Time to face reality: Marketing and advertising are a lot harder to do today than ever before. Half of consumers don’t trust print ads or television commercials, and fewer still trust what they hear on the radio. And consumer trust level is even worse for direct mail and outdoor advertising.

What’s the No. 1 trusted source of advertising? Word-of-mouth! That’s a huge game changer. Before, marketers had to convince consumers to buy their product. Now, they have to convince consumers to convince other consumers to buy their product.

It’s no small wonder that marketers have fixated on social media as the solution. Nearly all consumers are using social media these days to share everything with their friends (e.g., hobbies, events, humor, and, sometimes, even information about products and services).

Engagement DB, which studied the world’s 100 most valuable brands, found that the level of those brands’ engagement with their consumers via social media correlates with revenue. Companies with the highest level of social media activity increased revenue 18% in the previous 12 months, whereas companies with the least activity recorded a 6% drop in sales.

No wonder Nike’s chief marketing officer, Davide Grasso, once noted, “Facebook is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.”

Others also took the hint and made social media a priority for their marketing teams. For a lot of marketers, that meant setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter profile. But the results haven’t worked out as planned. For many, the sales needle has moved little.

The reason for the lack of results is familiar. The same thing happened back in the day when advertisers were first told that the Internet was the place to be. Their biggest failing? A build-it-and-they-will-come mentality, which still exists. Too many marketers create accounts on Facebook and Twitter, and when nothing happens… they become disappointed.

It’s as though marketers have forgotten what makes marketing and advertising really work in the first place. The problem is the lack of engagement.
Continued…

Other than hiring CSA&D to do all your marketing, here is what Dave Logan says:

Last year, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote what may be the most important business article in a decade, detailed here. Since its publication, I’ve asked many executive groups to read the article, most said the authors’ work is clearly groundbreaking — but they’re not sure what ground had been broken.

Here’s what the authors argued, and what this blog post will show you how to do: create industry-changing innovation by enriching tribes important to your business, without any concern about how the move will benefit you. Porter and Kramer call their approach “creating shared value.” My co-authors and I wrote about something similar in 2008. We now call it “tribal enriching innovation.” It boils down to three steps:

Step No. 1: Find a group of people important to your business who need help, and commit to helping them, without any thought about how this action will benefit your business. If you want bonus points, commit to helping this group even before you know what you’ll do. Vacation-rental website Airbnb got this right, and the results are changing the hospitality industry.

In 2009, Airbnb’s situation was desperate. Like many startups, they were amassing debt while trying to get traction on their business that connects people looking for a place to stay with “hosts” who are renting out parts or all of their homes.

Paul Graham, who runs Y-Combinator, plays a key role in where the story goes next. The cofounders walked into Graham’s office looking for advice. Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia picks up the story:

And [Paul Graham] asked us a really simple question. He said, “Where’s your market?” We said, “Out of all the cities, New York shows the most promise.” And he said, “So let me understand this: So your users are in New York City, your business is happening in New York City, and you’re here in California?”

We are like, “Yeah, we’re here for the program [Y Combinator].” He says: “Your users are in New York City and you’re here for the program in California?” And there’s a long pause and he goes — famous line — he says, “What are you still doing here? Go to New York City!” And we are like, “What are we going to do in New York City?”

After the three cofounders and Paul Graham brainstormed, they had an idea about how to help the early adopters in New York. Gebbia told us:

One of the things we realized is that the photos that people were using [to highlight their rooms for rent] were absolutely terrible. The pictures that people were taking were from their cameras phones, or Craigslist images, or no images at all. And we said: “Well, we are design guys, we know how to take a good photo. Why don’t we go and solve this problem ourselves?”

Two of the three founders landed in the New York area intent on fixing that problem. They rented a high-end camera and close to thirty pounds of lenses, other equipment and a tripod. After taking photos, they also sat and talked with the hosts, many of whom made suggestions about the website that the founders had never considered.

They made the changes to the website, uploaded the photographs, emailed thanks to the hosts, often including links to the features the New Yorkers had suggested. Then they flew back to California to assess the results. Revenue in New York doubled, from about $200 a week to $400.

They returned to Paul’s office, showing him the results. Their mentor showed enthusiasm, and then asked again: “What are you still doing here?”

The two cofounders returned to New York, repeating the process, and did to the following weekend. Each time, the revenue from the area doubled. They had reached the point of “ramen profitable,” which was making enough money to pay for rent and pay for ramen, all in one month.
Continued…

We all know social media is an important tool for brand awareness and customer acquisition — but how exactly are you supposed to convert random Twitter and Facebook users into real-life customers? Well, that depends.

Different brands have different challenges when it comes to customer acquisition: “If you’re our customer, you’ve signed up for a year-long service, unlike the Starbucks of the world, where you can be a customer by coming in for a cup of coffee one day,” says Lisa D’Aromando, social media community manager at Equinox. Whether you’re a clothing shop, a restaurant or a subscription service, you must tailor your strategy so that it makes sense for your brand. That said, there are a few universal ways to help your company attract new faces on the social web.

“I’m a big believer in creating and sharing meaningful content,” says Danni Snyder, co-founder and creative director at jewelry brand Dannijo. “Over time, that is every brand’s best bet for creating and sustaining a following that will grow their business.”

But what does it all entail? Mashable spoke with some super-social brands about how they find new customers and lock in their existing ones they have as repeat buyers.

1. Get Your Search On

There are 340 million tweets sent per day — odds are that a few of them are referencing your brand, though you may not realize it. “Just because chatter on social media channels isn’t mentioning your brand by handle or hashtag doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” says McKee Floyd, director of brand development at Sweetgreen.

Continued…

In my last column, I spoke to how analytics as we once knew them were dead when it came to mobile metrics and tracking. More than a few people in the analytics fields reached out to me. Some of them were not fans of my sentiment, but interestingly, most agreed. They shared exciting stories of new developments and incubator companies coming up with amazing ways to detect householding tendencies and start to define who is doing what on the share device.

I was both excited and impressed with what I heard. I wanted to give a great shout-out to contributors in particular whose feedback was worth sharing.

The crew over at Monetate, which focuses on optimizing your company’s online visitors and offers, has done some research that shows activity on tablets is much different than smartphones. Their comments suggest that as publishers, we should look for platforms that track smartphones and tablets separately. They see the tablet acting much more similar to a desktop than a smartphone. A link to a recent infographic they did is here.

Mike Edelhart, president of Pivot and Social Week, took a bit of a different approach, pointing out that householding is closer than you think but we can’t hold our breath for certain options.

He said, “According to Nielsen, 70 percent of kids use a tablet in the household. Even now, it is possible to impute tablet usage by taking a 360 degree view of all connected devices in the home. If sister is on her notebook, active on Facebook, and mom is up in her office, accessing a company Yammer account, then it must be brother on the tablet. Also, many folks use tablets, but only one I think tends to have email on the device. So, whoever accesses email identifies themselves.”

“Availability of publications on multiple devices can also help show who is accessing what. I started on the tablet, but now it is on mom’s phone. So, the looking at access points and cross-referencing with credit cards will show the magazine is really hers,” Mike continued.

As to predictive analysis for the household, Mike adds, “That is a way off. Humans are complex and their behavior is maddeningly hard to predict. I think the best we can expect any time soon are tools that give a slight hint of tendency. Anything more will require deeper insight into how humans tick than we have now. The only exceptions will be specific situations like illness, marriage, pregnancy. I think we’ll be able to predict these quite accurately soon based on the social and web information available to us all to study.”

For all of us on the front lines, this information can help us define rules and guidelines for building analytics that drive us forward. My takeaways in the end were these:

1. Use your analytics tool to track everything.

2. Build a customer use case of your product/service – make sure you consider all devices and the householding effect.

3. Look for the gaps that your analytics tools can’t provide (e.g., did the credit card registrant make the purchase and read it?).

4. Act like a spy. Identify clues to help get around that (e.g., are all devices being used to read that item registered to the same credit card holder?).

5. Build out a top-10 list of ways to proactively move the business forward. I will be sharing mine in my next column. Let’s build solutions that work for the industry together.

source: clickz.com: The New World of Analytics: What You Need to Know Now: Jeanniey Mullen

And If They Don’t, They’ll Be Relegated to Overseeing Promotions While Someone Else Takes Chief Customer Officer Role

Data was once the domain of tech geeks and direct-marketing gurus, while chief marketing officers focused on loftier things like shaping brand perception. But those days are over. A study from tech-research firm Gartner projects that by 2017 the CMO will spend more money on information technology than the chief information officer.

Macy’s CMO Martine Reardon
Thanks to an explosion of data from social-media platforms, call centers, transactions, loyalty programs, registries and more, CMOs who want a seat at the table will have to harness customer data and leverage it — or risk being relegated to chief promotions officer.
Continued…

A month or so back I published a list of ten social media power influencers. I’ve been developing the research since then and now have about 150 social media writers and experts in my power list. Below are the top 50.

The list was compiled using PeekYou‘s social pull metric – which, roughly speaking, measures the number of people in your second degree networks who are identifiable and active (see an explanation and some of the criticism of it in this post about the top 10 women influencers). Continued…

I recently visited Jarred, The Galleria of Fine Jewelry, to pick up some Christmas gifts. I had never been to Jarred before, although I had heard positive things about the jewelry. Having spent much of my career working for the competition (we shall call them Store X for this article), my instinct was to shop there first (at Store X, that is).

Here’s what I found on my shopping excursion: there was no one at Store X, nor Store X’s sister divisions, nor three other jewelers. Everyone seemed to be at Jarred. Jarred was full of people, including a much needed full staff and a bunch of customers. Jarred was literally buzzing with activity. Not sure why… the commercials? I honestly didn’t think they were that great, but possibly memorable (“He went to Jarred…”) The jewelry? It wasn’t that different from other jewelers in that price arena. Continued…

What’s the the single most important element of all advertising? Ah yes…. describing the benefits of the product or service in an engaging way that blah blah blah blah… No! Excellence in design, with colors and imagery that support the blah blah blah blah…. No!

The single most important element of any communication is getting the attention of your target . If your marketing isn’t stopping them in their tracks, you’re throwing your money away. It must be Job #1! Getting attention always involve some risk but as they say: No risk—no reward.

Failing in this crucial endeavor is the single, biggest reason why most advertising yields few or no results. When we explain our thinking, all clients nod, but not all can think out of the box. So we return to our desks and bolster ourselves with sushi.

Of course you have to do a great job of selling your product or service, but that is secondary. Page through a magazine and see what gets your attention and what doesn’t (which is harder.) Then, when it comes to your own advertising, steel yourself and be different, funny, interesting, challenging, enigmatic, original, mysterious, unexpected… Go on, get some attention and make some sales.

Have a project you’d like to see some fresh thinking on? Let’s talk. We’d be glad to meet at your convenience and give you our two cents worth. 214-215-0803 or email info@csadmark.com. We’re ready to go.

Any agency worth it’s salt is proud to share it’s track record. The success stories. The awards. The projects brought in on time and on budget. You’d expect a really good agency to be able to pile it on. But that’s not the reason we bring a shovel.

We know your target market isn’t paging through their favorite magazine to find your print ad. Running excitedly back to their desks to read your latest email blast. Searching for your tweets, liking you on Facebook or reading every word on your website. We’re flattered you’re still reading ours.

SO WHY THE SHOVEL? Will we use it to drive your sales message home? No. We’ll use it to dig up the gold about your company, your people and your product or service that will make compelling, believable and unforgettable advertising. In today’s overcommunicated market, that’s what it takes.

Any agency that tells you any differently has another use for their shovel.

Have a project you’r like to see some fresh thinking on? Let’s talk. We’d be glad to meet at your convenience. 214-215-0803 or email info@csadmark.com. We’re ready to go.

Every so often, a traditionally non-business word finds its way into the business world, fueled by an admirable desire to find new ways to think about old challenges. “Storytelling” has become one of those words. And though storytelling has been around since early hunters first gestured to each other in front of a fire, only recently has the corporate community recognized the potency of using storytelling strategically—to position brands, transform business, and engage and align employees.

As “storytelling” becomes part of the corporate lexicon, it runs the risk—as do all such terms that come into fashion—of being overused and misappropriated. Continued…