Social Customer

It seems that Target may have finally found its way into the next frontier of digital retail. Within the last week, Target has launched Cartwheel, a responsive website which will eventually become an application that allows users to earn and redeem in-store savings via Facebook and their smartphones.[read more]

You can go “off grid.” You can turn off your email. In unplugging yourself from your social media networks and the online world, I posit what you’re really doing is unplugging your robot friends till you want to deal with them again. Friends have become objects of convenience.[read more]

Eighty percent of companies plan to use social media for customer service and brands must respond quickly to customer queries on social channels. There is also an opportunity to use social customer service to increase brand loyalty.[read more]

Pinterest's newest updates could mean big things for e-commerce and brands should take notice. What should your business be looking out for? In short, they add up to the emergence of Pinterest as a prominent e-commerce site. Partnership with brands allows Pinterest to be a greater part of the shopping or advertising experience.[read more]

IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping organizations provide better customer service and product recommendations in real time at scale. The same technology that once outsmarted humans to win Jeopardy and has recently been used to diagnose cancer will now be used to help organizations sense and respond in real time.[read more]

As more sites have now added share buttons and integrated social media it has become easier to share content socially than ever before. In February 2010, people preferred to share content via email but now sharing content via email has decreased from 93.3% in 2010 to 53.3% in February 2013.[read more]

Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications

I had a chance to sit down with Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications to discuss some of the topics that you will see at the Social Shake-Up Conference where Adam will be speaking. The following is a transcript of that conversation.[read more]

While digital gives you the opportunity to reach out to millions with a single click, it also poses a problem: if not monitored properly, it will not be as effective as face-to-face communication. Since your customers are interacting with you through electronic media, they need to be able to see the human side of the interaction to trust you and do business with you.[read more]

Most social media campaigns are doomed from the beginning. Nothing you can't recover from. But if you start off on the wrong foot, then it's hard to convince others (or yourself) to keep persevering in the face of lackluster results.[read more]

Nata Sha / Shutterstock.com

Even with the projected 80% increase in online investment by luxury brands in 2013, fashion brands small and large also are significantly recognizing that the silver lining lies in the adoption of a reliable listening strategy. As transient as fashion is, it appears that Geek Chic is here to stay. Of course, Oscar Wilde knew that over a century or two before Geek Chic became the rage, noting way back then that “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”[read more]

citizens/shutterstock

A new study found that 40% of adults used social media as part of a political campaign during the 2012 presidential election. Interestingly, online engagement was largely found to have been done by the well-educated and affluent amongst us.[read more]

Although Facebook tests everything and course-corrects as needed, the challenge here will be to find a balance between generating revenue and the psychology of what Facebook users think the service is (no one likes being sold to).[read more]

An update on the Amy's Bakery Company social media fiasco. They've hired Justin Rose PR and are planning to carryout a grand reopening. I can't help but feel that a huge amount of the people following this story are purely people wanting to watch the carnage unfold. And unfold it has! They will get next to zero value from that increased audience.[read more]

I don’t know the history. I don’t want to know it. There are probably reasons they are so upset. However, there should never be a reason any brand behaves in such a way on the social networks. If you feel the need to tell your community off, take a breath, take a walk, turn off your computer. Don’t blast it on your page.[read more]

Unfortunately, because of all the noise in this vast Internet maize, it’s no easy task getting your infographic out there, and even the most beautiful ones need lots of heavy promotion to get in front of as many people as possible, generate shares and get plenty of quality backlinks.[read more]

Instead of relying on exclusively on locks–and waiting for the new locks to be installed—companies need to invest in proactive monitoring to complement the locks. Just like in the physical world, this virtual “police force” looks for suspicious patterns and attempts in the neighborhood and, by learning how the criminals behave across multiple locations, can stop them before they even reach your door.[read more]

While content is obviously important, what is more important is the context it is provided in. A lot of successful entrepreneurs and marketers have shown us that in order to truly make the most out of digital marketing, it is imperative that firms are able to integrate technology with creativity.[read more]

The most common mistake people make is not defining their social media goals before they begin. Why are you on Twitter? What are you doing with your blog? And how are these activities going to support your professional goals? Forget about the ROI. I’m talking about being able to define what success will look like.[read more]

Why would I care? Why would I share? These are two key questions that Droga5’s chief creative officer, Ted Royer, says his agency considers when creating social content for brands on Facebook. Create a content calendar that has different types of content offerings every day. Try to diversify as much as possible.[read more]

If you want to grow your business with Facebook, you have to be constantly adding value and engagement on your page. Good content would certainly help you to do that, but good content is wasted and ineffective if you don’t have a supportive community to broadcast your content to.[read more]