The approach, and the comment aren’t unique this one retailer or retail at all but rather it’s just one example of the growing gap that exists between how companies operate at the point of interaction and the growing focus on customer experience in corporate.

As this discussion was taking place I could see the lines growing… and yet employees were visibly scampering around to other parts of the store, backrooms, and out the frontdoor for their current task. Some consumers waited and filed the experience away into their own head while others likely chatted about the long waits to whoever they were with on the spot or when they got home and then of course there are the few people who pulled out their smartphone and shared it with the world right then and there. But no matter how they acted, no matter what the, tickets / cashier or any other store KPI may have been, the perception of the store was impacted.

Just about every company has or is in the process of creating a team tasked with building reputation and yet these teams are often kept away from the process where impressions are actually made, left trying to leverage the good outcomes and mitigate the bad ones. For stores, call centers, even web teams, the focus is often on the same metrics they’ve known for years: items per basket, cashier efficiency, upsell dollars – drive the bottom line. It’s not the two sides are at odds with each other, it’s simply how they look at the world – social attacks experience to drive results while stores look at results to determine what to do in experience.

When the idea of social business first started to catch, we could only see as far as our team – how do we in corporate marketing get more people talking, how do we drive more reviews – agencies did this, brands did this, I did this, well did this – it was, at the time, the right way to go. But now we know better, we know that while we may say “social”, we don’t mean what happens at Facebook or Twitter, we mean what happens at the store, with the returns call center, during the tradeshow that creates the experience which will make it to Facebook.

So when we talk about bringing “social” to the entire company it doesn’t just [just] mean get everyone on Twitter to respond to questions, it’s about changing the culture, the metrics, the very way we do business. We have to think about what’s going to make our reputation against what we want out of our business – is our price point low enough to really be able to get away with long lines? Is our service really what we think it is?

Social should start in corporate, it should be managed by a team, defined and run as a part of everyday operations but that’s not where it ends.

Customers form their opinions at every interaction point and the impact of each positive or negative is huge – even if it’s never put out with a public comment that the corporate team can see. This requires a complete shift; we can’t assign reputation to a small team and leave those on the floor who actually make it ignorant of the realities of the market. To improve reviews, shares, likes – social, we have to improve the experience first.

As email has become more competitive and customers have taken to a variety of communication paths, most notably social in 2011, sends have become much more individualized with companies in the same category and channel sending very different offer types and frequencies.

Looking at the overall trend, it appears volume is up, likely as companies continue to strengthen their digital competency as well as the size of their offers.

The Volume Counts:

• Brookstone – 114
• Restoration Hardware – 55
• Bath & Body Works – 54
• Macys – 42 [includes sub brands, i.e. rewards]
• Harry & David – 41
• Victoria’s Secret – 42
• Zales – 42
• Ice.com – 39
• CircuitCity.com – 38
• Eddie Bauer – 37
• NewEgg – 34
• Pottery Barn – 32
• NFL Shop – 31
• Sports Chalet – 28
• Best Buy – 29
• Costco – 27
• Target.com – 24
• Bed, Bath & Beyond – 23
• HP – 22
• BananaRepublic – 21
• Dockers – 21
• The North Face – 18
• Zappos – 15
• See’s Candy – 15
• SiriusXM Radio – 12
• StarbucksStore.com – 11
• Quicksilver – 7
• The Art of Shaving – 7
• Mophie – 6

The misses & future opportunities:

1. Many companies repeated messages, offers and creative. While emails do go missed, trends become notable and as shoppers key in, response is reduced. By diversifying messaging points, even with the same baseline offer, activity increases to see what “different”.

Restoration Hardware is just one example having sent 4 identical titled emails in 1 day.

2. Significant oversending continues to be a wide-spread problem with Brookstone setting the bar at 114 emails in around 90 days. While more volume can drive short term sales, finding a balance helps insure list quality and continued usage throughout the season and minimum opt-out requests.

3. Only a few companies addressed mobile viewing. With the huge spike in mobile this year, the implications of being accessible are significant — increased awareness and offer usage for retail and being a direct alternative for etailers.

Harry & David and Best Buy offered a mobile links on messages improving their shot at converting shoppers on the go.

4. Almost no companies leveraged social to validate messages. By including user generated content such as user reviews, comments from other shoppers, or more abstract programs like gift tips, social can help email become more authentic and lessen the spammy nature of offer only messages.

Samsung keyed in to both reviews and Facebook chatter in one of their email sends.

Note about the data: I track emails starting in September that mention holidays through to new years. Messages are sent to a dedicated account and regularly opened to fire tracking tags but are not acted on [no purchases] to avoid segmentation changes and of course some messages do get lost in the mix, this is not scientific.

So whether you want to call it a “New Year’s resolution” or whatever, let’s put the billboards, the fan counts and the hyped up programs aside and take social back to what makes it actually work.

Enough with the Giant Banner Splash Pages

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to explain your page’s value but somewhere in the process we went from curated content to full page ads and fangating people out of our content. If the goal of social is to engage current customers and win over prospects, the first thing people should see is that we are actually there for a dialogue… not to sell. No one should have to “like” to ask a question.

So keep the intro page up but make it about what your page is about, if you can pull off the development hours, bring some user generated content into the fold to show that it’s not just what are selling, it’s what people are saying and sharing.

Don’t Just Broadcast, Join the Conversation

Remember when your executives came up to you with that first Comcast Cares news story and asked what “we’re doing with this social stuff”. Comcast didn’t get all that press because they launched a Twitter account and started posting their latest shows times and offers… they got it because they jumped into conversations and not just ones aimed at them, they found people talking about them who didn’t even know they were on Twitter, and answered their questions too.

That was a good idea, in fact, it was just the tip of the iceberg as brands pushed the boundary to stop just being logos and become people who could ask questions of their own, follow up with a little personality to a comment and get into the conversation as a participant.

So while Twitter has been taken over by many support teams, Facebook and Google Plus’s comment after comment approach makes things hard to sort the more you grow, let’s get back into the mode of responding… to support, to questions, to positive statements and show our customers that we’re actually online too. If you’ve ever tweeted back at 2am or posted a Facebook reply on Christmas day about how to configure the remote for the new stereo you know just how well it goes over.

Share what others share, not just what is on that week’s marketing calendar

Facebook renamed them to likes [“likers”??], Twitter says followers, Google Plus has circles but most of us still them Fans because that’s what our goal was always to get. People with a passion and interest in our brand and guess what, we found them, often times a lot of them and they share content right and left way more than we could ever make or keep up with. But leaving it at the bottom of a wall or a public but directed reply is like walking right over the hundred dollar bill to get the five.

While little Timmy may not have the reach of the big name bloggers / celebs they both influence on their own level and both have a purpose to being reshared… one to get hype and attention, the other to make it very real, authentic. Let’s leverage them all but not in a 90 brand / 9 celeb / 1 user kind of way. It’s like the idea of making a “fan of the week / month / year” and putting them into the profile picture – it was a good idea when it first came out and it’s spread but why stop at one person, once a month?

Feature those contributions, those quotes, the fan photos. Heck, let’s go back to making that the feature of our page… albums about what fans are doing encourages more fans to share which ups our EdgeRank on Facebook and our Retweets on Twitter so we get seen more. Transparency Visibility… can’t go wrong there.

If you’re going to push offers, don’t expect interaction

The stats show just how big the gap has become…  brands think it’s about talking, consumers about deals & giveways and with the messages out there, why wouldn’t they?

There’s nothing wrong with saying your page is about discounts, another way of accessing your email or print coupon offers, but if you say that you have to realize that’s always going to be what your fan expects. There’s no magical shift that happens when someone clicks “like” that makes them actually like your brand for what you stand for and do… instead it’s a matter of how you got them hooked that determines what they expect and who they are.

If you want engagement, if you believe that the ROI of social media is that you can actually talk to your customer and have them talk to their friends instead of just screaming in their direction with an ad, don’t sell something else to lure people in – it doesn’t work.  Instead explain exactly what your page does, how you’re here to answer, to share, to build that community.

That doesn’t mean you should be offer-less but when you a follow a truly premium brand who rarely discounts, does only the most select giveaway and focuses on content, sharing, conversation 95% of the time, each offer becomes special and something people clamor for. It’s no coincidence that the less you discount, the more people react… share… and buy.

Go for interactions, not counts

And with that we’re brought to perhaps the most frustrating point… ending this quest for counts. Is having more reach good? Tempting as it is to say yes, that’s the old world broadcast thinking… what’s good is having the right reach. Unless you’re Coke, Pepsi or P&G and literally have a place in every household, there’s no way you’re going to get truly interested followers let alone fans from having “everyone” follow you.

One day Twitter and Facebook and Google and every other tool will have a great way to segment contributors, actual customers, serious prospects and general followers but right now they are all one population. That means they bring up or pull down each other — whether it’s in visibility through systems like Facebook’s Edgerank, the strength comments on a discussion or just having other fans motivated enough to reply back so you can get that peer to peer cycle going. Having more fans that are less connected hurts you under the social model.

So sure, measure your growth in fans but don’t do it on the basis of what the guy down the street has, do it on how you’re using the most organic, the most targeted, the most appropriate sources to find people who will like because they actually like your brand or are teetering on the edge of being there and looking for another fan to push them over.

The best way to increase your profits or your loyalty is not to make your customers worry about the next addon fee: doing that merely drives them to check the other guys and blog, tweet and bash everyone every over every dime. There’s a reason why people are using the shopping cart and then leaving it so frequently (71%): they have to get that far just to know the actual costs.

The implication of nickel and diming is direct to the bottom line when someone passes by and less obvious with implications to brand reputation, loyalty and repeat business.

One could argue that we as consumer are as much to blame for fees as sellers are: after all we’ve bought into and encourage price wars through our hyper-comparative shopping and we will go to extreme lengths to save what amounts to pennies [like a Starbucks run to prep for a long line at Costco for gas]. But consumers been frustrated with the fee system for years now and more and more brands are turning this into a major win:

- Southwest airlines: A favorite for many regional and infrequent travelers and even though they’re considered a low cost carrier, the truth is they’re often not the cheapest but they’ve baked in costs that others charge averaging the impact out and turning burdens like lugging a bag into a positive which lets them run more efficiently.

- Washington Mutual [now Chase]: Granted WaMu’s mortgage arm didn’t do so well but remember how fast people, especially students and those living paycheck to paycheck, moved over when they announce no fee checking? Everyone copied it and when BofA tried to buck the trend with a Debit card fee this year, it cost them the homepage of CNN.

- Disneyland: Tell someone the price of a ticket and there’s a moment of shock but compare it to other theme parks and its clear what is Disney is doing. Yes, you can buy a meal or a tshirt and even charge for a few fair style games now but they don’t charge you for rides or fast passes, they’ll let you bring in lunch and you can come and go as you please while their competitors take a smaller upfront cost and then hit your wallet all day long.

- Amazon: Sure their base price is at the bottom of the list to start with but that’s the point: their base price is their price for almost every customer. There’s no shipping, there’s no electronic waste fee – it’s all baked in… I’m mighty interested to see what they do when they end up with tax in the majority of states; last I checked it was just 6.

All these brands share a common attribute: they’re popular.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the businesses which buck the trends to cater consumer’s perceptions do well. Hardcore shoppers, the really frequent fliers, the uber geeks, they all find the actual cost differences and stir up the pot here and there but most people aren’t looking to dive that deep.

So while so many businesses focus on how to out feature, out upgrade, out message, they’re missing the simple point that people want to feel like they got their money’s worth and that’s as much about the how the bill looks and what the social stigma of the brand is as the actual price they paid.

It’s like we’re screaming “we’re at the party too” in the hopes that people will think we are cool because we’re there, except this party doesn’t have a guest list and everyone has shown up.

What we’re really doing when we broadcast our social sites is sending a very loud message – go somewhere other than our corporate “home” to see how “authentic” we are. We didn’t open up the doors in place where everything is suppose to be tidy and perfect so we’ve rented out this space down the street and that’s where you can find the “real” talk.

At the same time, by the mechanics of social networks plus along with our fangating and page settings, ask everyone who comes over to like us – even though they don’t even know us. We’re preaching engagement but requiring visible affinity to even ask a question and then wondering why people don’t respond when we do post something up to them.

And of course let’s not forget the difficulty seeing and using these channels in the first place – we run dozens of profiles for different products and regions – which one is right? We drop people off at a wall full of different types of messages that we expect people to sift through. If they don’t find what they wanted, it’s waiting for a response from us or someone else or clicking a link over to our website where interested customer probably wishes they had gone too in the first place.

In the era of social the word control has been become taboo but controlling the experience by aggregating is not a bad thing. So rather than trying to look relevant by telling people you’re on XYZ, be relevant by giving them the all the information they actually need – and putting it in a place that is identified as yours — that’s transparent, that’s useful.

Social is about the opportunity to engage – not the requirement to do so. Short comments, full reviews, check-ins, photos, all of the features that exist out there can come right into your site [from those networks in fact] and extend, validate without the need for a visitor to click away from your brand. You’re creating all of this great content, why limit the exposure? Why mix your fan base with people who are just looking? Instead build your own community out of what people are already doing and bring it back.

You can’t call your brand social, expect to grow from social, and yet have social be a silo that lives outside of your brand.

What it is that makes people line up 6, 12 even 24 hours in advance? Is it the deal? Being able to claim first in line?

Certainly price has always had a lot to do with it and even more so in this economy as evidenced by the degree of the deals being offered and the scrutiny they’re getting. But only a few get the $199 doorbuster TVs while hundreds more wait in line knowing they’ll be picking at far smaller deals – there has to be more. At the end of the day we’re talking about sacrificing personal comfort, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner [or at least a long conversation after it] for something that can often be matched online and savings that amount to just a few dozen dollars on items that are hardly necessities.

Great Deals + Sharing = The Black Friday Experience

If we put aside our brand / marketing hats for just a minute, pull out the social science degrees so many of us spent years working on, and put ourselves in the shoes of consumers I think we can see that the success of Black Friday it boils down to our social nature. No doubt the deal is essential but looking at the person to your right and left and realizing that you all share the same goal changes things from a deal into an experience, something you don’t have to quantify the measurable ROI from and are willing to do not just once but year after year. Add in the exclusivity — whether it’s a limited count doorbuster or making a “sacrifice” to just be there and it’s not surprising that many people find the whole event to be, well, fun.  Seeing how Black Friday checkins, social comments and posts have grown even faster than the lines is certainly a testament to our desire to participate with others about what really amounts to nothing more than shopping.

As I talked with people tonight and heard their excitement, even saw a few faces walk out the store after hours of waiting without a purchase or disappointed look, there’s no doubt that for businesses to thrive in this market means going beyond the price war and building on the sense of adventure, chance … of the Black Friday experience. In the race for the customer, the bottom price is not where you want to try and make your stand and yet without offering anything but a deal, its where so many have ended up to the point that 30% off no longer feels special.

As Black Friday Becomes an Event, Success Will Depend on More than Price

But this year with the big transition towards 12am openings, I saw new ideas being tested out there. Best Buy ran movies at select locations; Food Trucks were called in by malls, and straight giveaways like free water are becoming more and more common. It’s personal too: I watched security guards and store employees spend hours outside chatting and standing alongside the crowd when they could have just as easily remained inside their warm stores. All of these actions speak to the link between our customers and our brands – you can call it an incentive, a hook, but the result is that its building community and giving people a sense brands are relatable.

As we see more consumers take part in this communal shopping event, more stores will get into the early openings and offers will increase making it even more important to be seen in the right light, to be more than just a place looking to take people’s money but instead offering up a little empathy, some excitement and perhaps soon a free cup of coffee in exchange for 12 hours of someone’s time.

Of course 8 hours in line are quickly forgotten as the doors open and people rush as fast as they can “walk” towards that big offer – but as I watch people filtering out of this store and back to their cars, it’s clear that the experience is as much a part of their excitement as the savings that exist at 3:30am.

While the holidays offer a great opportunity, they are also present a unique challenge as the buyer is often no longer the recipient of the product: write a review prompts, follow up offers, social campaigns  all go out the window and to maximize the opportunity, a seasonal strategy is needed. Here are 3 programs to connect and grow even when you’re not certain who is getting the order in the end.

Write a Review / Story Inserts –

Knowing that products are often hoping around before reaching their actual recipient may take automated emails out of the equation but it increases the potency of any included insert which suddenly is the only “marketing” that’s anywhere around. Leverage that holiday style.

Rather than a typical old “share your thoughts” piece, take the opportunity to make your insert extend the gift and bring your brand into the picture [in an acceptable way]. I’ve seen luxury products go as far as to include a greeting card with a direct, back of the page, message but even a standard single-sided insert can wish the recipient a happy holiday and invite them to share their thoughts about the product, or story about getting it in a fitting way.

With the right spin, you can even bring the customer back to a social channel to follow you for more down the road now that they’re a “part of the family”. But leave the cross-sell piece out for now; we are talking about a gift after all.

Share the Experience of Giving –

While your direct customer may not be the person using the product at the end of the day, chances are they have a great deal of investment in how it turns out and building around that initial impression is a virtually untapped idea, but exciting in its own right.

While you can’t ask these users for a review [and you should disable your write a review email to anyone who checks gift wrap / present options], you can ask them to comment about why they picked the gift, how the gift holder reacted, even to share a photo or video as the person giving it out. The content that stems out isn’t intended to validate the utility of the item but rather to validate the decision for everyone who comes back considering that item, or your brand, for a future gift themselves. Just think how much visibility you could get from a video contest that led to a dozen kids ripping open the paper on their new favorite toy of the moment.

Did You Get It? Social Network Participation

For many brands Christmas Day can be the biggest engagement hours of the year with the surrounding weeks taking other top spots. Why? Because people either got it or got disappointed. For youth focused brands and high ticket items this is especially more true with kids rushing to tell each other that the latest iWhatever ended up under the tree after all.

So whether you celebrate the holiday with a big family gathering or head to the nearest theatre to catch a movie and escape it all [you won’t be the only one], it’s a day you simply cannot turn the computer off for. Instead embrace the rush with a few messages that pull out the excitement from those who got it and fuel them back to your channels to motivate those who did not. You’ll build up post-holiday purchases [hello targeted offer] and explode validating content to your networks, blog, and product pages with ease.

Of course being socially active on a major holiday via support and a few updates scores serious points with your customer base: it’s a double play or better.

Become a part of the gift experience today and give people a reason, and opportunity, to do the same

Gifts are special for everyone involved and yet so often go untapped as a source of discussion. By appealing to the excitement, and staying away from the sales push, there’s a lot of upside to be had in building buzz for 2012 and beyond. And remember, if you don’t gather the content today, you’ll be back in the same spot with big coupon offers and bright creative come 12 months from now.

Why. It’s a simple question with vast implications.

A guy starts receiving emails from Victoria’s Secret after placing a gift order – without the details what will those messages say? Are they going to assume he is a direct customer? Why tells the marketing team that instead of multiple-emails a week with personal offers, the message can shift to less frequent suggestions, gift ideas, even useful content that makes the brand useful to him to follow. And the results? Well, I don’t know about you but I don’t know many men buying products for themselves from Victoria’s Secret.

Every day Living Social plays on my Pandora stream, inviting me to become a customer… millions of dollars in ad budgets to reach people with a sign up message who are already signed up. I can close their popups but that’s the extent of the feedback… With a simple question, they could appeal to current customers with value, contextual relevancy, something that doesn’t just make them top of mind but invites consideration. And for the price of one answer, I’d get the benefit of not hearing the same boring ad day in and day out.

Why is the hardest question but digital gives us a medium to answer it every day.

Social has created a frenzy for businesses as well all vye for the customer’s attention pounding them about new products, offers and a host of other campaigns we want to see go “viral” but that’s not where it ends. Customers are ready to spill their guts… not in drawn out forms or lengthy processes but through dialogue.

Not just surveys or expensive focus groups, we can go out with messages to customers in an individualized basis and not only to ask them questions but even to show them that we are asking. And they expect it.

From optimized campaigns to operational learnings, there’s a heck of a lot of value in knowing why.

6 months after getting the iPhone 4 I took it rock climbing and put a nice big crack in the front. Everything worked but needless to say I’ve been counting down the days until the new version was announced… 5, 4s, 2011… As much as I wanted the curved design, the features were almost irrelevant.

But while my upgrade decision has been stable, my carrier choice, not so much… Not [just] for the usual AT&T complaints but because half of my new apartment flat out doesn’t get a bar of service. So, while my contract may not be up, it seemed worth the termination fee to make a jump.

And then came an [unexpected] great customer service moment

After reading tweets from @DannySullivan and some “unknown” friends, I prepared for a battle on the phone, to push through a wall of counter arguments from one of AT&T’s “resolution specialists” [seriously, that’s their I.V.R. greeting]  and all the usual drama you expect when calling a company. My experience has always been that these “service” battles actually make it easier to cancel out of sheer frustration, but none the less, it’s a painful experience to know you’re walking into.

But after a few minutes on hold and giving out all of my personal information again the rep didn’t fight me. Instead he merely asked what the issue was and when I explained the lack of signal coverage, he apologized. Rather than going into a pitch, he then told me the cancelation cost [$325 - $10 / month of service was $175 for me] and how to cancel to insure a smooth transition of my number, how to get a hold of AT&T after the change for any issues, etc. Only as he was finishing up did he finally throw in a “I realize this won’t fix your signal issues but if you want to stay I can offer you a small credit off your bill, if not…”

Attitude. That’s what good service is about.

The rep offering me $75 wasn’t a deal breaker; heck that’s well less than a month of service between my minutes, texting and data + tethering package. Verizon’s service doesn’t work great here either [why there’s poor coverage in a “upscale” apartment community with 750+ units is beyond me] but between their trade-in programs, a better service reputation, and just being a different experience I was willing to jump ship despite the added cost until the rep, and thus AT&T, demonstrated commitment to me as a customer. Sadly commitment has become a rare thing these days.

The rep did everything other than what I expected. He was polite and legitimately apologetic. He provided the information I wanted first, an offer last. And when I took him up on it, he made the process seamless, taking the order, getting the right information, providing the little details [like the fact that the phone may just show up after the 14^th despite what websites say]. As icing on the cake, he also noticed that – for a reason which he didn’t know – I’m getting another $75 credit from AT&T in a few months for having an iPhone with my particular history… a retention bonus… we all know keeping a customer is far cheaper than replacing them.

iPhone ordering makes for great case studies because, between millions of experiences, you have the best and worst service scenarios all coming together around one constant. The apple website should be a prime example to every single etailer of how you make a shopping experience – the selection process is about a solution, not a shopping cart; the up-sells appear as value-adds and never stand in your way; the form fields are minimal and rarely error on a legitimate entry [like a special password or unique address]; and between split payments, multiple-financing options, and gift cards, it’s just as flexible as shopping in store. On the other hand you’ve got stories from the carriers of nightmare hold times, conflicting upgrade information, insanely high costs, near arguments over account features, discrepancies in warranty offerings & information… all in one ordering experience.

I didn’t expect to have a blog-worthy experience in upgrading a phone but what AT&T did goes beyond their service, iPhones or the cell industry – the sad reality is that we, as consumers, have come to expect our opinions to be practically ignored, to be hard-sold by someone reading off a script with 3 different levels of service and to be brushed aside with generic response. Despite all the talk of being social & transparent, most of customer service is still about getting the issue to a “closed” status rather than actually engaging to understand, acknowledge and learn from the issue.

The truth is you can’t always fix the root problem a customer is having but when you allow your reps to be honest, friendly, informative, and let them decide how to handle a negative based on their expertise doing this hour after hour, you do what customers don’t expect… care.

——————

Unfortunately I didn’t get the rep’s name; but if anyone from AT&T reads this, email me and I’ll give you the order number as he deserves a thanks.

The chief issue with a like, a retweet, or any other broadcast that is asked of a user is the endorsement behind it. Just as social has a code of conduct for brands engaging with consumers, the same exists for consumers engaging with each other. Posting to the wall and using a strong statement, each “like” is a statement. And not only do you have to get past that hurtle, but under the current feed systems, each action disappears off in minutes to a sea of new updates, photos and other likes leaving little long term connection outside of a smart counter.

But with Facebook’s new timeline feature and the apps that plug into it, the sharing game is in for a massive change.

As Facebook demonstrated with their launch partners at the recent f8 developer conference, a timeline app is an aggregation of activities from a particular site or tool that are individually less visible but collectively add up to reflect a part of someone’s life in their profile — whether it’s sharing a live playlist with spotify, last nights’ movie with Netflix, the current craft project, or even an automated stream from a vacation, apps will allow for users to associate activities as a part of their self identification.

Less visible & less significant, the opportunity for exposure will increase

The challenges to liking that I mentioned previously poses a significant barrier on many levels — users are selective about how many companies they like in total, how frequently they will add something new and even how they interact with sub-level pages like a brand vs an individual item for fear of overdoing it or being spammed by brands. By lowering the priority of each post and enabling more reasonable actions (reading, watching, listening to, researching, etc) it’s logical that users will become more willing to share and even allow for automated posting for trusted and appropriate tools.

In traditional advertising we consider repeated exposure vital to building up awareness and consideration so while these changes reduce the impact of any individual share action that is moved over to a timeline app, repetition is a worthy tradeoff for building social credibility.

Social has gone far beyond speeding up support inquiries or driving discussion n product launches, brand building is now really more “brand attachment” or the connection a brand is able to make, keep and show within a customer’s life. Timeline draws this evolution out literally and even further drives home the significance of moving from a buyer-supplier relationship to a partnership of sorts.

Early adopters will benefit significantly from viral effects.

While f8 outlined a few possibilities, there’s really no consumer facing brand that can’t find a way to bring themselves into a timeline.

The opportunity for timeline apps to is significant across many b2c and even b2b channels going from the very straight forward and “obvious” activities like a streaming service post to far more complex sharing like an update after a QR code scan or the departure of a plane.

Pulling in my own real world example, we see timeline as a game changing way to launch and build activity bringing gift related actions out from our standalone web and mobile platform and into a user’s existing social base without having to force (or build) a full app connection. With a simple confirmation, the wishlist picks, reviews and discussions around products created on our site live in a central place right where our user is most — Facebook. This in turn drives up repeated impressions which not only gives us the chance at growing our users but it helps the user fulfill their goal of getting their wishlist shared, seen and that gift purchased – it’s an action that we both want.

From my seat as both managing a consumer service and bringing brand marketing programs out, timeline apps are one of those changes that we will look back on and say “wow, that changed things” but I am eager to know what you think — is your team mapping out ideas, knee deep in code or holding on the sidelines to see if things shake out first?