Taking a new marketing approach is not limited to Facebook, Daily Deal or Location platforms. Change is not just about building reviews and positive content. As important as those all are, it’s the legacy areas of your programs, the “rules” that have “worked” for decades and decades [read: neglected and yet defended] that are truly the opportunity goldmines.

Nowhere is this more true than remarketing. Continue reading →

For most brands social has grown out of the corners: a motivated marketing coordinator, customer service rep, etc. While this has lead to some of the most authentic and impactful campaigns out there, if you can’t trust an employee with the keys, don’t trust them with the customer. Continue reading →

As the debate over internet privacy makes headlines with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus all taking center stage around the hotly contested idea of “real identity” marketers face our own privacy battle. For us it’s not about how to open things up but rather looking at what open means for participation with our brands. Casting aside personal opinions and beliefs for the larger privacy debate, one has to realize that not all customers are willing to share all businesses – as themselves – to their own friends – in a way that can be seen forever.

Are the social tools we are using the right tools for our businesses? Continue reading →

For most digital marketers when we think about a term like “conversion optimization” it brings up ideas like one page checkouts, testing new trust marks, button colors and confidence text. While these are important, downright vital, steps every site should go through they’re details and can stop us from forgetting the much more vital question – does the process offer the best experience for the customer?

As ecommerce has become a part of our every day lives not a lot has changed in the fundamentals… the same types of product pages, cart overviews and checkout flowers and while one can say it “works” with very different products from store to store, is works really enough? Continue reading →

Reached out to a tourist company in Hawaii this last weekend via twitter and the response was crickets. When I did reach them [via another channel] they offered a simple response… the marketing person works “standard” hours. This is an all too common tactical error that, as we become more connected, is having a greater bottom line impact. Continue reading →

Franchise compliance is not new problem, nor a simple one… independent owners, local markets & a personal p&l to live by, but in a world where each customer can reach 100s of people who trust their opinion in seconds, the “independent” excuse just doesn’t cut it anymore. So how do you bring together a single brand in a business that shares one logo and many autonomous owners to avoid a negative social onslaught? Continue reading →

With nearly one in two internet users on Facebook, hundreds of millions on twitter, forums, blogs, and niche networks social support isn’t just a great way to communicate with customers, it’s become an essential part of doing business and is nearly as expected as a phone number. But don’t worry about hiring on a whole new support team: with a creative approach, social support is more about using the benefits of the channel than investing millions — and that’s important as the flood gate of inquiries is near infinite. Continue reading →

Low cost, quick to market and a platform for engagement: of all the ways social media has impacted the way we do business, social support is perhaps the most direct and accepted business use. But social support has a flip side — for many brands it’s become a way to address the connected customer while legacy support systems, long wait times and product defects go unresolved — social support has become a crutch.

I’ve been there before myself, several times. Between acquisitions, periods of rapid growth, outsourcing of departments and a myriad of other challenges, we saw social support as the way to quickly address a bad stigma about the brand’s service, long queue times and public critique over support. But while social support provided an apparent short term fix, the truth was we were making a long term mistake and conditioning our customers to turn to the wrong venue, a very public venue, to solve something which they asked us to, and we should have been able to, solve elsewhere.

When social support is “better”, that obviously means everything else is worse Continue reading →

As social has grown become the top activity online, it’s not surprising that employers have started banning the use of sites by retail, support and genera employees. And that’s mistake.

Whether it’s leveraging motivated employees to provide a face to the brand, influencing friend circles or simply giving employees enough respect to check in now and then, there’s great opportunity in opening up social to your entire organization and focusing on educating and training rather than limiting a If productivity stinks, Facebook is merely today’s outlet for free time, and a ban will not fix the problem anymore than removing the free water cooler.nd penalizing. Continue reading →

As the buzz around social becomes stronger, many corporations coming from the era of tv and print just finished struggling through online advertising and are now finding themselves facing something completely transformative that pushes aside the principles decades of marketing experience has taught them. This has caused a reactionary response where marketers have been tasked with hitting metrics to claim victory to the stock holders, the board or just the executive team. The buying of a like has become a quick fix.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it Continue reading →