Ninety-eight percent of mid-sized merchants said segmentation and targeting are important to their overall Web and cross-channel merchandising strategy, yet the majority are not satisfied with the business tools they use. Below are some of the specific areas of concern:

• 62% said they would like to improve their ability to offer, control, and manage cross-sells and up-sells to encourage more sales
• 60% said they would like to improve their site search functionalities
• 55% said they would like to improve their ability to offer, control and manage promotions
• 37% said they would like to improve the “help” and customer service features on the site

In regards to current merchandising and promotions tools:

• 66% said they are too manual, not automated enough
• 38% said they are difficult to use
• 30% said they do not have enough control over site content
• 23% said they do not have enough control over the product catalog

When it came to how merchants plan to improve customer experience and their site’s performance to drive additional growth in the near future:

• 53% plan to improve by experimenting with emerging sales channels, such as mobile and social commerce
• 42% plan to improve by investing in add-on services, widgets and tools they can implement on their existing sites
• 33% plan to improve by completely replacing their existing commerce platform and re-launching their web store

Continue reading at: Website Magazine

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• ATG Study Reveals Mid-Sized Merchants Seek Better e-Business Tools for Segmentation and Targeting to Drive Web Growth (eon.businesswire.com)

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Think about that for a minute. A targeted advertisement by one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world was brought down in less than 48 hours by a relatively small number of social network users. What’s more, these social network users were on Twitter — one of the social networks many companies find most challenging to use because of its format of 140 character messages, and a culture of interaction — not broadcast.

Motrin used traditional media to distribute the advertisement — they weren’t using social media specifically for distribution of this ad. It was on the Motrin.com website and YouTube, but it was also distrubuted via traditional and print media — “Safe media”. Not using social media for the main ad push likely made Motrin advertisers consider putting resources elsewhere, and not in a social media monitoring strategy. Yet, by not having a solid social monitoring strategy in place, the outrage of Twitterers to the ad swelled so quickly that Motrin didn’t notice until it was too late, and ultimately lost complete control of the entire campaign.

Some consequences of no Social Monitoring Strategy

The advertisement was a bust — it had to completely stopped. The financial implications of their misstep are likely painful. Here’s a shot of the graphic on the Motrin.com homepage.

Motrin apology

Motrin did the right thing in acknowledging it’s mistake of offending baby-carrying Moms, and then removing the ads. Their sincere tone and thanks for public feedback will likely help this debacle become a thing of the past soon.

But your company is likely not as well funded as Motrin. What lesson should you take away from Motrin’s very public social media misstep?

Don’t ignore Social Media: Even if you never promote your company via social media networks, don’t ignore it. Hire a Social Media Marketing Consultant or agency today to help you develop a relationship and monitoring strategy. Skipping this step can devalue your brand, and cost your company millions of dollars and customers.

Check out some of the brands who got punk’d by social media (via Forrester’s Jeremy Owyang).

UPDATE:
For those of you who haven’t seen the ad yet, the Motrin Moms ad is still available here.

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“From the last seven years of polling, we’ve found that what older people like best about the Internet is being able to connect to family and friends,” — Susannah Fox — Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Kaiser Family Foundation

New family social networks are popping up almost every day. The real draw to these sites for Boomers seems to be the huge disconnections families have these days. More families are geographically separated from each other than ever before. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the family event coordinator (usually a Boomer) is looking to the internet to connect geographically distant family members. Family is a big deal to Boomers, and family social networks provide an easy way to gather the family group together again.

Boomers also feel a need to pass on to their family and the next generation the story of where they began. So family social networks are not only a place to connect socially, but they’re also a place to discover your family’s past, and discover yourself in the process.

In meeting with family social networking executives recently, I’m finding that one of hottest trends in family social networks is in the field of DNA social networking. I recently spoke to a company whose USP is based on having a large database of DNA results for users to access. There’s huge potential in this area of social networking. So much so that Google recently invested $3.9 million in a DNA social networking startup called 23andMe. The goal of DNA social networking sites like this is to help users gain a better understanding of their genetic information, and track down lost or distant relatives.

Famiva.com

Famiva Home Page

Famiva  just had a major update over the weekend, and the look is clean and appealing.  Within Famiva, users can work with family members on a secure site to “build your family tree, share photos and stories, stay current with family events and reminders, and much more.” What Boomers will like about Famiva is how easy it is. There’s no sign-up required and has really great features to capture genealogy as well as connect current family.They also have a great tour which makes it easy to know exactly what to expect from the network.

Genoom.com
Genoom is an innovative site with a bevy of tools to create private family networks. Genoom helps family researchers not only learn about their past, but connect family together for current events and create digital heirlooms for future generations.

Geni.com
Geni  is a great great family social network which helps users trace their family roots. Geni also has the family tree, photo sharing, and event calendar of other family social networks, but it also allows users to add family friends as “friends of your family tree”.

Obviously, boomers are becoming more active in social media, one study last year cites that 45% of boomers online are using family social networks. What does this mean for businesses looking to advertise on social media? Don’t count out baby boomers in your social advertising plans. They’ve got financial strength that many Gen Y and X don’t have yet, so if your product or service has any overlap for the boomer generation, either as users or buyers, make them the focus of some of your marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to create a social media marketing strategy, and would like to see how you can incorporate boomers into that strategy, contact me. Let’s talk about how we can work together to help you reach your goals.

ghennipher [at] ghennipher.net

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Here’s the top 3 results I think are especially sapient (Ha!) for those of us in social media:

• More than 1/3 of marketers surveyed revealed that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising.

• When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.

• It’s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

These results are a real kick in the pants for interactive agencies. I recently met with some execs from a local interactive shop representing the 2nd largest advertising agency in the world. They were scared stiff to even consider talking about social media to their largely tech clientele. This agency excels on the creative side, and recently won awards for a great “viral video” they designed for one of their Fortune 1000 clients. But a search for this viral video doesn’t immediately connect it with the client it was representing! The only search results for the client promoted in this “viral video” are well below the fold. No viral video results at all show when I search for the company name. It takes some real searching to even figure out who the viral video was created for. There’s a HUGE disconnect there. That client paid 6 figures for this ‘viral video’ campaign, and yet finding out who the video is supposedly promoting is a real challenge. What’s the ROI in that for their client? It seems to have paid off more for the interactive agency, what with the design awards and all.

This is the kind of thing marketers can no longer tolerate. In the past, when advertising successs was measured only by reach, this may have been considered a successful campaign. Now with the specific analytics tools which make agencies much more accountable for the results of their campaigns, results like the ones above are simply unacceptable.

Smart interactive agencies will continue seeking out social media professionals and re-evaluating how to best serve their clients. Social media marketing is certainly not about creative advertising that still “pushes” a message on customers. That old standard is crumbling fast, and many agencies are hurting as they scramble to understand the new medium that is totally “pull” based and customer-centric.

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business’ and the customer’s viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions – unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out – heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don’t think this won’t happen with you or your clients – some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

A Social Media Professional’s job, especially in consulting interactive agencies and/or their clients, eliminates this kind of self-inflicted brand wound and can very often stop the hemorraging from previous decisions based on the traditional “push” mentality. In business, its the customers that matter anyway – not the creativity of an ad. The real focus should be on building relationships with the customers, not so much on the Creative Director of an agency. Social Media Marketing professionals are needed as the solid bridge from traditional marketing to greater levels of business transparency and customer interaction.

Check out the full text of the CMO answers here: Survey Reveals Brand Marketers’ Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future

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Its amazing to me to see the real life implications of online social media. Take the Beijeng Olympics, for example. There are groups of Twitter users meeting together online to dispatch Tweets about what they see offline at the games. These Twitter users will likely meet offline for a meal or drinks, as do many other Twitter user throughout the world.

Social networking has proven itself to be much more than a buzz word in the Internet world. It’s reality. Humans are social creatures, and no matter if we’re tethered to our internet-enabled devices, or perhaps even more so if we’re connected to our internet devices, we crave face to face human interaction. Twitter has made that bridge easier to cross for people of all nationalities during the Beijeng Olympics.

Keep up on some of the Beijeng Twitter happenings here:

#080808 Twitter campaign — started by Chinese Twitter users. One of the best ways to keep up with the excitement

Ogilvy China Digital Watch — There’s tremendous buzz online about the Games, no surprise there, and they’re frantically following all the goings-on.

#080808 Twitter Campaign for Olympics — This is a link to a great collage of #080808 Twitter buddy icons.

This is certainly one of the most exciting events I’ve experienced on Twitter — no doubt due to its global scale. And huge agencies like Olgivy and others are taking the lead in bringing the event to social media networks. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the research strategies that come out of this global social media case study. Exciting!

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One such example was just a couple of days ago. A relatively small group of Twitter users got fed up with the endless talk about Twitter’s Fail Whale (the default page graphic that displays when Twitter is overcapacity or down for maintenance). This small group of positive thinkers decided instead to celebrate Twitter’s success and openly pimped the Twitter Prevail Whale.

The positive attitude wasn’t a resounding success — there were those who continued to bring up Twitter’s downtime — but it was a shift in thinking for many of us to actually appreciate the success of Twitter, and by extension ourselves in social networks.

Another example comes this morning from Joel Postman, Principal of Socialized. He tells about his own experience of negative and controversial conversations in social networks. And among other things, he has personally chosen to stop criticizing others on blogs simply to make a point. He calls this contrarian philosophy a Social Media Love Manifesto.

Is the social network community ready to play nice? Are we ready to quit jumping on the FAIL bandwagon whenever someone starts to get attacked in social networks? Personally, I’m with Joel. Sometimes, the Tweets coming through Twitter are so inflammatory and reputation damaging that I simply have to turn it off for a while until the flames die down. I’m not a pussy and can take care of myself, but I also have a strong sense, like I think most of us do, of what is fair. So as of today, I’m advocating Joel’s Social Media Love Manifesto. For those of you that haven’t read it yet, here it is:

“The people we “meet” in our online interactions are real people. They probably own a computer or two, write a blog or participate in a social network, and through the social media filter we see only glimpse of them, but that does not mean that they are not real, or that we are in any way excused from treating them like any other person we would meet.

I have therefore resolved that when writing on my blog, or when using any other form of social media, when calling into question the conduct of a specific, identifiable person, I will:

• Base my comments on the facts, and make reasonable efforts to gather all of the relevant facts before weighing in on a controversial discussion.
• Weigh carefully the value of any comments I choose to make against the potential for harm.

And I will not:

• Make assumptions about people’s motivations.
• Generate controversy for its own sake.
• Join others by superficially “piling on” when someone is under attack

I will always strive to:

• Treat people online with the respect and kindness I would extend to a friend or colleague.
• Take time regularly to leave a supportive comment on a blog or acknowledge someone positively in a public forum.”

I’m going to give this a try. Are you game for playing nice in social media networks? Tell me about your views, positive or negative.