4. ThisNext: An interactive wish-list based shopping network with a recommendation system based on opinions from real people.
5. Kaboodle: Share product recommendations with the community and discover new stuff from users with similar tastes and styles. Just sold to Hearst Magazines this week.

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Boozing consumers remember ads

Drinking isn’t normally associated with a good memory, but according to a new Arbitron study, somehow adverts do tend to stick in the heads of pub and bar-goers. The Advertising Age reports that the study of bars and nightclubs found the average brand recall was 43% for an ad on the Ecast platform, an out-of-home ad-serving network available on 10,000 digital jukeboxes across the country.

The US study focused on people who spent more than one hour in a bar or pub and interacted with the Ecast platform, which consists of banner ads that accompany music selections.

Considering many bar-goers can’t even remember what they drank the previous night, the fact that they remember ads might seem impressive.

“What surprised us was the number of people who use jukeboxes themselves or watch someone like a friend using one,” the study’s author says. “They interact with it like they would ads on the internet.”

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Online search just the beginning for consumers

People looking to buy a product or service in their local area will generally follow up an online search with offline inquiries by phone or a personal visit, according to a comScore Networks study reported by Marketing Charts.

According to the US study, 82% of online local searchers follow up offline, via an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase – and, interestingly, of these searchers a very high 61% went on to make a purchase.

Other revealing statistics from the study show that:

• 33% of all consumers still consider print yellow pages as their primary source of local business info.
• 90% say print yellow pages are still valuable because it provides more information than online, such as accurate phone numbers.
• 60% of searchers online looking for local businesses think that the top results are most relevant – 25% don’t want to have to scroll down.
• Traditional advertising triggers branded online searches – between 60% and 90% of searches for heavily advertised categories such as pizza, insurance, banks and financial institutions were branded.
• A majority of local searchers (60%) first go online for conducting a local search.

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