Questionnaire results from 606 people - blog readers from the Shiny network - showed that consumers increasingly expect and give permission to brands to talk to them online:

• • More than half (51%) of respondents believe brands should be engaging with them online.
• • A third (35%) said that they were more likely to visit a brand web site if they had read about it somewhere else on the Internet.

Information acquired online is often valued more highly than information acquired elsewhere. Faced with the statement ‘The info I find online is more relevant to me than offline info’, 49% of respondents said that they agreed and 13% said they strongly agreed.

Not only is online information likely to be viewed more favourably, but it is also more likely to propagate further. Nearly half of respondents (47%) agreed that ‘I am more likely to share info with friends if I receive it online’, with a further 19% agreeing strongly.

Lastly, making online a good source of information about a brand is no longer optional. An overwhelming 94% of respondents are most likely to use the web when seeking information about a person or a company.

The poll also asked whether responents would spend more or less time using different media in the future. As one would expect, the Internet in general seems likely to gain more viewers for more time: a third of respondents said they’d spend more time ‘looking at stuff online’. In particular, one clear winner is online communities, with a third saying that they would spend more time getting involved with such sites.

However, while it would seem that brands would be well advised to shift a considerable amount of their marketing effort online if they have not done so already, Nowicka demonstrated that they need to exercise considerable caution. Most consumers (55%) are able to pick out examples of brands ‘getting it wrong’ through heavy-handedness, dishonesty or apathy online. Nowicka advised brands and their representatives to remember that they are guests in a relatively sophisticated online world and to remember that they are guests in this world.

A PDF of Nowicki’s presentation is available here.