So, sexy digital is going all serious and proper. Once flirty and out there for anyone’s taking, digital is going around telling everyone that, nowadays, it’s more like data, don’t you know.
Digital: hot, spunky, appealing to young, forward-thinking, creative types. Data: crunchingly boring, appealing to geeks (but not sexy geeks). So what’s going on? Some of the answers can be found in the write-up (page 4) of the roundtable discussion hosted for the writers of the essays that follow, and in the collection of essays themselves.

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By Suzanne Bidlake, www.campaignlive.co.uk, June 28th 2010

Congratulations, your client the Think Vitamin Dairy have had a few weeks to mull over what you presented and are now fully on-board. They are super excited about how you will help them sell more orange flavored milk. So exited in fact that they seem to be rushing it a bit.

You always want a client to drive their project forward but sometimes you need to slow them down. Preparation and double checking every aspect of the plan is crucial. You don’t want to pay for sloppy prep later on in the project.

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By Jaan Orvet & Andreas Carlsson, March 29 2010

1. You ask a question.
2. Customers share their ideas and vote up the best ones.
3. Improve your product and customer loyalty.

Visit site

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From Google Webmaster Central Channel, YouTube.com, 4 March 2010

The emergence in 2009 of social media as a real catalyst of change signalled for the first time the possibility that customer service had a vital role to play in winning the hearts and minds of customers.

As the year went on, more and more customer service agents could be heard chanting their new found mantra – “I’m sorry, how can I help you” – as they emerged from the shadows of their monolithic corporate structures. Customers no longer complained in private, but engaged in open and authentic conversations with ‘customer advocates’ willing to listen empathetically to their problems. Companies such as BT, ASOS, EasyJet, O2 and Virgin Trains led the way in the pursuit of helping their customers at their moment of greatest need. These companies recognised that social media, or specifically Twitter, allowed them to do just that, and they were willing to take a leap of faith.

A number of trends have become evident: the rise of help networks, customer service ‘on the go’, the decentralisation of trust and the ‘intermediation’ of business processes. All of these trends serve to highlight one simple truth: social media is diluting, redistributing and challenging the dynamics of the traditional company-customer power structure in favour of customers.

In terms of customer service, Twitter is helping to turn customers into people, whilst making companies more human, personable and approachable. People are becoming used to the immediacy of response, which in turn is forcing companies to not only re-evaluate and potentially redefine how they provide customer service, but also to validate their very legitimacy to do so.

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Posted by Guy Stephens in Customer experience, Social CRM on Wed, 10/03/2010

Read about the Peer Influence Pyramid, which describes and shares recommendations about three types of online influencers: Social Broadcasters, Mass Influencers and Potential Influencers.

Each of the three types of influencer is important to marketers, and each must be engaged in a different manner.  Social Broadcasters are appealing because of their large followings, but they tend to assist more with awareness than with preference. Mass Influencers is a new category of influencer–28 million in number in the U.S. alone–created thanks to the scale afforded consumers by social media tools. (I’ll be sharing more about Mass Influencers in my next Forrester report.)  Finally, the vast majority of social media participants are Potential Influencers, people who have modest networks rich with trust.

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By Augie Ray, Forrester Research, Feb 27 2010

That’s exactly what the results from a recent iProspect study looking into offline influence on online search behaviour indicate…

But there’s more for digital marketers to digest. Unfashionable offline is effective in its own right, and much of offline is converging with online. For example, more people listen to digital radio on PCs and TVs than on their radios according to OMD Metrics. People watch television with a laptop and mobile to hand. And it cannot be too long before RFID technology in mobiles interacts with electronic billboards and then to the web.

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By Richard Walker, 11 Feb 2010

So here’s a taster-menu of five great TED talks on how technology might influence the future. Rather than describe the latest in consumer tech, they take on the much harder task of predicting how technology will change our lives in profound ways.

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By Andrew Maynard, Mashable, Oct 2009

It seems that everywhere you turn, businesses, media properties, and brands are asking us to connect with them in the social Web. Whether it’s on TV, in press materials, advertising, or email, brands are vying for our “friendship.”

In July 2009, Bill McCloskey in partnership with StrongMail, analyzed the email marketing campaigns of top brands and how they integrated social profiles into the marketing presentation. McCloskey observed that top brands were reviving email campaigns with the inclusion of links to social profiles, specifically Facebook, Twitter, and also MySpace.

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By Brian Solis, Jan 27th 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkIjOP0aug