With constant access to a growing list of channels and devices, today’s connected customers are no longer satisfied with vanilla, one-size-fits-all experiences and offers. To stand out in the increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, many C-level executives from the world’s most iconic brands are not content with just “Keeping Up With the Joneses.” Instead, they are actively seeking opportunities to better understand their high-value customers across every channel and device.

The reason for this is simple: These customers are more often than not brand loyalists and willing to persuade others to become regular brand purchasers if they’re kept happy and engaged consistently in every single place they are interactive with brands. But the task of keeping brands happy and engaged beyond one big “win” isn’t easy. It requires CMOs and the entire business, for that matter, to combine their internal resources with technology that’s both powerful and agile enough to boost customer engagement and revenue long term. And a brand’s success today, in this hyperconnected and digitally dependent environment we live in, depends heavily on leveraging digital to reward high-value customers. Rather than spout out a to-do list of tactics that show high-value customers they’re appreciated, here are some specific benefits instead that can be derived from deep and sophisticated forms of segmentation:

Don’t confuse high-value customers for high-volume customers.

In the less digitally savvy days, brands and their teams of analytics “experts” would navigate through Excel spreadsheets with massive amounts of data. In those days, there was sometimes confusion and lack of knowledge as to what constitutes a high-value customer. As a result, high-volume customers would often be mistakenly categorized, and subsequently treated, as high-value customers. But the reality was, and still is today, that people who interact with a brand frequently aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that have the most value from the perspective of consistent engagement, conversions and sales across multiple channels – from being inside a physical store to making a last-minute purchase on their mobile devices or shopping from their PCs. So it was common for those brands to see a huge surge in traffic for a short burst of time, but after the excitement faded, so did the engagement and ROI.

Marketers today need to adopt a more realistic and accurate definition of value that’s based on “the combination of opportunities to convert and increase potential order value, and maximizes both, while at the same time, yields your highest value customers.” But identifying the best customers online and serving them the content they need is easier said than done. The key to obtaining a 360-degree view of high-value customers means personalizing and differentiating every message by offering an array of online content to drive maximum conversion and revenue uplifts.

To get there, the modern brands of today must, and I repeat must, push beyond the basic forms of personalization – think product recommendations or ads that chase you around on the Web. Instead, these brands are likely to be best served by leveraging the power of technology, real-time data and automated segmentation to effectively profile individuals who are in actuality high-value customers. That identification is the first hurdle that brands need to overcome. From there, it’s all about extending personalization across every device and channel to delight and please consumers with the most humanly relevant, easy-to-navigate and engaging offers.

Tap into the beauty of data to boost cross-channel ROI.

The urgency to identify high-value customers online is being fueled by a number of factors. First, the online channel represents the biggest growth opportunity for most brands. According to a new Forrester Research global eCommerce report, e-commerce revenues are going to continue to grow in 2014 as customers’ online buying habits evolve. Meanwhile, a new study released by IBM in 2014 reveals that brands stand to lose $83 billion due to poor customer experiences.

When you think about it, that’s a lot of revenue that could be left on the table if brands don’t put every segment of their customers first. For example, brands are able to gather intelligence on channels shopped — including Web, tablet, mobile phone or store — and then integrate data from a CRM system, POS, DPM or other source to help augment customer profiles. By combining intelligence on shopping history, search history and Web behavior, this combined intelligence can help brands identify when to offer an in-store promotion, extend a seasonal offer or make a product recommendation. If brands are able to identify their high-value customers, then they can scale the business more efficiently and ensure that every decision and action they make is focused on delivering the right actions defined by the right data.

Discover unique attributes of unique markets.

One common challenge that today’s brands face is a tendency to make decisions based on data points as opposed to data profiles. In these instances, it’s not that uncommon for brands to use pre-existing data models to identify their buyer personas as well as the content and offers they deliver on their websites and mobile sites.

By using automated segmentation and targeting, brands should be able to detect segments unique to their brands and industries. This process turns traditional targeting on its head because buyer profiles and offers are all determined by real-time intelligence gathered against real-time customer behavior. One example of such a data profile could be a “weekend shopper” persona. Based on their digital behavior and purchase activity, these shoppers may spend significantly more money (at multiple channels) than mid-week shoppers. So it’s more than likely these shoppers would be frustrated and intolerant of being shown irrelevant and mismatched offers that would better suit mid-week shoppers. That is where many brands today realize that even with all the benefits of technology, they have made shoppers that much less tolerant and patient with poor experiences.

Move away from campaign analysis; bring it back to the customer.

One of the ways brands have traditionally gathered intelligence on customer behaviors is through basic A/B testing of different content and offers. Building on the quantifiable value of testing, many innovative brands are now shifting from campaign-driven analysis to a more holistic and accurate customer-driven analysis. By doing so, marketers can get a more robust and humanistic view of every single customer segment, as well as being able to identify which segments are performing better than others. With businesses – across all teams – being challenged to consistently demonstrate ROI, this ability to gauge the value of high-value customers and appropriately target them with the best content on the best devices at the best times and places, is especially critical to success.

Responsive design brings a variety of benefits – both for brand marketers and the consumers interacting with content across multiple devices. According to data from a December 2012 study conducted by eConsultancy, nearly 70 percent of client-side marketers described their experience level with responsive design as “average” or better, and more than half of that group described their companies as “ahead of the curve” or “state of the art” when it came to the design technique.

As advanced as some brands and in-house digital marketers may believe they are in responsive design, there are still quite a few challenges that optimization experts and digital marketers must heed. Here are some lessons CMOs can use to get strategic in their approach while driving real, impact-filled growth to the bottom line.

Rule #1: Don’t Become Complacent

Since the mobile marketplace is extremely dynamic and the mobile consumer is ever changing, don’t become complacent just because you launched a responsive-design site.  At the beginning of 2013, tablet users were already showing a higher conversion rate than desktop shoppers. Moreover, 20 percent of mobile users use it as their primary device. This means consumers are evolving more quickly than you may think, so closely monitor your analytics. In fact, companies like Gilt have seen a 100 percent increase in mobile users in a single year.

Rule #2: Always Be Refining

Continually develop and refine new design iterations that work seamlessly across multiple screen sizes and functionalities (e.g., touch, swipe). Being immersive is just as important as being intuitive. Pinch, swipe and zoom are features that smartphone and tablet users know and love. In the early days of responsive design, it was said that these were features that couldn’t be tapped into. With today’s more common blend of adaptive and responsive design, we know that this is not the case. Developers have touch-screen-specific controls at their disposal, and customization can be achieved through injection of JavaScript, for example. It’s important to strike the right balance between optimal performance (page-load time) and customization, as the two are interrelated.

Rule #3: Never Stop Testing and Learning

Always be testing and learning with your responsive-design site so that key information and functions are visible, prioritized and accessible to people regardless of what device they are using. Getting shoppers to move through the entire funnel – starting on the home page and moving to key product and landing pages all the way through the checkout process – is no easy feat. Each consumer, be it a first-time visitor or a longtime brand advocate, wants something different and unique from the checkout process. For a big-box apparel retailer, for example, free shipping can prove effective in rewarding high-value customers and cultivating loyalty among a brand’s average customers. This is where testing and learning play an integral role in pinpointing the optimal threshold for free shipping to boost online sales and grow the brand’s market share amid competitors. The data and insights delivered from a test-and-learn strategy could very well disprove brand assumptions and, in turn, generate the type of ROI brands seek such as higher average order value, as well as an increase in purchase conversions and overall revenue. 

Rule #4: Leverage All Data

Even the most basic site analytics can reveal huge potential opportunities.  Incorporating analytics early in the development of a responsive-design site is important. Set your responsive breakpoints you seek to track within your analytics solution and run a report for traffic to specific pages by device type. You’ll be able to glean a wealth of information about which areas of your site are seeing the heaviest tablet traffic, compared to areas with significant upticks in smartphone-only traffic.  You’ll also be able to see which areas produce low traffic or poor conversions. This tactic can help you optimize the customer experience to drive customer engagement, loyalty, conversions and revenue consistently for the long haul.

Back in 2001, when Google AdWords was just launched, I remember the day that my first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign yielded the first batch of leads for the company I was working for. In all, this tactic generated 42 leads, and a significant portion was even qualified. Better yet, the price was just right, ranging between 15 to 25 cents per click. It seemed like a great tool to grow our website traffic, as well as an effective means for generating unique leads. There was no doubt in my mind we were going to scale this campaign.

Since then, a lot has changed in the PPC world. Now there is a great deal more available in terms of competitive products from other search engines like Bing. You don’t just have an array of search ads; now there are native ads on Google that replicate the search experience, remarketing display ads, mobile ads, Facebook-sponsored ads, sponsored tweets via Twitter and LinkedIn ads. The CMO has fallen in love with performance-based ads like these PPC ad vehicles, mainly because they work (to some extent) and it’s easy to justify a budget for it when a return can be clearly shown to the CFO.

But like any ad, the efficacy of a single ad deteriorates over time because people become numb to repeated exposure to the ad. So the typical reaction is to change the ad around and run it again. But what happens when the efficacy of the ad network declines? The usual approach from marketers is to simply run more ads and spread them out in different places — all in the hopes that they will stick somewhere. But hope and guesswork do not make an effective strategy.

It’s amazing to me that so many enterprise-level CMOs focus on increasing their digital advertising budgets as the first option to increase online engagement. That’s only going to lead to a flawed strategy and less-than-stellar results. Why would you spend a lot of money, resources and staff hours on mobile ads if the online or mobile experience itself frustrates, irks and turns away customers?

What CMOs need to do is focus on creating seamless, easy-to-use-and-navigate, relevant and meaningful experiences for customers, regardless of their device or channel. And that doesn’t mean launching a full redesign of your website with fancy UX architecture, nor does it mean you should put all your mobile eggs into the responsive design basket. It means taking the slow and steady approach to test and tweak every single experience across the entire engagement funnel and using real-time data to power more personalized experiences that meet the individual needs, habits and behaviors of customers.

But before CMOs raise their hands in the air in praise of online testing and personalization, they need to make sure that they’re measuring the right metrics (that really matter for their business). For instance, analyze bounce rates and your average number of page views. These types of insights can tell you a story about your visitors — who they are, what they’re doing, where they’re going within your website or mobile site and what types of actions they’re taking. What if you have a high double-digit bounce rate of 30%, 40% or even 50%? This is what’s commonly known as the “show up and throw up” approach in the Web business. Most likely, you have a low single-digit page view of 1.xx or 2.xx, which is not uncommon. This is where the money is literally falling out of your budget. And that’s not something CMOs can or should take lightly.

Consider taking a piece of your PPC ad budget and instead, put it to good use by testing and optimizing your online experience. I’m not talking about search engine optimization (SEO). What I’m talking about is making every single page a funnel within a website or mobile site optimized and personalized for the actual traffic you are driving to it. For example, if Facebook is driving a certain portion of traffic to your website, are you using all of the data you have about those visitors and combining it with Facebook data to create the most intuitive, relevant and engaging on-site experience to convert “lookers” into purchasers? If a mobile ad is directing smartphone users to your mobile site, have you tested the specific page they’re landing on and optimizing it to drive higher engagement, conversions and cross-channel revenue? If your answer is no, then you have a serious problem.

The reality is that in a world where the consumer reigns supreme, there is an abundance of opportunities for brands to connect, interact with, speak to, engage and convert casual browsers into loyal brand advocates. So it’s high time brands stop running themselves ragged with PPC ads and start putting their attention toward creating a unified customer experience across every single device and channel.

As more and more marketers are discovering, it’s impossible to think about any digital or e-commerce strategy without acknowledging the critical importance of the overall Hispanic population on today’s electronic marketplace. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, comprising more than 53.4 million, or nearly one in six Americans. What’s more, the Hispanic sector is the fastest-growing ethnic segment in the U.S., accounting for more than half the growth in U.S. population between 2000 and 2010, rising from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010. By some estimates, Hispanics will outnumber all other cultural groups in the U.S. by 2050. In fact, there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than in any other country in the world, save for Mexico.

Just as brick-and-mortar retailers have recognized the growing purchasing power, shopping preferences and influence of this vigorous and fast-growing demographic, online marketers too are beginning to see the value of personalizing and customizing every customer experience to better serve their individual needs. So then I ask myself a simple but very important question: Are CMOS acting like mobile and social “agents” for Hispanic shoppers and giving them exactly what they want (i.e., online content, messaging, images, offers) in the right way on the right channels at the right times and places? It comes down to a CMO’s willingness and ability to listen to and observe what customers are doing online, what types of sites they are visiting, what types of keywords they are searching for online, their purchasing behaviors and the like. The failure to listen can have the most negative consequences on brand engagement, loyalty and most important, online and mobile sales.

Think in experiences, not channels.

According to the Terra Third Hispanic Digital Consumer Study by comScore, Hispanics have actually outpaced non-Hispanics in the adoption of smartphones, increasing from 43 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2012. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 46 percent of online Hispanics over the age of 18 regularly shop online, compared to just 43 percent of general market online users.

Even more interesting is that Hispanics tend to use their smartphones to research and make purchases more than non-Hispanic consumers in every category. In fact, Hispanics are highly likely to leverage social, mobile and other online resources in their buying decisions, and in fact, are even bypassing the traditional PC-online route in exchange for the convenience of “always on, always connected” smartphones and tablets. As Walgreens CMO Graham Atkinson stated so profoundly at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East in New York City last month: “Omni-channel is an experience strategy, not a fulfillment strategy.” To put that in simple terms, customers don’t think in channels; they think about the experience as a whole. Does the mobile site look like a duplicate, yet shrunken, version of a brand’s online site? Do the images and pages on a brand’s mobile site take more than 7 seconds to load? Is the brand’s Checkout button large and easy to find? Does the home page feel cluttered and make it difficult to find and use the search bar? All of these questions need to be asked when a brand is looking to optimize their site to be as informative, relevant and easy to use on mobile devices. If it isn’t, you can bet consumers won’t think twice about visiting a competitor’s site or even clicking away forever from all of your digital channels.

To be sure, Hispanics are not a monolithic and homogenous market. The group actually embraces dozens of different nationalities, cultures and identities, including about three out of every five Hispanics who were actually born in the U.S. As a result, buying habits and patterns may vary significantly depending on their country of origin and local community.

Oddly enough, relatively few mainstream e-commerce marketers make specialized efforts to personalize and tailor their presence across multiple channels to better serve the needs of this hyper-connected and demanding market. Some major sites, such as insurer Progressive, are setting the bar high in terms of creating customer experiences that are authentic, engaging, relevant and useful for mobile buyers.

While your site may be well designed for full-screen viewing on a PC, it may be difficult and impractical to view on a smartphone or tablet. Is the navigation practical? Are the products and options presented meaningfully on a small screen? Should you parse and meter the content differently?

Depending on the nature of your site, it may pay to invest in a so-called “responsive design” that automatically adjusts to the viewing device, allowing for a coherent experience on anything from a 4-inch smartphone to tablet, to PC—or deploy a separate, specially built layout designed strictly for mobile devices.

In addition, it would be smart to thoroughly test and experiment with your mobile presentation to discover possible obstacles, sticking points and other issues that may affect the mobile users’ experience. In the constrained space of a mobile device, you may need different tactics and approaches to ensure a seamless and frictionless experience. What works on the PC may fail on a smartphone.

People don’t engage with brands; they engage with a purpose.

Earlier this year, Gustavo Razzetti, EVP and managing director of Lapiz, the Latino unit of digital agency Leo Burnett, wrote in Clickz: “Social media has become so big that sometimes we forget to approach it as part of the overall marketing strategy. Successful brands have a holistic approach rather than approaching social media as a stand-alone tactic. We know that Latinos show a higher engagement with brand pages versus non-Hispanics. But that doesn’t mean that they will follow any brand. People don’t engage with brands. People engage with a purpose. And the most successful case studies are precisely those that embrace this approach.”

Now consider the fact that the Pew Hispanic Center found that 68 percent of Latino Internet users say they regularly use Facebook, Twitter and other social media, compared to just 58 percent of all U.S. Internet users. Perhaps even more relevant for online marketers is that Hispanics are actually more likely to seek advice and opinion before making a purchase, including both face-to-face and mobile and social channels. This means brands need to take ownership of what social channels they are embracing, how they are communicating and interacting with these tech-savvy consumers, and what purpose they fulfill. Otherwise, counting the millions of likes a brand gets on Facebook is just an empty metric if brands don’t, in one way or another, drive consumers to click more, read more and essentially spend more across multiple channels—be it in-store, online or mobile.

With more advanced personalization and optimization strategies, it’s now possible for brands to modify and customize the customer experience across multiple channels—in terms of messaging, tone and content—based on where the visitor is coming from, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or another referring site. The result can make for a smoother transition between social and commerce, a low-friction journey toward purchase.

Never stop testing and learning.

Depending on a brand’s particular offer and target market, including a Spanish-language path for customers, may be worth testing and refining. However, you might discover that a simple language translation of your site may not be optimal; messages and elements that perform well in English may not work as well when simply recast in Spanish. It may indeed call for separate optimization and refinement. Should your buttons, calls to action and checkout processes be tweaked and adjusted for different language or cultural sensibilities? Only real-world testing can provide definitive answers.

UPDATE:  here is a page that provides citizens with guidance on getting the most of the Census website. Enjoy!

Marketers have been trying to capture that magic moment when a potential consumer is actually looking to interact with your brand. Back in the day, we had to rely on “inferred interests” gathered from demographics, psychographics and other data to estimate what segments might have higher than average propensity to have that interest and then broadcast various messages at them, hoping we just might hit them at the right place and at the right time.

But in the past five years things have dramatically changed. With nearly ubiquitous smartphone coverage, we finally have a way to access consumers’ mindsets at almost any time in a meaningful way. What’s more, not only can we tap into each magic moment but also consumers actually want to participate in it.

Current smartphone technology allows for nearly infinitely granular targeting based on behavior, third party data, contextual data like location, and universal sign-in profiles. All of these allow increasingly relevant interactions to follow a consumer across apps and the mobile web, all while waiting for the right moment. While interesting, however, this is not what I am talking about. This is just a refinement of existing approaches to targeting. It’s nothing new.

What I’m talking about is giving consumers control, a tool that allows them to quickly and easily learn something about a specific product or service. I’m talking using our smartphones to create intuitive gateways that bridge the real world with related digital experiences. Whether you call it Web 3.0 or the “internet of things,” this is what mobile is all about and I believe visual recognition technology will play a key role in making it happen.

Google Glasses are already showing us ways in which visual recognition and augmented reality can be combined to provide a dizzying array of overlays and information. This beta product offers an exciting peek into one vision of what might be in store for marketers and consumers alike.

Other companies like smartsy are showing a more targeted approach to visual recognition, allowing consumers to use devices they already have and apps they already use to interact with the world in specific ways. They allow consumers to snap a picture of whatever they are interested in, be it a can of Coke or a Louis Vuitton bag, with any visual recognition app on their mobile device and interact with the brand in real-time.

Both approaches have their pros and cons but they share the common goal of creating customer engagement. Ideally if you want to tap into what a consumer is doing with your brand and well as when and where they interact with it, you will want to allow them to use visual recognition in different ways. Who’s to say which will work best? Its still early days of visual recognition but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think it will play a role in consumers’ lives and marketers’ strategies.

So, you’re one of the seemingly millions of brands out there using Facebook to lure people over to your website. Chances are you’ve viewed recent reports about Facebook’s surprisingly low activity rates (“Only 1% of people who like a Facebook page ever go back to that page”) as vindication of what you’ve always suspected: marketing on Facebook just doesn’t work.

You’re not alone. The following are the 10 top reasons brands fail to tap into the real potential of Facebook. (Hint: zero of them are Facebook’s fault.)

1.     Failure to make a great first impression

Most fans won’t ever come back to a brand’s page unless they feel they have good reason to. This is not totally different from how they interact with their friends’ pages when you think about it. Unless the new friend has great content to go back to, there’s not much of a reason to go directly to their page very often, if at all.

2.     Poor text and visuals

A successful Facebook page must have concise, engaging text that’s relevant to both the brand and the fans’ interests. Overly long, humdrum copy will fail to capture fans’ attention. Crisp, eye-catching, high-resolution visuals (photos, videos, illustrations) that clearly speak to those things visitors like about the brand in the first place will draw them in for more.

3.     Stagnant page content

If fans stop by more than once only to find the same old Facebook page, they might assume the page is outdated — or worse, abandoned. It’s important for marketers to give fans new ways to connect and advance their relationship with the brand or product being promoted. Keep to a consistent schedule with fresh content and ever-improving offers, and be sure to test what works with your audience.

4.     Inconsistent or lazy branding

If there’s no stylistic connection between a company’s Facebook page and its main website, visitors may not trust that the page is legit. Brands often spend a disproportionate amount of time, money and effort on website branding efforts, in comparison to the relative pittance reserved for complementary Facebook efforts. Keep branding consistent across all channels, so that visitors know exactly where they’re going and whom they’re dealing with.

5.     Confusing calls to action

Once fans arrive at a brand’s Facebook page, they should have a clear idea of what to do and what’s available to them. Offers and calls-to-action should be prominently displayed, and any associated instructions should be easy to follow. Be aware, however, that Facebook has guidelines concerning calls-to-actions, offers and anything else resembling blatant advertising on company pages, so it’s important to make sure you’re current on usage guidelines.

6.     Too many clicks

People are impatient—and want immediate gratification—especially on Facebook. If you have to use forms to give visitors access to the content they want, they’re likely to click away. Make sure the desired destination can be reached in the fewest amount of clicks possible. Also, if you have to use a form to capture data, keep it short and simple.

7.     Mysterious visitors

All fans are not alike – so why treat them all the same? With the right tools, marketers can compile profiles using Facebook data authorized by the user (age, gender, location, name, relationship status, etc.) as well as previous site behaviors, to get a better sense of the type of people they’re reaching on Facebook. Those profiles can then be used to present offers, content and/or experiences that are the most effective in attracting fans, “Likes”, website traffic or any other relevant conversion metrics.

8.     Preconceived notions

As excited as marketers may get about shiny new objects—especially social media objects—they‘re often reluctant to spend the time and money to truly develop new efforts for them. Why not step out of your comfort zone and try to develop specific content based on customer segments? An even crazier idea—consider developing Facebook-specific campaigns rather than repurposing ones created with a different platform in mind.

9.     Ineffective plugin use

If Facebook plugins aren’t integrated into the main company website, a great deal of potential traffic—and revenue—is being lost. Plugin tools turn consumers into brand advocates, making it easy to share site information with Facebook friends. Let visitors like or share website pages back to their Facebook profile with one click. Better yet, provide personalized suggestions to your website visitors, based on what other people are sharing as well as their own click behavior.

10.   Sticking to stand-alone metrics

Getting just one side of the story isn’t enough. Marketing programs need to be set up so that Facebook stats and user profiles are fully integrated with all other online and offline ecommerce channels’ information to create rich, detailed and fully comprehensive user profiles. Profile reports should be updated on a regular basis, so the most recent user information is always available.

With the proper attention to detail and willingness to dedicate the same energy to Facebook efforts as they do to other initiatives, online marketers will no doubt find that their 1% conversion rate is something they can control—and that it’s not Facebook’s fault their customers aren’t more engaged.

We’re all human. We all make mistakes. However, when your mistake involves social media, it’s not that easy to make amends. Take, for example, the case of the (now) infamous KitchenAid tweet about President Obama’s dead grandmother.

If you somehow missed it, it went a little something like this: During the first presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, Obama credited his tenacious grandmother who helped raise him and passed away three days before he was elected president.

Moments later, @KitchenAidUSA, the company’s official Twitter account, sent this:

“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! She died 3 days b4 he became president.” The insensitive tweet not only went to the company’s 25,000 followers, but also included a hashtag to make it a part of NBC News’ social debate conversation. KitchenAid hastily deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. Even after the head of the KitchenAid brand, Cynthia Soledad, offered an apology, many still expressed outrage and announced boycotts of the brand.

Of course, KitchenAid isn’t the only company who has fallen victim to social media gone bad. There is a plethora of marketing campaigns to choose from that all ended with disastrous results. Here are a couple listed below along with the lessons we can learn from each of them.

Toyota Camry

During last football season’s Superbowl, Toyota launched a major Twitter campaign meant to promote the Camry. Creating a number of Twitter accounts labeled @CamryEffect1 through @CamryEffect9, Toyota intended to engage users by directly tweeting them. However, this had the opposite effect: users accused Toyota of bombarding and spamming them with unsolicited messages. To their credit, Toyota quickly suspended the accounts and issued an apology, but by then it was too late.

Lesson learned: Not only is mass-spamming your social media audience an awful campaign plan, but in order to truly engage your community, tweets should be interesting and engaging. In the case of the Camry, it came across as nothing more than self-serving spam.

Qantas Airlines

Last year, Qantas faced huge backlash over a very poorly timed Twitter competition, inviting followers to win a pair of first class pajamas by tweeting their idea of a luxury experience. The promotion was arguably already in poor taste given the global economic downturn, but was also acutely insensitive given that at the time of the contest, the airline’s labor relations was at a standoff with the unions representing its pilots, engineers, baggage handlers and caterers. Qantas had grounded their entire domestic and international fleet, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. The competition turned into an opportunity for angry customers to share their gripes and jokes at the company’s expense.

Lesson Learned: Timing is everything.

Durex South Africa

Durex caused quite a controversy when they sent out this terrible tweet in South Africa: “Why did God give men penises? So they’d have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke” The tweet certainly made an impression with tweeters, bloggers, and mainstream media picking up the story with the sole intent of trashing the brand. Durex later issued an apology of the offensive, misogynist tweet which was apparently sent out by their PR company.

Lesson Learned: Just because you have a hashtag joke does not mean anything goes, and sex does NOT always sell.

Now, for a couple examples of social media done right:

Canlis

A couple years ago, Canlis, a restaurant in Seattle widely regarded as the best in the city, celebrated its 60th birthday, and to mark the occasion, it ran a Facebook and Twitter contest where the winners were able to dine at 1950’s prices. From a restaurant where the average entree can set you back over $60, that’s a pretty good deal. Brothers (and founders) Mark and Brian Canlis personally signed 50 restaurant menus from 1950 and hid them around the Greater Seattle area daily for the 50 days leading up the Canlis’ 60th birthday. The “scavenger hunt” started anew every day, as the restaurant posts a clue to the menu’s whereabouts, via their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The first person to unravel the clue and find the hidden menu won the dinner.

This was a genius social media marketing campaign and I love the creativity that went into it. The contest duration was long enough to give it lasting interest and participation, it encouraged repeat visitors to their social media sites, the prize was worth playing for, and there were MANY winners.

Proctor & Gamble

We all know the infamous ‘Old Spice’ viral video campaign by now (which earned itself over 43 million views on YouTube), but what you may not have heard of is the follow up to the video. Proctor and Gamble’s brand agency, Wieden + Kennedy, put Isaiah Mustafa on the Web and invited fans to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to pose questions that he quickly answered. The questions poured in–even celebrities asked a few–and Mustafa responded in more than 180 Web videos shot quickly over a few days. The real-time effort was the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.

QuestionPro

Lastly, let’s take a look at a social media campaign going on right now that you can take part in: QuestionPro, a provider of online survey software, is currently running a contest on their Facebook page, asking users to ‘burn their comment cards’. The idea behind the contest is that the era of paper feedback is dead, and that hospitality needs to move to a more digital solution, such as QR codes, digital feedback surveys, and iPad and tablet based research tools.

This campaign works for a few reasons — it’s funny without being offensive, it relates to their product strongly enough to send a message but without going overboard, and most importantly, it’s easy to enter. Yes, there are lots of examples of super-innovative contests that attract plenty of attention, but there are even more examples of innovative contests that flop because they are too complicated for the user.

Head over to the contest page to check it out.

This is the era of Social Media.  With over a billion consumers offering opinions, sentiments, and insights online, Social Media has in a few short years eclipsed many traditional forms of expression in terms of volume and importance.  As a result, the professional world is abuzz with discussion of this new form of communication and interaction, concentrating on its positive, even revolutionary aspects.  However, there is still a lot of discussion by an alarmingly large group of pundits that Social Media lacks clear ROI.  In my view since Social Media generates ROI more directly and with higher velocity than other forms of marketing.  It’s the era of Social Media for a reason!

Media planning and buying is an area in which we see this Social Media-led advantage in bold-relief.  In the traditional model, advertisers and media buyers make and execute buying decisions and then wait for the results to come in.  It’s often hit or miss and mid-course correction is impossible.  Nuanced feedback is virtually non-existent and when insights are generated they are delivered after-the-fact.  Billions of dollars and thousands of people-hours are expended with little result to show.  Of course, there are effective media buys but they are rarely driven purely by empirical or predictive data.  While hits occur, the ratio of hits to misses is sub-optimal, a bitter pill to swallow in turbulent economic times.

Not so when media planning and buying is informed by Social Media.  When it is, you benefit from immediate ROI and take the guess-work out of your decision-making.  This is true for three core reasons:

• Social Media provides real-time and contextual data
• This real-time data, when deciphered and interpreted, allows you to make data-driven decisions
• Social Media is underpinned by technology which allows for speed; meaning you can measure and react with no delay

When these are combined with a team that is ready to hone and adapt quickly, media planning and buying can be taken to the next level.

A few examples are in order here.

Leveraging the social nature of TV

In the traditional model, a media buyer contracts to purchase spots based on imperfect knowledge of audience attitudes.  The spots run and the buyer gets feedback three months later, well outside the window of possible action.  With social media, you get feedback instantaneously whether on content, messaging or the theme of your ad; you learn what is resonating with the audience of a given TV program minutes after it airs!  With that insight you can make changes on the fly and either avert disaster or further enhance an already-popular campaign. An engaged TV audience with spot on messaging gets more happy consumers, and is a profitable win-win that pays for itself quickly.

Optimizing media choices

In the traditional model, smaller companies with new and disruptive products and services are often locked-out of media buys because they lack the incumbents’ financial muscle.  With information and insights derived from Social Media, these companies can find alternate and more effective channels to disseminate their messages in real-time and with high-fidelity to audience attitudes and behavior.  Social media democratizes the playing field for small and medium companies for whom attention and exposure is priceless, and again generating an immediate ROI.

Perfecting product placement

In the traditional model, a media buyer spends valuable dollars to place an advertiser’s product in a media outlet.  The decision about which outlet is made often with a gut decision based on limited information and the resulting uptake, or lack thereof, cannot be measured with precision.  It’s a shot in the dark, which not only costs dearly but forecloses on other opportunities.  With socially-informed buying, a buyer can test the potential reception of products in real-time and make data-driven decisions accordingly.  This process leads to finding the most relevant audience and most relevant outlet, driving immediate ROI and allowing an advertiser to avail the best opportunity available.

In today’s world of media and marketing in general, ROI is not a luxury it’s a must.  By informing your decision process and actions with the data from Social Media, you can guarantee the most you’re your marketing spend and in do so immediately generate what we call an IROI.