Looking at the May 2013 edition of McKinsey Quarterly, many of the Top 10 tech trends will have a significant impact on B2C marketers, and the gap between champions and laggards is widening. In order to stay competitive, it’s become essential for companies to be channel agnostic and consumer-centric yet maintain a holistic approach.

With technology breeding technology, tech companies are jumping at every opportunity to launch new apps and solutions for everything it seems but the kitchen sink. Of course consumers are eating it up. All this fighting for their attention is totally to their benefit.  They are more connected than ever, more mobile, more savvy, more entertained, more curious, less patient… instant gratification is the name of the game (same day shipping!). And as consumer expectations continue to rise, marketers are left in the dust playing catch up, holding on tight and trying to keep their customers happy.

Time and money are not affordable luxuries in this fast-paced, competitive, technology-driven market. All those legacy systems and IT investments working in silos or being partially connected are not going to cut it anymore. Otherwise it will always be a game of catch up, and the winners are the ones who adopt and adapt. The ideal solution is a platform that can not only leverage current IT investments to get caught up as quickly and as efficiently as possible, but it needs to also be flexible for quick and simple integration with any new tech trends that come along.

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” – Steve Jobs

Digital adds more P’s to the marketing mix

In 1960, marketing professor and author Edmund Jerome McCarthy identified the 4Ps’ that make up the marketing mix, a tool still used to this day, except now it has increased to 7 Ps:

Physical (elements in the store from what an employee wears to signage to merchandise), People (employees who have direct contact with customers) and Process (marketing systems) are now as essential as Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Perhaps more so because that is where marketers can truly differentiate themselves in a consumer-driven environment. One of the ways to do this is to mine social data (a real goldmine) for customer sentiment and combine that knowledge with the oodles of data stored in the cloud.

The integrity of true data integration

It’s hard to argue with a guy like Einstein, who prolifically said, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted".

Just because the data is now stored in the cloud and accessible for analysis, does not mean it is useful or relevant. Big Data does not paint the Big Picture. A customer journey is made up of many little steps that can and do change direction with the wind (or a meaningful offer!).

In order to truly understand a customer and be able to offer them personalized communications and seamless customer experiences, data needs to be cleansed, parsed and merged with unique customer profile attributes and behaviors - that is how to build true, transparent customer relationship marketing. It’s about integrating then segmenting based on quality information, social sentiment, purchase behaviour, social profiles, analytics, etc.

The best of both worlds: digital and physical combine for the ultimate customer experience

With the incredible adoption of mobile commerce capabilities emerging in retail stores across the US, consumers are heading back instore expecting something special. Apple started it years ago in their stores. Starbucks mastered the Foursquare check-in to drive sales and build loyalty. Macy’s recently launched a virtual dressing room experience with a 72-inch “magic mirror” that allows shoppers to see the clothes on them to help make purchase decisions.

The good news is that retailers are ready to embrace the change. In fact 88% of retailers polled in a recent study by RSR Research agree or strongly agree that technology in store will help them compete with the online experience, and 80% contend that incorporating technology as part of the in-store experience is a necessity. The trick is connecting the new technology with existing systems so the customer experience is captured in their personal profile for subsequent, personalized communications.

It will be interesting to see at the end of the year where technology did in fact bring us, which new disrupters broke out and changed the game, and what the best-in-class marketers will do with it. Because not only does technology breed technology, it also breeds creativity.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Peter Drucker 

Your effort will pay off because Facebook’s social graph puts their tremendous amount of influential social data to work for you. Nearby Places appear in order of relevance for your potential customers (geo-targeting, categories, Likes, Recommendations and Ratings from their friends and Facebook network). Capturing their attention at a moment when they are in discovery mode is a tremendous opportunity to connect with them!

Here are a few tips:

• To claim or establish your business inside Facebook Places, each Page needs an address and a category. It will then automatically be listed as a Nearby place. For larger chains with many locations, each location may have to be set up individually.

• Be sure to involve all managers so they are aware of best practices.

• It is recommended to have someone monitor your locations regularly and ensure your pages are official so you can consolidate the data.

As a Marketer, Places lets you connect to a person at a unique moment in their customer journey; empowering you to act on it in the most relevant way. From there, use that knowledge and create the marketing ecosystem you desire; check-in loyalty programs, identify frequent customers and ambassadors, offer seamless experiences across all your POS/POI. Test offers, measure ROI and optimize future promotions to keep them coming back.

Facebook Places is an ideal channel to add to your cross channel mix. By bridging the social and mobile environments with offline brick and mortar, you can identify even more moments on the customer’s journey as you track them step-by-step across touchpoints.

Note that at the time of publication of this article Facebook has recently revamped its Nearby feature for its iOS and Android apps but is still in beta mode and only available in limited locations. Brands can run only one check-in deal at a time per location, but can run it at several locations, or test different check-in deals at different locations. Each location must be set up individually.

By Guy Kawasaki.

Many people ask me how I manage my social media accounts (and others make stuff up rather than figure out what I do). Here are the gory, inside-story details of what I do. Perhaps you may find some of my methods useful to help you get the most out of social media, too.

Twitter

On Twitter, I'm @GuyKawasaki. My Twitter practices defy the recommendations of social media "schmexperts" (schmuck + experts) to manually post a limited number of tweets and not use automation, repetition, contributors, and ghostwriters.

I have never been on the Twitter Suggested User List, and I have more than 1.2 million followers. I attribute this success to providing a lot of interesting links that people retweet. These retweets expose me to many people who then follow me. There are five (yes, five -- count 'em) sources that feed my Twitter account:

1) HolyKaw

I co-founded a website called Alltop. Half of it is an aggregation of 30,000 RSS feeds organized into 1,500 topics ranging from adoption to zoology. The other half is a website called HolyKaw.

HolyKaw provides a continuous flow of interesting and diverse stories that should elicit the response, “Holy cow!” (Holycow.com was taken but since my name is pronounced “Cow-asaki,” I figured that HolyKaw would work.)

The posts on HolyKaw are short summations of stories, a picture or video to illustrate the story, and a link to the source. Approximately twenty people/organizations have contributor-level access to HolyKaw.

We pay several as editors -- they are not “interns” in the sense of unpaid students. Organizations such as Futurity and National Geographic also have contributor-level access because they consistently post great stories.

The headline of a HolyKaw post -- for example, “Compilation of stories about introverts, outsiders, and loners” -- automatically generates tweets that go out through a custom app called GRATE, for “Guy’s Repeating Automated Tweet Engine." These slightly modified tweets appear four times, eight hours apart.

The reason for repeated tweets is to maximize traffic and therefore advertising sales. I’ve found that each tweet gets approximately the same amount of clickthroughs. Why get 600 page views when you can get 2,400? Like CNN, ESPN, and NPR, we provide content repeatedly because people live in different time zones and have different social media habits.

2) Repurposed Google+ Posts

Three other people also post to HolyKaw via Google+: Peg Fitzpatrick, Trey Ratcliff, and me. (I explain this in the Google+ section below.)

3) Repurposed Facebook.com Posts

Peg Fitzpatrick manages the Facebook.com/guysco brand page. When she posts stories there, they automatically appear as tweets.

4) My Comments and Responses

I use Tweetdeck to respond to @-mentions of @Guykawasaki, as well as to direct messages. If you see a response tweet, it is always me--never anyone else.

5) Promotional Tweets

Finally, if you see a tweet that is promoting my books, appearances, or investments, it’s almost always one that I posted with Tweetdeck or that Peg Fitzpatrick has scheduled using HootSuite.

Google+

On Google+, I'm GuyKawasaki, and Google+ is the core of my social media existence. It is the Macintosh of social media: better, used by fewer people, and often condemned by the experts. Unlike other social media profiles I own, no one else ever posts, responds, or comments on Google+ as me.

My orientation toward Google+ (and social media in general) is what I call the NPR Model. My role is to curate good stories that entertain, enlighten, and inspire people 365 days a year. My goal is to earn the right to promote my books, companies, or causes to them just as NPR earns the right to run fundraising telethons from time to time.

My posts range from first-person accounts of being a black tourist in China, what happened to Allen Iverson after his NBA career, and gifts from Air New Zealand. I use five primary resources to find stories to post:

1) My Alltop Account

This is a custom compilation of the RSS feeds of websites such as In Focus, The Big Picture, YouTube, and NPR that are mother lodes of great content. This is my one-stop shopping cart for content.

2) HolyKaw

Yes, I post what my contributors post as me (i.e. under my name) because the HolyKaw contributors are often better at being me than me. Wrap your mind around that.

3) What’s Hot Feed of Google+

Think of this as crowdsourced story leads. The beauty of this feed is that you know that people have already judged the stories as good, though it tends to be heavy on Android news and inspirational quotations.

4) Most Popular Stories

When I’m checking out stories from the first two sources, I look at the “Most Emailed” and “Most Popular” listings on the right side of most websites. These often yield great material. I’ve also compiled a collection of most emailed and most popular feeds at Most-Popular.alltop to make this even easier for you.

5) Pointers From Various Friends and Family

Many people know that I’m on the hunt for good content, so they send me leads. These are almost always good enough to post.

Some of my Google+ posts pass the “holy cow!” test, and there is a plug-in to publish Google+ posts to a WordPress blog. This means I can cherry pick my Google+ posts for HolyKaw. (Look for the hashtag “HolyKaw” to see which will appear in HolyKaw and later Twitter.)

Peg Fitzpatrick, Trey Ratcliff, and I use this method to select some of their Google+ posts for inclusion in HolyKaw. They do this to gain additional exposure since these posts are tweeted to my 1.2 million Twitter followers four times eight hours apart through the HolyKaw GRATE machine.

Three Google+ Power Tips

I adore Google+, so let me provide these power tips for using the service:

1) Find anytime, but post when you’re cogent.

I often get up in the middle of the night and check Alltop and the Google+ What’s Hot feed on my Nexus 7. When I find something good, I share it to a Google+ private community with only one member: me. When I wake up in the morning, I go to this community to see what stories I found in a less cogent condition and write up a post.

2) Schedule Google+ posts.

There are multiple ways to schedule Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest posts using various tools. However, Google+ makes it harder than those services. There are two ways to do this, however. First, there’s Do Share, a Chrome extension. Second, if you have a HootSuite enterprise account, you can schedule to a Google+ Business Page (as opposed to a personal profile). Since my Google+ focus is on my personal profile, I don't use the HootSuite method.

3) Get rid of trolls.

Be a hard-ass: Get rid of people who irritate you. Think of your Google+ posts as your swimming pool. If people pee in it, throw them out. There are some people you need to get out of your social media life. A Chrome extension called Nuke Comments is a lovely solution because it enables you to delete a comment, block the person, and report him/her with one click.

Facebook

I have two personas on Facebook: Facebook.com/guy and Facebook.com/guysco. The first is a personal profile, and the second is a brand page. I operate them differently.

First, a virtual assistant monitors my Google+ account and manually adds most of my Google+ posts to Facebook.com/guy using Buffer. (Disclosure: I advise Buffer.)

There are plugins that can automatically publish Google+ posts to Facebook. However, every Google+ post is not appropriate for Facebook, and there’s no way for me to tag the ones that are appropriate. Thus, a human has to make the decision, download the photo or YouTube embed link, make minor edits such as removing the “+” in Google+ +mentions, and post to Facebook.

I monitor comments at Facebook.com/guy and respond to them as much as time permits. My virtual assistant never acts as me, so either I answer or there is no response at all.

Second, for Facebook.com/guysco, Peg Fitzpatrick, whom I mentioned earlier, makes all the posts to this page, and these stories automatically become tweets. This Facebook Page is a branding effort for “Guy’s companies,” which are primarily my books.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, I am Guy Kawasaki. The virtual assistant who takes my Google+ posts and publishes them to Facebook uses the same process for LinkedIn using Buffer. One of the cool things about Buffer is that you can post to Facebook and LinkedIn at the same time, so this is easy.

There are seldom comments on my LinkedIn posts, so I seldom visit my posts to respond -- of course, this may be a self-fulfilling process. But I have to draw the line somewhere, or I’ll never play hockey during the day, which is a key component of my happiness.

Pinterest

On Pinterest, I'm Guy Kawasaki, but Peg Fitzpatrick manages my Pinterest presence. There are two reasons: First, I don’t have enough time to do a good job with more than three services (my priority, in order, is Google+, then Twitter, then Facebook).

Second, I don’t have Peg’s magic sauce to manage Pinterest as well as the Pinterest community deserves. Part of doing social media well is knowing what you don’t know and what you can’t do well, and then finding someone who does.

Conclusion

Don’t get the impression that there is a huge team of people doing what I described above. The total of all resources, excluding my own activities, is approximately one full-time equivalent. In addition, I spend three to four hours per day creating my own posts and commenting and responding.

To summarize, here’s quick wrap-up to review my social media methods:

Twitter: Mostly generated from the headlines of HolyKaw stories, four times, eight hours apart; contributions via Google+ and Facebook; and manual promotional tweets.

Google+: Me only. Think of me as the Mike Rowe of Google+ -- I'm willing to do the "dirty jobs."

Pinterest: Peg Fitzpatrick acting as me.

Facebook and LinkedIn: Virtual assistant reposting some of my Google+ posts.

Again, no one responds as me (for better or worse, as I've sometimes learned) on social media, though many different people may be behind a post.

This is how I manage my social media presence as of May 2013. I hope there are techniques here that you can use. Stay tuned, because my procedures are ever-changing.

Sometimes the art is in the simplicity. As Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos so simply explained it, the ultimate in personalization is “when you go into a bar and sit down, and the bartender puts a whiskey in front of you without having to ask what you want." [PC World, June 28, 2000].

The stroke of genius behind Amazon’s success was in seeing the potential to recreate that sentiment to an online shopper – and doing it! From their startup as an online bookstore to today’s extensive network of 3^rd party resellers and e-commerce platforms, Amazon has always found a way to take the incredible wealth of information being generated on the Internet and curate it down to the individual level.  In essence, it is the result of combining art and science.

This commitment to creating customer-centric experiences through data optimization has been – and continues to be – evident across all Amazon operations. Zappo’s, who joined the Amazon family in 2009, has managed to maintain its core philosophy of providing personalized customer service despite its huge growth and expanding repertoire . Committed to “Delivering Happiness”, CEO Tony Hsieh affirms in his book of the same name that “In any relationship, it's important to be a good listener as well as a good communicator. Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship but, remember that at the end of the day it's not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.”¹ This mentality has surely helped Zappos become the world’s leading online shoe retailer today.

Amazon’s influence can be felt across all industries. For example, Netflix, the world's leading Internet television network, may not have changed the way we shop online but they certainly revolutionized the way people watch TV and movies. Catering to more than 36 million members, they serve up personalized entertainment recommendations based on individual choices and ratings.

Other evidence that online personalization is making a huge impact on the retail industry can be found in new initiatives by Walmart with their @WalmartLabs technology and by Target’s recent launch of Cartwheel.

Every day it seems there is another innovative company leveraging the data out there to provide personalized, curated online shopping experiences. Read about them in our blog.

Today’s cloud technology and the significant amount of data available to marketers make it easy to implement customized programs quickly with Whatsnexx such as:

• Personalized upsell/cross-sell
• Intelligent wishlist and shopping cart conversions
• Geo-localisation

Creating a personalized customer experience every time – like a great bartender –.- is what drives loyalty and is our commitment here at Whatsnexx. In essence, we help our clients master the art of listening to each person across multiple channels and then acting on it so that person feels special and important.

As quoted from their website, Amazon’s mission statement is “To be Earth's most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” A worthy mission for those of us who are part of the new retail revolution. Thanks for the inspiration!

Creative business models combined with scalable and innovative technology, social media and big data is creating a changing of the guard in the retail sector. Not to mention the endless amount of consumer driven data at their fingertips. It’s a retailers dream with a silver lining.

Here’s how Etsy, Pinterest, Rent the Runway, Warby Parker and Shopify are cashing in on the dream.

Etsy has been compared to "a crafty cross between Amazon and eBay," two e-tail giants to say the least. The open source marketplace for hand made goods and crafts opens the global retail space to anyone from large retail chains to “mom and pop” shops. The Etsy API gives companies access to member's favorites as well as a recommendation engine, and allows developers to create apps that create and manage listings, analyze sales history and control shop appearance.

Perhaps it's coincidence that Etsy is also the most popular source of pin content on Pinterest. Pinterest is rapidly becoming one of the most influential sites. In fact, recent studies have indicated that Pinterest generates higher quality traffic to retailers than other social networks and that the average purchase originating from Pinterest is higher. This socially evolving, window-shopping, wish list building platform continues to demonstrate considerable retention, engagement and virality metrics and opportunities for retailers (up to 80% of pins are re-pins!).

Rent the Runway brought the highly successful Netflix business model to the online fashion distribution industry. They are truly changing the retail industry by making high fashion accessible to the masses - democratizing retail through renting vs. buying. In doing so, they also provide luxury designers with an unmatched acquisition platform and exposure to a new demographic. 

Speaking of high fashion, Warby Parker has found great success with its customer-centric strategy and socially conscious business model that offers designer eyewear at one standard low cost. Interestingly, this e-tail giant recently opened its first brick and mortar store, claiming that eventually the notion of one without the other will dematerialize.

And for those who have yet to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon, Shopify claims it can get you up and running in about 20 minutes. Its innovative platform includes templates to set up e-commerce stores from A-Z as well as a content management system that allows users to manage inventory, edit HTML and CSS code, create coupon and discount codes, and accept payments online with PayPal and major credit cards.

Disruptions in marketing technology continue in parallel to the disruptions from the retailers themselves.  Deeper targeting, tighter integration between marketing technology providers, and agile marketing as a methodology being better supported through real-time data, test and target and constant iteration are changing how we think about delivering solutions to the more disruptive marketers.  Fundamentally, your marketing technology should not be the barrier to your own disruptive force, and we take this promise to heart in the delivery of both our platform and our solutions targeting new marketing paradigms.

All this to say, these disruptions are a positive disturbance for retailers, as they pave the way and open doors for the future of customer experience.

Karen Leland provides resources and advice for brands that want to pin some success on her site at KarenLeland.com - and check out her pins on Pinterest. The infographic below is from Karen Leland's new book, Ultimate Guide To Pinterest For Business (Entrepreneur Press, 2013) which details the 10 best ways to promote your business using Pinterest.

Infographic originally posted on: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226590#ixzz2StxPM6DW

James Murray is another expert weighing in on the discussion from the UK.  James is the Digital Insight Manager for Experian Marketing Services. In his role, he shares the value of Experian data and insight through PR, thought leadership and speaking opportunities which help to drive customers’ multi-channel marketing strategies.  He recently posted on some data gathered from monitoring brand searches for up to five searches after a visit to Pinterest. This is by no means perfect but is a useful benchmark of brand recognition and retention – how likely is a user going to be influenced to search for a brand as a result of something they saw on Pinterest?

The table above, from State of Search (a UK site) shows the top 10 retail websites that showed a much higher propensity to be searched for after a visit to Pinterest compared to normal search. An index score of 100 benchmarks the average (i.e. no discernible change between normal search and a search after a visit to Pinterest) whereas anything over 100 denotes a greater likelihood to search for the brand.  

Still early days for determining ROI and where the most impact is going to come from in terms of overall customer journey, but Pinterest has carved out a beautiful home in branded consumer engagement and forward-thinking marketers have already made a decision to participate and capture hearts and minds in a meaningful way for now, even if it means sorting out the pesky ROI question at a later point.

All of this available preference data and market opportunity has to be approached with the right intent and an appropriate filter for true consumer behaviours, best evidenced by this frequently shared gem from social media.

Happy Pinning!

The Whatsnexx solution will provide Personal Edge/Centre du Rasoir with analytical capabilities that traditional data solutions cannot offer, such as high frequency and real-time utilization. The company will be able to leverage the entirety of their data to track customer actions and behavior, and to attribute revenue to the various cross channel campaigns and programs. Ultimately, Personal Edge/Centre du Rasoir will gain a better understanding of their customers and will be able optimize conversion rates in real time across the board.

For more information on the event, visit the CEO Vision Website here.

Recently, a new client approached us to help them optimize their online marketing spend. What they wanted to know is what banner ads were the most effective at generating profitable leads, what landing pages were best at converting those leads into customers, and what was the best messaging strategy to stimulate repeat purchases. We were clearly talking to a sophisticated etailer who was looking to both understand and improve their customer experience.

To date they had been limited by their ability to track this complex combination of variables: banner ad, landing page, and messaging. This project was uniquely interesting because it allowed us to provide the Lead and Sales reporting they were looking for through a simple orchestration of the flow of events and actions between an ecommerce site, Google Analytics and Cakemail. 

This particular marketing ecosystem coordinates the sending of 28 different email communications. There are four customer segments: Prospects; New Customers; Repeat Customers; VIP Customers. Depending on where the contact is in the marketing process they will receive one of these 28 personalized emails according to their ongoing behavior (whether they buy or stop buying for a period of time). One interesting feature is that we are using eight versions of the Reminder email that is sent out when a customer stops buying after a period of time. As soon as they purchase again a Thank You email is sent and the stops buying timer is reset. The Reminder emails start up again according to the contact’s segment and state; however the sequence of emails picks up where it left off, therefore the contact does not receive the same email twice unless they have gone through all eight different Reminder emails. The opportunities for testing are immense!

One of the goals of this ecosystem is to attribute the sale to the last email sent in order to determine the most effective messages for getting contacts to buy. Over time, this information will allow the etailer to improve email content leading to higher sales. The attribution of the sale to the last email sent is done by the customer experience ecosystem and is reported in near-real time using Google Analytics. The client can view the effectiveness of the marketing program in terms of the number of sales, total sales and average sales for specific time periods. This gives them great flexibility to try different email content strategies without the need to rebuild the ecosystem.

The etailer is also testing out various banner ads and landing pages. They wish to know which combination provides the best results in terms of number of sales, average value of sales, and lifetime customer value. The results are easily reported using a simple Excel Power Pivot table, and the etailer can add new banners and landing pages without having to modify the ecosystem (i.e. Involve IT).

Best of all, the entire ecosystem took me a total of three days to design, build and test! Once the client had set up all of their email templates in Cakemail it was a simple process for me to connect them. Ran one final test and put the ecosystem into production.

The real measure of a marketing automation system from an operation efficiency perspective is how fast the marketer’s solution can be built, how flexible the solution is so that it is easily modifiable, and how agile the solution is in terms of integrated marketing in multi-channel environments.