Social shopping is getting realer: GiveEmThis is a new “gift engine” for Twitter and Facebook friends [Mashable]

When’s the real prime time on television? [nielsenwire]

Why innovation is a growth requirement for brands [Branding Strategy Insider]

The future of advertising is social: here’s why [WSJ, Forbes]

Should you turn your content marketing strategy upside down? (Our answer: maybe) [Convince and Convert]

Twitter’s new free analytics tool looks pretty neat [Hubspot]

A new deck with interesting social stats [Slideshare]

Brands need to be very careful about inappropriate use of social media in a crisis [Fierce Government IT]

The 7 essential elements of social media marketing [Business2Community]

How social platforms are creating a buzz in the fashion world [Times of India]

Where can companies look for organic growth? [HBR]

The war in Afghanistan is fought on the battlefield – and now, on Twitter [Guardian]

Since the advent of what we would recognize as social media in the mid-2000’s, discussions over business use of social platforms have mostly focused on social’s value as a communications and marketing tool. But by focusing so narrowly on talking to customers, have we neglected the other half of the conversation – listening?

Don’t get me wrong – social gives businesses an enormous opportunity to change the way they talk to customers, and as technologies advance, marketers should be on the forefront of developing new ways of reaching the people that matter. And marketers do talk a pretty big game about listening, but that usually takes the form of fixing individual consumer complaints, monitoring levels of negative sentiment, and pulling verbatim quotes to provide color to larger consumer-focused initiatives.

But a new effort from Johns Hopkins gives some clues as to how health marketers, especially, can take advantage of consumer sharing habits to inform key decisions – particularly around media spend, shelf placement, and other choices whose optimal resolution can vary significantly between – and even within – local markets. Researchers at that JHU’s School of Public Health analyzed 2 billion public tweets, from May 2009 to October 2010, to determine whether semantic analysis could unearth meaningful information about public health trends.

The results were remarkable: plotting the overall Twitter chatter around the word “flu” and the actual reported flu rate for a given week according to the Centers for Disease Control indicated that the two metrics are highly correlated:

(image via the Pharma Marketing Blog)

So, for influenza, at least, the self-reported flu rate as indicated by social sharing closely mirrors the flu rate as measured by more typical epidemiological methods. I could imagine that, for other familiar ailments (think colds, stomach viruses, and headaches) the chart might look the same.

These data could be tremendously useful to pharma marketers looking for ways to segment their marketing mix by hyperlocal criteria. For instance: here in Washington, DC, sessions of Congress often lead to longer hours and higher levels of stress, not only for congressional staffers but also for the lobbyists, public relations folks, policy experts, and bureaucrats that support and influence them. I could imagine that mentions of the word “headache” might spike during these times – and marketers who have that knowledge can move headache relief to the top of the local marketing mix for a few weeks, rework in-store displays, and, to the extent they can, move those products to higher-traffic areas of the store.

It mirrors Walmart’s new social shopping initiative, profiled here by FastCompany. This program aims to detect subtle shifts in language and sentiment across geographical areas – for instance, if chatter about “bicycles” increases in Silicon Valley, stock can be shifted around local stores, additional inventory can be ordered, and in-store marketing materials can be placed to guide shoppers towards what they’re looking for. If Walmart can tell who wants bikes, surely pharma companies can tell when certain ailments are spiking in different places around the country.

More broadly, though, the judicious use of data is one key part of marketing agility – the function’s ability to quickly take advantage of subtle shifts in the landscape. We might not yet have the ability to accurately predict demand and capitalize on it, but we’re getting there, and the marketing departments of the future will need to be able to use tools like these.

MLC members, for more cutting-edge uses of social media data, check out our appropriately-title webinar replay from last year, as well as our social media tactics topic center.

The NFL is back, and, for much of America, not a moment too soon. I’m a hockey guy myself, but I’ve played a fair amount of (American) football in my life, and last Thursday, as I watched the season kick off, I realized that football coaches and marketing planners have pretty similar jobs.

Coaches and planners go into intensely competitive situations (football stadiums and market economies, respectively), lead teams with certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and a limited ability to change those things, adapt a “game plan” without knowing much about how the other side will react, and end up being judged on things that may or may not be their responsibility. They have to be meticulous enough to draw up most of the game in advance, but flexible and agile enough to call new plays should conditions warrant them. Most of all, they have to have the ability to get everyone on the same page, and motivate and marshal their teams to execute on the plan.

Football teaches, I think, 3 big things to marketing planners and managers: Read More »

The retail industry is at a bit of a crossroads. Big retail segments, like record stores, bookstores, and video rental shops, have nearly disappeared, while others are struggling to fight off online and discount big-box competitors.

Rather than trying to out-discount the discounters, or compete with the scale on which Amazon and other online retailers operate, I think retailers should be reevaluating their value propositions, both to their customers and to their consumer manufacturing partners. How do retailers in general, and your retail chain in particular, bring value to business partners and consumers?

I think the key to this is taking advantage of the two things retailers have in spades, and that all manner of disintermediation and price undercuts can’t take away: knowledge and space. Read More »

These days, the economy is the first thing on many consumers’ minds, and sustainability efforts have, to a degree, fallen by the wayside. But there’s still a significant segment of consumers making decisions based on environmental differentiators, and when the economy recovers, we’d expect many more will join them.

So, we’ve put together some principles that should guide green efforts, particularly in the auto and broader manufacturing sectors. Read on for more: Read More »

An excellent piece on how successful CMOs embrace the attributes – such as paradox, uncertainty, unpredictability and intuiton – that got them to the top [design mind]

What if Richard Branson ran a media agency? [AdAge]

Did you know that the world’s first resume was written by Leonardo da Vinci? [Mashable]

Lesson for marketers: be real and authentic when the stakes are high [NYT]

Groupon might not file for that IPO, after all [WSJ]

Building social commerce, with reviews, social login, and mobile [GigaOM]

Next on the reading pile: this very cool book about the history of A&P [NYT]

CMOs will have higher budgets next year, according to one study [B2B Magazine]

What should B2B marketers be considering in marketing automation? [VentureBeat]

How long do people pay attention to links shared by social media? Apparently 2.8 – 3.2 hours [bitly blog]

What People Don’t Get about Jobs (we’ll add M for Marketer at some point this month) [Atlantic]

We know that B2B marketers have a huge effect on the organizations they sell to – they help customers operate more efficiently, less expensively, and with greater levels of confidence. In a business environment that’s becoming more complex by the day, B2B marketers help their customers simplify the world by taking things off their plate and giving valuable insight into how other customers are using their products.

Now, you’ve heard this before: every marketer reading this post has their company’s value proposition memorized or internalized. But sometimes the value prop becomes such an integral part of what we do, that we never question whether our customers are actually seeing the same value. MLC research from a few years back shows that B2B customers typically don’t perceive supplier differentiators – at least, not to the degree that marketers expect them to – and we should be sanguine about how well the marketplace understands value propositions, too.

Informatica, an American enterprise data integration software firm, ran up against this problem when they realized that their innovation-oriented messaging wasn’t working. It wasn’t that the messages were poor – it was just that, although the company enabled groundbreaking innovation at its customer firms, they had no credibility as an innovative supplier.

To solve the problem, the company created an annual Innovation Awards series that recognized the innovative ways that companies were using Informatica products. The result? Happy customers, lots of great press, and a newfound reputation for innovativon.

MLC members, check out the full case, and for more, see our tips on marketing to innovation-oriented buyers.

A few months back, I was helping an older relative clean out their attic – a space home, among other things, to nearly every issue of National Geographic released for the last 40 years. There is, of course, no way to stumble upon a cache of old magazines without thumbing through a few. The journalism itself was instantly-recognizable – most things you could transpose to a modern National Geographic without too much incident – but what was astounding were the differences in advertising.

Marketers and advertisers have spent over 100 years trying to communicate with customers in modern, recognizable ways, and during that time the language we use to do that has evolved. Customers now don’t need everything spelled out – they react instantly to small symbolic cues, rich images, and a memorable tagline – but consumers of previous eras didn’t have the rich symbolic vocabulary necessary to do that. The result was advertisements that are much more literal – and maybe more informative, in a strict sense – than the ones we have today.

We’ve collected ten of the coolest vintage magazine and TV ads we could find. Have others? Post them in the comments! And make sure to check out our resource center on getting the most out of agency partnerships, so maybe your company will be on a list like this in 2061. Read More »

JC Penney has taken a controversial piece of merchandise off its shelves [Styleite]

How are marketers and advertisers noting the September 11th anniversary? [NYT]

Google’s featuring a daily deal on some of the most valuable real estate on the internet: its homepage [Reuters]

10 great interactive magazine ads [Adweek]

Brands might benefit from thinking of Facebook as a loyalty program [AdAge]

Ford will use Zipcar as a promotional channel across 250 US college campuses [NYT]

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone will advise Berkeley MBA students this fall [WSJ]

As we continue to issue-sense around emerging research topics for the coming year, one thing comes up again and again: the role of data in marketing strategy. The members we’ve talked to understand that the vast amounts of data collected on customers has enormous potential for driving commercial results and delivering insightful and useful experiences, but simply having the data isn’t enough – how do we get from having it to putting it to good use?

This quarter’s Executive Guidance - a series of leadership studies put out by the whole of CEB, representing a cross-functional consensus on emerging management topics – is called “Overcoming the Insight Deficit”, and it’s all about putting Big Data to big use. We found that even as companies invest tens of millions of dollars in data and analytics, less than 40% of employees have the ability to take advantage of those investments. The report’s focus is on developing individual and organizational capabilities that make the technical investments worthwhile.

Want to learn more? You can download the report here.