The good
The tile interface. The Android/Apple cold war has lead to a similar UX for the two largest smartphone platforms. On Windows Phone 7, my Facebook, Twitter and other social accounts are all aggregated into my People tile. No need to flip through separate apps for all of my separate social networks. Emails and upcoming meetings are even previewed on tiles so I do not need to dig into an app to review my information- they’re all consolidated into one experience. The concept behind this was to connect you to information as quickly as possible, getting you in and out of your phone in a few gestures so you can go back to your life without missing a beat. Very cool.

Attention to detail. The interface elements, scrolling and subtle animations that guide the interface are intuitive, snappy, and just plain fun. I love how updates flip through to my home screen as they happen. No need to check individual apps as the newest news is pushed to me directly. Even the system fonts tout a polished design that looks crisp onscreen and has a subtle hipness to it. You won’t find Times New Roman here.

The bad
Camera experience. The software is clunky and the Samsung camera is slow, although overall image quality is pretty good. This will disappoint iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S users but could be on par with midrange Android and older iPhones. No doubt your mileage will vary depending on your particular phone, but the laggy response and clunky UI were somewhat disappointing.

Disjointed Syncing Experience. Much to my surprise, nothing happened when I plugged in the WIndows Phone 7 to my Mac. There was no included documentation on connecting my device either. After a Google search, I was directed to a file on Microsoft.com for a Mac-compatible Windows Phone 7 media manager. Unfortunately, the file was a 4kb text document that contained a link to the “real” URL in the Mac App Store. Very lame but easy to fix.
Then once I managed to load the software, I had stability problems as the app forced my Mac to restart after one freeze and took an incredibly long time to load just one album. This was a pretty lousy experience, and I’m hoping Microsoft works to educate users where to find their software and improve the application experience.

The Potential
Windows Phone 7 has a ton of potential through its genuinely fresh take on organizing our digital lives through the tile UI. But for me, the honeymoon ended when I tried to sync the device. Specifics like including quick-start documentation with the phone to updating the content mess on Microsoft.com that send users on a wild goose chase are easy fixes to get users what they need.

Updating the Mac media manager is mission-critical for Microsoft to be taken even remotely seriously on the Mac platform. While you could argue Microsoft should prioritize the user experience for Windows users, I think it’s shortsighted to see Apple’s OS X tied only to the iPhone.

Windows 7 has already won praise from mobile critics and I think the platform will only gain momentum as developers create more apps and services, effectively replacing RIM as the “big three” companies dominating the mobile landscape. Unlike Blackberry, Microsoft proved it has the chops to develop a genuinely new approach to mobile, putting the user first. I think 2012 will be the true demise of RIM, plagued by software delays, disappointing hardware and corporate mismanagement. In it’s place, I can see Windows phones rising to the occasion, dramatically increasing market share.

I really want Windows 7 to succeed. The system feels fresh and will force Android and Apple to up the ante to deliver even better user experiences. While I’m not quite ready to trade in my iPhone for Win7 just yet, I think Android may see Windows 7 turn into a formidable opponent. And with integrated Office support, I can see the Windows platform destroying RIM’s Blackberry platform and stealing this business-oriented user base. Microsoft has a ton of potential here. Windows Phone 7 feels more like XBOX than Windows- and that’s a great thing.

Mobile Payments: What’s the freakin’ hold-up?
For the last couple of years, mobile payments have been a holy grail for tech companies, financial service providers, and marketers. Yet, do you know anyone who’s actually making them? I use my phone for a lot of things—watching videos, extending car rentals, tweeting minutiae—but paying for my convenience store purchases is not one of them. And I am a noted smartphone addict (well, “noted” among friends and family, at least). Most people aren’t even excited about the idea. Even among 18 to 34 year-olds, 74% are not at all or not very interested in mobile wallet technology. So what’s the barrier?

Last month, eMarketer published “Mobile Payments: Moving Closer to a World without Wallets”, which surveyed the mobile payment landscape and gave us some interesting insights into why consumers aren’t yet chomping at the bit for a wallet-phone and how they think marketers and technologists will overcome that. eMarketer pinpointed a major fear inhibiting widespread mobile payment adoption: consumer concern about data privacy and fraud.

And how will marketers get them over this fear? Apparently, by emphasizing not just convenience, but also the “benefit” of targeted offers. Quoth eMarketer: “Because each of the systems proposed will entail gathering data about what, where, when and how a consumer buys, the possibilities for accurately targeted offers and discounts are huge.” And this is supposed to entice consumers into using it?

Let’s just say I’m skeptical.

Please, marketers, advertise to me. I beg you
The convenience factor I can’t deny. Though with a number of the different mobile payment options eMarketer discusses, inputting a PIN is necessary, so it’s not quite tap-and-go and thus not that much faster than a debit or credit card.

But the idea that marketers are going to change consumers’ minds about the dangers of information-sharing and data-mining by showing them offers, discounts, and deals seems terribly optimistic. Oh hey, folks? You’re freaked out by how much access to your private information and shopping habits we might have? Let’s prove how much data we’re mining by sending you advertising that is obviously based on your personal mobile purchasing behavior and use! To make an analogy that might verge into hyperbole, this is like a woman being afraid that a man might be stalking her, and the potential-stalker responding by saying “I know, I’ll buy her favourite flowers and her favourite chocolates and some shoes and underwear in her size and she’ll totally love me.”

I think marketers might be getting a little tunnel vision, due to our immersion in the business. We need to take a step back and consider things from a consumer perspective. The average person, even the average iPhone user (iOS sees a 0.78% click-through rate on ads, higher than Android or Blackberry), rarely thinks of marketing messages as a benefit. They’re a side effect of media use. Sometimes a good one, on the less-frequent occasion when an ad makes you laugh or shows you something you want to see or helps you out. But often just another piece of white noise to be almost unconsciously ignored.

Of course, we’ll still advertise
I’m not saying, let’s not send people targeted messaging if and when mobile payments start to really take off. What I am saying is, let’s not pretend that “targeted messaging” is really perceived by the consumer to be a benefit. Let’s focus on creating real consumer benefits, and let targeted messaging stay behind-the-scenes as a business objective.

Because then maybe people will actually start to adopt mobile payments, and it will hit critical mass, and I can start hitting the town with only my phone in my pocket. I’m sick of carrying a purse.

Curious’ recent research using our online community ShopTalk touched on why people choose to boycott companies. We found that boycotts which stem from bad personal interactions with companies are far more powerful than boycotts that arise from social or political scandals, as the case with BP or Nike.

About half of our members boycotted a company based on the company’s social practices or political views. Members talked about boycotting companies like Wal-Mart, based on their employment practices or Citgo-gas because of its ownership by “enemy of America” Venezuela. The other half boycotted a company based on a bad personal experience, such as terrible customer service. It was the first time I’d heard of Denny’s, Barnes and Noble, and Suave being boycotted.

Even though the reasons for boycotting were split down the middle, we noticed very different attitudes toward the boycotts. Consumers who refused to buy from companies based on social or political events were far more likely to later abandon their boycott. On the other hand, those who felt personally slighted were adamant that they will keep their boycott going forever.

Consumers who boycotted companies because of political views relied heavily on external information to form their opinions and make the decision to boycott. However, once the scandal stopped being covered in the news, many felt that the company had improved their practices or that the issue had been resolved. For example, a couple of people said they initially boycotted Nike, but later ceased their boycott because they hadn’t heard anything in the news and assuming that Nike had rectified the situation. Other people talked about doubting the accuracy of second hand information as reason for ending their boycotts. In fact, about a quarter actually said they had given up their boycott and started buying from the company again. Since they weren’t personally affected by the actions of the companies, many were less committed to their boycotts.

It’s a completely different story for personal boycotts. Often these respondents were victims of appalling customer service and most held a personal vendetta against the company as a result. One member had a bad experience with an airline and after complaining by email to the company and not hearing a response, she now refuses to fly with the airline ever again. With personal boycotts, only 12% of our members started buying from the company again. A full two-thirds said they would never buy from the company again, no matter what the company did to try to correct their mistake, whereas only quarter of people with political boycotts said they would never buy from the company again.

Not much can be done for those with personal boycotts, but social media can help prevent these boycotts from forming. People are now taking to social media to voice displeasure about bad customer experiences, as Jeana did when she tweeted about Charter Communications. Monitoring the Twitter sphere, Charter was able to intercept Jeana and solve her problem, before her displeasure turned into a boycott. By immediately dealing with customer complaints, companies can turn a negative situation into an extraordinary experience.

So how do you build a social networking presence which goes beyond coupons? Curious asked members of its research community, ShopTalk, why they were fans of companies and we found they liked companies that acted as ‘brand butlers’. A brand butler is a Trendwatching term for companies that assist consumers in making the most out of their lives, rather than try to sell them a lifestyle. When it comes to social networking sites, it’s all about providing value to your fans/followers through content that is unique, relevant, and useful. To become an effective brand butler on social networking websites, consider the following traits: Personality, Share-ability, Brevity, Channel Integration, Responsiveness.

Personality

Although it’s important to be as useful as your classic English butler, it’s not always a good idea to act like one. Consumers on social networking sites like brands that address them in human rather than corporate speak and display their personality. Consider Geoffrey Butler from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Geoffrey is quick-witted, sarcastic, and talks to the Banks informally. Similarly, consumers like it when brands address them in a direct, personal way and when they can interact with some of their employees. Kraft’s Facebook moderators have their own profile, which includes their real name and a profile photo, so fans can see who is actually answering their question. Whether you do that or interact with fans/followers through the brand’s “official” profile depends on your brand’s personality and what your audience prefers. But displaying that personality and being human in your interactions is always a plus.

Share-ability

To get exposure on social networking sites, it is necessary to provide content that consumers not only personally like and find useful, but are also inclined to share with their friends, in the same way a rich kid would want to share the services of his butler with his friends. Consider Coke Zero as an example: they launched the “Coke Zero Facial Profiler” Facebook app, which scans photographs of faces and attempts to find a matching face from a database of its users. The app spread virally because Coke knew that fans couldn’t resist sharing their matches with their friends. Coke Zero’s app was not only a fun app conducive to sharing, but it also conveyed a brand message: you can’t tell the difference between Coke Zero and regular Coke.

Brevity

Look to Lurch from The Addams Family for a lesson in brevity. Whenever Lurch spoke, he was to the point and concise, only ever uttering “You rang?” Consumers want nearly this level of brevity on social networking sites. ShopTalk members told us they are often annoyed by companies posting messages that are too long or posted too frequently, cluttering up their newsfeed and pushing down more useful information. They told us the very reason they use social networking sites to research products and stay up to date is to get concise information in an easy-to-digest format.  That means keeping posts short and to the point.  If you need to provide more detailed information, post a link to your website – this is where consumers expect to find the details anyway.

Channel integration

A master butler is as capable outside of the household as in. Look at Alfred Pennyworth, butler to Batman, and you’ll see that he does a lot of work outside of the house, including espionage, intelligence-gathering, and medical assistance.  Similarly, a brands’ offering should be consistent across all its customer touch points: website, mobile, in-store, social networking sites, etc. Once it’s integrated with other channels, your social networking page can serve as an e-commerce tool, driving fans to your website or store. Levi’s has taken advantage of Facebook’s social plug-ins and placed a “Like” button on their website’s product page, which has led to Facebook becoming the number one site referrer for levi.com. By integrating social into their website, Levi’s was able to increase site traffic and generate social comments on its product pages.

Responsiveness

A capable butler is always standing by the door waiting for the bell to ring. At least, that’s what television and movies have taught me. Similarly it is important to be ready to react and respond to messages on social networking sites. This is especially true when dealing with a complaint, as Kohl’s recently had to do. A woman posted on Kohl’s Facebook page about an order being cancelled and telling Kohl’s that they ‘suck’. Within an hour, Kohl’s responded to her complaint, privately dealt with her issue, and the woman posted back thanking Kohl’s for the help. By being responsive, Kohl’s was able to show their fans that they care and turned a negative situation into positive goodwill.

By incorporating these aspects, you can create a social networking presence that will engage your current fans and help you obtain new ones, promote your brand and even increase sales. Whatever content you provide, be sure to observe the number one butlering rule: provide value for your audience. Oh, and the salad fork goes on the outside.

Ian is an Associate Consumer Researcher in the Curious group, out of our Calgary office.

There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16^th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.

Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.

Web info overload and why Web 3.0

This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.

What does Semantic Web mean?

The first version of the web was a means of delivering documents online through methods of download and display. The second, web 2.0, allowed users to generate their own content through tools such as blogger and youtube, flickr and myspace. 3.0 aims to have the web intelligently filter content for users.

One way of achieving this is OWL (Web Ontology Language), a language that both computers and laymen can easily understand. Another is through a universal sharing, linking and describing service such as XDI. Both allow computers to pick up on the context of what’s posted and categorize accordingly.

In this way, the results you get would be specific not so much to the terms you enter, but what you intend to find. The software wouldn’t just give you links that mention the term you’re searching for. It would also figure out why you’re searching for that term and rank results based on what you mean. Basically, it’s semantics.

A web without marketers?

When the web first began, it was possible for users to manually filter out the pages they didn’t intend to find. There would only be a few hundred relevant mentions and perhaps a dozen that were most pertinent. The rest you opened and closed relatively quickly or learned to avoid.

Today, despite the best attempts of aggregators, SEO, Google Ads, and other sorting techniques, advertisers frequently show up inappropriately or worse, don’t show up at all when they should.

The semantic web would help us avoid these problems. Ideally it would allow us to speak solely to those we targeted. With added filtration, we would also be able to author messages that were more target-specific. The web will get more personalized, and so will clients’ abilities to serve customers.

On the other hand, this could be the end of non-consensual advertising altogether. Computers that can return exactly what you want can also filter out everything you don’t. The software could be smart enough to know that even if the ad in question matches the users’ request exactly, because the user also requested not to receive any advertising, the ad is never seen. In effect, a safe search for ads.

A web without privacy?

Another aspect of a personalized, intelligent web is the erosion of anonymity. Users’ preferences could be stored online rather than in their computers as they increasingly access the net through multiple platforms and devices. We are already starting to see this. Email is slowly becoming the standard sign-up ID and multiple accounts are being merged (i.e. using facebook to blog, email or access flickr, etc.).

But in order for Web 3.0 to understand user intentions, it will need to glean more and more specific information from individual users. As the resulting ethical concerns become even more hotly debated, digital marketers will need to recognize the implications. For example, some people accept that their brands know everything about them while others want to believe in anonymity. For brands, recognizing these preferences and behaving accordingly will be crucial to whether they can retain customers.

Will it happen?
Whether all of the web can go semantic is up for debate. Computers have not historically been good at dealing with vagueness. Logic fails when confronted with inconsistencies. Computers accept nearly all human input as fact even though humans don’t always input the truth. Content in the form of images and videos are still not automatically recognizable to computers without human tagging. While a new version of the web is in the works, how long it will take to get up and running is pure conjecture.

Being ahead of the upgrade

Still, there are things we can do now to pave the way for a semantic web. As with much of interactive, Web 3.0 is primarily about anticipating people’s needs. By designing smarter sites that are both intuitive and comprehensible, we’ll stay relevant with the advent of smarter search. By providing value, creating services and delivering ads which users can opt into or out of with ease, we prevent pushback from privacy-conscious consumers.

Clay Shirky's newspaper would do nothing but aggregate

With content more plentiful and easily produced than ever, aggregation and delivery could actually become a more valuable service than production. Clay Shirky’s ideal newspaper has no original content whatsoever. We should remember this for clients who still think going viral is a matter of aping what’s hot on YouTube right now. If we do create content, keeping it 100% worthwhile, interesting and relevant will keep us from being filtered out of existence.

Summing up

We’ve gone from hard drive capacities smaller than a single comic panel to computer networks larger than our own memories. Web 3.0 is trying to help us retain only what we want to know. Aside from having far-reaching cultural and ethical consequences, it will also mean that, more than ever, brands have to be worth engaging with. We have to ensure our messages stay in the need-to-know. For soon clutter will not only be ignored, it won’t be seen at all. There may be more in the Saturday Star than in a Renaissance man’s head. But that’s not to say he’d find any of it worth reading.

Richard is a Copywriter in the CM Toronto office.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a seminar with the Insight & Planning team to learn about creating authentic personas. The seminar’s focus was around creating personas that are more like real people rather than the flat, somewhat contrived versions that’s aren’t entirely uncommon. Byron Stewart, an actor and co-owner of Dramatic Diversity showed us how we can use techniques from the world of theater to create personas.

This may sound strange, but he had some excellent points that hit a nerve with professionals who have been seeing a troubling trend amidst persona design. Many of us are aware of the theoretical value behind personas, but let me take a minute to illustrate how a robust, well-defined persona can make scenarios come alive.

Let’s take a well-known character from the annals of American Pop culture… Homer Simpson. Imagine him walking from the Quickie Mart to Moe’s Tavern in the town of Springfield. Now imagine him using whatever design you’re working on now. No, seriously, stop reading for a second and imagine it.

— Insert your daydream sequence —

The point of this little exercise is that since Homer’s character has been so well developed we can actually see him in our mind’s eye with a strong sense of his perspective on the world. Complete with imperfections and personality quirks that you’ve likely observed in various situations throughout the years, it isn’t so difficult to imagine what he might do using your design. Dare I say it could even be fun and helpful?

Love them or hate them, personas are an established way to put more of the user in the user-centered design process. When utilized properly personas get you out of your own head, designing for the target to make their lives easier and make the experience extraordinary. As humans we are inherently biased, and it can be easy to fall into the trap of making design decisions based on our own preferences, opinions, and proclivities. However, depending on the products or service, the actual users may be nothing like you. Choices that would work for you using your own design could just as likely frustrate and confuse your target audience. This may sound obvious but we all see far too many examples of poor user-experience planning in the products, customer service, marketing and packaging we encounter every day. According to the consulting firm Accenture, “almost 95 percent of electronic goods that are returned are not faulty and 68 percent of customers just that they can’t figure out how to use them!” Just think about any TV remote you’ve ever used.

The question then becomes how to make decisions that will satisfy your USER’s needs while providing an enjoyable experience for them. Sounds easy as pie, right? If a high quality persona is developed as a strong character with a specific point of view, using them in your work is like having a representative of your future user base at your beck and call. The persona helps guide you on your design journey.

As a designer committed to user-centered methods, I have noticed a disturbing trend that was voiced by many Planners and Information Architects in the seminar. More and more personas aren’t evolving beyond an abstract, bulleted list of personality traits, preferences, and other assorted details with an associated mug shot of some random person. These personas-esque creations are veering toward the stereotypical, the hollow and the fabricated. They can’t help us see the world from their point of view because they don’t have a point of view. They aren’t real to us–no more real than the androgynous mannequins at American Apparel, at least. To be a useful tool, a persona should be a character that is real enough for you to conjure up in your imagination, one you can ask yourself what he or she would do in a given situation. The personas that often get created aren’t robust enough to help us out in that department. Here is where theater comes in.

As it turns out, theater has a lot in common with design. (No, not just an affinity for skinny jeans.) The overlap is so obvious that it belies the depth of its utility. In theater there are characters in scenes, and in design there are personas in scenarios. In acting, much time and attention is spent on understanding a character’s motivations, their emotions, their wants and needs. If all falls into place, the audience doesn’t see someone pretending, they see a real person come to life. Even those of us (like me) with no acting background can leverage this thinking by augmenting persona development to bring them alive and make them more meaningful.

What if each member of your team ‘owned’ one persona? S/he would be the explicit advocate before any features are added or removed to the persona. This team member would my spend time determining how the target might FEEL about this, and how s/he would react. If the persona is a fleshed out character that you’ve spent days thinking about–comparing to people you know that are similar to her, discovering commonalities that you share, figuring out what s/he wants or feels—s/he would be much more natural and far from arbitrary. Get everyone on your team to know their personas intimately and then showcase them to others. Your personas can even be used in body storming (The act of combining brainstorming with the physical exploration and ideation) to enact likely behaviors.

Using Theater as part of the design process can take persona development from the prescriptive to the realm of descriptive. Your users are more likely to have amazing experiences interacting with your designs if they are more thoroughly and comprehensively considered at every stage of the design process. One of the best ways to accomplish this lofty goal is to create personas that are real to you, to the full team, and to stakeholders. If you chose to add theater-based methods to your design toolkit, Stewart ensures the user will be at the core of what you create.

Mo is an Information Architect Intern in our Chicago office this summer.

If you’re in the working world, you’ve probably sat through a 401(k) benefits meeting and heard the spiel:

“Saving for retirement is really important. And if you just set aside a little bit per day, you won’t even feel the contributions coming out of your paycheck. For example: think about how many times you go for that morning coffee at Starbucks. Now do the math. $5 per day x 7 days a week x 52 weeks in a year…”

When it’s framed like that, it’s hard to argue that a daily Starbucks fix can add up to a pretty hefty dent in your bank account. Yet interestingly, roughly a week ago, Starbucks became the first brand to surpass the 10-million-fan mark.

From a Luxury Brand to a Listening Brand

In these tight, recessionary times, with unemployment rampant and people everywhere feeling the financial pinch, Starbucks, once an icon of edible luxury, has emerged as a winner, warming consumers’ hearts like a peppermint latte on cold winter day.

It wasn’t too long ago that Starbucks was dubbed a brand in crisis with eroding sales, rampant store closings and plummeting stock prices. But now, in August of 2010, they are firmly on the rebound and own boasting rights as part an elite group: the 10 million fan club, which includes such social media superstars as Lady Gaga and President Obama. So how did they do it?

Returning to Their Roots

From a business standpoint, they took extreme action. Earlier this year, we covered some of the sweeping in-store changes Starbucks implemented to get back on course. They brought founder Howard Shultz back as CEO. They right-sized. They restructured. They researched. But at the heart of the turnaround was this: they went back to listening to their customers. As Cliff Burrows, a Starbucks exec in charge of American operations, stated: “All of a sudden you start to see it’s not a numbers game — it’s about consumers.”

Sounds like common sense, but nowhere does this philosophy resonate more clearly than Starbucks presence online. From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube and mystarbucksidea.com, Starbucks has used social media masterfully, as a pivotal touchpoint to engage with consumers. And they’ve set the benchmark for brands struggling to find the silver bullet of customer engagement.

Tips from Starbucks’ Social Media Maven

At the Word of Mouth Marketing Supergenius Conference last December, we were fortunate enough to glean some guidance from Starbucks’ Global Social Media Director, Matthew Guiste. Here is a run-down of 6 pointers you should employ online to jumpstart your social media strategy—with the ultimate goal being to drive action.

1.  Only post content that adds value. In order to get fans to read or watch your content, follow two rules:

A) Ask yourself: does it add value? Will it provoke thought, teach something, or make someone smile? If not, don’t add to the noise.

B) Test & refine: Experiment with different types of content (promotions, polls, videos, etc) to see which ones resonate with your audience. Guiste cited a rough 50-50% split between planned and reactive content.

2.  Look for opportunities to amplify a trend. If you want customers to respond to your message, take the time to listen to what they’re already talking about, what interests them, what irks them. Tap into the hot buttons and drive action through liking, voting or commenting. A great example: they didn’t have any promotions planned around seasonal drinks but they noticed a lot of chatter about Pumpkin Spice Lattes in the Fall. They immediately developed the “Red Cup Celebration” campaign to engage in the conversation.

3.  Social media is a value exchange. Encourage sign-ups, follows, fans, likes and email opt-ins by offering up something in return, be it promotions, coupons, tips, exclusive benefits, etc.

4.  Inspire sharing. Sounds basic but it’s true. If your content is perceived as valuable, if it resonates, your customers will naturally want to share it with friends, family, co-workers.

5.  Use social media to sell. Engagement with customers is hugely important in and of itself, but Starbucks’ business turnaround is directly linked to actions impacting their bottom line. Adept use of promotions via social channels has been a key factor in driving traffic and sales to Starbucks retail stores.

6.  Create advocates: Happy customers equal loyal customers. Positive brand interactions (such as happiness, motivation, good service or escaping from the everyday) can have a ripple effect, and the amplification online can be exponential. “Free Pastry Day” at Starbucks drove their biggest traffic day ever, with no traditional advertising—only owned media (Starbucks.com), Facebook, Twitter and earned media (PR). According to Guiste, they have experienced the most success using social media for short-term, high intensity promotions, but they are also quick to point out that coordination across channels (digital and PR) is key.

Though the economy has created huge challenges for marketers, Starbucks is a great example of a brand turning around its business by returning to its roots and reconnecting with its customers. The most interesting takeaway: that their social media success is not about coffee at all—but how the coffee makes its customers feel. Tapping into that insight took them all the way to 10 million+ fans and counting.

Celia is the Marketing Director for Critical Mass globally, with a desk in our Chicago office.

Last Thursday I attended the WWD Forum on Mastering Mobile Marketing, part three of WWD’s series on digital media http://www.wwd.com/wwd-summits/wwd-series-on-digital-media-2443804/. Over the course of the day, I listened to marketers from across the retail sector share how mobile fits into their marketing strategies, and how they’re integrating mobile into their overall marketing mix. The key takeaways for me were: 1) Mobile is truly changing the way that brands interact with consumers, and this change is largely being driven from the bottom up (consumers are challenging brands to evolve, not the other way around), and 2) The success of any mobile brand initiative can often be boiled down to a single, simple (yet all too frequently overlooked) principle: “know thy customer”.

Consumers are challenging brands to evolve

Consumers are using their phone as a device to gain confirmation from peers prior to purchase. I recently learned that today’s “second opinion” involves taking pictures in the dressing room, sending the photos to a friend, and if the response from that “trusted personal stylist” is positive, then (and only then) the credit card comes out. Smart brands are recognizing this trend towards buddy-shopping and co-browsing, and building parts of the shopping experience (both in-store, and online) around this new set of digitally-enabled social behaviors; they’re using their mobile initiatives to connect prospects and customers with their brands and with each other. But are they doing enough?

Ever heard of GotryIton.com? http://www.gotryiton.com/ An Accelerator Finalist at this year’s SXSW, Gotryiton is an online community that allows users to upload digital photos of themselves wearing outfits they’re thinking about buying. So the next time you buy an expensive pair of jeans, you have someone to blame!

Panelists agreed that as consumer needs evolve, so too must brand experiences. This is especially true of mobile. And especially now.  At Critical Mass, we’ve become adept at recognizing the types of bottom-up changes that force evolution, and turning observations into insights that lead to extraordinary work for our clients.

Know thy customer

Deep knowledge of the customer was a consistent theme throughout the day. These marketers understand their customers! They understand the purchase process their customer segments go through and they’re using this knowledge to find unique opportunities for engagement. They’re monitoring usage of their mobile sites to understand changing behaviors. They’re building apps and developing content, and watching where and when the content is consumed.

We all know that the iPhone is gaining share of the smart phone market and there are now over 85,000 iPhone apps in the App Store. Some marketers are optimizing strictly for the iPhone platform.  Brian Dean from Brooks Brothers, however, knows that his customers carry blackberries into the store. He is coming up with ways to use it to connect his in-store representatives to customers.

Sabine Feldmann from Teen Vogue knows that Millennials sleep with their phones. (Well, I suspect it isn’t just 14 – 29 year olds. Come on. Admit it. I know you do too.) She recognizes the importance of the device and how it fits into the lives of her readers.

By understanding the utility value the device has for your audience, you stand a better chance of becoming an important part of that value exchange.

These are just a few examples of the great content at the ongoing WWD digital media series. Marketing – at its core is really all about making connections with your customers. And more and more, mobile will be the place where these connections are established, maintained, and grown. For me, this week’s session reaffirmed my belief that Mobile isn’t replacing online. But it is changing how we think of the Web. Mobile is changing the dynamic between channels, and smart marketers are starting to realize that their channels are converging. For brands wishing to capitalize on new channel opportunities it will mean

1) Being uncomfortable in some cases, and being okay with that.

2) Having your ear to the ground every single day.

Building an app or a mobile site might seem like the easy part, but, understanding your customer’s changing behavior and the interaction they have with their mobile device, and THEN building the right app and developing the right content is the hard part. It takes insights about channel usage and channel preference. You need to look at the entire customer journey and see where the mobile influence is happening.

That’s all for now. All this talk about shopping makes me want to do some damage.

Cindy is an SVP, Group Director working out of the Critical Mass New York office.

Going viral: For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to define that as an idea, phrase or a piece of rich media being replicated and shared, spreading with the speed and intensity of a viral infection. A very popular meme.

Memes are an insanely interesting characteristic of the social media, especially for those who are in the business of harnessing the power of social for brands. These viral fads go through the same cycles as fashion and music. The unique kids adopt the meme or trend first; they feel a sense of ownership or that they’ve discovered this piece of content. The masses sniff this out and start adopting the meme; they forward it to all of their gchat buddies. A member of the masses sends said piece of content onto one of the early adopters who replies with “I saw that like a month ago.” The masses overplay and click-by- click kill this trend, bringing it to “viral” status. The cool kids move onto the next thing.

As a rule, it’s difficult for large brands to grab a hold of these large-scale trends and insert themselves in a relevant way while the trends are still hot. On the flip side, content creators have been attaching their inevitably viral blogs, tweets and videos to brands in ways that stick and get forwarded down the chain-of-cool. A notable example is Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. This serves as a terrific case study, so please bear with me as I do not wish to imply that you, dear reader, have not seen this video or heard this song. After the original song was posted to YouTube, several video iterations emerged as users adopted it and tweaked it to their own tastes. The combined total views of these videos mention Pizza Hut and Taco Bell thousands of times. However, as the meme reaches the main stream, its status as “cool” has effectively been killed.

It’s fairly safe to say that starting a viral movement requires the leader, or brand, to have the guts to stand out as different. More important than that, however, is a well educated community that collectively feels listened to by a humanized brand. Advocates. With processes in place to address concerns and praise positive contributions to a movement, the principles of Derek Siver’s TED talk apply. Siver outlines the importance of nurturing the first few followers of any movement. Without the first advocate or follower, the brand isn’t leading a movement; it’s just a “lone nut.”

Aside from the initial idea and execution, the entire movement is on the shoulders of the advocates. Creating the type of content that most brands are comfortable with requires a production budget and “talent,” but devoting a spend on something that may or may not be adopted by the community is risky. I would guess that Ford went through a similar thought process as it inevitably put a huge volume of its social content creation for the Ford Fiesta in the hands of its advocates. The brand acted as a leader, posing its community with challenges that required creating cool content with the Ford Fiesta in the background.

As far as going viral is concerned, this model is ideal: be the kind of inspiring leader that isn’t rigid about ideas for content. Allow the first follower to have the creative license to be just as inspiring as the brand itself.

Jeana is a Community Manager in our Chicago office.

Image compliments of www.seekyledraw.com.

Alex Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago

It often takes months to develop a website or digital program.  After tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, persona development, creative reviews, usability testing and some long nights, launch date is a huge milestone.  But often times after a site goes live the client is ready to move on to the next project.  However, it is in the post launch period that we can actually have the most impact and ensure that all the time and money we spent is paying off.  Website optimization, the process of making continual improvements to the site in order to increase performance, can help make our clients, and ourselves, look like rock stars.

Part of website optimization comes from reporting.  Every marketing initiative should have goals, and it is the Marketing Science Department’s job to define and track progress against these goals.  Through reporting, we can identify underperforming areas and make recommendations for improvement.  When we combine reporting with testing we can start to understand not only what is working, but why it is working as well.

Almost every aspect of a digital program can come under debate; page layouts, calls to action, image size and page colors are just a few things that can be contested.

A testing program could help settle these debates and optimize the experience to meet our marketing objectives and more importantly our customer’s goals.

In a nut shell, testing is the process by which we test different versions of a web page on the live site environment and then, through scientific methods, declare a winner of the test (the page that has best shown the ability to best convert visitors to do the actions that we want them to do).

The simplest form of testing is an A/B test.  We pick a site goal, like conversion from a landing page, and then measure how different versions of this page perform against our goal.  With tools like Omniture’s Test & Target or Google’s Website Optimizer we can serve up pages that have different images, copy or other treatments in real time and measure the results against a control page.

Page A is our control; it has not had any changes made to it.  On page B, we can start to swap things out; it could be a new image or a different call to action.  We run our test and find that visitors who saw page B had a 300% higher conversion rate than those who saw page A!

A more complex test we can run is a multivariate test, which allows us to change multiple components of the page at the same time.  Doing so can help us find a combination of images, copy, offers or anything else we can dream up that work the best.

Optimization programs can lead to some very powerful insights and recommendations.  But there are a few things that need happen for an optimization program to be successful:

1. Commitment to the program.  This one seems pretty obvious, but if the client is not committed we are destined to fail.  This commitment includes the creation of extra comps/copy/offers/etc. for us to test.  It also may include timing and process changes as well.
2. We have to invest in the right tools and process.  Some tools are free, others are not.  With any Marketing Science program, we need to evaluate our needs and implement the right tool for the job.  We also have to secure some time from our developers, so they can add a code snippet to allow for testing on the page.  Finally, we have to ensure that we are staffed to analyze these results on both the client and the agency side.
3. Socialization of our results.    Testing can lead to some very powerful insights that can help inform the work of every team that touches the site.  But it is all in vain if we do not share what we have learned both internally and externally.

So where do we start?  You have to be able to walk before you can run so start by running some simple A/B tests on your top landing pages – this is most likely where you will see some immediate results.  As you begin to get the hang of things, you can start to experiment with the more complex multivariate tests and before you know it you will have pretty serious optimization program in place.

The fact that most concepts include many creative options means we may already have material to test, so why guess which will work the best when we can prove it through testing?  Given the opportunities that the digital space offers, it is important that we understand what works and what does not.  It is also important that we plan for change, and understand that the launch of the site is just the beginning of the optimization process.  Tight budgets and short timelines mean that we are forced to do more with less; optimization can help ensure that we get the most bang for our buck and achieve rock star status.  Let’s rock and roll!

Alex is a Marketing Science Analyst out of Chicago.