The following is a summary of some key take-aways for digital marketers:

• Battle of the Mobile Ecosystems.  Over one-half of all new mobile phones purchased are smartphones, and the competition among mobile operating systems will intensify as companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung, Verizon, and AT&T vie for the millions of consumers purchasing smartphones this year.  The mobile operating system is a key decision factor, just behind quality of the device, and as Apple and Google (and to a lesser degree Windows) continue to battle it out, marketers need to plan for multi-mobile ecosystems.
• Tablets are Going Mainstream.  As important as the iPad has been to launching the Tablet revolution, the introduction of the lower priced devices by Amazon and Barnes & Noble will likely be seen as the ‘tipping point’.  The Kindle Fire and NOOK Tablet offer relatively strong features at a lower price point and will attract hordes of consumers for which the iPad isn’t a consideration.  Given that tablets are supplementing and replacing other screens (e.g. computers and TVs), we need to ensure that our digital content and online shopping experiences are optimized for  tablets.
• This Isn’t Your Father’s Sales Funnel.  Smartphones are transforming how consumers shop by bringing the collective power and wisdom of the Internet into brick-and-mortar stores. Using their smartphones, shoppers have immediate access to ratings, reviews, and pricing information that wasn’t possible in the past.  As marketers, we can’t bury our heads in the sand.  Instead, we need to embrace change and provide the tools, functionality, and information our target audience needs when they want it, how they want it, and where they want it.
• Rise of the Digital Omnivore.  According to comScore, “The surging global adoption of smartphones and tablets is changing the how, when and where consumers connect to digital content, creating the most dramatic shift in digital media consumption since the advent of the personal computer”.   They refer to this multi-device consumer as the “Digital Omnivore”, and understanding the wants and needs of the Digital Omnivore will be extremely important for us to minimize the effects of disruption and maximize the opportunities, whether it be in an entirely digital or hybrid digital/bricks and mortar world.
• Mobile Video Takes Off.  Driven by faster connectivity (4G and more wireless hotspots), the never-ending supply of apps, and more powerful devices, mobile video will increasingly become an important activity for mobile users. Underscoring the impact of faster connectivity, comScore states that 4G subscribers in the U.S. are 33 percent more likely to watch mobile video on their smartphone than an average user.  As such, we need to understand how mobile video factors into our strategy.

We’ve already started to see the impact of mobile, and 2012 will only increase its significance.  What are you doing to integrate mobile into your digital marketing plans?

Pinterest is about viewing, sharing, and organizing images or videos of anything that’s of interest to you.  If you find something you like, whether it be a photograph of Abraham Lincoln or a dress from a Paris runway, you can ‘pin’ it.  Collections of pins are grouped into ‘boards’, which are usually built around a common theme (e.g. books you like, design ideas for your kitchen remodel, favorite quotes, etc.).  You can follow other boards and re-pin items (e.g. akin to the Facebook Like).

Pinterest usage has skyrocketed, in large part, because it’s incredibly easy to pin things and create boards.  Also, the visual nature of Pinterest makes the browsing experience very rich and fun.  The beauty of the website and related apps is how the technology gets out of the way of the star attraction – the photos themselves (videos too, but they aren’t nearly as popular).

So, how popular is Pinterest?  According to comScore, Inc., almost 8 million unique visitors flocked to Pinterest in December 2011 – that’s up from 418,000 in May 2011.   According to Shareaholic, Pinterest grew from 2.5% of referral traffic in December 2011 to 3.6% of the referrals in January 2012.  Especially impressive is that their share was only .17% in July 2011.  Hitwise reports that Pinterest is now the fifth most popular social networking site, ahead of Google+ and LinkedIn.

In my next blog post, I will discuss how marketers can leverage Pinterest but until then spend some time pinning.  You will find it, um, pinteresting!  Oh, and if you need a Pinterest invite (at the time of this post, you need an invite to join), just send me an email at tim at shaydigital.com with ‘pinterest’ in the subject line.

Christine called her mom and asked her the same question her daughter Ellie asked.  Christine was surprised that her mom gave her the same answer she gave Ellie:  “”That’s a great question.  I hadn’t really thought about it.  I’ve always done it that way because that is how my mom did it.  I assumed it was to make the ham bake better.”

So, to satisfy Ellie’s and her curiosity, Christine called her Grandmother and asked her about the ham.  She told her Grandma she assumed she cut off the ends because it’s the secret for a better baked ham.  Her grandma replied, “Oh honey, I wish I had some special secret.  The real reason is that the only pan I had was too small for a whole ham, so I cut off the ends to make the ham fit”.

The New Year is a great time to challenge assumptions and make sure you aren’t doing something just because it’s the way it has always been done.  Are there any situations where you are cutting off the ends of the ham and don’t know why?

…plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

While he was talking about war, the sentiment can be applied to pretty much any situation including digital marketing.

The point President Eisenhower was making is that the unexpected will happen – you can’t change that. In fact, as paradoxical as it sounds, the one thing you can can count on is the unexpected occurring.  However, the process of planning is invaluable because, if done properly, it will better prepare you to be able to react to surprises.

You need a plan for 2012 – it’s essential. Based on what you know now, the situation as it exists today, you need to understand what you are going to do to achieve your goals. However, you also have to expect that things won’t go according to plan. Even if your assumptions are spot on, it’s likely that issues outside of your direct control, whether internal or external, will force you to adjust your plans.

Therefore, don’t shortchange your 2012 planning process.  Make sure you understand the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ of your plans.  Spend time to discuss what could derail your strategy and how you would react.  Develop contingency plans when necessary. Know your biggest risks even if you can’t do anything to mitigate them right now.  Consider the impact of technologies or platforms emerging or fading more quickly than expected.

All of this can’t stop the unexpected; however, it will make you better prepared to deal with it.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

“We have always capped e-commerce at 10 to 15 percent of total retail sales, but this (tablets) potentially has the capability of really expanding e-commerce much beyond that.”

So, if you haven’t starting considering tablets in your plans, what does this mean for you?  First, don’t ignore tablets because only 10% of Americans currently own one (according to Pew Research and Forreter).  Forrester predicts that number to grow to 1/3 of all Adult Americans by 2015, and I believe that is a conservative estimate.   Given that tablets are being adopted at a rate greather than any technology ever and as prices decrease, features increase, and applications continue to amaze and entertain, more and more consumers will purchase one.

Second, you need to understand the role of tablets in the lives of consumers.  These devices are not simply a smaller laptop.  They provide a unique level of engagement, convienence and interactivity that traditional laptops or desktop machines done.  If you haven’t yet, spend a couple of weeks using an iPad or Android tablet and you’ll see.

Third, think specifically about the type of experience you need to provide for your consumers that use tablets.  Like with smartphones, it will likely be a combination of optimizing your website for tablet computers and developing apps that take unique advantage of the device.

Forrester believes most companies are slow to recognize the importance of tablets.  If you haven’t, it’s not too late.  Doing so now will enable you to get out in front and take advantage in a way that many of your competitors aren’t.

However, before pubishing a Facebook Fan Page, there are a number of factors you need to take into consideration.  Thinking about these issues prior launching your presence on Facebook will help ensure success.

First of all, it’s not about how many Facebook fans you can accumulate – it’s about how many truly interested people you can get engaged with your brand.  You could attract millions of fans through a contest offering a new car, but when the contest is done, what have you really accomplished?  How many of those fans are going to interact with your brand one month after the contest is over?  If they aren’t interacting with your brand, they won’t be seeing your posts (read the post on EdgeRank)

1. Listen and Observe. Is your target audience using Facebook?  What are they doing on Facebook?  Are they talking about your brand?  What are your competitors doing?  See how top brands, even if they are not in your space, are effectively engaging consumers on Facebook.
2. Who’s Involved. Who will be involved in the planning and execution of your Facebook presence?  Who will help provide new and interesting content?  Who is responsible for distributing customer insights?  Who will handle customer problems?  Although you need to have one group ultimately driving the process, it needs to be a multi-department effort.
3. Resource Planning. Plan the type of content you would want to provide over the course of the month.  Think about much how much activity your Facebook page will get and what type of commitment you will need to address issues.  Don’t expect that one post a month is going to create a robust presence.  You need to be realistic about what resources are needed to provide value, interest, and service to your audience.
4. Social Media Policy. If you don’t have one, establish a social media policy for the company.   Do you want product managers talking about new products in advance of their release?  Do you want your staff directly responding to comments on your Facebook page or anywhere else?  If you do, do you make it clear they need to transparent in terms of their role at the company (vs. pretending to be Joe Consumer)?  If you need help getting started, SocialMediaGovernance.com has warehoused a number of social media policies from various companies and organizations.
5. Set Expectations. Set realistic expectations. Building a Facebook precense is not like laying sod – it’s more like planting seed.  It takes time to see real results.  You need to spend time to nuture and grow your fan base.
6. Disaster Planning. What are you going to do when you get negative comments?  How are you going to respond?  Getting aggressive or defensive will only create more issues.  See how other brands handle issues.  See how consumers respond after the brand gets involved – does it add fuel to the fire or calm the situation?  Talk through various possible scenarios that may arise and discuss how you would handle them.

There is no substitute for experience and you will continually be surprised with what happens on social network websites like Facebook.  However, the proper consideration prior to the launch will undoubtedly help avoid major problems and increase the chance for success.

• Over 500 million users
• The average user has 130 friends on the site
• 50% of active users login every day
• The typical user sends 8 friend requests per month
• The average user spends 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook per month
• The typical user visits the site 40 times per month
• The average user spends 23 minutes during each visit
• More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each day

As such, marketers are starting to awaken to the promise of Facebook – not only as a social media platform but also as a social marketing tool.  Companies increasingly are setting up Facebook Fan Pages and focusing on getting users to ‘like them’.  However, in order to leverage the power of Facebook as a marketing tool, you need to understand the process that determines whether posts from your Facebook Page will even reach your fans.

For most Facebook users, the news feed is the lifeline to their network – it contains all of the activities of their friends and pages they have liked.  A user has two choices for her news feed:  ‘Top News’ and ‘Most Recent’.  Most Recent is a chronological order of all activity and Top News (the default) shows the content Facebook believes would be most interesting to the user.

One of Facebook’s challenges is continuing to provide a useful and relevant experience for its users as the total number of users increases, each person’s individual network expands, and the number of activities grows.  For the average Facebook user, a news feed with all activities listed can become overwhelming and crowded with uninteresting content.

One way that Facebook is attempting to meet this challenge is by providing the Top News news feed.  The content displayed in Top News is determined by Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.  While Facebook doesn’t provide specifics, it has shared the components of the formula:

Don’t worry, you don’t need to dust off your old high school or college math text books.  No complex computations are necessary.  A brief overview of each component is all you need to get started on the right path.

Affinity score attempts to show the strength of interaction between the user and another Facebook entity (user, brand, etc.).  If you click on posts from your Mom every day, comment on her wall, like her updates but never interact with the 1st grade teacher you friended, the affinity with your Mom will be much greater than with your 1st grade teacher.  Affinity is a one-way score:  I may have a different affinity score with you than you do with me.

Weight pertains to the type of activity and it is believed that certain activities are assigned more weights than others (e.g. a comment may be worth more than a like).  The more engaged someone has to be to interact, the higher the weight is likely to be.

Time decay depicts that new content is going to be given preferential treatment over older content.  Typically, as a post ages, it becomes less relevant and so it will lose EdgeRank.  As with most social media, people want new and fresh content.

From a marketing perspective, the key takeaway is a simple ‘post it and hope they will read it’ approach won’t work. You have be more planned than that.  As with any other marketing tool, it’s all about engagement.  It’s thinking about what type of content will most likely generate a positive reaction – which content will your audience find interesting.  Which content will generate the type of response that keeps you in someone’s Top News news feed?

Understanding how EdgeRank impacts your ability to stay connected with your fans is the first step to effectively using Facebook as a critical marketing tool for your organization.

Source of Facebook data referenced: facebook.com & pingdom.com

Photo via santibon on Flickr

For those radio programs that rely on listener interaction, stimulating conversation is a necessary part of their program.  To be successful, they have to motivate listeners to call in to recount stories which will not only interest other listeners but further stoke the discussion.

Picking up a phone and dialing a radio station isn’t a herculean effort, but relatively speaking, especially in this time-taxed age, it does require some effort (it’s more of a time commitment than clicking on a button to re-tweet or forward an email).

So, what can we learn from radio?  It seems that there are four key takeaways relating to successfully starting a conversation that we can apply to social marketing:

• Subject Matter.  Yes, this is an obvious one, but more companies than you think just appear to ‘phone it in’ (love the  puns).  There is a lot of competition for people’s attention so you have to select subjects that your audience is going to be interested in – not ones that only serve your company/brand.  It takes work.  It takes time.  This usually means thinking beyond your product or service and really focusing on the customer.
• Need to Ask.  Don’t forget to actually ask your audience to participate in the conversation.  This is equivalent of the radio station announcing their phone number and asking people what they think.  You’d be surprised how many more contribute to the discussion when you explicitly ask (we’ve tested this).
• How to Ask.  The way you phrase the question can have a significant impact on the response.  Sometimes you want to ask a very open-ended question and sometimes you will want it to be very specific.  It really depends on the subject.  Over time, you will learn the best approach for the type of question and your audience.
• Listen and Learn.  In most situations, radios programs are just asking the questions for the entertainment value.  But as marketers, we can learn extremely valuable information regarding the motivations, interests, frustrations, etc. of our target audiences from those conversations.

So turn on the radio and let the old dogs teach us social marketers a new thing or two about social marketing.

1. Design landing pages for email campaign
2. Implement paid search ads
3. Deploy transactional emails
4. Publish blog posts
5. Start drip campaigns
6. Optimize key pages
7. Plan sales promotions
8. Develop creative for display advertising
9. Post on Facebook fan page
10. Design merchandise up-sells

The to-do list of what you need to do to manage your online presence is virtually never-ending. You have so many tools in your toolbox, and you never feel like you have the adequate time and resources to be doing everything you really want to do. It is so easy to get buried in the day-to-day activities of managing your Internet operations.

However, as important as those tactics are to your success, you can’t forget to dedicate time to step back and take a 30,000 foot view of your business and consider your opportunities.

Real game changing ideas come by thinking big. That type of thinking can’t be crammed in between analyzing your conversion funnel and adding new products to your online store. You need to find the time to really allow your mind to clear itself of the day-to-day minutia so that you can think strategically.

This is not the once-a-year strategic planning that other groups in your organization may be able to do. Given the rapid pace of innovation in our space, you need to be doing this much more frequently – for example, monthly. You need to get out of your office, turn off your phone, leave your laptop in your bag and let your mind explore the possibilities.

What implications do Foursquare, Quora, QR codes, NFC, a double-dip recession, tablets, electronic wallets, cloud computing, smarthphones, federal spending cuts, Groupon, unrest in the Middle East, etc. have on your business? What’s the next big thing? What are your competitors doing? Where is the venture capital money going? What are the real visionaries talking about? Is there innovation in seemingly unrelated industries that you may be able to leverage? What do your customers really need, and is there a way to provide them with a better experience? What assumptions are you making that you need to challenge? What does all of this mean in terms of risks and opportunities?

Are you ready for your trip to 30,000 feet? Are you ready to see the forest through the trees?

By telling a customer that you are sorry when she has a negative experience with your product or service, you are showing her that you care, you sympathize with their situation, you aren’t blaming her, and you are willing to take responsibility.  Maybe most importantly, you can significantly change the tone of the conversation so that you can have a meaningful discussion in trying to find a resolution to her problem.  

However, ‘sorry’ is more than a word – it’s an attitude.  It’s a mindset.  It’s introspective.  It’s thinking first about what your company could have done to prevent the problem or what it can do now to resolve issue.

Elton John sang, ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word.’ Is that the situation for your organization?