The phenomenon of big data certainly comes with big promise. After all, having terabytes of data on customer history and behavior is certainly better than trying to extrapolate from just a few data points.

For sure, online marketers who make sense of big data are going to be better able to build customer experiences around hard data and evidence rather than on hunches and guesswork. Instead of working on intuition, or crude analytics, you could use definitive evidence to design product pages that lure your best customers directly toward the shopping cart. You’d know exactly when to introduce your promotions and offers, and you’d know which promotion would work best with each particular customer. You could optimize your online interface, so that everything from search to registration to “Place Order” was virtually friction-free.

Getting to that point, however, requires first harnessing the data. It is no small feat to integrate huge amounts of data from a variety of sources. It is even trickier to figure out exactly how to translate that information into more visits and fuller shopping carts—in real time, customer by customer.

The good news is, there are technologies and tools that make it much easier to find the gold hidden in the data—and use it to refine your online marketing with laser precision. But there’s a mind-set at work here, too—a way of thinking about data that may involve some shifts in culture, depending on where your organization is right now.

Having worked with a number of online marketers who needed to tame big data, here are six steps to help you get there:

1) Think continuous evolution and iteration, not instantaneous.

Yes, big data can fundamentally shift the way you do business. But don’t try to change everything at once. It’s far more productive to adopt a “test and learn” philosophy. Two dozen incremental improvements in site design or wording or personalization can get you much further than trying to “innovate” in one fell swoop. We see this every day.

The most successful marketers are optimizing and refining all the time. They steadily move ahead, with a thousand baby steps, finding something to improve almost every day.

Note: This tactic may call for some adjustments to Web development processes. The most agile marketers can typically go “live” with tweaks, adjustments or tests in a matter of hours. (Slow marketers wait for the next release. Don’t do that.)

2) Align big data goals with your individual business goals.

Create separate initiatives or projects for each of your business goals, such as acquiring new customers, boosting conversion rates, improving customer loyalty or increasing lifetime customer value. This approach makes it much easier to determine what type of data to reel in, and exactly how to use it. Focus a team or a project on one objective at a time.

3) Sell the concept internally.

In some organizations, moving toward data-driven, evidence-based marketing may call for some extra communication to get everyone on board:

• Encourage knowledge sharing, continual learning. Let everyone know what you found out.
• Simplify everything. Present data and outcomes in easy-to-understand terms that managers can use to make decisions. Use pictures and graphs.
• Communicate plans and achievements across the organization. Don’t hide results.

 4) Create one team for big data.

You will need to include marketing strategists, analytics gurus and Web developers. And especially creatives, who may sometimes feel threatened or hampered by having to work with hard evidence.

Then integrate with those responsible for e-commerce and site optimization. No silos allowed.

Find a committed, obsessed, dedicated executive to drive the process and act as a focus for future customer experience innovations.

5) Your own data is best. By far.

The real-time data that your website and CRM systems are gathering is far more valuable than anything you can obtain from an outside vendor. Because it’s about your own living, breathing customers, it is data that your competitors don’t have. Advantage, you.

Examples of the typical aggregate data you can capitalize on in a big data strategy:

For most marketers, the goal should be to make in-session decisions as to what customers should see, what offers you recommend and what you say to them.

Craft a custom experience for each visitor, and they’ll buy more.

Do all of this, and they’ll be back.

This article was originally published on iMedia Connection

Recently there has been a lot of conversation against the importance of relationships in selling such as this recent Harvard Business Review article on Selling is Not about Relationships which makes it seem like social media would not make a good fit for sales people.

But a new RAIN Group report proves otherwise and shows that sales people that truly “connect” with buyers in this “always on” environment we live in to win more often. So here are 3 reasons why …

Social media provides great way to connect with potential buyers

• Social media provides the sales person with unprecedented ways to connect with potential buyers, increase likes or followers to the business, build relationships and most importantly start conversations.
• Social media provides the sales person with a platform to allow for their online personality to shine and begin that trusted relationship which can create affinity with the buyer
• Social media provides the sales person a platform for sharing value, which builds reputation and affinity for the seller

Social media provides a platform to collaborate with potential buyers

• Sales people can use popular online meetings tools like Google Hangout or even GoToMeeting to create spontaneous meetings with potential buyers
• Other technologies like Postwire can be used for more direct collaboration with more middle of funnel prospects
• Social listening technologies like Radian6, Hootsuite (or whatever your favorite is) will allow you to chime in at most relevant times with potential buyers, middle of funnel prospects or even existing customers – keeping you top of mind at all times!

Social media allows you to educate potential buyers with new ideas

• Social media provides plenty of ways to do this. Sales people that tweet their own ideas or find blogs articles that espouse their position – make it easy to connect with buyers. Content is king so being able to use it to your advantage is key.
• Marketing teams provides the platform and resources to sales to be able to do this. Too many companies in my opinion leave it to the sales team to figure this out all this by themselves. Content is the new collateral. If marketing creates the platform and the sales team can bring it to life with customers then sales will surely flow.

An integral part of the sales process is getting to know your prospects and establishing relationships—and it turns out social media can help you accomplish this quickly and easily. Follow the steps above to help your sales team make the cash register ring using social media. Remember – when you’re there alone there is no one to compete!

Hashtags have been around for a while. At first it was just a neat way to call out a particular sentiment or be associated with a trending story on Twitter; they’ve now made it into our vernacular and expanded to other platforms including Instagram and Google+. With this evolution, brands are now leveraging the once lowly hashtag as a strategic tool to unify campaigns and connect with customers.

Companies like Volvo have taken steps to use specific branded hashtags like #SwedeSpeak and #MyFirstVolvo to interact with specific consumers about particular topics. By doing so and educating their audience about how to use them and what to expect, they have been successful in transforming these conversations into engagement tools for existing consumers while driving awareness of that usually positive relationship to those consumers’ networks.

In order to be successful with your hashtag strategy, leaders in the space recommend several best practices to follow:

1. Limit the number of hashtags you use and keep it simple. Too many hashtags make it difficult to track and are confusing to consumers.
2. Make them mean something. Figure out what you are going to focus on and then consistently leverage those across numerous campaigns.
3. Avoid open-ended questions. By not limiting the response to a specific type, not only are you losing relevancy, but you are opening a can of worms for a hashtag hijacking.
4. Be realistic. Make sure you have permission from your consumers to claim that hashtag. Blackberry’s #BeBold campaign, complete with super heroes, was a #Fail that opened it up to ridicule that quickly expanded into a chance to mock their slip into irrelevance.
5. Get organized. Use dashboards structured by hashtag or more easily monitor and manage your campaigns.

Innovators, such as American Express, have pushed the envelope even further. Through the newest phase in their partnership with Twitter AMEX has created hashtag-enabled commerce, allowing joint AMEX-Twitter members who connect their accounts the ability to pay for a new Kindle Fire just by sending #BuyKindleFireHD.

Other companies are also creating new ways to leverage this supercharged special character. The mobile marketing platform smartsy, for example, is using their engagement marketing features and visual recognition functionality to help transform products and campaign assets into #objects, which act as focal points for easily creating and distributing user generated content within the platform as well as across channels, including social media.

As you can see hashtags have come a long way since Jack Dorsey launched Twitter six years ago. I’m excited to see what the next six years will bring. #Predictions, anyone?

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.

I got a chance to interview Robert Scoble on the topic of “Communities, Social Media, Twitter and More.” I think his insights into how to get started with blogging are spot on. Just observing his blog and his Flickr and Twitter pages offers lessons in social media incarnation.

Scoble is setting a high watermark for all of us. So B2B marketers out there, let’s listen, learn and get busy!

A Podcast with Robert Scoble on Communities, Social Media, Twitter and More

About the Scobleizer

Robert Scoble is a technical evangelist, writer, and author of the popular blog Scobleizer. He is currently Vice President of Media Development at the Palo Alto-based video-podcast startup company PodTech.net, where among other things he produces the ScobleShow, a series of interviews and stories about, as the site puts it, “geeks, technologists and developers.” Scoble is a lifelong technologist. He grew up just blocks from Apple Computer and played in the garage with electronic gadgets his father brought home from work. Scoble worked for Fawcette Technical Publications, UserLand Software, NEC and TabletPC before landing a job in 2003 with the Channel 9 MSDN Video team producing stories about Microsoft employees and products. During this period, his Scobleizer blog became a favorite of technologists who valued his independence and objectivity. He is a popular speaker and coauthor of Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

One of the new media firms on the leading edge of innovation these days is Organic. Founded back in 1993, it is, in fact, the first dedicated digital communications agency.

I conducted an interview with Chad Stoller, Organic’s Executive Director of Emerging Platforms, to discuss the direction of social media as seen through his eyes and the eyes of his clients. I was curious about what B2B and B2C clients are asking him for as a clue to what we should all be thinking about.

Chad Stoller leads Organic’s strategy for new communication. Chad co-founded Surge Interactive and led interactive brand strategies for Universal Music Group, Tommy Hilfiger, Progressive Auto Insurance, Clear Channel, Rockport, Cuervo, and Playboy.com. Chad has also developed a series of award-winning programs, including the Cannes Gold Lion award-winning “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker” for Reebok and Jeep Evo 4×4 for DaimlerChrysler.

Where is Social Media heading, a podcast with Chad Stoller