The company also takes a nuanced approach to international social media management, allowing execs at its 160 country locations to create Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, but monitoring them for quality assurance. The U.S. marketing team recently had to shut down one of those Facebook pages when it wasn’t up to snuff.

“We’ve been allocating some dollars for experimentation every year because the marketing landscape is changing so quickly every single month,” Carone told ClickZ on Monday. That experimental media budget accounts for less than 5 percent of the overall marketing budget, she said.

“As a result of our recent paid Twitter activity, we increased interested followers by 50 percent, and increased awareness of a new video on our YouTube channel through engagements including retweets, replies, favorites, and clicks,” said Carone. The company also ran a promoted “Who to Follow” campaign targeted to people interested in B2B.

“When I look at this from a business-to-business perspective… I say ‘OK, paid Twitter promotion activity can be effective in a very tactical way.’ ” She would not use the platform to market to large corporate clients buying multi-million dollar systems and services. In addition to selling printers, Xerox offers IT outsourcing services, handles transactional processing for highway payment systems such as E-ZPass, and does administration of electronic medical records.

The firm does a lot of “very targeted digital advertising” such as display advertising when promoting specific, lower-priced products, said Carone.

Read more at [Clickz.com]

As more and more users are searching, posting, buying, and interacting through mobile devices- any company worth it’s salt should be looking at the mobile front as viable source of business. Given the immediate email access given by smartphones; if as a marketer you are able to streamline the process of buying such that it can be accomplished all on a single device with only a few taps on a touch screen rather than through a computer at a later point in time… you will win that customers business.

If free aps are preferred by more than 50%, why would you put a price on yours?  By creating an app interface, or a digital, mobile storefront through which your customers can interact with the  brand you are adding a pocket full of value for them at little cost to you. Not only will an app allow for information and sales transactions, but it can also be used to create and distribute meaningful content of its own, for example a game or special mobile offers for app users.

At the end of the day, people enjoy the path of least resistance. They are on their phone nearly 24/7, why not allow them to accomplish all that you want them to on that single device. Simplify the buying process, increase value, and be ahead of your competition.

As each day arises, the web is exponentially more and more chaotic and cluttered, leaving more and more options for SEO and PPC. By taking a careful look into your competitors keyword analysis, you gain a invaluable and complete overview of the exact phrases your competitors are optimizing.

So what can marketers do with this?
-Discover cheap (unused) PPC opportunities and undiscovered SEO niches
-Spend less time testing, tracking, experimenting, etc, “in the dark”
-Find out what historically works and doesn’t
-Emulate what works & trash what doesn’t
-Find new trends or slang your competitors aren’t optimizing and jump on it

Read more about gaining a PPC competitive edge.

With the new version of Bing, rolling out over the coming weeks and broadly available in the U.S. in early June, people can easily get advice and recommendations from friends and experts with the new social sidebar. They can also view useful, action-oriented information via the new snapshot feature. And they can find what they’re looking for faster, with more relevant results and a refreshed user interface. All of this is presented in a new, three-column design that focuses on helping users take the leap from finding information to making quick, informed decisions.

“Increasingly, the Web is about much more than simply finding information by navigating a topically organized graph of links,” says Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division. “We’re evolving search in a way that recognizes new user paradigms like the growth of the social graph, and will empower people with the broad knowledge of the Web alongside the help of their friends.”

The new Bing updates were developed in response to user research showing that people use search engines to save time and get things done quickly. “People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from where things were a decade ago,” says Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz. “And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done.”

The new features in Bing are designed to help people complete tasks combining the best information from the Web, rich data organized in a better way, and the input of friends and experts.

• Improved Web Results: Consumers can perform traditional Web searches faster, with more relevant results using the new, cleaner user interface.
• Snapshot: Users can quickly complete tasks by viewing useful information related to their searches and compiled by Bing as a single “snapshot” – all in one place in a separate column.
• Sidebar: Consumers can take action based on the recommendations of friends and experts in the sidebar – displayed in a third column, separate from main Web results page.

Move over June Cleaver and Carol Brady. Meet the Mommy Blogger. She seems so unassuming and quaint, but she wields a significant power and influence among her faithful readers. If you didn’t even know she existed until now, just let these stats paint her picture for you.

14% of all American mothers with at least one child in their household have read or contributed to a blog in the past 30 days, according to a recent study by Scarborough Research. About 3.9 million moms in the United States identify as bloggers, but just 500 of them are considered to be influential among other mothers.

The average mommy blogger is:

• 37 years old
• Has kids between the ages of 2 and 11
• Are socially conscious and are 85% more likely to have supported a politician based on an environmental issue
• 88% more likely to buy eco-friendly products
• 38% more likely to volunteer than the average mom
• 76% always vote in presidential elections
• Has a household income of $84,000, that’s $14,000 higher than average income for non-blogging moms.
• 52% more likely to have college degrees than moms who don’t.
• 90% have visited a social networking website in the past 30 days.

Knowing all this about mommy bloggers, how will you connect with this important demographic and use their influence to your benefit? Share your approach with us at Customer Insight Group.

[Source: Scarborough]

1. User clicks through deeper into the mobile site (user does not bounce, clicks on navigation menu item or merchandising zone)
2. User finds customer service options easily (e.g. order status, store locator’s)
3. User downloads a mobile application
4. User subscribes to something (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc).

The role of the mobile home page is not to convert a sale, but to win a click on that takes the user towards one of the above goals, and move the user toward taking action on your site.

First of all, we should know how to build layout. Your design should reflect your mobile strategy — namely, what is the purpose of your mobile site, and how do you deliver value to your customer?  For example, the Lowe’s mobile site. Though its mobile site doesn’t include a lot of contents, its main goal of sticking consumers is shown by post the big banner “Shop, Click, Pick Up, 20 minutes guaranteed.”

Second,Graphic elements:  Use carefully. People thin that the more graphic elements, the better. The fact is not like that. Instead, too much graphic elements leave no rooms for menus and increase the loading time of mobile site, which is the main factor of bounce factor.

Menu organization: Most important links first, or alphabetical order? Some company like E-Bags, using the mixture of both and some other companies use searching tools for consumers. This is a way of showing customer friendly.

Menu usability: Navigation markers. The navigation markers are the little right and left cones that can be very helpful for a mobile site. It’s much more faster than loading a new pages.

Online measurement has long been a hot topic among marketers. Over the years, brands have often determined campaign spend for individual media ingredients (e.g., TV, radio, magazine, coupons, display ads, etc.) by using a marketing mix model system – or a similar sales attribution program referred to by a different name.

Campaign Reaches 30 Percent of Online Germans

For the holidays, Ferrero, Nutella’s parent company, sought to increase awareness and sales from Dec. 1 through Dec. 24, 2011. Ferrero wouldn’t give specifics about the broadcast campaign, but says the Facebook ads got the largest return on investment when compared to the other media channels.

Nutella bought Facebook’s Reach Block ads, which are designed to create a predetermined number of impressions within a demographic, and Premium Ads in the effort. Five different versions of the Facebook ads were used. The creative encouraged people to become fans/likes of the Nutella Deutschland page and to try out its “Advent Calendar” app, where they could open calendar doors in the German Christmas tradition. The social promos reached 30 percent of the online population in the country, equaling 3.8 million unique impressions, according to Gfk Group, a Germany-based online consumer panel provider.

A dynamic design and web personalization is delivering different and unique content to each individual customer based on the customer’s interests. So when you go to the web site, you will feel like this is a site just for you.

The old personalization form often includes relatively “wide” customer segments like new vs repeat visitors, and relatively static discount or product promotions. For now, the dynamic personalization is doing more detail. The promotions are customized with every page view to the specifics of each individual visitor.

A classic example is Amazon.com. When you shop at Amazon you would see “customers who bought X also bought Y” after you added an item to your shopping cart or searched for a specific item. And you will also find there is a “recommend based on your browsing history”. It shows the similar items you searched for and ordered by popularity. What is more, it will ask you if you would like to sell back your copy after you keeping it for a period of time. That is dynamic personalization. Specific product recommendations are based on your unique behaviors. And all of these are encouraging you to keep doing business with Amazon.com.

How and why it works.

How it works? All your behaviors are compared in real-time with the behaviors of other shoppers. The result is a match between things you are interested in, and the things others are interested in. This is called collaborative filtering. Recommendation systems use it to predict items that a user may be interested in, given some information about the user’s profile. As customers continue to visit a web site, browse and search, view products, and purchase, this data is fed into the personalization database. As the site owner adds products, content, and promotion, this information is fed in as well. In this way, the dynamic personalization system continues to learn more about what is popular and relevant right now. So it helps the owner to know its customers better.

Why it works? Because this method is a fancy way of using wisdom of the crowd. It use data mining to segment customers and pattern their purchase trends.

Why it matters.

Sell: Get users to view what is relevant to them-making them aware that you have what they need, give the right recommendation let them realize what they also need. This is a way to greater sales and customer retention.
Serve: It gives customer better services and save time. You can subscribe a certain product you like, so you do not need to search for it every time you need it.
Speak: Dynamic personalization allows customers to choose what they would like to know or to receive. So it increases the efficiency of advertising and promotion.
Sizzle: All of the above can help add value, strengthen the brand and develop the relationship.

In conclusion, dynamic personalization relies on what your customers are actually telling you about what they prefer.

Why is this an important topic?  Because email communication can, and should be, engaging!  Recipients of your email should be compelled to want to open your emails.  They should be excited to receive them and look forward to the next time one appears in their inbox.  Utilizing Movable Ink helps make that a reality.  They provide real-time relevance that leads to real-world results.